Looping Nature. Knowledge Enhancing Transdisciplinary Collaboration and Participatory Practice in Natural Science Museums

Museum visitors and non-visitors in Germany: A representative survey

Recommandations pour la pratique clinique

In this article, environmental and climate practices in science and natural history museums in Türkiye are presented and discussed. While environmental and climate problems are global issues, they have local roots. As environmental issues are related to human activities and museums play a societal role, it is important to examine practices and approaches of museums in relation to the environment. Operations and practices of natural history and science museums in Türkiye, including educational activities, are important elements in communicating the risks of vulnerable environmental issue. This study outlines the environmental practices of the science and natural history museums of Türkiye which are commonly accepted as reliable providers of information to engage with audiences for action towards environmental challenges. Documentary research was conducted for the study. When the environmental practices and approaches are reviewed, it is seen that natural history museums function basically as research areas. Still, they have public education roles and organize educational activities about natural history, biodiversity and environment. While public education is one of the roles of natural history museums besides their conventional functions like collecting, conserving, researching and exhibiting, science centers are institutions dedicated to public education. Since science centers are mostly supported by municipalities, it can be said that they operate in a more sustainable and holistic way. Also, it is seen that their environmental reach-out programs offer a wider range. Based on data, we claim that collaboration with municipalities has an effect on the environmental activities and perspectives of museums. Also, climate-context works encourage museum community to make interdisciplinary works across the world. By presenting the current environmental and climate practices in natural history and science museums in Türkiye, it is aimed that the article can provide collaboration among institutions and advance the discussions among museums in the context of environment and climate.

Many natural science collections (NSCs) and museums keep information about collectors and other collection agents affiliated with their specimens and respective institution in internal catalogues, databases or wikis. Despite the fact that people data are crucial for linking collection objects, expeditions, publications, archival material, correspondence, etc. (Page 2016, Groom et al. 2020), such data are often only available internally, with limited or no access for external users. In the past, collectors have often been active in multiple fields, gathering e.g., zoological and botanical as well as ethnological or anthropological objects. This transdisciplinary collecting practice, in addition to the tradition of exchanging duplicates between institutions, results in a large overlap of people affiliated with different collections. Opening up available data will improve data quality in collection databases, support the disambiguation of collection agents (Dillen et al. 2021) and allow cross-disciplinary reuse of the data. Within a pilot study conducted at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), the information kept in an internal “MfN collector wiki” is made available via Wikidata. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that is collaborative and multilingual, and can be edited by anyone in the world. Wikidata stores structured data that are both human and machine readable, and it serves as a hub/broker for other identifiers (Vrandečić and Krötzsch 2014). An innovative open participatory approach is taken using edit-a-thons, involving MfN staff (collection manager, scientific heads of collections, scientists, etc.) to add and update information ‘passively’ available within the institution, and the wider public, e.g., citizen scientists and other interested parties. MfN staff (collection manager, scientific heads of collections, scientists, etc.) to add and update information ‘passively’ available within the institution, and the wider public, e.g., citizen scientists and other interested parties. Wikidata items are newly created or updated and enriched with additional information, also linking to collections, archives, and libraries. In this talk we will present the method and preliminary results of our study. One focus will be ‘hidden champions’ such as women scientists and local collectors, to make their contribution to global natural heritage visible. Another focus will be on collections from the era of European colonial expansion until the beginning of the 20th century, especially the former German colony, Cameroon. The number of institutions openly sharing data is increasing. However, following the TDWG 2022 conference motto “Stronger together”, we call for others to join in sharing data using persistent (people) identifiers and standards.

The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (Natural History Museum — MfN) established participation and exchange as central elements of the entire institution alongside its research. In order to experiment with formats and settings for dialogue-oriented exchange and participation, an area within the exhibition round walk was designated for this purpose in 2018. Over the course of three years, the “Experimental Field for Participation and Open Science” has developed the practice of opening the museum's research and collection in a dialogue-oriented, participatory way. Focus lies on museum visitors and on reaching new groups who are not in close contact with science yet. The practice of opening and participation was tested, reflectively accompanied, and further developed during the whole time period. This article describes idea, concept, design, and the results of the external evaluation of the formats of dialogue-oriented and participatory outreach in the Experimental Field at the MfN. It gives an overview of underlying ideas, design of the space, and how the goal of creating mutually beneficial encounters and enabling participation and co-creation was addressed.

アンケート調査に基づく博物館来館者のクワガタムシ、カブトムシの飼育と外来種問題への認識の実態

The year 2020 celebrates the centenary of Paulo Freire, which takes place in the midst of the rescue of the founding concepts of his work and demonstrates the relevance of his critical thinking. His ideas have been present in Museology since the 1970s, influencing museological research and practice. In natural science museums, several works from the 1990s seek to identify theoretical and methodological trends in science education in exhibitions and educational activities. Within these trends, one can see the absence of productions that are based on critical theories and on Paulo Freire's ideas, which has been occurring more recently. This text discusses the articulations between research and practices in the fields of education and communication and science museums, questioning whether and how Paulo Freire's ideas became present. It was also intended to discuss the use of Freirean ideas in the context of science museums, focusing on two movements: scientific literacy and the relationships between science, technology, society and the environment. At the end, we propose some paths and argue in favor of a more intense use of some of the key concepts of Paulo Freire's work in the research and practices of natural science museums and problematize, given the complexity, conflicts and tensions that permeate today's world, about what science and what science education and communication we want to support in science museums. Key words: Paulo Freire; Education; Dissimination; Science museums

In the article, the author reflects on contemporary museology and cultural anthropology paradigms that focus on participation and collaboration to include people from vulnerable groups in the museum work. The article presents how the paradigm shift to participation or collaboration changes the epistemological value of experiential knowledge related to cultural heritages and the way museums work. Finally, the author shows how three experimental participatory, collaborative practices in national museums with the change of perspective on people?s role from passive visitors to active collaborators also changed the perspective on their vulnerability and presented a valuable tool for better social inclusion. Through participatory approaches, museums can gain more social relevance in contemporary society.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss key findings from the Australian Research Council funded international project, “Hot Science Global Citizens: The Agency of the Museum Sector in Climate Change Interventions” (2008–2012). The project looked to the museum sector—natural history, science museums and science centres—to play a role as resource, catalyst and change agent in climate change debates and decision-making locally and globally. The discussion focuses on a section of the research findings relating to the current and potential roles and agencies of natural history, science museums and science centres in polycentric climate change governing assemblages within Australian and US contexts. Through the analysis, eight strategic positions and role changes emerge for the different forms of the museum with a greater emphasis on collective action, networking and building more critical information on climate change as a complex issue and governing subject alongside activism in community and political contexts. In addition, re-working the relations between nature and culture across museum practice through a series of ecologizing experimentations was identified as a key role change in advancing sustainable practices in the long term.

This chapter describes a prototype platform developed by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Nottingham in collaboration with Tate as part of the Research Councils UK funded Horizon project (2016–7). The prototype, hereafter called Cartography, consists of a web application enabling participants to input data and generate visualizations about participatory art practice in museums and art galleries. The chapter starts by analyzing the significance and changing role of performance documentation for museums and art galleries, focusing in particular on the role of the public in the context of participatory art practices. The chapter then makes a case for the capture of ‘relational’ forms of documentation which not only reflect how individual points of view sit in juxtaposition, or in opposition to each other, but also disclose important information about the rhizomatic nature of participatory practice. In conclusion, the chapter shows why relational documentation may offer significant insight into art and heritage more broadly.

It seems nowadays that any aspect of collecting and displaying tangible or intangible material culture is labeled as curating: shopkeepers curate their wares; DJs curate their musical selections; magazine editors curate media stories; and hipsters curate their coffee tables. Given the increasing ubiquity and complexity of 21st-century notions of curatorship, the current issue of MC Journal, ‘curate’, provides an excellent opportunity to consider some of the changes that have occurred in professional practice since the emergence of the ‘digital turn’. There is no doubt that the internet and interactive media have transformed the way we live our daily lives—and for many cultural commentators it only makes sense that they should also transform our cultural experiences. In this paper, I want to examine the issue of curatorial practice in the postdigital age, looking some of the ways that curating has changed over the last twenty years—and some of the ways it has not. The term postdigital comes from the work of Ross Parry, and is used to references the ‘tipping point’ where the use of digital technologies became normative practice in museums (24). Overall, I contend that although new technologies have substantially facilitated the way that curators do their jobs, core business and values have not changed as the result of the digital turn. While, major paradigm shifts have occurred in the field of professional curatorship over the last twenty years, these shifts have been issue-driven rather than a result of new technologies. Everyone’s a Curator In a 2009 article in the New York Times, journalist Alex Williams commented on the growing trend in American consumer culture of labeling oneself a curator. “The word ‘curate’,’’ he observed, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting” (1). Williams dated the origins of the popular adoption of the term ‘curating’ to a decade earlier; noting the strong association between the uptake and the rise of the internet (2). This association is not surprising. The development of increasingly interactive software such as Web 2.0 has led to a rapid rise in new technologies aimed at connecting people and information in ways that were previously unimaginable. In particular the internet has become a space in which people can collect, store and most importantly share vast quantities of information. This information is often about objects. According to sociologist Jyri Engeström, the most successful social network sites on the internet (such as Pinterest, Flickr, Houzz etc), use discrete objects, rather than educational content or interpersonal relationships, as the basis for social interaction. So objects become the node for inter-personal communication. In these and other sites, internet users can find, collate and display multiple images of objects on the same page, which can in turn be connected at the press of a button to other related sources of information in the form of text, commentary or more images. These sites are often seen as the opportunity to virtually curate mini-exhibitions, as well as to create mood boards or sites of virtual consumption. The idea of curating as selective aesthetic editing is also popular in online markets places such as Etsy where numerous sellers offer ‘curated’ selections from home wares, to prints, to (my personal favorite) a curated selection of cat toys. In all of these exercises there is an emphasis on the idea of connoisseurship. As part of his article on the new breed of ‘curators’, for example, Alex Williams interviewed Tom Kalendrain, the Fashion Director of a leading American department store, which had engaged in a collaboration with Scott Schuman of the fashion blog, the Sartorialist. According to Kalendrain the store had asked Schuman to ‘curate’ a collection of clothes for them to sell. He justified calling Schuman a curator by explaining: “It was precisely his eye that made the store want to work with him; it was about the right shade of blue, about the cut, about the width of a lapel” (cited in Williams 2). The interview reveals much about current popular notions of what it means to be a curator. The central emphasis of Kalendrain’s distinction was on connoisseurship: exerting a privileged authoritative voice based on intimate knowledge of the subject matter and the ability to discern the very best examples from a plethora of choices. Ironically, in terms of contemporary museum practice, this is a model of curating that museums have consciously been trying to move away from for at least the last three decades. We are now witnessing an interesting disconnect in which the extra-museum community (represented in particular by a postdigital generation of cultural bloggers, commentators and entrepreneurs) are re-vivifying an archaic model of curating, based on object-centric connoisseurship, just at the point where professional curators had thought they had successfully moved on. From Being about Something to Being for Somebody The rejection of the object-expert model of curating has been so persuasive that it has transformed the way museums conduct core business across all sectors of the institution. Over the last thirty to forty years museums have witnessed a major pedagogical shift in how curators approach their work and how museums conceptualise their core values. These paradigmatic and pedagogical shifts were best characterised by the museologist Stephen Weil in his seminal article “From being about something to being for somebody.” Weil, writing in the late 1990s, noted that museums had turned away from traditional models in which individual curators (by way of scholarship and connoisseurship) dictated how the rest of the world (the audience) apprehended and understood significant objects of art, science and history—towards an audience centered approach where curators worked collaboratively with a variety of interested communities to create a pluralist forum for social change. In museum parlance these changes are referred to under the general rubric of the ‘new museology’: a paradigm shift, which had its origins in the 1970s; its gestation in the 1980s; and began to substantially manifest by the 1990s. Although no longer ‘new’, these shifts continue to influence museum practices in the 2000s. In her article, “Curatorship as Social Practice’” museologist Christina Kreps outlined some of the developments over recent decades that have challenged the object-centric model. According to Kreps, the ‘new museology’ was a paradigm shift that emerged from a widespread dissatisfaction with conventional interpretations of the museum and its functions and sought to re-orient itself away from strongly method and technique driven object-focused approaches. “The ‘new museum’ was to be people-centered, action-oriented, and devoted to social change and development” (315). An integral contributor to the developing new museology was the subjection of the western museum in the 1980s and ‘90s to representational critique from academics and activists. Such a critique entailed, in the words of Sharon Macdonald, questioning and drawing attention to “how meanings come to be inscribed and by whom, and how some come to be regarded as ‘right’ or taken as given” (3). Macdonald notes that postcolonial and feminist academics were especially engaged in this critique and the growing “identity politics” of the era. A growing engagement with the concept that museological /curatorial work is what Kreps (2003b) calls a ‘social process’, a recognition that; “people’s relationships to objects are primarily social and cultural ones” (154). This shift has particularly impacted on the practice of museum curatorship. By way of illustration we can compare two scholarly definitions of what constitutes a curator; one written in 1984 and one from 2001. The Manual of Curatorship, written in 1994 by Gary Edson and David Dean define a curator as: “a staff member or consultant who is as specialist in a particular field on study and who provides information, does research and oversees the maintenance, use, and enhancement of collections” (290). Cash Cash writing in 2001 defines curatorship instead as “a social practice predicated on the principle of a fixed relation between material objects and the human environment” (140). The shift has been towards increased self-reflexivity and a focus on greater plurality–acknowledging the needs of their diverse audiences and community stakeholders. As part of this internal reflection the role of curator has shifted from sole authority to cultural mediator—from connoisseur to community facilitator as a conduit for greater community-based conversation and audience engagement resulting in new interpretations of what museums are, and what their purpose is. This shift—away from objects and towards audiences—has been so great that it has led some scholars to question the need for museums to have standing collections at all. Do Museums Need Objects? In his provocatively titled work Do Museums Still Need Objects? Historian Steven Conn observes that many contemporary museums are turning away from the authority of the object and towards mass entertainment (1). Conn notes that there has been an increasing retreat from object-based research in the fields of art; science and ethnography; that less object-based research seems to be occurring in museums and fewer objects are being put on display (2). The success of science centers with no standing collections, the reduction in the number of objects put on display in modern museums (23); the increasing phalanx of ‘starchitect’ designed museums where the building is more important than the objects in it (11), and the increase of virtual museums and collections online, all seems to indicate that conventional museum objects have had their day (1-2). Or have th

Museums and researchers require knowledge of how museums think about and practice sustainability to understand how sustainability considerations can further be incorporated and institutionalised into museum practice on four pillars: environmental, social, economic and cultural. A systematic literature review was carried out to explore the theoretical background of sustainable museums. This study, which used Q methodology, was designed to determine museum visitors’ preferences related to the most important sustainability elements of museums. The participants in the study were 24 museum visitors from Generation Z in Hungary. Data were collected through 37 Q statements. According to the findings of the research, young museum visitors can be distinguished into three groups (factors): Conscious, Experience-seeking, and Enthusiastic-to-learn visitors.

The article is devoted to the reasons of the active use of digital tech-nologies in the modern natural science museum. The emphasis is made on the specifics of interpreting natural science material. The relationship between these features with the history of making the collections of that profile is traced. It is noted that the task solution of popularizing the scientific picture of the world requires significant additional material. The task of reconstructing the phenomena and processes of the past geological epochs is also important. Digital technologies allow to make the exposition richer in information and attractive to the visitor. The article is illustrated by the examples of the exposi-tory practice of the Russian museums.

Research demonstrates that children have vast potential to expand their knowledge base with simple supports from adults and older children. Children's museums have a heightened awareness of the value in and the need to reach out to support adults accompanying children, thus bringing about an emphasis on family learning. Iterative exhibition studies conducted at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis illustrate the impact of planning for family learning. But for any museum, intentionally applying the strategy of scaffolding by building on simple concepts and working toward mastery of ideas, can inform adults and simultaneously help children stretch to new levels of understanding and achievement. This strategy requires curators, educators and exhibit developers to work collaboratively to determine various levels of accessibility of content and activity moving from entry level ideas through more complex and abstract ones for older children and adults. Children visiting museums of all types is certainly nothing new, but their experience in those spaces has changed over time. From the earliest iterations of children's museums, to contemporary practices in museums of all types, the attention museum professionals place on the needs of this special audience is changing. The idea of hands-on learning, facilitated and mediated learning experiences, and scaled-down environments have become more prominent (and often expected) in museum settings where young children visit with their families. The increased visitation of family groups, especially those with young children, requires greater attention by museum educators, exhibition developers, and designers to support the learning needs of this audience. Most children's museums place special emphasis on designing environments that support learning for very young children. Lessons learned from the work done in children's museums can provide models for those in other museum settings to meet the needs of early learners.

Research demonstrates that children have vast potential to expand their knowledge base with simple supports from adults and older children. Children's museums have a heightened awareness of the value in and the need to reach out to support adults accompanying children, thus bringing about an emphasis on family learning. Iterative exhibition studies conducted at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis illustrate the impact of planning for family learning. But for any museum, intentionally applying the strategy of scaffolding by building on simple concepts and working toward mastery of ideas, can inform adults and simultaneously help children stretch to new levels of understanding and achievement. This strategy requires curators, educators and exhibit developers to work collaboratively to determine various levels of accessibility of content and activity moving from entry level ideas through more complex and abstract ones for older children and adults. Children visiting museums of all types is certainly nothing new, but their experience in those spaces has changed over time. From the earliest iterations of children's museums, to contemporary practices in museums of all types, the attention museum professionals place on the needs of this special audience is changing. The idea of hands-on learning, facilitated and mediated learning experiences, and scaled-down environments have become more prominent (and often expected) in museum settings where young children visit with their families. The increased visitation of family groups, especially those with young children, requires greater attention by museum educators, exhibition developers, and designers to support the learning needs of this audience. Most children's museums place special emphasis on designing environments that support learning for very young children. Lessons learned from the work done in children's museums can provide models for those in other museum settings to meet the needs of early learners.