New Media Initiatives

Now that Don’t Sleep on It is over and everyone has caught up on some sleep, I thought I’d share a bit more on the technical setup and a lesson learned. Witt told me he thought that it was one of the best, if not THE best, event that WACTAC has ever done. I tend to agree.

As I explored in a previous post, we used a digital still camera to take our single frame images, then stitch them together in quicktime as a longer move. For the event itself, we used two cameras. The primary camera, a Canon 10D, was equipped with a 16mm wide-angle lens that gave us a really good shot of the entire space. The second camera, a Canon G9, wasn’t quite as wide-angle, but would be a good backup camera in case something happened to the 10D. A sample of the space:

We taped off sight lines, just out of frame, so the artists would know what was in frame and what was not.

Our events & media production team set up a very nice mount for the cameras, as you can sort of see in this blurry, hastily snapped iPhone shot:

Unfortunately, every good plan has it’s own particular achilies heel. In this case, that heel was electronics’ desire for an uninterrupted flow of electricity. Midway through the evening on Friday night, the circuit breaker that powered the computer and cameras was tripped. Power was quickly restored, and the computers were turned back on. However, the startup procedure to get the time-lapse running was not something that could be scripted or automated, so the capture did not start again until 9 AM the next morning when I cam to check on things.

The lesson here: Time lapse is awesome, but next time, use an uninterpretable power supply. Preferably one that has a loud audible warning. I probably should have thought of this, but it really didn’t occur to me how chaotic and crazy the event would actually be (I mean that in the most endearing way possible).

The fact that we lost 12 hours of the time-lapse does stink, but it also means we still captured 12 hours of the event. I’ve assembled the video, and it has been posted to YouTube, but the quailty is not as good as a quicktime file. Here is a higher-quality quicktime MP4:

Click to play, or download the original file.

To fill some of the 12-hour gap, we hastily collected photos from whoever was available and had taken photos. They’ve been put together as a short slideshow filling a portion of the 12-hour missing period.

WACTAC has an event next week called Don’t Sleep on It, taking place during Art-a-Whirl. The gist of the event: over the course of 24 hours different groups of artists will transform a gallery space, destroying and re-building the art many times over the period. At the end of the event, they want to show a time-lapse video of the transformation.

Making a time-lapse movie is not hard. While it can be done using a video camera, it’s easier to use a digital still camera. You take a series of images at predefined intervals and stitch them together using software like After Effects, or, even simpler, Quicktime Pro. We’re using a Canon G10 and the Canon Remote Capture software to take photos every 10 seconds. I set up a test in our office just to make sure it would run correctly and without incident. Here’s the result:

Taking one photo every 10 seconds over 24 hours generates 8640 frames, creating a video just under 10 minutes long. We may end up dropping every other frame to create a shorter movie. The nice thing about using a digital still camera for this is that it produces a video well beyond even 1080P HD resolution.

In the above video, you can enjoy watching me look up documentation on Django, read a book about symfony, and my be mesmerized by a screensaver.

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.

We just made a small addition to the Walker website: a social media page. In case you didn’t know, the Walker is on Flickr, Twitter, FaceBook, and YouTube. The Walker has actually been in those spaces for some time, but there hasn’t been a good connection from the Walker site.

There are four different Walker-related groups for user contributed content on flickr: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker After Hours, and WACTAC. The social media page highlights the most recent Walker and Garden photos. We also post a good number of photos of our own, from After Hours to exhibition installation views. To make things clearer, we also added a official photography policy.

Since around September of 2008, I have been posting on twitter as the @walkerartcenter. Twitterfeed fills in some gaps with our blog posts, but I try to announce other notable things and answer visitor questions there. When the #snowmageddon happened, our twitter followers knew about it first. The social media page lists our latest 5 tweets to give visitors a good indication of what we tweet about.

We’re on the Facebook, too, and keep the page up-to-date with selected events and current exhibitions. Facebook doesn’t let Pages do a whole lot, but we’ve got 6500 fans.

And the Walker’s YouTube page has been around for over a year, first starting with the Tell us a story about your suburb project for Worlds Away. We’ve posted a few things from the archives there, and we’re slowly porting content from the Walker Channel to YouTube as well.

Setting the social media page up was made easier by using the Tweet! and jQuery.Flickr plugins.

If you’ve tuned into the live streaming events the Walker Channel has carried in the past, you have been forced to use Real Player to watch. Real was great back in the day when the Walker Channel was launched, but in 2009 it is a little dated. Flash streaming is much more convenient, and the VP6 codec flash offers is quite good. 

For tonight’s The Art of the Book panel discussion, we will be using ustream.tv to stream the event, rather than Real Player. No fancy plugins or separate applications required. It is also free, and doesn’t require us to run our own Real Media server. It will also help us decrease the turn-around on getting a recorded event into the Walker Channel, iTunes U and YouTube. None of this is rocket surgery, of course. Other places, like The UpTake, have been using free straming services very effectively, we’re just a little late getting on the bandwagon. 

We’re doing tonight’s lecture is a test of ustream, and we will be working out any kinks. We’ve done some testing already, but haven’t used it in a live setting where anyone other than a handful of people have been watching. 

If you’re watching and run into any problems, let us know. Shoot me an e-mail (click on my name to get the address), hit us on twitter, post here, or join the chatroom on ustream.

Last week we made a small change to our online calendar, adding social media sharing features. This means it is easier for readers of our online calendar to tell their friends and contacts about events. In our calendar, if you click the “share this” button, it slides out this drawer:

There are a number of pre-made DHTML widgets out there that are easy to use, but don’t provide quite the user experience we would like to have. Furthermore, they don’t share the content as cleanly and aren’t event specific. So we made our own functionality. It isn’t rocket surgery, but some notes on what we did may prove useful for others.

Sharing to calendars
Because this is an online calendar, sharing events to other calendars are very important. We already have an iCal feed for our calendar, and it is already set up to share specific events rather than all events, we just hadn’t been using that feature. The new sharing widget does so, simply by passing the proper event ID to our iCal page. A user can download this .ics file and it should work in Outlook, Sunbird, or iCal.

We also added sharing to google calendar. Google has an event publisher guide that documents how to share events to gCal. Compared to most other sharing solutions, gCal is more complicated. The main thing we had trouble with was formatting the date properly. Google prefers the date in what it calls “UTC format”, but I cannot find documentation anywhere showing what google uses is actually UTC format. What UTC format actually appears to be is the ISO 8601 time formatted without any punctuation. This is very similar to what the iCal format uses internally. Thankfully, since we were already calculating this for the iCal format, Nate was able to easily pass me this info for each event. With that, it is simply a matter of putting together the various components of the URL:

gcalURL = 'http://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&text='+encodeURIComponent(share_eventTitle);
gcalURL += '&dates='+startDate+"/"+endDate;
gcalURL += "&sprop=website:"+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&sprop=name:Walker%20Art%20Center";
gcalURL += "&details="+encodeURIComponent(share_eventDesc);
gcalURL += "&trp=true"
if (theLocation){
	gcalURL += "&location="+encodeURIComponent(theLocation);
}
window.open(gcalURL);
return false;

Sharing to social media sites
MySpace and Facebook both have specifications for how to share events to each of them, documented here and here, respectively. For Facebook, it is important to modify your page to include the meta tags it requests. When you share to Facebook, it doesn’t pass a description or image via the URL. Rather, Facebook scrapes the referred page to ascertain the description and images. Using the Meta tags gives much better results than whatever Facebook’s scraper comes up with. Most of the time, if you rely on their scraper, it will come up with some chrome images from your site rather than actual content images.

MySpace doesn’t scrape the page like facebook, so it’s important to construct a friendly description, with an image, if you can. We put a linked image along with the first few sentences of text for the description we pass to MySpace. Here is the format MySpace uses:

http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=postto&u=YOURURL&t=YOURTITLE&c=YOURDESCRIPTION&l=3


We also “share” to twitter. There isn’t really sharing per se, on twitter, but you can pre-assemble a tweet for someone. Simply pass someone to http://twitter.com/home/?status=YOURTWEET. We assmble the event title, a reply to our twitter account, and a twitter-friendly shortened URL. Like this: “2008 British Television Advertising Awards @walkerartcenter - http://bit.ly/3c60xK”.

To get the friendly URL, we’re using bit.ly, one of the many URL shortening services available. However, bit.ly has a handy, well documented, API that does JSONP, allowing us to get around cross-site scripting issues.

Sharing to bookmarking sites
Sharing to Bookmarking sites like delicious (formerly del.icio.us, we miss the old URL) is quite simple. These are the formats for Delicious, Google Bookmarks and Yahoo Bookmarks, respectively:

http://delicious.com/save?jump=yes&url=YOURURL&title=YOURTITLE
http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk=YOURURL&title=YOURTITLE
http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/toolbar/savebm?u=YOURURL&t=YOURTITLE&opener=bm&ei=UTF-8

Yahoo Bookmarks like to be opened in a pop-up window, but it isn’t strictly necessary. Always remember to urlencode text that is being passed into the URL, since there are many reserved characters in the URL. Javascript provides the encodeURIComponent function to do this.

When we switched from standalone WordPress to WordPress MU for the Walker Blogs, we also switched from Spam Karma 2 to Defensio. Spam Karma 2 had its funky interface issues on the admin, but it worked really well keeping our comment spam at bay. 

We’ve been using Defensio for not quite two months, which should be plenty of time to train the filters, but our statistics aren’t that great:

Recent accuracy: 97.10%:

• 3708 spam
• 147 legitimate comments
• 135 false negatives (undetected spam)
• 12 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)

I’ve never had great confidence in Akismet, but perhaps my misgivings are unfounded. Are there any other spam comment plug-ins people like? What have been your experiences?

What I’d really love to see is a comment plugin that used an Akismit-like baysein filter for catching the big stuff, than Amazon Mechanical Turk to test the stuff it’s not sure about. I’d pay $0.10 a comment for that.

Thanks to everyone who took our Blogs survey over the past couple of weeks. We received a good amount of feedback that we’re in the process of digesting. We also picked a winner for the iPod shuffle, who happens to be a new media developer as well. I hope to post a little more info about that soon.

I thought I would share some of the statistics and comments from the survey, in case anyone is interested.

My hunch is that the kind of people who take our survey are those that are already somewhat interested in programs that the Walker offers, and are likely to want to closely follow what we do. The responses to the first question seems to back up that assumption:

How did you find the Walker blogs?

The number of people who came here from a search engine is significantly lower than what we see looking at our analytics, but not all search engine referred visits are of the same quality as people who come on their own. Also, if you’ve been a blog subscriber for years, do you really remember how you found the blog in the first place? Probably not.

We asked how often people read the blogs. The answer is pretty often, with a good chunk of people using RSS readers:

How often do you read the Walker blogs?

And the reasons people read the blogs:

For what reasons do you read the Walker blogs?

How many people have left a comment:

Have you ever left a comment on the Walker blogs?

Where people live surprised me a little bit:

Where do you live?

St. Paul seems under-represented, as do the suburbs (which are caught up in the jumble of text in the graph). We did focus the choices for this question on the United States, but we do know that there is an international readership.

We also asked people what other blogs they read, which gave us a ton of responses. Here are the handful that were mentioned the most:

• Design Observer
• Boing Boing
• Manystuff
• Modern Art Notes
• Brooklyn Museum
• FFFFound!
• We Make Money Not Art

And some of the more eclectic (or just mentioned less):

• Magic Made Simple
• Switchblade Comb
• Because I Said So
• The Acme Siren
• Grain Edit
• Mediation

I liked this question a lot, because it gives a sense of what our visitors are reading and what their interests are. The list is heavily weighted towards museum/art blogs and design related blogs. I also liked the question because it gives me a few more sites to add to my RSS reader. Thanks survey takers!

Finally, we asked for some general feedback and comments from anyone who wanted to share. Here are several:

The Walker blogs are great. I really like hearing from designers at Dwell, a magazine I also read, right on the Walker’s site. I love that dialogue w/ outside designers and artists that’s brought to me via the Walker because of the staff’s professional networks that extend well beyond my own! Keep it up :)

I enjoy reading your blogs but I really feel that they could use more pictures,video and audio

It would be nice to have guest bloggers on every topic, or to have less specific, umbrella blogs covering a not-so-wide range of topics and points of view.

Be less Minnesotan.

(I’m not sure what that means, eh?)

I live in Massachusetts and can’t come to the Walker very often, but I love your blogs because they keep me connected… and they make me want to move to Minneapolis.

I think NMI should blog more

Here’s trying.

Walker Art Center iTunes U page.

Several weeks ago, Robin posted about the Walker Channel on iTunes U. I am going to follow up on her initial announcement with a more info about the process of designing an iTunes U Page, the preparation of content, and putting content online.

Designing an iTunes U Page

There are a number of different designs for pages in iTunes U. Some institutions that have been in the store for a while have a three column layout. However, Apple has now standardized on a two column layout for iTunes U pages. There options for customizing a page are limited, but not restrictive. Colors for backgrounds, borders, and text can be changed. An overall header image that is 600px by 300px is used on the top of the main page. The downside of a two column layout is that it does not re-size to a smaller iTunes window as nicely as a the three column layout.

A three column iTunes U page.

In order to design our site, I ended up doing some of the initial work right in iTunes. I figured out our color scheme and organizational structure, then took a few screenshots of iTunes. The screenshots were pasted together in photoshop, and I layered the header and course images onto it. Thankfully, the iconography choices were straight forward. The exhibitions use images from an exhibition, either artwork or an installation view. For Subjects or Featured courses, the icons are all similar, just using color, pattern, and language changes, each referencing the different artistic program pages that are already on the Walker web site.

Encoding video for the iPod using h.264

The h.264 codec is both amazing and vexing. It has very high compression, good quality, and is a widely supported standard. Working with h.264, especially for devices, can be complicated. Since the 5th generation, iPods have been able to play h.264 encoded video. They can even play 640×480 video and downscale it to their 320×240 screen, which is great since a 640×480 video will look good on a larger screen too. The real trickery with h.264 comes in with profiles.

Exporting to mp4 in Quicktime Pro. Not iPod compatible.

The MPEG Streamclip settings we use

Most of the time, if you just export a movie from quicktime using h.264, you use the main profile. However, for a device like the iPod, which doesn’t have a fast processor, Apple specifies that you need to use the low-complexity profile. There technical differences are mostly beyond me, but the low-complexity profile drops some of the more advanced hinting and shape features, but will mean a less processor intensive decode process that the iPod can handle.

Getting video encoded into a low-complexity h.264 profile is not a clear process. Apple’s own QuickTime Pro doesn’t let you encode to low-complexity and have any control over the output. If you want to make a movie compatible for the iPod, you must use the Movie to iPod or Movie to iPhone preset. Both of these presets encode at a very high bitrate, which makes for good quality. However, if you have the scenario we have– long movies of not a lot of action–a high bitrate is both filesize prohibitive and not necessary to maintain quality.

Some time ago, we switched to saving all our channel videos in a mp4 file, using the h.264 codec, thinking that it would make them iTunes compatible. We apparently missed the low-complexity part, and discovered that our videos were, in fact, not iPod compatible. This meant we would need to re-encode our video files to make them more useful in iTunes U. I looked at several different pieces of software to do this, but eventually decided upon MPEG Streamclip.

As I noted above, Quicktime Pro would not work for this. I also looked at Compressor, basically the Pro version of QuickTime Pro. Compressor offers much more customizability than QuickTime Pro in terms of codec configuarion and workflow. Compressor, for some reason, takes an inexplicably long time to encode a iPod compatible mp4. On a high-end Mac Pro, encoding a 640×480 was taking well beyond 8 hours. The output look really good, but given that we had 50 files to convert, it was simply not an option, even when using distributed encoding.

I also looked at FFmpegX and VisualHub (now defunct). Both of them are essentially wrappers around FFmpeg, and they produce good results, are very efficent encoders, and let you adjust every setting (almost to a fault). However, FFmpeg suffers from being written to expect a PC gamma of 2.2, and the resulting videos looked considerably darkened when compared to the original.

In the end, MPEG Streamclip worked the best. It offers the same speed of FFMpeg, much of the same control over settings, and deals with the gamma–outputting the a proper video for the iPod. At a bitrate of about 950kpbs, a typical two hour lecture comes in between 450-500 MB, just below the iTunes U limit of 500 MB.

Putting Content into iTunes U

The processes of editing content and putting tracks into iTunes U straight forward, though frustrating, since it involves a lot of clicking and waiting. iTunes has evolved considerably over time, and certainly letting a huge range of users edit parts of the iTunes Music store was not one of the original design specifications. The process is a bit clunky and Web 1.0-style, but it works. Uploading content is done through a browser, which can be a very finicky, especially with large files. After some trial and error, I figured out that setting Firefox as my default browser and using that for uploading worked better than Safari. Safari will time out the upload after a period of time, whereas Firefox keeps on chugging.

Before files are uploaded, they need to be properly loaded with metadata. iTunes U doesn’t let you edit much on the site (just title and artist) so other fields must be filled in on iTunes on your computer before uploading. When you edit the metadata fields, iTunes commits the changes to the movie files itself. When you upload the movie files, iTunes U will pick up on this and display it. One thing I found a little confusing that artwork is not displayed in the store or when you are previewing a file. Apple says that artwork on movie files is used to display on the iPod, but never in iTunes. This is all covered pretty well in the iTunes U User’s Guide.

Despite the time spent figuring out codecs and monkeying around with uploading, we’re very happy to have our content in another venue and excited to keep adding more.

Shelley Bernstein over at the Brooklyn Museum has posted some details on their recent hack of the iPod Touch to use in the gallery. Shelly hasn’t posted all the details on the blog, but if you contact her, she will be happy to link you up to the juice. If you’re looking to do something like this in a gallery, it’s a great head-start.

Photo by Shelly Bernstein

Using an iPod touch as a video display in a gallery is a really great idea for a number of reasons:

• iPods are cheap (relatively).
• The screens are offer a high resolution and an acceptable size.
• They’re small and unobtrusive, so they have the potential to not irritate curators who dislike too much stuff near the art. 
• The playback hardware is contained right in the unit, so no need for extra wires to a DVD player or other playback device.
• They have WiFi, so there is potential for remote administration, updating, and connecting to content on the Net. 
• If you get a first generation, they’re hackable. The second generation will probably be hackable soon. Thanks to things like Cydia, you can install SSH and all kinds of useful goodies.
• The interface is simple. Though I’m not sure if my grandma would know how to interact with it. 

The only real downside to the IPod touch is the cord comes out a weird angle, making the mounting and display a little tricky.