Core 5 - Interpretation and (re)Presentation

Citizen Curators - Core Five

Interpretaton and (Re)Presentation

I missed this session but have read through the notes and feel there are a few takeaways for me as someone who is regularly involved in communication, interpretation and (re)presentation.

Whenever I visit a Museum the quality of the story around an item is crucial. You can see this in action in my previous post about the lifeboat painting in Falmouth Art Gallery.

I have also visited the Archeaological Museum in Crete, mentioned in Tony Jones's post for Aim about storytelling, and felt similarly impressed by the objects, but left cold by the lack of information around them. We had visited the ancient site of Knossos before and even making links between the two was impossible.

Even the exhibits in Crete's Archaelogical Museum seem astonished at the lack of storytelling

For my masters in Professional Writing my professional observation was about Museum Panels and how they are used to interpret items and spaces: so this is familiar territory for me. I have worked on creating stories for the National Trust which interpret rooms via the voices of their previous inhabitants, adding richness and meaning to the visitor experience.

For myself, I would like to draw out the following list as a reminder of possible different ways to interpret:

• Personalise
• Punditing
• Poetry
• Playful
• Musical
• Humour

I'd also like to draw out the statement that we must not treat our visitors like experts and more must we treat them like idiots. As a journalist and writer, I must often draw information from experts and re-interpret it for the general public and I hope these skills might be off use to my host museum in the future.