Blogs Media Lab

Podcasting museum audio tours – the sanctioned and unauthorized

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Everybody’s talking about podcasting, and as we prepare to push out Walker’s Art on Call files as a subscription, several of our sister institutions have beaten us to the punch. Last week MoMA was #23 (today #45) in the iTunes most subscribed podcast directory, and I’m told that SFMOMA is close to releasing a tour [...]

Everybody’s talking about podcasting, and as we prepare to push out Walker’s Art on Call files as a subscription, several of our sister institutions have beaten us to the punch. Last week MoMA was #23 (today #45) in the iTunes most subscribed podcast directory, and I’m told that SFMOMA is close to releasing a tour of their Richard Tuttle exhibition. While these are official audio guides, the media has been attentive to the unauthorized tours produced by the writers of Slate Magazine for the Met’s modern gallery, and Art Mobs, a podcasting project at Marymount Manhattan College where students did tours of MoMA for a class in communications arts.

This week’s On the Media did a segment on podcast alternative audio guides. Here’s some of what I heard:

  • Conversations about art–as opposed to monologues–can be more interesting for some museums visitors.
  • The Daily Show’s piece on Christo’s Gates was inspiration for at least one of the Art Mobs students.
  • Alternative audio commentary is not intended to undermine or replace the art historian but laymen should be able to find a way to engage with art that’s not intimidating.
  • MoMA’s deputy director of education reports that usage of their audio guides is up. About 33% of MoMA’s visitors are using the audio guides since July 1st when they started offering them for free (well, that’s after you pay the $20 admission fee). Prior to that it was about 5%.
  • MoMA let’s you download the same files through their website or iTunes.
  • MoMA is “intrigued” by Art Mobs and sees the educational possibilities for a younger population.
  • Fun is good when embedded with real pieces of information.
  • MoMA doesn’t think alternative audio commentaries eclipse the scholarly perspective of the work. Instead, it enhances the possibilities for people’s engagement.

So, my question is “ Are people really downloading this material and bringing it into the museum on their mp3 players?” Unlike most podcasts, these programs–whether produced by the museum or an involved public–have limited appeal divorced of the work. Walker will be riding this wave (bubble) and making our audio commentary available as a podcast … but we’re really hedging our bets on the cell phone.

Diagramming and generally great Flash resource.

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Samuel Wan has a lot of very helpful Flash demos on his site. He has taken the time to solve a lot of problems that many of us Designer/Developers come across over and over. I was particularly interested in Xilhouette 1.0 project. It is a live XML visualizer written in Flash. If your interested but [...]

Samuel Wan has a lot of very helpful Flash demos on his site. He has taken the time to solve a lot of problems that many of us Designer/Developers come across over and over. I was particularly interested in Xilhouette 1.0 project. It is a live XML visualizer written in Flash. If your interested but don’t have an XML file handy try pasting the source view of this page into it. Quite a nice simple radial layout.

Also anyone who is was a fan of the Smart Money Market Map or the News Map might like to see Samuel Wan’s Blog Tree Map. It is the same graphing concept executed in Flash with Creative Commons licensed FLA files available for download.

radial graph

mnartists.org RSS feeds

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We’ve launched RSS feeds for mnartists.org this week. There’s a feed for all recent artwork, articles, events/news, and one for each individual artist as well! (it’s on their homepage) The exciting bit is how it handles associated media – if there is some audio, it automatically formats the feed like a podcast, which means a [...]

We’ve launched RSS feeds for mnartists.org this week. There’s a feed for all recent artwork, articles, events/news, and one for each individual artist as well! (it’s on their homepage)

The exciting bit is how it handles associated media – if there is some audio, it automatically formats the feed like a podcast, which means a feed made up of audio tracks will just work in iTunes as a podcast! Check it out from the new music CD collection: The Music of Here. Now.

Finally, I re-did the caching for that site so that when it caches a page it will last for at least 10 minutes instead of expiring as soon as some new content gets added to the site. Things tend to get added in flurries, and this will help spread the load (I hope…).

Research into diagramming methods

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I’m researching different diagramming methods today. Focussing especially on interactive diagrams of small data sets (20-100 items) using nodes and lines. Hyperbolic Tree example: Plant Classifications explanation: from Deep Green in depth:full details Graphical trees provide an intuitive way to display hierarchically organized information like biological classifications and phylogenies. Unfortunately, however, as static trees incorporate [...]

I’m researching different diagramming methods today. Focussing especially on interactive diagrams of small data sets (20-100 items) using nodes and lines.

Hyperbolic Tree

example: Plant Classifications

explanation: from Deep Green

in depth:full details

Graphical trees provide an intuitive way to display hierarchically organized information like biological classifications and phylogenies. Unfortunately, however, as static trees incorporate increased information, they become cumbersome and confusing. Hyperbolic trees, which are a dynamic representation of hierarchical structure, are an effective way to display complex trees clearly.

Focusing on one part of the diagram while minimizing the diagram around the peripherey is a powerful tool. The full hyperbolic tree model is geared toward large data sets but aspects of it could be used on a smaller set.

Animated Radial Layout

example: Video in AVI format

There is one center node with other nodes spread out at different fixed levels of orbit at fixed distances from the center. Each node in the set can be moved to the center causing other nodes to move into a new position reflecting their distance from the new center node.

Full explanation: Ka-Ping Yee’s GTV page

Flickr Graph

Created by Marcos Weskamp the Flickr Graph maps connections between people using Flickr. It looks like a mix of methods used in the Hyperbolic model mentioned above and the Radial layout. Items disappearing from the edge resemble the hyperbolic model while the radial distance seems logically from the other.

Maps to small and medium data sets. The node sizes do not scale so it can not handle very large sets.

They Rule

They Rule is a diagram using node (each person) and line method and user interaction to assign position. Interesting to note the connections are drawn as you explore the chart, it is not all laid out for you ahead of time. Allowing the user to expand, contract, move and close nodes allows this relatively simple diagram to hold a large amount of content.

sources:

Many sources found on Tamara Munzer’s presentation online as well as her Information Visualization class page. Original source Pasta and Vinegar.

Rhizome member location now includes cities

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Rhizome.org, one of the leading new media arts organizations, recently added location sorting to it’s member index. Today I saw they pushed it a step further by adding a city grouping. This is a great addition to an already deep resource. They added a new pull down field for the city so I would encourage [...]

Rhizome.org, one of the leading new media arts organizations, recently added location sorting to it’s member index. Today I saw they pushed it a step further by adding a city grouping. This is a great addition to an already deep resource. They added a new pull down field for the city so I would encourage all you Rhizome members to go out there and add yourself to the nearest city. I just added myself to Minneapolis but it otherwise appears quite anemic, just one other member in Minneapolis so so far.

Visual Arts Blog

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The brand new Visual Arts Blog is off to a great start with their first post by Doryun Chong. Thats great documentation and a good read. Thanks Doryun!

The brand new Visual Arts Blog is off to a great start with their first post by Doryun Chong. Thats great documentation and a good read. Thanks Doryun!

Combined Walker Blogs (again)

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Feedshake is now in beta 2 and expiring all of their beta 1 feeds. Our original combined feed was broken anyway – character encoding issue between our sites – so it seemed like a good time to fix it all. You can now and for the future find the Combined Walker Blogs at: http://blogs.walkerart.org/combined Enjoy!

Feedshake is now in beta 2 and expiring all of their beta 1 feeds. Our original combined feed was broken anyway – character encoding issue between our sites – so it seemed like a good time to fix it all. You can now and for the future find the Combined Walker Blogs at:

http://blogs.walkerart.org/combined

Enjoy!

Competition between charts

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Doing some more trolling on the internet for successful blogging advice to share with my colleagues I found these two sites that track popularity of weblogs. Truth Laid Bear claims to be “widely regarded as the definitive weblog ranking system” although truth be told I have always much prefered Technorati’s Top 100 page myself. It’s [...]

Doing some more trolling on the internet for successful blogging advice to share with my colleagues I found these two sites that track popularity of weblogs.

Truth Laid Bear claims to be “widely regarded as the definitive weblog ranking system” although truth be told I have always much prefered Technorati’s Top 100 page myself.

It’s interesting to note the discrepancy between the two charts. Technorati features the weblog Boing Boing as #1 with 16,913 links but it comes in at #6 on Truth Laid Bear. An even bigger discrepancy is Michelle Malkin’s blog which is #1 on Truth Laid Bear is only #23 on Technorati.

More Productive Blogging

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Doing a bit of research about more effective blogging turned up an article on how to be a more productive blogger by D. Keith Robinson. The To Done weblog itself seems like a deep resource thats worth more of a look.

Our Blogs Reviewed

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Our blogs got a short write up on mnSpeak last week. The post is short to the point and generally honest. The author makes the point that no one at the Walker ” has decided to really own a genre”. This totally makes sense and started me thinking about what a successful blog was and [...]

Our blogs got a short write up on mnSpeak last week. The post is short to the point and generally honest. The author makes the point that no one at the Walker ” has decided to really own a genre”. This totally makes sense and started me thinking about what a successful blog was and maybe it was my chance to clarify our goals with the New Media Blog at least.

So what is a successful blog? You could say a successful blog is a heavily read blog. Like an online popularity contest. I’m sure many readers think successful blog is a frequently updated blog with cool stuff on it or affcianados think a successful blog depends on having high quality original content on it. When we started on our New Media blog we made a concious effort to write original content for the site. This makes our production time longer and our post frequency lower but we did not want our blog to turn into a link mill. Sites like boing boing and We Make Money Not Art are great but a large amount of time goes into filling them up and keeping them interesting.

Being a link mill and growing your blog roll is a fun and easy way to gain readership and add chatter to the “blogosphere” but that is not what we set out to do with our New Media blog. We were trying to contribute original text and images to the internet so other institutions and professionals could learn from our processes, successes and mistakes. I know I was inspired to share our process by talking to people at the Museum Computer Network conference. Our blog seemed like a natural medium to promote a culture of information sharing with our collegues.

So right away the New Media blog was not going to register on many peoples radar as “cool” or “successful” just because it was bound to be a infrequently updated page full of nerdy stuff. (and art institutional nerdy stuff at that!). For our desired audience that could still be considered a success. I know that many of my favorite sites only update once a week and when they do update, I read that post right away because I know it will be quality and no where else on the web.

Every other department has a blog but the direction of their site is up to them. If they choose to make their blog a space to publish what is new and exciting and fresh in their field that could be a great thing. It makes a lot of sense for anyone curating or researching art work to publish short fast posts about “the new and upcoming”. I do know people here (and in general i think) are reluctant to add another technology to their lives unless they see a possible benefit and many of us are struggling to find out how to best serve our audience with this new technology (well it’s new to us anyway).

If you are interested in a lot of posts about “cool” things across mediums or departments I think the creation of our new Off Center Blog or our Monster RSS Feed (just noticed our big feed is down) might be what your after.

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