How about DIY podcast museum guides?

Submitted by doc on Tue, 08/01/2006 - 06:48.

For my birthday last weekend we drove down to Los Angeles to take in some museums. My wife is from Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, as the city was originally known. But the huge Getty Museum, overlooking the West Side from a hill beside the 405 at the south end of the Sepulveda Pass, postdated her reseidence there. So we decided to hit that first. It was a nice visit, including a stop at the Elliot Porter photography exhibit and a 45 minute tour by a guide through the museum's outdoor spaces.

Far more impressive, however, was our visit the next day to the Natural History Museum, where the current featured attraction is The Mysterious Bog People. Here one found that, if one's ancestors are from Northern Europe (as are most of mine), their depressing cultures involved murder, ritual sacrifice, and internment in peat bogs. The term "bog people" is something of a misnomer. Seems the bogs were employed mostly as burial sites for unfortunate victims of stabbings, stranglings, eviscerations and fatal whacks on the head.

While the remains of these victims are described as "remarkably well-preserved", in fact most of them looked like bog jerky: gray deflated sacks of skin with shrunken mummified heads at one end. Some had no heads at all. Others looked like monkey fists with hair and a hole surrounded by tiny, protruberant teeth. The lighting was so dim that reading explanatory text was nearly as torturous as the corpses were nauseating. Worse, the stories they told were severely depressing. The mood music was even darker, giving visitors the sense that they were trapped in an unpleasant movie with no happy ending. Kind of a neolithic Seven. Pure Hollywood, of course. Makes sense, given the location. It worked too. Our nine-year old boy made jokes about the corpses during the visit, but had trouble falling asleep because he couldn't get images of dead bog people out of his mind. "I keep seeing teeth sticking out of things", he said.

Next to that, tours of dinosaur skeletons and stuffed animals in painted habitats were positively delightful.

Except for the Bog show, everything else was accompanied not by traditional headphone narrative, but by music. You wore headphones attached to receivers that knew what room you were in, and gave you various composers' ideas of what pumas, caribou and stegosaurs might have liked to hear on the radio, before they were dead.

The new approach is, I suppose to "deliver an experience" to visitors, rather than to inform them. After all, who wants information these days? Especially in a museum? Geez. Hey, if all the smart Web designers in the the entertainment business are subjecting site visitors to cool Flash animations, why not bring the same proven approaches to museum site design?

So anyway, I got to thinking that authorities on featured museum subjects should provide their own commentary for vistors, in .mp3 form. That way, visitors could just bring their own iPods or other players along, and get the kind of useful commentary that museums, for whatever reasons, can't or won't provide. Podcasts with a purpose.

In fact, I think links to these would be a cool extra service that Wikipedia, or Wikipediasts, could provide. For example, in its own entry on bog people, Wikipedia could include a list of links to narrative explanations for museum tours like this one.

This idea comes to mind in part because I'll be going to Wikimania this weekend in Boston. Might be an idea to bring up.