An image of an article in the Social History Curators Group Newsletter, issue 92, with the headline ‘The Sensational Museum’ and a block of text below.
To the right, a photo of Hannah Thompson, captioned with the beginning of her description, ‘A white woman with shoulder-length hair in shades of grey, brown and blond smiles at the camera. She is wearing thick glasses with tortoise-shell and purple frames. They magnify her unusual eyes and the fine wrinkles beneath them.‘
The visible text says:
Title: The Sensational Museum
Subtitle: Professor Hannah Thompson, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway University of London
Text: Traditional museums can be very sight-dependent places. Visitors move around in silence looking at objects or artworks that are often behind glass. This ‘look and learn’ approach works for some people. But others want to access and process information in ways that are not reliant on what we can or cannot see.
As a partially-blind museum goer, I can enjoy some great audio and tactile experiences in museums across the UK. But why are these experiences so few and far between? My local museum has thousands of objects on display, but only one table of objects for me to touch. In the first phase of our project, which came to an end in December, we wanted to understand how museums think about…[no further text is visible].