Information Versus Facts

Passion, Provocation and Meaning or Information?

This comes from a conversation I’ve had recently with a colleague as well as time spent planning some training for docents at my own institution. The question has come up in two very different settings, but similar contexts. Locally, a docent who is a college student has decided not to attend interpretive training, telling her supervisor that she has some experience with interpretation and knows what themes are, because they are the same as thesis statements. For one of my colleagues, training that she had planned is being resisted by some whale guides who seem to do a great job with facts, but provide no meaning, no connection between the tangible facts and intangible meanings.

Freeman Tilden, in Interpreting Our Heritage, makes a clear distinction between information and interpretation:

Information, as such, is not Interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based on information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.

So if interpretation isn’t the same as interpretation, what’s the difference? What in the heck does ‘revelation’ mean? Facts are things like weight, height, year, acre-feet, and age. By themselves, I think they mean nothing except as a description. Interpretation provides (or can lead to) meaning, context, relevance, and a passionate reaction by the audience. This, of course, ties in with another of Tilden’s principles:

The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

Facts don’t provoke; they are either filed away or quickly forgotten. I have a theory that is half in jest, half serious. I really don’t feel the need to memorize facts. Facts can be found in books. If I memorize them, then the purpose of the book has been wasted, and trees have been harvested for nothing. On the other hand, I realize that I’ve collected thousands of facts over the years. I use them in my work and my life to make points. By giving them context and meaning, I’m using facts to create interpretation.

My colleague’s conversation with the whale guide included a comment from a visitor that she “likes facts.” Good for her, but so what? I think that as a society we tend to gravitate toward stats and superlatives. Biggest, smallest, most expensive, oldest, etc. all are interesting in the same way that we glance at tabloids in the supermarket checkout line. For most of us, they are just curiosities that are chuckled over and quickly forgotten. Facts really don’t mean much without context, and by focusing on superlatives, I think that we’re sort of creating a freak show in our heads.

There are several similar acronyms used to describe Interpretation: EROT (Enthusiastic, Relevant, Organized, Thematic) and POETRY (Personal, Organized, Enthusiastic, Thematic, Relevant, and it’s all up to You) are the two I run across most often. Key to these memory aids is the mention of relevance. I’m sorry to tell you if you haven’t realized it, but mere facts don’t have real meaning unless they are relevant to our audiences, and a fact dump just won’t do that. There may be a short term head nod, a quick “wow!” but there will be little or no retention or impact on our audience’s lives, which is a darned shame.

For the college student who believes that themes and thesis statements are identical, she’s close but not quite on the mark. I think that technically she might be right, at least as to the mechanics of a theme. To quickly review, a theme is a single sentence that expresses what we want our audience to know at the end of an interpretive presentation of some sort. They differ from topics in that they are expressed as sentences, and indicate context and meaning, not just a subject or topics. Here’s a topic:

Transcontinental Railroad

And here’s a theme:

Construction of the transcontinental railroad connected California and the West to the rest of the United States.

It’s a theme that could also be a thesis statement. It’s accurate, but kind of weak. It’s not compelling; it doesn’t cause the reader to think “okay, tell me more.” How about:

Construction of the transcontinental railroad made it logically possible for people to travel quickly across the continent, reuniting families, creating vast new business opportunities, and allowing California’s rich agricultural lands to feed a growing nation.

Now I’m interested! How were families reunited? Long distance travel was now much faster and less expensive. Men who had come west during the Gold Rush could now return home to see families that they had left behind. Families could come west to be reunited with their father. Extended family groups could come together, or even visit each other, going back and forth.
Manufacturers of machines and tools in the East now had new markets in the west. Fast and inexpensive freight allowed manufacturers to grow larger and develop economies of scale, to build huge factories served by rail lines, and quickly and easily ship their products across the continent to many users. This, in turn, sped up development in the West.

Fast shipping allowed agricultural crops, most notably fruit, to be shipped from California across the country. People who had never seen an orange could now get them inexpensively. By opening these larger markets, agriculture literally bloomed in the Central Valley of California, as well as across the prairie.

My second theme has much more depth. It’s provocative, contains some teasers, and contains three related concepts that all spring from one idea. This is quite different from a thesis statement used academically, even if it might technically meet the form.

For the two situations with people who don’t (or don’t want to) know the very real and important difference between interpretation and information or fact dumping, this might be a function of fear, or disinterest, or a fundamental misunderstanding of what Interpretation does for people and society. Maybe this is a symptom of a struggle in my profession as an Interpreter. We’ve never done as good of a job as I hope we would do with justifying our profession, and perhaps if we did, it would be simpler for people to understand the difference between Interpretation and information. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think it’s a very important question.

Themes Can Ruin Your Day

It's an axiom in my business that theme development is vital for creating interpretive programs. They're tough for me many times, and not so easy to explain sometimes, but here is the gist:
A theme is a single sentence (like a thesis statement, sort of) that powerfully or provocatively states the desired effect or outcome of an interpretive program. Put another way, it is the key message that the interpreter hopes to communicate to the visitor.
Themes are amazing. When I've developed a good theme, even related to subjects \that I'm not very familiar with, the program outline seems to cascade downward from the theme as we explore the idea, and it's a marvel to behold.
Right now I'm training an intern, or attempting to. This young person has one of the worst cases of knowing more than older people than anyone I've seen.
So we worked through an NPS training module about theme development, and this young person seems to understand the difference between a sentence and a paragraph. He also seems to have normal hearing, but he doesn't think that a theme needs to be limited to a sentence. As I'm learning, he wants to throw virtually everything I say aside in favor of his 19 year old opinion. He does not accept that a theme can be confined to a sentence. In order to make progress, I analogize a theme to a sound bite, just to keep going. He still disagrees that they need to be only a single sentence. Why?
I'm paraphrasing here, but in essence he said that he hoped to find a more intelligent public that can understand more complex ideas than can be expressed in a single sentence.
Sigh. Some of these days seem very long right now.

Where to Begin?

This afternoon I stopped at the famous overlook of Donner Lake on old US 40 at Donner Pass in California's Sierra Nevada. This is late March, and the Sierra is emerging once again from a cold, snowy winter. However, even though winter has allegedly ended, I've rarely felt as cold as I did when I got out in the stiff NE wind. In fact, it nearly pulled the door off my vehicle as I exited. What really drew me, aside from the incredible view of Donner Lake bathed in sunlight while the surrounding landscape was shaded by clouds, was the energy of a storm front blowing through. There's a school of thought that pressure imbalances release ions in the atmosphere that cause a minor exhilaration for some people, but I just think storms are cool.
My thermometer said 38 deg. Fahrenheit, but the windchill was certainly in the teens or below, and the wind must have been over 40 mph. A dry March followed a cold and snowy February, and it's leaving like a lion. Garrison Keillor claims that

God designed the month of March to show people who don't drink what a hangover feels like.

Donner Lake overlook is one of the most historically significant sites in the United States. In addition to the fabulous view, Donner Pass is arguably the most significant link between California and "back east".
It was within spittin' distance of the viewpoint that the first covered wagons crossed the Sierra in 1844. The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party pioneered the first trail to California, fortunately right here for the '49ers, just a few years later. By spittin' the other way, you might hit petroglyphs etched into granite by Native Americans who sat here before Christ walked the earth.
Just up the hill from there is the Sierra crossing of the transcontinental railroad, built by hundreds or thousands of unknown Chinese working for the Central Pacific railroad in the mid-1860s during a desperate race with the Union Pacific railroad. This particular stretch has two significant features, the 1,654 foot long Summit tunnel and the 75 foot tall "China Wall", a dry laid granite wall and fill spanning a chasm. The wall was built by hand and leverage, and during its active life it supported billions of tons of railroad equipment, freight, and passengers. No one knows how many men died during construction, victims of avalanche, explosion, and exposure. This was the great engineering achievement of the railroad, and though it was de-tracked in 1993, it would still work for trains if the railroad were so interested.
In the early 20th century, the Lincoln Highway, the first automobile route to cross the United States came through this same pass, following a wagon road built in 1864. The list goes on and on.
Did I mention that this is also part of my back yard? Maybe office would be a better description. I'm an interpreter-- naturalist, if you prefer, but I use "Interpreter" because I'm better at cultural history than natural history. Both names have problems. When I say "interpreter," people ask me what languages I speak (a smattering of Spanish and pig latin, just so you know). If I say "naturalist," some people think I'm a nudist (I might tell that story later). I manage the interpretive program for a national forest, and though I worry quite a bit about budgets and politics and the sheer mechanics of finding subjects, developing themes, buying supplies and equipment, hiring staff, and the other stuff, I am constantly amazed and entranced at this amazing opportunity and responsibility I have, and each day is a genuine wonder.
Through what I do, I have the chance to expand people's minds, to alter their perception, and create a constituency for the land. Every year, thousands of people come to our programs, or read our wayside signs, or pick up our publications, or hear a story or song that, if I do my job right, could plant the seed of lifelong learning and appreciation.
It doesn't always work, of course, and even when it does, we don't always have the impact we would prefer, but there are the sublime moments when we connect a visitor to the resource. That "aha!" moment can last a lifetime, and we've had some remarkable experiences with our visitors and clients.
So that's a very long winded way of explaining what I hope this blog will be about-- interpretation. Theory, explanations, successes and failures. Hare-brained ideas and schemes, comments, and frustrations. This is an amazing profession that's given me the opportunity to learn a lot, to share some of what I know, and to have incomparable peers who give me goosebumps when I realize how smart and talented some of them are.
Well, that's my story and I'm stickin' with it. More later.