Year: 2007

"Open Source Museum"?

I came across this fascinating ad somewhere in my RSS feed: Open Source Museum Project Leader at The Tech Museum of Innovation.

The Tech is seeking an energetic and innovative Project Leader to launch its "Open Source Museum" project. This is a unique opportunity to "reinvent" the exhibit development process at one of the world's most innovative technology centers, and to make a lasting impact on the museum field.
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Using the power of the Internet as a venue for designing and prototyping individuals
will be able to create a space where they can design and develop an exhibit based on a specific theme. They will be able to link with others from around the world to share ideas and knowledge, create teams and refine their design.

The project leader will engage a jury of professionals who will select the top virtual exhibits generated by these teams. These exhibits will then be developed and built in the real world.

I'd love to know how the exhibition design process works in practice.

Ok, last Facebook post, I promise, but for Londoners, there's Poke 1.0, a 'Facebook social research symposium':

This social research symposium will allow academics who are researching the 'Facebook' social networking site to meet and exchange ideas. Researchers are welcome from the fields of sociology, media, communication & cultural studies, information science, education, politics, psychology, geography and any other sphere of 'internet research'. PhD and post-doctoral researchers are especially welcome, as are researchers considering Facebook as a potential area of research.

Usability articles at Webcredible

The article on 10 ways to orientate users on your site is useful because more and more users arrive at our sites via search engines or deep links. Keeping these tips in mind when designing sites helps us give users a sense of the scope, structure and purpose of a website, no matter whether they start from the front page or three levels down.

How to embed usability & UCD internally "offers practical advice of what a user champion can do to introduce and embed usability and user-centered design within a company" and includes 'guerrilla tactics' or small steps towards getting usability implemented. But probably the most important point is this:

The most effective method of getting user centered design in the process is through usability testing. Invite key stakeholders to watch the usability testing sessions. Usability testing is a real eye-opener and once observed most stakeholders find it difficult to ignore the user as part of the production process. (The most appropriate stakeholders are likely to be project managers, user interface designs, creative personnel, developers and business managers.)

I would have emphasised the point above even if they hadn't. The difference that usability testing makes to the attitudes of internal stakeholders is amazing and can really focus the whole project team on usability and user-centred design.

Bad archaeology

Bad Archaeology is a site where you can explore "the diversity of archaeological misconceptions, mistakes and distortions" written by archaeologists who say they are "fed up with the distorted view of the past that passes for knowledge in popular culture. We are unhappy that books written by people with no understanding of real archaeology dominate the shelves at respectable bookstores. We do not appreciate news programmes that talk about ley lines (for example) as if they are real".
(via 24 Hour Museum news feed)

Severe cuts in UK cultural heritage as funding diverted to the 2012 Olympics

While there's good news for the Museum of London, overall the cultural heritage sector in the UK is about to suffer. As the 24 Hour Museum puts it:

While the round of government grants, now in its sixth year, is welcomed by the country's museums and galleries, trepidation still hangs in the air as severe cuts are due to come into force in Heritage Lottery and Arts Council funding.

The main reason for this is money being diverted for the Olympics – the HLF has lost £233m to the Olympic fund up to 2012.

Lottery grants for projects exceeding £5 million have been slashed from £80 million in 2006/07 to half that in 2007/08, and to £20 million in 2008/09. Big handouts have helped projects like the £10m York Minster restoration this year, but commentators say hard decisions will have to be made over future applications of the same significance. The HLF budget for smaller projects has also been reduced.

From DCMS Wolfson Fund Announces £4m For Museums And Galleries.

Catalhoyuk question

This will only be relevant to the archaeologists, I guess, but it has occurred to me to ask – what would you like to see in the Catalhoyuk archive reports? What information would either be useful or satisfy your curiosity?

In a wider sense, what can we (as IT geeks in the cultural heritage sector) learn from each other? What are we too scared to ask in case it's a stupid question, or because it seems too obscure? What don't we share because we assume that everyone else knows it already?

A recent Alertbox talked about Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings:

The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad.
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The heatmaps also show how users don't fixate within design elements that resemble ads, even if they aren't ads

I guess the most interesting thing about the post is that it acknowledges that unethical methods attract the most eyeballs:

In addition to the three main design elements that occasionally attract fixations in online ads, we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing's main ethical principles by making the ad look like content:

  • The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it.
  • Not only should the ad look like the site's other design elements, it should appear to be part of the specific page section in which it's displayed.

This overtly violates publishing's principle of separating "church and state" — that is, the distinction between editorial content and paid advertisements should always be clear. Reputable newspapers don't allow advertisers to mimic their branded typefaces or other layout elements.

I think it's particularly important that we don't allow commercial considerations to damage our users' trust in cultural heritage institutions as repositories of impartial* knowledge. We've developed models for differentiating user- and museum-generated content and hopefully quelled fears about user-generated content somehow damaging or diluting museum content; it would be a shame if we lost that trust over funding agreements.

* insert acknowledgement of the impossibility of truly impartial cultural content.

In a post titled, What is Web 3.0?, Nicholas Carr said:

"Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data and software into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people."

And recently I went to a London Geek Girl Dinner, where Paul Amery from Skype (who hosted the event) said
"the next big step forward in software is going to be providing the plumbing, to provide people what they want, where they want …start thinking about plumbing all this software together, joining solutions together… mashups are just the tip of the iceberg".

So why does that matter to us in the cultural heritage sector? Without stretching the analogy too far, we have two possible roles – one, to provide the content that flows through the pipes, ensuring we use plumbing-compatible tubes so that other people can plumb our content into new applications; the second is to build applications ourselves, using our data and others. I think we're are brilliant content producers, and we're getting better at providing re-usable data sources – but we often don't have the resources to do cool things with them ourselves.

Maybe what I'm advocating is giving geeks in the cultural heritage sector the time to spend playing with technology and supplying the tools for agile development. Or maybe it's just the perennial cry of the backend geek who never gets to play with the shiny pretty things. I'm still thinking about this one.

This post on 'What comes after post-processualism' caught my eye, I guess because I have a fascination with the ways in which archaeological theory affects database design and digitisation strategies. I either work with contract archaeologists or on a post-processual site and the structural requirements are quite different, though both fundamentally rely on single context recording.

We have to face the fact that archaeological theory is quite simply no longer at the heart of archaeology, as it perhaps was from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s.

Instead we have seen over the last few decades an enormous expansion of commercial archaeology, now controlling far more funding than the Universities and responsible for the lion share of archaeological research. We may or may not like that fact and what it led to in terms of research results but commercial archaeology is undeniably today a far bigger player in the discipline than its poor sibling, University-based research.