Tag Archives: ndf2012

Lightning rounds #ndf2012

Leave a reply

Nate Solas, Walker Art Center: the intro session
In Improv, can’t say “No it’s not”, you have to say “Yes, and” so the scene can move forward. Four rules for a show he was involved with:

  • Listen – no lines so have to listen to what they’re saying because otherwise your next line may make no sense. In technology we might hear “I need WordPress” when the real question was “I need to publish information” and so our response (based on all the technological issues frustrates. (Ie reference interview)
  • Accept the offer – instinct may be to say no to Skype but listen to the need to talk to an offer so “Yes, and…”
  • Build on it – “…let’s use Google Hangouts and broadcast it on YouTube” – add value
  • Reincorporate – leverage existing tools that reliably get work done. Sometimes shiny products are good but need a collection of reliable tools.

John Sullivan, Alexander Turnbull Library: Privacy, WAI262 and bequests
Curators caught in a cleft stick: NZGOAL vs Privacy Act and WAI262. Orgs can be frustrated by curators, who can feel under siege. Not good! Need to recognise that heritage aren’t just disseminators but kaitiaki of taonga. Most heritage collections aren’t government information – subject to donation agreements. Privacy very relevant. Need informed discussion about likely uses of data and can be hard to explain mashups to 90-year-olds.

Sometimes easier to discuss what can’t be put up openly. eg images less than 100 year old with identifiable people (some exemptions for public figures); made in schools, hospitals, prisons, etc where privacy could be reasonably expected; images related to mātauranga Māori; scenes of public trauma or tragedy; people subject to grief; material that might be objectionable under censorship laws.

Kim Baker, NZ On Screen: Rights at NZ On Screen
2007 NZonscreen initiated. Now over 2000 titles. Rights clearances important – affects what appears. Originally had no license agreement, just an Excel spreadsheet listing the films needed rights for. Now have a custom database and access to legal advice.

Many constraints when started. Started exploring, discussing with stakeholders. Some hostility – threat to livelihood. Relationships with filmmakers, production companies, NZFilm Commission, Maori TV, ….

With new platform came new requests and processes. Not paying fees so wanted lightweight license agreement with fair out. Easy-to-read two-page license agreement; also can accept agreement by email or over the phone. Respect cultural boundaries.

Got agreement to screen programmes that include association members’ music.

Goal to make things easy for rights holders. Many claim they do/don’t hold rights when they don’t/do. Licensing for free still costs in time/resources. So far no instances of untraceable copyright holders coming back from the dead.

Some TV ad licensing under way. Need license to acknowledge that web won’t always be the only way to access material. Ability to ask if rights holders want to apply Creative Commons.

Brian Flaherty, University of Auckland Library: Matapihi future
420 seconds on Windows – collective digital housekeeping.
Window as shopfront; but also window onto Aotearoa, ie Matapihi.
How is Matapihi different from DigitalNZ? It’s a subset – just 14 content partners and 400,000 objects.

DigitalNZ has broad mandate – includes govt departments and private sector. Matapihi centered around NZ culture – Turnbull, Archives NZ, Te Papa.

Could say front end doesn’t matter because all in Digital NZ and harvested by Google. Maybe a case for that…

Europeana opens up dataset of cultural objects for free re-use – give away their metadata. Allows user-generated exhibitions, family histories.

Matapihi could morph into advocating for open licensing, on making metadata available for aggregators (eg Summon), high-res images subset of DNZ, a pilot of NZ etext and book corpus (think about NZETC, AtoJs, Te Ao Hou, etc etc and pulling this all together), a Digital NZ GLAM filter, or something bigger: a trusted and curated space for NZ cultural heritage.

Do sets just create a digital object vending machine – lining things up together without defining relationship? Need to build narrative around images.

Or could just pull the plug. Shouldn’t be scared of saying it’s past its use-by date if this is the case. Currently in a state of palliative care… Do we develop it more or let it pass? The idea of looking in a window at stuff is passé – now we talk about engagement.

Emily Steel: Little Slide Dress @emilymsteel
Wearable technology project “fireflies and lightening bugs” – make a piece of clothing and put lights in it. Had to use microcontrollers and sensors. What interested her was if using something celebrating light, why not use light for input data so project would only come to life in certain conditions.

Drew inspiration from the discarded – reusing old materials. Can you turn something old into something new and celebrate the old while using the new technology? Got box of old slidefilm from garage where dumped by father’s junkshop travels. Seemed to suit the theme of light.

Blending technology – magic of light bringing images to life. Always interested in light bringing movies to life.

Hence the “Little Slide Dress”. Learned a lot – technologies don’t always work together. Slides don’t like becoming a dress. Lights don’t like becoming wearable. Code likes to break.

Keynote 2 by @thisisaaronland – #ndf2012

Leave a reply

Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland
Aaron brings big data and a big world to NDF along with a current preoccupation with time pixels / units of measure in the land of fan-fiction, rent-seeking and lifestyle porn. He’s Canadian by birth, American by descent, North American by experience et Montréalais au fon, and usually tells people he is from the internet. He’s currently Senior Engineer (Internets and the Computers) at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and has previously worked at Flickr as Senior Engineer on all things geo, machinetag and galleries related. His work at Stamen Design as Design Technologist and Director of Inappropriate Project Names created some of the world’s most beautiful maps.
Aaron spends a lot of time thinking about archiving social software and looking glass archives, in the form the Parallel Flickr and Privatesquare projects (straup.github.com). He’s a member of the Near Future Laboratory, a frequent speaker at the Museums and the Web conference, sits on the advisory board to the Built Works Registry and has served as Co-Director of Revolutionary Technologies for the Spinny Bar History Society since 2010.
Aaron’s projects and curiosities include blogging at www.aaronland.info/weblog/ and Stamen’s (very pretty) prettymaps.stamen.com, which have been exhibited and featured at the Museum of Modern Art, NACIS Atlas of Design, and 20×20.

One of the nicest things someone said to him about the Pretty Maps project was that it was “indecipherable gibberish” until they saw their own city and then it “snapped into place”.

The Cooper-Hewitt is closed until 2014 and his job is to work out what will make the museum part of the internet.

What might have plausible manufacturability in the next five years?

A good time to be a design museum – design is becoming increasingly intangible. What does it mean for a museum to collect service design? If we had acquired the War on Terror how would we show that?

Why are we keeping all of this stuff? Why do we have archives or museums where we don’t show people stuff? We must believe this stuff has meaning. If not, what’s up with the buildings? Is it just an expensive perk?

How many buildings are actually in OpenStreetMap? 67 million as of last month. Simple conceptual model: points (nodes) bound to lat/long. A set of points (way) can get a tag building=yes. Each has a unique id. He built a website as a registry and created id so wouldn’t collide with whereonearth ids.

Photo of a monkey holding a tiger. “We don’t really know much about this but it’s a monkey holding a tiger!” “Parallel flickr” to take a living look at user+friends’ Flickr activity; and to look at backup issues. Log into it with your Flickr account. Meant to run alongside Flickr and be an alternative in case tomorrow Flickr stopped working. Mirrors Flickr url structure. Does it make more sense to run one copy of Parallel Flickr for 1 user and friends or for all of them to run a copy? It doesn’t matter. If multiple users and run into the same photo ID twice just means both have seen photo – a way to rebuild network.

Habit of users of Flickr Commons of covering images in notes. How do we backup Flickr? You buy it. It’s the only way to preserve the permissions. But what if you used the Commons as a seed? These are all in the public domain. Then you could go one degree out and contact people who interacted with it to archive photos and preserve permissions. If/when Flickr dies, non-public photos could go dark and only reemerge after 70 years.

Privatesquare – similar to Parallel Flickr but for 4square. Not going to tell 4square when you’re at the drugstore. So a site you could tell everything and then optionally tell it to tell 4square. But there’s no shared ids so there’s an inability to reconstruct the network. Thought of creating a map on checkin and uploading that to Flickr and that’d provide a photoid. Or just a 1x1px image. (Flickr friends were Unhappy with this idea…)

If creating “shadow services” not in opposition but to rebuild them then need to sort this out. So someone suggested wanted to build integers as a service -> “mission integers”. Text-based ids aren’t as portable as numbers.

Brooklyn Integers running building ids with odd numbers while OSM gets the even numbers. Cooper-Hewitt is using Brooklyn integers. Aaron added them as a joke and they kept them. London Integers – where does this fit in? It’s not that they’ve cornered the market, just honouring each other’s offsets. So London Integers decided to fit a few million ahead of them and claim all the numbers divisible by 9 – they now no longer use numbers divisible by 9. But scaling up? Create a Ministry of Numbers and issue numbers on a per-country basis. A way for all these projects to get unique IDs…

Or create Canal St Integers – reusing twitter ids from famous people.

Spacetimeids – fancy name for a Hilbert Curve. Just 3 dimensions – latitude, longitude, timestamp. A unique id for everything (starting at 1970) (on earth).

What about lat, long, objectid – we’re a design museum. We collect fire hydrants. They’re meant to be mass produced and distributed globally. Suddenly you have ids for all fire hydrants of a particular model.

Museums have an obsession with experience, and obsession with demanding people time. “It’s a little bit rude.” Why not give people confidence that this stuff will still be here? (No rush.)

It’s not that we have to do everything. It’s that we can.

Amazon bought Zappos not for its shoes but because they had the world’s best space-fitting software. And Kivos (sp?) for its robots which sit under shelves, lift them up, bring them to a human; ceiling-mounted lasers point from shelf to shelf and the human’s job is to move the things from shelf to shelf.

If we can do this for cat litter, why not for the important stuff: our stuff? Well, Amazon has billions of dollars [me: and an overworked underpaid disposable workforce]

SelfAwareROOMBA twitter account. Our collections are becoming alive (or at least getting the illusion of being alive).

Registries – lists of things with pointers that let you find them again.

What harm does it do to give people the ability to hang “Purple and Brown” to our artifacts – to make connections, add their stories?

Museum obsession with talking about everything as a little event, an opportunity to publish a book. Instead can share it, be confident about it, be confident other people are using it to build their own stories.

Baselines: During Sandy watched Twitter messages coming in saying “We’ve lost the internet”. Everything just said is predicated on the internet being there; internet is predicated on electricity.

How will you commemorate the First World War centenary? #ndf2012

Leave a reply

How will you commemorate the First World War centenary?
Virginia Gow @vexus_nexus and Douglas Campbell, WW100 and Auckland Museum

What is your organisation doing to commemorate the centenary of the First World War?
The First World War (1914–1918) was one of the most significant events of the twentieth century and had a seismic impact on New Zealand society. Ten percent of our then population of one million served overseas, of which more than 18,000 died and over 40,000 were wounded. Nearly every New Zealand family was affected.
In this session, join Virginia Gow and Douglas Campbell to get some pointers on preparing your organisation for WW100 – New Zealand’s First World War centenary commemorations. We’ll cover some of the activities already underway in the digital GLAM sphere, how you might contribute to national initiatives such as the Cenotaph redevelopment, and hold an open discussion on how we can support each other to be ready for WW100.

Virginia: Centenary of WWI coming up in 2014. Why are we commemorating it? Is there anything left to digitise?

Nearly half of NZ’s young men went to war. Events touched every family, community, school, workplace. Aim to tell stories, not sanitised. Create a comprehensive website of the WWI history http://www.firstworldwar.govt.nz. Aims: Public engagement, preservation of our heritage, creation of new interpretations of our history, international connections.

Funding opportunities available – applications close Nov 2012, May 2013. Have created symbol and official name for even (available on website). Programme office no mandate or intention to organise everything. Providing support for things but mostly facilitating activities elsewhere.

What does the centenary mean for us as GLAM institutions?

Of note: photographs taken by NZers before 1944 are probably out of copyright.

Could be good to get together, figure out what we’ve got and what’s out there, then pulling it together in meaningful ways. What story will we tell the future about this centenary? (eg people using Twibbons as people in the first Anzac Day commemoration wore hats?) An opportunity for the GLAM sector to shine especially if we work together / collaborate.

Private mailing list available to discuss plans – contact the programme office for info.

Douglas: working on Cenotaph redevelopment. Cenotaph is a biographical database for NZers who served in war. Records for most of 100,000 NZers who fought overseas and have died. Records may have details and photos, or may only have name rank and serial number.

Will keep a page per soldier but jazz it up a bit and add other entry points – maps, battalions, battles. Could have much more content available out in the GLAM sector. GLAM could contribute; links could go both ways. Users could contribute info/photos about family. Crowdsource research, digitisation, transcriptions, stories both typed and audiovisual, corrections (eg bad machine data matching, mistakes in official records, soldiers giving wrong date of birth). Provide data (vocabularies, authoritative data, international data, linked data) back to institutions. Make databases available to academic research. Will be complicated so hope to partner with DigitalNZ.

Curly questions:

  • scope (which people, which wars?)
  • centralisation – should it all be on Cenotaph or should it link out?
  • ownership
  • provenance – how do we make sure we know which data is curated, which crowdsourced, etc?

Note service numbers aren’t unique but can use Cenotaph number which should (hopefully!) be permanent.

Q: Data going to institutions and academics but back to users who contributed it. Will we see an Open API?
A: Hope so but will be curly as integrate data from various sources.

Q: How do we turn commemoration into something inclusive of all NZers including those whose ancestors fought on other side?
A: We’re just one project among many all around the world. There are other ways into the centenary than Cenotaph eg life a hundred years ago.

Q: Is there an index to conscientious objectors?
–Apparently there’s one in the Gazettes.

Q: Can you commit to the Cenotaph ID being permanent?
A: Yes, so commits.

Ways of seeing: collections, stories, language and place #ndf2012

Leave a reply

Ways of seeing: collections, stories, language and place
Eleanor Whitworth, Arts Victoria
http://cv.vic.gov.au/stories/map/melbourne/
Culture Victoria has worked closely with indigenous communities to share indigenous cultural material and stories. The indigenous culture theme is one of the most visited sections on the Culture Victoria website. When we implemented the ‘browse our content by location’ search function, we thought carefully about the implications for representing indigenous content.
Language is not a sole determiner of personal heritage, but it is a significant one. Unlike New Zealand, where Māori is an official language, Australia currently has around 150 indigenous languages; none are official, and most are under threat. As Aboriginal communities identify connection to country and culture via language group, mapping our indigenous material to a single point that referenced a Western place name would have been grossly insufficient.
This presentation will cover our partnership with the Koorie Heritage Trust to map our content to the widely recognised 38 language regions in Victoria, including the decisions we made on representing borders and dealing with multiple spellings. The presentation will also provide examples of the power of cultural collections to foster connection and collaboration between museums and traditional owners; support intangible heritage; and link objects with stories and place.

Starts asking “Where are you from?” and plays clip YouTube clip Jimmy Little Yorta Yorta man

Eleanor would answer with a point; Jimmy with an area. She’d see the country as divided into large chunks and needs a point to give specificity; he’d see it as collection of language areas: http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/

Culture Victoria has collections and stories. Group stories under broad themes; link stories; search stories by location.

Collaboration with Koorie Heritage Trust. Each artwork accompanied by story, noting storyteller and language group. Language groups are strong identifiers for place so logical to extend browse-by-location function to include language groups. Used Gazetteer of Australian Placenames to help mapping – pragmatic but not always optimal as pinpoints area by geographic centre. Language groups aren’t point, they’re areas.

Problem #1: borders. This project is a “Victoria” project but this isn’t how indigenous people would see the area. Decided to include 38 groups that broadly overlap state of Victoria.

Problem #2: borders. How to determine areas of language groups? They change! Looked at three maps – interesting that over time they seem to become less detailed. Decided not to show visible borders – seemed best way to acknowledge fluidity. But still needed to determine for purposes of database/searching. Used maps, created polygons to overlay on map. Sometimes had to go by eye. Sent lat/long data to someone to create the polygon on the map. Some regions overlap a little, or a lot. Checked, refined.

Also had to consider spelling variants – phonetic interpretations. Some identify with one or another so system had to cope with all.

At the moment can only search by location but hope to add search by language group.

Did this exercise because had something to attach to the mapping: the stories.

Look at the stories on the website (eg the possum skin cloaks – which skins were from New Zealand as illegal to kill possums in Australia whereas encouraged here…)

Q: Can you tell us about the consultation you did?
A: Koorie Heritage Trust is made up largely of Aboriginal people – close relationship with communities. Lots of discussion about shapes as very sensitive, but mostly driven by community.

Q: Very Western structured presentation on website cf traditional storytelling cycle.
A: Some limits due to funding. But it’s the content that’s the cycle – the story circles around. This conference has raised questions of how you present data, present linking systems, in an interface that’s fluid and flexible – emerging technologies. Definitely aim to increase interactivity.

[ETA 11/7/2014: Slides and notes are blogged at Culture Victoria.]

Going mobile: lessons learned #ndf2012

Leave a reply

Going mobile: lessons learned
Francesca Ford and Brooke Carson-Ewart, Art Gallery of NSW
Over the past year the Art Gallery of NSW have designed and built new apps to deliver rich content via mobile phone and tablet devices. We now have a mobile website and visitor iOS app; we have also produced the first two in a planned series of iPad apps focussing on different parts of the collection. Responding quickly to internal and external demands to deliver content via new devices and in new ways has been an incredible challenge. Along the way we’ve made plenty of mistakes and continuously revise our way forward, we’d like to demonstrate what we’ve built so far and tell the story of how we got there.

Built new CMS in 2010 and wanted new web presence. Built with only desktop users in mind and only later started thinking about mobile devices. At first hard for staff to imagine that they didn’t represent the wider world.

2010 “The First Emperor” was their first mobile exhibition app – downloaded 13,000 times. Positioned mobile apps as a marketing tool but wanted to created something longer lasting.

“The MOMA Effect” = keeping up with the Joneses. Helps show value of these apps to people unfamiliar with tech. Created a benchmarking document which was powerful in convincing executive and trust to put money into these projects.

“Contemporary” was first iPad app. New gallery construction allowed them to add wifi capability so people could use mobile apps in the gallery. Had iPads with headphones available for users. Decided not to lock them down – “knew we were asking for trouble” but wanted to see what happened. Older users avoided touching iPads or engaged only with default view. Younger users would close down exhibit app and use others eg photo app. Played with settings to change background image, language, generally personalise it. Others tried to download games, apps, music from the iTunes store. Eye-opening and sometimes inspiring – but in the end couldn’t leave them unlocked.

Didn’t want to make iPads into touchscreen kiosks either so worked with people to enable people to pick them up and use them as iPads. Setup isn’t foolproof and apps did crash. Have learned to live with fact that things don’t always work. Gallery service officers have learned to stand back and let people experiment.

The “Mona (sp? Moaner?) Effect” – “I love this but I don’t know why. I want to create something the same but completely different”.

In the space of one month went from having to campaign hard to do anything to having everyone wanting them to do things, so had to come up with a way to manage it sustainably.

“First Emperor” app was expensive and though it’s still on the app store it didn’t really have a lifespan beyond the exhibition. And on the other hand, apps also require ongoing maintenance, they don’t just end when the exhibition does.

Created mobile site – so many opinions that it could have ended up as a replication of the main site, but wanted to break away from this. Had to build fast so no time for community signoff on every decision (“which is a good thing…”)

Thought Android users would be glad for a mobile site but found out they didn’t think this substituted for an app. Initial design was also rejected and had to go back to drawing board rapidly.

Had to get wifi working across whole gallery, not just one space. Challenging but the hardest part was convincing IT it could and should be done and wouldn’t result in users coming in to download Twilight. Currently 80% wifi coverage, aiming at 100%.

Effective usertesting with no resources? Don’t underestimate informal and impromptu testing – got a lot out of watching users use tools. IPads got dirty at end of day. (Note: white backgrounds show fewer fingerprints than black ones.) Users happy to give opinions especially if they don’t like it!

Marketing another challenge especially with budgets shrinking. Often marketing department is genuinely shocked and surprised that media is interested in this news!

Want to do more – geolocation, mobile tours, digitising print catalogues.

The Future of Products #ndf2012

Leave a reply

The Future of Products
Dave ten Have, Ponoko, davetenhave
How digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing changes the way products are designed and used.

We sit at the centre of a supercollider – social, cultural and technical changes in the way things are made. The orthodox of getting something made on the other side of the world is changing. Looping back around to the way things used to be made – by ourselves. A manner focused on relevance, “customer of one”.

What if the carbon component of a product/transportation were transparent, priced into the product? How do you design a factory with all we know today?

Keep the point of instantiation as close to point of consumption as possible. Instead of putting factory in China, smear it across the surface of the Earth. A distributed manufacturing system.

Built the Ponoko platform made up of

  • a catalogue of digital product designs
  • catalogue of materials
  • digital fabrication hardware (eg 3d printing but other tools too)
  • buyers

This last part is the hard part. Etsy was and remains dominant in this space…

At core, system is a file checking mechanism. Designed a design language – design checking in order to allow credit card charging. Have relationships with eg electronics components producers so people can develop very complex products.

Achievements: Have moved amateurs to professionals – people using this to run their own business. Tapped into inter-generational shift and cultural shift around the maker movement.

Diagram showing level of need of something crossed with degree of effort to create it – intersection is point of relevance.

Use the network to give you reach. Move fast, iterate, eschew IP protection. Quotes someone saying “If I were to apply for a patent, by the time I got it I’d be onto my 10th product.”

Someone using Kickstarter to determine whether people want it and whether people would fund it. TechShop for local prototyping, fabrication, and Ponoko for digital prototyping and fabrication.

Future of products – that people can build their physical environment in same way as digital environment.

The tales we can tell #ndf2012

Leave a reply

The tales we can tell
Tim Sherratt and Chris McDowall
The growing proliferation of digital sources provides opportunities to view the past in different ways. We can analyse textual content of documents, extract and compare information from images, and build all manner of impressive graphs and visualisations to discern new patterns and insights. But this data has its origins in human activity. Behind each data point is a multitude of stories, as different as they are the same. By abstracting these experiences, the world of big data can become detached and alienating. How do we take advantage of quantitative techniques for contextualisation while holding on to the differences, the anomalies, the contradictions that continue to nourish and intrigue us?
Using examples drawn from a variety of collections and projects, Tim and Chris will investigate ways of bringing the two perspectives together. How can we construct interfaces that enable us to move freely across gulfs of scale and meaning? How can we present online narratives that embed multiple contexts? How can we use machine- readable data to frame and enrich our human-sized stories?

Tim: What happens when we bring stories and data together?

The excitement of linked open data is about making meaning. Explore, wonder, linger, sometimes stumble. The frustration of linked open data is that we talk as if it was all just engineering – a big industrial plumbing project. Can instead be a craft, created with love – or in anger. Linked open data will be a success not when we’ve linked everything to DBpedia, but when we’ve created thriving communities.

Western tradition equates knowledge with accumulation. Linked data promises Lots More Stuff. It’d be a tragedy if all we ended up with was a bigger database or better search engine. Want enriched stories, embedded meaning.

Did a presentation once adding triples – but presentation and triples were still separate. Want to create something not with a platform (“sneaky server-side stuff”), something anyone could do. Plain text, no markup. Hacked together javascript to work with text in document, get data from elsewhere, and: Live demo. Script inspects text onscreen and displays visible entities to the right. (The audience is audibly wowed.) Right now most data comes from within document, but sometimes only includes an identifier and pulls info from other sources. Rough demo and long to do list – but gives ideas on how to create data-rich stories.

Just used HTML, RDFA, and some javascript libraries. Wanted it to be accessible. “Access” not just the power to consume but also the power to create. Doesn’t want to live in a world where data is something other people collect for us. Wants “slow data”. Not the giant global graph, but data artisans hand-crafting stories into a messy tapestry.

Chris: Showing DigitalNZ listing thumbnails which link to institutional landing pages. Thinks it’s great if you know what you’re looking for. Tells of being in museum – not looking for a specific thing but just exploring. When online, don’t want to look at a postage stamp.

On a screen there’s so little real estate. Most compelling part of an image is typically the face. So took images (all 21,000 of them) and passed through OpenCV to extract 16,500 faces. Started experimenting with tile placement algorithms.

Composited images into a single image (in five clusters eg the area of soldiers’ faces) displayed with a maptiler interface: can zoom out to full mosaic or zoom into individual image. Wants online but first needs to add a metadata overlay and a clickthrough to source.

Has questions: Is this useful? Would this scale? Does this automatic cropping respect the images?

Sembl, the game of resemblance #ndf2012

Leave a reply

Sembl, the game of resemblance
Catherine Styles, @cathstyles
Sembl is a powerful system for thinking in a playful, dialogic, creative way. Cath will introduce Sembl through its initial manifestation as a real-time group adventure game at the National Museum of Australia, and explore how its play cultivates polyphonic, associative thinking, and new ways of knowing. She will explain where the game comes from and speculate on where it could go, in physical museum space but especially on the web, as an engine of open and linked data, and a game- based social learning network.
This game of resemblance has been gestating a long time, so Cath is stoked to share the story of its emergence.

[ETA: Cath’s own images, notes and clips from the presentation.]

Sembl
Game derives from Charles Cameron’s “Hipbone Game” who got the idea from Herman Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game”.

Started as an iPad game at National Library of Australia. Users make connections between objects (a branding iron and a breastplate “label bodies”; leg irons and a Welsh organ both “involve keys”), which are then rated according to how interesting they are. What makes a resemblance interesting? Makes you think about things in different ways.

Developed on paper, tested with kids, then moved to a digital prototype and tested with same kids. This got them even more interested in getting into the museum itself.

Co-authorship, radical trust, open authority, new epistemology. Meaning not just imposed by museum, created by visitors. Game provides structure for dialogue between museum and visitor and among visitors.

linked data — linked link data
identy — similarity
logical — analogical
prescribed — freeform
comprehensive — generative

Those creating network links learn network thinking.

“You kill what you categorise.” @ffunch
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” – Emily Dickinson

Image of an exhibit colocating slave shackles with fine silverware

Open Museum had a game where users posted “this image is similar to that” until the chain of images looped around to the first image again.

“Every move you make is a futher link in the pattern that connects. Every move you make is a creative leap.” – Charles Cameron on Sembl

Beyond social #ndf2012

1 Reply

Beyond Social
DK @justadandak
If social (media) is no longer the new shiny set of tools that everyone gasps at then what are the next set of questions? In this fast-paced session, DK will balance his presentation with overarching cross-sector ‘big picture’ strategies right through to platform-specific tools and techniques which deliver.
DK (yes, just a D and a K) is a social media advisor who has helped people like UNICEF, BBC, the Gates Foundation, Welsh National Assembly etc. He lives on the internet at justadandak.com. @justadandak

Not going to talk about “Why Twitter is cool” because assumes we already know that.

Shows interactive TV from 1953 Winky Dink where kids had printouts and at some point in show it told them to join the dots.

April 20th someone became first person to edit Wikipedia 1,000,000 times – rewarded by Wikipedia with a day named for him.

Quick dirty simple ideas for museums (people are already aggregating stuff for you- why not borrow/steal/embed existing work?). Problem is at conference people get excited and then realise they have to go back to work.

“Culture eats strategy for lunch” – Peter Drucker. We need a culture that embraces social media – it’s not one person’s job. Doesn’t mean everyone needs a Twitter account, but everyone needs to embrace idea.

(Lots of animated gifs in this slideshow.)

We need to become a lot more curious about other people’s work. Not just within GLAM but outside the sector. Social media lets us do that with RSS feeds.

Currently we think of our website as a destination. But the most popular places on the planet are not destinations, they’re intersections. Google’s popular but we don’t go there to stay there – we go there to go somewhere else. Same with Twitter. We should be an “intersection of amazingness”.

“Trust people to know that there’s a back button on their browser.”

Recommends Rework by Fried. DK wrote notes as read it summarising it, posted to blog. Two weeks later retweeted by author (who “could have gone a different way with that”) and got tens of thousands of hits on his blog – and was then remixed by someone else adding colour; and then someone in Sweden remixed that into a more corporate-style format. Nothing the author could have planned!

Ideas – “Social media Tuesday” once a month for social media geeks to get together over lunch and share – build culture

For a long time Mr Potato was sold without the potato because they assumed you already had one.

Clip of William Gibson talking about how we can get a bit “iPads, meh. gene therapy, whatever” about the present. DK says instead of looking forward to future, should sometimes focus on using the cool stuff that already exists.

Could ask us “Who’s got a social media strategy?” and hands would go up. But what if he asked “Who’s got a cultural strategy?”

New Memory Palaces and the Sublime #ndf2012

Leave a reply

Piotr Adamczyk, @adamczyk, Google Art Project
Piotr has been exploring the possibilities for exchange between practices in the sciences and evaluation techniques from the arts. Most recently he led development on the Google Art Project. Before that he held an analyst position with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. With a background in Mathematics and Computer Science, Piotr holds graduate degrees in Human Factors and Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Piotr has authored papers and organized workshops for Association for Computing Machinery conferences centred on human-computer interaction, and served as a Program Committee member for ACM Creativity & Cognition in 2007 and 2009. His recent work is focused on the use of open/linked data in cultural heritage institutions.

Shows images of museum content contrasting with museum data… Worked on Museum Data Exchange Project with OCLC

At one pointed had to scrape own website to get data sharable. Has used Yahoo Pipes. Tried this with a single object – what about with a whole collection? V&A infinite scroll. [Google, DuckDuckGo, etc do this – why not library catalogues and databases?] SFMOMA ArtScope lets you see an overview of the whole collection but still distancing, doesn’t give you context or differences. SFMOMA Collections Online Visualization Tool – Beta makes it into a graph.

Got into Google Art Project as a Met employee. Now working on backend metadata and systems. 36102 artworks from 184 collections from 43 countries – 2 from New Zealand. Will take any nonprofit institution, copyright-free or -cleared content. Not replacing existing platforms but creating another one. Not just the art but also a streetview component currently in 55 galleries. (2m-tall trolley that someone walks behind and gallery says where to go.)

Adding features – In Google can do things quickly compared to “museum time”. Eg user galleries, compare features to compare two artworks eg a sketch and a finished painting. Unplanned benefit of aggregation. Quickly added a Hangouts feature, so can take people through guided tour. Goggles – image recognition software for mobile devices to lead back to institution website.

“Memory Palace” (Wikipedia, WikiHow)

Lots of photos of exhibits here, and Flickr groups – What’s in your bag?, Bookshelf project – musing about how we visualise collections of things.

Google Art Project can only give a sense of what’s measurable, a sense of what institution has said is most significant. “But what we do well is we do everything at once.”

Brings us back to copyright, he says, showing a streetview with one of the images blurred out. (There’s someone who goes through this streetview and takes the blurred images and gets someone to paint it so that the blurred painting now actually exists!) There are also some glitches due to software/hardware images from the trolley trundling through. Some issues remaining but thinks still doing good stuff.

Q: What problems do people report with StreetView?
A: Visitors ask why they can’t go into certain spaces (navigation is determined by institution); institutions report more technical problems.

Q: Showed us several examples of meta-art – would it be useful to articulate a new level of language to talk about this kind of art?
A: Big data’s something we need to deal with which scientists have been looking at. When you start putting things together, need to have a different way of talking about collection. Language of curation and selection has to change. Trying to get metadata from different institutions to talk together is hard.

Q: Just used “big data” and “curation” and “selection in a single sentence. Can we select (“a person sifting through every day for ever”) or do we just take everything (“the firehose”)?
A: May need to go with the firehose. Can we expect people to sift, or machines, or…? May depend on how much meta info we need – if we want richness might need human intervention, to get closer to meaning. Machines can only do so much.

Q: How do we enable people to make meaning for themselves; how enhance engagement?
A: Each institution has very different reasons for joining the project. Some because everyone else was, some because they don’t have own website, some trying to drive users back to their own site, some to make use of advanced features. How do we measure success? 50million visits in last six months, which we know is just looking at the objects. Does this mean more engagement?

Q: Can you talk about the Google Art Project’s plans for opening up connections not just through screens?
A: When setting up background did work on converting data to a metadata standard and giving this back to institution. Less of half of institutions have given metadata (for whatever reason). So are being kept back from opening up as an API because only a few institutions could do something with it right now; but is something they’re interested in.