Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/museums.

HZ: This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, release the linguistic hounds. Coming up in today's show.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: If you think you're being followed, you quite possibly are.

HZ: To warm-up, here's some word history. The thesaurus sounds like it got its name from a synonyms-loving dinosaur, but it comes from the ancient Greek word "thēsaurus", meaning "storehouse", or "treasure". From the 1590s, there were "thesauriae", early dictionaries that were treasure troves of words, but it was celebrity thesaurus-compiler Peter Mark Roget who first used "thesaurus" as the term for a collection of words grouped together by meaning. And since it was first published in 1852, Roget's Thesaurus has never been out of print. And, in case you're wondering whether there are any synonyms for "thesaurus" in the thesaurus, yes, there are. Including a new word to me: "Onomasticon". What does that mean? It means the same as thesaurus, keep up. On with the show.

HZ: What are your top five reasons for visiting a museum? New gift shop. Café. Fantasy shop for artefacts I'd take home if I could get away with it. Oh, and edify myself by studying important, beautiful, or educational objects. But what's probably not on most people's list is reading the written caption description thingies accompanying those objects. Come to think of it, I don't even know the proper name for the written caption description thingies.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: They're called text panels.

HZ: Thanks.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: But there's a variety of text panels, so there might be introductory text panels, there may be sectional text panels, there may be object labels.

HZ: Rachel Souhami is an exhibition maker, curating and designing exhibitions.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: They're the last thing that you will write or do for an exhibition. An exhibition will take somewhere between two and five years to create. Usually you're at the end of something that's been a very long process.

HZ: You're just wanting to get rid of it...

RACHEL SOUHAMI: You've got to get rid of it, get rid of it now.

HZ: But you can't because there's still a lot of work to do.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: So you have to think about how it is you want to distribute text throughout the exhibition. Let's say you've got an exhibition that's over multiple rooms. For each room, do you want to have a panel that introduces that room? And then, if the objects in that room are sort of divided into different related sections, do you want to have a panel for each section? And then do you have a label for each case of objects, or each individual object? So you have to develop something that is called a text hierarchy. And then from there, we don't want to inundate people with text. That makes it a book, rather than an exhibition, and we know that people don't really read that much text in exhibitions.

HZ: Oh, they don't?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: No, they don't.

HZ: Oh, so all this is for nothing?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: The visitor tracking studies, where... This has been going on since about the 1950s, at least, you sort of watch visitors move through exhibitions and look at what it is that they... Where they go and what they look at and how long they spend in a place.

HZ: We're being spied on?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: You're being, yes, yes.

HZ: Oh great.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: If you're being, if you think you're being followed, you quite possibly are.

HZ: What kind of proportion of people are actually bothering to read?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: About 30 percent.

HZ: Oh.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: So, you know, it's a bit sad, really.

HZ: Seems like a lot of effort for 30 percent uptake, so why bother?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Oh, it's a way of directing a reading. It's a way of saying, "This is what this room is about, this is what this subject is about, this is what you should be thinking about this." Perhaps all of us, museums and the rest of society, have an idea of museums being kind of places of authorised established knowledge, and that if you go to those, you'll see, you know, the official version of "science" or "natural history" or "art history" or whatever. But of course, that isn't the case. They are a version.

And the interesting thing about exhibitions is they're authored. You know, they're put together, they're constructed, like a TV documentary. But we're often not aware of that. It's not made explicit. The credits are, you know, buried away at the end somewhere. You might not necessarily know who's put it together. And so what you're seeing really is one person or group of people's view on this subject. But visitors will come with their own views, and their own interpretations, their own sort of background knowledge. So it's striking a balance. You don't really want to be wishy-washy, but at same time you don't want to say, "This is what you should think about this," because people might want to disagree with you. So I guess there's the question of how much do you want to feed someone a line on either a subject for the exhibition as a whole, or a particular painting, and say, "This is what this is about." It should really be, "This is what we think about this."

HZ: OK, so there's the museum's editorial standpoint, plus the mitigating factor of what the visitors might think, plus the essential facts about the exhibit itself. That's a lot to fit on a little text panel. How do you even go about it?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: You have to be a journalist. So it's the same kind of principles as writing a news article in a way. So short sentences. Don't be too verbose. Don't be too technical. Try to explain the words immediately, but also don't patronise your audience. Try and get the essence of what this panel is about in the first sort of couple of sentences. How it is that you frame an exhibition, and the whole language in which an exhibition is framed and the subject is talked about, actually starts well before you even come to write the text. It starts well before you actually start to write the concept for the exhibition. It comes down to things like... What's the museum? So if you're going to have an exhibition of photography and you're a modern art museum, you might talk about it in a different way than if you're a design or a historical museum. Why are we doing this now? What's the imperative? Who are our sponsors?

HZ: Does that influence the information much?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Well, if you think about, you want to get some money for something, you know, this gallery needs updating, we don't have enough money, where are we going to go for this? How are we going to pitch this in terms of the buzzwords that will get us some money from sponsors? They might be commercial sponsors, they might be public funders, but there's still a kind of way in which one needs to present the project in order to get money, and that will then frame, you know, what it is you're going to do and how it is you're going to talk about it.

HZ: Are there many compromises involved in that kind of situation?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: There can be, and I suppose it depends on how or where you are that this is what you're doing. Because there's a kind of a zeitgeist of how one thinks about subjects, or museums, or exhibitions. What's the purpose? Why do we do this?

HZ: Is it inevitable that an exhibition is going to be a reflection of the time of the exhibition, rather than the objects in the exhibition?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Yes, yes, absolutely. And actually, this is something to think about when you're writing text as well. If it's a permanent collection, that might be up for 10 years, 20 years, so you have to think carefully about the language that you're using. It can't be too contemporary, because it's going to go out of date very quickly, so... And that's another challenge, what happens if you create this exhibition, you know, based on what it is that you know now, or what it is you think now, and then five years down the line new evidence or new information comes to light that goes, "Oh, well, hold on a minute, it's not quite like that," you know, what do you do and how quickly can you change it? And is that just a matter of changing a text label, or do you have to redo the whole exhibition?

HZ: Sometimes there are additional linguistic challenges that are rather unexpected.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: I was working for a well-known science organisation who were putting on an exhibition about genetically-modified foods, and they wanted me to write some text panels about what genetic modification is. But their way of thinking about their audience was that they had a, quote, "scientific literacy", unquote, of a 10-year-old, which means that we need to leave out some terms, like "chromosome" and "gene".

HZ: Difficult to write about genetic modification without using the word "gene".

RACHEL SOUHAMI: It took me two days to write 70 words of text.

HZ: Are there any synonyms for "gene" that are less complicated than "gene"?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: No. So I can't remember quite what I did, but it was convoluted. Would have been much easier to be able to say "gene". And I kind of understand the fear about not wanting to use technical language, but it's very easy to introduce a term and then immediately define it in a sort of completely non-patronising way. Your audience aren't stupid.

HZ: They're in a museum.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: They are in a museum.

HZ: Here's the predicament. Too little text, and visitors might not have all the information they need. Too much, and they might spend too much time reading, and not enough actually looking at the exhibits. Is there an optimal amount of text?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: I mean, it really does vary. So, places... Tate Britain, for example, has minimal text in its new hang, whereas other places have, you know, huge amounts of text. I went to an exhibition. It was a living history exhibition, supposedly, and it was 16 panels of text and four replica objects.

HZ: Seems a bit disproportionate.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: It was a bit disproportionate. I thought it was a shame, because it's not really an... It's not my idea of an exhibition, it's just a lot of text, and actually it's quite exhausting to read. We already know that only 30 percent of people read all that text anyway, and it's a bit dull. You need something, you want something to interact with in some way.

HZ: Well, there needs to be a reason for being there, rather than just reading it in a book or on a website.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Yeah, exactly.

HZ: Do people ever sabotage the text panels, as far as, you know? Write amusing things on them?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Not as far as I know, although I do know exhibitions where people have made guerrilla exhibits. They've put an exhibit in with its own little label. It's called "institutional critique", which is where people will make interventions in an existing exhibition, sort of point out deficiencies in the previous exhibitions, or new ways of thinking about that collection. New histories.

Fred Wilson's a really good example of that. Fred Wilson is an artist, and his most famous example was an exhibition called "Minding the Museum" at the Maryland Historical Society in the States. And this was a sort of old colonial house with sort of very nice, fancy silverware, from sort of the colonial masters. They invited him in to make some interventions, and he went through their collections and found manacles that were used for slaves, and put those in with the fancy silverwork, and called the case "metalwork". So what you get is this juxtaposition of fancy silver stuff and manacles. It's all metalwork, it's all from the same era, it's all from the museum's collections. The manacles previously weren't on display. But it immediately makes a commentary about not only the museum, but that period of history as well. The label for that was just that one word, "metalwork".

HZ: So with just nine letters, the meaning of an exhibit can be transformed. And in fact, the presence of the words in museums, whether you read them or not, makes a critical difference. In 1925, the archaeologist Leonard Woolley was excavating a palace complex in the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Ur. The palace would have been pretty new when Ur was abandoned around 500 B.C., so Woolley and his team were surprised and perplexed when they uncovered a roomful of objects that were hundreds of years older than that... Until they discovered a number of clay cylinders covered in writing in three languages, which turned out to be written explanations of the artefacts they accompanied. Woolley realised they'd unearthed a museum. In fact, the earliest known example of museums as we define them today.

Thanks to the texts, they understood that the room contained a curated collection of objects designed to preserve, commemorate, and interpret the past for viewers in the present. Without the text, it was just a bunch of old stuff. So ignore the text panels at your peril. Although sometimes the exhibitions seem to want to discourage you from reading them.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: I once saw an exhibition that had its text panels at floor level, but it's sort of problematic, because you really have to get down on the floor to see them, so it's not very good if you're sort of very tall, or slightly arthritic, or...

HZ: Was it an exhibition for snakes and babies?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: No, it was an art exhibition. It was all sort of hung on the wall. It was really weird. But again, I think it's that thing about, we want the works to stand on their own. You know, you have to see the works and then not be distracted by the text.

HZ: But then, just don't have it.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Yeah, but then people complain because there's no text. So it's that odd thing of people don't read the text, but they kind of want it there.

HZ: As well as putting on exhibitions, Rachel Souhami produces the Museums Showoff live show. Visit museumsshowoff.org for dates of the next gigs.

This show's online home is theallusionist.org, where I've been posting some of your very interesting correspondence about previous episodes. Click the "Extra Allusionism" tab to read it. And seek out @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter. I was pretty excited to hear from one of you who is a linguistics professor, at a very esteemed university, who gave one of his classes the assignment of listening to the c-bomb episode of this show, which is both very flattering and very worrying.

Before we go, your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Caprine. Adjective. Related to or resembling a goat or goats.

Try using it in an email today.

This episode of The Allusionist was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, and there'll be another in a fortnight.