New Media Initiatives

The museum technical community got some good news today: MuseTechCentral officially launched. Billing itself as the MCN Project Registry, the site seeks to “provide a place for the MCN community to share information about technology-related museum projects”.

After some quick browsing (encouragingly, there are already a good number of entries, including several cell phone tour projects I was interested in) it was easy to see the potential of the site:

• When starting a new project, it’s smart to see if this problem has been solved before. If so, how? And for how much? Is it worth the investment? Or is there a vendor to avoid? Now you can find out.
• Vice versa, upon completing a project, you may find yourself being hit up constantly for information requests. Now you can now simply refer people to your project page on MuseTechCentral.

While I was there I created an account and added our Art on Call project to the registry. The site is full of ajaxy goodness that makes form entry and navigation a breeze, although I do wish you could bookmark filtered results.

So far the projects seems to be fairly art-museum-centric, but hopefully that will change as more institutions start to contribute. The registry will be most useful if it truly represents the museum community, so if you’ve got a project to add… go add it!

Overall, this is a great effort by the Museum Computer Network and the Museum Software Foundation. Looking forward to future browsing and adding many more projects!

[via Musematic]

In the research process for Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, Design Director and Curator Andrew Blauvelt uncovered many interesting words invented to describe suburbia. Andrew enlisted now-former Design Fellow Jayme Yen and Visual Arts Fellow Rachel Hooper to assist in the research for the exhibit, and to further research the lexicon of suburbia. To make the collecting of the terminology easier, we set up a private wiki for them to use.

The wiki of terms has transformed into the lexicon found in the Worlds Away exhibition catalog (soon to be found in the Walker Shop). We thought the lexicon would make a great resource, so it was decided to build it into a larger exhibition website.

Site URL: http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/

The exhibition website is still a wiki, and you can help enhance and add to the terms in the lexicon. Each entry in the lexicon consists of a definition, a section for images, and a google map. You can modify or enhance the definitions, or add new terms we might not know about. Images can be added to better describe the term. And map locations can also be submitted to give a satellite overview for terms that may best be seen from above (cloverleaf, for instance). We also added bios for all the artists in the exhibition, as well as a few sample essays and excerpts from other essays found in the catalog. Additionally, the selected videos from our YouTube competition can be found on the video section of the site.

The design of the site is drawn from the exhibition catalog design by Senior Designer Chad Kloepfer. The book uses different paper and ink colors in different sections to compartmentalize the types of content (essays, interviews, lexicon, and topics). The site also takes the book or paper metaphor and uses it as the navigation mechanism, allowing you to always see the index for the other sections of the site.

I wanted to enforce a rigours structure on the wiki, not let it grow out of hand, and only allow public edits in the lexicon section. Like our other wiki sites, this one is based on pmwiki, which allows for a rigorous permissions system. We’re using a few extensions, extended markup (for footnotes), Google Map API, NewPageBoxPlus, and DictIndex (for the lexicon list). Pmwiki is quite hackable, and the skin we constructed makes good use of that hackability. For the animation and accordion, I’m using my favorite javascript library, MooTools.

Please take some time to explore the site and enhance the lexicon of terms.

Several months before I was employed by the Walker, I was one of the “resident artists” that participated in the OPEN-ENDED exhibition. The project that my collaborators, The Revolutionary Party, and I came up with was called Nothing (Nowhere) to Hide. We were asked by the Minnesota History Center to bring the project out of the archives for the opening of The Enemy Within: Terror in America - 1776 to Today. The opening reception will be Tuesday January 29, from 7-9pm.

The project is an examination of the aspects of secrecy in the government, and how much the government wants to know about the goings-on of citizens. The idea for the project was largely inspired by the warrantless wiretapping scandal, broken in the New York Times. We wanted to show how government secrecy is, for the time being, still a two way street, at least in a token manner, but highlight the disparities in the flow of information.

The project consists of four parts. One is documentation of de-classified, re-classified documents from the National Archives, a separate, but perhaps more mind-boggling example of government secrecy. The second is documentation of the FOIA request letters and responses to our request for our own FBI files (we requested them). The third part of the project is a computer and printer kiosk where users can fill out an on-screen form with their information to generate FOIA and Privacy Act letters to request their FBI file. The final aspect of the project is a video we created explaining how to request an FBI file. We shot this video with local actor Jim Bovino. Here’s the video, it’s kind of fun:

How To Request Your FBI File from Justin Heideman on Vimeo.

Sadly, our FBI file request generator does not work online, as it was designed for a specific browser and printer settings, but the site Get My FBI File seems to do the same thing (maybe even better).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve decided to extend the deadline for our open call for videos about the suburbs. The deadline has been extended a week to January 22nd. So if you ran out of time, you have a little more. To participate, upload your video to YouTube and add the tag “ walkerworldsaway” or post it as a response to our call video (seen below). To be considered for gallery screening, entries must be 5 minutes or less and be online by January 22, 2008.

Here’s a playlist of some of the great submissions we’ve already received:

• I have a thing for “ugly”, 1996-esque sites (I think they’re awesome). Here are some of my recent finds:
  • The Best Webs.net
  • Jim Jacobson’s Home Page
  • Killer Japanese Seizure Robots! (seriously, you might get a seizure)
  • American Beauty Equipment
• The Daily Mole has a good op-ed about the problems with accessible web video for hearing impaired people. This is an interesting topic, and one can see both sides of the issue, but clearly at some point the technology will have to evolved and web video will need captions. Target lost a suit for not making it’s website accessible, so one hope major media outlets are aware of the ramifications for avoiding accessibility. One has to wonder, though, what should someone who’s putting a video on YouTube be responsible for? When everyone is a media outlet, what is the cutoff?
• The 48 hour film project moves into second life.
• This is a pretty slick hack of Canon cameras to get a very high speed shutter.
• Neat threadless shirt, “The internet was closed so I thought I’d come outside today.” Cool, except the internet doesn’t close, and right now it’s 7 degrees outside, so I’ll just stay in, thanks.

Hat tip to Paul Schmelzer for some links.

• I have a thing for “ugly”, 1996-esque sites (I think they’re awesome). Here are some of my recent finds:
  • The Best Webs.net
  • Jim Jacobson’s Home Page
  • Killer Japanese Seizure Robots! (seriously, you might get a seizure)
  • American Beauty Equipment
• The Daily Mole has a good op-ed about the problems with accessible web video for hearing impaired people. This is an interesting topic, and one can see both sides of the issue, but clearly at some point the technology will have to evolved and web video will need captions. Target lost a suit for not making it’s website accessible, so one hope major media outlets are aware of the ramifications for avoiding accessibility. One has to wonder, though, what should someone who’s putting a video on YouTube be responsible for? When everyone is a media outlet, what is the cutoff?
• The 48 hour film project moves into second life.
• This is a pretty slick hack of Canon cameras to get a very high speed shutter.
• Neat threadless shirt, “The internet was closed so I thought I’d come outside today.” Cool, except the internet doesn’t close, and right now it’s 7 degrees outside, so I’ll just stay in, thanks.

Hat tip to Paul Schmelzer for some links.

Visitors to the Walker’s Frida Kahlo exhibition have the option of renting a multimedia guide ($6, $5 Walker members). The tour was produced by Antenna Audio whose staff are providing bi-weekly reports on usage. Here’s what we know so far:

• Take-up rate varies widely depending on attendance with the average being 9%. Thursdays are our big day with typically around 22% (Walker admission is free on Thursday nights). Saturdays are also a big day but the take up ratio (.05%) is diluted by Free First Saturday (FFS) attendance. FFS is the Walker family day; we had 4,800 visitors on November 3rd, a large percentage of which were 12 and under.
• The numbers show far more non-members purchase the tour versus members (approximately 20:1). However, once members purchase the tour, they’ve come back multiple times, often with friends and family.
• The 50+ crowd are the folks purchasing the tour. Teens and 20-somethings think they know it all and tend to dismiss it. I wonder how much this demographic might change if the tour was free and/or offered on personal technology.
• Antenna’s new hardware appears to be holding up to public use. By the end of a 6-hour day, the players can get a bit sluggish but they brought in additional units so they can rotate more frequently.
• The comments from visitors continue to be overwhelmingly positive. Some of the quotes we’ve gotten:”Fantastic…indispensable for understanding the heavy symbolism of her work.”"…loved additional visuals on touch screen…” \r\n\r\n”…would have been lost without it…”

  “…numbers next to paintings should be larger…” (Sigh. The labels, always the labels.)

  “Excellent to have optional perspectives on the artist and contextual background on her life and times.”

  “…the order of paintings didn’t jive with the audio and I had to skip all over the place to find where I was supposed to be.” (The tour is random access and some visitors still prefer a more linear tour.)

  “Every exhibit should have these!”

Most techies probably know that Leopard has been out for a while now. Aside from all the goodness that is Time Machine, the thing that has me most excited is the new version of Quartz Composer. Create Digital Motion did a great post about what’s new, and you should read their post for the exhaustive info.

Aside from many useful things (closed loops!), there are two things that stick out to me as exceedingly useful for creating dynamic digital signage:

• Data crunching: Quartz Composer can now load, and download XML files, which makes it much easier to move large chunks of data in and out of your composition.
• Multiple screens — or multiple projectors: There is now support for running Quartz compositions across multiple screens, and also a cluster.

Being able to use XML data rather than just an RSS feed could be extremely useful for specifying things beyond text and images. Color values, timing, or any number of things could be included here in XML. The way we generate most of our pages here at the walker, our output is XML, so piping something like the Walker Calendar into a Quartz Composition just got much easier.

The second thing on that list is the really exciting part. As part of the Developer Tools, apple added a new application called Quartz Composer Visualizer, aka QCV. It does a couple of things. It lets you play a single quartz composition across multiple screens, which you could not do with Quartz Composer in Tiger. I’m not sure yet how this works across multiple video cards. It also adds a network mode, where a host and clients share the same composition and synchronize via the network. Here’s a movie I made of a modified version of our Vineland Lobby Kiosk Screensaver:

This is running on two different computers, my laptop and my desktop (with two displays). For the most part, the displays are in perfect sync. There is a little blip, but I think that’s probably because my Desktop is struggling to keep up, due to an older video card. There is also the option to run a second composition as an “optional processing composition”. What this means is that you can create another composition that has the logic for processing the data and settings, which gets passed along to the display compositions. Basically, this allows you to use a MVC way of doing things. Here’s a screenshot of the app in use:

Finding clients is done via bonjour, so it is limited to the local network, but all you have to do is fire it up on each machine and they find each other. Depending on how well separate video cards are supported, it could be quite easy to run a multiple screen setup from one high-end Mac Pro, since most of QC processing happens on the video card(s). Mac minis could also work as well, though due to the underwhelming onboard video, might not have enough horsepower to do any fancy core image effects.

QCV isn’t an industrial level application; you couldn’t ship this off to a client as a complete solution for a digital signage project. But for use in house, or a situation where it could be monitored more closely, it could be extremely useful. The complete source code to QCV is also included in the developer tools, and it’s meant as a template and example for people. An enterprising objective-c developer (which I am not) could create such an industrial level application. But as a template application, it is surprisingly useful. QC and QCV are the things in leopard that excite me the most.

• Two blogs that I’ve recently stumbled upon are the Open Blog at the New York Times and Alpha Channel on MSNBC. Both are blogs from the developers behind the NYT and MSNBC, respectively. The entry on how TimeSelect was eliminated, partially powered by Amazon S3 is pretty interesting (if you like grid computing and the word terabyte), as is the entries on the redesign of MSNBC. It’s interesting to note that MSNBC and NYT have had blogs for a while, but not developer blogs. Welcome to the party, guys.
• The Brooklyn Museum has been doing some experimenting with Twitter and it turns into a bit of a mixed bag. Is there a phone-based opportunity here? Certainly so, but Twitter doesn’t quite seem to be the right vector. Something we’ve discussed before, bluejacking the phone number of Art on Call, might be another approach.
• Jason Kottke has an interesting post up about FFFFOUND!, which, thanks to him, is my new daily RSS post-count king. FFFFOUND! is a social image bookmarking site that has amazingly good content. Jason thinks that perhaps our curators should be looking over their shoulder:
  

  Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum’s wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people.

  I don’t think curators have to worry quite yet, but it isn’t unreasonable to say that the internet has and will continue to exert influence. It also works in the other direction. Jason points out a few bloggers that have crossed over into curating gallery shows. To that list I would also add I Heart Photograph.