Category Archives: Authority

Dialogic learning in museum space

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Ten years ago, some museums began to articulate their mission in terms of a dialogue with communities. In practice, that dialogue occurred mostly in the context of education and public programs; exhibitions tended to maintain a detached, authoritative voice.

As a significant site of informal and social learning, how can museum exhibitions also be dialogic?

poster for the exhibition 'Captive lives: Looking for Tambo and his companions'

This question was central to my PhD research, and I’m revisiting it since an article I wrote in 2001 was recently republished in Ethos, the journal of the Social Education Victoria. In it, I explore the possibility of self-reflexive museum exhibitions – approaches and techniques by which curators and designers can engage visitors in history but also in its making. Specifically, I describe a model exhibition (‘Captive lives: Looking for Tambo and his companions’), and offer suggestions for how the Australian War Memorial could engage visitors more actively in the process of making that site meaningful.

Since it is now much more common for museums to deploy technologies for co-creation, or indeed, to use high- or low-tech means to be participatory – in the parlance popularised by Nina Simon, I am surprised that this article remains so relevant. Is it that exhibition curators and designers – those at the heart of museum representational practice – yet resist the dialogic tum?

If you fancy a slightly longer-than-bloggable read, here’s the a scan of the printed article (PDF 2mb).

Stone head at the Australian War Memorial

Stone head at the Australian War Memorial

Sembl praxis: identify sameness, explore difference

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As part of his ‘Mining the museum’ installation at Maryland Historical Society in 1992–93, artist Fred Wilson placed a set of shackles in a display case with fine silverware and titled it Metalwork. Pow. United by the metal of their fabrication, the racially-divided, hierarchical histories of these objects dramatically distances them:

Who served the silver? And who could have made the silver objects in apprenticeship situations? And [...] whose labour could produce the wealth that produced the silver?

A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.

This simultaneous pulling together and springing apart of the sociophysical world interests me, and I’ve been thinking about it in relation to Sembl, where the challenge of the game is to identify a way in which a given object is related – surprisingly or humorously or otherwise interestingly – to another object.

What constitutes ‘interesting’ is of course difficult to define and depends to a large degree on the particular players playing. But if the natural conceptual distance between the two related objects is great, the relationship is more likely to be interesting – perhaps because it enables you to think about something in a new way. That’s what made Wilson’s juxtaposition of shackles with silver tableware interesting, and powerful.

Composite image of a branding iron and a breastplate given to an Aboriginal man

In the same vein, the Sembl players who linked the above branding iron to the breastplate – because both are tools for labeling bodies – cast new light on the colonial practice of giving metal breastplates to Aboriginal people.

My (big!) point here is: Hipbone games and Sembl alike can create a safe space for people to explore differences. When identified, similarities form bridges across and clarify difference. Attending to relatedness in this way inspires understanding; and opens a channel toward reconciliation.

Museum experience and participatory design

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This is a paper I wrote for my digital design course.

Is it possible for museums to think about their space, or at least their digital space, in a whole-of-experience kind of way? It seems both uncommon and important. So that’s what I tried to do in this paper about digital museum experience design (PDF ~200kb). I’m especially interested in participatory design – where both the process and the resulting ‘opportunity space’ are participatory.

As is my wont, I drew a diagram for the essay. It illustrates the shift from presenting users with a finished product, to designing with their participation. It can be beneficial to involve museum visitors at every stage of the design process and indeed, beyond, as visitors can valuably contribute to meaning-making through their interactions in museum space.

My take on the GLAM-wiki recommendations

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Following on from my last post wondering about the lack of public comment to date, here’s my take on the recommendations. Obviously, as well as being really long, this post is selective and partial – many items seem to me to be straightforward and correct, so I have not commented; others are better discussed by experts in that area. Some of my comments might indicate my ignorance on some issues; I’m happy to be corrected. We all have our ignorances – as I think is evident in some of the requests themselves. So it’s good to have the conversation, and to keep the momentum going.

A key point in the recommendations – and my response to them – is that the cultural sector needs to be educated in the ways of Wikimedia. This venture is just beginning!

1.1 Law requests to GLAM

The idea of proactively publishing the copyright status on each collection item’s description page makes perfect sense, but it is unlikely to be simple to implement. It might (or might not!) be straightforward to adjust the collection database to accommodate a new publicly-visible field, but populating that field for every item would take a lot of human resources, and in the case of government archives, often a single item (a paper file) might require various copyright statuses.

Of course people should be free to use public domain work! Do some cultural institutions really have an actual policy that requires users to ask permission to use public domain content? And do others really place ‘copyright-like restrictions’ on public domain content? Is that even legal? I can understand the Wikimedian view that it might be better to have no online access to public domain content if a donor agreement has prohibited third-party use – it is cause for frustration and potential conflict to have it there.

I’m all for using creative commons licensing where the work is wholly owned and controlled by the institution and/or free for educational use. As someone who has been responsible for responding to requests to reuse published material, I can attest that it is often very time-consuming to craft a response to a request that could be handled by an up-front license with a clear attribution statement. But I also know that this would be a significant change for cultural institutions and that without a ministerial directive, it won’t happen across the sector any time soon.

1.2 Law requests to Wikimedia

On the request to publish donor information as part of the attribution statement, isn’t it up to the license-creator to specify how the attribution should be made?

GLAM sector workers’ access to resources about Wikimedia and the free culture movement seems critical to the success of the collaborative venture. (Note, this request seems to belong more in the Education area?) Some elements that could usefully be incorporated into a toolkit, training package or FAQ are:

  • customised training in adding content to Wikimedia and creating and editing Wikipedia pages
  • a list of benefits of creative commons licensing over other forms of copyright control
  • an explanation of how non-commercial licensing is fraught, and the benefits – including business-wise – of allowing unrestricted use
  • strategy and tactics for negotiating with donors to achieve the best outcome for public access
  • demonstration of successful partnership projects eg German Federal Archives

2.1 Technology requests to GLAM

On the request to publish stable and clean URLs for collection items:

  • this is a really important request – anyone who uses collection material needs to be able to cite and link back to the original sources
  • the fact that this is a request by Wikimedians to the GLAM sector suggests to me that the GLAM sector didn’t really need to request that Wikimedians ‘take proactive care of the moral rights of content creators’
  • this is another recommendation that, for some cultural institutions, could be tricky to implement in the short term – which is not to diminish its status as a high priority request. One workaround for collection databases that don’t generate usable URLs (let alone pURLs) is to create a Zotero translator and publicise that as a way to generate links back to the item. And it may be that the solution to this problem emerges from an agreed standard for cultural collections, which in turn enables a more semantic identification of collections and items within them.

The idea of providing the general public with read-write access to a metadata repository is sensible. It would generate great community engagement, and it would enable bulk development of rich metadata, which could dramatically improve findability of the material and also enhance its meaning – I wrote a paper about that. But such a prospect would also be fairly freaky for many cultural workers, who tend to be concerned that it would jeopardise the integrity or authority of the collection. Such concerns are not difficult to overcome, and indeed successful models are now proliferating (think Powerhouse collection, Australian Newspapers project).

2.2 Technology requests to Wikimedia

Rather than (or as well as) creating ‘easy and extensible templates for citing institutional sources and data’, perhaps Wikimedia could help institutions to make their own template?

3.1 Education requests to GLAM

How good is the Wikimedian offer to do volunteer work on commission from cultural institutions? Are cultural workers thinking about this, even in a back-of-mind way? They should be!

Personally, I think it’s a good idea for on-staff experts to set up an account on Wikimedia so they can be consulted on specific topic areas. If I was an on-staff expert on a particular topic, I would do so. But I wonder how well-received this idea will be – would ‘Expert advisor to Wikimedia’ look good on your CV? Unless you are a high-level academic, in which case it would make you groovy, I suspect not.

3.2 Education requests to Wikimedia

To me, the idea that Wikimedians should highlight the importance of real-world interaction with cultural heritage is weird. Of course a digital copy of something will always lack something that the original, physical item has. But why should it be Wikimedians’ role to remind people of that? Should gallery hosts inform people of the advantages of an online digital copy? (Eg, access from anywhere, any time, sometimes in greater detail and with better light than you can see the real thing; access to items that are otherwise in storage and/or inaccessible in the real world.) This seems a prescriptive, condescending recommendation. Surely each cultural interface can speak for itself. The only way in which this requests makes good sense to me is if it is tied to the request to Wikimedia to improve consistency and comprehensive use of metadata (including physical location of the item). Provenance and context are absolutely critical to understanding cultural heritage. Note that Liam made a similar point in his Wikimania presentation in August.

‘Affirm the compatibility of interpretive debate within encyclopedic neutrality’ – cultural workers who feel this request is a necessary inclusion should read the Wikipedia policy on neutral point of view. My feeling is that the request is already well-met, and seems to work in practice. For example, the long and well-referenced page on evolution includes a paragraph about creationism, which in turn links to a page on creationism that includes sections on Christian and scientific critiques.

Don’t the requests to enable ‘expert contributions’ and external peer review clash with the spirit and process of Wikipedia?

Another request that seems unnecessary is to improve the visibility of the quality assessments of content. Here is a sample page that cites no sources:

Part of a Wikipedia page that cites no sources

To my mind, the orange bar and position at the beginning of the body content makes the message very prominent and clear.

4.1 Business requests to GLAM

These requests all seem reasonable and important and in the case of the request to make images of damaged items available for Wikimedians to digitally restore, generous.

4.2 Business requests to Wikimedia

These requests also seem reasonable, although many of the requests for information about business models could simply constitute items for the training package.

The final request, to generate positive media attention around collaboration projects, would seem to apply equally – or more – to the GLAM sector, which has more resources and a higher, more authoritative media profile than the wiki community.

Cultural lessons from the crowd in the cloud

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In the last couple of weeks I’ve encountered some great insight into and evidence of the potential effect of large public networks on the work of making cultural assets accessible. It has come from two separate sources – Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but also the first ever public conversation between Wikimedia and the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).

I haven’t finished the book yet, so my focus here is on what the GLAM sector might take away from the conference (although no doubt the book is infiltrating my thinking.) The following points are not neatly sewn-up instructional lessons, and of course, people will disagree, but I believe the following are important considerations for those of us working to make cultural assets accessible online.

1. A completely different process of authorisation

I heard a lot of talk about how Wikipedia lacks authority and I heard a lot of what seemed like fear that its perceived dodginess would infect cultural institutions and jeopardise their authority. Well, for me, an almost opposite view is far more compelling.

Cultural institutions hold in their collections assets that have authority because they are original sources. No question; nothing will jeopardise that. And academic research accrues authority through the process of peer review, or by being written by someone who has accrued authority in the course of their professional career.

Wikipedia has an entirely different relationship with authority. Its articles are by definition, necessarily and absolutely not original research. And yes, Wikipedia editing is amateur. But the amazing thing is that Wikipedia articles can achieve a form of authority by virtue of the fact that the community of editors (which includes anyone who wants to be in it) finds a neutral, consensus position, and the article settles into relatively stable content. That stability is a genuine, honourable form of authority. It is not invested through credentials but emerges – and continues to emerge – out of open dialogue. And because Wikipedia gives voice to the community rather than to an individual or institution, in my view, Wikipedian authority is of great value.

I’m not suggesting that Wikipedia is the only source we need. On the contrary, it is vital to check the original sources, to seek out other sources (including primary sources!), to read critically and to adopt your own position. But Wikipedia is an excellent starting point. How many of us would deny that we regularly use it?! And the fact that verifiability it cites and refers readers to reliable sources positions it very well as a potential partner for cultural institutions.

2. A horde of willing and able enthusiasts

The arresting image below resides in the German Federal Archive but now – along with almost 100,000 others – it also resides in the Wikimedia Commons.

A photograph from the German National Archives via Wikimedia, June 1942 – Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-N0619-506

Jewish women with yellow star, Paris, June 1942 – from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia – Deutsches Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F000136-0009

It’s there because Mathias Schindler negotiated a deal with the Bundesarchiv, by which the archive would release 100,000 images into the public domain, and in return, Wikipedians would help by describing the photographs and matching person data (authority files – the A-word again!) in three places – German Wikipedia, National Archive and National Library.

As an employee of a federal archive, I am acutely conscious of the scale of the work involved in description and digitisation – core tasks usually prerequisite to making cultural assets accessible. Anything with the potential to distribute this load must be worth exploring. That way, more culture can be shared more widely which is, of course, the point.

The experience of the National Library of Australia in soliciting bulk text enhancement – via its wonderful Australian Newspapers project – provides further evidence that the public can be relied upon to do a mammoth amount of good work in enhancing OCR’d microfilm.

3. More accessible doesn’t seem to mean less profitable

And importantly, evidence is amassing at the Powerhouse Museum that increasing the accessible reach of your photographs, through the Flickr Commons, has a massive impact on how many people see and tag your images, but very little effect on image sales.

So…

In short, unlike Angelina, I came away from GLAM-wiki feeling fairly enthusiastic – like Gerard – about the possibilities for partnership.

Innovative ideas

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A few comments on Friday’s Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia…

A bit of faith in humanity goes a long way

From my POV, the most interesting aspect of the forum was that one key theme was so not-new – trust in and respect for the public / consumers / audiences / users – whatever we want to call them. Four of the presenters suggested in some way that trust as an essential element of contemporary cultural work – Marcus Gillezeau, Mark Scott, Rose Holley and Darren Sharp. This is an absolutely critical point. But it has been said many a time before, especially in relation to the library sector. It was the issue that was most discussed in 2006 when I posted a paper about Web 2.0. And it’s all over the web now – just try googling ‘radical trust’.

As government-funded cultural workers – as people in positions of cultural authority – we need to lay aside our fears, withhold our judgement, and actively resist our will-to-control – and trust and respect our audiences, radically and fundamentally. If we assume the best of people, and build systems based on radical trust (which can include transparency features and safeguards such as version tracking and rollback functions), then it’s possible to get the brilliant results that the Library is getting through its Newspapers Digitisation Program – thousands of people correcting millions of words, because they want to help. As Rose Holley reported, people are motivated by the trust and respect the Library is showing them.

The opposite is also true, and I bet we all have this experience: lack of trust is a powerful demotivator.

But clearly, hearing the words and seeing the success stories is not sufficient to engender the cultural shift we need in order to build trust-based systems. Every single time I hear (or talk) about a project involving user-generated content, someone invariably asks the question about the vandals.

Well, yes it happens that some people do dodgy things, by accident and by design. But it’s better to build a system that enables public participation for public benefit than to preclude that participation and benefit on the assumption of ill-will. Only then can we allow and benefit from user-led innovation  – thanks to Darren Sharp for bringing this notion to the forum (and hear, hear to the recently-released Venturous Australia report, which pointed out that governments have been pretty good at fostering top-down innovation but fare badly when it comes to innovating from the bottom up).

Talking the talk but baulking at the walk

Despite lugging my huuuuge Mac laptop with the idea of swimming along in the tweetstream while I listened… I was one of the who-knows-how-many who couldn’t connect, even after more IP addresses were made available. Well – I did manage it at 4.45pm from the foyer, after everyone had gone home :-(

So as someone willing but unable to participate in that way, I was disappointed that the social media channels that had been set up for the event were not integrated in any way into the forum itself – rather, there was an unfortunate (and ironic, given the subject) disconnect between the presenters and the audience.

Perhaps the next forum could be a more radical experiment in the form of the forum – perhaps we could collaborate to create some innovative ideas.

A phenomenon that passed me by…

I admit I had never once heard a jot about Scorched, the ambitious and fascinating all-media creation of Marcus Gillezeau and co. I’m not a watcher of commercial tv, so no surprise there. But I’m a user of social media, and did not hear about it that way either. Would have been interesting to see a show of hands as to how many people at the forum had heard of the project, watched the telemovie, participated in the community. Lots about it is interesting and worthy of further discussion – in particular, the relationships between fact / fiction, and commercial / non-commercial culture. And what happens to the community now that there’s no more funding?

Reading the textbook is not enough

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Here’s an idea I like:

Students should not read textbooks; they should write them.

Bruce Tognazzini said it in the 1990s, and David Weinberger considers it in a story in The Filter, published by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Weinberger was initially ambivalent, but since the advent of wikis he has warmed to the notion. He describes how the collective, collaborative – and no doubt contentious – act of crafting a coherent, accurate wiki on the subject of study is itself educational:

Let them argue about how to organize it. Keep the discussion pages up. Keep the differences visible. Let them fill it with links. Let them connect with other students in other schools creating related wikis.

A class’s wiki is not going to be as complete, well-grounded or well-written as a good textbook. But students will learn more by writing one than by cribbing and cramming from a professional textbook.

In my (by now, predictable) view, the same principle applies to museum exhibitions and websites. If you’re only ever engaged in a passive way, as a consumer, it’s hard to remain interested. But if you have the chance to think through the issues of what to put on display, how to arrange and describe the items, and what they mean, it’s a faaaar more interesting experience. A journey, rather than a sushi train of neatly prepackaged ideas. At 5 to midnight, my metaphors are failing me, but I hope you know what I mean.

I’d like to see more programs that work on that principle. I’d love to hear about yours.

(Thanks to Mal for the pointer.)

What makes a good leader?

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A couple of months ago I heard Allen Behm, a political and risk analyst from Knowledge Pond talking about leadership. Apart from a bunch of engaging stories about good and bad leaders he has known, the take-home message was that effective leadership requires three practices:

  • maintain your integrity – be a decent human
  • be comfortable in your own skin – recognise your strengths and your limitations
  • welcome dissent – foster a culture of contestability

It’s simple, really. Which is not to say it’s easy.

A good exhibition is…

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What constitutes a good exhibition? Last week I attended a seminar on this topic presented by Stephen Foster, an adjunct professor at the Australian National University, and former general manager with responsibility for content at the National Museum of Australia.

It’s a deceptively simple question. To answer it, you can draw on exhibition development guidelines, or you can think about the kinds of things people say in reviews, to come up with a list of criteria for evaluation. It seems a valuable exercise, and long overdue.

What I found interesting about the criteria tabled at this event was that, although some of them were about visitors’ experience, there was no mention of what those Assembling here might consider central to the mission of museum exhibitions – educational value. I’m not thinking here about how well an exhibition lends itself to having a non-formal education program built around it. I mean that an exhibition is itself a program for informal learning.

In that sense, a good exhibition is one that constitutes a good learning program. And for me, whether an exhibition/program is satisfying or deadly dull often depends on whether it involves its audience in the process of meaning-making – rather than simply presenting one thing after another, after another. To rate well in my book, an exhibition needs to generate a dialogue with its visitors. How it does that depends on the:

  • content of the exhibition
  • creativity and nous of the exhibition developers

But for me, an exhibition should have some kind of in-built audience participation. So that’d be my two-cent answer to the question. (To keen readers seeking a higher-cost rumination on this theme, I offer my doctoral thesis.)

One thing to clearly emerge from the seminar is the need to cultivate a culture of critique around museum exhibitions, comparable to – if distinct from – that around fine art, books, and film. The current paucity of critique contributes to the uncertainty over what constitutes a good exhibition.

In that light, here’s an idea: perhaps we should take inspiration from art mobs. Perhaps Collections Australia Network should offer to publish unofficial audio guides to Australian exhibitions. I’d like to see that. And my hunch is that an unofficial guide would add value to an exhibition or, in other words, help constitute its goodness.

History Summit in cloud-cuckoo land

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Over the weekend, I read the transcript of the Australian History Summit that Education Minister Julie Bishop convened after Prime Minister John Howard criticised school history as ‘fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’. The summit agenda was to revive the narrative approach to teaching history, and to agree on the main currents and big themes in Australia’s national story.

For me, whether a historical narrative is necessary – and even what gets into the narrative – is less critical than the issue of historical enquiry. If students are encouraged (as they have been since the enquiry-driven approach of the latest curriculum), to come to their own conclusions by researching, reading and evaluating a range of sources, then it matters far less what picture their teacher paints about the past. The narrative is a starting point. But the work of history students happens after that, as students examine the evidence and begin to form their own narrative.

Interestingly, some participants looked down their noses at the ‘Wikipedia generation’ of students, as if Wikipedia is not a great place to go for an introduction to most historical events or topics – check out the History of Australia page. If history students are seeing that as the be all and end all of their research, then that’s clearly a problem: whatever narrative they produce, it will not be informed by research or analysis. But the principle of starting with a coherent narrative overview is fine. (Hang on, wasn’t that the point of the whole summit?) So why be so condescending toward students?

Anyway, so I was keen to find out how the summit dealt with the issue of historical enquiry. Was the discussion of narrative content framed by recognition that students need to develop skills, and use primary sources?

Despite many mentions of historical skills, and clear recognition of the need for rich teaching resources, there was only one mention of primary sources. In the last session of the day – ten pages after afternoon tea – Inga Clendinnen said:

I want to be sure we have moved well away from the notion of learning history to doing history. We need analysis of some primary material, because you learn from doing history, not by being taught it. It is a critical discipline.

If I had been invited to the summit, I reckon I’d have uttered a hearty cheer at that point. Maybe that just confirms my position outside the ‘sensible centre’. The point is, she was immediately chastened by Gregory Melleuish:

I think what Inga said is fine if you are training a postgraduate historian who will become a professional historian. But when I look at my daughter and her friends, quite frankly, that is up in cloud-cuckoo land.

Well, if Inga is in cloud-cuckoo land, I’m right there with her. And so is Jenny Gregory, who pointed out (Inga Clendinnen persisted for a while but Gregory Melleuish was adamant):

it is very easy to present students with a set of documents about a particular event which gives different viewpoints and then give them the opportunity to analyse, to look at the evidence and come to a conclusion.

Indeed.

I could go on here. I could list a bunch of links to primary sources on the web. Or I could speculate on whether the lobbying by the museums sector and the Australian Society of Archivists (to which Geoffrey Bolton referred) had any effect. But I’d rather hear some other views. Comment, anyone?