New Media Initiatives

Jennifer Trant and David Bearman know how to stage a good conference. Museums and the Web 2009 continued the tradition of inspiring a community of museum professionals to do more, stay connected, and advocate principles of openness, sharing, and participation within and among our institutions. In no particular order, here are some of my takeaways:

Gotta do a game
I’d read about but didn’t understand SAAM’s “Ghosts of a Chance” until now. Can’t say that we’ll do an ARG but Georgina Goodlander’s enthusiasm is infectious and the programming that’s happening as a result of goac is something to emulate. Group activities, family and school programs, sms combined with looking at art = serious time spent at museums, fun, and engagement. “Fancy a cuppa?” Read her paper and play a sample game by sending the text message ‘goac black’ to 95495.

I never liked evaluation until there was WolfQuest
WolfQuest is a 3D wildlife simulation game developed by Eduweb and the Minnesota Zoo. Dave Schaller and Kate Haley Goldman reported on the evaluation, incomplete but three-fourths baked. The great thing about this evaluation is the sheer volume of data, no statistically insignificant results here. This is one of those rare instances where follow-up interviews with surveyed users reveals whether they actually did what they said they would as a result playing the game (e.g., lookup info about wolves on the Internet, make art related to wolves, visit a zoo). An unfortunate truth is we only do evaluation where funding requires it, and we rarely get the information needed to truly inform new versions or future initiatives. This project proves otherwise.

The conference that Twitter made
Twitter was the talk and technology of the conference. MW2009 was among Twitter’s top 10 trending topics, even claiming #1 on Friday.  I will admit to not liking the Twitterfall on screen during the opening plenary—too much of a distraction—BUT the conference vibe and distillation of what people were thinking, feeling, seeing as evidenced on Twitter was amazing. Reading the topic feed provided entry into sessions that I hadn’t been able to attend and helped me select must-read papers for the flight home.

IMA puts Indy on the map
From Max Anderson’s opening keynote “Moving from Virtual to Visceral” and the generous sharing of information about cloud computing and ArtBabble to the Friday night reception and chance to wander the gardens and galleries, the Indianapolis Museum of Art set a high bar for local hosts. IMA is reason enough to come back to Indy (that and the Children’s Museum which I didn’t get to). Also, must say I loved the airport:  small, clean, pretty with all the amenities (ample Starbucks, free WiFi) and I could check-in with an electronic boarding pass on my phone.

Winning is nice
The Walker’s My Yard Our Message won best of the web in the innovation category. For a team that’s been feeling like it lost the “new” in media during the long ArtsConnectEd development effort, this was nice. But the big winner was Brooklyn, who took top honors for exhibition (Click! A-Crowd Curated Exhibition), on-line community or service (Brooklyn Museum Collection, Posse, and Tag! You are It!), and best overall site (brooklynmuseum.org). Sadly, the award coincided with the museum’s announcement of cost-saving measures in response to economic challenges. Among these actions, a moratorium on staff travel, which meant no one from Brooklyn attended the conference. Instead they sent a video acceptance speech thanking their director, team members + dogs, and above all the audience and participants that made it all possible. I was nearly in tears.

Resolution
Having been referred to as a “seasoned webster” in the conference Twitter stream, I resolve to stop expressing the feeling of being old. I have yet to figure out the reward for colleagues catching me in the act of “old” behavior but there will be one. Really, I’m not that old, I’ve just been in the game for more years than most M&W participants and … okay, I’m exhibiting old/been there behavior.

Nina Simon
Nina’s mantra—translate those digital experiences into the physical space of the museums—is something we’re trying to do at Walker in the upcoming reinstallation of the collection. She started her mini-workshop with the British comedy sketch “Facebook in Reality” (a must watch if you haven’t already http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs) and then showed examples from Harrah’s gift card to the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book return/tagging exchange as examples of integrating technology into the visitor experience. Seemingly simple, great examples (read Nina’s paper), but oh so hard to do (as in coming up with the good idea). I’m still wrestling with her closing observations about the disconnect between IMA’s online and physical presence but her ideas are nonetheless aspirational.

Going home
We got great feedback on ArtsConnectEd, just what we needed going into the May 4th public soft launch. We developed the content submission technology—collection records exported in CDWA Lite XML format and harvested with OAI-PMH—to support the future possibility of including other collections but weren’t prepared for the number of people asking how they could get their stuff into the repository. It all holds great promise but there are a few politics to work out on our end.

Charlie Moad (developer at IMA) kicks off the session with a discussion of cloud computing, the advantages and disadvantages.  One of his most compelling arguments in a non-technical sense is the incredible energy efficiency of these large data centers: their cooling system and power use are at levels we can’t approach in our co-located server rack. Google is approaching a 1.1:1 ratio of cooling to power consumption. They’ve recently documented their cooling and datacenter practices here.

Other advantages Charlie mentioned for using Cloud computing:

• Scalability
• Pay as you go. This is the big benefit. You use what you need when you need it, also helping the efficency.
• No hardware to administer. No downtime. This makes sysadmins very happy.

Some disadvantages are:

• Security. (Not sure on this… don’t recall amazon or google having any big issues with security. This is in the hands of us doing their jobs and setting proper permissions.)
• Portability. AWS and Google App Engine (GAE) are proprietary systems. GAE has more issues in this realm than AWS.

One other thing to note about Google App Engine that Charlie didn’t mention is that GAE is a spec, and from what I’ve heard from various python people, Google very much wants it to be implemented by others. There is already an open source implementation of AppEngine called AppScale. And Joyent has an implementation called ReasonablySmart.

IMA is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting ArtBabble. A simple breakdown of their usage thus:

• EC2 instances for transcoding video
• S3 and CloudFront for storing video and media files (images/js/etc)
• Wowza streaming server running on EC2 for streaming video

Cloud computing structure for ArtBabble

Charlie had a nice slide I don’t remember being in the paper: a diagram of where these services sit in the cloud (storage vs service) and what the end user’s browser is actually talking to at any time. It sounds like changing the number of wowza instances is still a manual process, but I imagine it could be automated.

The stats are impressive: 40,000 video views since launch 9 days ago, and 3,500 registered users.  They’re cleverly using Google / Yahoo sign-ins to create OpenID accounts, without telling people it involves OpenId.  Uptake is much higher by hiding the technology on this process…  Also impressive is the cost, or lack thereof: they’re able to run ArtBabble for the same cost as their internal website.

Charlie closes by mentioning a few recent advances in Amazon’s hosting that allows essentially pre-paying for a year’s service at a much discounted rate.

I think I’m not the only webmaster in the audience who is thinking “we have to move our sites into the cloud,” but also concerned about finding the time to do so.  This paper and presentation have gone a long way towards answering some questions I haven’t been able to research fully.

Jusitn Heideman also contributed to this post.

For the past month or two, we have been working on changes to mnartists.org. We deployed some of these changes several weeks ago, and just deployed even more now. I thought I would take some time to highlight the enhancements and new goodies.

Homepage

The first change you’ll notice when visiting the site is that the home page got an overhaul. The rotators for New Artwork and Featured Collections were changed to display images to the full-size of their boxes and they animate smoother. This means sometimes cropping work, but we think it’s a trade-off worth making.

Articles are also displayed with a three-tier hierarchy, allowing the site to call recent writing out more prominently, even though we feature six instead of 10. The sidebar on the homepage has also been reorganized, bringing the mnartists.org blog to the top and adding links to the Facebook and Twitter profiles for mnartists.org.

The revised homepage.

Revised article page

Articles

Articles got some attention in several ways. First, we changed the way images are displayed by adding a larger expanding gallery at the top of each article, rather than having small images thumbnails listed down the left side. On the back end for editors, we also added an enhanced editor (tiny mce) to allow for richer control over formatting and even embedding other media.

Social media Sharing
Across many areas of the site, you’ll now see a link to Share this article/artwork/collection/event. Using much of the same code we developed for the Walker Calendar, sharing is now easier on mnartists.org. We connect with Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Delicious, Google Bookmarks, and Yahoo Bookmarks, as well as rolling in email links in a few places.

The new sharing links.

Search

The one change that will probably make everyone cry tears of joy is the search results refinement. We’ve heard lots of complaints about the search, not wholly unfounded. The search actually works pretty good, but the simple search weights everything more or less equally. If you search for someone’s name, hoping to just get their artist page, it will be in the results, but there might be other things that rank higher.

The revised search result page lets you change your simple search into an advanced search, using tabs above the results to select the type of resource you want to search for. This is very similar to what google does with their search results refinements (web, images, video, maps, etc.).

Old style search results

New search results with refinements.

Artist Pages

Artist pages also got an overhaul with two big changes. First, images for each artwork will display at a new, larger size, about 519px tall and/or 520px wide. For artworks with more than one image associated, a gallery rotating gallery will cycle through the images. Previously, if an artwork had more than one image associated, only the first would show up, and the rest would be listed in the “Related Media” list.

Old artist homepage.

Revised artist page.

Secondly, we changed the way Related Media works. Now, it is simply “Media List” lists every type of media associated with an artwork. More importantly, for non-image media, such as video and audio, we embed the media in the actual page. So if you upload a quicktime file, the quicktime embed code will be generated and put right into the page. MP3 audio files will be played with the jwplayer flash player, making audio on the site a lot more nifty. We’re using the excellent jquery.media plugin to do this.

This approach to handling media isn’t without some issues, but given the variety of media already on the site and our resources to work on it, this is the best solution. We are looking at making more substantial changes to this in the future, but this is a good incremental improvement.

Artwork with video before changes.

Artwork with video after changes. (Two video files attached)

The image size and media enhancements have also been applied to the collections area of the site.

Editing text

Another change we made a month ago was adding a visual editor to various form fields on the site. Prior to the change, users could only enter a very limited selection of markup to entries, [b] for bold, [i] for italic, and [a] for a link. We’ve eliminated that and replaced it with the new editor (tiny_mce), which allows for bold, italic, underline, unordered lists, and links. While seemingly simple, it was actually quite a challenge to deal with both the legacy code and the new formatting. The text actually goes through several transformations between the editor, the database, and being displayed again. Keeping everything consistent is a non-trivial pile of regular expressions.

The new visual editor.

One thing that we will have to keep an eye on is users pasting in text from Microsoft Word. Word tends to shove a bunch of garbage pseudo-html into the clipboard, and when pasting, it can be difficult to filter out. The editor has a button to Paste from word (with the blue W) that helps.

Any issues?

If you notice any problems with the site, please let our community manager or myself know. Bugs may crop up, and we do fix things.