Category Archives: Historical interpretation

The Collector’s Museum: Art and Interpretation in German-Speaking Switzerland

Founded in the 1780s, Kunsthaus Zürich now straddles a busy intersection in two buildings.

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. Among the many differences in museum practice, one pattern was especially noticeable in the art museums of the German-speaking cantons: their organization around named private collections, or Sammlungen.

A wealthy collector may have assembled works of art over a lifetime and later donated or loaned the collection to a museum. Rather than fully integrating those works into a chronological, thematic, or art-historical presentation, the museum often retains the collection as a distinct unit bearing the donor’s name.

There are legitimate reasons for doing this. A named collection preserves its provenance and recognizes the role of private collecting in the formation of public museums. It can reveal an individual collector’s tastes, preferences, ambitions, and blind spots. The collection itself can become a historical document.

This model is not unique to Switzerland. American museums such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Frick Collection in New York preserve, to varying degrees, the identity and vision of their founders’ private collections. In those institutions, however, the collector’s personality, residence, installation choices, or philosophy of looking is central to the museum’s public identity. Visitors generally understand that they are entering a particular person’s conception of art.

The situation becomes more complicated when several named collections coexist within a larger institution. The visitor is no longer encountering one clearly defined collector’s museum but moving among several private visions whose differences are not always explained.

The Sammlung Merzbacher at the Kunsthaus in Zürich.
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Walking Through Two Eras at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio, following completion of its 2 Era Restoration. The project interprets both the Beecher family residence and the later Edgemont Inn period, revealing the building’s evolving role in the community across generations.

When I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio this February, I expected to learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s years in the city and how her experiences there influenced the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What I did not expect was to come away thinking as much about the building itself as the woman who once lived there.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House recently completed what it calls a two-era restoration, interpreting both the Beecher family period (1840) and the later Edgemont Inn period (1940). At first, I wondered whether trying to tell two stories in one house might feel confusing. Instead, I found it to be one of the project’s greatest strengths.

The tour begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Cincinnati she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s. Visitors learn about Lane Seminary, debates over slavery, the city’s free Black community, and the experiences that shaped Stowe’s understanding of freedom and injustice. These stories unfold in rooms restored to the Beecher era, allowing visitors to imagine the world she experienced as a young wife, mother, and writer living in Cincinnati.

What impressed me most, however, was how the restoration itself became part of the interpretation.

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Rethinking Learning Outcomes for Historic Sites

Note: This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of how museums and historic sites can define meaningful visitor experiences. I continue that work in “Beyond ‘Learn’ and ‘Appreciate’: Writing Better Visitor Outcomes,” which builds on these ideas by introducing five Outcome Types and a more structured approach to writing interpretive outcomes.

For several years, I have been adapting L. Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning for use in museums and historic sites. Fink’s framework is enormously useful in formal education because it pushes teachers beyond simple content delivery (i.e., foundational knowledge) to application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn. That is a helpful corrective in classrooms, where learning unfolds over a semester and where students can be asked to practice, reflect, revise, and demonstrate growth.  But I am increasingly convinced that this framework does not translate as easily as I hoped to the interpretation of house museums and historic sites.

The problem is not Fink’s taxonomy itself. The problem is that historic site visitors are usually not students in a course. They are often there by choice, joined by family or friends, have uneven prior knowledge, and motivated by many different reasons: curiosity, leisure, family activity, travel, identity, or a search for meaning. They may spend 45 minutes in a guided tour, 20 minutes in an exhibition, or an afternoon in the gardens. We need a framework that recognizes these distinct conditions.

My earlier handout, “Verbs for Significant Learning Outcomes,” tried to help museums define what they wanted visitors to know, feel, or do and to create relevant, meaningful experiences. That part still feels right. The challenge is that the categories remained too close to classroom learning. Some verbs—apply, execute, operate, practice, monitor—make sense for students or professional training but are less useful for visitors at a historic house. Because house museums and historic sites interpret history, the framework should also reflect the discipline’s core practices: using evidence, recognizing perspective, acknowledging uncertainty, connecting local stories to broader patterns, and inviting public dialogue about the past.  More importantly, the framework did not clearly align with the visitor journey from first encounter to deeper meaning.

That’s a lot to juggle and I may be dropping a few balls, so here’s my preliminary draft work-in-progress revised framework organized around two related ideas: Outcome Level and Outcome Ambition.

Outcome Levels

The Outcome Level describes the kind of visitor change an interpretive experience is designed to support. In plain terms, it asks: What kind of change are we trying to create in visitors? Imagine levels as a journey on a nature trail:  getting oriented at the trailhead; noticing plants, insects, animals, and geology; seeing how parts of the ecosystem connect; pausing at an overlook to understand the larger landscape; and leaving with a clearer sense of what you learned, what matters to you, and what you might do next. 

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The Clip Economy and the Case for One-Minute Museum Videos

Screenshot from “The Clip Economy is Eating Everything” by the Atlantic.

I was recently listening to a podcast from The Atlantic—“The Clip Economy is Eating Everything”—where Charlie Wartsall interviews business writer Ed Elson about the rise of short-form video. Their argument is straightforward: the dominant unit of media is no longer the article, the podcast, or even the YouTube video. It’s the clip.

That stuck with me and I’m uncomfortable.

Much of what rises to the top in this “clip economy” is not especially thoughtful or constructive. And yet, it’s how many people are now consuming information—not through television, books, newspapers, museums, or even longer-form digital content, but through YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and TikTok. Whether we like it or not, this is the environment our audiences are living in.

While I’ve been producing content for this blog for more than fifteen years, a few years ago I began producing YouTube videos. Based on research on the attention span of viewers, I aimed for a six-minute length but yikes, those take me days to produce. I don’t do it frequently so editing is slow, narration has to be re-recorded when I inevitably trip over a sentence, and assembling images into something coherent takes real effort.

So I decided to experiment.

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What Happens When You Apply Museum Standards to a State Capitol?

The Virginia State Capitol offers guided and self-guided tours to visitors.

When I agreed to conduct a Museum Assessment Program (MAP) review for the Virginia State Capitol, I knew it would be an unusual assignment. MAP is designed for museums—institutions with clear missions centered on collections, exhibitions, and interpretation. The Capitol, however, is not a museum. It is the active seat of the General Assembly of Virginia. That distinction matters.

At the Capitol, the “museum function” is secondary—sometimes tertiary—to the work of governance. I’ve completed several MAP assessments but only choose those that relate to my expertise and interests—and the unusual environment engaged me immediately and made me wonder what would happen. Tours, exhibitions, and school programs operate within an environment defined by legislative sessions, security protocols, and shifting public access. I suspected that some museum standards wouldn’t apply. Others—especially those related to education and interpretation—would, but required adaptation. What I discovered is that the most useful part of my visit wasn’t evaluating against museum standards—it was a workshop.

As part of MAP, I facilitated a session to develop guiding principles for the visitor experience (called Education and Interpretation in MAP). Think of them as a set of best practices—but ones developed by the staff themselves, grounded in real situations rather than imposed from outside. Rather than start with abstract values (e.g., diversity, education, creativity) or a series of broad questions (e.g., why does the museum exist? what is the museum’s educational vision?), I used scenarios—real situations staff face every day.

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Your Tours Aren’t the Problem—Your Outcomes Are

If you’ve ever wondered whether the challenges you’re facing at your historic site or house museum are typical or unusual, there is some collective evidence to draw on.

For the past decade, Ken Turino and I have led Reimagining Historic House Museums workshops across the country for the American Association for State and Local History, based on our book of the same name. We begin each workshop with a simple but revealing question: What is the greatest challenge facing your site?

We have collected these responses from a wide range of locations (such Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Texas, and Maryland) from a wide range of participants (staff, boardmembers, and volunteers). From a sampling of these lists, I used ChatGPT to analyze and synthesize the responses into the seven overarching issues, each representing a structural or strategic challenge. While the data was not collected in a scientific manner (participants are self-selecting, not random), the consistency of responses across regions and institution types is striking.

The most frequently cited—and arguably most consequential—is relevance and interpretive stagnation.

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Walking Through Time Before You Even Enter: Lessons from Rancho Los Cerritos

A breakdown of the key elements in the timeline walkway at Rancho Los Cerritos in Long Beach.

A couple of weeks ago, Engaging Places spent two days at Rancho Los Cerritos in California as part of an interpretation and visitor experience assessment. Before I even reached the house, something caught my attention—and it’s stayed with me since.

Walking in from the parking lot, I encountered a pathway that integrates a timeline from past to present. It was developed as part of a stormwater and groundwater reclamation project designed by Studio One Eleven, but what struck me wasn’t just the infrastructure—it was the interpretive opportunity. The walkway quietly does something many historic sites struggle to achieve: it begins interpretation before the visitor even arrives.

I’ve long been interested in how entrance sequences can frame a visitor’s experience, and this is a particularly effective example. As you move along the path, you’re also moving through time. Each step becomes a kind of measurement—an embodied sense of duration and change. It’s intuitive, familiar, and requires almost no instruction. In a matter of moments, visitors gain a basic orientation to the site’s history and significance.

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Using AI on a 500-Year-Old Page Changes Where Curatorial Expertise Begins

Objects to be sold in an auction house include a box filled with framed prints.

I bought the box for $30.

It was a brown cardboard box at a local auction filled with framed prints and miscellaneous ephemera. The sort of lot you bid on partly out of curiosity and partly because, if you’re lucky, you might discover something interesting. I did—it was a framed page from a 500-year-old German book.

As a historian, I enjoy reading. But more than that, I love books as objects. Their design, typography, and material presence give me tremendous joy. I got the bug in college in a federal work-study position in the rare books and special collections department of the library, where I learned how much evidence a single page can hold: paper quality, typeface, layout, illustration style, and wear patterns can all reveal a story before you even understand the words.

This page immediately caught my attention.

The typeface was Gothic, clearly German, probably around 1500. But the illustrations were strange. Instead of familiar late-medieval imagery (saints, cities, plants, kings) one woodcut showed a man lying in bed while another pressed a knife to his neck. Another showed a dining table with people seated around a severed head on a platter. Huh?

It was unmistakably early printed material, but not religious, political, or medical.

In other words: a cool mystery.

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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

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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