We are in the midst of a second Age of Enlightenment. Just as industry and education made possible the creation, mass distribution, and consumption of printed materials in the 17th and 18th centuries, digital technology and the Internet today make possible the creation, mass distribution, and consumption of  a variety of media. (It makes you wonder what René Descartes would have posted on YouTube.) At interpretive sites, digital media are becoming more and more integral to the visitor experience, and interpreters are becoming more tech-savvy. (At the 2010 NAI National Workshop, a preworkshop session on podcasting was the first to fill and had a long waiting list.)

Some digital media—podcasts, interactive kiosks, etc.—are perfect complements to the first-person interpretation one finds at many sites. Some media, like television and radio, are meant for an entirely different audience—individuals who are not onsite and may never visit the site being interpreted. There are challenges and benefits that make mass-media interpretation different from the program an interpreter delivers onsite, but the goal remains the same—to create intellectual and emotional connections.

And as always, interpreters are a resourceful lot. Creating a radio program or a television show might sound like an expensive proposition, and getting it on the air in the first place seems like it would be a formidable challenge. These are obstacles that can be overcome through increasingly affordable, high-tech equipment and partnerships with local radio and television stations.

This issue of Legacy tells the stories of interpreters who have taken their stories to the airwaves. The feature articles in the following pages detail the challenges of interpreting for a large, anonymous audience, the technical issues involved with creating television and radio programs, and where to go to find a home for your program.

Most importantly, this issue discusses how mass media make it possible for interpreters to document their important messages for posterity, and to get those messages out into the world on a large scale. As this second Age of Enlightenment puts the ability to disseminate information into the hands of the many, interpreters are taking advantage.

NAI Art and Publications Director Paul Caputo can be reached at pcaputo@interpnet.com. Send letters to the editor for publication to legacy@interpnet.com.

I consider it one of my most important responsibilities as a parent to provide a broad world view and expose my children to different cultures—not just in terms of language, food, and dress, but as a way of looking at the world. To that end, my wife and two children went with me when I attended NAI’s International Conference in Townsville, Australia, earlier this year. Before the trip, we anticipated kangaroos, koalas, beaches, and tropics, but it was an event at the Townsville Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Centre that provided one of the most memorable moments. The site features interpretive exhibits, a thoroughly thematic gift shop, and musical and dance performances by aboriginal people in traditional garb.

Our children watched the dancers and musicians with rapt attention. Joel, age 6, bobbed his head to the beat of the drums. Three-year-old Maya laughed and tried to emulate a traditional dance that mimicked the motions of a kangaroo. Then Joel’s and Maya’s eyes widened when the performers stepped off the stage to interact with visitors. After an initial hesitation—not just on the part of my children but of everyone in the audience—visitors crowded around to converse and take photos together. The seal had been broken, and the performer-audience relationship quickly shifted to one of human beings talking about everyday things like clothes and food. One group of performers was a family that included children only marginally older than Joel. Both sets of parents watched and smiled as the aboriginal children and Joel (barely) interacted. I snapped the photo here—one of my favorites—and encouraged Joel to ask questions, but he was overcome with shyness, perhaps because of the growing group of onlookers.

After the visit, Joel and Maya found their voices and peppered my wife and me with questions about the aboriginal culture. We certainly didn’t have every answer (who does?), but the fact that our kids were asking the questions told me that the site had achieved its goals. As my children grow up, I hope that there will continue to be places where they can go to ask questions and learn about cultures other than their own, not just abroad but at the many that exist here in the United States.

Nikko National Park in Japan plays host to striking natural beauty and fascinating cultural heritage, including the 17th-century Toshogu Shrine. I took a day trip to Nikko in 2008, and stood in awe of the ornate, magnificent buildings like the five-story pagoda pictured here.

“This” pagoda was built in 1650. I put the word “this” in quotes because I’m not sure that there’s another grammatical construct that encapsulates the way the history of this building was explained on site. The actual, physical pagoda in this image is an 1818 reconstruction built after the 1650 original was destroyed by fire. In fact, many of the historic buildings we saw in Japan were either partially restored or completely reconstructed, but interpretive materials made little distinction between the originals and newer, restored versions. I frequently had to dig to learn that some “historic” buildings we visited were actually replicas from as recently as the 1970s.

I learned through conversations with park staff that this was not an attempt at deception, but a reflection of a cultural belief that the essence of a building is in its original purpose—that this reconstruction and the original 1650 building are in fact one and the same. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the current iteration featured slight (or not-so-slight) “improvements” over the original, and I felt a mild sense of disappointment knowing that the construction in front of me was not actually built in the 17th century, but I was aware that these thoughts were born of cultural differences. Ultimately, I was glad to have the opportunity to witness a significant cultural artifact first-hand.

This issue of Legacy explores the sometimes-sticky issue of restoration—natural and cultural—at interpretive sites. What are the challenges of restoring resources and of interpreting those restored resources? Where do you draw the line between restoration and maintenance? What is the difference between restoration and conservation? And can the authors in this issue discuss the topic without using as many quotation marks as I did?

At first, I chuckled at the image of a bunch of nerds wearing Spock ears and speaking Klingon arguing the finer points of particle physics with a Johns Hopkins University physicist. But as I read the article, I realized that I was feeling a sense of disappointment myself. I understand that, even if humans ultimately develop the capacity for interstellar travel, I’m probably not on the short list of who gets to make the trip. But I’ve always imagined that long after my time on Earth, our species would find a way to explore the universe and maybe even find other life out there, so, to me, it’s terrible news that travel at light speed may simply not be physically possible.

One of my all-time favorite reads is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy by Douglas Adams. Growing up, at night before going to sleep, I used to open one of the books to a random page and start reading. In the third book, Life, the Universe, and Everything, the protagonist, a helpless, overwhelmed earthling named Arthur Dent thrust unwillingly into exploring the universe with his alien friend, reads this passage in The Guide:

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

This issue of Legacy addresses the interstellar dreamer in all of us. We may never know “what the universe is for and why it is here,” but who better than interpreters to talk about that wonder we feel when we look up at the night sky?

NAI Art and Publications director Paul Caputo can be reached at pcaputo@interpnet.com. Send letters to the editor for publication to legacy@interpnet.com.

When the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series in 2008, I felt like I had accomplished the feat myself. After a lifetime of rooting for a team that had experienced what can politely be described as minimal success, I surprised even myself with the intensity of my reaction to their claiming the ultimate prize. Watching the last few outs in my living room in Colorado, I cringed, sweated, and ultimately cheered along with close to 50,000 fans in Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, 1,800 miles away. Here was my favorite team in my favorite sport—a team that had heretofore won the World Series only once in its 125-year history—accomplishing something I never thought I would see in my adult life.

My wife, who is completely baffled by my affinity for team sports, stopped asking long ago why I allow myself to be affected so deeply by millionaire strangers playing a game in their pajamas. This is a good thing, because there’s no rational way to explain it. But when the final out was recorded, I thought of my father, who raised us on baseball in what is largely a football town; my sister, a lifelong fan; and my brother, who was actually in the stands when it happened. I thought of my friends in what I still think of as “back home”—as well as countless strangers in the stadium or elsewhere in the greater Philadelphia area—hugging, high-fiving, and crying tears of joy.

I thought, too, of the place itself. Citizens Bank Park debuted in 2004 and has been home to relatively good teams since its inception—unlike now-defunct Veterans Stadium, where I suffered through countless losses throughout my youth and young adulthood. As with most new ballparks, it’s a beautiful place in terms of aesthetics and architecture, whether you care about the game or not. But if you’re a fan, stadiums are like cathedrals, and standing in their shadows evokes memories of deeply emotional experiences shared with thousands of like-minded individuals.

In August 2008, just two months before the Phillies won the World Series, I took a guided tour of Citizens Bank Park. Obviously, many of the people who take tours of stadiums already have emotional and intellectual connections to the place, so the guide’s challenge is more to facilitate a meaningful experience than to create those connections.

Of course, much of the thrill of the pregame tour was being on the field while larger-than-life superstars took batting practice, but even empty rooms in the depths of the stadium brought a thrill. At each stop on the tour, our guide gave us minimal information and let us simply soak it in.

Two months later, when fireworks popped and the players celebrated their championship on the field, I watched on TV, remembering what the stadium looked like when I saw it from home plate during that tour. Whenever players and managers take questions during interviews in the media room, I remember the brief moment I stood behind that podium, trying to imagine flash bulbs popping and reporters shouting questions.

When Harry Kalas, Phillies announcer for literally my entire lifetime, passed away suddenly in 2009, one of my first thoughts was of visiting the broadcast booth where he worked his magic. I’ll forever remember a headset labeled “Harry” and our guide’s simple statement, “Harry Kalas sits here.”

In the field of interpretation, it’s easy to think of traditional natural and cultural resources like parks, museums, and historical sites when we talk about creating emotional and intellectual connections. But sports are a huge part of our heritage, not just in the United States but worldwide.

Many of us have some connection to something related to sports, whether we play or spectate, whether it’s professional, college, amateur, or just an informal game played by children in a neighborhood. This issue of Legacy addresses the interpretation of sports, from a Mesoamerican ballgame with origins more than 3,500 years ago to contemporary youth baseball leagues, from the marshes of a New Jersey-based birdwatching event to the skies over New Mexico interpreted in the Anderson Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum. 

NAI Art and Publications director Paul Caputo can be reached at pcaputo@interpnet.com. Send letters to the editor for publication to legacy@interpnet.com.

Note about the cover: Visit www.interpretationbydesign for a discussion on the ethics of the Photoshop techniques used on the cover of this issue.

Sure, as a member of NAI’s staff, I spend most of my time at these events performing the mundane tasks associated with running a workshop or conference—hauling boxes, pushing carts, setting up audiovisual equipment, fielding questions, etc. But I get a charge out of attending these events because my days are punctuated by short conversations with NAI members. Sometimes someone I have never met has an idea for a Legacy article and wants to run it by me. Sometimes someone I have known for years wants to talk about what the Phillies should do with the back end of their bullpen. Regardless of the topic, these conversations remind me that the magazine I help put together represents the collective knowledge and experiences of this diverse NAI community.

At the most recent such event, the 2009 NAI National Workshop in Hartford, Connecticut, I had the privelege of announcing the recipients of NAI’s 2008 magazine awards, as determined by volunteer judges from within the NAI community:

• Outstanding Cover Photo: Kelly Farrell, “How and Why a Regular Person Like Me Attended NAI’s First International Conference,” The Interpreter, Jan./Feb. 2008
• Outstanding Feature, Legacy: John C.F. Luzader, “What Conflicts We Orators Have,” May/June 2008
• Outstanding Feature, The Interpreter: Doug Capra, “Seven More Words Interpreters Should Know,” Sep./Oct. 2008
• Outstanding Column, The Interpreter: Kirk Carter Mona, “A Lifetime of Memories,” Nov./Dec. 2008

This issue of Legacy addresses community-based interpretation. As I have come to expect with each issue, members of NAI’s community found thought-provoking and diverse ways to address the topic. I hope you will consider checking out upcoming themes (online at www.interpnet.com, under “Publications”) and contributing your own knowledge and experiences to this community.

As a child, I visited Williamsburg, Virginia, with my family. Prior to the trip, I spent months anticipating a day at an amusement park called Busch Gardens. I was consumed with and petrified by a roller coaster called the Loch Ness Monster, which featured multiple loops and a 114-foot drop. I studied photos of the roller coaster in a Busch Gardens brochure and wondered if I would have the courage to get into one of those metal, yellow cars when the time came to do so. (I would, and it was great.)

My 10-year-old brain had blocked out the fact that Busch Gardens would only be one part of a vacation that included several other sites. So you can imagine my surprise when, on the first day of the trip, I found myself not on the greatest roller coaster ever, but watching a living history interpreter in period costume demonstrate how Colonial-era Americans made brass doorknockers.

Once I stopped comparing the relative adrenaline rushes associated with the Loch Ness Monster and brass doorknockers, I appreciated the immersive historical experience of Colonial Williamsburg. I may not have understood all of the history I was seeing, but I left (in spite of myself) with an appreciation of how different my life was compared to what it might have been 200 years earlier. I learned something about the origins of my country and the people who made it what it was.

What I did not appreciate at the time was all of the discussions that go on behind closed doors at sites like Colonial Williamsburg. I did not think about how easy it would have been for poorly researched or inexpertly presented first-person interpretation to warp a visitor’s sense of what life was like in the Colonial era. It never occurred to me that management might have chosen to use interpreters in contemporary dress to educate visitors in the third person. Once I bought into the experience, I never questioned that what I was seeing was anything but purely authentic or that there was any other way to present it.

At a site like Colonial Williamsburg, I am confident that the living history presentations were then and continue to be of the highest quality. However, whether it is because of poor planning or a lack of resources, that may not be the case at every site. This issue of Legacy discusses some of the many factors that go into creating and providing effective, genuine historical experiences, and explores the whys and hows of different methods of doing so.

Seven years before Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder made its resounding impact on the field of interpretation (as well as much of the rest of society), another book encouraged all of us to get outside. In fact, John Stilgoe’s book, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places, begins with the directive, “Get out now.” Stilgoe continues:

…Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our century. Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. Forget about blood pressure and arthritis, cardiovascular rejuvenation and weight reduction. Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike, and coast along a lot. Explore.

To be sure, Outside Lies Magic and Last Child in the Woods are different books, written with different purposes in mind. John Stilgoe focuses not only on the natural world, but overlooked details of the man-made environment. (There’s an entire chapter on interstate highways.) Richard Louv addresses the importance specifically of getting children into nature—for their own well-being and to nurture future stewards of the environment. Both books, though, speak to the importance and benefits of unstructured exploration of the environment.

When I get home from work in the evening, I am always thrilled to find my neighborhood teeming with kids (two of them my own) riding bikes, playing baseball, and, in the case of my two-year-old daughter, picking up “roly-polies” to watch them curl up in a ball. Parents watch, chat with one another, and play with the kids. My suburban neighborhood is not a remote wilderness by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel that John Stilgoe and Richard Louv would both approve.

This issue of Legacy focuses on interpretation’s response to the challenge to parents and educators highlighted in Last Child in the Woods—to create opportunities for children to get outdoors. A host of feature articles and commentaries address the roles and responsibilities of interpretive sites, interpreters, and parents in cultivating a love of the outdoors.

Paul Caputo is the art and publications director for the National Association for Interpretation.

In these tough economic times, it seems that everything you read begins with the phrase, “In these tough economic times.” Understandably, we have become consumed by the financial crisis that has dominated headlines, wreaked havoc on the job market, and devastated the global economy. It seems that everything we do is defined in terms of “surviving” the economic downturn—a term that can be taken literally, as interpretive organizations, sites, and programs, not to mention the livelihoods of those who oversee them, are endangered.

Of course, adjusting to the crisis means finding ways to deal with it. One of the things that strikes me whenever I am around NAI members is a sense of community, an innate camaraderie even between folks who have never met each other. (I was warned when I first started with NAI in 2002 that this was “a very huggy group.”) Whether it’s a regional training event, the NAI National Workshop, or the NAI International Conference, there is a kinship among members of this association that I have not felt in other professional groups. In a post on NAI’s blog (www.interpnet.com/naiblog), Amy Lethbridge wrote this about the recent NAI International Conference in Greece:

While I learned a great deal from every session, I must admit that, for me, the magic was in the individuals. Strip away the PowerPoint, the agency and title, and the citations, and what you had was an amazing group of passionate warriors for the earth and our heritage.

So in these tough economic times, I am struck once again by the way interpreters band together and lean on one another. This professional network becomes more than just a vehicle for sharing ideas and information. I witness NAI members at events—or even on e-mail and Facebook—sharing job leads, offering support, or simply lending a compassionate ear. I can honestly say that I have never experienced anything like that as a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) or the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP).

This magazine offers another, more traditional venue for NAI members to offer support to one another. Within these pages you will find some unique and interesting thoughts about how to save money or generate funds for your interpretive program or site. And as always, you have the chance to participate in the discussion, to offer your own helping hand by commenting on these articles online at www.onlinelegacy.org.

Paul Caputo is the art and publications director for the National Association for Interpretation.

This issue marks the completion of a transition that Legacy started at the beginning of the year. Some differences you will see immediately (the typeface used on the magazine’s flag and headlines is different) while others you will discover over time as you read the magazine. However, the magazine continues to contain feature articles that relate to a specific theme (this time, it’s interpretation’s role in for-profit tourism) as well as articles of benefit to the professional interpreter that do not necessarily relate to that theme.

One significant difference with this issue is that thematic feature articles, which were until recently written by freelance journalists and other professional writers, are now written by your peers—interpretive professionals writing about interpretation. Themes through late 2010 are posted online, so I encourage all of our readers to visit Legacy’s page on NAI’s website, www.interpnet.com. (Click on “Publications,” then “Legacy Magazine.”) If you have a story that you’d like to share as it relates to an upcoming theme, please e-mail me your idea.

Columns that do not relate to the theme are listed under “Departments” on the contents page and include such topics as frontline interpretation, inspiration, media, planning and design, technology, and training, among others. Readers will recognize some familiar faces in this and future issues. The regular columnists you’ve come to know over the years, like Alan Leftridge, Kris Whipple, Kirk Mona, and Jon Hooper, to name a few, will continue to appear in the departments. And you’ll see new faces in this and future issues. Again, if you have a topic that fits one of Legacy’s departments or would like to propose a new department, please e-mail me.

It’s a different magazine now than it was a year ago, so it looks different, too. Those who are interested in this sort of thing will notice small design changes throughout the magazine and a significant change in the cover design. (Those who are really interested in this sort of thing should visit NAI’s newest website, www.InterpretationByDesign.com, for more on the changes.)

Most importantly, Legacy continues to strive to meet the needs of NAI members. The first goal of the magazine is to be a useful resource for interpreters, to advance the field of interpretation by sharing ideas and discussing important issues in the field. (You can share your own ideas and discuss issues on Legacy’s online companion, www.onlinelegacy.org. Every article you read in this issue will appear online over the course of the next two months, and you don’t need a username or password to comment.)

NAI’s strength is in its diverse and unique membership, and I hope you will consider the value of making your voice heard, either in this magazine or online.