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US Museum App Review 3: History Museums

This series started off with art museums and then moved on to natural history. Now, for the third and final review of apps I used in the US, here are a couple of history museum apps.

New York Historical Society

This museum is only a block away from AMNH and offers a welcome relief from the throngs of holiday crowds there. It was one of the less high-profile museums on my itinerary, but one I made a point of visiting as I had the opportunity to meet someone from the Society at the VSA conference.

The app was designed to accompany the New York and the Nation Exhibition, a new permanent exhibition and the first space you encounter on the ground floor. I liked this exhibition, which covered the history of New York and its broader influence on the US. It combined historical/archaeological objects, art pieces and technology in a clean and simple (but not too minimalist) style. Unfortunately they did not allow photography so I won’t be able to share my favourites in any detail.

App home page
App home page

The app features additional content such as videos and interviews that added an extra layer to the experience. For instance, while the ceiling structure over the ticketing desk was unmistakably Haringesque*, the app revealed that it was an actual part of Haring’s Pop Shop from the 1980s (I’m not sure if this information was duplicated elsewhere – if it is I didn’t see it but then again I was using the app as my main guide through this exhibition).

The app lists exhibit by title and there also is a map (which something has happened to since I visited so I can’t put up a decent screen grab). I remember having a bit of trouble using the map at times, as the icons were quite large in relation to the map, so sometimes it was hard to tell if you were in the right place (that could be just my map reading skills). Besides that I thought the app worked well. It often had more detail than I wanted to read or look at but I think that’s OK so long as you can find what you want to look at easily enough.

Interpretation of a multi-part sculpture which is positioned right at the entrance. At first glance, it looks very much like a typical 'grand old men' sculpture with marble busts. Closer inspection reveals something more sinister, in the form of slave shackles and badges. The interview with the artist reveals the intent was to show two sides to 'heroic' figures such as Washington - as freedom fighters on the one hand, slave owners on the other.
Interpretation of a multi-part sculpture which is positioned right at the entrance. At first glance, it looks very much like a typical ‘grand old men’ sculpture with marble busts. Closer inspection reveals something more sinister, in the form of slave shackles and badges. The interview with the artist reveals the intent was to show two sides to ‘heroic’ figures such as Washington – as freedom fighters on the one hand, slave owners on the other. I wish I was able to take a picture to show in better detail.

 

Access American Stories

This app is an interesting idea, although I have to confess I really struggled with it in practice. It’s a bilingual (English and Spanish) “crowdsourced” companion to the American Stories exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. So it means you can contribute as well as hear the voices of others. It’s also intended to enhance the experience of visitors with low vision.

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You can choose whose voices you wish to listen to, and what they will be talking about:

Select or deselect the voices you wish to hear.
Select or deselect the voices you wish to hear.

You could then choose the gallery section:

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So far, so good. However I found that when you selected a particular setting, off it went, and there was no way of easily corresponding what you were listening to to what you were looking at (the gallery sections above all contain numerous exhibits).  It seems to leap straight into a description of something and you’re desperately looking around to see what it might correspond to. It felt a bit like listening to an audio guide that was stuck on shuffle play.

I might have got the hang of it had I persevered – but I was just trying to get my bearings of the exhibition in general and (like all my museum visits in DC) I was on a pretty tight schedule to see as much as possible. I think this exhibition was pretty new when I visited (late July this year) so I’d be interested to hear if there have been any evaluations of the exhibition and the app.

*Assuming you are familiar with Keith Haring of course. Visiting a Haring exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 1996 was one of my foundational museum experiences. 

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Free Choice and the “Forced March”

Nina Simon has just posted a thought-provoking piece on her blog about linear storytelling and how it relates to the design and layout of museum exhibitions. She observes that while the digital world theoretically allows for infinite possibilities when it comes to navigation and storytelling, “simplicity trumps possibility” and most digital storytelling still has a linear backbone. She goes on to ask:

“[D]oes this preference for linearity impact people when visiting museums? Are people overwhelmed or confused by the “infinite paths” that we offer through galleries, collections, and exhibitions?”

Simon describes museums like the International Spy Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museums (both in Washington DC) as “fixed march” experiences: visitors are fed into a common entrance and the exhibition galleries follow a fixed linear path, like beads on a string. You always know you’re on the ‘right’ path because there is no real mechanism to stray from it. Simon, like a lot of museum professionals, was sceptical of this approach – aren’t fixed marches dictatorial? Are we sacrificing opportunities for visitors to do their own thing, make their own meanings, because linear exhibitions are easier to operate and manage? But she is now questioning this scepticism – museum professionals likely take this view because they know museums well. The standard experience seems boring and humdrum to them, and they want to explore different ways to subvert it.* But perhaps less frequent visitors like the comfort and grounding of knowing they are on the ‘right’ path?

 

My PhD research to date would suggest that most visitors like to know they are on the ‘right’ path, or at least that they haven’t missed anything. On accompanied museum visits I conducted last year, some of my research participants said things like:

 

“. . . it’s very difficult to choose where you’re going to go from here. You almost need like directions about where you should be starting. . . “

“. . .and it’s a bit of a maze, in a way, in terms of um there’s no obvious, um, path to proceed around, in terms of um you could just follow them around but there’s a lot of branches that you could, navigate . . .”

“Um I find it a little bit tricky because I like to, go through and know that I’ve seen everything, whereas if there’s lots of different pockets that you need to go past, um you lost track of which areas you’ve seen and which you haven’t.”

But it is also true that linearity limits a visitor’s options, particularly if they are more interested in seeing something in particular than checking out the museum in general:

“. it’s less linear in terms of, er, it’s not so, it’s um  .. .it’s it’s less like a sausage machine you’re going in one and coming out the other, you seemed to be able to get more lost and be able to go from one thing to another as we certainly did today.”

“. . .it’s a gallery to me that makes you wind around, which is probably intentional but, sometimes it’s nice to be able to see a big view and work out ‘yes I’m interested in one particular aspect I’m heading over there’, whereas you are forced to wander around, the gallery to find something.”

I visited both of Simon’s cited examples, the Spy Museum and the Holocaust Museum, earlier this year. While I understand what she means about the ‘fixed march’, the experiences did not seem overly restrictive to me. Yes, the galleries were in a fixed linear order, but once you were in a particular gallery it was sufficiently open and spacious that you could choose what you wanted to see or decide what would be a logical path (or how to navigate around the summer crowds). And you were able to tell when you’d seen everything and were ready to move on.

In this sense I think ‘fixed march’ experiences are suitable for museums where a majority of your visitors are likely to be one-off tourists. I could imagine if you were a regular visitor to such museums, the need to trudge through a line of galleries to get to what you really want to look at would be a chore. It brings to mind a trip to Ikea where (except for a handful of easy to miss ‘shortcuts’) you are forced to walk through every section before you get to the checkouts. The rationale for their strategy is clear of course – I have never left Ikea with the ‘just one or two things’ I went there for!

As an alternative to the fixed path I would suggest layouts that incorporate a common ‘home base’ – for instance a central spine off which galleries radiate (like a lot of ‘traditional’ museums) or a hub-and-spoke or cloverleaf arrangement where all galleries open off a central hub or atrium. This is supported by space syntax [1] studies in museum spaces. Space syntax characterises spaces in terms of two main properties: connectivity (a highly connected room has many other rooms opening off of it) and integration (a measure of how directly you can move from any given room to another in a building). A highly connected central hub or spine (or atrium across multiple levels, as below) limits the linear trudge, while at the same time providing a common navigational reference point: all roads lead to Rome, so to speak.

The central atrium, National Museum Scotland
The central atrium, National Museum Scotland

The need for common points of reference in a building has been reinforced to me during some visitor observations I have been doing this week. Most of the exhibition spaces are in a long, thin building that spans four levels, with stairs and lifts at each end. I was tracking visitors in an exhibition space that takes up the entire second floor, where the ‘logical’ route would be to enter via the stairs/lift at either end, and then exit the other. In contrast, I observed several visitors traverse almost the entire length of the gallery, only to double back to enter where they came from. In a couple of instances, visitors did exit from the other end, but shortly thereafter turned around and re-entered the gallery to head back to the exit they came in from. Presumably ending up somewhere different from where they started meant they felt lost, so their solution was to retrace their steps. I would expect that common hubs (where practical) would eliminate this problem.

*Comments on Nina Simon’s blog suggests a cultural dimension to the distaste for linearity. One commenter observed that linear experiences are the norm in Germany, so it is something that German visitors do not question as it has been ever thus. I wonder if the US, as a highly individualistic culture, has more visitors with a yearning to be able to carve out their own path?

[1] Hillier, B., & Tzortzi, K. (2011). Space Syntax: the Language of Museum Space. In S. Macdonald (Ed.), A companion to museum studies (pbk., pp. 282-301). Wiley Blackwell.

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US Museum App Review 2: AMNH

Last month I posted about some of the art museum apps I used while in the US back in August. Now I’ll follow up with a couple of apps I used at the American Museum of Natural History.

AMNH Explorer

The AMNH is quite a labyrinth and I found it tricky to navigate. It spans five levels over a large historic building plus a more recent extension (Rose Center and Hayden Planetarium).

One of the three (very similar-looking) stairwells in the AMNH's main building. Signage directs visitors to the special exhibitions and is supplemented by adhesive floor graphics that guide visitors to special exhibits as well as the cafe.
One of the three (very similar-looking) stairwells in the AMNH’s main building. Signage directs visitors to the special exhibitions and is supplemented by adhesive floor graphics that guide visitors to special exhibits as well as the cafe.

Visitor routing around the planetarium means you can’t easily retrace your steps if you find you’ve missed something (it once took me a couple of attempts to re-locate a gallery as I could not find a way to get back down a floor once I’d gone ‘up’ an escalator with no apparent ‘down’ counterpart). The main building has three main stairways and sometimes special exhibitions (entered through pre-paid timed tickets only) blocked logical pathways if you were trying to tackle the museum fairly systematically floor-by-floor (as I was).

This is where the Explorer apps came in – I used both the paper map and the app to assist my navigation of the complex space, as well as to ensure I hadn’t missed anything noteworthy.

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Home page of the AMNH Explorer app

One feature I liked about the Explorer app was the selection of tailored tours:

Special-interest tours of AMNH. I didn't follow any of these specifically, but did use the 'highlights' tour to double check I hadn't missed any key exhibits.
Special-interest tours of AMNH. I didn’t follow any of these specifically, but did use the ‘highlights’ tour to double check I hadn’t missed any key exhibits.

You could also select specific exhibits:

Search for exhibits by popularity, location, or alphabetically.
Search for exhibits by popularity, location, or alphabetically.
Featured exhibits included brief information and the ability to share, bookmark or mark as 'visited'.
Featured exhibits included brief information and the ability to share, bookmark or mark as ‘visited’.

In theory, the app also had the capacity to give you directions to a highlighted exhibit from anywhere inside the museum.  I say “in theory” because I didn’t have much luck getting this to work in practice – the app struggled to find my location*, and so defaulted back to giving me directions from the main entrance. Sometimes it was tricky to relate these directions back to where you actually were, particularly in the higher/deeper reaches of the museum. But I like the idea, even if the execution was less than perfect.

Beyond Planet Earth

This app was an accompaniment to a specific special exhibition that was showing while I was at AMNH. It’s pitched as an Augmented Reality app, although I don’t think I really grasped that that was the point at the time. The idea seemed to be to find and scan the 11 icons scattered around the exhibition (a good tactic to encourage looking at everything!). You could collect the set and then share them via social media.

Instructions for the app were under four headings: Explore - Collect - Learn - Share
Instructions for the app were under four headings: Explore – Collect – Learn – Share

When you scanned an icon a little animation came up on your screen, but calling them Augmented Reality is drawing a bit of a long bow if you ask me. . . But then maybe I just missed the point? Also some of them were a bit hard to scan properly in the low exhibit lighting so I became preoccupied by the task itself rather than the outcome.

An example of one of the info screens
An example of one of the info screens.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t part of the target audience for this app; it seemed to be a game designed for kids rather than for older visitors with pretty good existing knowledge of the subject matter^ (which is fair enough!). I still enjoyed the ‘collecting’ challenge even if there wasn’t really much of a pay off beyond that for me.

In any case, any app was bound to be upstaged by the hero of the hour: the Mars Curiosity Rover, whose safe landing had been announced only a couple of days before my visit.

A full scale model of Mars Curiosity. The people give a sense of scale - it was far bigger than I imagined.
A full scale model of Mars Curiosity. The people give a sense of scale – it was far bigger than I imagined.

 

* I wonder if this was a technical glitch because I was using wi-fi rather than 3G.

^ I have a fond attachment to space exhibits: my first major exhibition project was the National Space Centre in Leicester, and I worked on a couple of exhibitions for them subsequently.

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Open to Interpretation?

The end of the year is a time to reflect.

As I look back over the year, the things I’ve read and the discussions I’ve had, it’s given me pause to think about my own biases, assumptions and weaknesses. How do these shape my work and my approach to interpretation?

First, some context: my academic background is in the sciences. My subject choices at school became increasingly sciencey as the years progressed. Of course, to choose science was also to reject other options. In my case I think it’s just as telling to consider the path not chosen as the one that was. Was I drawn to the sciences or repelled by the arts? Perhaps a bit of both.

I dropped art fairly early on in high school – mainly because I lacked any real creative skill or talent in the visual sense. I was, however, fairly skilled at writing and this was my creative outlet. For as long as English lessons focused on the mechanics of grammar or the creativity of free writing, I enjoyed it and did well. But that all stopped when English ceased being about creation and started being about criticism. Frankly, it got all opaque and impenetrable to me.  We were now supposed to deconstruct the intent of another author, find metaphors in poetry and hidden meanings in literary text. I just didn’t get it! If an author wanted to say something, why didn’t they just say it? I struggled writing essays with minimum word counts when I felt I had said all that I could meaningfully say in half that.

By contrast, school science was an oasis of sense and logic – there were rules; you learned them; you applied them. As you grasped the rules you started to see the patterns in them. Chemistry in particular made perfect intuitive sense to me. Inevitably, I was drawn to the certainty of the sciences rather than take my chances on the humanities, where so much of your grade seemed to be down to teacher judgement or sheer luck.

While age and maturity mean I now have a renewed appreciation for the arts and humanities, I’m still stumped by things like poetry. Every now and again I duck into literature, but I worry that there is some grand metaphor that I’m completely oblivious to, and that I’m really only seeing the tip of the iceberg. In short, sometimes the arts can make me feel pretty darn stupid.

So what does that mean for my approach to interpretation?

I think it means I’m particularly wary of anything that does not make its intent explicit – anything that expects me to “make my own meaning” with minimal support. Make my own meaning with what? How? How do I know that I haven’t got completely the wrong end of the stick? While I might critique it once I know it, I still want to know what the ‘official’ answer is supposed to be.

I’m aware some people are polar opposites. They love the freedom to make their own meaning and can find interpretive tools (that I find essential) a distraction or even an intrusion. Perhaps they grasp something intuitively in the art or literature in the same way I did in chemical equations. Perhaps they have confidence in their own interpretations in a way that I don’t. Perhaps their brains are just wired differently. I don’t know. I do know when I meet such people though, as they tend to find interpretation “shouty”, overbearing, or dumbing down. I’ll call such people “meaning makers”, to distinguish from people like me who are probably more “meaning readers”.

Being a meaning reader must influence my approach to interpretation. To my mind I’m putting clarity before confusion. But is that how a meaning maker would see it?

In any case, how can we accommodate both in the same experiences? How do we not shout at the meaning makers, while still providing enough context to ensure the meaning readers don’t end up feeling like they’ve missed the point?

Are you a meaning maker or a meaning reader? What does it mean for your approach to interpretation and exhibitions?

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US Museum App Review: Barnes and MoMA

I made a point of trying out different museum smartphone apps during my US trip this July-August, and I’ll post some general comments and reviews of my experience using them over the next few weeks, in no particular order.

But first, a big golden rule for museum apps: No wifi, no point. OK slight hyperbole there – but it’s essential for international tourists and a huge convenience for everyone else. I had mobile data well and truly disabled to avoid any nasty roaming charges upon my return. If there wasn’t reliable wifi to enable me to download and use the app easily, I wasn’t going to use it. Even locals may have concerns about exceeding their data limits, and I’m starting to think that free wifi is becoming one of those facilities that people will increasingly expect.

Barnes Collection, Philadelphia

The great thing about this free app is that it duplicated content that was in the audio guide (pre-loaded on an ipod touch that you could hire for $5). And an audioguide was essential as there was no other labelling besides printed catalogues in each room which just listed the titles and artist. (And these didn’t exactly advertise their presence as the picture below attests. But I digress . . . )

Catalogue guides were set in little wells in the seat in each gallery – but, being a very similar colour to the walls, it took me a while to realise these existed, particularly since the galleries were busy and seats often occupied.

Artworks at the Barnes are displayed as ‘ensembles’ – groupings of works that Barnes had used as a pedagogical tool, with juxtapositions intended to show similarities or contrasts in colour, line, form, etc.

Interpretation of individual ensembles, as well as an explanation of the ensemble concept.

There was also interpretation of individual works, colour coded by room to aid orientation.

Interpretation of individual works

The app also featured maps to aid orientation and there was a tailored tour for families.

The app offers a choice between Masterworks and a Family Tour. The Masterworks was available in English, French and Spanish.

The app was intuitive to use and had a good level of detail, although I didn’t always listen to the audio descriptions to the end (not that they’re overly long at about 1-2 minutes, but I was just trying to get a flavour and hadn’t planned to spend more than a couple of hours or so at the museum). There was nothing that was really innovative or remarkable about its features, but this no-gimmicks approach means it did what it said on the box. There is nothing wrong with a functional and straightforward guide app.

MoMA

The MoMA is more of a combination of a brochure and guide in app form. There is a calendar feature that shows what is on today or on a date of your choosing, which would be more useful for locals than one-off visitors like me.

The app offers a few different ways of exploring the collection – by location, by audioguide number, or by searching for a particular work alphabetically. Detailed visual descriptions are provided for the benefit visually impaired visitors (or those seeking an in-depth looking experience).
The app allows you to search the collection by artist, title, or keyword. There is also an alphabetical list of art terms (that I’ve only just discovered but is a great way of decoding some of the specialist language you see in art labels).

The MoMA app is also offered in an impressive range of languages:

The MoMA app had many more features than I had the time, need or inclination to use during my visit (including podcasts and links to YouTube and further iTunes content). To be honest I can’t recall how much I used this app during my visit (months on it’s all a bit of a blur) compared to the standard paper guide map – I suspect not much but just because I was pretty museumed out by this stage of my trip.

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Don’t box me in!

I’ve been having an interesting debate on Twitter about the usefulness of applying categories or segmentation models to museum visitors. I’ve previously blogged about Falk’s Identity model and Morris Hargreave McIntyre’s Culture Segments, and several museums have their own in-house audience segmentation models that they use to inform exhibition development, programs and marketing.

But some people have a problem with such categorisation: I recall many years ago the first time I was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Index in a training workshop – someone in my group found the very idea offensive. So while some people may feel a sense of self-revelation when they discover they are an ENFJ or ISTP, others think it has as much insight as a tabloid horoscope. Their starting premise is that people are each individuals and are not so easily typed and categorised.

Personally, I think visitor typologies are useful, at the very least as heuristics: yes each visitor has their own unique interests and circumstances, but it’s not practical to consider each and every visitor as a unique individual who cannot possibly be grouped in any meaningful way. Conversely, we know the public is not an undifferentiated mass with the same interests, needs and prior knowledge. So segmentation is a middle ground and visitor research tends to bear out the fact that there are patterns in the visiting public, even if the emergent categories are not exactly the same for every museum and at every time.

I wonder if resistance to categorisation arises when such categories are used inappropriately or injudiciously – when they become laws of the land rather than rules of thumb. For instance I’ve taken the MBTI test on more than one occasion and each time I’ve come out with a slightly different result. Therefore it would be wrong to say something like “Person X is an INFP. It necessarily follows that they will do Y in circumstance Z”. Similarly with visitor categories – they are not meant to be dogmatic and they can be fluid: the type of visitor I am today does not necessarily predict the type of visitor I will be tomorrow.

What do you think? When are visitor categories useful and when are they constraining?

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Children in Museums and Galleries

The latest version of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ report Children’s Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities has recently been released. This report shows participation rates in a range of cultural, recreational and sporting activities by children aged 5-14 inclusive. I’ll focus on museum and gallery visitation here, although for comparison I’ve included public libraries and performing arts attendance in following table:

Children’s attendance at cultural venues and events in preceding 12 months (Source: ABS)

This shows that 70% of children aged 5-14 attended at least one library, museum, gallery or performing arts event in the preceding 12 months. Note the figures pertain to activities undertaken outside of school hours, so this does not take into account school visits. The increases in performing arts and museum and gallery attendance are statistically significant, at least when comparing 2012 to 2006.

The following table breaks down the frequency of attendance among participants:

Frequency of attendance (in past 12 months) among participating children (Source: ABS)

Frequency of participation in museums and galleries is comparable with that of performing arts among all age groups, whereas visitation to libraries is more frequent (which makes sense given the nature of library use).

Museum and gallery attendance is not uniform throughout the community, however. Children from non-English speaking countries and non capital city residents are less likely to attend. There are also slight variations according to gender and age bracket, as well as differences by state of residence. The state differences may be at least partly explained by the fact that some states have more of their population concentrated in capital cities than others.

Source: Children’s Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities, Australia, Apr 2012 (ABS)

It’s hard to compare these figures directly to the ABS figures for adults, as museums and galleries are reported separately for adults. (Recent ABS statistics for museum and gallery visiting are reported here.)

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Rising to the “Future Challenge”

Last week was Interpretation Australia’s National Conference, titled Future Challenge. As IA President Sue Hodges said in the opening ceremony, Interpretation faces challenges in the present, as well as the future. Economic downturns lead to budget cuts, which often disproportionately affect funding for interpretive projects and staff. In light of this, how can interpreters adapt to changing circumstances and make a better case for the value they add to natural and cultural heritage?

Our opening and closing keynotes gave two very different perspectives on this issue.

Genevieve Adkins, Director of the Centre for Interpretive Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, highlighted the importance of interpreters having a solid grasp of the theory that underpins their work. Theory confers rigour, and rigour is necessary for funders and other stakeholders to take interpretation seriously. Judicious application of theory can also lead to better returns on investment in heritage interpretation projects.

For the closing keynote, Dee Madigan, Director of Madigan Communications and probably best known as a regular panellist on ABC’s spin-deconstruction program Gruen Planet, gave an ‘outsider’ perspective on the issues facing interpretation. She highlighted some of the parallels between advertising and interpretation, and how there is common ground in needing to understand the motivations and wants of your target audience.

I’ve prepared a storify of the tweets from Day 1 and Day 3. Day 2 was mostly taken up by field trips to destinations around Regional Victoria – I went to Point Nepean National Park and learned some of the history of the site as a Quarantine Station and later as an Officer Cadet School.

Ships and their passengers en route to Melbourne were held in quarantine at Point Nepean. The station was in use from the mid 1800s until the 1970s.
Quarantine was strict – passengers belongings were fumigated and all passengers had to go through special bathing procedures. Even the mail was fumigated! This case shows equipment used for fumigating mail.

I also gave a presentation based on Chip and Dan Heath’s 2007 book Made to Stick: why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck. In keeping with the Future Challenge theme of the conference, this paper was intended to show how the Heath brothers’ ingredients for ‘sticky’ ideas are a useful checklist for interpreters. Conversely, it shows how the business world is hungry for sticky ideas: are there potential untapped markets for people with interpretive skills?

 

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Shifting the Research Lens

In visitor experience workshops I have frequently pointed out the need to question our cultural assumptions – if we’ve grown up always visiting museums and heritage sites, it can be hard to know how our institutions come across from the point of view of someone for whom visiting is an alien concept. But let’s take a step further back for a moment – what assumptions and unspoken rules are embedded throughout our “Western” culture?

Recently I participated in a doctoral research project by Dr Lorraine Muller called “Shifting the Lens: Indigenous Research into Mainstream Australian Culture”. The whole idea of the project is to study mainstream Australian culture from an Indigenous perspective, and to examine those assumptions of the culture that seem alien from an Indigenous perspective. I volunteered as someone who could speak from their experience of being a ‘mainstream Australian’, and who was willing to share my understanding of the basis of some of these assumptions.

It was tricky at times, especially trying to explain why things such as Spirituality and connection to Country – central tenets of the Indigenous world view – have such low priority in mainstream culture.  Almost by definition, they are concepts I’ve given very little thought. Others were a little easier to conceptualise, such as why we see Individualism as such a positive attribute (I suspect it has roots in Protestant theology, which, as I understand it, prioritises the individual relationship with God through scripture rather than liturgy).

Since I participated in this research project, I’ve been giving “Indigenous-mainstream” relations a fair bit of thought. As there are stages of colonisation, so there are stages of de-colonisation. So where do I fit in to this decolonisation process? I consider myself relatively ignorant of Indigenous culture and world-view. But how do I learn more? I have fears of asking inappropriate questions, saying the wrong thing, or inadvertently causing offence. And I suspect I’m far from the only one. But we need to collectively work past this barrier if we are to work closer towards reconciliation. For this reason I’ve found being involved in Lorraine’s research personally enriching.

I didn’t realise the extent to which the unspoken rules, hidden assumptions and different world views were such a barrier to Indigenous people ‘getting on’ in mainstream Australia, and I wonder if this is the root cause of so many well-meaning initiatives that have failed to improve the life circumstances of so many Indigenous Australians. On one level this is disheartening, because such fundamental mutual incomprehension makes the barriers to reconciliation seem so insurmountable. But on the other hand, knowing the barriers are there might make it that bit easier to address them.

I would encourage other people who self identify as non-Indigenous ‘mainstream’. Australians to consider participating in Lorraine’s research. This is actually her second PhD – in her first she documented the theory that informs Indigenous Australians in the helping professions, Indigenous Australian Social-Health Theory. This second PhD has arisen from the first, where participants identified that there are some aspects of mainstream culture that they would like to know about. A PhD presents a respectful way to ask these questions. If you’re interested, I’d encourage you to contact her via

Dr Lorraine Muller
BSocSc-BSW Hons, PhD
PhD (2nd) Candidate
School Medicine and Dentistry
James Cook University
lorraine.muller@gmail.com

She is particularly interested in speaking to people in the medical / health professions, as well as young adults.

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Review: Eastern State Penitentiary

I very nearly didn’t visit Eastern State Penitentiary. But I’m very glad I did.

It was the first Saturday in August, on my last day in Philadelphia. I had spent the morning trekking around the Philadelphia Museum of Art (yes, the one from Rocky – and people actually do train on those steps in the mornings before the museum opens). So I was feeling pretty museum-ed out. And I had to be on a bus to New York later that afternoon. AND the weather didn’t look like it was going to hold out and I didn’t want to get stuck in yet another East Coast summer downpour. But I decided to go anyway, and was pleasantly surprised at the quality and variety of their visitor experiences, which had been simply and sympathetically achieved.

Eastern State was built in 1829, when it was widely thought that it was a good idea to completely isolate prisoners so that they had a chance to silently reflect on their misdeeds and become truly ‘penitent’. Over the years the prison was expanded and solitary confinement was eventually phased out. It was in use until relatively recently –  the last prisoners were transported out in 1970. Over the next couple of decades, the site fell into disrepair, but from the late 1980s onwards was gradually rehabilitated and opened to the public.

A view down a typical cell block at ESP. These cell blocks all radiated from a central zone in a hub-and-spoke design; additional spokes were added as the prison was expanded.

Site interpretation was through a combination of audiotour and signage.

A group takes advantage of the juxtaposition of seating, signage and audiotour track.

The audiotour used a combination of guided and self-guided tracks that I thought worked quite well. The audioguide was one of the typical select-track-number-to-play types, so in theory you could choose whatever track you wanted whenever. However, the idea was that the first 10 tracks or so took you on a guided tour from the visitor centre around the site so you could get your physical and conceptual bearings.

The final part of the ‘guided’ part of the audiotour was called ‘Voices from Eastern State Penitentiary’, and it was paired with images displayed along the cell block. The idea was that each image was paired with oral history quotes from people with links to the site – former inmates or guards. The text above each image was the first line of spoken words associated with the picture, so you were clear what audio went with what picture. It was a simple but effective way of pairing sound and pictures that were being presented independently of one another.

From there you could choose from a further 20 tracks or so peppered around the site. On the site map you were given, these additional tracks were organised by topic (art installations, famous prisoners, etc), so you could follow particular areas of interest if you wanted to.

For the most part, ESP is preserved as a ruin rather than restored. This section, which you encounter early in the ‘orientation’ section of the auditour, is a recreation of what the penitentiary would have looked like in its early years of operation.

There were also face-to-face “Hands on History” stations around the site, where staff would do brief (10 minutes or so) demonstrations at regular intervals. I didn’t take part in any of these as I was more interested in doing things at my own pace, but these sessions appeared to be popular with family visitors in particular.

However, while ESP does cater for families (those with older children at least – I think they discourage younger children because of the subject matter), they don’t shy away from providing more confronting topics for adults. Some of the audiotour tracks are only accessible by getting the track numbers from reading certain graphic panels. As well as frankly presenting episodes from the site’s past, they presented interpretations and artworks that went to the heart of present-day issues.

The bar chart on the left shows the dramatic increase in the USA’s prison population from 1970 to the present day. The bar chart on the right shows that the USA imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world – at tremendous cost.
“GTMO” – one of the several art installations at ESP. The contents of the cage are the possessions that are allowed an inmate in Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay.

The other thing that struck me about this site is that it came across as very visitor-focused: a good variety of interpretive media, clear orientation, friendly staff, recognition of visitors’ intelligence. Upon departure one of the guides at the entrance was even so kind as to direct me to the nearest bus stop to take me back across town. A little thing maybe, but it finished my visit on a high note and helped make ESP one of the unexpected highlights of my visit to the US.