Category Archives: Historical interpretation

Interpreting Slavery at Historic Sites Workshop on May 25

George Mason's Gunston Hall, Virginia.

George Mason’s Gunston Hall, Virginia.

George Mason’s Gunston Hall in Virginia will become a hands-on laboratory to explore how to create a comprehensive and conscientious interpretation of slavery at an historic site at a one-day workshop on Wednesday, May 25, 2016 from 9:30 am to 6:30 pm (right before the AAM annual meeting).  You’ll learn how to better connect and extend your site’s interpretation of its history of slavery and help staff and volunteers achieve a greater understanding of difficult knowledge and complicated emotions.  Registration is $90 and includes morning refreshments, lunch, and a post-workshop reception.  For more details and to register, visit http://bit.ly/SlaveryWorkshop.

The workshop will be led by Kristin Gallas, co-editor of Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites and includes presentations by Continue reading →

Latest National Research on Technology in the K-12 Education (with Tips for Historic Sites)

"From Pixel to Print," the 2015 report on the use of technology in K-12 education.

“From Pixel to Print,” the 2015 report on the use of technology in K-12 education.

Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization focused on education, just released a national study on the use of technology by teachers and students called, “From Print to Pixel: The Role of Videos, Games, Animations, and Simulations within K-12 Education.”  For the past thirteen years, Project Tomorrow has provided these annual “Speak Up” research reports to help schools and elected officials (and I’m including museums and historic sites) better understand the trends in technology in the K-12 education field. This year’s report incorporates responses from 415,686 K-12 students, 38,613 teachers and librarians, 4,536 administrators, 40,218 parents and 6,623 community members representing over 7,600 schools and 2,600 districts in the United States and around the world.

 

From “Print to Pixel” highlighted these major findings: Continue reading →

Challenges Facing Historic House Museums: A Report from the Field

AASLH Historic House Management Workshop at Brucemore in 2016.

AASLH Historic House Management Workshop at Brucemore in 2016.

At the annual AASLH workshop on historic house museum management, we always start by asking participants about the biggest or most important challenge they are facing at their historic site.  For the participants, the exercise allows them to get to know each other beyond a name by recognizing the issues they may have in common.  As the instructors, It’s an opportunity for George McDaniel and me to ensure we address their concerns.  For AASLH, it’s a way of keeping a finger on the pulse on what’s happening in the field.  At the end of the workshop, we review the list and provide some time for participants to develop a plan to address their issue.  As a reminder, they also fill out self-addressed postcards with a message to themselves, which I’ll mail to them in six months.

So that you can keep your finger on the pulse of the field, here’s the list of issues and challenges from the Cedar Rapids workshop at Brucemore, which included participants from Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois: Continue reading →

Video: Detour’s High-Tech Audio Tours Come to Museums

Groupon founder Andrew Mason guides Casey Newton of Verge through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art using the latest version of Detour, a location-based outdoor audio tour app that now works indoors as well.  Through your smartphone, Detour knows your location in the museum and presents the artworks in that specific gallery along with the associated audio recordings so you can wander (giving you the right information in the right place), as well as 15-30 minute “walks”.  Parts of this Verge video are silly and the background music too loud, but it looks like smartphone technology now has the capability to be used at historic sites for self-guided tours of the buildings, landscape, and neighborhood in a way that’s more flexible and responsive to visitor interests.

The video below is a better explanation of Detour’s ability to “automatically guide you as you walk, almost like you’re there with a real person”.  It debuted last year with ten Detours of San Francisco (including architecture) at $4.99.

Tackling Challenges for Historic Sites in St. Louis

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Last week, Ken Turino of Historic New England and I gave a one-day workshop on reinventing historic house museum in St. Louis, Missouri for the American Association for State and Local History.  It was a sold-out workshop with more than 50 people participating, mostly from the St. Louis region, so it was a great opportunity to meet so many of our colleagues, including a couple places who were starting new house museums (glad to have people learning about this specialized field before they open the doors!).  A big thanks to Andy Hahn at the Campbell House for hosting the workshop and to the St. Louis Public Library for allowing us to meet at the historic Central Library.

Ken and I continue to refine the workshop based on the evaluations we receive from the participants, and one of the elements we added to the beginning of the workshop is asking, “What is the biggest challenge facing your house museum?” and “What needs to be reinvented at your historic site?”  Here are some of the responses we received: Continue reading →

Video: “Every Student Succeeds Act” Overview

In this 3:38 video, Education Week’s Alyson Klein provides an overview of the changes brought by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaces No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the 2017-18 school year.  Responsibilities for performance, curriculum, and testing shift from the federal government to the states.  For museums and historic sites, that means that your local school district may be adopting new standards of learning, which could prompt you to revise your school programs.  States are required to adopt “challenging” academic standards, which could be Common Core but it isn’t required.  For more details, take a look at Education Week’s written summary or the analysis in The Atlantic.

 

Looking for Exhibit Ideas? Check Out These Online Files

Exhibit Files 2016Looking for an idea for an upcoming exhibit? Need some alternatives for an interactive activity? Want to know if anyone else has installed an outdoor exhibit at a bus station? You’ll want to explore “Exhibit Files,” a free online collection of exhibition records and reviews for exhibit designers and interpretive planners.  The Association of Science-Technology Centers launched this website in 2007 with funding from the National Science Foundation, but despite those affiliations, you’ll find plenty of files related to history, including a case study of Lewis & Clark (the national Bicentennial exhibition); a review of Terror House in Budapest by Daniel Spock of the Minnesota Historical Society; and a case study of a low-tech document-based interactive exhibit at the Missouri State Archives. Because most exhibit techniques can be used with any subject, you can adapt many ideas for your specific needs. The files can be searched by title, date, tag, or topic (such as history or architecture).   And if you have an exhibit experience to share or you’re looking to solve a problem, you can join for free and become one of the nearly 3,000 members.

Interpreting Race: Challenges and Solutions from NCPH

Interpreting African American History and CultureLast year when I was preparing Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites, it seemed that the obvious had been overlooked: race. Although we all advocated for the integration of African American history in interpretation in part to overcome racism, I wondered if instead we are inadvertently promoting the idea that races exist and we simply need to find ways to get along, just like dogs and cats in our homes. We never questioned or uncovered the assumptions about race that visitors may carry with them into museums and historic sites. Our bigger concern was that African American history was sufficiently significant to merit preservation and integration into the interpretation.

We know that races do not exist and it was a theory developed by scientists in the 18th and 19th century as a way to explain human differences.  Race has long been disproven, but certainly race and racism continues, probably in the minds of many of our visitors.  So if more of our visitors could understand that race is socially constructed and artificial, it may go a long way towards Continue reading →

An App That Easily Merges Oral History and Images

My recording about a bird nest on the Galapagos Islands using PixStori.

My recording about a bird nest on the Galapagos Islands using PixStori.

At the National Council on Public History conference last week in Baltimore, Michael Frisch of the University of Buffalo introduced PixStori, a iOS app that he helped develop that easily shares photographs with audio recordings.  Frisch is a leader among oral history practitioners and he developed the app as a way for people to record short oral histories to accompany photographs.

Users pull up a photo from their iPhone or iPad and then record a short message (up to 20 minutes), which can then be shared via email, Twitter, or Facebook.  I experimented with a photo of a bird and it’s remarkably easy to use.  It’s definitely fun for sharing photos, but I can easily see museums and archives using it to share historic images or documents with a comment by an historian or help promote an upcoming event.  But I can also see how it might be used in-house to record visitor reaction to proposed exhibit or to send a message to your staff about a site emergency. It appears that the recordings are stored at PixStori, so recipients don’t need to have the app installed but do need an internet connection to see and hear the file. The app is available free for iOS devices and an Android version is underway.

Interactive Station Using a Tablet and Stanchion

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The equipment for interactive displays is becoming increasingly easier, thanks to powerful computer tablets that can show documents, images, and videos.  There’s no need to mount a monitor to the wall with a fat cable snaking to a computer unit tucked into a cabinet.  I recently saw a nice example of an interactive tablet system at the George Washington University Museum in Washington, DC.  The tablet (such as an Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab) is mounted on a stanchion with a special head from the Exhibit Stanchions Group.  That’s it. None of the tablet’s ports are blocked so it can be charged or updated even when it’s held in place.  The tablet is securely fastened and the stanchion is heavy enough to withstand a casual bump, but if you need to remove the stanchion for an event or use it elsewhere, it can be easily picked up (yes, a thief could steal the whole thing but if they’re walking out the door with a stanchion, you’ve got bigger problems).