New Media Initiatives Blog

Exploring Museum COllections On-line: The Quantitative Method
Frankie Roberto, Science Museum, United Kingdom

Three problems with museum data.

Data from FOI requests include curator, object, country, year, and acquisition method. Need a mapping process, as not everything maps, and certain items can be mapped to something simplified, for example, “edged weapon” becomes just “weapon”. Same for countries, etc. However, there are several tricky ones, for example, what country is “asia”? This is when you say “Good enough”.

Frankie shows off a locally hosted website showing the aggregated data. By putting the data into more generic silos he’s able to parse things much more easily for view and searching.

Issues - all objects counted equally (small coins all counted separate, so there are many more of them), no photos, user interactions not available. Prototype at museum-collections.org.

Uniting The Shanty Towns: Data Combining Across Multiple Institutions
Seb Chan, Powerhouse Museum, Australia
People like order, but if you look closer you get mess. But mess is good. Yet mess makes mashups hard. Can we agree on standards? Lets start with calendars. Figured can’t be hard, it’s just a calendar. But it was, everyone has different CMS’s or no CMS at all. How do we do it? Could just use people to do it by hand, but that’s too much work. So we scrape, aggregate, have a nice backend and use sites we can trust. Then we can get a nice frontend, RSS and iCal to all these aggregated sites.

Semantic web, why can’t we use it for collections? We write themes, tags, tracking searches, etc, but there’s gotta be a better way. Use Calais, a text analysis tool, creates dynamically generated meta data tags. It’s work humans can do, but this is automatic, which saves a lot of time. However, it doesn’t always come up with proper tags (but again is “good enough”). Once you have this data, you can then start connecting it to other data. Once you have the data identified, you can use it in mashups of other data (for example, if you have a company pulled out for Google, you can then do auto mashups of stock prices, locations, etc).

Take it to the next level. If you know where Google is in our example, you can mashup your own location, put it into a search page, and it will show you what things are near your current location (including Google if you happen to be near it for example), as well as all the other data associated with the original record.
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Where Do We Go From Here? Continuing with Web 2.0
Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum, USA
Year ago worlds worst bloggers (her words, not mine). Everything on the blog back then was just in an institutional voice. Now, the blog is about personal stories, direct from the staff members. Authors are identified by photo and bio. Asked themselves if the blogs were really worth it. Got some comments but not a ton. The answer came in January. Comment came on a blog post about a house in the museum. Gave an incredibly personal comment on information they didn’t even have in this house. Made a connection on their blog they probably never would have had if the blog had not existed.

Also did a video competition on YouTube. Tons of rules in order to put up a video. Barrier to entry is fairly high. However, one video submission was entitled “art thief”, which reminded people of a person who would walk into the Brooklyn Museum and hang his own artwork (much the chagrin of museum admins). Could have posed a problem because of what happened in the past, but the lesson learned is trust your audience. Not everyone is doing things in a negative light, even if you’ve been burned in the past. Don’t let one rotten apple spoil the bushel.

Brooklyn has a Flickr group where they let people post photos of the museum and the work. Had the idea of why not invite 10 top photographers on Flickr to come in and shoot the museum objects in their own way. Gives a personalized view of the artwork, which is very different from the normal object photo shot. Allows people to see the artwork in a new way online. Turned it all into one big video showcasing the museum. Visitor created, but showcases the museum really well.

Art Share. Facebook app, to share artwork on their Facebook profile. If you’re an artist you can upload your own artwork too. What’s interesting is what people put on their profiles. You learn more about people based on what they decide to display on their profiles. (note: Walker Art Center is part of Art Share)

Click. A crowd curated exhibition. Again, trust your audience, let them have a say in your museum.

Hat tip to the Walker: In the Q&A, Shelley mentions Robin last year talking about engaging younger members of your museum to blog, as many tend to actually want to be blogging (which is very true).

Ladders Of Participation, Social Media And Museum Audiences
Lynda Kelly, Australian Museum & Angelina Russo, Swinburne University, Australia
Classifying online participants, use Forester research questions to find out how Australians were working online. Compared that to the US. Found people that visit museums participate a lot more in 2-way activities than people who do not visit museums.

Classifications:

We’ll be live blogging Museums and the Web 2008 from Montreal for the next few days. Our thoughts, notes and opinions on each session we attend will be broadcast for those of you who didn’t happen to make it out, or want to catch up afterwards. Stay tuned.

A few days ago Microsoft announced their standards compatibility plans for IE8. It starts off talking about how IE8 passes the Acid 2 test, and then goes on to talk about the viewing “modes” in the various IE browsers.

IE handled these modes like most of the other browsers. There was “quirks” mode, which is invoked if no doctype is set (or a deprecated doctype), and “standards” mode if you used an appropriate doctype. Safari and Firefox work the same way. This gives a bit of flexibility to those who may have some older site with nonstandard or old spec code, and still follows general web standards for new code like you would expect.

Microsoft however decided to change things again in IE8. One would think the new and better standards that came about through the Acid 2 test would work in “standards” mode in IE8 given they follow the standard. But that is not the case. If you use “standards” mode in IE8, the browser will instead render the page like IE7 did, you will not get the new up to date standards fixes. And “quirks” mode will still render in IE8 like IE6 did.

Instead, to get the “super standards” mode, web developers will need to add a special meta tag to their sites to tell IE8 to render it in the new mode. This is just short sighted. It’s a band aid fix us web devs will have to live with for another 5 to 10 years.

The biggest problem here is the fact that standards compliance means “opt in”. Standards compliance should be determined by the doctype of the page, like the standards say, not some random meta tag. Microsoft’s comeback is that adding in standards means many pages build specifically for IE6 or 7 will break, and expecting everyone to rewrite their entire websites to standards compliance is not feasible.

Which is why I want to know why standards compliance can’t be an “opt out”? The meta tag idea is fine, but it should be the fix for the old, out of date, non-standard content, not new content. Microsoft can (and should) save companies the time and effort in having to rewrite all their sites, but that saving should come at the cost of adding a simple meta tag in the header of your old pages.

If you look at Microsoft’s OS’s they do similar things. XP broke some of the Windows 2000 programs because the API changed. Same thing happened in Vista. Microsoft rightly gave developers notice of these changes and gave them time to implement fixes for compatibility, so that when the new OS came out, the old programs could already be updated to run on the new OS. I’m not sure why a browser should be any different. Give legacy site devs the meta tag to add now, so that when IE8 comes out it “just works” like it used to. But leave the standards compliance the way it should be, the way the spec says.

This also has the added benefit of allowing legacy code and this fix to die off faster. If meta tags are only put into old code, as those sites are replaced, we can get rid of this “fix” much quicker. Making developers put it into new code just means we have to deal with this for that much longer, which is a pain.

I’m happy that Microsoft has finally decided to embrace web standards for a change. But in their quest for legacy support, their decision to slap an ugly band aid onto future code is a bad one. And it opens a slippery slope for future versions of IE that I’m not looking forward to, and that is unfortunate.

Here’s an interesting problem that came across my desk several weeks ago. Lets say you want to know exactly how many people are in a gallery at any given time. How do you do it?

There are expensive people counters available, with all sorts of technology, right down to thermal imaging. There are also cheap hand held counters, with plus and minus buttons to add and subtract people as they come and go to keep a consistent count of people in a gallery.

These cheap hand held versions are great…if you only have one entrance and exit point. What if you have multiple entrances and exits? Suddenly the hand held version falls apart, and putting cameras all over is way too expensive.

This is the issue that was put forth to me. We have an upcoming exhibition for Frida Kahlo. The gallery that the exhibition is in can only support 200 visitors at any one time. We expect more than that, especially on busy days. The kicker of course is that the gallery it’s in has two entrances, so we needed to find a way to accurately count how many people are in the gallery at any given time, and if that number goes over 200, the gallery guards would have to hold people from entering until the number dropped below 200.

I thought for sure something like this must have been made before. Surely we aren’t the only people who have ever had this problem? But in looking online I couldn’t find anything that was cost effective and would “just work”. We kept saying “if we only had two clickers that could talk to each other”.

Something interesting happened the same day I was presented with this problem. Apple announced the iPod Touch. As soon as I saw the Touch, my first thought was Art on Call and the Walker Channel. I could see all sorts of uses for both in the galleries. But after a couple hours wrestling with this given problem it hit me, why not use the iPod Touch?

The iPod Touch is handheld, has touch input, and a browser with wifi built in. All we had to do was make a simple web app for it that counted up or down. Two people could have the Touch’s, check off how many people are entering and leaving, and both be up to date on exactly how many people are in the gallery. So that’s what we did.

Here are some screen grabs of what I built. The left image is the typical display of the app. Options are simply to add or subtract a certain amount of people as they enter or leave. You’re able to reset the counter to zero in the upper right (it has a confirmation before doing so). The right image shows what happens when you go over the gallery maximum. The app also auto updates the number every 10 seconds, so the guard who has people waiting will know when the the number drops below the max value right away without needing to manually refresh.

Making a web app specifically for the iPod Touch (or iPhone) turns out to be really easy. It’s just a webpage. You pretty much can do anything that is available in Safari (though there are a few inconstancies to watch out for), and there are also several special meta tags you can add specifically for these apps (for example, I turned off scaling for our web app). Apple has written up a very nice development doc on their website that I used when making this app. It includes things like screen size, font size, color, meta tags, basically everything you need to make something look nice and stylish on these devices. I’d recommend it to anyone working on apps like this. The screenshot to the left is how the iPod Touch looks with the rest of the UI around it, to give you an idea.

As far as the iPod Touch/iPhone goes, I’m very impressed. I really do think these devices are the future of museum audio tours. Well, not just audio, but video as well! There are things that need to be fixed (like the fact that you can’t get podcasts on them via wifi yet), but overall there is so much potential here, simply by having a real browser with wifi on it and supporting rich media, as well as the UI and multi-touch interface. It could very well be the Rosetta Stone of digital museum tours.

So the Picasso exhibition is over and we learned a lot about mass iPod audio tours. The first lesson, they’re very popular! We’ve had iPods for our permanent collection for a while now, but we never really had the push behind it like we had for Picasso. The difference I noticed here is that if you advertise it, people will use it.

We did a lot better job for the Picasso show in getting the word out that the iPods as well as Art on Call were available. People used them. There were very often waiting lists for people to check out an iPod. I had honestly thought at the beginning that 25 iPods was overkill, but after a short time it was obvious we could have probably had twice that and still had all of them in use at any given time. A lot of this was because of the show itself. A ton of people came to see Picasso. I’ve never seen that many people in our galleries before, outside of After Hours. And this was day in, day out. But like anything, word gets out, people in the galleries see others on their cell phones or with iPods and learn they can do the same (for free) and people really ate up the content. We will post more on our numbers when the final data comes in.

So that’s great, people dug the content, but what were the caveats? For us there were several things that came up that we had to work around. One is what I already mentioned, the iPods being checked out constantly. Because of this, none of the iPods during the day got a chance to recharge. Most made it through an 8 hour day fine, but what we didn’t expect was having to charge them over night. Because they needed to be locked up somewhere safe when the building was closed we had to find a secure place to take the charging station each night, and thankfully we were able to.

Also, at first we were going to use one of the computers at the front desk to dock the iPods on, but given the traffic, that didn’t go over well as that computer needed to be used off and on all day for ticketing, etc. But we still needed a dedicated computer there just for the iPods. We thankfully had a spare Sony laptop that sufficed for this and did a good job.

There was also something that came up that I never had even thought about. I originally put the iPods down in a floor cabinet which could be closed. This was partially to be neat and tidy and partially for security. Problem was, we were so busy and swapping out so many iPods that the Visitor Services staff started to really strain having to bend over again and again to swap out iPods all day. Thankfully our carpentry shop rectified this by making a pedestal that the iPods could go in to make it easier on everyone’s backs.

And what about dead and abused iPods? Several notes here. One, Notes mode works better now than it did when I first used it and dismissed it and then instead hacked the iPod firmware. But there are still major issues with Notes mode. While better, it’s still not ready for prime time and there are still ways for users to change settings even when locked into Notes mode (which I’m still trying to figure out, but given the number of iPods I got that I had to reset, it’s certainly an issue). That said, we will probably use Notes mode for exhibition-only tours in the future.

Secondly, when your audio tour is this popular bad things happen. We had a few iPods die on us. Three were hard drive failures, and one had a screen fail from abuse. The good news is Apple will replace iPods for free if there is a hard drive failure and the iPod is under warranty. The bad news is the same can’t be said for screen abuse (or any other kind of user created problem). Most of the iPods survived just fine, some had to be reset with a hard reset (getting into the hidden firmware setting to do so), but in the end most survived the ordeal.

The other big challenge was getting people to understand how to use the iPods. Believe it or not there are a lot of people who have never used one before. The Picasso show skewed a bit older as well which added to this. We had a stop on our tour (the first stop) that was all about how to use the iPod and the tour menu itself was as simple as possible (just one list, no submenus), but as with any technology there is still a learning curve involved, regardless of how simple it may seem. Someone will always struggle. It’s important everyone in your museum knows how they work, because anyone, even security guards, may be asked to help someone who’s stuck. This is the most important part to me, because if people can’t figure out how to use your device, there’s no point in having it!

Lastly, as Robin guessed before the show started, ditch the earbuds and get over-the-ear headphones for your iPods. This was a very good move. Nobody wants to stick earbuds in their ears after 20 people before you have!

In related iPod news, we’re getting a few of the new iPod Touch’s in at the end of the month, and I’m currently building an app for it. I think these could have a real impact on audio (and video) tours because of the built in WiFi and browser. I’m pretty excited at the possibilities. More on this soon.

I came across this story online about how Nielsen/NetRatings is going to drop its normal website rankings that use page views as a metric, and change to user session length instead. Much of this has to do with the advent of AJAX, with content loading on the same “page” and thus not being counted in the page views statistic Nielsen/NetRatings currently uses.

Forget how this impacts the current online leaders (the article says it will hurt Google, and in the same breath says it will help YouTube, go figure), I just found it interesting that they were still using page views as their main metric. While we certainly keep track of them here, we tend to put much more weight into user sessions. Take for example this comparison of page views vs. user sessions on our website, from Feb. ‘07:

tickets.walkerart.org
Page Views: 347,258
User Sessions: 2,581

blogs.walkerart.org
Page Views: 305,609
User Sessions: 105,387

Notice the difference? Our tickets website had more page views than our blogs did, but only 2% of the user sessions. Why? Well, it’s mainly because there are many more pages in our ticketing system to go through to place an order, as well as a few iframes here and there that just inflates the page count. By itself, one would think looking at the page views that tickets was the more popular site, but in reality many more people visit our blogs.

Like any statistic it’s important to look at multiple sets of data to come to a conclusion. With these two metrics we can not only find the depth of our visitors but also the breadth. Blog users don’t seem to dig as much, perhaps because they don’t have to compared to what’s required in a ticketing system checkout process, or perhaps because they haven’t found anything interesting to read and leave!

This is where Nielsen has made their change. Instead of just looking at simple page numbers (which is important to advertisers to count “impressions” of ads), they’re now wanting to see how long someone has spent on a website. This means the trend has changed from the number of impressions, to the overall impression length.

We also keep track of user session length on our websites. And again when combined with the other metrics, it adds another layer of info we can use to determine the relative success and weakness of our sites. Here are the user session lengths of the above sites for the same time period, in seconds:

tickets.walkerart.org
Session Length (secs): 589

blogs.walkerart.org
Session Length (secs): 281

Probably what you would expect. It took a lot longer for those users on tickets to weed through all those pages to place their order. However if you look at the ratio of users to page views for each site, and then look at the session length, you’ll notice that blog readers spend more time on each page during their sessions.

tickets.walkerart.org
Ave. Secs./Page: 4.4

blogs.walkerart.org
Ave. Secs./Page: 96.9

Obviously the tickets time is a bit skewed, because of iframes, robots and the like, but this shows that people do spend much more time on average on each page on our blog website than on tickets, even though the overall session length on blogs is less. This is good, it means people are getting through the ticketing software quickly, even with all the pages to load, and it also means people are actually staying on our blogs and (hopefully) reading.

Session length can also show us popular sites we may have otherwise missed. Take our Walker Channel from the same period:

channel.walkerart.org
Page Views: 21,596
User Sessions: 6,732
Session Length (secs): 574
Ave Secs/Page: 179

The user sessions on our channel aren’t super high, at least not in comparison to some of our other sites, and neither are the page views. However, the session length, and more importantly, the number of secs users spent per page is very high. Those people who do visit the Walker Channel like to spend a lot of time there. Perhaps this is something we should put more time into, to drive more users to this content? In fact, that’s exactly what we are starting to work on.

One of the cool things we’re doing for the Walker’s upcoming exhibition Picasso and American Art is significantly increasing our iPod audio tour capacity. For the exhibit we were able to get 25 iPod Video’s, and like our normal iPod audio tours, we will be letting visitors use them for free. The same content is also available on Art on Call.

This presents a bit of a challenge however. Up until now we’ve only had four iPod Nano’s to worry about, and plugging a few into a computer or two to charge isn’t that big a deal. Now however we have 25 of them to deal with, and there certainly aren’t enough USB ports to go around. The goal was to find a way to charge most of the iPods, do it in a limited space, and do it for as cheap as possible.

My solution was to buy three USB hubs and use them just for charging. We don’t really need to have them connected to the computer to sync with, we just want the power. This turned out to be harder than I thought. I went through a few USB hubs trying to get the iPods just to charge off the supplied AC adaptor. Each hub I tried didn’t allow this. It would only charge when the hub was connected to a computer via USB. I can’t fathom a reason why they limited it like this, as the power comes from AC on the hub, not from USB. Whether the hub was connected to a computer should not really dictate whether power could be supplied to the device or not. Alas, there was no cost efficient way around this.

So I had no choice, if I wanted to charge via any hub, I had to connect the hub to a computer. Thankfully we did have a computer near where our iPod storage is. Except it only has two open USB ports, not the three I needed. Another stumbling block. But then the thought occured to daisy chain the hubs. In essence, the USB cable that was supposed to go to the computer for each hub would plug into one of the other hubs instead. The last in the chain would then plug into the computer. Basically we could connect all of the iPods to a computer with one USB cord, regardless of how many hubs we had. And that’s what we did, as it worked perfectly:

One interesting feature of this is it allows us to mount all of these iPods at once, as you can see here. This actually makes adding and editing content on all of them a breeze. So in the end, perhaps all of the troubles were a blessing.

Total cost for this: $60. It may not look the prettiest, but sometimes when you’re trying to be frugal, getting something that just works is what counts.

I sat in on the Art Education session Wed afternoon. Below are my thoughts:

Julie Springer of the National Gallery talked a bit about some work they’ve done with video iPods. It was presented as a podcast, though with the video involved it seemed more like a vodcast (semantics I guess). Julie showed a sample movie they had made with the default tools on a Mac, something anyone can do. The movie was a pseudo dialogue between a viewer and the subject in the painting. It was very well done. I would have loved to see an alternative version of this movie, giving a different voice to the conversation. I wonder if that wouldn’t help attract a different audience.

Abigail Frazen-Sheehan and Betsy James DiSalvo talked about their experiences in creating The Warhol, an online resource for teachers. They stressed the importance of user testing, and went through the various changes that were made along the way. Some of the changes were pretty small (simply adding another link option to the main nav), but made very large impacts. This was interesting to me because of our upcoming work with ArtsConnectEd.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stick around for the rest of this session.

I don’t want to reiterate Nate’s post about the Web 2.0 session but I felt I should share my comments on it as well.

Jeff Gates’ session about Eye Level was one I’ve heard bits and pieces of before. It’s a great look into how their institution is set up and run with regards to blogging. The thing I found most interesting is the amount of layers set up before a blog post gets out. Jeff showed a 6 or 7 step process that happens, starting with a blog post and then various itterations, reviews, editing, etc, that goes on before they decide to finally publish it (assuming the post makes it that far).

I’ve always found Eye Level very well written, almost more “article-like” than blog-like. It stands in stark contrast to our blog process which is literally “blog post > publish”. It’s the only way I know how to blog, and the way I personally prefer. If I had to go through many levels of review before I was able to get a blog post out, I most likely wouldn’t blog. And you wouldn’t be reading this post.

Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth at the Brooklyn Museum rock. Simple as that. The amount of social structure they have built into their website is very inspiring. I loved their thought that they didn’t want a distinction between their website and their museum, they wanted them to all feel as one. This goes down to letting a user leave comments on a computer both in the galleries and online (in fact it’s the same form). These are things I’ve thought about as well. Their use of Flickr, Youtube, etc is amazing. Simply put I think they are our benchmark of where I feel we should be in the future. Thankfully we’re already moving in that direction.

Lastly, Mike Ellis of The Science Museum, UK, gave everyone there the kick in the bottom I’ve been waiting someone to do for a while now. His words of “just do it” ring true, especially to us. Research it, prototype it, try it, and don’t be afraid to fail. He touched into a lot of the phobias many people have about technology and change in general. I can understand concerns people have in this regard, but Mike is right, if many of us don’t adapt and move past them, we’ll be left behind and become largely irrelevant. Technology moves too fast for us to sit on our hands.

Today I was forwarded a post (hat tip: Alttext) by Paul Bausch of Onfocus, entitled The Former Audience in Meatspace. In it he recounts his experience with a tour guide at the High Desert Museum in Bend, OR, where he received much more information about an exhibit than he ever would have had he not gotten the tour. He then wonders why more of this great information isn’t online, or used in the actual exhibits for other people to hear.

The tour guide relayed stuff that wouldn’t make it onto the official wall text describing the exhibits, but the extra layer of information helped bring the scene to life. […] I thought that the tragedy of this is that all of this knowledge vanishes when he’s not around. In fact, I’d been to the museum several times and hadn’t hit this vein of information. With this info, the museum was a completely different experience.

I think he hits the nail on the head why new media is so important in the museum space. It allows us to enrich the museum experience beyond just putting a painting on a wall or fossilized bones on a pedistal, and it also goes beyond the walls of the museum itself. It gives the patron a way to experience the museum in a different light, in different way, and in their own unique way.

This is something we really prescribe to with our new media projects at the Walker. Art on Call gives people the opportunity to listen to comments from artists, curators and yes, tour guides, whether you’re at home or standing right in front of an artwork in the galleries.

Our blogs give people behind the scenes info on exhibitions, technical how-to’s, interviews, and just plain arty fun, giving people yet another side to the Walker. Even our Minneapolis Sculpture Garden website has it’s own video tours! All of this is available at the kiosks in our front lobby, or from the comfort of your own home.

When I read Mr. Bausch’s post it really made me think about all of the work we’ve accomplished and realize that we’re moving in the right direction. It also made me realize that in this age of increasing technology, more museums should be moving in this direction as well. It’s obvious from his post that being interactive, customizable and “deep” is where the trends are moving to. You need look no further than the web itself to see it. Technology adds more layers to the information, it adds more to the experience, and it adds more to the overall museum community. It would be a disservice to ourselves and our patrons to ignore that.

A little over a year ago I described AJAX and the work I was starting to research into it. Back then I was calling it RPC (Remote Procedure Call), since I thought it made more sense than the term AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) as we techincally weren’t using XML.

Since then AJAX as a term has become pretty widespread and ubiquitous, as has its impact on the web. Now we can add the Walker to the large list of sites using this technology.

If you head over to our Art on Call website, you may notice a few changes to our stops list. Gone is the long list of stops, and in it’s place is a searchable, sortable, paginated view of our info. All of this happens dynamically without refreshing the page.

The way I went about writing this is a bit different from normal AJAX. With typical AJAX, you request XML data and load it into memory. Then you parse the the XML by various means, either using Javascript to pull data out of nodes, or an XSLT processor built into many modern browsers. The result of course is HTML, which you output to the page to update content when a user requests it.

There are two benefits to the normal approach. One is that it takes any translation processing off the server load and puts it onto the users machine, allowing the server to be more responsive. Two is that it gives you some flexibility in placing lots of data changes all over a page.

But it also has a large downside. Design and implimentation of normal AJAX usually means designing with Javascript. Since you’re front loading everything onto the users computer, actually designing and making changes to data means not only do you need to get the HTML right, but also the Javascript or any other parsing agent you use. This greatly adds to development time and makes maintainability a challenge.

Instead I chose to go a different route, something more in line with the AHAH (Asynchronous HTML and HTTP) method. AHAH could be thought of as a subset of AJAX. There is still