Evidence: the goals of a museum curator

A museum curator seeks to achieve general educational goals through the description of a set of carefully selected objects. In general, the goals are to convey important generalisations (e.g. ``Organic jewellery tends to have natural themes'') and to dispel important misconceptions (e.g. ``Jewellery tends to be made of expensive materials''). These important points have to be brought in appropriately during the description of the exhibits which are selected by the visitor.

In order to see how a human being tackles such complex goals, we performed a ``Curator of Oz'' experiment, in which we chose an arbitrary sequence of exhibits in the 20th Century Jewellery gallery of the National Museum of Scotland and asked the curator to give us a commentary. The curator exploited opportunities of the following kinds. Note that the classification here is only meant to be suggestive, and we don't claim that the categories are entirely disjoint or exhaustive.

Introducing general points/themes

suggested by the objects. The curator frequently moved from the objects to the general issues surrounding them, using the objects merely as an excuse to introduce these topics:

V: ``There's a set of three objects here.''
C: ``What these symbolise for me are the preoccupations of the 1980's with...''

Moving to more interesting topics

Sometimes the curator indulged in much more extensive digressions:

V: ``It's the suffragette brooch. Could you tell us something about that? ...''
C: ``Suffragette jewellery is a subject which few people know about... The colours of the WSPU were purple, white and green.... They had sliced bread wrapped in the colours....''

Reinforcing a point from the past

When an important point has already been made, an excuse to reinforce it by showing its relevance in a new situation is exploited:

V: ``This one here...''
C: ``Yes, you've made a link with the first piece that we looked at, which is the idea of a jewel which is also a work of art and a sculpture...''

Linking to previous items

Making connections to items previously seen helps to improve the continuity of the discourse:

C: ``... and it was work like this which directly inspired work like the Roger Morris brooch on the stand which we looked at earlier.''

Suggesting future items

Although the curator cannot control the choices of the visitor, nevertheless they can attempt to influence them in a way that will open up useful opportunities in the future:

V: ``... object 9... Why is that there?''
C: ``... That's there because I'm quite interested in refractory metals, which include titanium... there's another example in the same case ...''

is nothing like a conventional schema structure to the descriptions produced. The approach looks a lot more like putting together arbitrary pieces of interesting material subject to only very loose retrictions. This may not be the best way to produce a carefully-argued written text, and clearly the result is not always fluent according to stringent criteria. In some---but not all---respects, it resembles the unplanned discourses discussed by [Ochs 79]. Furthermore, in the interactive and relatively informal setting of a museum tour, it works.

We thus decided that ILEX should have a whole set of goals about things to say. These are linked into a single metalevel goal, which is something like ``to achieve as many of the individual goals as possible, within the space available, in the context of a globally coherent discourse which maintains the reader's interest''.