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#MuseumHour 4 Years On

On Monday 8 October we celebrate #MuseumHour‘s 200th edition. It also marks the community’s 4th birthday. Twitter timelines on Monday evenings in the UK and all sorts of other time zones across the world have never been quite the same.

When Sophie Ballinger and I started up #MuseumHour this is what we had in mind. Amazingly, there has been no mission creep. It is still the same, just bigger.

It’s a very simple enterprise, light weight but high energy and without any constrictions of institutionalism or stakeholder expectation. It’s free and for all-comers.

Two years ago we were marking our 100th #MuseumHour. Then, we had two co-organisers, had 46 guest hosts and ~130K impressions per month. Today we have three co-organisers, have had 102 guest hosts (some serial guests) and we get ~ 313.1K impressions per month. A few weeks ago we passed the 10,000 follower milestone.

And we don’t even bother with a blue tick.

We are not funded or supported by any organisation. It’s as independent as you can get. Even if you are not a Twitter-user, you can access all the chat from the website. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is not (yet) a walled garden.

The we is important. My view as a co-organiser is to let the community lead its direction. I have no desire to manage the community or shape the various themes and subjects that get suggested to us. The result is that people seem to really feel like they are part of something, and they are as equally part of it as the next follower.

It’s because of this attitude–shared by co-organisers Katy Jackson and Kate Groome–that the most engaged-with tweet over the last 6 months was about museum toilets.

And that’s all I’m interested in saying about analytics and statistics. The popularity of #MuseumHour and the organic way it has grown has meant it has attracted the attention of more people and organisations wishing to use the platform to gain a new audience. This is great, but we don’t provide analytics or statistics to guest hosts as this is about taking part first, promotion and profile-raising will come automatically if you do that well.

It’s nice to hear that #MuseumHour is now a regularly recommended part of someone’s study or volunteer work, and many pledge to take part as part of their AMA (CPD award organised by the Museums Association).

The one area of change that I am particularly keen on supporting is the growth in interest outside the UK. Over the last year and a bit we have had #MuseumHour hosted in Estonia, Croatia, Sweden and New Zealand (twice). Maybe #MuseumHour could use a different language as well as English some time?

Happy 4th Birthday, #MuseumHour! Here is every person and topic that has made it happen so far.

 

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Old Heritage Archive

#100museumhours

#100museumhours logo

  • 2 years
  • 100 chats on 100 subjects
  • Two Hosts: @tehm and @sospot
  • 46 Guest Hosts
  • 22.1K Tweets (all time)
  • 130-140K Impressions per month
  • 4-5K Impressions per day
  • ~25-100 Engagements per Tweet

It’s a very simple enterprise, light weight but high energy and without any constrictions of institutionalism or stakeholder expectation. It’s free and for all-comers.

Follow: @museumhour
Mondays 20:00 UK time
Hashtag: #museumhour

In October 2014, I wrote about the idea of #museumhour, a (yet another) Twitter movement following the model of weekly, fortnightly and monthly chat forums. Today we celebrate museumhour’s second birthday and our 100th #museumhour.

It was Sophie Ballinger’s tweet from the Eureka! Museum account back in May 2014 that I found a couple of months later (wondering if anyone had started up a regular museum slot on Twitter) that started it all off.

Over the last two years and 100 museumhours things have evolved but not a huge amount. I thought it would be useful to outline museumhour’s current philosophy and how it works. It’s a very simple enterprise, light weight but high energy and without any constrictions of institutionalism or stakeholder expectation. It’s free and for all-comers.

Our philosophy

To provide a regular, open forum for the discussion of museum issues. It is for anyone with an interest in museums, not just museum workers. You don’t have to participate to benefit from it.

Free from influence. Museumhour is run entirely on a voluntary basis, week in week out with occasional breaks. We don’t receive any funding or in-kind support beyond our own resources.

Platform for communication, not broadcast. There are very few rules that govern museumhour. All we ask is that the topics that are suggested to us are broad enough to encourage as wide an audience as possible. However we also welcome specialist topics that don’t often get public airplay.

We will not accept themes that are solely for the promotion of one initiative, project or organisation. It’s fine for your thing to be used as an anchor for debate but prompts, cues and links must range broadly. The best museumhours are those where the host engages with a range of the responses tweeted in return – it’s not always easy though when it gets very frenetic!

It’s also ok to use the #museumhour hashtag to help promote and plug your events and activities but when you’re hosting you must be mindful not to broadcast but to exchange and communicate.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is a relentless quick-fire ‘of the moment’ forum for rapid exchange. That’s why we chose it – or rather it chose us.

Managed well, Twitter also promotes the sense of an open and diverse community that we need for museumhour to work and provides a healthy and productive environment for people to share their views and information without fear of thinking they or what they have to say isn’t important enough or might be subject to sneers, reprisal or other puerile behaviour.

The other benefit of Twitter, over, say, Facebook, is that it is open for everyone to see, not just those who have an account and are logged in. This way anyone with access to the internet can head on over to twitter.com/museumhour and see the discussions, or, follow using the saved hashtag #museumhour.

Museumhour only exists on Twitter and that’s where it is staying. We do not maintain separate channels such as website, enewsletter or other social networks. We or our Guest Hosts will occasionally Storify museumhour debates or include content in their own Storify account or other work which is great.

Featured

Museumhour benefits from occasional blogging by us and others. We’ve been really pleased to be featured by the Ministry of Curiosity, Fran Taylor, and others, as well as featuring in museum articles such as Museum Practice.

Our 46 Guest Hosts have also done a brilliant job using their websites, blogs and social media channels to promote the subjects of their museumhours.

We do want to take part in the big debates and issues facing museums and have played a role in helping other organisations with hosting sessions whose results have fed into research, for example, AIM’s work on museum charging, and the MA’s work on workforce professional development.

Is this a good format for museumhour for the foreseeable future? And can you suggest changes to refresh the experience? Do you want to join our team?

What next?

Our format is simple. After the first couple of weeks of museumhour we realised that the big wide open world of topics made it difficult for people to engage meaningfully with each other so we started to introduce themes.

We or our Guest Host comes up with a range of prompts, cues and links to information prior to (usually) and most importantly during the hour – approximately one every 5-10 minutes. Some of these are in the form of questions, others are statements that are responded to.

Museumhour happens and then it ends. We move on to organising the next week.

Is this a good format for museumhour for the foreseeable future? And can you suggest changes to refresh the experience? Do you want to join our team?

Two years of relentless weekly organisation is bound to take a toll on the schedules and lives of its two founders. Two people who haven’t even met each other in the flesh but who have somehow made this thing work.

Tribute

I would like to pay tribute to my co-founder Sophie Ballinger for being a brilliant colleague and friend making the museumhour enterprise both fulfilling and fun! We seem to fill each other’s gaps naturally and with minimum fuss. That can be quite a rare quality in a team.

But museumhour isn’t all about us. We have prided ourselves on taking a back seat and gently herding from behind. We think it is about time our team expanded. We are therefore shortly going to be advertising for new members of our small team. If you have read this and feel excited about museumhour please stay in touch.

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#museumhour

#Follow @museumhour
Mondays 7-8pm UST (UK time).

#museumhour tweets

#museumhour is (yet another) new UK-based museum movement which took 24 hours to set up by Sophie Ballinger (@sospot) and me (@tehm).

Sophie had a while back posed the question of whether a #museumhour existed in Twitterverse and received the sound of tumbleweed in return.

I was travelling back to Cornwall from London after a meeting of Museums Association Regional Reps in which there was much discussion about the best forums for museum people to get together online to exchange news and views, particularly to debate the Museum Association’s new agenda Museums Change Lives (I almost wrote Loves).

Place-based Twitter hours have been well-established across the country, from #CornwallHour to #ScotlandHour as have profession-based ones such as #legalhour.

Searching for the existence of a #museumhour Tehmina found Sophie via Eureka! Museum’s twitter feed and after a few tweets exchanged after working hours during commutes and baby feeds we claimed the hour every Monday 7-8pm. Sophie set up a Twitter account @museumhour to help field the exchange of tweets and an automatic retweet of its accompanying hashtag #museumhour

As long as people used the hashtag #museumhour or replied to @museumhour participants can follow tweets easily.

After some initial campaigning in between our day jobs Monday 6 October, 7pm arrived. We had about 57 followers at the beginning and by the end of the evening this grew to over 100.

We had no idea what would happen. We didn’t want to control proceedings by forcing a topic but to encourage people to share #onecoolthing about their museum or their favourite museum.

Although a UK-based social meet we had willing tweeters from Virginia, USA to South Australia. And those working in museums were joined with museophiles.

Astonishingly 99 people sent 349 tweets during the first #museumhour

Tweets ranged from Brighton Museums’ football table in their World Stories gallery, Kids in Museums’ Youth Panel meeting at Geffrye Museum, the launch of iBeacons at Roman Caerleon, the famous cat mummy of Derby Museums (it is essential to include cats in all Twitter conversations–Ed), Lowewood Museum’s community project and exhibition on World War 1 display, finding out Sir Walter Scott used to be a Sheriff and his courtroom museum is there to be visited in Selkirk, a museum geek’s Elk, two major development projects at Surgeons Hall Museum and Epping Forest District Museum, and news from the Welsh Museum Festival. And more.

In fact it continued beyond the hour.

Look, just take a look at #museumhour tweets.

The idea is to let #museumhour grow organically and steadily and begin to introduce some hard hitting topics to the weekly discussions.

Policy-making museum people were notably absent or quiet and yet tend to be the ones always wanting our opinion on things. We hope they join the talk.

I also hope that #museumhour will remain good fun, be a new, additional way, for museum people to meet each other and network, as well as providing a forum for opinions to be exchanged.

Follow @museumhour now.

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In defence of history by women

The visibility of the resurgence of women’s voices has launched into the stratosphere these last two weeks, from the triumph of the campaign to get a woman back on a UK banknote, to the rather seedy and distasteful rape and bombing threats aimed at women by anonymous so-called trolls.

But what is worse than all that is the society-sanctioned, media-fuelled defence of such revolting behaviour because ‘you can just ignore it’. I am assuming the same people who ignore such things probably in a past life also ignored the inhumanity of slavery – if you don’t want a slave just don’t have one! For there is no virtual world and real world. Twitter, Facebook and anything else online is the real world.

She’s rubbish because I don’t like her

So amongst the flurry of comment and opinion about all this I read the latest post on Prof. Mary Beard’s blog A Don’s Life reflecting on her latest TV programme about Caligula, the First Century Roman emperor. I must admit that I have not seen any of Mary Beard’s programmes but I have heard a lot of good things about them, and about her, and I have read some of her published work. I don’t have a TV but I do sneak the occasional fix well after the event on iPlayer etc. so maybe I will watch them some time.

In her post Mary was rather putting her own experience of being a woman on TV, and that too a woman presenting much of her own research, in a serious history programme, in the context of the overt and aggressive sexism experienced by so many women in their everyday lives both online and offline.

Distaste for her TV history manifested in a dislike of her and how she looks. But what really got her goat was the flippant accusation by someone who called her history like that of Wikipedia.

Wiki-lite

Now, there are two problems here. The first is that Wikipedia is not a source of original information, that is, first time published thought, argument or opinion. It is, if you remember them, meant to be like a set of encyclopaedias (-paediae??), and is entirely reliant on the sources the writer references as to how decent an encyclopaedic entry it is. So some are good and some are bad.

Mary Beard’s chagrin came from the fact that, albeit she is a Cambridge Don with over 40 years of experience in Caligulan history, she is still not taken seriously by those moved to damn her and her work by calling her ‘Wiki-lite’. The second is that if you find yourself not understanding what a historian means then they are not explaining it properly. This is not uncommon and many historians make a career out of being obtuse to dazzle their audience and get promoted in the process. On the opposite end of the spectrum if you find a ‘historian’ enthusiastically saying a lot but not saying very much then they probably don’t know their stuff.

So this post was shared on the Women For Cornwall group on Facebook and there has been a bit of debate about it and the problem women have in being, for want of a better term, taken seriously simply because they are female.

Part of the debate was also about how history is taught in schools. I’m going to blog again about this and the Govian view of school history so won’t dwell on it here. Someone brought up the old S-Level – remember them? I came at the tail end when they had just scrapped the examination but we went through the motions of it anyway. The idea was that those most able to grasp key concepts could spread their wings by inserting some original thought into debates and learn to construct their own arguments rather than clutching a knotted string of others’ opinions. Until this time, apparently, A-Level students were just taught ‘facts’ [those who have taught history undergrads in recent years may feel this comment still stands].

Why don’t you prove it?

I reflected on my own experience. Until GCSE I really did not get school history very much. I enjoyed it but it was not on top of my list. I was after all going to be a scientist of some sort. But I had a cracking GCSE and A-level teacher who did teach us to critique, challenge established facts, learn to understand historical opinion and find bias according to authorial origins. Even my fourth-year primary school (inner London comp) teacher (today’s Year 6) stopped a lesson one day and said, “why don’t you ask me to prove it?” I think we were talking about the troubles in Northern Ireland, no less. God bless you, Mr Hadfield.

That was a turning point in my understanding of the world. The interesting predicament Mary Beard finds herself in is that people’s dislike originates in the fact that she is damn good at both argument and backing it up with evidence – such as being a good historian entails unlike the Starkeys of this world. But saying they don’t agree would be putting the critics on the same level as her, whereas dismissing her as opposed to her arguments is much easier, it’s lazier but hey, it’s online and you can say anything and a few people will Like you for it.

So you think you’re a historian?

And I would like to have a continued go at people who think they are historians because they watch it on TV or cherry-pick information on the web or indeed osmotically absorb other people’s ideas and frankenregurgitate them as their own.

On two recent occasions I have had my own thoughts and ideas quoted back at me, and even ascribed to another speaker, following my giving a paper!

Good historians do argument and evidence very well. They compare. Then then explain by creating a narrative which can be followed. I have said in other fora that one of the main problems with the way that Cornish history is done is that it lacks comparison and lacks an audience in journals and books outside Cornwall, but that’s for yet another post. It is also unsurprising that the arch-narratives of Cornish history, the good and the bad (and there is an awful lot of bad), are all written by men. This has to change.

Would you have a hernia operation by someone who dabbled in a bit of Holby City and YouTube or someone who had studied abdominal surgery for many years? Sorry, in defence of my profession a bit. Especially those women who are in it.