How to be a good curator (part 52)

July 12 2018

Video: British Museum

Here's our favourite British Museum curator, Dr Irving Finkel, talking about ghosts in Mesopotamia. The video has had over 15,000 views in less than a month on the British Museum's YouTube channel. What's remarkable about it is that it's just Dr Finkel sitting in a chair talking about objects, which we occassionally see images of. Nothing fancier than that.

All you need to make a good video like this, through which you can engage new audiences on an otherwise obscure topic (Dr Finkel is the BM's 'curator of cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia', which on one level is about as niche as it gets), is to know your stuff and be good at telling stories.

Unfortunately, knowing your stuff is actually the easy part. Telling good stories is harder than we think. We need more Dr Finkels.

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