Presentations: A Show-Off's Guide

In December 2015 I gave a presentation at a 'Heritage Show + Tell' event in Leeds. The event rules were simple - three slides, three minutes, tell a story about your project. I've lost count of how many seminars/lectures/talks/expositions/etc/and-so-on I've sat through at heritage sector events, but this was one of the first formal events I'd spoken at and had to, like, dress smartly and that. 

Some of those drawings are mine. Drawing is not among my skillz.

I was working for Scarborough Museums Trust heading an Arts Council audience development project, part of which involved commissioning a pop-up 'Museum of Scarborough' which would tour the community and be an enthralling interactive celebration of all things Scarborial.  

This was an ideal project to roll-out for the Show + Tell evening, but my quandary was how to make my 3 minute presentation lively, enthralling and in keeping with the quirky nature of the pop-up project - an issue exacerbated by my allocated slot being the last speaker on a grotty winter's evening when any sensible person would have been good and ready to GO HOME.

My elegant solution was to conclude the presentation, following 2:30mins of precisely-timed wholesome professional public-speaking, thus... 

Dare to dream. Chase the rainbow. Note the exits before you start. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creepy Creepy Museum Dummies

Image
(N.B. for the really creepy bit skip ahead to the bottom...) My first museum sported a ploughman dummy which, after repainting by a volunteer, resembled a boiled Nigel Mansell. I remember well (usually around 3 a.m.) the feeling of removing his flat cap and discovering there was NOTHING underneath, the face ending in a sheer cut through moth-eaten expanding foam. (N.B. I refer to the dummy, not the volunteer. I'm not in the habit of touching volunteers' headgear).  There are broadly two schools of thought regarding the value of museum dummies (that's in the exhibitions, not staff). They can be either valuable interpretive assets which breathe life into a display by giving a sense of past people's interaction with their world, or... they're effing creepy and OH MY WORD WHY WOULD YOU EVER PUT SOMETHING LIKE THAT IN YOUR MUSEUM KILL IT KILL IT! I have a real soft spot for museum dummies - admittedly to a great extent out of a love of the absurd rather than a desire to
Read more

Domestic Digitising Doings 06: Sliding to a Halt

Image
It’s not that I’ve been too lazy to update this blog – oh no indeed! Far from it as a matter of fact. A good Curator is adept at prioritising tasks to ensure the best work is done in the best time so in the last, ahem, four months I’ve simply been working on more time-critical endeavours. Like, erm, digging a pond. And catching up with my hobby of sitting down. And drawing naff cartoons. So there. I will not be giving up the day job. Thanks for asking.   In amongst this there’s been a major funding bid to submit, a conservation-based chemistry course to get stuck into (more in a future blog…) and, last month, a museum to re-open. I know, I know – excuses excuses… Anyway… BACK AT THE SCANNING. What’s going on with the project to digitise my family’s slide collection? Well it’s kind of, erm, done. Yup. 6,451 transparencies all scanned and catalogued, a chronicle of family activities between the early 1960s and 2000. Boom. Done. Oldest and most recent slides. Each is presented
Read more