林肯博物馆利用最新科技展现第16任总统生平（在线收听）

Lincoln Museum to Use Newest Technology to Bring 16th President to Life

林肯博物馆利用最新科技展现第16任总统生平

The lives of Abraham Lincoln – American’s sixteen’s president, and argue believe one of its greatest, -- will soon be presented in a way never seen before. A revolutionary new museum is set to open in Springfield, Illinois, the capital of Lincoln's home state. Along with traditional displays of photographs and documents, visitors will encounter disembodied voices and faces that will bring the turbulent decades of the mid-1800s to life.

The clang of hammers and the buzz of saws echo through the empty museum hallways, and dust motes sparkle in the shafts of sunlight streaming through the windows of the lobby rotunda. But the blank walls and construction noise don't faze the museum's executive director, Richard Norton Smith. He sees what the museum will look like when it opens -- when visitors can explore what he calls "the totality of Lincoln's life."

The journey begins in a log cabin, like the one Abraham Lincoln lived in as a child. A log cabin made of real logs.

Smith: If you work with most exhibit designers and you say, 'Give me a log cabin,' you'd get a Styrofoam log cabin. This is a 200-year-old frame dwelling that was located in Virginia, taken apart, and put back together to create the Lincoln's Indiana home.

But most of the museum is more 21st century than 19th. A modern television newsroom will broadcast campaign commercials from Lincoln and his presidential opponents or what the campaigns might have produced if there had been television in 1860. Children can use an interactive computer to ask the President questions and then get the answers. And what appear to be ghosts talking about the past will materialize out of nowhere.

Someone criticize Norton Smith for the Disney-like feel of museum. But He says you can combine scholarship and showmanship -- in fact, he says you should.

Smith: I think any good history engages a reader, a viewer, a participant, a visitor on more than one level. In a nutshell, we're using 21st century technology to recreate the 19th century in a way that will be credible and memorable.

Mr. Smith is also trying to humanize President Lincoln and his family. Visitors will see the young Lincoln as he encounters a slave auction, watch as he courts Mary Todd in the parlor of her home in Springfield, and share Mrs. Lincoln's grief as their little son lies in his bedroom at the White House, dying of typhoid.

But the museum will not be a shrine to the 16th president.

Smith: You will get a sense of what people living in the spring of 1861 might have been feeling, might have been saying, might have been shouting, as their country came apart at the seams. By early 1861, several southern states had seceded, and the nation was moving closer to civil war. You will not only hear the voices -- sometimes strident voices -- on both sides of this issue. But you will actually see the faces of those people coming at you out of dark. It will be, for some people probably disturb, disturb themselves.

Fighting began in April of the 1861. In one room of the museum, visitors can track the battles of the Civil War.

Smith: And here is a huge electronic map. And you can follow the movement of both armies over those four years and the lower right-hand corner, is "odometer of death".

By the time the Civil War ended with the surrender of southern forces on April 9, 1865, that odometer would have passed 600,000. Less than a week later, another casualty -- President Lincoln was shot by a southern sympathizer as he and Mrs. Lincoln watched a play in the museum's replica of the Ford Theatre box, visitors can see the Lincolns just before the fatal shot.

One of the most effective uses of technology is the Ghosts of Past Theater. Richard Norton Smith says the library setting that combines live actors and holograms technology.

Smith: For example, there's a file cabinet that will open .A document will appear, it will turn into Civil War soldiers -- three-dimensional [figures] who will tell their stories. The Lincolns will appear as ghosts. It's a marvelous way to impart to young people, why does history matter. Why do we save all this stuff? What's the point of all these old papers? Which in a sense is the point of the entire museum.

I’m Kavita Cardoza, in Springfield, Illinois.

注释：

revolutionary [5revE5lu:FEnEri] adj. 革命的

rotunda [rEu5tQndE] n. 圆形建筑，圆形大厅

recreate [5ri:kri5eit] v. 使再现

memorable [5memErEbl] adj. 值得纪念的

odometer [C5dCmitE] n. 里程表

dimensional [di5menFEnEl] adj. 空间的