Bill Watt’s Blog

OK, enough about the hotel. On Thursday I just chilled and walked a bit to get my bearings. Friday was my day in the British Museum (wiki reference) and a chance to see all my favorite pieces including the Rosetta Stone. I’ll have to dig up the pic of Corinne standing next to it from the last time I was there in 1991.

Here’s the truth about me- when I’m in a place like that it makes me wish I had worked harder in college and done something big with my love of History. Teaching, museum work, archaeology… something. It is at these moments I have my biggest delusions of grandeur. Well, it is nice to let my mind wander when I’m in a place like this and think about what might have been. Sadly, the 80/20 rule works well for the start-up world but I never thought it would work for teaching.

I left the hotel at 8:30 and made it pretty quickly to the museum. Happily there is a starbux right across the street so I went in and grabbed a coffee and a muffin and did some reading. They open the doors earlier than they allow you into the exhibits so I wandered around the main area for a bit and mapped out all that I wanted to see. Once the exhibits opened I just wandered for 2 hours or so. The Rosetta Stone was right inside the door to the gallery I first entered and it is still impressive to me even after all these years. To think that this one message carved in 3 different languages provided the key to understanding hieroglyphics is really impressive. Thinking about the potentially equally impressive finds being destroyed in the Middle East right now saddens me (and I know it is an Argument from Silence… allow me this one).
The mummies are still a big draw and I had several folks stop to ask me if I’d seen them and how to get there as I wandered other parts of the museum. I find it really interesting how they lay out the technologies used to inspect mummies and what they can see inside with CAT scans and what not.

I still get the excited feeling inside when I think about what could be done to modernize the exhibits and how to make it more interesting to kids growing up with web 2.0 understandings. The Technology Museum in San Jose had a really cool intereactive element that would be really interesting to tie into these more traditional museums. For instance, in San Jose you get a tag that looks like you’ve checked a bag and each time you go to an exhibit you scan the bar code on the exhibit and it logs your interest for later viewing. No personally identifiable information is collected but the viewer can acess the museum website later and see the list of exhibits they liked, customize the order, and do some simple presentation editing if they’d like to make their interests public. The user can also get a link that they can include in a blog or other site that could be a really interesting way to get people back to the real world museum.

Think about a world where each exhibit has display screens and when you scan your bar code you’ve told them your prefered language and the associated commentary displays in that language. With the world of outsourced translation all the text could be localized and displayed in many languages instead of just English, French and German.
See, told you. Delusions of grandeur.

Mangelo- lest you worry that I was all touchy feely on this excursion, I did stop a few folks who were touching different exhibits. I love that the British Museum has guided tours where people who can’t see are able to touch some of the exhibits to experience what the rest of us see. The signs clearly say the rest of us should not touch because it wears down the stones over time. It drives me nuts when people think they are above the rules like that.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 11:00 PM and is filed under Sabbatical, Media, About Me, Technology, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.