How can museums resource this: recording and sharing visitors’ interpretations and stories about its artefacts?
One of the challenges around publishing personal stories made by lots of people is keeping on top of the ethical issues around the right to portray others in public. This will be especially true of teachers and also of public organisations like museums, libraries and educational courses. Recording, tracking and demonstrating that there’s proof that individuals are happy for you to show their work is one thing; getting second signoff by a parent/guardian in the case of stories by children, young people and vulnerable people is quite another. From my experience in BBC production, it’s the showing of individuals’ faces that brings on the paperwork.
As pondered on this, I came up with an idea that’s aimed at museums that would like to encourage visitors to tell their own personal stories about its artefacts. A story form which is captured in a kiosk where the artefact is shown but the face of the storyteller isn’t necessarily shown frees up the museum to:
1. open the activity up to many more people, including people who are more shy to show their faces
2. worry less about consents.
The story needs to be expertly facilitated, but technical resources can be reduced by setting up an automatic capture kiosk. Here’s how it works:
1. the visitor chooses an artefact that means something to them
2. they sign their name on a sheet below the video camera’s len, then pick up and hold the artefact whilst telling their story. They carry the object ‘out of frame’ at the end of their story, leaving just their signature in shot.
The end-product is a one-minute video clip which the museum shows alongside the artefact and which is burned onto a DVD for the visitor to take away.
Here’s a rough-and-ready proof of concept so you can see what I mean:
I hope you find this model useful; please feel free to add comments.
Written and first published by Gareth Morlais on 2 June 2009. Sorry the video’s no longer available. The hosting site changed its terms of use so I took it down and haven’t published it elsewhere. Let me know if you’d like a copy.