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.

… 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.

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

Other advantages Charlie mentioned for using Cloud computing:

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

Some disadvantages are:

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

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

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

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

Cloud computing structure for ArtBabble

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

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

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

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

Jusitn Heideman also contributed to this post.

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

Homepage

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

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

The revised homepage.

Revised article page

Articles

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

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

The new sharing links.

Search

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

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

Old style search results

New search results with refinements.

Artist Pages

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

Old artist homepage.

Revised artist page.

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

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

Artwork with video before changes.

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

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

Editing text

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

The new visual editor.

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

Any issues?

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

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.

It’s a little known fact that I put myself through college spinning cotton candy during the summer months. This project using live climate data and hacked cotton candy machines made me smile:

Climate Hack at Transmediale Festival
“Climate Hack is a workshop for emerging researchers, designers and artists dedicated to reframing the international political climate using means well-outside the traditional political rhetoric. Using both old and new technologies, live internet data streams and a diverse collection of hacking skills, workshop participants will produce a series of projects for public exhibition during the finals days of the Transmediale festival in Berlin, Germany.

Driven by the often-absurd nature of politics and the collective creativity often generated from equally absurd artistic mediums, the workshop will rally around the task of hacking Cotton Candy machines. Custom and hacked electronics, connected to live political news and weather feeds, will inform and animate the project. The result will be a set of dynamic and playful art objects designed to invert our perception of “everyday politics”.”

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.