Public Writing as Interpretation: Advice from the Editor of Public Humanities

One of the most important roles museums play is sharing scholarship with the public—and it’s also one of the hardest. We are often asked to interpret complex events that unfolded over decades and involved many people, and in the process we rely on shorthand that makes sense to other scholars but not always to our visitors. Words like contextualize, agency, material culture, or periodization can quickly create distance rather than connection. Too often, we respond by simply “simplifying” academic work, when what we really need is something more ambitious: a distinct, rigorous form of interpretation designed specifically for public audiences.

In “How to Do Public Writing,” Jeffrey R. Wilson—director of the Harvard Law School Writing Center—offers a timely corrective: public writing is not scholarship “lite,” but a different craft altogether, one that requires clarity, narrative discipline, and deep respect for audience. Wilson is also the editor-in-chief of the new open-access journal Public Humanities, published by Cambridge University Press, and is currently developing a special museum issue—making his insights especially relevant for those of us working in museums and historic sites.

Wilson defines public writing as scholarship for people outside the academy—what he memorably calls “the folks we grew up with.” His premise is simple but urgent: as humanities education has declined and public trust in expertise has eroded, the responsibility for interpretation has shifted. Museums, libraries, and cultural organizations are now among the primary places where people learn how to make meaning from history, culture, and evidence. In this sense, public writing and museum interpretation are performing the same civic function.

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From Sites to Stories: Using ESRI StoryMaps to Interpret Women’s History in Washington, DC

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Digital tools do not automatically produce meaningful interpretation. What they can do—when used with discipline—is force clarity about audience, theme, and purpose. This is why I have begun using ESRI ArcGIS StoryMaps as a core interpretive platform in my graduate course CMST6307: Interpretation of Historic Sites at George Washington University.

This fall, students were commissioned—within a realistic professional scenario—to create StoryMaps interpreting the history of women in Washington, DC. Each project connected five or six historic sites through a coherent theme, tailored to a specific public audience. The results demonstrate how StoryMaps can function not as digital scrapbooks, but as public-facing interpretive products grounded in professional standards.

I’m incredibly proud of what they accomplished, but this isn’t a showcase of student work for its own sake. It’s a case study in how digital storytelling platforms can support the interpretation of historic sites and house museums.

A flowchart of the interpretive planning process used in my course and at Engaging Places, which starts with audience, content, and design. — *Interpretive framework used in my interpretation course (and with my clients).*

A Professional Product, Not a Classroom Exercise

The assignment was framed as a hypothetical consulting project for the White House Historical Association. Students were told: “The StoryMap should connect 5–6 historic sites through a coherent theme, tailored to a specific audience. It should demonstrate professional standards in historical research, interpretive writing, and digital design.”

From the beginning, the emphasis was not on technology, but on interpretation. Each student had to demonstrate the integration of three core elements: audience, content, and design.

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How Emerging Museum Professionals View Community Engagement in Museums

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*Learning about the vision and resources of the GW Museum.*

End-of-semester reflections often confirm what instructors suspect but rarely see so clearly. Read together, the reflections from my course CMST 6703: Museums and Community Engagement at George Washington University offer a useful window into how emerging museum professionals are learning to connect the theory of community engagement with its day-to-day practice. For museum leaders and practitioners, the themes echo many of the field’s ongoing debates about values, capacity, and impact.

One of the strongest patterns was a shift in how students understand community engagement. Early in the semester, many approached engagement as something measurable through attendance, participation counts, or one-off programs. By the end, their reflections show a more nuanced understanding: engagement as a relational practice grounded in mission, trust, reciprocity, and long-term stewardship. This mirrors core engagement theory, which emphasizes relationships over transactions and positions engagement as an ongoing organizational practice rather than a discrete activity.

Students also demonstrated increasing comfort applying theoretical frameworks to real institutional contexts. They reflected on analyzing museums through mission, governance, resources, and capacity—recognizing that engagement strategies cannot be separated from how an organization actually functions. The shared GW Museum case study, while initially frustrating, became a practical laboratory for testing theory against reality. Students noted that working within a single, constrained case forced them to confront tradeoffs, power dynamics, and feasibility—key elements often glossed over in more idealized engagement models.

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EngagingPlaces.net at 15: What the Numbers Say

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In 2026, EngagingPlaces.net marks its 15th anniversary. What began in 2011 as a modest professional blog has grown into a widely used resource for history museum and historic site professionals working at the intersection of interpretation, engagement, sustainability, and leadership.

The numbers tell part of the story. In 2011, the site received 1,108 visitors—mostly colleagues and friends in the field. In 2025, EngagingPlaces.net recorded more than 37,000 page views from 22,000 individual visitors, a level of readership that reflects both the scale and the consistency of interest in applied museum practice.

Most readers are based in the United States, with international readership extending—at a distance—to the United Kingdom, Canada, and India. Within the U.S., the largest audiences come from Virginia, California, Texas, and New York, states with dense concentrations of museums, historic sites, and cultural organizations navigating rapid change.

What Readers Come Here For

The most-read posts over time reveal a consistent pattern: practitioners are looking for clear frameworks, practical language, and decision-ready thinking.

Among the most visited pages on the site are:

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From Standards to Spectrums: Why Museum Practice Is Better Understood as a Matrix

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One of the things I keep returning to in my teaching and consulting is how much museum work actually lives along a spectrum—not in binary terms of success or failure, right or wrong, compliant or noncompliant.

This is one of the persistent challenges of working with professional standards. Standards are essential. They articulate shared values, define public trust, and help the field hold itself accountable. But by their nature, standards can imply an all-or-nothing logic: either you are doing the thing or you are not. And if you are not, that’s a problem.

Museum management, of course, is far more complex.

Museums and historic sites operate with widely varying levels of capacity, expertise, staffing, governance maturity, and external pressure. Boards change. Funding fluctuates. Crises intervene. Even within a single organization, some areas of work may be highly developed while others lag behind—not because of neglect or incompetence, but because of constrained resources and competing priorities.

Over time, I’ve become interested in how we might better describe and normalize that reality for the field—without lowering expectations or abandoning standards altogether.

Why a Matrix (Not a Scorecard)

In different contexts, I’ve heard similar tools described as rubrics, spectrums, continuums, or maturity models. In my own work, I’ve settled on calling this a matrix, for a very specific reason: it allows us to look across multiple areas of practice at once.

Once you do that, patterns start to emerge.

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When Oversight Becomes Bullying: Lessons from the Smithsonian

In December 2025, the White House sent a letter to the Smithsonian Institution requesting extensive documentation related to exhibitions, educational materials, internal processes, and collections. The request followed an earlier directive tied to an executive order and was framed as part of federal oversight.

In principle, this kind of oversight is not only appropriate—it is necessary. The President and senior staff have a responsibility to ensure that federally-funded institutions are operating effectively and that public resources are protected from waste, fraud, or abuse. Museums, like any other organizations that receive public funds or tax exemptions, should expect scrutiny and be prepared to demonstrate sound management and professional standards.

What concerns me is not the idea of oversight, but the scale, scope, and apparent purpose of this particular request. From a museum management and governance perspective, much of what is being asked for would require significant staff time to assemble, while providing little information that would actually inform decisions about efficiency, risk, misuse of funds, or as they phrased it, “Americanism.”

*Excerpt from August 12, 2025 letter from White House to Smithsonian.*

As someone who has worked with museum boards, executive directors, and city councils for more than three decades, I see troubling patterns here—patterns I have seen before, much closer to home.

First, I’ll share my open letter to Vince Haley, Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, then I’ll relate this to museums and historic sites.

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What Emerging Museum Managers Are Learning—and Why It Matters to the Field

*Discussing current management issues in museums.*

Graduate students recently finishing an introductory course in museum management with me at George Washington University offered useful insights to the field. Their end-of-semester reflections reveal where emerging professionals are gaining traction, where they’re still uncertain, and what this means for museums and nonprofits navigating an increasingly complex landscape.

What’s clicking

A clear shift is underway in how new professionals understand museums. Rather than seeing them as a set of departments or activities, students are beginning to read museums as systems: mission, governance, finances, staffing, and programs working together—or, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Core documents like budgets, Form 990s, strategic plans, and bylaws are no longer viewed as bureaucratic paperwork, but as evidence of priorities, capacity, and risk.

Equally important, many students are learning that management is less about finding the “right” answer and more about making defensible decisions with imperfect information. That realization—often uncomfortable—is a sign of professional formation. They are also becoming more fluent in professional communication: writing memos for decision-makers, structuring findings, and using standards as tools rather than checklists.

Where the strain shows

The productive strain is familiar to anyone who has worked in museums. Students struggled most when ideals collided with constraints—especially around finances, staffing, and governance. They felt the tension between mission-driven aspirations and organizational realities. That’s not a weakness; it’s the work.

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A History Podcast Wins Big—And Offers Clues for Museums’ Future

Apple Podcasts recently named The Rest is History its Podcast of the Year, and in a December 4 interview on In Conversation from Apple News, hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland reflected on why history is resonating so strongly today. Sandbrook argues that despite assumptions, young people are deeply interested in the past—provided it is presented through compelling stories and vivid characters. Academic historians, he suggests, sometimes struggle to reach broad audiences because they avoid narrative. For Sandbrook, stories of the Second World War, Greek myth, the Trojan War, and Rome endure because they are foundational to human identity.

Holland adds that today’s students confront unprecedented content pressures, but unlike earlier generations, they are no longer limited to school as the sole venue for learning. The internet has created a lifelong landscape for historical discovery—“an enormous seam of gold,” as he describes it.

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New Guide: Writing Professional Memos for Museum Work

Over the years, I’ve noticed something consistent in my museum management courses: graduate students are well-prepared to write academic papers, but many struggle when asked to write professional memos—the format that museum directors, CEOs, and board members actually read.

This isn’t a flaw in their abilities; it’s a mismatch between what universities traditionally teach and what museums need. Academic writing is designed to demonstrate thinking. Managerial writing is designed to support decisions.

In the museum field, we write memos all the time—to recommend actions, summarize findings, or prepare leaders for decisions. That’s why many of the assignments in my courses require students to write to a real audience: a museum director, board chair, or CEO. Students practice being clear, concise, and actionable—skills that will serve them throughout their careers.

At recent professional conferences, I’ve also heard colleagues say that emerging professionals often struggle with executive communication. They know their subject matter, but don’t always know how to structure recommendations for decision-makers. Supervisors want to help, but explaining “how to write a memo” can be surprisingly difficult without concrete models.

For years, I’ve used the FranklinCovey Style Guide for Business and Technical Communication as the foundation (available free online). It offers excellent standards and a managerial memo structure that aligns beautifully with museum leadership needs.

Still, many students found it challenging because executive writing feels so different from college writing. So I created a new two-page memo about memos: “Writing Professional Memos in Managerial Format” (available as a free download at the end).

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Rethinking Board Governance in a Post-COVID World

At the recent Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM) conference in Pittsburgh, I attended “Headwinds and Tailwinds: A Panel Discussion about the Financial and Operational Impacts on the Museum and Arts Management Field.” One of the panelists, Hayley Haldeman of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, offered particularly insightful observations about board governance in the post-COVID landscape. Her comments confirmed what many of us have observed firsthand—museum boards are facing more challenges and opportunities than ever before.

A Changing Landscape—But Familiar Structures

Despite the upheavals of recent years, Haldeman noted that few organizations have made major changes to their board structures. Most boards remain large, and many governance documents have yet to be updated. The notable exception has been a growing emphasis on board diversity—though progress toward real inclusion varies widely.

At the same time, museums are experiencing significant leadership transitions. Many long-serving executive directors have retired, while others are navigating the aftermath of the “Great Resignation,” which has affected both staff and board leadership. These changes can be destabilizing, but they also open the door for renewal.

New Pressures on Museums and Nonprofit Organizations

Board service today comes with new (and sometimes unexpected) responsibilities. Museums and other nonprofit organizations are grappling with a range of threats, both real and perceived:

Drops in individual giving and shifts in foundation priorities
Greater community expectations for accountability and transparency
Political and legal questions (e.g., DEAI initiatives, exhibition content)
Cybersecurity and AI-related risks

Meanwhile, board members are harder to recruit and retain. COVID-19 reshaped personal and professional priorities, making time an even scarcer resource. For organizations, that means it’s harder than ever to fill board seats, onboard new members, and keep them engaged—especially when board work happens virtually.

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