The exhibit#

SLOP8374 · Week 12

The museum problem#

Your audience has never seen your dig site and never will.

A museum solves this every day: narrative first, artefacts in support, interpretation offered, judgement invited.

Structure#

1. The site — what it was, who built it, when
2. The excavation — your findings
3. The diagnosis — cause of death, with evidence
4. The ethics — should it come back?
5. The restoration — what you brought back, and what you left

Why that order#

The audience has to care about the project before they can care about your analysis of it.

Lead with method and you have written a report. Lead with the thing and you have made an exhibit.

The commonest failure#

Presenting all twelve weeks, evenly, in order.

You did twelve weeks of work. You are showing the three findings that earned the conclusion. The rest is in the written companion.

What makes a great exhibit#

The best of them make an audience care about a codebase they have never seen and will never use.

• Specificity — one well-told story, not twelve findings listed
• Evidence — artefacts the audience can see for themselves
• Voice — your interpretation, not just the data
• Stakes — why this particular death is worth the room’s attention

The written companion#

2000 words that complement the presentation rather than transcribe it.

Put the detail here: the full stratigraphy, the complete restoration log, the evidence you cited in passing.

What you will read differently#

You have spent a semester reading one codebase more carefully than its authors ever did.

That is now a thing you know how to do — including on code you wrote, which will one day be somebody else’s dig site.

Required reading#

Tilden, F. (1977 [1957]) Interpreting Our Heritage, 3rd edn. University of North Carolina Press. Chapters 1–3.

Serrell, B. (2015) Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, 2nd edn. Rowman & Littlefield. Chapters 1–2.