Over the course of my forty-year career (yikes!) I have made a long shift from natural history to cultural history interpretation. The transition has been… interesting. See, when you interpret birds or rocks or stars, you generally don’t argue for those things’ moral goodness or purity. Yes, you might defend their place within their ecosystem …
As an interpretive writer doing a lot of cultural interpretation lately, I find I am writing a lot about language. Indigenous languages, to be specific. I am working with Indigenous clients and partners to help communicate how language is fundamental to understanding culture, landscape, and life… and how so many Indigenous languages around the world …
Latin names have no place in popular writing and programming. Once upon a time I was a bit of a tedious pedant. Hard to believe, I know, but I have vivid memories of tossing around Latin names to impress my audiences. I was young and insecure, trying to do my best with a serious case …
I do a lot of planning workshops, including a lot of small-group work with front-line staff and their immediate supervisors. I love the energy and creativity that flows from these groups. But one of my reservations in working with front line people is the risk of giving my participants high hopes and dreams for real …
As a visitor experience advisor, I find that a lot of my work revolves around helping parks, historic sites, and museums do a better job of communicating who they are in an inspiring way. Naturally, as a life-long interpreter, I am a huge believer in the content-based approach. I’m not alone in this; content marketing …
About twenty years ago, Dr. John Falk and Dr. Lynn Dierking did a body of research on why people visit museums and other informal learning institutions. It’s fascinating and valuable stuff, and if you get a chance to read their work, you really should. They discovered that, broadly speaking, people have a handful of different …
Read more “Understanding Audiences: The Downside of “Falk Types””
A theory of change is a roadmap to the future that you want to see. It is plausible, feasible, and testable. And it stands between you and magical thinking.
As a visitor experience advisor, I’m a fairly big fan of using email to build relationships with your members and prospective visitors. And I’m not alone; generally, direct email is known to bring a higher return on investment than social media, and we manage to spend hours and hours every week trying to come up …
What happens when you have more ideas than you can handle? I just completed a really productive ideation (brainstorming) session with a client. It’s for a new major exhibit we’re planning. It was a ton of fun—we opened the workshop with a presentation of all the different kinds of interpretive media that could possibly go …
Virtually all arguments against repatriating Indigenous objects are rooted in white supremacy. Hey reader, did you ever have your bike stolen? I have more than once, and while I have never been successful in getting my bike back (thousands of them are stolen weekly in most cities, apparently), I’d like to take you through a …
