At the heart of our process is a Panasonic AV-HS400 video mixer, which accepts both an HD-SDI camera feed and a VGA feed from the presenter’s laptop.  The video mixer allows us to cut live between the speaker and his or her presentation materials, either with fades or straight cuts. In addition, the mixer’s picture-in-picture capability allows us to insert presentation materials into the frame, next to the speaker.  Doing so gives viewers both the expressiveness of the presenter and the visual references live audiences are seeing. One thing to note: if a speaker begins moving around the stage, it becomes difficult to frame a picture-in-picture, so the technique works better when people stand still.

The camera we use is a Sony PMW-350K, which is part of the XDCAM family. We shoot from the back of the room in all of our public spaces, putting a lot of distance between the camera and the subject. As a result, we need all the zoom our camera lens can give. Presently our lens is a Fujinon 8mm–128mm (16x), but realistically we could use something longer for better close-ups of the speaker. This is an important factor when considering cameras: where will your camera be positioned in relation to the subject, and how much reach is needed to get a good shot. Having a camera close to the speaker isn’t always practical with a live audience present, so many of shooters push the limits of their camera lens. Being so far out also puts a lot of strain on a tripod head. It is very easy to jiggle the frame when making slight camera moves fully zoomed out, so a good tripod head should go hand in hand with a long video lens.

For audio, our presenter’s microphone first hits the house soundboard and then travels to our camera where levels are monitored and adjusted. At that point, both the audio and the camera’s images travel through a single HD-SDI BNC cable to our video mixer where audio and video signals split up once again. This happens because the mixer draws audio from whatever source is selected. As such, if a non-camera source is selected, such as the PowerPoint, no audio is present. To resolve this, an HD-SDI direct out from the camera source on the mixer is used to feed a device that re-embeds the audio with the final mixed video signal. The embedding device we use is an AJA FS-1 frame synchronizer.

With the frame synchronizer now kicking out a finished program, complete with embedded audio, our AJA KiPro records the content to an Apple ProRes file. We use a solid-state hard drive module as media, which pops out after an event is over and plugs directly into a computer for file transferring. An important thing to remember for anyone considering a mixer is that an external recording device is necessary to capture the final product.

To webcast, our FS-1 frame synchronizer simultaneously sends out a second finished signal to our Apple laptop. The laptop is outfitted with a video capture card, in our case a Matrox MXO2 LE breakout box, that attaches via the ExpressCard slot. Once the computer recognizes the video signal, it is ready for webcasting. The particular service we use is called Ustream. A link to our Ustream account is embedded in the Walker’s video page, titled The Channel, and viewers can watch the event live through their browser. Live viewership can run the gamut from just a few people to more than 75 viewers. Design-related programs–like the popular lecture by designer Aaron Draplin in March–tend to attract the biggest audiences. Once an event has concluded, Ustream stores a recording of the event within the account. We have the option to link to this recorded Ustream file through our website, but we don’t. Instead we try to quickly process our own recording to improve the quality before uploading it to YouTube.

The most frustrating part of our webcasting experiment has been bandwidth. The Walker has very little of it and thus we share a DSL line with the FTP server for webcasting. The upload speed on this DSL line tops out at 750 kbps. In real life, we get more like 500 kbps, leaving us to broadcast around 400 kbps. These are essentially dial-up numbers, which means the image quality is poor and our stream is periodically lost, even when the bit rate is kept down. Viewers at home are therefore prone to multiple disruptions while watching an event. We do hope to increase bandwidth in the coming months to make our service more reliable.

Earlier I mentioned that the Walker does as little post-production as possible for event documentation, but we still do some. Once the final ProRes file is transferred to an editing station, it is opened up in Final Cut 7. The audio track is then exported as a stand-alone stereo file and opened with Soundtrack Pro where it is normalized to 0db and given a layer of compression. With live events, speakers often turn their head or move away from the microphone periodically. This can make audio levels uneven.  Compression helps bring the softer moments in line with the louder ones, thus limiting dynamic range and delivering a more consistent product.

After the audio track is finished, it is dropped back into the timeline and the program’s front and back end are trimmed. We try to cut out all topical announcements and unnecessary introductions. Viewers don’t need to hear about this weekend’s events two years from now, so we don’t waste their time with it. In addition to tightening up the top of the show, an opening title slide is added including the program’s name and date. The timeline is then exported as a reference file and converted to an MP4 through the shareware program MPEG streamclip.

MPEG streamclip is a favorite of mine because it lists the final file size and lets users easily adjust the bit rate. With a 2GB file size limit on YouTube uploads, we try to maximize bitrate (typically 1800–3000 kbps) for our 1280 x 720p files. Using a constant bit rate for encoding instead of a variable bit rate also saves us a lot of time. With the runtime of our events averaging 90 minutes, the sacrifice in image quality for a constant bit rate seems justified considering how long an HD variable bit rate encode can take.

Once we have the final MP4 file it is uploaded to YouTube and embedded in the Walker’s video page.

It’s been a couple of years since I attended the annual Museums & the Web conference. A must-stop for professionals working in the field of museums + all things online, this conference celebrated its 16^th anniversary under new management with the same great content we’ve come to expect.

A few of my conference takeaways:

Cultural data sculpting
Sarah Kenderine kicked off the conference, wowing us with her work in immersive environments using panoramic and stereoscopic display systems. I was entranced by recent installations using 3D imagery, high resolution augmented panoramas, and circular screens to recreate cultural heritage sites, performances and narratives (imagine dancers animating images in a cave painting and physical interactions with enormous datasets). From Hampi, India, and the Mogao caves, Dunhuang, China, to adaptions of Beckett narratives, the work of Kenderine’s lab at the City University of Hong Kong demonstrates the amazing possibilities for enhanced exploration, interactive interpretation, and new modalities of human interaction for cultural heritage preservation. Project documentation available here.

Be where the puck is going
In a session on Digital Strategies, Bruce Wyman evoked Wayne Gretsky’s advice to “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Bruce spoke to the permeability of place as the future of interactive media and suggested restrictive digital strategies may run counter to our needs. In a period of fundamental change, we need to evolve the things that we are good at, be nimble, and design not for the device but for the visitor and their engagement. Wyman encouraged us to trust our audiences and serialize the experience by developing content that transcends and crosses platforms.

Like Wyman, Rob Stein is an eloquent technology advocate. In the same session, he advised to make sure your digital strategy reflects the larger museum strategy. And all you technologists who think you have difficulty getting upper management’s ear, work on your communication skills. Learn to write! Despite his claim that writing doesn’t come easy, Stein’s paper is excellent: Blow Up Your Digital Strategy: Changing the Conversation about Museums and Technology.

After Gutenberg
There was much talk in conference sessions and informal meetups about changing publishing models. In the session After Gutenberg, the Whitney’s Sarah Hromack described the evolution of Whitney Stories, a blog wherein the museum is wrestling with questions of authority—what stories do we want to tell, which staff are qualified to speak on behalf of the museum, editorial approval—and issues of sustainability. I haven’t had a chance to read the paper but the presentation was a refreshingly honest assessment of the inherent problems in this work and the reality of making it a part of our daily practice (not in addition to what we do but rethinking how we do our work).

A museum without labels
The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is Australia’s largest private museum, a “secular temple” of 6,000 square meters to worship materialism with nary a label on the walls. Visitors use the ‘O’ mobile device to read about art on display and listen to interviews with the artists. The museum’s unique take on audience engagement—including claims to remove the most popular work as evidenced in ‘O’ stats and restricting online collection access to visitors who have actually experienced the artwork—suggest this is indeed a museum visitors are unlikely to forget. I enjoyed this article on MONA’s founder, David Walsh, describing his vision for this “subversive Disneyland.”

Spreading an analytics culture
There were a number of good sessions addressing the importance of continuous evaluation and building a culture of analytics. The panel on the Culture24 research project focused on the key findings in their recently published report. Among them, be clear what you are trying to do online and who it is for. Revise the whole suite of metrics you care about and the tools used to measure them. Google Analytics is only part of a multi-tool solution that begins with a good problem definition.

One of the participants in the Culture24 project, the Tate went into more detail on its efforts in a subsequent session and paper Making Sense of Numbers: A Journey of Spreading the Analytics Culture at Tate. Using the Tate Liverpool Alice in Wonderland exhibition as a test case, they described the analytics tools used (including Hootsuite, Adwords, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, ticketing system, and YouTube analytics), matrices, and reports built in response to the exhibitions communication plan and areas of activity, both on and offline. While the exhibition reporting was awe-inspiring in its quality and thoroughness, Tijana Tasich, Tate’s senior digital producer, admitted that more work, training, and resources are required to implement similar evaluations across the organization and its programs.

Epic fail
There’s much to learn from failed projects in our field and #MW2012 used this as a topic for its closing session. Hats off to the project cases studies that took the stage to reveal what didn’t work and why. Each project report included a round of bingo, with categories for failure occupying spaces on the card. Among them: poor organizational fit, must-be-invented-here syndrome, feature creep, tech in search of a problem, no user research, pleasing donors and funders, no local context, no backup plan, and not knowing when to say goodbye. Wifi was off during the session, forcing all of us to listen, learn, and not tweet specifics. Everyone should feel good after their time in the chair with therapist Wyman and his Labrador. We appreciate your honesty and hope we’re brave enough to take the stage at future conferences.

Best of Web Awards
The Walker was lucky enough to walk away with two awards for the redesign of our website (best in the category of Innovation/Experimental and best Overall). We are honored to receive the recognition of our peers and humbled to be in the company of so many excellent projects. The full slate of winners is available here.

We’re a serious bunch at the Walker Art Center, except when we aren’t. Cat breaks have made their way into Art News from Elsewhere, and we’ve tucked in a few Easter eggs for fans of these hidden amusements. Our new site includes a confetti drop that appears when you click on Parties & Special Events in the calendar. And for those who find their way to a place that they shouldn’t, there’s a custom 404 page. God forbid there’s a server crash, we’ll send you to a page featuring Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture.

Last week Eric added accumulating bees to the Lifelike exhibition page. The longer you stay on the page, the larger the swarm.

For those of you hoping to attract a few bees of your own, here’s Eric’s script.

With Fabric we can tailor our deployments precisely. We deploy often with one of two commands:
fab production simple_deploy or fab production deploy.
simple_deploy simply pulls new code from the repo and restarts the web server.
deploy does many things, each of which can be executed independently, and is explained below.

The scripts we run go both ways, code goes up to the server and data comes back to the workstation. We have fab sync_with_production, which pulls the database and images. The images arrive locally in a directory specified by an environment variable or the default directory. Conventional naming schemes simplify variables across systems such as the database name. Except for some development settings, our workstation environments are identical to the production environment, which means we can replicate a bug or feature locally and immediately.

We have been collecting all of the commands we normally run on the servers into our fabfile. And then we can group them by calling tasks from other tasks. Our deployment consists of 12 tasks. With this Fabric task, one can deploy to the production or staging server with this one command:
fab production deploy.

This makes it incredibly simple to put code that is written on developer workstations into production in as safe and secure way. Here is our deployment in Fabric:

First the “with” blocks put us onto the remote server, into the right directory and within Python’s virtual environment. From there “git_pull” gets the new code which contains the settings files, and “get_settings” copies any new settings into place. The task called “install_requirements” calls on pip to validate our virtual environment’s packages against the setting file called requirements. All third party packages are locked to a version so we aren’t surprised by new “features” that have adverse effects. We use celery to harvest data from other sites so we make sure they are running with fresh config files. The task “syncompress” does our compressing of css and js, “migrate” alters the database per our migration files and gunicorn is the program that is running django.

It takes about 60 seconds for a new version of the website to get into production. From there it takes 0-10 minutes for the memcached values to expire before the public changes are visible. We are deploying continuously so watch closely for updates!

Gushy thanks out of the way, the launch gave us a chance to notice the site was a little … slow. Ok, a lot, depending on your device and connection, etc. Not the universally fast experience we were hoping for. The previous Walker site packed all the overhead into the page rendering, so with the HTML cached the rest would load in under a second, easy. The new site is heavy even if the HTML is cached. Just plain old heavy: custom fonts, tons of images popping and rotating, javascript widgets willy-nilly, third-party API calls…

Here’s the dirty truth of the homepage when we kicked it out the door December 1:

12/1: 2.6 MB over 164 requests. Load times are pretty subjective depending on a lot of things, but we had good evidence of the page taking at least 4+ seconds from click to being usable — and MUCH longer in some cases. Everyone was clearly willing to cut us some slack with a shiny new site, but once the honeymoon is over we need to be usable every day — and that means fast. This issue pretty quickly moved to the top of our priority list the Monday after launch, December 5.

The first thing to tackle was the size: 2.6 MB is just way too big. Eric noticed our default image scaling routine was somehow not compressing jpgs (I know, duh), so that was an easy first step and made a huge difference in download size.

12/5: 1.9 MB.

On the 6th we discovered (again, duh) lossless jpeg and png compression and immediately applied it to all the static assets on the site, but not yet to the dynamically-generated versions. Down to 1.8 MB. We also set up a fake Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help “parallelize” our image downloads. Modern browsers allow six simultaneous connections to a single domain, so by hosting all our images at www.walkerart.org we were essentially trying to send all our content through one tiny straw. Chris was able to modify our image generator code to spread requests across three new domains: cdn0.walkerart.org, cdn1, etc. This bypasses the geography and fat pipe of a real CDN, but does give the end user a few more straws to suck content through.

By the 8th we were ready to push out global image optimization and blow away the cache of too-big images we’d generated. I’m kind of astounded I’d never done this on previous sites, considering what an easy change it was and what a difference it made. We’re using jpegoptim and optipng, and it’s fantastic: probably 30% lossless saving on already compressed jpegs and pngs. No-brainer.

12/8: 1.4 MB, almost half of what we launched with.

Next we needed to reduce the number of requests. We pushed into the second weekend with a big effort to optimize the Javascript and CSS. Earlier attempts using minify had blown up and were abandoned. Eric and Chris really stepped up to find a load order that worked and a safe way to combine and compress files without corrupting the contents. Most of the work was done Friday, but we opted to wait for Monday to push it out.

Meanwhile, I spent the weekend pulling work from the client’s browser back to the server where we could cache it site-wide. This doesn’t really impact bytes transferred, but it does remove a remote API call, which could take anywhere from a fraction of a second (unnoticeable) to several seconds in a worst-case scenario (un-usable). This primarily meant writing code to regularly call and cache all of our various Twitter feeds and the main weather widget. These are now served in the cached HTML and it’s negligible in the load time, instead of 200+ ms on average. It all adds up!

CSS Sprite for Header and Footer nav images (it has a transparent background, so it’s supposed to look like that):

So Monday, 12/12, we pushed out our first big changes to address the number of queries. Eric had combined most of the static pngs into a CSS Sprite, the javascript and CSS were reduced to fewer files, and the third party APIs were no longer called in the browser. Really getting there, now.

12/12: 1.37 MB, and 125 requests

Happily (as I was writing this) Eric just pushed out the last (for now) CSS sprite, giving us these final numbers:

12/13: 1.37 MB, and 110 requests! (down 53% and 67% respectively)

This isn’t over, but it’s gotten to the point of markedly diminishing returns. We’re fast enough to be pretty competitive and no longer embarrassing on an iPad, but there are a few more things to pick off around the edges. We’re heavier and slower than most of our museum peers, but lighter and faster than a lot of similar news sites. Which one are we? Depends which stats I want to compare. :)

We used the following tools to help diagnose and prioritize page loading time issues:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Launched late last week, the new Walker website is generating plenty of reactions from art bloggers, journalists and our colleagues in the museum world.

Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes offered a quick response last week, calling the site a “game-changer, the website that every art museum will have to consider from this point forward.” He followed that up with a more in-depth piece today that both praised the Walker (“no American art museum is more prepared to produce journalism than is the Walker”) and offered some challenges (“How probative will the Walker site be about its own institution, which dominates the presentation of contemporary art in a huge section of the country?”).

“Art museum websites typically pretend that the museum is an island unto itself,” he writes. “The new Walker website rejects that approach by presenting the Walker as both a physical and a virtual community hub — and it defines its community appropriately broadly, as both the art world and the Walker’s home state of Minnesota. With its audience thus defined, the new website promises to provide not just information about the Walker, but information about art and artists wherever they are, with an special and appropriate focus on its home region. That’s smart. Next up: We’ll see how the website delivers on that promise.”

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic writes that the site “should be a model for other institutions of all kinds.” He writes: “What I love most about what the Walker is attempting to do is that they seem to have realized that they can do more than stave off a slow spiral into irrelevance. The Internet means that the Walker can become a global art powerhouse from the comfort of the upper Midwest.”

Seb Chan, recently named director of digital and emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, interviewed Walker staff about the technology side of the site, noting that “it represents a potential paradigm shift for institutional websites.”

Museum Nerd, the popular anonymous art-tweeter and blogger, followed up a tweet from Friday (below), with a fleshed out analysis at Artlog. Calling the site an “earth-shaking gamechanger,” Museum Nerd writes, “They’re not just positioning themselves as an arbiter of taste (the connoisseurship thing has long been in every art museum’s bailiwick): the Walker is also placing themselves at the center of the conversation that their mission is all about.”

Marianne Combs at MPR: “As a reporter, I find this shift particularly interesting, because it marks a significant step forward in an ongoing trend. Namely arts organizations, faced with a lack of media coverage, are creating their own coverage, and taking the dialogue directly to their audiences.”

Secrets of the City: “[P]retty darn cool. The new look moves the site into more of a content focused direction, but also makes it easier to see what’s happening in the galleries.”

The Getty:

Minneapolis Institute of Arts:

ICA Philadelphia:

MoMA:

The Mattress Factory:

Museumnerd:

I’ll continue to update this post as more reviews come in.

Updates

12.06.11: Nina Simon at Museum 2.0:

“Here’s what I see: a website as a unique core offering–alongside, but not subservient to, the physical institution. Walkerart.org is not about the Walker Art Center. It is the Walker Art Center, in digital form.”

12.08.11: The Independent (UK):

“It’s curation, but not as we (or other galleries) know it yet. It ought to help hugely the Walker’s role on the arts stage…”

Minnov8:

“To say I was impressed is an understatement: the design is fresh, exciting to view and the content compelling. The breadth and depth of coverage of art and design quickly shifted my mind toward a completely different place, one of consideration, thought and ideas instead of my typical focus on the tech ‘flipper-flappers’ and ‘eye candy’ of this new website they’d delivered.”

12.09.11: It’s Nice That (UK):

“It’s a great step forward that should be welcomed by all creative types – the writing is excellent and it looks great too with lots of interesting web design tricks producing a thing of real beauty.”

 12.20.11: Alissa Walker, GOOD:

“A vibrant and thoughtful portal for the local creative community… Museums everywhere should take note, yes, but publications should be paying attention as well.”

An ongoing conversation here at the Walker concerns the issue of systemic wayfinding within our spaces — certainly an important issue for an institution actively seeking attendance and public engagement, not to mention an institution whose building is literally a hybrid of the old and new (with our 2005 expansion). While not normally in New Media’s purview, and only occasionally so for Design, a recent initiative to improve the flow and general satisfaction of visitors brought with it the idea of using digital displays, with their malleable content and powerful visual appeal, to guide and direct people throughout the Walker.

Our new static directional signage

Currently installed in one location of an eventual three, and with a simple “phase one” version of the content, the Bazinet Lobby monitor banks cycle through the title graphics for all the exhibitions currently on view, providing a mental checklist of sorts that allows the visitor to tally what he or she has or hasn’t yet seen that directly references the vinyl graphics at each gallery entrance. The corner conveniently works as an intersection for two hallways leading to a roughly equivalent number of galleries in either direction, one direction leading to our collection galleries in the Barnes tower, and the other our special exhibition galleries in the Herzog & de Meuron expansion. To this end, we’ve repurposed the “street sign” motif used on our new vinyl wall graphics to point either way (which also functions as a nice spacial divider). Each display tower cycles through it’s given exhibitions with a simple sliding transition, exposing the graphics one by one. An interesting side effect of this motion and the high-contrast LCDs has been the illusion of each tower being a ’70s-style mechanical lightbox; I’ve been tempted to supplement it with a soundtrack of quiet creaking.

The system, powered by Sedna Presenter and running on four headless, remotely-accessible Mac Minis directly behind the wall, affords us a lot of flexibility. While our normal exhibitions cycle is a looped After Effects composition, we’re also working on everything from decorative blasts of light and pattern (the screens are blindingly bright enough to bathe almost the entire lobby in color), to live-updating Twitter streams (during parties and special events), to severe weather and fire alerts (complete with a rather terrifying pulsating field of deep red). In fact, this same system is now even powering our pre-show cinema trailers. I’m particularly interested in connecting these to an Arduino’s environmental sensors that would allow us to dynamically change color, brightness, etc. based on everything from temperature to visitor count to time of day — look for more on that soon.

See it in action:

Behind the scenes / Severe weather alert:

Installation:

Our little corner of the office, over the past few months, has been transformed into a veritable Apple Store in miniature. You’ll be seeing some of these around the galleries soon.

Photo by Greg Beckel

Cast wider nets: organize, filter, present.

Just as we’re getting good at putting our content online and connected internally, we’re starting to realize that’s not good enough. We need to connect more dots for our visitors: show related content not just from our institution, and not just from other institutions in the sector, but the entire web. We’re still a trusted source dealing with authoritative information, but we’re now expected to use that authority to interpret and present more than just our own content.

Part of this includes opening up our content in return so that we can be part of someone else’s related content. This includes OpenGraph markup (FaceBook, etc), simple machine readable versions, and above all: sort out our licensing and make it easy to understand what can be shared and how!

Standardize access, not content.

There was some of the usual hand-wringing over metadata formats and authorities, but also some new ideas on skirting that hurdle rather than jumping it. While everyone agrees we need to continue to work towards clean, linked, open data using shared authorities, there are a number of steps we can take right now that can potentially have a great impact.

Namely, what if we standardize the access to the data, rather than the data itself? Rather than building another API (although we’re still going to), we can provide similar and simpler functionality right now. (In an afternoon, if my impassioned rant is to be believed!  :)  Details to follow.)

Stop inventing. Iterate.

A great demo (early beta here: http://trope.com/miami/) was given in the unfortunate timeslot of 8am on Saturday morning. The Art in Public Places project by Miami-Dade County is, to quote @minxmertzmomo: “a great example of doing the obvious thing excellently”. There is a tendency to try to solve our shared problems in a unique way with a special and clever twist (guilty!), when instead we should be choosing best-practices from working solutions and applying them in an un-complicated way. To reach higher we need to stand on others’ shoulders instead of building our own stepladders.

Don’t finish building the wrong site.

James Davis from the Tate presented a great paper describing the process they’ve taken to launch the new (also beta) version of their Collections site: http://beta.tate.org.uk/art/explorer. The paper is a lovely narrative exploring the issues we face when development takes years and we must constantly remind ourselves to not finish building what we started building, but instead what it’s become along the way.

Summary

For me the conference provided a great summary of the latest innovations and thinking of museums online, and affirmed for me many of the choices and directions we’re taking in our current relaunch project. It was fantastic to see old friends and make new ones, and hopefully set the stage for future collaborations. I’ve also got a growing list of stuff to steal (er, shoulders to stand on.. :). Fantastic stuff all around!

For our upcoming exhibition 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection, we’re trying something a bit different. As you can probably tell from the title, we’re allowing our audience to help us curate a show. The idea is that our chief curator, Darsie Alexander, will curate 50% of the show, and the audience will select from a group of 180 different print works for the other half.

As with most things presented to New Media, the question was posed, “how best do we do this?”. The exhibition is being hung in the same room as Benches and Binoculars, so the obvious answer was to use the kiosk already there as the voting platform for the show. With this in mind I started to think of different ways to present the voting app itself.

My initial idea was to do a “4-up” design. Display four artworks and ask people to choose their favorite. The idea was that this would make people confirm a choice in comparison to others. If you see some of what you’re selecting against, it can make it easier to know whether you want specific works in the show or not. But it also has the same effect in reverse. If you have two artworks that you really like, it can be just as hard to only be able to choose one. The other limitation? After coming up with the 4-up idea, we also decided to add iPhones into the mix as a possible voting platform (as well as iPads, an general internet browsers). The images on the iPhone’s screen were much to small to make decent comparisons on.

Nate suggested instead using a “hot or not” style voting system. One work that you basically vote yes or no on. This had the small downfall of not being able to compare a work against others, but allowed us to negate the “analysis paralysis” of the 4-up model. It also worked much better on mobile devices.

The second big decision we faced was “what do we show”? I had assumed in the beginning that we’d be showing label copy of every work like we do just about everywhere but it was suggested early on that we do no such thing. We didn’t want to influence voters by having a title or artist on every piece. With works by Chuck Close and Andy Warhol mixed into the print selections, it’s much too easy to see their name and vote for them simply because of their name. We wanted people to vote on what work they wanted to see, not what artist they wanted to see.

Both of these decisions proved to be pivotal in the popularity of the voting app. It made the voting app very streamlined and simplified. With 180 works to go through it makes it much easier to get through the entire thing. Choices are quick and easy. The results screen after voting on each artwork shows the current percentage of no to yes votes. This is a bit of a psychological pull. You as a user know what you think of this artwork, but what do others think about it? The only way to find out is to vote.

Because of this the voting app has been a success far beyond what we even thought it would be. I thought if we got 5,000-10,000 votes we would be doing pretty well. Half way through the voting process now, we have well over 100,000 votes. We’ve had over 1,500 users voting on the artworks. We’ve collected over 500 email addresses wanting to know who the winners are when all the voting is tallied. We never expected anything this good and we have several weeks of voting yet to come.

One interesting outcome of all of these votes has been the number of yes’s to no’s over all of the works. Since the works are presented randomly (well, pseudo randomly for each user), one might expect that half the works would have more yes than no votes, and vice versa. But that’s not turned out to be the case. About 80% of the works have more no votes than yes’s. Why is this?

There are various theories. Perhaps people are more selective if they know something will be on view in public. Perhaps people in general are just overly negative. Or perhaps people really don’t like any of our artwork!

But one of the more interesting theories of why this is goes back to the language we decided to use. Originally we were going to use the actual words “Yes” and “No” to answer the question “Would you like to see this artwork on view?”. This later got changed to “Definitely” and “Maybe Not”. Notice how the affirmative answer has much more weight behind it: “Yes, most definitely!”, whereas the negative option leaves you a bit of wiggle room “Eh, maybe not”. It’s this differentiation between being sure of a decision and perhaps not so sure that may have contributed to people saying no more often than yes.

Which begs the question, what if it was changed? What if the options instead were “Definitely Not” and “Sure”? Now the definitive answer is on the negative and the positive answer has more room to slush around (“Hell no!” vs “Ahh sure, why not?!”). It would be interesting to see what the results would have been with this simple change in language. Maybe next time. This round, we’re going to keep our metrics the same throughout to keep it consistant.

The voting for 50/50 runs until Sept 15. If you’d like to participate, you still have time!