Listen to the Gears: 2

Summer holiday season is upon us. What do you see and do when visiting a new place? Guidebooks point us to the highlights of the city or region, but what of other local things?

Smart City podcast discussed spottedbylocals.com. This tourist information blog, described as an ‘atlas of emotion’ is made up of suggestions of what to see and do by local people. For them, the best things in the neighbourhood are different to the guidebook ideas. It seems that seasoned travellers even say ‘sometimes the tourist attractions are the least interesting part of the trip’. Well, this doesn’t bode well for museums and galleries does it? They’re often the highlights in the guidebooks. What to do?

I suggest that museums play on this idea themselves, making use of their local visitors. An exhibition project combining local topographical art, personalised Google maps and visitors’ connections to these places and objects has potential. It could breathe life into tired collections and provide a way to get local people in the doors, as well as visitors from further away. It’s a similar idea to those exhibitions where the whole point is that visitors write their own interpretive labels. This information mapping could be extended even further. Adding catalogue data to the map would be valuable for staff and researchers. It would allow them to see the locations of finds or views. Map your collections using local knowledge. Like a visual version of oral history?

Listening to The Future and You, I kept the mapping idea in mind. American guest Robert Hooker discussed trends in IT, globalisation and immigration in the UK. It is always interesting to listen to an outsider describe your own environs. Some of what he said didn’t sit comfortably with me, but it did make me question how narrow my own experience is. Sometimes I find this reflected in the narratives that museums tell. Migrants will inevitably have different views and experiences of the local area. Being an outsider allows you to see things in a different light. Running a museum project to harness these narratives could create a new layer to the map. Or a new map altogether. A way of charting local history as it happens from multiple viewpoints.

Kansas Historical Society’s Cool Things in the Collection focuses on and discusses the biography of one object per podcast. A story cloth made by Hmong refugees narrates the story of the escape from Vietnam at the height of the war. This narrative textile seemed to me a predecessor to the mapping idea. The traditional use of fabric to tell a story that can be packed up and transported with you for easy accessibility has correlations with today’s Internet use. Save your map online and you can open it up for perusal through any Internet connection, wherever you are. Evolving the mapping idea in another direction, a virtual map could even chart the ethnic minorities’ diasporas and journeys to the local area.

Technology has moved on but the importance of storytelling has remained a constant. Local museums need local narratives. Bring them up to date.

Listen to the Gears was written by August.