The Sweet Spot for Interpretation & Questions for the Whole Team
The ideal interpretive approach is about blending staff ideas with visitor insights. First and foremost, the team should consider and understand what visitors want from your organization using formal evaluation. Without this information, your organization is working blind. With that research in hand, the team needs to spend some time working together dealing with …
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The Sweet-Spot in Interpretive Approach & the Politics of Mounting Installations
Helping visitors engage in collections is a primary concern for museums. Museum professionals often partner with various vendors, consultants, and partners to do this work, for example commissioning firms to develop interactives for exhibitions. Mounting these installations can be exhausting and rife with interpersonal challenges. Visitors walking into spaces, ideally, have no idea how …
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Content Strategy Matrix for Developing Compelling Content (Graphic)
The best writing is complex. Persuasive text needs to inform in order to convince the reader. Inspiring texts often grow from a kernel of fact. Enjoyable texts are the best way to feed people information. While creative writers have more latitude to move their readers, every writer needs to understand how to balance these aspects …
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Focusing on Self-Care is Good for Business
I had the pleasure of doing the keynote talk for the Pennsylvania Museums Association conference in April, 2018. Below is a summary of my remarks. Summary: We all need to take care of ourselves As managers, you particularly need to take care of yourself You also need to advocate for your staff and to help …
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Thinking Systematically about Content / Interpretation in #Museums
Thinking systematically about content creation requires having a facile ability to navigate between communicating the overall idea and articulating the component concepts. The ideal systematic thinker is both a big picture and detail-oriented person. While some people seem naturally able to employ systematic thinking, practice can help anyone become more capable of working systematically. …
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Alpine Institute’s 2018 #TheStateofRace Symposium
The Aspen Institute had their annual State of Race Symposium last week. Journalist Juan Williams moderated two panels: one about politics and a second about hate speech. As Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Comcast Corporation, David Cohen suggested in his opening remarks, the symposium aimed to ignite discussion about race in America …
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Visitor-Centered means Object-Centered
Over the last few years, there have been some heated debates behind the scenes of museum education offices about the ways that visitors should be engaged. Many directors have changed the department moniker from education to learning or interpretation. This change could be seen as a transformation from older methodologies to more sophisticated forms of …
Guiding Questions to Think about Bias in Museums (by functional area)
At AAM 2018, there was a wonderful panel led by Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko about Decolonization. While all the speakers were wonderful, I was particularly struck by Jaclyn Roessel’s remarks about indigenizing museums as an act of transforming the current power structure. Overall, the conversation underscored the importance of systematic and cataclysmic change in transforming the colonialism inherent …
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Recognizing Bias in Interpretation and Content
Being culturally situated is a state nothing can avoid, collection objects included. Collection objects, even natural history specimens, are mediated by creators, curators, educators, amongst others. A dinosaur bone is excavated by a person, identified by a person, and reclassified by a person. The human existence, in other words, flavors the essence of every …
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#AAM2018 Recap: Language, Collaboration, and Action
The Annual American Alliance Conference 2018 was hosted in toasty Phoenix. Many participants mentioned that this conference felt like a year to consider the basics. Rather than big bang projects, many presentations seemed to focus on maintenance, improvement, and thoughtfulness. As part of this introspection, many presentations put a fine focus on understanding the …
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