Since I’m not part of the museum world (my doctorate is in English), I’m a little diffident about proposing anything to do with museums, and since this is THATCamp Museums NYC, I’m a little diffident about proposing anything NOT to do with museums. But this one time at THATCamp SoCal I suggested (since THATCamp is supposed to be productive), a session in which anyone who wants to just hangs out in a room together and blogs. Call it a blogathon. A nice, quiet space and time to do that blogging we’ve all been meaning to do, or to get started on it, at any rate. Certainly as THATCamp Coordinator I do always appreciate it when people blog about THATCamp, of course, even if it’s just summaries of sessions, and it’s also true that blog posts about THATCamp can be nominated for consideration in the Proceedings of THATCamp, whose first issue will be released on August 1, but it could be anything, on any blog, including this one.

I’d like to propose a session in which we look critically at one of the most familiar data visualizations: the timeline. Traditional timelines are static, but in recent years projects such as SIMILE Timeline, Chronos, and Verite have created dynamic representations of temporal data.  Digital timelines also afford an ordering structure to present collections of digitized assets, such as the Presidential Timeline of the Twentieth Century.

In this session, we can explore the possibilites of enhancing access to cultural heritage materials through timelines while examining their pedagogical function as visualizations. How do we break out of the traditional linear representation of temporal data (or should we)? What visual language is necessary to represent the complexity of multiple streams and categories of information? Can we crowdsource timelines? What about using linked data to create semantic timelines? Do the techniques used in data journalism transfer to the cultural heritage community?

Let’s have a discussion about pedagogy and learning around the use of digital exhibitions.  We have tried a variety of methods at the Bard Graduate Center in our courses.  I would like to share ideas about best practice and how this mode of presentation is particularly useful for the study of material culture.  What are the best platforms?  How do we integrate into the curriculum and academic program?

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?

Museums have been using touch screens for years, but the iPad gives us all a common and familiar platform for app design.  Let’s spend a couple hours comparing notes on iPad app authoring tools and possibly even build a basic ourselves.  Programming experience would be nice, but no previous experience with iOS development should be necessary for this discussion.

The really successful apps and services we see today do one of three things: provide something fundamentally useful to other apps, collect together the already existing data and functions of other apps, or provide a central place for gathering all your interactions with other apps and services. Think Foursquare, Instagram, and Facebook. Foursquare provides location data and check-in for many apps; Instagram uses Foursquare to map your photos as well as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr to share them; all your check-ins, instagrams and anything else can be on your Facebook wall. The “ecosystem” (mostly APIs provided by all these services) allows these parts to sum into a greater whole.

Most museums apps feel like dead ends to me because they don’t really do anything. They don’t share very well (if at all) and they don’t interact with anything else, not even the institution’s own website. I think what we lack is a sense of the proper “ecosystem” for Museum apps and web services. Some parts of a potential ecosystem exist, such as Foursquare, but what are the missing elements? What could a museum provide that would make a check-in at a museum more than or different from a check-in elsewhere (or how could we use check-ins more to our benefit)? Easier membership? If we could get over cameras in the gallery, what could we add to Instagram? A way to attach object information to the photo? Foursquare can find all the pizzarias near you, but if object information could be attached to a photo that was that attached to a check-in, couldn’t Foursquare then find all the nearby Van Goghs?

What kinds of interactions are going to truly benefit museums and museum visitors, how do identify the missing pieces and then… how do we build them?

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.

Fairly recently, METRO and NYPL sponsored a workshop on Linked Open Data, and also a lecture by Marcia Lei Zeng.  I attended the first session, which piqued my curiosity, but I need a review.  I also have some questions:

• How exactly does LOD relate to/interact with the old crosswalks of metadata standards familiar to libraries, museums and digital collections?
• There seem to be 200 implementations.  Where are they? What do they look like?
• Does LOD answer or help to the age-old question of access to all digital collections of libraries and museums in one place or one grand interface?
• Is LOD a new iteration of the web entirely?
• How is it possible to keep up with/migrate to/understand/implement new standards such as this?  I barely understand DAMS and CMS.  Now more!  What is the minimum technical knowledge required to keep current in the field and how is it possible to achieve it without spending $$$$ on a 2nd degree?

As must be obvious, I am not an expert on this.  Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable will join the session to enlighten us.  If not, we will together explore web sites and other resources explaining it.  I have a few session notes that will get us started.

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……)

Archives and special collections used to hold documents and books. Then archives expanded to maintain photographs, film, video and sound. These additional materials are less permanent than documents.

After the 1990s or thereabouts, digital media enter the archive. If the great novel of 2001 was written on WordPerfect the software that runs Word Perfect is no longer produced. Today’s Stan Brakhage uses an IPhone. When the next generation of IPhones comes along, can we still watch those movies? What will happen to the digital “rough cuts” of Hollywood movies that aren’t blockbusters? We still have Leonardo’s sketchbooks, but the aging monitors used by Nam June Paik are endangered, even though they are only forty years old.

The preservation of digital media requires emulation and migration. Almost any medium can be preserved on a hard drive but the physical parts of hard drives wear out, and hard drives themselves may become obsolete. The answer may lie in cloud computing, but even then, the motorized parts of servers will wear out. Perhaps there are computer hardware experts here who can help.

Let’s examine the history of knowledge containers, because that’s what servers are. If we use today’s language to describe them, wax and clay tablets are knowledge containers. So are scrolls, palm leaf manuscripts, codices, and folios. They are old technology that was advanced when they were new. In our culture, the book was the preeminent knowledge container.As in the tablet, the scroll, and the codex, function, available means, and serendipity all played a part in the development and adoption of the book. In what ways have function, available means, and serendipity influenced digital media?

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.

What are some things you can do, when you happen to hear a tour group leader spouting some blatantly inaccurate information at their participants? Whether it’s a creationist group visiting the evolution wing of a museum, or an Official museum tour where the leader was ill-informed about the topic (happens a more often than you might think), most people tend to leave them alone. But, what if you are the type of person that just simply can’t stand idly by?! I will propose a strategy for addressing the situation that is diplomatic (you can NOT be mean!), pragmatic (using utility as a motivation for changing opinion), and concise (you might only have 30 seconds to talk). We can compare its strengths and weaknesses against any other approaches anyone else might have.