Is Good Enough?

We often hear the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but this is exactly what we do (if we didn't, we wouldn't need a saying to remind us not to). And though it is great to open a book and take a look inside, if we did this for every book in the library we’d never get our essays written.

This week, there was no cover to judge as I read a couple of blog posts by Dan Cohen. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values” talked about how open access is important for scholarly discourse but, despite the ease of publishing openly, scholars often still prefer to publish in well-read and well-regarded journals. This is natural; they (we) seek recognition.

However, it becomes contradictory when said journal does not allow open, online access to its content. In this instance, the author is actually damning himself to obscurity. The published article may reach a number of scholars, but it will not be widely available or easy to find.

One point Dan Cohen made struck home with me. He says that “Writing is writing and good is good.” I agree entirely. Quality is intrinsic and cannot be bought. However, our ability to recognize quality is often hindered.

This reminded me of an experiment conducted by the Washington Post in 2007 (find “Pearls Before Breakfast” here). You should watch the video before you read on.


If you watched all the way to the end, you noticed the one woman standing and watching the violinist. She alone recognized Joshua Bell, one of the most acclaimed violinists in the world. Bell is used to playing to packed houses at respectable venues all over the world, but for this experiment, he played in a Washington subway station to about 1,000 commuters on their way to work. The goal of the experiment was to see if people would recognize the beauty of the music and stop to listen or to tip. Few did. They were all too caught up in their commute to spare the time and effort for music.[1]

This experiment demonstrates that although something might be the best in the world, we might not recognize it as such because we are lazy creatures. We have many demands on our time and attention and we often do not open our minds to content that requires too much thought. Unfortunate but true.

If we want to appeal to a wider audience, we have to make the package attractive. For scholars, it is important to publish in a recognized journal but there is no reason not to publish in one with an online version. If you only blog your research, it is less likely to get you recognition because it has not gone through the vetting process of peer-reviewed publishing. This important step gives legitimacy to an author’s work and tells the reader that the contents are worth a look. Dan Cohen examines this idea in his post “The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing.”

To summarize thus far, the content is very important but the package is what will draw people in to take a look. We can apply this concept to museums.

The museum itself lends legitimacy and authority to its content, but if that content is not presented in an appealing way, it will not resonate as deeply, or at all, with the audience. I raise this concern because I have seen many exhibits, online and offline, that present artifacts and history in a bland, unengaging, or amateurish way. If we want people to come visit our museums and heritage sites, we have to hook them with interesting and varied activities, engaging exhibits and tours, and good promotional material.

Dinosaur Exhibit at the ROM

Here is a picture of the dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto that I took a couple of years ago, shortly after they finished their renovations. When I arrived in this area, I was entirely unimpressed because it was literally bare bones. I seem to remember that this exhibit was much more interesting when I was a kid, but this may be a fabricated memory (more on that in a later post). On the other hand, the new dinosaur exhibit at the Nature Museum in Ottawa was much more striking. It had life-sized replicas of what dinosaurs might have looked like and interactive elements you could engage with, such as a parasaurolophus call station. If I had to choose, I would go back to the Nature Museum before I would go back to the ROM.

Dinosaur Exhibit at the Nature Museum sourced from tripadvisor.ca

Unfortunately, money is often lacking in heritage these days, especially for small heritage sites. This means that we have to be creative. Digital tools are one way to promote heritage and they are often free to set up and use. Twitter and Facebook are easily accessible to a wide public and websites and blogs can serve to inform and entertain. The downside to them is that they require knowledge and effort to set up and maintain.

If our heritage sites are to stay relevant, we must seek out new visitors and hook them into coming back again and again. I leave it up to current and future heritage workers to figure out how to do this.

What to do with Digital Tools?

Welcome! As part of my digital history class, I am blogging about various questions presented in class. This week's topic: How do I see digital tools and approaches affecting my current and future practice of (public) history?

Well, digital tools are becoming more and more an integral part of our daily lives. I don't know about you, but I can no longer leave the house without at least my phone and either my tablet or my laptop. And if I do leave without them, I feel completely disconnected from the world around me. Even the New York police service is getting onto Twitter!

Public history too is becoming part of this trend. It must if we want to remain relevant. But before we embark of that, we must know what we are talking about. What is Public History?

When I tell people I am doing a masters in Public History I often receive blank stares. The inevitable question soon follows: "So WHAT is public history?" Patiently I answer, "it's the study of how the public interacts with history." Knowing that this is not a clear enough for most people, I promptly add, "like through museums, archives, websites, documentaries, etc." Although I lament the fact that most people have no concept of what I'm studying, I myself was ignorant of this branch of history until a few years ago.

By chance, as I was looking for a summer job, I noticed a posting on a museum website. One of the requirements for the job was a Master’s degree in public history or similar. Since I knew that I one day wanted to work in a museum full time I thought to myself: "Aha! I shall have to get one of those!" And so began my exposure to the field of public history. Of course, public history had been a part of my life long before this rather dull epiphany. It began the same way I imagine it begins for most people, with a visit to a local museum.

So how do digital tools affect Public History? Since the digital world is fusing to every part of our lives, this includes history. New tools are being developed every day to help us interact more easily with history. Where would we be without Wikipedia? How would we procrastinate effectively if we did not have Horrible Histories or Crash Course History available on YouTube? And what of Clash of the Titans or 300? What would those movies be if their creators had not so thoroughly researched the myths and history they based them on? Probably the same as they are now. Bad examples.

As for me, I see myself using digital tools to promote the museums I work for to a wider audience. This can be done through Facebook, Twitter, or blog and, as technology evolves, I'm sure new ways we cannot even fathom now will also become available. So I’ll take this opportunity to present one of the museums in the Ottawa area to you. This is Billings Estate.



It is the ancestral home of the Billings family. The house was completed in 1829 by Braddish Billings, one of the first settlers in the Ottawa area. I could go on and on about the history of the house, the family, and the area, but I will stop here for now. The museum often promotes its events and activities on Facebook and I had the opportunity to contribute a picture to one such post about an upcoming event at the Estate.

Post by Billings Estate National Historic Site.

The city of Ottawa also has digital exhibits about its museums on its website. This is another way that we can expand the museum world into the digital world. Unfortunately, the digital world cannot offer direct human contact. I have found that the best way to engage people in history, especially in a museum setting, is to interact with them in person. Digital exhibits can be very engaging but inevitably you will not learn as much from them as you would from a museum employee.

I believe that museums must become part of the digital world but that the digital world in turn has to become a part of the museum. In this way we can ensure that human contact is still a part of the museum experience but at the same time present historical information in a more efficient and engaging way.

There are many ways to do this currently. Often the exhibits themselves have multimedia aspects to them which can be an engaging element. Sound and multimedia can be very effective ways of getting the public to interact with the exhibit on a new level. One of the most novel integrations of technology into exhibits that I have seen was at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. They integrated an Xbox Kinect into their exhibit called Creatures of Light. An image was projected onto the floor and would change to follow the people walking upon it. It was very entertaining.

I would like to go a step further by integrating personal smart devices into the museum exhibit. I am often frustrated by the lack of information available about artefacts, especially in large museums where there is no staff to answer questions. It would be nice if you could scan a code or take a picture of the item with your smart device to get more information about it. This way, you would not be overwhelmed by information and you could investigate only those artefacts that interested you. It would be possible to do now but would require a lot of labour to get it set up and the number of people who might use it is uncertain. In any event, that is how I see digital tools affecting my practice of Public History. As new technologies emerge, I hope I will be a part of integrating them into the museum experience.