Hva er en god museumsblogg?

Jeg vil gjerne at denne bloggen skal være en kilde til inspirasjon og kunnskap om museumsarbeid. Et skritt på veien mot det målet er å sette opp en liste over gode blogger og nettsider om temaet. For å finne ut om det er noen viktige museumsblogger jeg har oversett spurte jeg på twitter om tips til gode skandinaviske museumsblogger. Oslo Museum (@OsloMuseum) svarte at de har en nystartet blogg, og spurte: "Får vi spørre hva du vil se mer av? I din samling av blogger, hva skiller de gode/interessante fra de dårlige?"

Det hadde jeg ikke tenkt over, og må innrømme at jeg har plukket ut blogger ut i fra førsteinntrykket. Men, ubevisst har jeg nok en god idé om hva jeg synes er interessant og ikke, og jeg vil prøve å sette ord på det her.

Jeg vil begynne med å skille mellom blogger som handler om museer og det å drive et museum, og blogger som drives av museer og som er en del av museets formidling av sitt område (byhistorie, naturvitenskap, kunst osv.) Jeg har vært mest oppmerksom på blogger som handler om museer, og vil nok hovedsaklig linke til blogger som diskuterer museumsdrift og formidling. Blogger om museumsdrift kan også være skrevet av museet selv, slik tilfellet er med Oslo Museums nye blogg. De ønsker å invitere publikum med inn bak kulissene. Det samme gjør bymuseet i London i sin blogg "The working life of Museum of London". Museene henvender seg på denne måten både til fagfeller og besøkende. Jeg har ikke lest Museum of Londons blogg veldig nøye, men det ser ut som de har satset på en fortellende og informerende stil, med lange innlegg og få kommentarer.

Oslo Museum avslutter sitt første blogginnlegg med disse to avsnittene:

"Vi skal forsøke å komme bak fasadene på museet, være aktuelle, litt morsomme, ganske seriøse og om mulig litt personlige. Kanskje vi klarer å engasjere publikum på veien?

Oslo Museum har satt seg som mål om å bli Norges beste museum på sosiale medier. Bloggen innfrir nok ikke dette målet alene, men kan sammen med de andre sosiale mediene vi bruker, vise nye sider ved museet."

Spørsmålet om å engasjere publikum er avgjørende for om museets blogg skal bli en suksess, og her kommer vi inn på hva som gjør en museumsblogg, som alle andre blogger, god og inspirerende. En av de beste museumsbloggene jeg kjenner til er skrevet av Nina Simon og heter Museum 2.0. Den handler, vel å merke, om hvordan filosofien som ligger i web 2.0 kan tas i bruk i museumsdesign, og har kanskje derfor en fordel når det gjelder å lykkes i bloggmediet. Men det som gjør bloggen så god er at den er diskuterende, ikke informativ. Nesten alle innleggene diskuterer en problemstilling knyttet til museumsformidling, og Simon oppfordrer eksplisitt til kommentarer fra leserne. Samtidig knytter hun problemstillingene til helt konkrete, virkelige eksempler. På den måten blir det sammenheng mellom det fysiske museumsrommet og den virtuelle bloggen. Nå skal det sies at Simon er spesialist på hvordan man inndrar og aktiverer publikum i museumsutstillinger, og da er det kanskje ikke så rart at hun også er god til å aktivere bloggleserne sine.

Jeg tror at om Oslo Museum klarer å skrive en blogg som er diskuterende, aktuell og utadrettet så vil de helt klart holde på min interesse. Med utadrettet mener jeg at bloggen skaper en kontekst rundt innleggene sine ved å referere til, og linke videre til, relevante saker som er diskutert andre steder, til avisartikler, til andre museer osv. Ved å gjøre dette kan de skape seg en plass i den offentlige debatten, eller i museumsmiljøet, og ikke lage et lukket rom som bare handler om Oslo Museum.

Aftenposten anmelder museer

I sommer har Oslopuls (Aftenposten) testet Oslos museer. Sist ute er en anmeldelse av Teknisk museum. Anmeldelsene er strukturert av overskriftene Førsteinntrykk, Adkomst, pris og tilgjengelighet, Fasiliteter, Interaktivitet, Gavebutikk, Kafé, Lærte vi noe? og Museumssjekkens vurdering. For museene er det selvfølgelig veldig gledelig at de blir viet så mye oppmerksomhet av aftenposten, og anmeldelsene trekker nok fram det de fleste museumsbesøkende er oppatt av, men er det plass til grundigere anmeldelser av museumsutstillinger i aviser som aftenposten?

Ny start

Masteroppgaven er ferdig, og dermed er det tid for å gi bloggen et nytt liv, og mer liv. Det er ikke så lett å ha mange prosjekter på gang i en masteroppgaveinnspurt, bloggen ble derfor nedprioritert de siste månedene. Hvordan bloggen kommer til å utvikle seg er jeg ikke helt sikker på, men den kommer til å være fokusert på det skandinaviske museumsmiljøet. I første omgang har jeg fått lagt ut noen linker til blogger og andre nettsider som jeg mener man kan ha nytte av om man er interessert i museer, og flere vil komme.

Done

The thesis is done. It is written, printed and handed in.

It ended up as a study of the role of historical media texts (photographs, newspapers, film, drawings, sound recordings etc.) in cultural history exhibitions. My main research question was:

How do media texts from the past work in cultural history exhibitions when experience is em­phasized, when media are used not only to present contextual information about museum objects, and digital tech­nology provides novel possibilities for display?

To focus the study, four questions of particular interest were fore­grounded:

- How do media texts from the past work in relation to media texts about the past in the exhibition?

- How can we understand media texts from the past in relation to the museum object?

- How do media texts from the past work in relation to the special spa­tial charac­ter of the exhibition?

- How do media texts from the past contribute to the creation of histo­ricity in the exhibition?

I analysed six media installations from the Museum of London and six media installations from the Churchill Museum in London.

One of my conclutions is that media texts are used as copies of a situation or event, and not presented as objects with a history of their own. Information about why the media text was produced and how it was used is not available in the exhibition, and is not used to create meaning in the exhibition. One of my main arguments is therefore that media texts are used as "reality effects", rather than treated like historical remains.

If you want to read the thesis, e-mail me at hegebhuseby@gmail.com.

Two interesting research projects

This week I came across two research projects that are touching upon the same questions that I am currently working with.

Two days ago I was so lucky that I was able to attend a talk by Ross Parry at the Department of Education here in Oxford. Parry is the program director for Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and he has digital heritage as his main research field. Wednesday he talked about his new project called “Museums and make-believe. Reclaiming the illusory within heritage.” This project will continue his previous work about the relation between the museum and the computer. Museums have been quite sceptical about computers and digital media, and Parry argues that this is because computers seem to do the complete opposite of what museums do. Museums rely on the original, the authentic and the empirical evidence, while digital media and the internet often are associated with the copy, the manipulated and the fictional. Parry’s argument is that the features of the computer also have been important aspects of museum practice through the history. The authenticity museums rely on is not only created by facts. Imitation, immersion, illustration and irony has been as important argues Parry. This relation between factual historicity and imitation is something I am discussing in my thesis, but specificly related to the use of media texts. Media texts are both used as illustrative, immersive elements, but also as historical evidences and traces from the past (as objects are), and I see it as one of the museum's challenges to be able to balance the two. Maybe will Parry's study provide some helpful reflections on how museums historically and today are balancing between the factual and the illusionary.

The second project I was made aware of by a tweet from @formidlingsnet. Christian Hviid Mortensen has announced the start-up of his PhD project Radio as immaterial heritage in a museological context. You can read about it here, on formidlingsnet.dk, or on his newly started blog. One of his main focuses will be how to “display” radio recordings as objects in cultural history museums, because sound usually ends up as an aesthetic effect. This question is really close to what I am dealing with, and I look forward to follow his study. Media texts are getting more and more important for museums, both as sources and exhibition elements. Knowledge about how media texts produced outside the museum, should be treated in an exhibition is therefore very welcome.

Historical truthfulness and media installations in exhibitions

"It is absurd and illusory to imagine that we can view the past from any vantage point but the present, or to pretend that we can project ourselves back to the minds and bodies of participants in past events. All we can do is endeavour to be honest about our position in the present, and about the way our vision of the past relates to our vision for the future." Tessa Morris-Suzuki - Towards a Political Economy of Historical Truthfulness.

Morris-Suzuki writes beautifully about representations of the past in photographs, film, cartoons, textbooks and museums, and why they are important for our understanding of history, and why we should strive for historical truthfulness instead for historical truth.

"Historical truthfulness refers to the way we conduct our relationship with the past. It begins with attentiveness to the presence of the past: the recognition that we ourselves are shaped by the past, and that knowing the past therefore is essential to knowing ourselves and others, and indeed to knowing what it is to be human. (...) Historical truthfulness is an ongoing conversation through which, by engaging with the views of others in different social and spatial locations (across and within national boundaries) we shape and reshape our understanding of the past." Tessa Morris-Suzuki - Towards a Political Economy of Historical Truthfulness.

From the World War II installation at the Museum of London

Museums have a long history of being structured after strong linear narratives, with little room for contradicting worldviews. This way of displaying history, and museums tendency to mis- and underrepresentation of minorities, have the last three decades been strongly criticized. Historical truthfulness is therefore taken seriously by museums today, to make the museum a space for different versions of the past, and a space for discussions about the past. However, Morris-Suzuki also emphaize, that to use media texts like photographs, film, cartoons etc to build up our understanding of the past, we need to be aware of how media texts are used, reused, edited and recontextualized. Media texts, which already have had a life outside the museum, are more and more common in exhibitions. Both as museum objects, photographs are for example displayed beside an old dress in a vitrine, and as part of media installations. A media installation can for example be a touch screen where you can look at digitized photographs, drawings or documents, or a combination of film and sound recordings that have not been combined outside the museum.

From my analyses of media installations at the Churchill Museum and the Museum of London, I have noticed that these two museums do not reveal much information about where the digitized media texts (photographs, film and sound recordings, documents etc.) come from, or in which context they originally were used. The media texts that are displayed as objects in vitrines tend all to have labels. (This was especially apparent in Museum of London.) This shows that there is a different understanding of the role of media texts when they are displayed as objects and when they are part of an installation. The problem, as I see it, is that the installations often include fictional elements, it is therefore difficult to see which parts of the installation are created for the exhibition, and which did actually exist at the time the installation is trying to tell something about. Another problem is that media text are not neutral descriptions of the past, and it is both important, and just interesting, to know who made them, why they were made and how they were used.

Touch-screen installation at the Churchill Museum with photographs and other documents. Information about what the photographs show is given

An installation that is a combination of extracts of digitized old newspapers projected on a wall above a copy of a painting. There is no information about neither the newspapers or the painting.

The quotes from Tessa Morris-Suzuki are from the text you can find here, a speech based on her book The Past Within Us (2005).

Examining media installations in history museums

An installation at the Churchill Museum. Among the photographs is a frame showing a film, but it is presented as a photograph in a frame. One medium (film) is presented as another (analogue photograph) in a third (a digital screen).

I'm halfway with my thesis now, and my focus has changed a little since I started. From the very general question: how do media work in museum exhibitions? I have now narrowed it down to: how do media work as an effect in exhibitions at history museums? I have chosen to focus on history museums because of two reasons that affect their relation to media. One is the simple fact that history museums focus on history. The other is that history museums often are more focused on telling stories than displaying a certain collection of objects. The reason I find these two aspects of history museums interesting is the role media plays in relation to them. To "recreate" the past is a main task for the history museum. This is why this kind of museum is interesting when examining the ways media now have got new roles in the exhibition. Media play an important role in our understanding of history. Not only do we learn about history from different kinds of media, media are also historical objects in their own. In addition, media play a crucial role in telling stories in museum exhibitions. Media, this can be text, photographs, film etc., are used to tell the parts of the story that the objects cannot.

An exhibition can be a total mix of different qualified media, different technical media, media from different context, original media, reconstructions and new productions. This makes it impossible to say anything general about the relation of media in exhibitions to history. I will therefore argue that it can be fruitful, as an extension of Elleström's media model, to ask: where in the medium do we find the historicity? As I see it, the historicity of the medium exists on different levels, and the levels can be connected to different historical times, in different ways. The levels are the technological medium, the qualified medium/ the media genre, and the content/the representation. The easiest is when the technical medium, the qualified medium and the representation were all made at the same time and are representing the present time. This could for example be a daguerreotype taken in the 1860 of a woman in contemporary clothes, or it could be a movie from the 80s about the 80s, showed on a TV from the 80s. Then we can also meet media objects where the representation and the qualified media are old, while the technological medium is new. This could for example be a digitized magazine from 1950. We can also represent the past, even though the representation was not made in the past. We can dress up a woman in clothes from 1870, and make a film to illustrate women's dressing from that time period. Here the only relation to the past is the representation of the past. Another variation, which might not be that common in history museums, is when the media technology is old, but the representations and the aesthetics are new. Examples of that could be music from today on a gramophone, and film from 2010 on 8 mm black and white film. This is a questionable example, because when is a medium old? Is it old when it is not the medium used by the majority? Another version of this is when the qualified medium is the only layer connected to the past, but here we again has to ask, when is a qualified medium old? A suggestion for an example of this could be a book on a computer.

This is a touch screen from The Churchill museum showing a box with a bill for a puchase of some pigs. The bill is a scanned in original, the same is the photograph visible under the bill. Here the technological medium is new, while the representation is the important link to history. But the way the bill is presented is made to give us a feeling of older media, a box, paper, photography.

When doing the analyses of the new galleries at Museum of London, and the Churchill Museum, I will therefore ask: first, which time period do this installation say something about? Second, on which level in the installation is the connection to this period? Third, how is this connection made?