Content Journey Mapping to Hone Interpretation Planning
Content in museums where theory becomes practice. The best-laid plans of mice and curators are exposed to visitors. Then the visitors wander through the installation spaces like pinballs. Anyone who has wasted serious coin on pinball machines knows that winning the jackpot is equal parts skill and luck. Frankly, good interpretation is similarly a bit …
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Appetite for Content by Visitor Segment
When planning content, interpreters need to perform a weird type of math. After they formalize their process and create their goals, they then need to edit their desires to meet the visitor desires. Getting just the right amount of content is challenging to say the least. Part of the program is that the majority of visitors …
Hack the Bureaucracy : MuseumNext 2018 London
Hack the Bureaucracy ( #MuseumNext 2018) Note: These are my notes from my MuseumNext London 2018. I presented with Paul Bowers, so many of these come out of our shared conversations. I only included my parts of the talk in this write-up. Museum workers are doing amazing work. Millions of objects are in care for …
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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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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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