Category: Interpretation

Russell Staiff: Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation

Matthew Tyler-Jones2 Comments

When I had just started my research, in 2014 this book was published, literally down the road from where I live. So why I only discovered it a few weeks ago is a mystery. despite being published in my home town, I had to arrange an inter-library loan to get it from Leeds University Library. So, now I have to whizz through it, pulling out his thesis, and some choice quotes to illustrate it, before I have to send it back.

First, its worth point out that he come from a point of view that is (was?) skeptical about the profession of interpretation as espoused by Freeman Tilden. His preface recounts his puzzled reaction when a national park manager used the term. “Isn’t everything about interpretation? What else is there?” he, an art historian, asked himself. Indeed an early chapter is a dissection (or demolition?) of Tilden’s foundation text for the heritage industry.

On Tilden

His key point is that everybody interprets everything, all the time. Using the Michelangelo’s David as an example, he argues that while the erotic and comedic use of the David’s penis or buttocks displace the “authorized” narrative of David as the slayer of Goliath, sculpted by an artistic genius, “the two stories are not mutually exclusive for many viewers despite them being somewhat incompatible. […] Heritage interpretation cannot manage this level of of complexity without radical editing of the content or unsatisfactory and ethically suspect reductionism. What heritage interpretation can attempt is a facilitation of multiple meaning-making and meaning -making as a dynamic process within systems or representation.” He obviously thinks Tilden’s work tend more towards the reductionist angle.

For example, Staiff takes issue with Tilden’s use of the term “revelation”, on one had because it implies a hidden truth worthy of conspiracy theorists and thriller writers like Dan Brown, and on the other because “it maintains a hierarchical power relationship between the ‘expert’ and the non-expert, between those with ‘the knowledge’ and those ‘without the knowledge.'” He does acknowledge that later in the book, Tilden (in his discussion of aesthetics and beauty) “opens up the possibility of (1) the power of feelings and the role of sensorial experience of heritage and (2) visitor empowerment and (3) interpretation as a social construction.” But, Staiff claims, Tilden quickly closes that door because it “potentially unravels many of his principles of interpretation.”

Overall he considers Tilden’s work dated, and so it is. Perhaps he his correct that it is past time to move beyond Tilden’s principles.

On narrative

I very much enjoy how Staiff writes about narrative, “stories do something to us that descriptions do not; we seem to enter into what I want to call ‘fictive space.'” But, “As Roland Barthes and others have cheekily but pointedly written, texts ‘read’ the reader, the reader does not read the text. Stories, thefore do not guarantee a connection to the topographical and physical setting of the narrative. This is a crucial insight often lost in heritage interpretation.” Generally a fan of the power storytelling to give form and structure to what people are looking at, he is aware that “this is an imposed or even artificial structuring of heritage places. […] Is the way a narrative organises time and events (into causal relationships) the most appropriate way to communicate with visitors about a particular site?” On that last point, I would counter that cause and effect chronologies are just one of many narrative structures.

By way of example he imagines (creates) a segment of audio-guide for an excavation in Greece, but then critiques it. There are other ways of understanding places, he says. What of the science behind the engineering of any building? What of the context for the story his segment told? In his extract he mentions Homer’s epics. Do they need any explanation? Stories need to be peopled, but who are the people in the listeners minds? can heritage interpreters offer as well “rounded” a depiction of a historical personality as a biography, or even a novel?

He worries to that the desire for narrative might assign cause and effect to even descriptive interpretation, where no narrative is intended “In heritage interpretation the desire for explanation of often paramount in both those creating narratives and those listening, reading or seeing them.”

He concludes his musing on narrative and interpetation with four “implications”. The first is that “narrative is not the only way heritage places are represented but narrative is a very potent form of giving material things meaning and making material things the touchstone of our deepest desires, feelings, imaginations and emotions. […] The role of narrative in heritage interpretation reinforces the fact that what’s often at stake is not things but, objects and landscapes, but us.” (page 113)

Secondly he points out that there are many stories associated with any place, but they fall into two categories: sanctioned narratives – “those stories that have the imprimatur of institutions […] the narratives of scholarship (or historians, archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, ecologists and so forth) and the narratives of custodians of heritage spaces (those who work for conservation agencies, heritage agencies or are traditional owners of a site) and usually a combination of the two”; and unofficial narratives “those created by everyone else.”

“Thirdly, narrative sutures heritage places into a particular form of representation; it absorbs the physical entity into chronological time, and it provides action, character, causation, closure and narrator. Heritage interpretation that employs narrative furthers this structuring but mostly uncritically.” I take issue with this, not with his concern that narrative might indeed structure the place uncritically, but rather I take exception with the idea that heritage interpretation “provides action, character, causation and closure.” Its often really hard to get action, character or closure out of a places history, in a way that makes an engaging narrative. Although, “Causation” there is plenty of, and I agree, probably too much. I agree with his assertion that “Chronology is particularly pernicious in the way that it organizes cultural heritage into a linear sequence.”

Finally he recognizes that “stories are a powerful and seductive way of connecting people to places,” buts asks “Is there an ethics of stoytelling at heritage places?” and here he challenges Tilden’s core aim, that interpretation should change attitudes and behaviours by instilling a conservation awareness.

In my next post, I’ll get into the meaty chapter, about digital storytelling.

Adventures in Moominland

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In the evening after I visited the V&A, I’d managed to bag the last ticket for the last entry slot that day of the exhibition at the South Bank Centre. I’m a Moomin fan, having read all the books when I was a child. I’d already seen much of what was on show at the public Library in Tampere, Finland, which is the guardian of most of the Tove (best pronounced something like “Toover”) Jansson archive. The South Bank exhibition, Adventures in Moominland, takes advantage of the Tampare collection moving to a new home there in May to borrow part of the collection for a similar presenation to last year’s very successful Wondercrump World of Roald Dahl. Just like that successful family exhibition, this one also uses the author’s work to explore the life of the author.

Tove Jansson’s life was not entirely happy, she grew up during civil war in Finland, with loving parents whom she loved and respected in return. But while she was a progressive left winger, her father sided with the Fascists. Not only that, she had a hard time coming to terms with her lesbian sexuality. These are some quite challenging concepts to share with an audience as young as might visit this show, but the curators and interpreters did a very good job of it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this exhibition sees less actual children than last year’s. While Dahl’s popularity has endured with every generation, in the UK Moomins grabbed the imagination of a good part of my generation in the seventies, and had brief surges of popularity with a couple of later children’s television series, but it seems to me that they are best known by people of my age, and not so quickly recognised by younger generations (except, I’m willing to bet, by the children of older fans – I know I read all the books to my own children).

The group assembled for my tour were, apart from one young fan, all adult. It’s harsh of me to say its what I expected – it was after all the last tour of a workday in term-time, so even the home-schoolers will have likely gone home. (And I bet, given the lack of school in the novels, that there is a correlation between homeschooling parents and Moomin fans, but I digress.) The format followed Wondercrump’s successful formula. An introductory talk from a host who warned of scary dark experiences ahead, but reassured us that though the Moomins often had scary adventures, they always ended happily. “Apart from Moominvalley in November” I said. Then she handed over to a guide, a young woman dressed in such a style as to resonate with Jansson’s illustrations of the Mymble, Fillyjonk and Toft, etc., without actually trying to be one.

The guide led us in and as with Wondercrump, we discovered she was playing a two-hander with a disembodied voice. This time, it was Sandi Toksvig – guess Danish is a bit like Finnish. So so we progressed with these two guides, recorded and live, through spaces that evoked Sniff’s cave, Snufkin‘s tent, the woods of Moominvalley, a raft like that in Comet in Moominland, Moominpapas lighthouse island, and the Moominhouse itself. In each space the guide and exhibits focussed (mostly) on one of the books, and explained what each book had to reveal about Tove’s life. Even the youngest reader will recognise (even if they might struggle to put it into words, as I did when I was seven or nine or whatever) that the novel series (there were a couple of picture books too, but I only found those as an adult) start out as outward facing proceedural adventures but become more inward looking, dramatic, and psychological with each publication. It can put some young readers off the later books, but those who persevere have their first introduction to existentialism.

The South Bank adventure doesn’t follow the books in order, but structures the story about Jansson coming to terms with her sexuality and acknowledging her love for her life-long partner Tuulikki. Moominland Midwinter thus becomes the climax of the exhibition’s story. In the novel young Moomintroll wakes up early from hibernation, in strange new snow-covered world, which he doesn’t like at all, until he meets Too-ticky, the girl who shows him its wonders. I admire the curators’ resistance to chronology in favour of a more satisfying emotional journey, preceding Midwinter with the loneliness of Moominpappa at Sea, which actually came eight years later.

Maybe wisely, they avoid the last novel Moominvalley in November, altogether. As a young reader, this was the most important work for me. Taking place after the Moomins have left for the lighthouse island in Moominpappa at Sea, the other inhabitants of the valley move into their house and try to recreate their life, waiting for them to return. But they never come back. Jansson’s mother had died while she was writing this final novel, and she is said to have said she “couldn’t go back and find that happy Moominvalley again.” I can’t quite explain the emptiness that fills my chest, even as as an adult, as I remember finishing the novel as a child. I am convinced it was a vital moment, maybe the very first step in my journey to being a grown-up.

So, I wrestle with some dissatisfaction that the experience didn’t feature my favourite work, while at the same time being impressed with the effectiveness of their story construction. I was also even more impressed with the “mixed media” approach of exhibit, lighting effects, audio commentary and sound and live guide. In a way its a more scripted version of what I’m trying (and currently failing, it feels) to do at Chawton.

I feel it might be a technique that other places (and yes I’m thinking of the National Trust places I work with) should experiment with.

Building the Revolution 

Matthew Tyler-Jones1 Comment

I finally got to the V&A today, for their exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution. I got turned away at the end of Cromwell Road last time, as the museum was being evacuated after a bomb-scare. 

I’m writing this review on my way home, using my phone (so please forgive my typos) partly because I want to recommend you go, and there is not long left to see it. 

The exhibition charts the western cultural revolution of 1966-1970, though John Peel’s record collection, plysbof course fashion and design from the V&As own collection and other items, such as an Apollo mission space suit borrowed from other institutions. 

One of the gimmicks of the show is the audio, an iteration of the same technology used at the Bowie exhibition a couple of years ago. I didn’t get to go to that one, but I had a demonstration of that tech from the makers Sennheisser, at a Museums and Heritage show. 

I wasn’t very impressed. Though these headphones, which play music or soundtrack to match whatever object or video you are looking at, were well  received by the media back then, in my experience the technology was clunky. Other friends who’d been confirmed that they changes between sound “zones” could be jarring, and that it was possible to stand in some places where music from two zones would alternate, vying for your attention. 

The experience this time was an improvement. It was by no means perfect: I found the music would stutter and pause annoyingly, especially if I enjoyed the track enough to find myself gently nodding my head. Occasionally the broadcast to everyone’s headphones would pause so everyone in a room could share a multimedia experience (of the Vietnam war for example) across all the gallery’s speakers, screens and projectors. These immersive over-rides were effective, in much the same way as those at IWM North, but when a track you were enjoying or a video that you found interesting was rudely interrupted, one couldn’t help but feel annoyed. I found myself forgiving the designers however, for this and even the stuttering sound of the headphones, because it all felt resonant with that late sixties “cut-up” technique. 

Where the technology really worked however was on two videos that topped and tailed the exhibition. In the first various icons and movers of the period were filmed in silent moving portraits of their current wrinkled and grey selves. Their reminiscences of the time appeared as typography overlaying their silent closed-mouth gaze, a little like Barbera Kruger’s work, while  over the headphones you heard their voice. The same characters appeared at the end, that s time as a mosaic of more conventional talking heads. And for the first time, the interpretation was didactic as each in turned challenged the current generation to build on their legacy. 

For me, one of the highlights was the section on festivals, which invited visitors to take off their headphones, lie back in the (astro)turf and let (another cut-up of) the famous Woodstock documentary wash over them on five giant screens. 

The other things I loved were, dotted around among the exhibits, tarot cards that, at first glance, looked like they might have been designed in the sixties. But then you notice references to things like Tim Berners Lee and the World Wide Web. You realise these are a subtle form of interpretation, telling a future of the sixties that apparently came true and for those of us from that future, creating correspondences and taxonomies that connect the events of 1966-70 with today. The V&A commissioned British artist Suzanne Treister to create the cards, based on her 2013 work, Hexen 2.0. And the very best thing about them is you can buy them (pictured above) in the shop which must be the first time copies of museum interpretation panels have been made available for purchase. 

Of course, the aren’t the only form of interpretation. About from the soundtrack, there are more traditional text panels, labels and booklets around the exhibition. But the cards show how cleverly the layering of meaning and interpretation has been created. Many visitors will have passed them by unnoticed, given them a cursory glance or chosen to ignore them, and will have had an entirely satisfactory experience. But for those that paused to study them in more detail a whole new layer of meaning opened up. 

I visited with a sense of duty, to try out a responsive digital technology. But I found so much more to enjoy. This is a brilliantly curatored exhibition. So much better than the didactic, even dumbed down permanent gallery of the new Design Museum which I visited before Christmas. I urge you to go, if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s only on for another month. 

A colleague who had visited the exhibition before told me how depressed it had made him: the optimism of that period seems to have been dashed upon the reactionary rocks of 2016, Brexit and Trump. But I came out with a very different mood. 

One of the early messages of the exhibition is the period as a search for utopia. The final tracks you hear as you walk out (after the video challenge issued by the old heads of the sixties) are Lennon’s 1971 single Imagine and then, brilliantly, Jerusalem. 

No, of course they didn’t find the Utopia they were looking for in the sixties, but we could build it…

Could this be … the first decent museum app?

Matthew Tyler-Jones2 Comments

sfmoma

Last week my wife and I went to San Francisco. Our second full day there was mostly spent within SF MOMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And for the first time ever, I used a museum/heritage app that actually enhanced my visit.

Part of what made it so successful was the infrastructure that made it easy to download and use. I didn’t have to plan in advance and download it before my visit. I wasn’t even aware of it before I went, but if I had been, I would have been unlikely to download it, because our hotel’s free wifi only allowed one of us to use our device each four hour lease period.

We’d started our visit walking through the museum to the opposite entrance to contemplate the Richard Serra sculpture. It was early in the day, the museum was just opening, and there was a team-brief on the tiered seating that surround the piece. But they moved on and we sat for a moment to contemplate the enormous steel structure (I can’t deny the meditative quality of Serra’s work, or the calming impact it seems on have on the psyche when encountered, but really I sometimes feel “seen one, seen them all”) and to plan our day.

My wife noted a label on the wall directing people who wanted to know more about the art to SFMOMA’s app, and helpfully pointing out that you could log into the museum’s free wifi to download it. I think it said that it was iOS only, but if you didn’t have a suitable device, you could borrow one.

The first pleasure was logging onto the wifi. This was possibly the most hassle-free process I’ve ever encountered on public wifi. The signal was strong (everywhere), reliable and speedy too. The app downloaded quickly, and upon opening gave me three screens introducing what it offered, such as the one below:

It wanted access to my location services (of course), camera and, unusually, to my activity (the “healthy living” function of more recent versions of iOS), but having been so pleasantly surprised and satisfied by the process so far, I was very happy to allow both. All this had taken very little time, but enough time for my wife to have wandered away towards the elevators to begin our exploration of the museum, so I hurried after her, scanning what was on offer from the app as I went.

There’s a highlights function, which includes “Our picks for forty must-see artworks that are currently on view”, a timeline function that enables you to record and share your visit, and section on other “things to do”, and of course the ability to buy tickets, membership etc. At the core of the app are “Immersive Walks”: a range of fifteen to 45 minute audio tours of the galleries.

On no! I’d left my earphones back at the hotel.

But that wasn’t a problem, because as I caught my wife up by the elevators, I saw a stand stacked high with cases of SFMOMA-orange ear-buds. These were given away free and of a somewhat disposable quality, but good enough to last the day (and to pass on to my son when we got back from the holiday) with in-line volume controls for ease of use. The thought and effort that SFMOMA put into the infrastructure around the app deserves to be commended.

But lets get to the meat of the app’s functionality. The key thing here is indoor positioning. I’m guessing it’s achieved through wifi mobile location analytics, but I haven’t confirmed that. I can confirm that its pretty accurate, though with a little bit of lag, so it takes a while after walking into a gallery, and then standing still for a moment, before your device can deliver to you the buttons for the content relevant to the artworks on the gallery. Some, but not all, of the artworks are accompanied by a specific bit of media (mostly audio) to offer more in-depth insight into the work. This can include commentary, reviews or snippets of interviews with the artist.

I also took an immersive walk. I chose German to Me, a personal exploration of post-war German artists from radio journalist Luisa Beck, in which she shares her reaction on some of the works in the collection and interviews for mother, grandmother and cousin to uncover more about her own German-American identity. As the tour progresses you are guided, not just by Luisa’s spoken directions, but also by the app’s indoor positioning, as shown below.

I have to say, I would have given these galleries the most cursory of glances, had I not been captured by Luisa’s tour. As it was, her (wholly un-sensational) story, and her commentary upon the art engaged me emotionally to a degree I wasn’t expecting. It enhanced my visit like no other app has achieved.

The phone also recorded my “timeline”, my journey through the museum, on-line so that I can share with others the photos I took, the artworks that caught my attention enough to seek more information from the app, and the tours I went you. As you can see, I spent three and a half hours with the app, walking 3,369 steps (or 1.7 miles). This timeline is the only slightly disappointing aspect of the app – I would have like to have clicked through this on-line version to listen to some of the media again, now that I am back home, maybe even to be reminded (though the apps abilities to determine location) who made some of things that I took photos of.

You’ll know that I’m not a massive fan of looking at things through my phone, but this app did well enough to almost convince me otherwise.

The museum had other digital interventions of interest. You might have spotted in my timelime that one of the first things we looked at was a surveillance culture-inspired artwork by Julia Scher that turned the museum in to Responsive Environment, changing according to visitors actions.

img_6792

There was also a fun activity in one of the cafe’s that allowed you to create your own digital artwork, printing it out on thermal paper instantly, but also linking to a hi-res online version, which I used for the illustration at the top of this post (you will note that those free earbuds are the stars of that piece).

SFMOMA, with their technology partners Detour on the app, and the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, are doing good things in the digital sphere. If you’re there, you should check them out.

#openheritagescholarship Thinkathon

Matthew Tyler-Jones1 Comment

thinkathon

Last week, went to Winchester School of Art to meet with some university colleagues to join a couple of facilitators from We Are Open, for a Thinkathon. “What,” I hear you ask “is a Thinkathon?”

I guess in less enlightened times, we might have called it a brainstorm, but it was a tight, friendly discussion/workshop to help us think through some challenges we’d set ourselves about open heritage scholarship, to wit (quoting from Graeme’s brief):

  • The nature and extent of user transitions from one open scholarship mechanism to one or more others e.g. one of the 40 million users who have already seen one of our documentaries following through to ePrints or our Massive Open Online Course, visiting Italy to see the archaeological site via a bespoke tour or paying to visit an exhibition.
  • The impact of our improved system on user engagements with each mechanism e.g. reading and commenting on Arkivum or ePrints datasets; public sharing of related content via social media. This will identify the opportunities for monetising activities in open scholarship
  • The impact of the design of the open scholarship ecosystem on these user journeys, building on previous work including video annotation, navigation via 3d content, interactive mapping, and timelines and multimedia navigation.

One thing that set it apart from your more traditional brainstorming session was the presence of Bryan from We Are Open, who constantly drew as we (and he) talked, projecting his doodlings up onto a screen so we could watch our ideas take shape as we came up them. Some of his sketches illustrate this piece.

So what did we conclude? Well the second half of the day went down a credentials rabbit hole, which was fun (and interesting) but I think, probably not yet where we are in the project. The Portus MOOC which in the new year will have its fifth intake, has been a great experiment in open education, and more Heritage Organisations are taking their first steps into those waters. But the challenge (I think) is to test the willingness of heritage organisations to think “open” (at least in the digital world) rather than strictly controlled and moderated. I’d like to get these guys from We Are Open into a room with my professional colleagues, and with others from Historic Royal Palaces, English Heritage etc. I learned that week that John from We Are Open actually started is working life with the National Trust, before moving on to organisations like Mozilla, so it would be fun to join the circle and get him involved again.

Can the PORTUS project afford it though?

Mulholland on Museum Narratives

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Working on the narratives for the Chawton Project, I’m taking a break and catching up on reading. Paul Mulholland (with Annika Wolff, Eoin Kilfeather, Mark Maguire and Danielle o’Donovan) recently contributed a relevant first chapter to Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage (ed Bordoni, Mele and Sorgente).

Mulholland et al’s chapter is titled Modelling Museum Narratives to Support Visitor Interpretation. It kicks off with the structuralist distinction between story and narrative,  and points to a work I’ve not read and should dig out (Polkinghorne, D. 1988 Narrative Knowing and the human sciences) as particularly relevant to interpreting the past. From this, the authors draw the “narrative inquiry” process which “comprises four main stages. First, relevant events are identified from the historical period of interest and organised into chronological order. This is termed a chronicle. Second, the chronicle is divided into separate strands of interest. These strands could be concerned with particular themes, characters, or types of event. Third, plot relations are imposed between the events. These express inferred causal relations between the events of the chronicle. Finally, a narrative is produced communicating a viewpoint on that period of history. Narrative inquiry is therefore not just a factual telling of events, but also makes commitments in terms of how the events are organised and related to each other.” Which is as good and concise a summary of the process of curatorial writing as I am likely to find.

There’s another useful summary paragraph later in the document. “When experiencing a museum exhibition, the visitor draws relationships between the exhibits, reconstructing for themselves the exhibition story (Peponis 2003), whether those relationships are, for example, thematic or chronological. The physical structure of the museum can affect how
visitors perceive the exhibition narrative. Tzortzi (2011) argues that the physical structure of the museum can serve to either present (i.e. give access to the exhibition in a way that is independent from its underlying logic) or re-present (i.e. have a physical structure that reinforces the conceptual structure of the exhibition).” Tzortzi there is another reference I’ve not yet discovered and may check out.

What the paper does not do however, is make any reference to emotion in storytelling. the authors seem to leave any emotional context the the visitors’ own meaning making. The chapter include a survey of current uses of technology in museums, and academic experiments including virtual tour guides and opportunities to add the own interpretations and reminiscences, as well as web-based timelines etc.

But, digital technology gives us the opportunity (or need) to break down cultural heritage narratives even more, and an earlier (2012) paper by (mostly) the same authors, Curate and Storyspace: An Ontology and Web-Based Environment for Describing Curatorial Narratives describes a system for deeper analysis. (Storyspace turns out to be a crowded name in the world of writing tools and hypertext, so eventually the ontology and Storyspace API became Storyscope). The first thing that the ontology brings to the table is that

a curatorial narrative should have the generic properties found in other types of narrative such as a novel or a film

So the authors add another structuralist tool, plot, to the story/narrative mix. “The plot imposes a network of relationships on the events of the story signifying their roles and importance in the overall story and how they are interrelated (e.g. a causal relationship between two events). The plot therefore turns a chronology of events into a subjective interpretation of those events.” But using the narrative inquiry process “the plot can be thought of as essentially a hypothesis that is tested against the story, being the data of the experiment.”

I like this idea. But its worth distinguishing between the two uses of the word “interpretation” in cultural heritage. The first use, familiar to my archaeologist colleagues, describes the process of building an understanding of of aspect of the past from the available evidence. The second, more familiar to my museum and heritage site colleagues describes the process of explaining the evidence to non-professional visitors. At its very best, the museum/heritage site form of interpretation will resemble and guide visitors though the process of inquiry that builds an understanding of the evidence on display. But most of the time the second form of interpretation more closely resembles storytelling. That’s not a fault or failure of my museum/heritage site colleagues, most visitors are time poor in story rich environments. But digital technology has the potential to allow museum and heritage site interpretation to more closely resemble the first use of the word.

What digital technology offers, is the opportunity for brave curators to offer alternative plots, or theses, and test them in a public arena, rather than just through a peer review process. Or even to create plots procedurally by following the visitors’ path of attention between objects, maybe discovering plots the curator had not imagined.

The two experiments that the authors describe go someway towards this, by their dry ontology misses an emotional component. The event ontology could surely include an authorial opinion on whether the narrative element suggests a simple emotional reponse (even as simple as hope or fear) but instead “If the tag represents an artist, then events are used to represent, for example, artworks they have created, exhibitions of their work, where they have lived, and their education history.” Dry, dry facts… There is the tiniest nod towards, if not emotion per se, the some sort of value in their brief discussion of theme:

Theme is also related to the moral point of the story. This could be a more abstract concept, such as good winning through in the end, which serves to bind together all events of the story.

Given that they say “Narratives are employed by museums for a number of purposes,
including entertainment” they haven’t given much time to what makes narratives engaging. There is hope however. In their conclusion, they do say “Other narrative
features such as characterisation and authorial intent could potentially be
foregrounded in tools to support interpretation.”

 

P.O.R.T.U.S is go!

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A week or two back, I had an interesting conversation with my supervisor, which I didn’t think I should mention on-line until, today, he invoked the “inverse fight club rule”. So I can now reveal that P.O.R.T.U.S stands for Portus Open Research Technologies User Study – yes, I know, as Graeme said “recursive-acronym-me-up baby.” This isn’t the Portus Project, but but it does ride on the back of that work, and (we hope) it will also work to the Portus Project’s benefit.

P.O.R.T.U.S is a small pilot project to explore better signposting to open research, so (for example) people interested in the BBC Documentary Rome’s Lost Empire, (which coincidentally is repeated TONIGHT folks, hence my urgency in getting this post out) might find their way to the Portus Project website, the FutureLearn MOOC,  the plethora of academics papers available free through ePrints (this one for example) or even raw data.

Though the pilot project will use the Portus Project itself as a test bed, we’re keen to apply the learning to Cultural Heritage of all types. To which end I’m looking to organise a workshop bringing together cultural heritage organisations, the commercial companies that build interpretation and learning for them, and open source data providers like universities.

The research questions include:

  • What are the creative digital business (particularly but not exclusively in cultural heritage context) opportunities provided by aligning diverse open scholarship information?
  • What are the challenges?
  • Does the pilot implementation of this for the Portus Project offer anything to creative digital businesses?

The budget for this pilot project is small, and that means the workshop will have limited places, but if you are working with digital engagement, at or for cultural heritage sites and museums,. and would like to attend, drop me a note in the comments.

The powers of people

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I was at Chawton again yesterday (before going to Petworth for yesterday’s mobile fun) to meet with Jane, one of the house’s most experienced volunteers. I’d challenged her to give me a 45 minute tour of her choice. She really wanted me to tell her what I was most interested to hear, but I wouldn’t. I wanted her unbiased perception of what were the most “important” bits of her her encyclopedic knowledge of Chawton and the surrounding area to share, given the 45 minute time limit.

(I always recommend that 45 minutes is the absolute maximum for a guided tour. In fact I suggest that half an hour is what people should work to. People who want more will stay behind to chat, but there is some evidence from the National Trust’s monitoring of visitors for conservation, that the average dwell time in a house, whatever it’s size is about 45 minutes.)

In the end she gave me what I’d call an architectural tour of the house, pointing out how the thick exterior walls of the the original manor had become interior walls after Richard Knight’s extensions. It was great, and reminded me about some of the things I’d forgotten about being a tour guide that make guided tours (with the right guide) so entertaining.

I’ve always said that guided tours often offer the best historic house experience. A good paid or volunteer guide can weave a compelling story as s/he escorts you around the house. He or she can reveal things you might otherwise have have missed. They can respond to your interests, and level of expertise, to give you a tailored experience. But Jane reminded me how they can transform the place, by pointing out those thick walls, or turning over a framed note hanging on the wall to reveal the ancient deeds from which the paper had been recycled. A good guide turns their audience into detectives – rather than simply telling them how Montague Knight installed a safe into what once had been an old garderobe chute, they help their audience work it out for themselves – a moment of insight, that emotional trigger where everything that has come before “clicks into place and reveals the shape of the whole” as Tynan Sylvester puts it.

Of course, Jane’s tour also demonstrated that the VERY best historic house experience would be to have the guide all to yourself. Not everyone on a larger tour (and there were a couple running yesterday that we bumped into) could have lifted the framed note from the wall to read the reverse. As I hung it back on the hook, I had conservation alarm bells ringing in my head. Every handling, every movement of this glass framed note (which Montague Knight had hidden beneath the floor for future generations to find) put it at risk. The more people given the opportunity I had, the greater the chance that it might be damaged.

Not everyone can do what I did, arrange a personal tour at a time of my convenience after an email introduction from the Director. For those other tour groups we met, the guided tour experience gets diluted, less personal, less tailored to each individual’s interests.

The technological approach I’m investigating might be able to address some of the personalisation challenges, but can it ever offer the magical moments of insight that Jane offered me?

Chawton

Matthew Tyler-Jones1 Comment
I dreary day to photograph a fine building, but the meeting made up for the weather!
A dreary day to photograph a fine building, but the meeting made up for the weather!

Just a quick note today to reflect on the meeting I had this morning with Gillian Dow, Executive Director of Chawton House Library. This place has been preying on my thoughts since I visited for the last Sound Heritage workshop. In fact, somebody (my friend Jane and her colleague Hilary) had suggested last year that it might be the perfect place to try out my Responsive Environment ideas. But my visit for Sound Heritage made me think more and more that they were right.

  • The place has many interesting stories but ones that can conflict with each other. Do people what to know about it’s centuries as a residence for the Knight family, its connections with Austen, and/or its modern day research into early female writers?
  • It’s a place that hasn’t been open to the public long (this year its its first full season welcoming days out visitors) and is still finding it’s voice.
  • Its relatively free of “stuff” and has modern display systems (vitrines and hanging rails), which means that creating the experience should not be too disruptive.
  • It has pervasive wi-fi (the library’s founding patron Sandy Lerner, co-founded Cisco systems) which will make the experiment a lot easier and cheaper to run, even though I’ve decided to Wizard of Oz it.

So today I explained my ideas to Gillian and, I’m pleased to say, she liked them. We’ve provisionally agreed to do something in the early part of 2017, before that year’s major exhibition is installed. I brought away a floor plan of the house, and I have just this moment received a copy of the draft guidebook, so I can start breaking the story into “natoms”. It looks very much like its all systems go!

I have to say I’m very excited.

(But right now, I’m meant to be taking the boy camping so, I’ll leave it there…

Attingham 2016 Conference

Matthew Tyler-Jones2 Comments

I’m speaking at the Attingham 2016 Conference, organised by the University of Nottingham. It clashes with the recently announced referendum, so its a postal ballot for me!

Anyway, I thought I might share my abstract:

Is there a place in heritage spaces for the gamification of adult learning?

 

Today’s fifty year olds were at school in 1980’s, when the ZX80, then the ZX81, the Spectrum, the BBC micro, and host of other cheap and accessible computing devices popularised digital gaming. How do the expectations of this first “Gamer Generation” differ from the adult learners that cultural heritage sites have welcomed in the past?

Gamification (Hamari et al., 2014, Kapp, 2012, Marczewski), the application of game mechanics in non-game contexts, has been a feature of learning since before the word was coined in 2002. Non-digital games have been used in the classroom and in less formal environments, for many years, to encourage people to learn about their world. Generally though, such games have been aimed at non-adult audiences. The term gamification has come to prominence in recent years mostly in reference to digital games, and an adult audience.

Heritage organisations have been using digital game technology to interpret cultural heritage since at least 1996, but it’s only since the creation of mobile digital devices that museums and other heritage sites have tried to harness game technology on-site to help interpret their stories (Fosh et al., 2015, Ioannidis et al., 2014, Roussou et al., 2013, Salomonsson, 2015, Treharne et al., 2013).

Digital games, especially immersive story-games, and cultural heritage sites share a multimodality (Champion, 2015, Roppola, 2013) that suggests games may work very well for adult learning in heritage spaces. However, heritage sites that have invested in projects involving gamification have often been disappointed in the numbers of visitors participating in such efforts.

This paper will chart the brief history of digital games in heritage learning, and share research into gamers’ attitudes to play in cultural heritage spaces. Exploring the opportunities and challenges that game mechanics offer heritage spaces, I will argue that some elements could be used to make cultural heritage sites more responsive environments, without turning adult learning into a game.

 

So, that’s the abstract, I better get on with the paper. I might need to find some more up-to-date texts as well, as some of these come from when I first started my studies. If anybody has published anything recently that touches on the above, give me a shout.

 

Hmm, given I’ve left citations in the text above I better do the decent thing and include the references:

CHAMPION, E. 2015. Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

FOSH, L., LORENZ, K., BENFORD, S. & KOLEVA, B. 2015. Personal and social? Designing personalised experiences for groups in museums. 19th Annual Museums and the Web Conference (MW2015). Chicago, IL.

HAMARI, J., KOIVISTO, J. & SARSA, H. Does Gamification Work? — A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification.  System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on, 6-9 Jan. 2014 2014. 3025-3034.

IOANNIDIS, Y., BALET, O. & PANDERMALIS, D. 2014. Tell me a story: augmented reality technology in museums. The Guardian, April 4.

KAPP, K. M. 2012. The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education, John Wiley & Sons.

MARCZEWSKI, A. Gamification: A Simple Introduction and a Bit More, (self-published on Amazon Digital Services, 2013). Kindle edition, Loc, 1405.

ROPPOLA, T. 2013. Designing for the museum visitor experience, Routledge.

ROUSSOU, M., VAUANOU, M., KATIFORI, A., RENNICK-EGGLESTONE, S. & PUJOL, L. 2013. A Life of Their Own: Museum Visitor Personas Penetrating the Design Lifecycle of a Mobile Experience. CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts. Paris: ACM.

SALOMONSSON, L. 2015. Leveling-Up With Cultural Heritage: Aspects from Gamification and Alternate Reality Games.

TREHARNE, H. E., TROMANS, N., SCARLES, C., SCOTT, M., CASEY, M. C. & CULNANE, C. 2013. Transforming the Visitor Experience with Augmented Reality.