6th November 2009, 03:50 PM
Vulpes - how many times does someone have to say that they agree (broadly) with what you are saying before you realise and stop resorting to what amount insults?
I'm not hung up on site tours, that's just the first thing that popped into my head and it's a bit difficult to list all the possible permutations of public involvement - I haven't got all day. Although, that does highlight the difficulty - there are so many ways in which you could engage with the public where do you start? How would a brief cover this? It would be like issuing a brief for piece of work without specifying what it even was. Try costing that up!
I would debate the point that academic interest filters down into public interest - how many people people visiting a site would be interested in the minutiae of academic debate, I'm not particularly interested in a lot of it and I'm an archaeologist! It would really depend on who was being told about a site - the information would inevitably have to be pitched somewhere in the middle, and so I doubt you would be able to get much of academic interest into it. In a general way, of course it does, but not necessarily in the sort of detail that, say, a publication might include.
I don't live in a 'particularly apathethic region' (whatever that means) and I am well used to discussing the results of the work that I do with the public at all sorts of levels and in various ways. My initial query was the manner in which public involvement might be catered for, costed, and specified and the difficulties it might cause.
'My old man's a binman,
But he wears an academic's hat,
He wears knackered old combat trousers,
And he lives off less than ?15,000 per annum'
I'm not hung up on site tours, that's just the first thing that popped into my head and it's a bit difficult to list all the possible permutations of public involvement - I haven't got all day. Although, that does highlight the difficulty - there are so many ways in which you could engage with the public where do you start? How would a brief cover this? It would be like issuing a brief for piece of work without specifying what it even was. Try costing that up!
I would debate the point that academic interest filters down into public interest - how many people people visiting a site would be interested in the minutiae of academic debate, I'm not particularly interested in a lot of it and I'm an archaeologist! It would really depend on who was being told about a site - the information would inevitably have to be pitched somewhere in the middle, and so I doubt you would be able to get much of academic interest into it. In a general way, of course it does, but not necessarily in the sort of detail that, say, a publication might include.
I don't live in a 'particularly apathethic region' (whatever that means) and I am well used to discussing the results of the work that I do with the public at all sorts of levels and in various ways. My initial query was the manner in which public involvement might be catered for, costed, and specified and the difficulties it might cause.
'My old man's a binman,
But he wears an academic's hat,
He wears knackered old combat trousers,
And he lives off less than ?15,000 per annum'