Telling Tales, Talking Trails – A Case Study

Brighton & Hove Museums and project freelancers provided training in interview and storytelling techniques, and the experience of recording audio in a makeshift sound booth. An ideation* case study has been made widely accessible via our podcast series detailing our experiences working with volunteers to create new digital stories for our museums.

*Ideation is a creative process of generating ideas. It involves sharing ideas and processes to identify and address problems and inform future projects and processes.

The next phase in the Telling Tales, Talking Trails digital project was the label-less webapp experience, One Minute Wonders, launched in January 2023. This combined the power of digital storytelling with an exhibition of animal and plant-related prints and drawings from our collection. The display was curated entirely by volunteers who have swept away the old museum labels in favour of their own interpretations, using the One Minute storytelling app.

We then shared our and findings with the public in a five-episode series of podcasts titled The One Minute Museum Podcast ‘Tell me about the Chamber Pots’.

The results were a variety of new perspectives and many unique stories.

• Working alongside volunteers we created a new bring-your-own device audio tour for Preston Manor, launched in 2022. A follow-up podcast series detailing the process, the experience of those involved in the project, and digital storytelling in general, was commissioned and completed in September 2023, and is now available to listen to on our website.
• In January 2022-June 2023 a label-less temporary exhibition took place in Brighton Museum, one-Minute Wonders. This was an experiment in digital curation in which bring bring-your-own-device One-minute digital stories replaced traditional labelling and info text panels.
• On the 19th October, in collaboration with the Brighton Digital festival (Dreamy Place) we hosted a seminar at Preston Manor on digital storytelling. Over 20 people attended the event which included presentations and an opportunity to test our Digital#8 funded audio tour. A follow-up opportunity to visit the building for free and trial our audio tour, was extended to the public on the 21st October 2023.

Ideation

• Process

Audio Guide

Through a series of creative workshops designed as a training programme for volunteers on narrative design, interview techniques, and audio editing, we created a new Audio guide for Preston Manor. Volunteers were trained by a professional from community radio station Radio Reverb, Lo-Fi Arts, and The University of Brighton, so they could interview staff and others about the house, another external professional on creative narrative provided storytelling training.

Label-less exhibition – One-Minute Wonders

We trialled a new way of exhibition display interpretation with One-minute Wonders. This project saw us remove all traditional text panel information and replace it with bring-your-own-device accessible one-minute digital stories curated and written by volunteers.

• Content

The content was be transferred to a visitor friendly mobile platform. Volunteers were consulted on the creation, but the design will follow an established template. The volunteers, overseen by a freelancer, created a tour that included the history of Preston Manor with focal points in each room and background stories of the family who lived there and the people who worked for them.

• Learnings

The original objective was to have visitors seek out highlights from the displayed collection and reveal a short story about each exhibit by simply photographing the object via an app. In practice we found the AI webapp tech was inadequate for the task we had expected. We switched to an easier and more cost-effective browser-based WordPress webapp accessible through QR codes in our galleries. This switch made it possible to run the project and eliminated glitches.

Evaluations demonstrated very clear that there was no public appetite for purely digital exhibition interpretation. Although the content itself was not unpopular, the lack of traditional museum labels and text was not received well. The process of accessing the text narrative through a bring-your-own device proved very off putting for many of our visitors. Findings demonstrate that although a level of digital information could prove useful and add to our existing displays and collections, we must be cautious of building this into temporary displays, and in no way can this replace existing forms of textual information in galleries or temporary exhibitions.

• Volunteers

A positive outcome was the involvement of volunteers and the benefits they derived from the project. Volunteers were motivated and rewarded by the process of creating museum content and gained satisfaction from the outcomes. Volunteering Digital projects are now an embedded element of our volunteer offer and our future volunteering plans: we describe this role within our wider digital offer as, “Everyday Digital”.

Positives

• Volunteer can make a valuable contribution to narrative ideas and storytelling, adding “Polyvocality”. The use of volunteers adds community voices to our museum spaces and provides a fresh way of telling stories and bringing collections to life.
• Feedback from the digital festival demonstrated that there is significant interest in digital narratives in museums/historical buildings, and the use of Polyvocality in that process was intriguing to participants at our digital seminar Telling Tales, Talking Trails, New voices, New Stories. The seminar held on the 19th of October 2023 in conjunction with Dreamy Place, a Brighton & Hove based digital festival. We recommend exploring a wider digital audience with the help of a community event like Dreamy Place.
• Museums, particularly small museums, on their own are not as affective at launching these public events. Partnering with the museum festival Dreamy Place was vital in promoting the TTTT seminar and open day. Skills sharing is a great way to be honest about findings and outcomes. What we learned was that small museums should not attempt projects like this on their own, but all museums can benefit from being part of wider digital offer.

Suggestions for future digital projects

• AI digital recognition software has insurmountable technical problems that make it unfeasible to use. Consider using a simpler browser based webapp accessible from QR codes in your galleries or displays.
• The “fiddliness” of engaging with complex apps is off-putting. Use the simplest user-friendly method you can, to avoid glitches and technical issues. The tech can soon become outdated and replacing/updating tech can be expensive and time consuming. Visitor reluctance to incorporating too much technology in their museum experience and shifting the onus onto the individual to download apps should be avoided. QR codes proved a simpler method of quick audience engagement. Improved generations of smart phone technology helped with this, as visitors were far less likely to require an app download to access QR codes. Although visitors will not.
• The use of QR codes partly solved this problem, but it can also lead to another problem with displays, as cards or signs with QR codes can be intrusive and not in keeping with the aesthetic of the museum or historical house, they can also be hacked, and museums should be weary of digital fraud. Try to integrate QR codes as early as possible into the planning or design stages of display or exhibition signage and interpretation. They can be part of already existing labels or incorporated into larger text panel displays.
• We would not recommend replacing traditional museum labelling and replacing it with digital bring-your-own device as the only interpretation method. Although the two can coexist, we would recommend giving serious consideration to how you go about integrating this with temporary exhibition displays and to why you might take this approach. We recommend first undertaking audience engagement/consultation.

This podcast titled The One Minute Museum Podcast ‘Tell me about the Chamber Pots’ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.