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Cemetery stories

Visiting a cemetery, just for the sheer curiosity of it, probably isn’t top of your ‘must do’ list.  It certainly wasn’t on mine.

But that was before I realised how much cemeteries can tell us about a place and its history. Death is the ultimate unifier and, almost by definition, a cemetery will include a true cross-section of society. In addition, the design of the cemetery and the symbolism of the monuments can tell us a lot about the culture and the values of the society that created them.

About three years ago, I was part of a team that was commissioned to do an Interpretation Plan for West Terrace Cemetery here in Adelaide (I wrote about it at the time in Issue 39 of Interpreting Australia magazine – free download available to IA members). It was an intriguing prospect – while there are a few cemeteries around the world that pull in the crowds (Pere Lachaise in Paris springs to mind), I don’t think many have systematically explored their cultural tourism potential.

West Terrace Cemetery is distinctive in that it dates back to the beginning of South Australia’s colonial history, and was the State’s principal cemetery for the best part of a century. South Australia’s early politicians, explorers, entrepreneurs, priests and paupers all share their final resting place in its grounds. You can consider the cemetery as a window into South Australia’s colonial history in particular (I’ll define ‘colonial’ South Australia as the period from first European settlement to Federation, i.e. 1836-1901).

So, back to the Interpretation Plan.  One of its recommendations was to produce a set of self-guided tours of the cemetery, each exploring a different theme. The first challenge was to choose, out of a longlist of several hundred, which grave sites would be chosen to create the first tour of ‘heritage highlights’. Eventually, a tour comprising 29 stops was developed and I was appointed to write the text for the signage (through Exhibition Studios).

One of the sites on the Heritage Highlights tour. The draped urn at the top of the monument was a common funerary symbol in the late 1800s.

It was quite an undertaking – to interpret the cemetery features and burial sites necessitated getting across a lot of SA’s early history in order to give the stories context and relevance. We needed to provide enough background for visitors who knew little of South Australian history, while still keeping the text succinct. The tone of the text needed to be lively, while still sufficiently respectful of the place it was sited. The content also needed to be approved by the descendents, who remain ownership and control of the burial plots.

The Heritage Highlights trail was officially opened on March 4, and I was delighted to be invited to the celebrations and meet some of the descendents of the people I’d written about. I was careful not to look too closely at the text (I was sure there’d be things I’d wished I’d done differently!), but was pleased to see a project that had been in the pipeline for so long finally come into fruition.

So if you’re in Adelaide, are curious and have a free couple of hours, I recommend you see it for yourself – among the people you will discover are:

  • Colonial powerbrokers such as the Kingstons, Henry Ayers and John Langdon Bonython
  • The entrepreneurs behind household names such as Faulding and Menz
  • The women who campaigned to see SA become the first place in the world to give women full democratic rights
  • Eccentric genius Percy Grainger (yes he’s buried at West Terrace!)
  • Plus the stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, such as the young Foot Constable killed in the line of duty, and a victim of South Australia’s worst civilian maritime disaster.

I hope that’s been enough to whet your appetite – and do let me know what you think!

The Cemetery is open every day and you can pick up the tour guide brochure at the front gate.

 

 

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Choose your own adventure

Once upon a time, some exhibition developers had a problem.

It was the 1980s, and a Natural History museum in the US had two popular and highly advanced aquarium tanks, unique in that they were designed to mimic whole ecosystems. So, to better communicate the scientific and ecological importance of these tanks, the museum decided to redevelop the exhibition area surrounding them*.

But before long, a split emerged in development team. While the scientists, designers, educators and others all agreed on the key concepts and messages that the new exhibition should convey, they could not agree on the best way to communicate it all. There were two competing approaches:

  • Structured: in this layout, visitors would be channelled into a linear route that would systematically introduce visitors to a range of concepts before they reached the tanks.  The rationale of this approach is that it would provide visitors with optimum preparation and background context to fully appreciate the tank displays.
  • Unstructured: this layout would not impose a visit sequence on visitors, but rather allow visitors to engage with exhibits with the order and intensity of their choosing.  Those that advocated this approach held that it would empower visitors to shape their own learning experience in a way that suited them. The agenda would be shaped by the visitor, not the museum.

Such debates are common enough over the course of an exhibition development – I’ve been part of a fair few of my own over the years.  I can imagine the scene of the development meetings, and how passionately (and probably also heatedly!) each side would have argued their case.

So the fact the team couldn’t agree on a fundamental aspect of the exhibition design is nothing out of the ordinary. What is unusual is that this museum had the opportunity to test each option.

The team designed the exhibit elements so that they were modular, moveable units that could be configured in both Stuctured and Unstructured modes. In each case the exhibits were identical; all that would change is the layout. This way each option could be tested and (everyone hoped) this would put the debate to rest once and for all.

Visitors were tracked and timed, with the exhibits they visited and the amount of time they spent on them recorded. In addition, visitors were interviewed at the end of their visit and asked what they thought the exhibition was all about.

The timing studies demonstrated that in both layouts, the time visitors spent in the exhibition space was roughly the same (a median time of only a few minutes). However, visitors to the Unstructured exhibition spent more of their time in the exhibition space actually engaging with exhibits (including reading more text and watching more of the video presentations). Furthermore, they described their experience more positively in post-visit interviews, and demonstrated a better understanding of the exhibition’s intended messages.

So, the Structured mode, which was intended to set things out in a more logical sequence and thus aid understanding, seemed to have the opposite effect. It was the Unstructured mode which did a better job of meeting the experiential and learning needs of visitors. So what was happening?

John Falk, renowned museum learning expert and principal investigator of this study, put forward a couple of possible explanations:

  1. Once visitors have seen the reef tanks, they are more motivated to read the supporting material in order to add additional meaning and context to what they had just viewed. So, in contrast to the curatorial intent, which was for the exhibits to serve as an introduction to the tanks, visitors seemed to prefer to use them the other way around.
  2. Visitors entered the exhibition space with a specific agenda, i.e. to see the tanks. In this circumstance, the linear visit sequence merely served to impede visitors reaching their destination; thus they were less inclined to engage with exhibits which (in their view) were just getting in the way of what they really came to see.  In support of this view, one visitor was quoted to say “I wanted to see the whale and the coral reef, but I had to wind all around and through things in order to see them.”

Broader implications

When we develop exhibitions, we often use words like ‘storyline’ and ‘narrative’ as a way of organising and arranging the ideas of an exhibition in a logical sequence, matrix or hierarchy. Usually, these arrangements manifest themselves in the exhibition space one way or another – for instance the linear arrangement of a timeline, or a ‘hub and spoke’ arrangement of several exhibits which all relate to a unifying central concept.

But exhibitions are not books, and stories are not always linear. Movies such as Memento and Reservoir Dogs have shown that a story can be told outside of the constraints of a traditional linear narrative – in fact, seeing a dramatic outcome and then seeing the sequence of events which led to this climax can be a compelling way to tell a story. Even so, with a movie we are inevitably seeing the story unfold in the order that the makers intended.

A better analogy for an exhibition might be the Choose Your Own Adventure books (that any true child of the 1980s will remember fondly!). In these, the writers set the general scene and context, but the path that each reader takes is one of their own making.

So does this mean that there is no point organising exhibits within an exhibition space? Er, no. There is other research (which I’ll detail in a future post), that shows that thematically linking exhibits both in space and through design attributes can affect visitor experience and understanding in positive ways. The difference here is that the difference between a space that uses design cues to offer guidance to visitors (which they can follow as much or as little as they choose), and a space that insists that visitors engage with it on its own terms.

*This is one of my ‘Museology’ posts, drawing on the published visitor research I’m reading during my PhD studies. In this instance this posting is based on a paper by John Falk: Assessing the Impact of Exhibit Arrangement Visitor Behavior and Learning. Source: Curator Vol 36(2) pp133-146 (1993)

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Museological Blogging

I’ve had a lot to get my head around lately.

My PhD studies began in earnest at the beginning of this month, and I’ve since become an avid collector of museum and design related literature. That’s the easy part – now to get down to reading, digesting and making sense of it all such that it can help me inform my research question and methodology.

As an area of academic interest, museums sit at the juncture of several fields and schools of thought: pedagogy, sociology, psychology, semiotics, architecture and design research are just some of the areas I’ve had to start to get my teeth into. There is so much out there that sometimes you can find yourself butterflying from one thing to another very quickly: social semiotics in the morning; statistical analysis of visitor data in the afternoon.

But I’m seeing patterns of thinking emerge and I think I’m starting to get a bit of a handle of how all these fields tie together, what ideas have influenced what and where there might be gaps in the existing literature.

Over the next few weeks I will write a few blog posts as bite-size summaries of the main areas of academic enquiry that I’m reading about. I plan to do this for a couple of reasons: firstly, I hope that preparing fairly brief summaries the main areas I’m reading will help me sort out my thoughts as I go. Secondly, it will give me a way of documenting the trajectory of my thinking (knowing full well that it may well make cringeworthy reading 2 – 3 years down the track!).

It also goes without saying that I hope that these posts will be of interest to those of you who are interested in exhibits, design and the visitor experience (and if you’re not, why are you here??), but have neither the time nor the inclination to trawl the literature yourself.

I have created the Museology category for these posts, so they will be easily found (or avoided) depending on your inclination. I hope to post the first one in the next few days.

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Museums and (community) memory

Australia is no stranger to extreme weather, and recently such events seem to be increasing in frequency and intensity. Just in the past few weeks, vast swathes of Queensland have been swamped by flooding. Brisbane, a city which only a few years ago was under severe water restrictions due to drought, was inundated and low-lying suburbs completely submerged. Shortly afterwards the north of Queenland was battered by Cyclone Yasi; while at the same time there was flash flooding in Melbourne and bushfires in Perth.

Living in Australia, the forces and vagaries of nature are a part of life. The effects of punishing droughts, catastrophic floods and devastating fires have all seared themselves into the national consciousness. Or have they?

ABC Radio National’s Rear Vision recently aired a program titled “Deluges that have gone before: floods in Australian history” (transcript available). Drawing upon historic major floods, in particular the 1893 and 1974 Brisbane floods, the program looks at what happens as these events fade from living memory and to the back of the collective consciousness.

 

Aerial view of the 1974 Brisbane Flood (State Library of Queensland)

 

Early European settlers ignored the warnings of Aboriginal inhabitants by building towns on flood plains. As historian Emily O’Gorman said:

“It seems to have been listened to with interest, but largely ignored. Later kind of retrospective accounts after a number of floods, people from outside Gundagai who knew about these warnings speculated that there was perhaps an element of racism at work, as well as I think the validity of oral testimony itself was in question, where the records of floods needed a numerical height to be taken seriously at that time.”

But even when prior events have been in the written historical record, and the subject of Government enquiries, lessons have not always been learned. Richard Evans, a historian who has specialised in the aftermath of natural disasters, has found a pattern in the way lessons fade from memory and are eventually lost:

“Reading the reports of various official inquiries . . . they are eerily similar. They will almost inevitably find very similar contributing factors to the severity of the disaster; they will make very similar recommendations, and they will, sad to say, usually be largely ignored in the longer term. In the short term there will be interesting commitment, but it doesn’t last more than a few years, certainly it doesn’t last decades. What really strikes me is how we have the disaster, we have the inquiry, we find out the same painful bitter lesson that too many of the people who live here don’t understand the nature of the place they’re living in, and then they forget it again. And then in the course of a generation or generation-and-a-half, the disaster recurs . . . and again we forget”

The problem, it appears, with enquiries, reports and recommendations is that they lack a permanent presence. Eventually they are retired to a shelf somewhere; there is nothing to keep the experiences and lessons learned fresh in the minds of communities over a period of decades or generations.

So can museums play a role in keeping these memories fresh and ever-present, thus helping us prepare and avert disasters better in the future? This was something that historian Helen Gregory suggested during the program:

“. . . because natural disasters are such a feature in Australia, it struck me that for instance, Victoria could have a museum of the bushfires, Brisbane could have a museum of the floods . . . there is a real, not just a community memory function in having a museum, to cover all the floods . . .because this is very much part of the city’s history and its relationship to the river. Not only is that important for the memory of the whole community, but to give people the opportunity to have their stories recorded . . . I think that Brisbane has a wonderful opportunity for developing a special repository for floods . . .”

Now obviously there are practical issues: museums are a significant capital and operational undertaking, not to be entered into lightly. But if something like this helps us better prepare for disaster in the future (perhaps in the context of an existing museum, if a dedicated museum is not feasible), it would be worthwhile.

In this vein, the theme for 2011’s International Museums Day, which is held around May 18 each year, is  “Museums and Memory”. The purpose of this theme is to highlight the role that museums can play in collecting and preserving the objects and stories which constitute a community’s memory.

Australia’s relationship with its history of natural disasters is a timely example.

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Museums and your Worldview

Does who you are affect what you can talk about?

Exhibitions don’t exist in a vacuum: people experience them in the context of the institution in which they are located. And often that institution has a long-standing reputation (call it a ‘brand’ if you like) which will influence what people expect to see there. (You wouldn’t expect an exhibition in Questacon to be the same kind of thing as an exhibition at the Australian War Memorial, for example).

To explore this idea further, let’s consider museums of science. Does an audience’s expectation-arising-from-reputation mean that science museums are obliged to present only a scientific, empirical view of the world in their exhibitions?

I’d like to explore a case study: the ‘The Science and Art of Medicine’. exhibition in London’s Science Museum. I’ll say up front that I haven’t seen this exhibition, but it is described on its website thus:

The Science and Art of Medicine gallery, one of the world’s greatest collections on the subject, reveals the history of medicine across the world and across cultures . . . A newly redisplayed section deals with other living medical traditions, including African, Chinese, Indian and Islamic practices.

17th Century Acupuncture teaching doll, one of the items on display in the exhibition (From Science Museum website; image no 10284604)

Its coverage of alternative medicine, in particular homeopathy, has apparently caused a bit of a ruckus. As one blogger said:

Depressingly, the [Science Museum] seems to have pandered to the whims of quacks by allowing them to create their own exhibit, and it looks like there was no quality control . . . [this] matters because the [museum] is supposed to promote science and understanding, not fuel an ever increasingly tiresome debate between those that painstakingly research and collect data and those that appear to pick any old idea then try to convince people it works.

The blog post closes with the statement:

Institutions like the Science Museum unfortunately do not have the luxury of sitting on the fence with issues such as these, especially when they hold a huge responsibility of informing the public.

This statement is telling – the writer seems to be just as vexed by the location of the exhibition (in a science museum) as he is about the exhibition’s content. Implicit in his statement is the assumption that the science museum is vested with a sense of authority, and from this comes a responsibility to ensure only scientifically verifiable facts are presented. Indeed, this writer and others suggested the museum should go further and expose unscientific and unsutstantiated claims wherever it can.

There was sufficient a wave of discontent for the museum and the exhibition’s curator to release an official response to the criticism, explaining their rationale for its inclusion of ‘alternative’ medicines in the display:

we take an anthropological and sociological perspective . . .we do not evaluate different medical systems, but demonstrate the diversity of medical practices and theoretical frameworks currently thriving across the world. Our message in this display is that these traditions are not ‘alternative’ systems in most parts of the world. Instead they currently offer the majority of the global population their predominant, sometimes only, choice of medical care. We do not make any claims for the validity of the traditions we present . . . We consider that these ‘alternative’ medical practices are of considerable cultural significance. We also recognise that some may consider the inclusion of these practices in the Science Museum controversial.

This statement in turn triggered its own flurry of comments, such as:

I strongly believe that something so fundamentally unscientific, really has no place in a science museum, no matter how anthropologically and sociologically interesting.

Again, the problem seems to be that the exhibition is presented in the context of ‘science’, more than the fact that the story is being told at all.

I first came across this controversy on Twitter, when someone (a scientist) posted a link to the Science Museum’s response, calling it ‘appalling’. When I retweeted the link, one of my colleagues (a historian) wondered what the fuss was all about, thinking that the inclusion of this content in a science museum was a refreshing dash of ‘anti-imperialism’.

In these different responses, I think I see a bit of a philosophical clash regarding what a museum (particularly a museum of science) is for.

One the one hand there are those who wish to promote a scientific viewpoint of the world, with all the benefits and knowledge science has brought to our lives. They might see the inclusion of alternative medicince as a kind of  slippery slope towards giving airtime to misleading claims and scare stories, leaving society the worse for it. (For instance the consequences of the so called MMR ‘scare’, where the conjuring of a false risk led to a decline in vaccination rates, thus exposing children to the real and deadly risk of diseases like measles).

On the other hand, the ‘march of progress’ narrative which is often implicit in science and technology exhibitions makes some people (in particular some museum professionals) feel a bit uncomfortable. Other experiences and perspectives can appear to be marginalised in a ‘technology trumps all’  kind of triumphalism. Science and postmodernism do indeed make odd bedfellows!

(But this is all getting a bit philosophical . . . and if I sound like I’m sitting on the fence it’s because I think I have a better view of the whole landscape from there . . .)

So let’s bring it back to visitors. What do they expect from a science museum?

There is research to suggest that visitors do see Science Museums as venerable, authoritative institutions. And this does affect the way they perceive exhibits they see there: they expect to be told clear facts and a scientific view of ‘truth’. In this context, a science museum would need to tread carefully: display does not necessarily mean endorsement, but visitors may take what they see at face value unless authorship is made extremely clear.

What this means for this particular exhibition at the Science Museum I can’t say, although I do know that the museum generally conducts thorough audience research during their exhibition planning process. It would be interesting to see what their research says about this one.

UPDATE: Sometimes you get so caught up in planet Interwebs you forget what’s sitting on your bookshelf! Following writing this blog post and others, I’ve once again picked up my copy of “The Politics of Display: Museums, Science Culture” edited by Sharon MacDonald. It looks at the political consequences of scientific displays and argues that they cannot claim to be apolitical. Have a look if you want to explore this topic further.

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What does ‘raising the bar’ really mean?

A recent posting on the Visitor Attractions discussion group on Linked In made me look twice: “Delivering minimum expected customer service rather than trying to deliver remarkable customer service is a better strategy. . .”

The title concerned me: I thought it was going to be an argument for cutting corners and maximising throughput; the ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ philosophy. Who cares about quality when you get what you pay for . . . (In other words, the business model pursued par excellence by the budget airlines).

The provocative title worked because I clicked through and read the whole blog post (ready to violently disagree). And it turns out that the message was far more subtle: namely that it’s better to be acceptable 100% of the time than excellent 10% of the time and substandard the rest of the time. 

No one is perfect, and sometimes in the pursuit of perfection we can overextend ourselves – offer too much; or make promises that our current resources can’t consistently deliver on.

Too often when we look at our visitor experiences and envisage how they could be improved, we look at the best case scenarios: how can we improve the best of what we have to offer? Conversely, this blog post argues that we’d do better to have a closer look at how we are doing on a bad day: how can we make sure that the minimum we have to offer is at the very least acceptable?

In other words, it’s a call to get the basics right: investment in whizz-bang technology or slick marketing campaigns is well and good, but it will not take away the bad memories of poor basic infrastructure or surly service. (Similar to the hierarchy of visitor needs in this presentation I gave to the Interpretation Australia conference last November)

It’s also about managing expectations – underpromise and overdeliver rather than the other way around.

So when we think about ‘raising the bar’ of visitor experiences, we should remember that it’s not always about making the best better. It’s can also be about improving ourselves at our worst.

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New Zealand: a visitor’s perspective (well, sort of)

My partner and I have recently returned from two weeks’ holiday in New Zealand.

It was a whirlwind fourteen days across both islands, taking in cities, wilderness and a huge diversity of landscapes. Both of us were struck by the huge variety of places you could encounter in just a few hours of driving.

As I said, this was a holiday. Which means that I made a deliberate decision to leave my “work” head at home and simply enjoy the experience without burdening myself with the meta-analysis of it all. Before we went away I made a pact with my partner that I would not drag him on a “Museums of New Zealand” tour (although I did gain an exemption to visit Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum in Wellington – more later). Put bluntly, I wasn’t going to spend my holiday thinking about signage design, quality of interpretive text, or musing on why experiences had been planned out the way they were. I was just going to approach everywhere we went as an ordinary visitor.

So rather than a considered review, I thought I’d just point out a few things which I thought were interesting or noteworthy, without any major analysis.

Worthy but not dull

There are lots of important bits of information about safety, cleaning up after yourself, and so forth that need to be presented to visitors. But Kiwis seem to have a bit of a sense of humour about it, which means (a) you’re more likely to read the signs and (b) remember them.

Hell's Gate
A 'no littering' sign at Hell's Gate, Rotorua. Given the pools ranged from 60 - 120 degrees C with pH 2 - 4, it was hardly an attractive proposition!
No littering sign at Mount John
Another 'no littering' sign, this one at Mount John Observatory overlooking Lake Tekapo (part of the University of Canterbury)

There did seem to be a bit of a theme across New Zealand of adding a dash of humor to interpretation – this even extended to Air New Zealand’s safety briefing video, which was full of rugby puns and gentle digs at Australians (the ‘put on your own oxygen mask before helping infants’ bit was illustrated by a sulking Aussie rugby fan).

Also, on our various roadside ventures into national parks and scenic vantage points, there were helpful instructional signs giving estimated walking times to particular destinations. Having this information was useful in deciding whether we had the time to factor a particular side trail into our journey or not. (And whether it was a trail for leisurely strollers like us, or the full-on hikers for whom NZ is a Mecca)

A way of looking closer

At the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki (NW coast of South Island), this illustration gave a whole new perspective to the geological formations in front of it:

Illustration showing faces and creatures in the rocks (apologies for cropping off of text - it was a little poem about what you could see hiding in the rock structures)
The actual structures the illustration was referring to - the leap of imagination in looking for the shapes was easier in the flesh, but it still makes you look at it differently, doesn't it?

Making the drive an interpretive experience

Points to our travel agent for this one. For the South Island leg of our tour she included hire of a Kruse system, a GPS-based travel guide which you plug into the car’s cigarette lighter (funny we still call it that although most cars ditched the lighter function years ago). It’s not a satnav (we had one of those as well), but rather a unit which uses your GPS co-ordinates to select and play audio tracks about the places you are driving through. The commentary includes Maori legends, the history of towns and places, tips for spotting local wildlife, suggestions of nearby scenic destinations and practical information (such as “this town has the last ATM for xxx km”).

It’s much more relaxing than combing through a guide book (which I can’t do when in a car anyway as it makes me travel sick), and was delivered at a sufficiently gentle pace mixed in with music (although my partner would have liked a ‘skip’ function for some of the songs which are admittedly an eclectic mix).

Kruse was a useful interpretive tool, revealing a depth of meaning to the places we were driving through (without it, many of the smaller towns would have been insignificant 80 km/h zones). It also helped us to understand the changes in the landscape as we moved across the island. We also took its advice for some scenic detours and stopping points which were definitely worth the trip.

On a technical front, it’s usually clever enough to know when you’re backtracking on a route and so doesn’t re-play the same tracks ad nauseum. Even in ‘holiday’ mode, I couldn’t help but marvel at the huge amount of time and effort that must have gone into researching and writing all the scripts. The hire was only NZ$10 per day and definitely worth it (I’ll take my commission now! 😉 )

Te Papa Tongarewa

Te Papa front entrance

As New Zealand’s national museum, this place was understandably HUGE. There was no way we were going to see everything and so we didn’t even set out to try. Fortunately, their current major travelling exhibition (European Masters) was one I had already seen in Melbourne so we could tick that off the itinerary straight away.

The building wasn’t the most intuitive in the world to navigate, but signage around the main congregation spaces was reasonably good and it was clear enough to find what was on offer on which floor, once you got the hang of the fact that the floor you’d arrived on was “Level 2”.

We concentrated mostly on the Maori culture and New Zealand history exhibitions, which for us first-time visitors to NZ were englightening. There was an informative exhibition on the Treaty of Waitangi, known as New Zealand’s founding document, and which I was only vaguely aware of prior to visiting. It presented the background to the treaty, and how differences between the Maori and English translations of the document have had ramifications which continue to this day.

I also enjoyed exhibition about the culture and experiences of Pacific peoples (from places like Tonga and Samoa) who have settled to New Zealand more recently. (I unleashed my inner kid, spending a lot of time on a virtual mixing table mashing up Pacific pop music.) There was also a large wall of objects linked to a touchscreen where you could select an item and find out its significance to a particular community. It contained more modern objects like T-shirts, flyers, album covers and so forth, but in display terms it was not dissimilar to this one from the Pounamu exhibition:

Pounamu, or Neprite Jade, was a much prized commodity for the Maori, who used it to make ornaments and weapons. The interpretation of these items is on the adjacent touchscreen. The spiralling layout was visually appealing as well as interpretively resonant (the sprial shape is commonly seen in Pounamu ornaments); I also found the shape of the layout made it easy to match the items in the case with their corresponding image on the screen.

The exhibition also presented some of the challenges faced in modern Pacific communities. Canned corned beef has become a major staple in many Pacific islands, displacing the people from more traditional food sources and creating an economic dependence on imported goods. This piece of art, a cow made from corned beef cans, was commentary on the issue:

The corned beef cow. There was an interesting back-story to this work, but I can't recall the details sufficiently clearly to recount. If I hadn't been in 'holiday' mode, I would have taken a picture of the interpretive graphic as well as a reminder. But I was, so I didn't, and now you'll need to reach your own conclusions . . .

And now, because it was a holiday, I’ll self-indulgently finish with a few snaps of the amazing scenery to prove that NZ is definitely a place worth visiting . . .

View of the Southern Alps from Lake Murchison
Arty skywards shot through an ice cave, Fox Glacier
Clouds boiling over Mount Tasman
Huka Falls nr Lake Taupo could be more accurately called 'Huka Torrent'

(PS Photo credits to my partner and his uber-fancy Canon)

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Interpretation: whose business?

I have a confession to make.

Probably a contentious one, given I am Vice President of Interpretation Australia, but one I will make nonetheless: I’m having a bit of a problem with the word ‘interpretation‘.

The word is tantalisingly – misleadingly – simple: and this in itself presents an interpretive problem. Outside the heritage profession, it has a completely different meaning, usually related to translating foreign languages. And even within heritage circles, I sometimes wonder whether we are all talking about precisely the same thing when we’re talking about ‘interpretation’.

The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud from www.alcorngallery.com (One of the top images which came up from a Google search under 'interpretation' - yet another meaning for this vexed term!)

Before I go on, I’ll bring in an analogous example – the word ‘theory’. No-one would need to go look it up in the dictionary. Through common usage we all know it means a ‘hunch’, something we’re basing on conjecture but which we don’t have enough evidence to prove outright. In common usage, ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’ are interchangeable terms. But not to scientists. In science, a ‘theory’ is something that is so well backed up by available evidence that it can be taken as an established fact. A hypothesis, on the other hand, is closer to our common understanding of  the word ‘theory’ – we think we know what might be going on, but the results are not yet in.

This disconnect between everyday and specialist usage of a seemingly harmless word such as ‘theory’ has its consequences.  For instance, people who wish to undermine the well-established Theory of Evolution for their own political or religious agenda can turn around and say:  “Well, it’s only a theory, isn’t it?”

Now ‘interpretation’ doesn’t suffer quite like ‘theory’ in the way it is wilfully misinterpreted. But even so, I think the issue of definition runs deeper than just having to clear up confusion when you answer one of those ‘So what do you do?’ questions at dinner parties. How do you get someone to value something when they’re not even sure what it is?

The latest edition of Interpreting Australia focuses on the business side of interpretation: does interpretation make sense from a business perspective? How can we incorporate the value of interpretation into business bottom lines? Is there a firm line where marketing and customer service stop and interpretation begins? And what does this mean for who should be charged with ‘doing’ interpretation?

Sue Hodges writes the first instalment of a thought provoking series (the rest will be coming on the Interpretation Australia website soon) about how the unclear definition and intangible nature of interpretation makes it easy for it to be undervalued and ‘claimed’ by other professions rather than being a separate entity, calling for its own dedicated expertise and budget:

Intepretation suffers from being pluralistic. It spans many disciplines . . . Yet it is this very adaptability that currently threatens our profession; many other disciplines also want our slice of the pie . . . most [interpretation] could theoretically be undertaken by anyone because the required skills base is neither mandatory, legislated nor confined to the arts or sciences. Interpreters are vying for business against specialties which are more clearly defined, such as architecture. . . . it can be hard to justify adaptive and intangible interpretive work against the familiar and tangible work from allied professions. (Interpreting Australia Issue 43, p6)

In this context, consultants from all sorts of fields can claim they can do the ‘interpretation’ part of a project. And if clients aren’t entirely clear what interpretation is, and get different definitions depending on who they speak to, this only muddies the water further.

In a similar vein, I recently had a discussion with someone who is charged with helping local tourism businesses create better experiences (to the end of increasing visitor spend and of course, profits). While we both understood intuitively how interpretation can (and does) enhance tourism experiences, it’s hard to quantify exactly what interpretive ‘inputs’ will lead to a specific set of bottom-line ‘outputs’. And without this hard data, it can be difficult for some business owners, unfamiliar with the term ‘interpretation’ in the first place, to get it (and see why it’s a wise investment).

Our discussion did make me wonder whether the use of the term ‘interpretation’ was actually counter-productive in this instance, and whether we should just be seeing good interpretation as an integral part of creating a distinctive experience, regardless of what we call it?

Or maybe we turn it the other way around –  and show how interpretation is something people know about already! In another of the Interpreting Australia articles, Michele Bain of Designhaus draws upon the example of Jamie Oliver as an ‘interpreter’ of food and nutrition:

. . .he engaged us and inspired us so completely we never even noticed that we were actually learning to cook. (Interpreting Australia Issue 43, p10)

Perhaps if we described interpretation in these more familiar terms – i.e. applying interpretive principles to communicating the very concept of interpretation – we might help businesses make the conceptual leap from seeing interpretation as something that sounds very academic and not particularly relevant to them,  to understanding that it is the ‘secret ingredient’ which makes the difference between so-so and must-see.

To take the cooking analogy a step further: bricks-and-mortar might be the meat-and-potatoes of a destination, but without the carefully planned and expertly created ‘sauce’ that is interpretation, the experience may satisfy the basics but it is hardly going to be unique,  memorable or emotionally satisfying.

Maybe that is the way to describe what I do at the next dinner party . . .

http://www.designhaus.com.au/
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I tweet therefore I am . . . (part of a community)

Or . . . how a techie novice came to embrace social media.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve learned until you come across someone who is yet to embark on that particular learning curve.

I came to realise this recently when I started to talk about Twitter at a conference, only to be met with a lot of blank looks. Almost by accident I have become a citizen of the Twitterverse, and it is only when I encounter non-tweeters that I realise how much I’ve learned about social media over the past few months.

First some background about my relationship with ‘technology’  – I’m not an early adopter. I’ve long believed that there are two main types of people when it comes to attitudes to technology:

  1. “What does it do?” types – these are the people who are turned on by technology in and of itself. They like experimenting with new gadgets and technology. They like the functionality, and play with it to discover applicability.
  2. “What does it do for ME?” types – these people aren’t necessarily anti-technology, but they’re more cautious. They don’t particularly like playing with gadgetry. But when they find an application that fits with their day-to-day lives, they’ll embrace it with both arms._
  3. (Yes OK there is a third type, those who are inherently suspicious of technology in all its forms and wish it would go away. If you are in this category you won’t be reading this post anyway because that would mean switching on a computer.)

I fit into the second category: I’m not all that confident with gadgetry and have never felt particularly web-savvy (although I’m starting to realise I probably know more than I think I do – osmosis is a powerful learning tool).

As a Type #2 person, I had adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ attitude to Social Media. I joined Facebook and LinkedIn in 2007, and this was in response to specific needs that presented themselves at the time. It was not long after I moved back to Australia from overseas, and these sites were a handy way of keeping in touch with friends from the UK and make new business contacts respectively. And I’ve been a reasonably regular user of each since. But I think Facebook is more of a tool for sharing with people you know rather than for meeting new people, and LinkedIn is quite focused in its remit and tends to be a more formal networking space.

By comparison, Twitter is far more powerful and versatile as a communication and networking tool. I opened a Twitter account out of curiosity in late 2009 but it sat more or less dormant until the middle of this year, which was when I embraced the Twitterverse.

So what were the catalysts for this change, at least in my circumstances?

  1. Change of work situation: in the middle of this year I left full time work and started working from home. This gave me a desire to connect with people so I didn’t feel isolated; it also gave me time & space to get to grips with how Twitter works and how it could work for me (not that leaving your job is necessary to get your head around Twitter!)
  2. Programs like TweetDeck and Echofon: I never really figured out how to incorporate the Twitter website into the texture of my daily life, and have only just recently taken the plunge to buy a smartphone (as a Type #2 person, I’ve been getting by on my partner’s hand-me-down phones for the past decade). I found that TweetDeck was easily customisable, incorporated Facebook and LinkedIn into a kind of one-stop-shop, and could happily run in the background on my desktop. Meanwhile Echofon was a handy application for using on my iPod touchto follow live Twitter feeds in front of the telly. Being able to do this gave me a feel for how the medium worked. (An aside: I only have an iPod Touch because Dad was given one as a freebie. It took me ages to figure out what the point of it was, but it is now is my near-constant companion – typical Type #2 behaviour!)
  3. Finding stimulating people to follow: I’d heard all the hype about Twitter being all about celebrity banalities and people broadcasting what they had for breakfast. I didn’t think it was necessarily a place where grown-ups congregated to discuss things of significance. But I knew a few fellow science communicators had been tweeting for  a while, plus I’d become aware of a couple of museum professionals with an interest in social media. So following these people seemed like a good place to start. Then, by following the #qanda hashtag during ABC TV’s Q&A and also the #auspol discussion during the lead-up to the Australian Federal Election, I also found more interesting people to follow. Plus there is a lively Twitter community in Adelaide and it wasn’t long before I found them and / or they found me.
  4. Getting over ‘stagefright’: I’m a fairly extroverted person, but I feared an off-the-cuff statement being preserved for all eternity in the virtual sphere. What if I couldn’t think of anything profound to say in 140 characters or less? What if I say something that comes across as stupid and it comes back to haunt me? I must say I’m still *relatively* careful about what I say in a tweet. But I now see that in the general scheme of things, my tweets are but grains of sand on a virtual beach – most people will only be half paying attention (at best) to anything I say unless I really go to town. Small sins are readily forgiven.
  5. Encountering a real community in the virtual sphere: through Twitter, I have participated in lively debates and discussions, shared links and valuable information, expanded my business networks, live-tweeted from conferences, kept up with breaking news and found out about forthcoming events happening in the Real World. (e.g. TEDxAdelaide had a strong Twitter presence before, during and after the day itself). I’ve even been to the movies and a picnic organised by #socadl. (Adelaideans in social media.) In short, I’ve made friends, broadened my professional network and come to know people I never would have encountered if I hadn’t taken the plunge into Twitter.

So my advice to the reluctant would be: give it a go! Terminology like handles and hashtags might seem a bit alien at first, but a bit of trial and error goes a long way. And it’s a great opportunity to feel part of a community of ongoing conversation.

Follow me into the Twitterverse!

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More on Museum Funding and Staffing

This is another post in my series looking at the ABS’s Arts and Culture statistics, again trying to get to grips with what the published statistics are saying about the sector. Here I focus on the statistics about museum income, expenditure and staffing as detailed in Chapter 8 of the report (the ‘museum’ chapter).

As noted previously, around two-thirds of museum income comes from Government sources: either Federal, State or Local. The report breaks down income and expenditure by museum type; I’ve also shown income and expenditure streams as a percentage of the total:

Summary of Income and Expenditure by Museum Type (Source: ABS)

(Note that the income categories are a little different from that in the chart shown previously – the Government figure is the same and I’m assuming the discrepancy is down to other categorisation differences.)

This shows considerable variation in the funding mix for different museum types, with the differences between Historic Properties and Natural /Science /Other showing the biggest contrast. Whereas less than half of Historic Properties’ income comes from Government sources, Government provides three-quarters of Natural /Science /Other museums’ income. The fact that Historic Properties are far more likely to be paid admission (see here) is consistent with this and explains the higher proportion of income coming from admissions.

There is also a marked contrast in the proportion of income from fundraising, with Art Museums taking in more than triple that of Natural /Science /Other when taken as a proportion of total income. Given the fact that both of these categories are likely to represent some of the larger and national museums (the reasons for this are given in the previous post), it seems that either Art Galleries are punching well above their weight in the fundraising stakes, or Natural /Science /Other museums are lagging behind somewhat (or maybe a bit of both). Another possibility that cannot be ruled out is that one-off capital grants (which are included in the Government funding total) have skewed the figures in this particular financial year.

On the expenditure front, I was surprised at how little (as a proportion of total expenditure) is spent on exhibition and display development. Given exhibitions are the main public face of the museum, and that exhibitions are typically quite expensive to produce, I would have thought it would have come in much higher than a tiny 4% (on average) of total expenditure.

The other thing that surprised me was the relatively high proportion spent on exhibitions by Art Museums (7%) as opposed to the much lower figures spent by other museum types. I can’t think of anything inherently more expensive about mounting art exhibitions and wonder whether the increased cost is down to an increased frequency of exhibition changeover in Art Galleries, rather than anything inherent in the cost of mounting a given exhibition. (Assuming Art Galleries do indeed change over exhibitions more frequently, that is!)

It should also go without saying that having a category called ‘other’ that accounts for half of museums’ operating expenses makes interpretation or generalisation from these data somewhat difficult.

Just to see what would happen, I took these income figures from above and divided them by the number of museums and number of visitors (paid and free admission) to each museum type (as provided earlier in the ABS report and summarised here).  Among other things, this shows the amount of Government subsidy per visitor to each museum type:

Income per museum and per visitor by museum type (as derived from ABS report, Ch8)

(I should add a disclaimer here: these figures have been derived by combining numbers from two completely separate tables in the ABS report. This may or may not be a valid way to treat these data. You have been warned . . . )

This bears out what the other table indicated – Historic Properties gain a higher income from their visitors ($6.95/visitor) ; Natural /Science /Other museums attract a greater Government subsidy for each visitor they attract ($34.65 per visitor).

Presenting Government subsidy in this way is pretty sobering in general really: with Government (Federal, State, Local) support coming in at an average of $21 per visitor, I can see the need for us to demonstrate real value and benefit. Conversely, it would be interesting to see how this figure relates to per-visit / per-use subsidies for the rest of the arts and cultural sector – that $21 may well represent excellent value when the full cost-benefit and comparison analysis is done.

So to look at expenses more closely, manipulating expenses in a similar way to what I did with income, it seems that the main reason Natural /Science /Other Museums are more expensive to run is due to staffing costs:

Museum expenses expressed per museum and per visitor (as derived from ABS figures)

As indicated previously, I think the Natural /Science /Other category is more likely to include large institutions (I’m thinking the Australian Museum, SA Museum, Melbourne Museum, etc. would all fit into this category); all of which have relatively large public programs teams, design departments, and so forth. The Art Gallery category would also include its fair share of large insitutions, but this is probably balanced by many other smaller and regional galleries.

So how do these staff costs break down? According to the ABS report, 7,856 people were employed in museums (June 2008).  At the same time, there were 23,426 people working as volunteers in museums:

Overview of employees and volunteers by museum type (Source ABS)

As with all the figures which are averaged out ‘per museum’, interpret with caution as it’s a pretty blunt instrument. That said, there is a marked difference between categories with respect to the ‘average’  number of employees and the numbers of volunteers (and their ratios to paid staff). These differences would definitely appear to explain the differences in staff costs.

I also wonder whether the cause of the difference in volunteer ratios is supply-side (i.e. social history museums are more willing to take on volunteers), or demand-side (i.e. people who wish to volunteer are more likely to choose social history). It could also be a bit of both: social history and historic sites tend to be smaller, local organisations with relatively low staff numbers and more dependent on volunteers; conversely because they are ‘local’, they may be more attractive to volunteers either through geographic convenience or because their impact is more visible than it would be if they part of larger institution’s ‘machine’.

Museum employees are broken down by category; I’ve shown the supplied numbers and have also presented them as a percentage of the total number of employees by museum type:

Breakdown of museum employees by job category (Source: ABS)

So for instance, the bottom row of this table shows that 31% of Art Gallery employees fall within in the ‘Security’ category, whereas this category only accounts for 20% of Natural /Science /Other Museum employees; 26% of museum employees across the board are ‘security’ personnel.  I’m not sure if any of these proportions leap out at me for being noteworthy or unusual, however.

As always, your insights and comments are very welcome . . .