Museums and the Weblog 2009
Posted on 27 April 2009 by Thomasin
I have this theory that if I procrastinate long enough, I’ll be able to write an old style post on Museums and the Web (MW2009) that simply indexes everyone else’s blog posts. Meanwhile, here are the things that remain in my mind. When fellow New Zealand (and other) MW2009-ers unpack their thoughts, we can join them up for a fuller picture.
Sites of interest
There were many, not all digital. Some I came across through (face-to-face) conversations, so you may not find them featured in the conference proceedings.
http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/ - transparency on the Indiana Museum of Art’s activities, using open source software – could we present DigitalNZ site statistics in a similar way? Video of keynote here .
http://www.artbabble.org/ - practical exploration of cloud computing – interesting fodder for those facing video repository or hosting solution challenges. Paper here .
http://museumpipes.wordpress.com - documentation of a project similar to DigitalNZ but using Yahoo Pipes – read from bottom up. Abstract here .
http://www.visiblepast.net/gwiki/ - collecting together geo-coded information for mobile devices & 3D visualisation. Web 3.0 is 3D. Here we come, ubiquitous computing !
http://www.seco.tkk.fi/applications/kulttuurisampo/ - impressive national-level ontology for semantic web development. Paper here .
http://conference.archimuse.com/nominee/wotr_write_record - innovative start to something that could grow much bigger. Sprinkle comments on your collections and content.
http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/good-apis-jisc/ - good practice for APIs.
Tate project aggregating access to collections - ome ideas for app front end to DigitalNZ API might be found here.
http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/about.asp - another instance, also actively researching useful applications for understanding a 'black box' of data using Patchwork Prototyping. One to follow. Abstract here .
http://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/ - geo-coding in action. Paper here .
Papers I’m going to read (more deeply)
Presenting at a conference means you spend some amount of time either preparing for your talk, giving your talk, or running around like a headless chicken trying to find a printer to spit out your notes. Now that I’m not doing any of those things, these papers are top of my list to return to. Click on the square paper icon to view:
Aaron Straup Cope: The Interpretation of Bias (and the bias of interpretation) - on 'reverse geocoding' among other things – turning coordinates into ‘place’ which is very often a geography of the mind or community as much as a physical one.
S. Chun, R. Stein and others: Steve in Action - been tracking this social tagging project for a while, especially after Susan visited New Zealand a couple of years ago. How might a collaboration with a NZ institution might work? 88% of tags submitted by visitors were seen by museums as useful; 86% don't match existing documentation. Interesting.
Nina Simon: Going Analog. Translating Virtual Learnings into Real Institutional Change - big buzz about this mini workshop, slides here suggest why . Sadly I was presenting at the same time, so while I could hear it ;-) I couldn’t attend it.
Dan Zambonini and Mike Ellis: HoardIt: Aggregating, Displaying and Mining Object-Data Without Consent (or: Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals for Museum Collections On-line). Similar project to DigitalNZ search, only we asked content providers first.
K. von Appen and others: WeTube: Getting Physical with a Virtual Community at the Ontario Science Centre - about 1% of content created in the meet up related to science collections – the rest was social interaction in the space, or just plain social. Still worthwhile?
Here is the DigitalNZ presentation. It’s a bit abstract without someone talking alongside it. I also need to do something about the videos which were a significant component and currently show as blank slides.
UPDATE 29 April: Slides, with links to video embedded, now on slideshare. Download presentation includes brief notes.
Random thoughts from other events
While colleagues from Te Papa and Auckland Museum took care of the museum-y and visitor experience side of things, I tried to interoperate with others doing API and open data stuff. There’s a definite movement going on, and I’m looking forward to DigitalNZ and our community being part of it.
Geo-coding data in our location fields. We have a lot of names of places, some a bit messy. But tools (and people) exist to help us start improving that – and feeding it back to our content providers if they want the data.
Persistent Identifiers. Still a hot topic, but hard to move to action. What role for DigitalNZ there? How to build on work such as this ? How to extend beyond our national boundaries?
Dublin Core may be a way to achieve interoperability among APIs (if such a thing is desirable). We need to write up our data dictionary & specs for others to see, including our advice to content providers.
http://museum-api.pbwiki.com/ a Wiki for people interested in cultural heritage and APIs and open data and things – a good place to share information around open data in cultural heritage institutions.
http://microformats.org/wiki/work-of-art of interest us as we try to give consistent encoding advice for DigitalNZ Sitemap XML harvest provider s .
Multi touch experiences and DigitalNZ API integration. Geo-coded data might help.
Should we be providing the DigitalNZ data in RDF XML format too?
If it’s not on Flickr it didn’t happen?
Judging by the size of the MW2009 pool, this is probably true. The whole conference kit and caboodle here. A few of my photos here.
By the end of April I'm going to try and make a stereoscope iPod viewer with some colleagues.
Pertinent tweets (no, that is not an oxymoron)
Luckily I am of the generation that can simultaneously listen to a speaker, read a powerpoint, and follow a wall of twitter. I’m afraid my favourite tweet (‘Yay, my panties are going to #MW2009' from @PantyGirl) disappeared too quickly for me to photograph it. Nonetheless, reading the #mw2009 hashtag summary will give you a good sense of the zeitgeist – which trended for a while (at least until Susan Boyle sang like Elaine Page). What you don’t get though is a sense of the real software-peopleware convergence. So many ‘question times’, for example, began with ‘yeah, so I just tweeted this, but maybe you can answer ….’
@mia_out impromptu museum API meetup during icecream bit in Cosmo at #mw2009. Come along and say hello if interested in making or using museum APIs
@briankelly Similar API buzz at #mw2009 RT @paulwalk : APIs are good; work in all kinds of contexts; help developers Get Stuff Done. 3 cheers for APIs!
@musebrarian What can you do with a semantic knowledgebase? Search for "beard fashion in Finland" across time and place. #mw2009
@georginab ninaksimon: Don't try to change visitor behavior, think about what they ALREADY do in your museum and how you can intervene. #mw2009
@mia_out would 'Star Trek as the A Team' be too frivolous an example of re-used content mashed up? http://tinyurl.com/6yxto2 #mw2009
@georginab Tate kids has re-written the standard terms and conditions for their web site into kid-friendly language - what a great idea! #mw2009 (kids.Tate.org.uk)
@anarchivist dear digitalnz: I have such a geek crush on you. please bring me out to visit and/or hire me. :) #mw2009
Finally
It was a privilege to represent the work we have all (content providers, team, developers, everyone) done on Digital New Zealand – and I hope many conversations come out of the connections Museums and the Web has afforded us. I even got my own moment of stardom (yes, I’m proud my tweet was about metadata). OK, so a Best of the Web Award for DigitalNZ would have been nice – but then we’d have no reason to return next year, would we?
We've turned off comments here, but we'd still love to know your thoughts. Visit us on our Facebook Page @digitalnz or on Twitter @DigitalNZ to share any ideas or musings with the DigitalNZ team.