Portrayals of the US Southwest's Native American inhabitants as “primitive” relics have been shaped by the intertwining practices of archaeological collection and museum display. Focusing on the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, this essay analyzes the interpellation of museum visitors as citizen archaeologists, a process that re/produces racialized discourses through rhetorics of science and time. It is argued that as visitors excavate remnants of the past they engage an archaeological vision that reinforces dominant constructions of “modern” citizenship. This vision maintains colonial histories by disallowing Native peoples both authorship of the past and belonging in the present.

The purpose of this article is to describe the links between late nineteenth-century psychological research and the early musical aptitude research of Carl Emil Seashore (1866-1949). The primary link was the music-related research of the leader of the mental testing movement during the 1890s, Columbia University psychologist James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944). German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt instructed Cattell in the German scientific tradition, and English researcher Francis Galton encouraged Cattell's research on individual differences and introduced him to statistical methods.

During the 1890s, Cattell conducted a longitudinal study, the hypothesis for which was that tests of sensory discrimination ability, including musical discrimination, would correlate with undergraduates' academic grades. After his study failed to produce the expected results, the mental testing movement followed Alfred Binet and Victor Henri of France, and Cattell turned to other activities. However, in the meantime, Cattell influenced many other important psychologists, including Edward W. Scripture, Carl Seashore's doctoral mentor at Yale University, and eventually Seashore himself. Despite the mental testing movement's shift to Binet and Henri's cognitive-type testing, Seashore continued his conservative, sensory approach to the testing of musical aptitude.

In September 2013, civilian contractor Aaron Alexis entered the Washington Navy Yard and murdered twelve people before being fatally shot by police. This incident, together with an incident three months earlier involving Edward Snowden, caused the U.S. government to critically examine their background investigation (BI) process; because both Snowden and Alexis had supposedly slipped through the cracks of their investigations, there must be some flaw in the BI procedure. The U.S. Committee on Oversight and Reform concluded that rules forbidding “background checkers from looking at the Internet or social media when performing checks” was one of the main factors contributing to defective BIs (Report, 2014). Since the report’s release, the Director of National Intelligence has been debating and trialing whether information from the Internet should be used to form a data double for BIs (Kopp, 2014; Rockwell, 2014). Using this conversation as a discussion catalyst, I argue that due to the nature of the data double, if the United States were to adopt the use of social networking sites (SNSs) for security clearance purposes, neglecting to take into account basic principles of SNSs into the process of BIs may lead to misinformation and unfavorable adjudication. Ultimately, being literate about the social practices involved in SNSs and surveillance would benefit not only investigators, but anyone, including academics, looking at individuals in online spaces.