Under the skin

As visitors to the Museum will know, we have a load of iPads (we were only the second museum in the world to incorporate them into displays) asking our visitors to engage in some controversial or complicated conversations that we are genuinely interested in the answer to. These conversations can all also be found and joined online at www.qrator.org.

We’re starting to change all the questions over, the newest one is:

Do you find skeletons, taxidermy or specimens in fluid more interesting?

When we design our displays, we have to decide what type of specimen should tell the story we want to tell. Should it be a skeleton, a taxidermy mount, or something preserved in a jar? How does your interest differ between them? Does each option mean something different to you?

So what do you think? Get involved in this conversation on the QRator site, or on your next visit. You can also download the free Android and iPhone app “Tales of Things” and find the conversations there.

All the past conversation will be kept live online at www.qrator.org/past-questions

The whole QRator project is a ground-breaking process of visitor engagement, run in partnership with the wonderful UCL Digital Humanities and UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.