New Media Initiatives

… blog about it in May!

Museums and the Web 2009 wrapped up with a challenge to all the inspired delegates: use the energy and ideas generated here to get one thing done in April.  (The idea being that many small steps build momentum, and it’s too easy to ignore the small upgrades we should constantly be pushing out.)

Yesterday I pushed out a few small upgrades to our aging collection site:

You can now limit your search to objects that are On View

What works by Dan Flavin can you come see right now?

OpenSearch capable

Can’t get enough of our collection?  Add it to your browser’s built-in search box!  When you’re on the Collection site, you should be able to pull down your browser’s search field and add “Walker Art Center”.

Developers (Piotr!): you can now use the Walker collection in your Yahoo Pipes tool without having to scrape the results!  Not an API (yet), but a good step.  Check out the XML for ideas.

Bring it all together:

You’re a busy person.  You’d love to come see Chuck Close’s Big Self-Portrait, and you know the Walker’s got it in their collection, but you see it’s not on view.  You don’t have time to check our website every day, so how will you ever know when it goes on display?  Easy:  build a search that finds Big Self-Portrait, then turn on the “On View” flag.  The object disappears (not on view), but you can subscribe to the OpenSearch RSS feed for this query (click the icon).  Now, when Big Self-Portrait is available to see in the galleries, the object will show up in your RSS reader!  (note: I picked this painting randomly.  I make no guarantee about seeing it in the galleries any time soon.  :)

So, baby steps.  Get one things done that opens more doors.

#didonethinginapril (I tag Andrew at the MIA to get one thing done in May!)

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.

Last night was the big SubZero street festival portion of Zero1. South First Street was closed for about four blocks in the SoFA district of San Jose, and many artists showing off their contraptions and work had set up. I took a walk down the street several times and captured some of the work.

Graffiti Research Lab was visibly present, both with some of their work on display on the street and in the Anno Domani gallery, with a show called “The U.S. Department of Homeland Graffiti Liquidation Sale”. Some of the work was a spoof on the LED sign scare in Boston a year ago, in which GRL was quickly and wrongly implicated. So nice to see Osama Bin Laden and George W Bush giving each other the finger in LED style.

Inside the gallery DJ Spooky (aka Paul D Miller) gave a talk about his new book and remix culture. He manages to connect the dots between many the history of the remix and how embedded it has become into our culture. I didn’t stick around to buy the book, though I plan to soon, because I was headed down to MACLA for a performance of Flock.

Upon entering the performance space for Flock, you’re given a black hat with a glowing white orb on the top and told to walk up to the stage. Just above the stage, there is a projection visualizing all the orbs on-screen, and with enough distinguishing movement, you can figure out which dot represents your orb. After a bit of play, the real performance begins. Four musicians playing saxophones eventually made the way on stage, each outfitted with an iPaq connected to a WiFi network, transmitting an ever-changing score of what they should be playing. Three dancers with white orbs eventually emerged, and began moving around the stage area. Their orbs combined with the movement of the musician’s orbs changed the score dynamically. Over the course of the show the method of generating music changed, from a simple cross-screen wipe, to something akin to radar, and also a connect-the-dots style graph. The audience was pulled in one at a time by the dancers through the performance as well, and were instructed to move around and generate the sound. At one point a conga line formed, and at another several people grabbed hands and began circling one of the musicians, overloading him with notes to play. In this way, the social interaction people engaged in to generate the music was more interesting than the music itself.

There were also low-rider art bikes on display. The display was no Minneapolis Art Car Parade, but still fun to see the weird things people do to their cars. The bikes in particular looked very slick. I’m afraid if I had a bike that nice, I’d never ride it.

Another performance on the street that always had a crowed was Drone Machines, operated by “Author & Punisher” Tristan Shone, consisting of several very industrial looking contraptions that as the description notes, “require significant physical interaction from the performer” to operate:

Minneapolis Art on Wheels has also been around the festival, but they were out in force last night at SubZero, at several different locations down First street and side streets. They even had one of MAW’s bikes rigged up with GRL’s L.A.S.E.R. Tag system and a crowd gathered around watching and waiting to tag. Everyone had a good laugh when a squad car drove by with an officer glared out the window at us.

I missed the first day of Zero1 due to an flight scheduling snafu that was totally my fault. From the reports I’ve read and the people I’ve talked with, it sounds like I missed out on some cool stuff. That said, I did make it to San Jose early yesterday morning and visited a few of the exhibitions. Rhizome already has some great coverage so I am not going to duplicate their thoughts.

Having not read much before visiting, I was expecting the exhibition to be very much in the realm of new media and digital technology as the primary focus. The show straddles the fence between technology as a driving factor in the creation of work, vs digital technology as the being only an enabling factor in much of the work. Its a good balance that seems to accurately represent the way many new media artists think; they dabble in many forms.

I would best describe Tantalum Memorial by Harwood, Richard Wright, Matsuko Yokokoji as a monument to retro computing, but it’s meaning makes it more solemn and morbid. It consists of several strowger switches, which a computer dials into and plays back recorded messages from London’s Congolese community’s circulating conversations. Strowger switches were the mechanical devices invented by Almon Strowger to replace human telephone operators. Strowger switches use Tantalum, as do many modern day electronics, including cell phones. Tantalum is mined in Congo, and is the source of considerable strife there, causing the deaths of many thousands in wars relatively underreported in western media. You can listen to the recording on a set of headphones. The sound of the switches echos through the gallery as if counting the rising death toll.

Global warming and climate change are themes that loom large in this exhibit and Zero1 in general. Rising North by Jane Marsching and the two other works by her address global warming more directly than perhaps any other work in the festival I’ve seen so far. The work consists of a almost sci-fi video showing the sea levels around the world rising, the mega-cities of the world shrinking and eventually being encased in some sort of biosphere and floatation device. The encased cities then move and converge at the north and south polls, the places on earth that will remain suitable for human habitation when much of the temperate zones become too warm. Watching the work, I can’t help but be both fascinated by the idea of moving entire land-masses and horrified that rising sea levels and temperatures is a future we are destined to see.

Ways to Wave is a virtual and physical sculpture; it exists both in the gallery and in a different form in Second Life. Participants in the gallery move the petals of the flower-like interface in the gallery, which effects a scene in Second Life projected on the screen just behind the sculpture. The movement of the petals also impacts a changing audio composition. There is supposed to be a way to visit the sculpture in Second Life, but I haven’t attempted that. It is an interesting way to bridge the physical and the virtual, and I’m always a big fan of work that encourages you to interact with it.

If/Then is Piotr Szyhalski’s contribution to the exhibition and the festival. Installed in the gallery and in changing locations around the festival are dispensers that drop leaflets designed by Szyhalski. The leaflets reference leaflets distributed by the US Military’s Psyops department in the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Visitors are encouraged to take some leaflets of leaflets that drop onto the gallery floor. The set of leaflets I received have the text “ Honor will never be regained, no matter what the cost”, printed in both arabic and english on the back, with pictures of Saddam Hussein and Thomas Jefferson on the front. The dual meanings of this are disturbing if unavoidable; Saddam Hussein will be remembered by many as a disgraced dictator, and the US has lost much of it’s honor and credibility in the world because of the war our government started in Iraq.

I’ve got a few more posts in store about the festival, so stay tuned.

This session has been great for me, as this is very much where my head is at right now with ArtsConnectEd… My live notes follow:

Brian Kelly chairs a session on Search, announcing that with the smaller size both speakers are willing to make this a bit more workshop-like. Terry Makewell starts by introducing his project: 9 partners making up the National Museums Online Learning Project. He goes over some of the goals of the project, and the current state of things, and the realization that some sort of federated search was needed to span the partners’ collections.

How to do the federated search? Multi-institution project meant different technical teams, different technologies, and limited resources in some cases. See the paper for more details, but the two technologies they considered most carefully are OAI/PMH and Opensearch.

OAI, the path we’re going down with ArtsConnectEd, uses a central repository and runs the searches there. Opensearch spools the searches out to each institution and then re-orders them locally and returns the result.

Opensearch fit the project requirements and timeline most efficiently, so that was their choice. He discusses their prototyping effort: scraping search results to generate the RSS for Opensearch. They now have a single page with a configuration file they can drop on each partners’ website and it will “just work”. Potential caveats: what if the search result page changes? Also the Opensearch can only be as fast as the response from the slowest partner.

He shows the working prototype, and I’m excited to see they’ve got thumbnails where available – their scraper must be fairly robust for each partner.

Lessons learned: federated search doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated, and it can work with small and large museums equally well. Their method pushes the work offsite, requiring minimal or no effort on the museum’s part.

(Note to self: end slide show with a kitten and you’re in.)

Q&A – Scalibility issues come up, they’re aware of them coming. Asked if they considered Google Co-Op: yes, but quickly found that Google was unable to deeply crawl many of the partners’ collections due to dynamic urls. Lots of twitter traffic in this session too.

Very interesting debate for me to hear on OAI vs. Opensearch. Many institutions moving towards OAI, but the scope of implementing it is a barrier for most. My feeling that OAI gives more searchable fields is somewhat refuted by the idea that the average user has no interest or knowledge of these fields (culture, era, etc)…

(Mike Ellis shows off by building a co-op search during the session.)

Johan Mhlenfeldt Jensen from the Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark, speaks next on his paper. Trying to catch up, I was distracted for the beginning.

The example he’s showing now exposes some fields for filtering, rather than just keywords. Interesting. Another example showing map-based searching, says it’s immensely popular. Easy to make for photographic collections since the address is known, much harder for other sorts of objects sometimes.

Interesting discussion on “advanced search” – he says studies show it’s minimally used, Google has changed everything. People just want a single field. Hmm… Are we wasting time and overbuilding if we have anything more advanced than a single field?? This is the question I’m banging against as I listen to these speakers.

He asks “is the best the enemy of the good?” Good question. Do we wait forever getting it right? Clearly, no, but how far do we go.

They both have good input on the question I ask about overbuilding: move the advanced search behind the scenes and make it more semantic. Still need the metadata, but don’t ask users to know about it. Also need a way to drill down after search: start with simple search, and then apply filters.

Very good comment on positioning: where and at what point in the process do you expose filters and result counts?

Brian summarizes the importance of getting static URIs for resources: then Google will “just work”…

(Note to self: implement Opensearch for the Walker and ACE)

This session, lead by Sebastian Chan of the Powerhouse Museum was packed to the brim, and well worth it. Seb gave a great overview of Google Analytics, as well as other stats tools and talked a bit about how to use them to create a big picture of visitor analysis. My notes are not very organized, but might prove useful for some.

The Search “Problem”

Google deep links.

Now google has search inside this site right there on front of results page, when you hit a high ranked site right away (search for Powerhouse museum). Not doing this to the Walker Yet.

Google hi-jacks these search results, shows ads, can hurt.

When someone enters from a deep link off google, hard to gauge intention from visitors.

Funny, jobs seems to be a top result on many museum sites.

Retailers hate this, they want to funnel your experience through all their ads. (Amazon wants to try to sell to you at all points, google thwarts this)

Traditional Metrics

Come out of the advertising world

visits, pageviews, time on site, etc

Ask people what they’re using

Almost everyone is using some sort of javascript based client side solution

Look at google analytics

13k visits, if were using a logfile based solution, would be vastly inflated by bots, spiders, harvesters

Javascript tagging solution resolves some of this

When switching to a logfile based solution, with inflated numbers, going to tagging solution, hard to explain big drop to the marketing department or the director

Benchmarking tool in google analytics. Interesting, haven’t looked at this before.

Demo of how unique visitor counting works.

Time on site: Seb showing a site with time on-site of 0:54 seconds. Break it out, 23K of visitors show a time on site of 0-10 seconds.

How many visitors have a depth of visit (Number of pages visited) of 1 page. Tons! Every visitor that hits only 1 page, they count as 0 seconds.

If you deduct the people that only hit one page (getting rid of 0 sec visits), you see that the median time on site visits are much better.

Looking at content drilldown, now looking at comparing regions and how to use drilldown.

Site search overview. Google can track search terms on your site, whether or not you’re using a google search on your site.

Traditional Metrics.

RSS feeds are not hit in GA, but can in logfile analysis. But problematic, because RSS hits are not really visits.

Email metrics

Useful to gather addresses of those who read email, take those addresses, and use them as seperate sub-group that are receptive.

Do the same, with those who clicked through, can drill down to specific exhibitions, etc. Allows very direct marketing to receptive people.

Realtime Metrics

Reinvigorate. My buddy paul loves this. Lets you see see visits in real time, what they’re searching for, etc…

Looks like tons of traffic from google. Wow!

Lets you expand visits, etc. Really slick.

Lets you pick up trends very quickly.

Outside metrics

Quote from Seb: “You’ve heard of Alex? Alexa is crap. Don’t use it.”

Instead, use AttentionMeter. But, it’s US only. Free!

Works that ISPs sell anonymozed logs, attentionmeter uses that for data.

Looks pretty nice.

Quantcast lets you look up similar sites, how you compare, etc.

Compete.com is another one worth looking at. Compete is better than Quantcast, according to Seb.

New Metrics

Flickr Metrics

For powerhouse, metric is not views, but how many things were tagged. Part of their goal with flickr commons, getting people to tag stuff.

Technorati Authority: Dubious, not all that great. Only measure blog links.

egoSurf.com: lets you check the “ego score” of a person and/or a site. Neat.

Domaintools: Lets you look up how much you’re being used as a reference in Wikipedia, amongst other things.

http://whois.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/walkerart.org

Side notes:

Tabbed browsing messes with things. if you open a tab, how accurate is it when you open a new tab and come back to it later? Not very accurate.

Question I asked about RSS Metrics:

Look at people who are nerds.

Captures a lot of machines, too.

Best metric is people who use feed my inbox.

Edit: Also some great notes here.

This session, lead by Sebastian Chan of the Powerhouse Museum was packed to the brim, and well worth it. Seb gave a great overview of Google Analytics, as well as other stats tools and talked a bit about how to use them to create a big picture of visitor analysis. My notes are not very organized, but might prove useful for some.

The Search “Problem”

Google deep links.

Now google has search inside this site right there on front of results page, when you hit a high ranked site right away (search for Powerhouse museum). Not doing this to the Walker Yet.

Google hi-jacks these search results, shows ads, can hurt.

When someone enters from a deep link off google, hard to gauge intention from visitors.

Funny, jobs seems to be a top result on many museum sites.

Retailers hate this, they want to funnel your experience through all their ads. (Amazon wants to try to sell to you at all points, google thwarts this)

Traditional Metrics

Come out of the advertising world

visits, pageviews, time on site, etc

Ask people what they’re using

Almost everyone is using some sort of javascript based client side solution

Look at google analytics

13k visits, if were using a logfile based solution, would be vastly inflated by bots, spiders, harvesters

Javascript tagging solution resolves some of this

When switching to a logfile based solution, with inflated numbers, going to tagging solution, hard to explain big drop to the marketing department or the director

Benchmarking tool in google analytics. Interesting, haven’t looked at this before.

Demo of how unique visitor counting works.

Time on site: Seb showing a site with time on-site of 0:54 seconds. Break it out, 23K of visitors show a time on site of 0-10 seconds.

How many visitors have a depth of visit (Number of pages visited) of 1 page. Tons! Every visitor that hits only 1 page, they count as 0 seconds.

If you deduct the people that only hit one page (getting rid of 0 sec visits), you see that the median time on site visits are much better.

Looking at content drilldown, now looking at comparing regions and how to use drilldown.

Site search overview. Google can track search terms on your site, whether or not you’re using a google search on your site.

Traditional Metrics.

RSS feeds are not hit in GA, but can in logfile analysis. But problematic, because RSS hits are not really visits.

Email metrics

Useful to gather addresses of those who read email, take those addresses, and use them as seperate sub-group that are receptive.

Do the same, with those who clicked through, can drill down to specific exhibitions, etc. Allows very direct marketing to receptive people.

Realtime Metrics

Reinvigorate. My buddy paul loves this. Lets you see see visits in real time, what they’re searching for, etc…

Looks like tons of traffic from google. Wow!

Lets you expand visits, etc. Really slick.

Lets you pick up trends very quickly.

Outside metrics

Quote from Seb: “You’ve heard of Alex? Alexa is crap. Don’t use it.”

Instead, use AttentionMeter. But, it’s US only. Free!

Works that ISPs sell anonymozed logs, attentionmeter uses that for data.

Looks pretty nice.

Quantcast lets you look up similar sites, how you compare, etc.

Compete.com is another one worth looking at. Compete is better than Quantcast, according to Seb.

New Metrics

Flickr Metrics

For powerhouse, metric is not views, but how many things were tagged. Part of their goal with flickr commons, getting people to tag stuff.

Technorati Authority: Dubious, not all that great. Only measure blog links.

egoSurf.com: lets you check the “ego score” of a person and/or a site. Neat.

Domaintools: Lets you look up how much you’re being used as a reference in Wikipedia, amongst other things.

http://whois.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/walkerart.org

Side notes:

Tabbed browsing messes with things. if you open a tab, how accurate is it when you open a new tab and come back to it later? Not very accurate.

Question I asked about RSS Metrics:

Look at people who are nerds.

Captures a lot of machines, too.

Best metric is people who use feed my inbox.

Edit: Also some great notes here.

Standing room only at David Greenfield’s morning session. I’m looking forward to this session now that my head’s full of Web 2.0 / Museum ideas thanks to Nina’s recent presentation. David starts by tipping his hat to Shelley at Brooklyn, Gail at V&A, and a few others – this conference, he says, is full of people tackling different parts of the Web 2.0 creature.

Quickly goes into some theory: Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences, how one measure does not predict another. Roger Schank’s notion of “narrative and intelligence”, how learning is connected to the experience and situation of the learning. Seymour Papert: communities of learners, and how group learning is powerful: everyone of all levels in the same classes, and a hierarchy of learning. Finally, Ken Robinson: “schools are killing creativity”, based on an Industrial Revolution mindset which no longer works in today’s society. I’m intrigued by the theory, but I’m more intrigued by how he’s going to tie this to Web 2.0 tools.

(Seriously, people are sitting in the isle and standing across the back of the room. It’s packed.)

David moves to a list of common problems museums face with technology and learning, and mentions a few solutions such as partnerships.

He’s got a wiki set up to support the session: www.redberry.pbwiki.com.

Finishes with some examples from the Living Museum and their Web 2.0 efforts: blogging, Facebook, Youtube.

Q&A – Audience giving examples of Web 2.0 efforts in their institutions. The issue of in-house programming staff comes up again – I think people get it, but it’s still hard to convince their institutions that this is so important.

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.

Fiona Cameron

Object Orientated Democracies: Contradictions, challenges, and opportunities

Fiona starts by defining “Networked Objects” – collections now operate in a global flow of greater resources online. Collections information is becoming fluid. The meaning is created and re-created in various ways, especially due to influences in popular culture.

Here, controversy is seen as a positive element: objects take on a new role as mediator, rather than simply cultural symbols.

Example of interpretting a Palestinian dress – different readings of the same object depending on reader’s perspective. Placing these objects in an open wiki was seen as highly problematic as “public” meets “museum culture”.

She shows an incredible map: “complexifying collections interfaces” showing an overview of the various spheres of influence on collections and objects. I love this: translation of the object is ongoing, not fixed.

These maps are blowing my mind! I need to find this paper online and pour over it more to really grasp what she’s saying here: “the meaning and significance of objects can take many forms.” She describes four influences: local knowledge, expert communities, experiental, and the museum voice. All combine to create jointly-generated knowledge of an object.

Emphasizing the legitimacy of other types of knowledge, and embracing complexity in collections.

Peter Samis

Who’s responsible for Saying what we See?

Exhibition of the work of Olafur Eliasson, and online component. Peter starts by talking about the idea of a “phenomenon maker” – doesn’t exist without people experiencing it, participating. Objects don’t have a meaning that the museum could convey, it required people to describe how they were experiencing it. Allowed visitors to describe the work on a new blog: they came, they reacted, they wrote. However, as we’ve seen in similar projects, most people were lurking, wanting to read others’ comments but not add their own.

Who knew Peter spoke French? :)

Their online component allowed them to guage interest in objects: those that seemed to “require” a comment. People needed to talk about them – positive AND negative.

What’s the value of comments such as these? He asks this tantalizing question, and leaves it for the Q&A at the end.

Traces the evolution of museum blogs: from institutional to more public participation, and theorizes on the final step of merging this interaction. References Nina Simon’s museum social interaction hierarchy.

Aaron Cope, flickr.com

The API as Curator

About artists and institutions “opening up” – not giving everything away, but allowing sharing and seeing what people build. It’s really about “plumbing, and making plumbing not scary.” If you’re talking about the web, eventually you’re going to have to talk about computer programming.

EXCELLENT pitch for bringing the programming in-house for museums! Not everyone needs to be a programmer, but we need it: for the “plumbing”.

Threadless: t-shirt company online where users generate and vote on designs to be made into shirts. It’s essentially printmaking, in a new form.

Now into APIs and the importance of exposing the data. (Flickr commons) Story of Dan Catt creating GeoCommons using flickr APIs to get geocoding data into flickr tags (basically a hack) and mash it into a google map (using THEIR API). Flickr hired him and made it real, but he was able to built it in the first place because the “parts” were exposed. (That sounds dirty. But it’s important.)

Museums need FAST release cycles to keep up with this stuff. Small steps towards awesome: this required having programmers ON STAFF to build APIs and build off of other APIs.

Aaron: great slides!

Q&A:

how to attract in-house staff? Teach programming at more levels.