Tag: museums

'Share What You See' at hack4europe London

A quick report from hack4europe London, one of four hackathons organised by Europeana to 'showcase the potential of the API usage for data providers, partners and end-users'.

I have to confess that when I arrived I wasn't feeling terribly inspired – it's been a long month and I wasn't sure what I could get done at a one-day hack.  I was intrigued by the idea of 'stealth culture' – putting cultural content out there for people to find, whether or not they were intentionally looking for 'a cultural experience' – but I couldn't think of a hack about it I could finish in about six hours.  But I happened to walk past Owen Stephen's (@ostephens) screen and noticed that he was googling something about WordPress, and since I've done quite a lot of work in WordPress, I asked what his plans were.  After a chat we decided to work together on a WordPress plugin to help people blog about cool things they found on museum visits.  I'd met Owen at OpenCulture 2011 the day before (though we'd already been following each other on twitter) but without the hackday it's unlikely we would have ever worked together.

So what did we make?  'Share What You See' is a plugin designed to make a museum and gallery visit more personal, memorable and sociable.  There's always that one object that made you laugh, reminded you of friends or family, or was just really striking.  The plugin lets you search for the object in the Europeana collection (by title, and hopefully by venue or accession number), and instantly create a blog post about it (screenshot below) to share it with others.

Screenshot: post pre-populated with information about the object. 

Once you've found your object, the plugin automatically inserts an image of it, plus the title, description and venue name.

You can then add your own text and whatever other media you like.  The  plugin stores the originally retrieved information in custom fields so it's always there for reference if it's updated in the post.  Once an image or other media item is added, you can use all the usual WordPress tools to edit it.

If you're in a gallery with wifi, you could create a post and share an object then and there, because WordPress is optimised for mobile devices.  This help makes collection objects into 'social objects', embedding them in the lives of museum and gallery visitors.  The plugin could also be used by teachers or community groups to elicit personal memories or creative stories before or after museum visits.

The code is at https://github.com/mialondon/Share-what-you-see and there's a sample blog post at http://www.museumgames.org.uk/jug/.  There's still lots of tweaks we could have made, particularly around dealing with some of the data inconsistencies, and I'd love a search by city (in case you can't quite remember the name of the museum), etc, but it's not bad for a couple of hours work and it was a lot of fun.  Thanks to the British Library for hosting the day (and the drinks afterwards), the Collections Trust/Culture Grid for organising, and Europeana for setting it up, and of course to Owen for working with me.  Oh, and we won the prize for "developer's choice" so thank you to all the other developers!

Define your purpose or others will define you (and you may not like the results)

[A re-post, as the blogger outage seems to have eaten the first version. I'm incredibly grateful to Ben W. Brumfield @benwbrum for sending me a copy of the post from his RSS reader. I've set blogger up to email me a copy of posts in future so I won't have to go diving into my Safari cache to try and retrieve a post again!]

There's a lot of this going around as the arts and cultural heritage face on-going cuts: define yourself, or be defined, a search for a new business model that doesn't injure the unbusinesslike values at the core of public cultural institutions. Mark Ravenhill in the Guardian, Global art: nice canapes, shame about the show:

Many of our UK institutions operate under a strange contradiction: most of the signals we give out suggest that we offer the international glamour, the pampering loveliness, the partnerships with banks and brands… But at the same time, we agonise about access: we want everyone to be let into the business lounge.
…
In a modern world that buys and sells information and luxury, the arts deal in something very different: wisdom, a complex, challenging, lifelong search that can make you happy and furious, discontented and questioning, elated or bored.
…
What we need now, more than ever, is a clear message about what we do and why we do it. The government has opted for swift deficit reduction and a good hack at the arts: it's up to us to set the long-term agenda for the role of the arts in public life over the next decade and beyond if we're not going to be cut, cut and cut again. Boom and bust are here to stay: capitalism will always be in a permanent state of crisis.

Nick Poole has also written on A New Way Forward for Museums, saying:

It is entirely possible to be commercially savvy, operate sharply and make sophisticated uses of licensing as an artefact of control all in the name of serving a public cultural purpose. Equally, it is possible to throw open the doors and make content universally accessible in the name of driving commercial value to the bottom-line. The cultural and commercial imperatives are not in opposition, but coexist along a spectrum of activity which runs from non-commercial, through non-transactional (things like brand equity and audience engagement) to strictly financially transactional.
…
If the financial future of museums lies in becoming commercially acute, then a key part of true sustainability will lie in recognising our place in the supply-chain of culture to consumers, and in truly understanding and embracing our core competence and their value.

…we need to recognise that focussing on our core competencies and using them to create cultural assets and experiences which we can monetise (and therefore sustain) in partnership with the private sector is a story of success and advantage, not failure or loss.

His post has some interesting suggestions, so do go read it (and comment).

Nick also describes a vision "of a world in which museums have renegotiated the social contract with the public so that people everywhere understand that museums are places where culture is made and celebrated, rather than preserved and hidden from view" – it's easy, in my happy little bubble, to forget that many people don't see the point of museums. Some I've talked to might make an allowance for the big national institutions, but won't have any time for smaller or local museums. Working out how to deal with this might mean changing the public offer of these museums – or is it too late? There's a silent cull of museums happening in the UK right now, and yet I don't hear about big campaigns to save them. What do you think?

Thoughts towards the future of museums for #kulturwebb

Last week I was in Stockholm to give a talk on 'Museum Crowdsourcing Games: Improving Collections Through Play (and some thoughts on re-inventing museums)'.  Again, my thanks to @kajsahartig and @nordiskamuseet for the invitation to speak, and to all the lovely people I met for sharing their own stories with me, and for listening to a talk in English. The quote of the day came from @charlotteshj during a panel discussion on museums and innovation at the end of the day: digital museum collections should be 'shareable, spreadable and nerd-friendly'.

Based on what I learnt about the audience I ended up including more explanatory material on museum crowdsourcing games and didn't really have time for the 're-inventing museums' bits, so I thought I'd share those notes here.  It's still very much a work-in-progress but since there are so many smart people thinking about the same subject, it's worth sharing for comment… (Also because Jasper Visser, who is also thinking about the future of museums, asked me what I was going to say. Btw, Jasper's #kulturwebb talk inspired the whole room, watch the video on his post about it.)

I know the future of museums lies in fitting into people's lives as well as being a destination; being the cathedral and being in the bazaar. Cultural heritage needs to be 'out there' to help people value and make time for visits the physical place.  It's about new types of engagement and outreach. It's not all digital, but as the world is networked and mobile and social, we should be too.

I was thinking about new metaphors for museums – what if we were Amazon? A local newspaper? A specialist version of Wikipedia? A local pub? A student blog? A festival, a series of lectures, or a film group? A pub quiz? Should a museum be at the heart of village life, a meeting place for art snobs, a drop-in centre, a café, a study space, a mobile showroom?

But I realised that the answer to the question of the future of museums is deeply personal to any museum, because museums exist in the intersection of their collections, their fans and their local audiences. This is good, because it means you can apply your existing knowledge about what your audiences love about you.  The answer to the question 'what would your museum be if it was invented in 2011?' is up to you…

Every time I approach the question of the future of museums, or of how the future of museums will be informed by what's happening the world today, I seem to come at it from a different angle. Today I'm wondering about the implications of the fact that there are no (g-rated) offline activities anymore – people will do almost anything with their mobile in one hand, and could be doing anything from googling to find out more about the museum object in front of them to looking up the lyrics of that one-hit wonder from that summer they went camping with friends.  Their head could be in any space as well as in your space.

I'm also thinking about outreach, whether improving wikipedia articles, snippets of local history on the back of pub toilet doors or putting a museum exhibition in a truck and taking it to kids in the outer suburbs.  Tomorrow I'll wake up with some new 'what if?' in my head. And I'm curious – what are you thinking about the future of museums?

Thinking aloud: does a museum's obsession with polish hinder innovation?

I'm blogging several conversations on twitter around the subject of innovation and experimentation that I thought were worth saving, not least because I'm still thinking about their implications.

To start with, Lynda Kelly (@lyndakelly61) quoted @sebchan at the Hot Science conference on climate change and museums:

'Museums want everything to be slick and polished for mass audience, we lose capacity to be experimental and rapid'

 which lead me to tweet:

'does big museum obsession with polish hinder innovation? ('innovation' = keeping up with digital world outside)'.

which lead to a really interesting series of conversations.  Erin Blasco responded (over several tweets):

We can't pilot if it's not perfect. … Need to pilot 15 quick/dirty QR codes but we can't put ANY up unless there are 50 & perfectly, expensively designed & impressive. … So basically not allowed to fail and learn = not allowed to pilot = we spend a bunch of $ and fail anyway? … To clarify: it's a cross-dept project. One dept ok with post-it notes & golf pencils. Two others are not. Kinda deadlock.

I think this perfectly illustrates the point and it neatly defines the kind of 'polish' that slows things down – the quality of the user experience with the QR codes would rest with the explanatory text, call to action and the content the user finds at the other end, not the weight and texture of the paper or vinyl they're printed on.  Suddenly you've got extra rounds of emails and meetings for those extra layers of sign-off, a work request or contract for design time, plus all the stakeholder engagement that you already, but does that extra investment of time and resources result in a better experiment in audience research?

But kudos to Erin for gettings things this far!  (An interesting discussion followed with Erin and @artlust about possible solutions, including holding stakeholder evaluations of the prototypes so they could see how the process worked, and 'making the pilot-ness of it a selling point in the design, letting audiences feel they're part of something special', which made me realise that turning challenges into positives is one of my core design techniques.)

For Linda Spurdle, the barriers are more basic:

Innovation costs, even my plans to try things cheap/free get scuppered by lack of time. For me less about risk more about resources

Which also rings perfectly true – many potential museum innovators were in this position before the museum funding cuts took hold, so innovating your way out of funding-related crises must be even more difficult now.

On the topic of innovation, Lindsey Green said the 'definite reluctance to pilot and fail impacts innovation'. Rachel Coldicutt had just blogged about 'digital innovation in the arts' in Making Things New, pointing out that the question 'privileges the means of delivery over the thing that’s being delivered', and tweeting that 'innovating a system and innovating art aren't the same thing and perhaps there's more impact from innovating the system'.

If the quest is to, as Rachel problematises in her post, 'use digital technologies to remake the Arts Establishment', then (IMO) it's doomed to failure. You can't introduce new technologies and expect that the people and processes within a cultural organisation will magically upgrade themselves to match. More realistically, people will work around any technology that doesn't suit them (for entirely understandable reasons), and even the best user experience design will fail if it doesn't take account of its context of use. If you want to change the behaviour of people in an organisation, change the metrics they work to. Or, as Rachel says, '[r]ather than change for change’s sake, perhaps we should be identifying required outcomes'.  Handily, Bridget McKenzie pointed out that 'The Museums for the Future toolkit includes new eval framework (GEOs = Generic Environmental Outcomes)', so there's hope on the horizon.

The caveats: it's not that I'm against polish, and I think high production values really help our audiences value museum content. But – I think investing in a high level of polish is a waste of resources during prototyping or pilot stages, and a focus on high production values is incompatible with rapid prototyping – 'fail faster' becomes impossible. Usability researchers would also say polished prototypes get less useful feedback because people think the design is set (see also debates around the appearance of wireframes).

It's also worth pointing out my 'scare quotes' around the term 'innovation' above – sadly, things that are regarded as amazing innovations in the museum world are often delayed enough that they're regarded as pretty normal, even expected, by our more digitally-savvy audiences. But that's a whole other conversation…

So, what do you think: does a museum's obsession with polish hinder innovation?

Update, January 2013: Rob Stein has written 'Museum Innovation: Risk, Experimentation and New Ideas', which resonated strongly:

A common pitfall for museums is an unhealthy addiction to monumental undertakings. When massive projects loom with ties to outside support and countless staff hours invested in a single deliverable, it becomes very difficult to admit the possibility of failure. As a result, we shy away from risk, mitigate the probability of embarrassment, and crush innovation in the process.

Sharing hard-won wisdom about museum games – introducing 'Lift your (museum) game'

One outcome from MW2011 was the creation of 'Lift your (museum) game', a site for people who make museum games to share their hard-earned wisdom – project evaluation, research, references, methods, rants, lessons learnt from real projects – about making museum games.  Inspired by a question from Martha Henson about whether any sites already existed to gather resources like those discussed during the panel discussion after the Games session at Museums and the Web 2011 (with Dave Schaller, Elizabeth Goins and Coline Aunis), I created the wiki during the closing plenary and watched in awe as Kate Haley Goldman immediately started populating it with links.
Museum games have to compete in a highly competitive market, especially for casual and social games, and I suspect 'worthy' will only take us so far these days.  I'm hoping the dialogue around this site will help people avoid the pitfalls of 'death by museum committee' when designing games and push for excellent gameplay in museum games.  There are some great museum game projects and research going on, and pooling resources could help multiply the benefits of that work and provide a resource for people just starting out.  Also, if you're a games agency or designer, this could be a great place to pass on any tips or links (or warnings) you'd like potential museum clients to know about.  I've got a few papers on crowdsourcing games for museums coming up, so I'll be adding links and resources as I go – it's easy to add your resources or questions, just sign up at http://museumgames.pbworks.com.
One of the key themes of MW2011 for me was 'standing on the shoulders of giants' – there's so much good work going on in the museum digital sector, and so many amazing people are willing to share what they've learnt along the way, and hopefully this museum games wiki is a contribution to helping us all see further and do better.

Founding visions (and learning from the past for the future of museums)

I've got a few presentations coming up that explore a re-imagining of museums, so I've been thinking about the original founding visions of specific museums (based on e.g. What would a digital museum be like if there was never a physical museum?), and whether there's dissonance between mission statements based in institutional history and those you might write if we were inventing museums today.

For an example of where my thoughts are wondering, check this out (from the excellent 'Museums should not fear the art snobs'):

…it was only with the emergence of aestheticism and competition from universities in the late 19th century that curators started making exhibitions for each other and for people of their class. Most earlier Victorian museums were educational institutions (not just institutions with education departments). In Britain, both the Liberal Henry Cole (founding Director of the V&A) and the Tory John Ruskin created museums that aimed to achieve the widest possible audience in the name of public education. The Met was founded “for the purpose…of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufacture and practical life…and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction.” In 1920, the Met’s president Robert de Forest wrote that it was “a public gallery for the use of all people, high and low, and even more for the low than for the high, for the high can find artistic inspiration in their own homes”.

So I'm curious, and if you're up for it, I have a little task for you (yes, you, over there) – what was the founding statement for your museum, and what is your current mission statement? And if you're feeling creative, what would you like your favourite museum's mission statement to be?

Some leads on game design in the UK

Today I passed on a query from @fayenicole: '…know anybody who could run a retro-style game design workshop for teenagers at the British Museum?' on twitter and got a bunch of responses. Since people were so generous with their time, I thought I'd take a few minutes to collate them so they're available the next time someone has a similar query.  Feel free to add further suggestions in the comments, particularly for people or agencies who are keen to work with museums and cultural heritage organisations.

In other news, I learned this week that 'MT' means 'modified tweet' and signifies when someone's shortened or otherwise changed something they're retweeting.  Mmm, learning.

What would a digital museum be like if there was never a physical museum?

This is partly an experiment in live-blogging a conversation that's mostly happening on twitter – in trying to bridge the divide between conversation that anyone can jump into, and a sometimes intimidating comment box on an individual blog; and partly a chance to be brave about doing my thinking in public and posing a question before I've worked out my own answer…

I've been thinking about the question 'if physical museums were never invented, how would we have invented digital museums?' for a while (I was going to talk about this at GLAM-WIKI but decided not to subject people to a rambling thought piece exploring the question).  By this I don't mean a museum without objects, rather 'what if museums weren't conceived as central venues?'.  Today, in the spirit of avoiding a tricky bit of PHP I have to deal with on my day off, I tweeted: "Museums on the web, social media, apps – stories in your everyday life; visiting physical museum – special treat, experience space, objects?".  By understanding how the physical museum has shaped our thinking, can we come up with models that make the most of the strengths, and minimise the weaknesses, of digital and physical museums? How and where can people experience museum collections, objects, stories, knowledge? How would the phenomenology of a digital museum, a digital object, be experienced?

And what is a 'museum' anyway, if it's not represented by a building?  In another twitter conversation, I realised my definition is something like: museums are for collections of things and the knowledge around them.

Then a bit of explanation: "Previous tweet is part of me thinking re role of digital in museums; how to reconcile internal focus on physical with reach of digital etc" (the second part has a lot to do with a new gallery opening today at work, and casting my mind back to the opening of Who Am I? and Antenna in June).

Denver Art Museum's Koven J. Smith has been discussing similar questions: 'What things do museums do *exclusively* because of tradition? If you were building a museum from scratch, what would you do differently?'. My response was "a museum invented now would be conversational and authoritative – here's this thing, and here's why it's cool".


Other questions: Did the existence of the earlier model muddy our thinking?  How can we make online, mobile or app visitors as visible (and as important) as physical visitors?  (I never want to see another email talking about 'real [i.e. physical] and online' visitors).

So, what do you think?  And if you've come here from twitter, I'd be so thrilled if you bridged the divided and commented!  I'll also update with quotes from tweets but that'll probably be slower than commenting directly.

Anyway, I can see lots of comments coming in from twitter so I'm going to hit 'publish post' now…

[Update – as it turns out, 'live blogging' has mostly turned into me updating the post with clarifications, and continuing discussion in the comments. I find myself reluctant to re-contextualise people's tweets in a post, but maybe I'm just too sensitive about accidentally co-opting other people's voices/content.  If you want to share something on twitter rather than in a comment, I'm @mia_out.]

UK Culture Grid wants to know what developers need – get in!

Neil Smith from Knowledge Integration dropped by the Museums and the machine-processable web wiki to ask what users (developers) need to get data in and out of the Culture Grid:

To support the ambitious targets for increasing the number of item records in Culture Grid, we thought know would be a good time to review the venerable old application profile we use for importing metadata into the Grid. I've added a discussion page reviewing options at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/w/page/Culture-Grid-Profile.

We really want the community to be involved in helping ensure that whatever profile (or profiles) we support will meet the needs of users – not only for getting things into the grid but also for getting things out in a format that is useful to them. Although the paper focusses mainly on XML representations of metadata, we're also interested in your views on whether non-XML representations (e.g RDF or JSON) need to be supported.

So whether you work in a museum or are an external developer who'd like to use museum data, I'd encourage you to think about the four options Neil outlines, and to comment, ask questions, share sample data, vote for your favourite option, whatever, on the Culture Grid Profile page.  One of the options is to develop a new model – definitely more time-consuming, but a great opportunity to make your needs known.

As an indication of the type of content that's available through the Culture Grid, I've copied this text from some of their about pages: "It contains over 1 million records from over 50 UK collections, covering a huge range of topics and periods.  Records mostly refer to images but also text, audio and video resources and are mostly about museum objects with library, archive and other kinds of collections also included."  So, that's:

  • "information about items in collections (referencing the images, video, audio or other material you offer online about the things in your collections)
  • information about collections as a whole (their scope, significance and access details)
  • information about collecting organisations (contact and access details)"

There's a lot of cultural heritage and tech jargon involved on the Culture Grid Profile discussion page – don't hold back on asking for clarifications where needed.  I'm certainly not an expert on the various schemas and it's a very long time since I helped work out the Exploring 20th Century London extensions for the original PNDS, but I've given it a go.

If you've read this far, you might also be interested in the first ever Culture Grid Hack Day in Newcastle Upon Tyne on December 3, 2010.

One reason why (science) museums rock

When I started work at the Science Museum a few years ago, after five years with a social history museum and archaeology service, I was curious about how the additional tasks of communicating scientific principles, contemporary science news and the history of science and technology would affect interpretation, collections and exhibitions. With that in mind, I did some research about science museums and came across an article about the impact of the Palais de la Découverte (a science museum in Paris) translated for me as:

In a recent work entitled 'Comment devient-on scientifique?' (How does one become a scientist?) published by Editions EDP, Florence Guichard indicates the results of a survey undertaken in the Ile-de-France: 60% of scientists over 30 and 40% of scientists under 30 claim, without prompting, that the Palais de la Découverte triggered their vocation. Pierre Gilles of Gennes, the winner of the Nobel prize for Physics is one of those 'lovers' of thePalais de la Découverte who was still visiting the place a few years before his death in 2007.

[Update – coincidentally, the day after posting, I came across another reference to the impact of science museums on children's interest in science:] The evolution of the science museum:

When did scientists first become interested in science? A 1998 survey of 1400 scientists, conducted by the Roper Starch organization for the Bayer Foundation and NSF, reported that a respected adult, such as a parent, was the biggest factor in stimulating childhood interest in science. […] a variety of informalactivities had an effect. […] 76 percent said science museum visits

That's pretty amazing.  But ok, for people who aren't scientists, why does science matter?  Well, for a start, the UK needs to keep up with the rest of the world, and there are global problems that we need scientists to help solve.  At about the same time, President Obama stated in his inaugural address that he would "restore science to its rightful place". Ed Yong, among others, answered the question, so 'what is science's rightful place?':

…underneath all of the detail lie some basic principles that science is built upon and these, I feel, ought to be more mainstream than they perhaps are. We should be strive to be unceasing in our curiosity, rational in our explanations and accurate in our communication. We should value inquiry and the power of evidence to change opinions. We should be unflinching in our search for understanding and the desire to test the world around us.

There is no question in my mind that these tenets should act as guides to our lives (albeit not exclusively; they are necessary, rather than sufficient). This is the greatest contribution of science to society. It acts as a stimulant that keeps us from sleepwalking through a wonderland. It is a cloth that wipes away superstition and myths to reveal an ever-closer approximation of the truth. It is a mental prophylactic that shields our minds from the folly of confirmation bias or the lure of unrepresentative anecdotes.

Tell people about the latest discoveries and many will ask what the significance is to their lives. In some cases, there's no way to answer that – they either appreciate it or they don't. But the very question misses an important point. The actual results may not be relevant but the principles that underlie them most definitely are, and they are omnipresent. Curiosity. Investigation. Communication. What could be more human or more pertinent to our casual existence?

The UK curriculum (key stage 1, key stage 3) aims to teach the value of scientific enquiry and perhaps fire a lifelong 'curiosity about phenomena in the world around them', and I suspect science museums make that teaching just a bit easier.  I know that the majority of people I talk to can still remember their school visit to science museums, but I haven't yet asked them what effect it might have had on their lives – does anyone know of any research?