Claire Bailey-Ross

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A ‘New’ space for innovation and experimentation? Taking DH outside of Academia

June 26, 2015 / claireyross / Leave a comment

On Monday 22nd June, 2015, I had the pleasure of taking part in The Durham Centre for Humanities Innovation (CHI – pronounced like Thi-Chi) workshop looking at The Emerging Humanities: Strategies for the Future.   The aim of the workshop was to explore the Institute for Advanced Study theme of Emergence, as applied to the emergence of new ideas, approaches and disciplinary trends in the humanities.  It was a great day with lots of stimulating discussions, a big thanks to all of the organisers.

During my talk, I took the opportunity to think about the possibilities of taking digital humanities research outside universities and into cultural heritage organisations.

As it turns out my talk was quite lively, and in fact quite different to many of the presentations during the workshop.  So I thought I would include the slides and my notes to act as an explanation – the notes themselves might not accurately reflect the exact words spoken – once I’m on a roll lots of thoughts come tumbling out.

I was initially inspired by Sheila A. Brennan’s  blog post DH Centered in Museums? which discussed her lecture at John Nicholas Brown Public Humanities Center.  The Lecture focused on the brilliant idea that Digital Humanities centres might benefit from moving into a museum setting.  Of course! Why hasn’t anyone done that yet!? (and if it has been done – can you let me know where? Because I want to visit!)   This also follows on from Neal Stimler’s panel discussion in Atlanta in 2011 at the Museums Computer Network about the future of digital humanities in museums, which I was lucky enough to attend.  There are some excellent video contributions as part of this panel over on YouTube.

I also pinched the slide design from the DH2015 poster – I thought it would be good to have a digital humanities colour scheme to support my points. I hope nobody minds! 


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Taking the idea of taking Digital Humanities out of universities as a starting point led me to think about how we can create new spaces of innovation and experimentation and how digital humanities could be used as a starting point for thinking about the future of humanities communication and public engagement.

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Why did I start a talk around the future of humanities with a slide about science communication?

Well…  There is a strong history and active research practice surrounding science communication but this if often lacking in the arts and humanities research.   I think we can learn a lot from science communication.

Science communication generally refers to public communication presenting science-related topics to non-experts. Essentially it’s about communicating scientific outputs of research in an engaging way. This often involves professional scientists, but has also evolved into a professional field in its own right.  The art of science communication is to pitch something traditionally perceived as complicated in a way that is not only engaging but also faithful to the evidence.  In essence making science accessible, engaging and exciting to non-scientists.

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A definition of Science communication that I really like is one with all the Vowels! It is one of the most representative definitions of Science Communication.  The AEIOU definition of science communication by Burns, O’Connor, and  Stocklmayer. (2003).  This looks at the use of appropriate skills, media, activities, and dialogue to produce one or more of the personal responses to science (the vowel analogy).   Personally, I think that the five components of the AEIOU approach is a good way of thinking through a process of active participation in not only science communication but Humanities communication.

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The SciCom definition was to provide a bit of context before getting on to an issue within the humanities. The ‘Public’ cares about the humanities…But they don’t necessarily care (care is probably a strong word – so lets change that to understand) understand as much about the work of academic humanists.

Firstly – what do I mean by the ‘Public’? Thinking of the public as an undifferentiated whole is unlikely to help develop any kind of purposeful, responsive and respectful engagement. The definition of ‘public’ developed from that provided by HEFCE:

”The ‘public’ includes individuals and groups who do not currently have a formal relationship with an higher education institution (HEI) through teaching, research or knowledge transfer.”

There are differences between individuals (including their backgrounds, interests, economic circumstances, gender, sexuality etc ) which shape their own sense of themselves and their agency.


ppt7How can our work be interesting useful and meaningful to the ‘public’?

There are multiple ways. There is huge potential to develop new ways of working to enhance access and awareness, engagement and enjoyment, creativity and interest in Arts & Humanities research.

At the workshop I discussed one potential way digital humanities can be used to change our relationship with the public.

So I asked can digital humanities be a conduit between the public and the academy? Or can it be a new kind of multivocal conversation that the public can join?

Before you can answer those questions, it was necessary to lay the ground work on what Digital humanities actually is…

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Over the past 20 years or so, the field we now refer to as digital humanities has been known by many terms: humanities computing, Humanist informatics, literary and linguistic computing and digital resources in the humanities to name a few.  Most recently it has predominately been known as digital humanities.

But what is it in the first place?

Is it an amorphous field that had become a catch-all for anyone doing anything remotely “digi-savvy” in the Humanities?  The question of what is DH seems to be repeatedly asked, but seldom answered to anyone’s satisfaction. It may even be that the act of asking is, in itself, what some scholars think digital humanities are about.

To me it’s a very loose confederation of researchers that are engaged in A&H research, from different disciplines and sectors. It is a Community of practice.  Researchers who are using digital in various ways to raise and address new questions exploring how we can apply technology to our experience of the arts, humanities, culture, & heritage.  DH questions how technology changes the environment around us, physical and digital, and discusses whether those changes are for the better.

ppt9The focus of my talk was a discussion of alternate futures of digital humanities outside of the university. So, I thought I would take the opportunity to think about the possibilities of taking digital humanities research outside universities and into cultural heritage organisations. And I wanted to discuss with the group, if being more connected, engaged, interdisciplinary and innovative makes sense, if it is actually practical, or if we all just need to collaborate more.

I often think that potentially the future of humanities research is not within the traditional constrains of academia, but is an open, collaboration between the cultural sector and academics in public space. Enabling the exploration of the importance and benefits of cross-sector and public collaboration and engagement.

So, can cultural heritage practice foster public engagement and greater collaboration amongst researchers and the public?  We are now being asked more and more to demonstrate our social impact.  So can working with and learning from museum, library and archive practice provide opportunities for researchers to work collaboratively, become more open and transparent to show the relevance of their research to society?

But rather than the title of the talk Taking Digital Humanities Outside of Academia – what if it is already out there?

So Interestingly DH happens in cultural heritage organisations, but just isn’t called that.

“Digital humanities” is a very academic term, and is irrelevant to some. This raises issues around if we need to define Digital Humanities? Should we just get on with the doing rather than getting bogged down in definitions that are limiting. Thinking broadly helps to think of multiple roots to Digital Humanities projects and to its multiple futures.

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First, let’s look at DH that is already happening in museums: I’m going to highlight a couple of examples of interesting digital humanities projects:

ppt11The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gallery One. Gallery One is transforming how museums can incorporate visitors’ active participation in gallery spaces. It opened to tremendous acclaim and fanfare  with a range of digital interactives throughout the gallery space offering opportunities for visitors to participate.

The image is of the Collection Wall – it is one of the largest multi-touch screen in the US—a 40-foot, interactive, microtile wall featuring over 4,100 works of art from the permanent collection (most of which are on view in the galleries).  It’s purpose is to facilitate discovery and dialogue with other visitors and can to act as an orientation experience, allowing visitors to download existing tours or create their own tours to take out into the galleries on iPads and mobiles.  The Collection Wall enables each visitor to connect with objects in the collection in a playful and original way, making their visit a more powerful personal meaningful experience.  Gallery One is, to date, the only non-science gallery which main focus is to use innovative technology to shift the visitor experience to emphasise engagement, curiosity and creativity.

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The scale of public participation in crowdsourcing projects is impressively large. The Zooniverse projects have more than 800,000 registered users, (www.zooniverse.org).  A nice humanities example is Old Weather a collaboration between Zooniverse and The National Maritime Museum.

Where users transcribe historical ships’ logs. These transcriptions contribute to climate model projections and will improve our knowledge of past environmental conditions. Old Weather project transcribed over a million pages from thousands of Royal Navy logs in less than two years.

ppt13Museums  obviously focus around visual and object collections and are very good at connecting and visulizing that data.  For example colour lens visualizes multiple collections by colour.  It  makes use of Public Domain images from the Rijksmuseum, the Walters Art Museum (Balitmore), and others with permission from the Wolfsonian-FIU (Miami), and was developed using code from Tate and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Highlighting that once digitised collections are available via an API (application program interface – a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications), they can be used them and put them into context with other objects.

Moving on to Libraries:ppt14

ppt15The British Library’s Georeferencer project is crowdsourcing location data to make a selection of its vast collections of historical maps fully searchable and viewable and comparable to modern maps.

So far they have georeferenced 50213 Maps within 17th, 18th, and 19th-century Books.  (they have just added a further 50,000 more digitised maps to be georeferenced).

 

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Trove, which crowdsources annotations and corrections to scanned newspaper text in the collections of the National Library of Australia, has around 75,000 users who have produced nearly over 130 million transcription corrections since 2008.

Paul Hagon from Trove estimated that if they had to employ staff it would have cost in the vicinity of $12 million.

 

and Archives:

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ppt18I’m cheating a bit here because I’m talking about special collections within a university with this one.

The archive of Bloodaxe Books, newly acquired by Newcastle University, is one of the most extensive and significant poetry archives in the world.

The aim was to be more creative, open-ended and playful with the archive. Designing new digital interfaces which enable new ways to explore and think about poetry.

These interactions are made possible through reframing the traditional idea of an archive, by questioning the notion of search as simply objective and designing new kinds of playful participatory interfaces with archive material.

ppt19The Great Parchment book held in the London Metropolitan Archive, is a crucial historical text documenting the City of London’s role in 17th century Ulster that was previously unreadable for over 200 years due to fire damage.

The manuscript consisted of 165 separate parchment pages, all of which suffered damage in the fire in 1786. The uneven shrinkage and distortion caused by fire had rendered much of the text illegible.

The project was a large collaborative undertaking in which the practical conservation of the Great Parchment Book was the essential first step, followed by the digital imaging and flattening work. After that, the aim was to develop a readable and exploitable version of the text, comprising a searchable transcription and glossary of the manuscript. The ultimate goal of the project was to publish both the images and transcript online.

 

ppt20So what can we learn from the cultural heritage sector and from digital humanities projects about future directions of humanities research?

I should probably say at this point that I am interested in this from two sides – for over ten years I have worked in and around museums on a range of digital projects, and for the past 5 years I have been an academic digital humanist.  My background in these two fields have shaped my perspective massively.  I strongly feel that important things can be learnt from working with cultural heritage sectors – particularly that surprising research findings and/ or ideas for future research can emerge from working with non academic collaborators.

So I’m going to talk through three key themes that resonate strongly within the cultural heritage sector and across digital humanities projects:

  • Public engagement & Knowledge Exchange
  • Innovation and Experimentation
  • Connectivity and Collaboration

ppt21As public institutions, museums, libraries and archives have hundreds of years of practice with educating the public about cultures, art, and humanities. While, like universities, museums have at times been challenged by the change from broadcasting education to engaging in dialogue with the public, there are a range of successful models for deep engagement and collaboration with the public that we can learn from.

Obviously with the emphasis on the idea of impact in the REF there has been a big shift and it has changed the landscape of research.  But public engagement and knowledge exchange shouldn’t just be for ticking boxes and form filling. PE should not be a new and separate activity for humanities researchers, but rather part of research, teaching, learning and knowledge exchange.

Effective public engagement informs research, enhances teaching and learning, and increases our impact on society.

Done right, engagement should be transformative for all sides. According to the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, engagement ‘is by definition a two-way process, involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit.’ So a two-way exchange of ideas, information and insights, but it is acknowledged that there can be many ways in which humanities researchers can interact with the public.

I am a huge advocate of public engagement and knowledge exchange, and I do believe we can learn a lot from museums, libraries and archives about how thinking creatively about academic research can enable us to speak to a wide range of audiences, even when the research subject seems to be quite specialised. I believe that communicating  research to a wider audience is neither time-wasting nor trivializing, but can bring benefits to academics and the public alike.

ppt22Thinking outside the box, establishing multidisciplinary research teams and international collaborations with the cultural heritage sector outside academia, push the boundaries of existing technologies and methodologies.  Creating an environment which is open to experimentation and innovation.

Museums, libraries and archives have made great efforts to support new research into digital technologies that seek to change the way audiences engage with material culture and heritage.  Each of the projects I have mentioned demonstrates how cultural organisations been up for innovation and experimentation and beginning to bridge the divide between research and innovation that has public impact.

Innovation and experimentation are closely related to Risk.  Innovation and experimentation in museums, libraries and archives has been a growing topic of conversation of late, and an increasing number of organisations have gone down the path of taking risks and developing new kinds of projects that push the boundaries.  A certain amount of risk is always associated with digital projects because they are ‘new,’ ‘innovative’ and ‘cool,’ but there are uncertainties about how much risk is too much risk. How far can the boundaries be pushed with one project and how much tolerance does the institution have? These are questions that many are now facing and questions which many digital humanists are trying to tackle.

Creating a culture in academia that embraces risk is a prerequisite to allow significant innovation to take hold. Digital Museums, Libraries and Archives projects are pushing the boundaries by Recognising that by attempting innovation you expose yourself to risk. The freedom to innovate can only happen when researchers remove the stigma of failure from the process. Instead, celebrate failure as a badge of honour and a key component needed to break old models and embrace innovation.

ppt23Ultimately, this presentation proposes that there is a need for collaboration between memory institutions and digital humanities, and that the role of the digital humanities researcher is evolving in order to effectively integrate memory institutions and the public as a partner in future scholarship.

There is an dominate stereotypical image of a lone scholar in humanities research surrounded by books (not people), with an inability to communicate with the wider world, a certain amount of reservedness and inwardness.  There is a strong association with isolation.  But we all know that it is the productive conversations with one another that makes research interesting.  But there is still a dominance of the long scholar which it seems important to me to challenge and to question.

Whereas the digital humanities tend to be much more collaborative.

Collaboration is widely considered to be both synonymous with and essential to Digital Humanities.  This is because one person can rarely possess all of the (inter)disciplinary and technical knowledge needed to implement many DH projects. Infact, one of the earliest documented examples of a Digital Humanities project, Fr Roberto Busa’s Index Thomisticus (a project started in 1946), was underpinned by a wide-ranging collaboration, not only with IBM, but also including, at one point, a team of 60 who worked directly on the project.

Why do digital humanities scholars collaborate more frequently than ―traditional humanities scholars? What difference does collaboration make?

A survey (by Lynne Siemens at UVIC published in 2011) of digital humanities research teams found that the most common reasons researchers cited for working together are ―Team members have different skill sets and Collaboration is more productive than individual work.

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Perhaps the digital humanities point to a future for the humanities in general to be more open, engaged, and transdisciplinary. We all are facing the data deluge, and all are part of a knowledge society that is transitioning rapidly to the digital. It’s important to try to addresses how modes of knowledge production and dissemination are changing as information becomes digitally networked -humanities scholars have to envision new ways of doing their work.

In some respects digital humanities scholars are at the leading edge of a transformation that will affect everyone, but ultimately I believe that the digital humanities will simply become the humanities.  Its been argued by some digital humanitsts that the digital humanities should not be about the digital at all.  Its all about innovation and disruption.  “The digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities” (Mark Sample)

Most of the research sources will be digital, as will the publishing environments. Scholars will need to devise methods to harness abundant information, explore new questions, and represent their ideas in new ways. In the face of skepticism of the value of the humanities, many digital humanities projects  working with cultural organisations demonstrate how the humanities can be more interactive, interdisciplinary, and engaged, enabling scholars and the public alike to create and share knowledge.

The main argument being put forward is that humanities researchers should embrace the opportunity to learn from and work with cultural organisations and digital humanists to form a connection between academia and the public.

We need to think less about completed projects and more about work in process, iterative runs and learning from failure; think less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; think less about ownership, authorship and authority and more about sharing and co-creation, and think less about broadcast and more about dialogue.

It is my hope that the reflections in this presentation will help to stimulate dialogue, and suggest future directions for a conversation about public engagement, cultural heritage, and arts and humanities research. This conversation is more pressing than ever, but must continue to welcome new, more diverse and at times discordant voices to the table.

 

 

 

 

 

10 good habits for museum online engagement

April 7, 2015 / claireyross / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago now, Mike Ellis from Thirty8 Digital presented at Show Us Your Assets – “Just Because Your Objects Are Online Doesn’t Make It Interesting”.  The slides are above.

Mike suggested 10 good habits for museums to get into when it comes down to thinking, showcasing and engaging with online collections. I always like Mike’s presentations because there are always handy lists and graphs.  Two of my favourite things.

  1. Be less museum and more audiency

Mike advocated for talking to your visitors – whether that is face to face, via the website or via social media.  Just talk to them find out what they like, what they want to know about objects and where they want the content

  1. Understand the importance of Google

Whether you love or hate Google, it is the main search engine that the visiting public use to access museum content.  Ultimately on the web, visibility is authority.  Mike’s provocation was that if museum objects can’t be found on Google, they are invisible to the world.  Going on to suggest if museum objects are invisible then there is no point in them being online. This produced lots of discussion on Twitter about how true this is – I’m a little bit on the fence.   Mike discussed SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and provided details of a handy SEO starter guide.

  1. Social/ Sociable objects

Let museum objects be the engines of socially networked experiences.  The hook around which conversations happen.  Sociable objects online are those that allow users to easily interact with them and with other people.  Mike also advocated for objects having a clear call to action.

  1. Not just “Fire and Forget”

Digital is iterative,  be continuously thinking about what and who your online collection is for, and how you measure success.

  1. Focus on Stories

Stories should be drillable.  Build a environment where museum object stories can evolve.

  1. Make informed tech choices

Unfortuantely technologies can’t be second guessed, but don’t be afraid to ask about formats, costs, standards and risks.  Also ask for help when you need it.  Mike discussed the MCG email list as a good place to go to for help and support.

  1. Knowing what users do

Measure everything you can.  Some questions that museums should be able to answer. What do people do with your objects? Which is the most popular? and why?

  1. Do less, better

There is a disconnect between what audiences and museums and funders want.  Museums & funders want a large quantity of object records online, whereas users want high quality object records with pictures.

  1. Don’t be afraid of marketing

  2. Be visual, designed and playful

I ran out of brain space for points 9 & 10 but the slides can do the talking for me.

Digital Frontiers: Installation day 2 (label panic)

May 30, 2013 / claireyross / Leave a comment

photo (18)day 2 of installation was a bit more stressful than the first. I think the realisation has hit that this is actually my exhibition.  A physical representation of things, ideas and research that I’m interested in and fascinated by.   The objects being installed range from Luna imagery to a drawer full of tropical flies. And they all look stunning. But I’m still really worried about my labels. Lots of people stopped to have a look today and asked questions about what the objects were and they had a personal interpretation filled with plenty of Claire’s  brand of enthusiasm for each object. The only problem being I don’t seem to be able to distil my enthusiasm into label form.  It’s the age old problem in museums. It would be great to have an enthusiastic knowledgeable curator next to each object, providing their unique interpretation to the visitor. But that just isn’t viable.

I’m really concerned that my labels don’t live up to the objects and that they don’t capture my passion for the subject either.

The brilliant Phil Holmes suggested that I embody my inner David Attenborough. I did try and explain a early electric meter as David Attenborough would explain a naked mole rat.  But it turns out unfortunately I am no David Attenborough.  I’m going to tweaking the labels as we continue to install to see if I can improve them a bit. That is one of the absolutely fantastic things about having an exhibition which only used digital interpretation. There is no problem with tweaking labels right up to the last minute as they don’t need to be printed out or mounted! The interpretation can even change throughout the course of the exhibition lifetime! Brilliant.
photo (16)

Digital Frontiers: Installation Day 1

May 29, 2013 / claireyross / Leave a comment

photo (10)

 

Over the past 6 months, I have been pondering the multitude of objects within UCL Museums and Collections in order to create an exhibition which focuses on the impact digital technology is having/had/will have on culture and society.

Here’s the official blurb:

Digital Frontiers: Smart, Connected and Participatory explores how emerging technologies are changing the way we access and experience culture and asks questions about the nature of art and technology. New digital applications are shaping our daily lives; the way we live, work, and study, but is digital technology really new? Digital Frontiers unravels digital culture, illustrates the power of emerging applications and poses questions about technology and culture in the past and in the present.

It’s been hard work and brilliant fun in equal measure.

Selecting objects was great. At first I was getting drawn to the most unusual, weird, gorgeous, amazing objects, but it soon became clear that I was creating a Claire’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Unfortunately that was not the theme of the exhibition, so with the help of some of the fantastic UCL collection curators I began an incredibly steep learning curve of researching individual objects, themes and narratives.  This was fascinating but tough at the same time particularly when it came to the Science collections.  I love scientific objects and research, but I’m not a scientist, so lots of concepts were completely lost on me.   So many awesome objects, but for the most part I didn’t have a clue what they were for!  Throughout the process I have become obsessed with Light Bulbs and early calculators! We got there in the end though and yesterday was the 1 day of Installation in the Octagon Gallery!

Box of Bulbs

Box of Bulbs

We have started with the Historical Science collections, as most of the exhibition objects are scientific, focusing on smart and connected technology.  I have to give a massive thank you to Nick Booth, the Geology & Historical Sciences curator, who has put up with endless emails, face to face meetings, and more emails mostly about me getting confused between light bulbs and Thermionic Valves.   Also massive thanks to Susie Chan, exhibition officer extraordinaire, for keeping the exhibition planning on track, and for not letting me get distracted.  Susie, who not only has fashion sense to die for and can run crazy distances (I’m also a fitness freak but Susie is in a completely different league!) also has the ability to run a tight exhibition schedule and make the whole process quite chilled out.

It was really great to start to pull the exhibition together in its physical form as for the most part it’s been either in my head, or abstract discussions and ideas and interpretation noted down on my laptop.  It’s really quite strange to see it taking shape in the exhibition space. Yesterday was the first opportunity to see the objects in their exhibition context, how they looked next to other objects, how they looked in the cases, and the panicked realisation that my labels do not do the objects justice.  I’m now seriously considering doing a Tate and removing the labels and letting the objects speak for themselves…

 

Some Smart objects
Some Smart objects

Roll on day 2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Belated: Say hello to Museums Dashboard

May 21, 2013May 22, 2013 / claireyross / Leave a comment

MuseumsDashboard

Whilst I was galavanting about at Museums and the Web and Museum Next one of our projects that we have been working on launched!

Say hello to UCL Museums Dashboard!

The idea from the Museums Dashboard came from UCL CASA’s  brilliant City Dashboard and some of the fatastic museum dashboards that are already up and running.  Have a look at the IMA’s dashbaord for an excellent example.  We wanted to explore how live data and data visualisations can create a more transparent, open place that involves students, staff and the public in all aspects of UCL Museums.  So immediately thought a real time dashboard would be a quick and convenient way of displaying all that info in one place.

During the design and scoping of the Museums Dashboard, there was some great  feedback from some of the UCL curators, who were more than up for taking part and having fitbits to measure how many paces they do a day going from collection to collection.  We also talked about real time visitor counts, temperature, humidity, number of objects in collection, number of objects on loan, accessions and deaccessions, how many objects are currently being conserved…The list goes on and on.   However we were on a tight budget so some of the ideas had to be pared down to make a viable dashboard in the couple of months we had available.  The dashboard pulls in data from a variety feeds (Social Media, weather, online collection images, museum temperature), developing our research view that the next trend in OpenData is towards a live interactive view of museums.

My favourite data feed is the museum sensors measuring live temperature at 5 key UCL Museum spaces. So right now the Grant Museum Elephant is 20.8C the Art Museum is a bit hotter at 23.4C and poor old Jeremy Bentham is currently shut up in the pitch black of his box with a illuminance of 0.

Its in Beta, we would love to build on it, if we get the chance!  It has been developed by  CASA), (UCLDH),and UCL Museums and Public Engagement.  It is part of the bigger CityDashboard project, this Museum special version shows data from, or relevant to, UCL Museums and Collections. It is part of the NeISS project and was jointly funded by JISC and UCL Museums and Public Engagement.

Bits2Blogs: Flip-Flops, Crapjects, Playful learning and leaving the phone at home

March 21, 2013 / claireyross / Leave a comment

 

This week I had the pleasure of being back up in my home town for the Bits 2 Blogs conference.  Bits2Blogs  is an annual event for anyone working in the North East cultural heritage sector, it was great to see and hear a regional spin on new ideas and new technologies to engage audiences. Particularly in a region which is dealing with horrible governmental cuts to arts and culture.  The focus on best practice on innovative digital projects saw topics range from some pretty nifty mobile apps, through to vanishing soundscapes and creating meaning from archives processes. And to add some extra sparkle there was the addition of Flip-Flopping and Crapjects. What more could you want in a conference!? Here’s the condensed version of my notes.

Leave the Phone at Home!

Jason daPonte is a brilliantly inspiring speaker. Fact.  He’s very good at highlighting the point that staring at a mobile phone screen instead of the surrounding environment is unnatural.  You should always use the device that comes most naturally to the interaction. This is not mobile phones.   We all seem to be obsessed with mobile applications, mobile web experiences.  But really what is awesome is standing in front of the object in the gallery.  Jason’s talk really reminded me of something Bruce Wyman said at MW2012 “Design for verbs” design experiences for specific interactions you want people to have.  Because the value of the interaction is critically important.  Jason talked about

Jason discussed the ways museums need to consider the futures relating to mobile media.  Or lack of future , instead focusing on subphones where he underlying phone functionality is embedded in other things, and the silent conversations of the Internet of Things.  So forget unnatural interactions on your phone, and start thinking about playing tag with hoodies (check out  Neighbourhoodie);or  embedding the ability for the oyster card to refund you if you are more than 15minutes late on the tube; or even Clothes hangers in C&A which tells shoppers how many people have liked the item of clothing on Facebook.

Jason hit home that working across platforms won’t be about web, mobile and tv. It will be about delivering contextual content and services in the most relevant places for users.  Competition for attention will be via ambient media.

Three key points:

  1. Designing visibility
  2. Make things simple and just work
  3. Gather data and create meaning out of it.

Representing Sound Visually

Ian Rawes from London Sound Survey talked about  vanished soundscapes and the importance of presented sound data well. Just because you’ve got good sound recordings on your website doesn’t mean your site visitors will necessarily listen to them. While a good content description is essential for sound archivists (check out the fab Content summaries BL sound and moving image catalogue) they’re not particularly attractive to the casual listener so how about creating some sound maps (look at BL UK sound map) and invest time in getting people browsing sounds, something like how BBC Radio provides journalistic teasers, photos and other extras on their pages.

                                                  

Starting Somewhere and making smaller, faster changes

Andrew Lewis, from the V&A reflected on the development of the V&A’s digital strategy over the last 18 months and the realities of implementing change.  I really enjoyed Andrew’s talk, I do love me a bit of institutional change chat.   the V&A has attempted to not be a ‘giant ship that’s hard to turn’ and adapt to the changing needs relating to digital. Andrew talked about how the  V&A doesn’t want to be a  giant ship with lots of little (organisational) silos that’s hard to turn but an institution which can adapt to the changing needs relating to digital. He presented a list of key themes to think about when working with digital strategy’s and making change happen:

  • Be audience focused
  • Use open data driven as default
  • Mobile first
  • Use shot planning cycles and defined product lifespans
  • Make faster, smaller changes
  • Be prepared for some Tough Love: Change requires hard decisions and effort

Andrew’s slides are already up on slideshare

 What on earth is Flip-Flopping?

Dominic Smith from the Tyneside Cinema did a brilliant presentation. With some excellent terminology.

The flip-flop is a term from the writer Robin Sloan and defined as: ” the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once.”

Dominic used the example of 3D printing to get his point across.  Museum have been digitising physical objects for some time both in 2d and 3d. But now that 3D printing is becoming more accessible museums have the potential to re-materialise these digital objects in interesting ways, and avoid creating ‘crapjects’ (rejects and misprints from 3D printing).  Greg Petchovsky’s work focusing on mixing digital sculptures with real objects  is a great example (see cracking video above).

But what does this mean for authenticity, value and Walter Benjamin’s aura? As media becomes increasingly transient from physical to digital and back again does its meaning change?  Is the meaning lost?

Dominic then went on to discuss starting to see a marketplace for 3D objects, but if there is a market there’s a potential for pirating. Is this a bad thing? Really? Museums have a tendency to turn a bit Gollum like and not let go of the ‘precious’ objects with a fear of something like fake Disneyland. What does it really mean when visitors can scan a perfect copy of your objects on their phone? How can museums make this work in their favour?

Compelling Objects

Rachel Clarke from Culture lab talked about exploring the qualities of digital representation through sensory & aesthetic experiences of objects. Two of the projects Rachel discussed really stood out for me:

    • The Whispering Table, a gorgeous installation where the technology wasn’t retrofitted onto the objects, instead the objects were carefully designed around the technology.
  • and a project dealing with Personhood and dementia- reminiscence, reflection and celebration by Jayne Wallace

Ultimately Rachel hit home that Digital processes change how we engage with objects and we need to think a bit more about what this means and the impact this has on our relationship to/with objects.

 

Playful Learning

Ben Templeton, from Thought Den talked about the creative process and the practicalities of three pretty awesome digital projects which all focus on playful learning: Wildscreen Arkive’s Survival app, Tate’s Magic Tate Ball, and Bristol Zoo’s Zoom.

Some key points in my scribbly notes:

  • Content is king:  Think long an hard about what the stories are. If you are asking visitors to unlock content its important to unlock good content. Unlocking needs to have an adequate reward. Magic Tate Ball is brilliant because it focuses on stories, the contextual awareness. The human angle of interpretation is key, but this can take time and effort.  Be prepared.
  • Test everything with users! User Testing is always talked about and advocated for but actually rarely done in practice.  Why? It can be done cheaply and quickly, and even a little bit of testing is better than none at all.
  • Simplicity is the way forward.
  • Design in order to take the visitor/user on a journey
  • Making a fuss come launch day is a really good idea. And Launch isn’t just the day it goes live, it has a long tail.  It is worth the effort.

Thanks to John Coburn and the Great North Museum for being excellent hosts! Lots of inspirational ideas to take away ponder and action points to implement!

A new Frontier: Claire the Exhibition Curator!

January 16, 2013January 16, 2013 / claireyross / 2 Comments

Octagon Gallery taken from ucl.ac.uk

Alternative Title: I first realised I hated Nick when… I became the Exhibition Curator!

Over the next 6 months, I have a new role! I am now the Exhibition Curator of an awesome new space part of UCL Museums and Collections, the Octagon Gallery. In my head, my new title is Grand high priestess of Curatorial Temporary Exhibition Land. I’m on a major power trip. I have access to all the curatorial knowledge and all of the collections available at UCL. That is a lot of objects!

The theme of the exhibition is the vague ‘Frontiers’. I’ve narrowed that down to the stuff I’m interested in, and so it doesn’t stray too far away from my PhD Research… It’s going to focus on Digital and the impact that is having/had/will have on culture and society. However if you think every museum exhibition is about dinosaurs. Yes that’s what it’s about dinosaurs (and perhaps even dinosaurs in space).

I’m really excited to get started, it’s going to be a steep learning curve and a challenge to juggle my PhD write up, exhibition and all the other projects I’m working on.

I’m going to blog the entire process, so will be regularly posting the exhibition’s progress, experiences, successes and, critically, failures in trying to create an exhibition, which not only uses all digital interpretation,but focuses on digital content, and includes digital immersive visitor experiences. The challenge is on! On here, I’ll be talking about the personal experiences, the nitty gritty stuff, what i love, what I find impossible, what random object I want to steal…, on the UCLDH blog I’ll be talking in a bit more of a academic professional tone about the exhibition process and visitor experiences, and on the UCL Museums blog, I’ll probably be having arguments with curators. There have already been insults thrown and its only day 1… it’s all Nick Booth’s fault. You will also get to hear from other people involved in on the exhibition, from the collection specific curators, to the exhibition officer, to the conservators. So we’ve got every perspective covered!

 

First up on the to-do list is to create a massive list of objects! better get cracking.

Positive and Negatives of Digital R&D Notes from UKMW12

December 4, 2012 / claireyross / 2 Comments

Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Museum Computer Groups UK Museums on the Web: UKMW12 ‘Strategically Digital’ conference at the Wellcome Collection, London.  I love the MCG’s annual conference, it is always a great opportunity for people in the museum sector to get together and think about the big and little ideas about how digital technology is changing how we do things.

I thought I’d post the notes from Jane’s and my presentation on the Positive and Negatives of Digital R&D.  In our proposal we wanted to highlight the differences between the aspirations and the reality of undertaking a digital innovation project: Digital Research and Development (R&D) projects are being classed as a quick win; offering museum professionals’ rapid, new and experimental ways of engaging visitors and to develop more efficient ways of working within organisations. However the reality of R&D can be very different. The Social Interpretation project (SI) at IWM has been utilising R&D and innovative practice to fundamentally challenge the way in which museums interact with, and provide for, audiences. The aim being to rebalance the authority / audience divide; turning museums into social, participatory organisations – with all the challenges this entails. We would like to share the learnings from this national project, focusing on reflections on R&D processes used to engage audiences and the implications for the use of digital technology that encourages participatory content creation by visitors.   We will balance these external-facing findings with a discussion about the challenges of trying to implement R&D in a museum environment on time and on budget. In particular we will discuss the challenges of trying to work in an agile manner in these most un-agile of institutions. We will cover key themes facing the museum in a modern digital context: moderation, community engagement, co-production of design and content, internal support, external advocacy, technical development and of course funding.  Although this paper will concentrate on technology and concepts created for IWM, issues of R&D and digital innovation are applicable to any museum.

Then

“Last year Tom Grinsted and I spoke at UKMW2011 (slides and notes) about this project and its aspirations.  We were described as a pair of excitable puppies so here are a pair of real puppies General Montgomery with his puppies “Hitler” and “Rommel” at his mobile headquarters in Normandy, 6 July 1944.  Jane and I would now like to explain the reality and the differences between the two and the share our learnings with the sector.

The last year summed up: The Social Interpretation project asked 2 key questions – 1. Does applying social media models to cultural collections successfully increase engagement and reach? 2. Is social moderation an effective response to the moderation challenge?”

Reality

“We delivered 3 Applications kiosks in gallery, qr codes in some places, mobile app and online. Can’t collect and share in gallery – too difficult to implement.

In reality looks OK – but robustness testing was live on gallery. We didn’t have enough time to properly develop and test the software.

SI came in late, November – to Family in War. To the yearly cycle of resourcing and exhibitions and facing the closure of the museum for redevelopment.

And content isn’t a quick thing to develop in a museum..for SI it was oversold and under achieved and meant full potential wasn’t achieved.”

Moderation and Co-Production

We experimented with moderation and co-production of design and content with visitors. We found that post- moderation works. There is an ingrained fear in museums that if you let visitors participate they will write rude things.  Just because they can doesn’t mean they will.  Trust your visitors.

But moderation can become resource heavy. The comment kiosks generated a significant amount of ‘social interpretation’.  The kiosks also generated significant nonsense and ‘cool’ comments. Moderating such high levels of activity was a considerable task for the IWM team.

Adaptation and adjustment to the SI process was required to deal with this.  From the outset the SI project aimed to be as open and transparent as possible; stressing the necessity in including users, stakeholders and the project team into a systems design process.  The reality, however, is very different. There is always the aspiration, and the SI team endeavoured to uphold that.  But with a one year project, once it hits delivery mode, the ability to communicate becomes increasingly difficult.  This from a UCD perspective is disappointing, as it is felt more testing and ability to act on recommendations would have enabled a better final user experience with the applications.

Visitors are up for discussion but are institutions? Do they have the time and resource to iterate? These are important questions museums need think about before you commit to user centered design.

Finally

In a nutshell, Museums don’t know how to do R&D.  Trying to be agile in a non-agile institution. Can’t do iterative development fully – costs, timings, resourcing.  Robust exhibits, project based development cycles (limited time and budgets) all work against live digital R&D in museums.  There are challenges around advocacy, communication, timescales, iterations etc.  But there are some positives and we’ve learnt a awful lot in the process.

Key Take Aways from the Social Interpretation Project

  • Content, Content, Content
  • Post moderation works
  • Deeper engagements happen online
  • QR Codes ain’t all that
  • Communication and advocacy
  • Be prepared to compromise
  • Resourcing
  • Raising Awareness
  • Build in evaluation
  • Incremental institutional change, baby steps
  • It’s not about the technology it’s about the experience
  • Is R&D right for your museum? – robust, stakeholders

In the next post I’ll talk about some brief highlights from my favourite sessions and the key ideas that were buzzing about; namely mobile, impact and evaluation.

Playing Catch up: Skulls, Sounds, Sports and Scan & Share

September 18, 2012 / claireyross / Leave a comment

I’ve been quiet on the blog over the past month, it seems that I’m at that stage in the PhD where writing anything AT ALL is exceptionally difficult.  So here are some quick and dirty bullet points of things I have found fascinating this month.

  • Obviously, the procrastination monster and my love of all things sport meant that the Olympics and Paralympics have been the biggest thing ever in my life over the past month. The BBC’s amazing coverage as well as Chanel 4’s brilliance of challenging perceptions and of course Clare Balding made me a very happy bunny.  The BBC also shared some mega stats and insights around the digital side of the Olympics coverage:The story of the digital Olympics: streams, browsers, most watched, four screens
  • Then there is Alex Balfour’s slideshare  (I’m sure you’ve already seen it ) of the breakdown of the online traffic statistics and facts from the official digital channels, website and mobile of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
  • Accidently walking past a brilliant interactive sound installation called Phantom Railings in Malet Street Gardens, Bloomsbury.  I’m getting quite excited about the potential for interactive sound installations in museums for visitor engagement, so literally walking into this after conversations about digital sound installations was a very pleasant thing. The Fad site has a nice post about it. I love the Policemen having a go in the video above!
  • The British Museum have released their new collection online interface (in beta). This initial release includes the free text basic search, search results, object details page, and a new image gallery.  Here’s my search on Roman Spoons.  I love how they have improved the images in the search results. And the object-page layout is pretty swish.  You can check out Matthew Cock’s a blog post about it.
  • I had a bit of a play with Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook I love that the stats from mine indicate that my significant words are: ‘museum’ and ‘gin’. Explains a lot.  Steve over at Big Data Toolkit has a nice post on it.
  • Things have been busy over at IWM Social Interpretation the iOS app “Scan and Share” (done diss the name it was the best we could come up with) is live (android is coming soon), the website pages are live (in beta) and we are up and running in the gallery spaces with QR codes and digital ‘kiosks’ both in IWM London and IWM North.  Really highlighting what you can and can’t achieve with a 1 year R&D project.
  • I’ve spent a lot of my time in the Grant Museum stalking visitors for my PhD data collection. Which was fun! Lots of sitting next to odd dead things whilst drawing maps and observing folk. I’d quite happily move into the Grant Museum tomorrow for ever. And that just gets me excited about the prospect of a geek in residence….
  • Ignite London is back! We are pleased to announce #igniteLDN7 on 15th November 2012.  You can submit your awesome talks now!

Even quicker Links

  • Digital Games and Pigs, whats not to love? Playing with Pigs
  • Nice post by Shelley Mannion on AR applications and delivering value for museum visitors
  • Guardian piece on Imapct – Impact factor: researchers should define the metrics that matter to them
  • Connecting Light up at Hadrain’s wall
  • The impact good research has on other arts orgs digital strategies
  • Making the Case for Creativity and Experimentation as a Continuing Value for Museums

Normal bloggage about museum digital stuff and public engagement will commence shortly… hopefully.

#MuseumNext video QR codes, Smart Objects, Museums and Public Engagement.

July 14, 2012 / claireyross / 2 Comments

Check out MuseumNext’s video of Chris Speed’s and my presentation about Smart Objects, QR codes, Museums and Public Engagement.  More of MuseumNext’s videos are on vimeo.

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