Hi everyone!

Throughout the next week I’m going to be adding workshop presentations to our Google Collection and embedding the presentations here on the blog.

Here’s the presentation for Leveraging TourML & TAP for managing and deploying Tours by Kyle Jaebker (@kjaebker), Indianapolis Museum of Art.

If you attended the workshop, please share your reflections as comments here (if you have many thoughts, consider making your own blog post and linking back to this one). If you did not attend the workshop, then feel free to look over the presentation and please share your own reflections and ask questions!

Technology offers countless ways to enhance the visitor’s experience in museum galleries. As museums continue to search for ways to employ new technology, it is important to ensure that these technologies enhance rather than eclipse the collection objects on display.

As museum audiences, especially younger visitors, increasingly gravitate to the next shiny new screen in any given gallery, how can we maintain the primacy of the physical object? What museums have successfully used new technology to enhance the visitor’s experience, and how have they done so? What pitfalls should be kept in mind when considering the use of new technology in museum galleries? In what instances might digital materials serve as a useful replacement for an object too delicate to be displayed for prolonged time periods?

In this session, let’s explore web content management systems in meeting the needs of different types of museum libraries. For example, if a museum is using a content management system to archive their photographic collections, what are some criteria we might consider in selecting a web content management system? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of free versus a proprietary CMS? In the case of a proprietary CMS, what happens to the content if the company who creates the CMS fails or if the company is bought out? Should museum libraries harness that control? Would it makes sense for museum libraries to work together to build their own CMS, shared across institutions?

Back in February, an advisory group of 5th graders from Queens proposed several ideas for museum trips of the future at the National Art Education Association Museum Education Division Preconference. As expected, some of their ideas were wonky, not quite possible or necessary for broader student audiences (You can read about their presentation on the Queens Muse).

The students mostly critiqued the restrictiveness of museum field trips. Most students had been to museums with their families and preferred the freedom to wander and explore. However, students were sensitive to safety issues and  believed they should be restricted to certain areas in the museum. Their proposal combined a few ideas – using GPS to find objects, being tracked by teachers, being restricted to certain areas, signaling alarms when help is needed and playing scavenger hunts electronically.

Can we combine object tagging, student tracking, and gaming possibilities on devices for use by school-age children in museums?

What are museums, libraries, and archives hired to do? Does this matter, and how does it differ from what they offer? I’ve recently been learning about Clayton Christensen’s work on disruption theory and it’s provoked some interesting questions about what job(s) people hire institutions to do. Here’s a link to a piece on the blog Asymco.com looking at technological disruption and change in the early telecommunications industry.

The theory comes out of the world of business methods, so why should we pay any attention to it at all? I think we should because of the broader implications that arise from it. The technology industry has been seeing an increase in disruption recently, and it looks like the effects are spilling over into other areas alongside the penetration of technology. I would like to take the time to think about what job museums, libraries, and archives are hired to do by their patrons and visitors, and if they face disruption by good-enough alternatives that might or might not be in the same business space (Wikipedia, Amazon, etc).

I’m by no means an expert on this, but I did attend a conference in Amsterdam on the topic as it relates to mobile computing. I’m interesting in seeing what people are worried about when it comes to possible replacements, or even if it is considered a problem.

I have a couple of different ideas which might be different sessions, might meld into other people’s session proposals, or might all belong in one session – you tell me!

Basically, I have an ongoing concern that current representations of material culture online are not sufficient. I worry that we’re already stuck in a model that makes more sense for documents and for 2D art than for three dimensional artifacts.

1. Thinking outside the box:

How can we reimagine websites for digital collections of artifacts in ways that transcend current models? We all know the current standard: you search, you end up with a list or a grid of thumbnails, you go to a page for a single item, you have one decent image of that item and some summary / tombstone-type text. Should we just be adding to this? More images, more information, more conversation? I’ve previously written about this as a need for “multiplicity.”

OR should we be considering new, completely different models? What would they look like? It’s hard to even imagine – but I bet as a group we could brainstorm some interesting ideas. Maybe some of you can share sites that are already transcending standard models.

What are the pros and cons here? There’s definitely something to be said for keeping a familiar interface so users are comfortable navigating through the information we have to offer. But how can we balance this with a need to better express the materiality of the objects?

then, another related issue-

2. Are ObjectVRs worth the effort?

I hope the answer is yes, because over the last couple years I have put quite a bit of effort into an objectVR project. Here’s a recent example from my project:

vcomeka.com/vccc/VR/1984.001/1984.001.htm

When I look at this object, I can rotate it to whatever side (and zoom in on whichever detail)  is most interesting to me. It would take hundreds of close-up images to view the same detail in a strictly 2D format, and would be confusing to understand where on the garment each detail fell. As I view the object turning, I have a better sense of its spatial presence. So, yes, worth it – maybe? My undergraduate students are lucky to have access to these real objects in our collection, but rarely is such access available on demand – and I realize that students at other institutions don’t have the same kind of access to such artifacts. I’m hoping that these digital surrogates can allow a student to engage in close looking not unlike how they might examine the object in person.

In my time working on this project I have come to the conclusion that the most “expensive” moment of the process (in terms of time and labor) is in the preparation – mounting the objects and setting up the lights. However, the same time and effort would have been required for a single front view photograph! If you’re going to spend all that time and energy to photograph an object, why not stick it on a turntable and photograph it from all sides, taking just a few more minutes?

Well, in the process of developing this ObjectVR project, I’ve found a couple of answers to the “why not?” but I honestly don’t think they’re very good ones. It has taken us quite some time to develop a workflow for processing the raw images into objectVR animations, and to publish them online. However, I’m hopeful that future stages of this project will move more efficiently now that we’ve worked out the kinks.

So, what do you think? Is it worth it? I’m happy to share details of my process and show more examples, including our custom settings in the commercial Object2VR software we’re now using (including the settings that hopefully make these work on mobile devices).

THATCamp notes taken during this Session can be found at ow.ly/b1czR

Session Proposal
Yielding to the omnipresent camera phone, most museums have had to change their no-photography policy (although still enforced in special exhibitions). Museums even encourage taking photos, featuring them on their websites and social media pages.

I would like to explore how photo taking and photo sharing practices have changed the gallery experience and the experience of art online. Do these candid snapshots reveal something that official collection photographs don’t? What do we need to know about fair use and copyright infringement? How do we manage all these images?

Here are some links to spark conversation:

At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus

At Galleries, Cameras Find a Mixed Welcome

Google Art Project and Google Goggles

Also –
Check out any museum’s social media pages including Official Flickr Group Pool and Facebook;

And see results of online image search for any artist:
( Picasso? – About 75,600,000 results in 0.12 seconds; Gauguin? “only” about 3,510,000 results; Beuys? 1,350,000……)

While commercial applications of virtual reality explode on your mobile screen, the history potential of the smart phone valiantly struggles to catch up. The Digital Humanities team of Kathleen Hulser and Steve Bull have been experimenting with history on the hoof. They concoct augmented reality scenarios that turn the smart phone into a history translator that conjures buried archival materials into real world contexts. Two recent forays show the potential for plucking history from the scholarly realm and popping it into surprising settings. “Tecumseh” summons an image of the Shawnee leader who tried to found a Pan-Indian Nation, during the War of 1812. No, Indians aren’t erased from the history, they’ve just been waiting in your mobile to re-materialize. Bull lurked amidst classical busts in the gardens of the Villa dei Pini, Bogliasco ITALY, to install “inVisible Presence” using augmented reality to make the men of marble to mobilize their thoughts. In both cases above the visitor is given the opportunity to have a snap shot taken with the avatar and posted to a social media site.