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.
squander is something we're not doing over at SI! (Image IWM EPH 4611: Squander Bug (a cartoon character to persuade people to avoid waste) air rifle target, 1940s)
A while back I announced that we had been awarded part of the NESTA R&D fund for a joint project with the Imperial War Museum(IWM), Knowledge Integration and our friends over at UCL CASA well we have well and truly started and are knee deep in agile project management, user centered design and puppy dog enthusiasm. So much so we have started a blog over at IWM Blogs, so all the project comings and goings whether they are good, bad or downright ugly will be posted in one spot from all of the project partners. It should make a good read, and if not there are lots of pretty pictures, like the Squander bug!
I’ll post on here when there are updates, and will put a more personal spin on some of the posts.
For the past couple of days, I have been down on the gallery floor, hiding behind tanks and rockets whilst observing visitor behaviour, to get an idea of what type of behaviours we need to design for in the social interpretation applications. What I really liked was that my feet, back and brain were sore by the end of each day, not because it was difficult, but because all the visitors were really engaged and did their best to fully explore the gallery space. It was hard to keep up with them sometimes. I can’t begin to imagine what I would have been like if I followed the visitor through their entire visit rather than just one gallery!
I’m in the process of writing up the findings from the observation sessions, which I will then post on the Social Interpretation blog, already there are some brilliant themes emerging.
I’ve been gibbering on about digital humanities, museums and digital technology on the brilliant Global Lab podcast. You can donwload it via RSS, iTunes or download the .mp3. You can almost hear my over enthusiastic hand gestures! I even managed to nearly knock over the microphone, but thankfully that has been edited out. So if you want to hear what I sound like, rather than read me, there you go. I mostly spoke about the QRator project which is a collaboration between CASA and UCLDH.
The Global Lab podcast is about cities, spatial analysis, global connectivity and the impact of technology on society produced by two brilliant chaps from CASA; Steve and Martin. Its very good listening for train journy’s and to whip out anecdotes in dinner party conversations. Check it out
The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind.
After spending ages tinkering and toying with a proposal for the NESTA R&D fund, we found out that we had been shortlisted for Interview. The interview was last Wednesday (21st September), we found out we had been successful on the Friday (23rd September) and last Monday (26th September) we began a two day intensive workshop run by NESTA for the successful projects. It’s all a bit of a blur to be honest. It is only really beginning to sink in that for the next year I will be working some amazing people on, even if I say so myself, a jolly exciting project!
UCLDH will partnering with the Imperial War Museum(IWM), Knowledge Integration and our friends over at UCL CASA to deliver a innovative project funded under the Digital Research and Development Fund for Arts and Culture run by Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and NESTA. The project will explore how social media models can be applied to museum collections and interpretation, to create a system which encourages people to respond to the themes and collections in IWM’s exhibition spaces through several forms of digital interaction and participation both in the gallery, via mobile and online. I’ll be focusing on the user centred design of the application, as well as hopefully using the project a tasty case study for my PhD on visitor experience and museum digital content.
I have just blogged about it over on the UCLDH site. But here I wanted to put a more personal spin on the whole process. It really is such a privilege to have been selected out of 495 projects which applied. But what I’m really happy about this whole project is the speedy collaboration, communication and cohesiveness we have already built up as a project team during the proposal and selection process. Until a couple of months ago I didn’t know Tom Grinsted from IWM, in fact on our first meeting I had to send a coded message about what I looked like, because we had no idea who each of us were! But after one quick cup of tea, a glass of lemonade, a couple of phone conversations and a google doc, we are now about to embark on a 1 year exciting funded project. The whole process reminded me how important it is not only to have a clear vision for a project, but also that the project team is right. During my management training, we we’re always taught to manage the process and the people. But to be honest, I have always thought that it is always the people that are the most important aspect of any project. The people involved have to get along, know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and be open to seeing other people’s viewpoints. I think it’s a good sign that after quite a stressful application process Tom and I were able to sit in a two day workshop and whilst holding in depth discussions on potential research possibilities we were also able to have serious discussions about what type of biscuits we are going to have in our project meetings, that and the Great British Bake off. I think between the four partners we have a nice mix of experience, ideas and ability to create a really innovative project.
It was also really fantastic to see cultural organisations from the North East (I’m a Geordie Girl) and Nottingham (my new abode) represented in the R&D projects. The Sage Gateshead plus partners with Videojuicer and Aframe will be exploring how digital technology can help orchestras and venues find new audiences and income streams; and the New Art Exchange, Nottingham with Artfinder will develop a digital portal for dialogue and exchange which allows artists to upload, sell and exchange their art work, as well as for audiences to vote on and virtually curate art programmes.
I’m really looking forward to getting started on our project, but it will also be fascinating to see how the other 7 successful projects gather momentum over the next year.
Yesterday I went to my first CASA seminar, and it was great! Well the second half was, the first half involved a lot of equations about Thermodynamics and I didn’t have a clue what was going on, and I chose an unfortunate seat near the front, I was slightly terrified that he might ask the group to solve said equations. I have trouble adding up numbers let alone Greek letters. I’m sure it was brilliant, but unless you have a firm basis in maths or thermodynamics I don’t think you would have stood a chance. Then came the good stuff, the stuff I understand, and the stuff that makes me happy: Social Media, visualisations, maps (I am a closet geospatial nerd who has no geospatial abilities- I’m like superman on kryptonite) animal logos and to my happy surprise a bit about museums.
Steve Gray and Fabian Neuhaus provided an overview of the tools in CASA’s crowd sourcing toolkit; SurveyMapper, Tweet-o-Meter and the Twitter Collection tools. There has been a massive explosion of handheld mobile devices with GPS as well as a move to crowdsourcing info this has produced a heck of a lot of online geospatial data. Add newly released public sector data and you get yourself an exciting situation where people can take that data and turn it into something more interesting. CASA work on integrating tools for unlocking, exploiting, understanding and sharing new data sets and to also enable users have a go at mapping and spatial analysis.
Firstly Steve talked about Survey Mapper – a real time geographic survey tool. What I like about survey mapper is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It knows it’s doing clever stuff behind the scenes, but presents a friendly giraffe – you can’t not love a giraffe – with an easy to use interface. One of the survey’s Steve discussed was the BBC’s Look East Broadband speed survey which produced a lot of responses over 6500 in a day I think (I might be wrong on that one).
Tweet-o-meter – This is genius and really beautiful too.
Tweet-o-Meter is powered by CASA, as part of the NeISS project. Created by Steven Gray
Tweet-o-meter harvests geospatial data from Twitter with the aim of creating a series of new city maps based on Twitter data. Data is collected from tweets sent via a mobile device that includes the location at the time of sending the tweet. Via a radius of 30km around different cities, for example the number of Tweets have been collated to create New City Landscape Maps of London, New York and Paris.
Created by Urban Tick
I think this is a beautiful analogy for twitter activity where contours correspond to the density of tweets, mountains rise in active twitter locations and cliffs drop down in to valleys of tweet deserts.
UrbanTick has the full set of the different new city landscapes, all available in Google Maps viewer (I think)- head over to take a look at the gorgeousness.
Steve and Fabian discussed that there are now 60 cities around the world that have their tweets monitored over the period of one week. Amsterdam is a top tweeter with over 50% geolocated tweets. Whereas London which is still a really active city send on average send about 10% geolocated tweets. Visualisations clearly showed that different cities seem to be more active in the morning and others in the evening, producing some lovely looking kidney shapes. The data also shows that different days of the week are more conducive to tweeting, for example Monday and Tuesday are generally less active than the rest of the week.
Data was also collected during the early days of the Egyptian revolution in Cairo. It was really interesting to see how the protests and internet blackout affected twitter activity. For example when the big internet switch was flicked back on the data shows an immediate rise in geolocated tweets.
And then came something that I got really excited about and something that I could really use in my PhD… Andy, Steve, Fabian … if you’re reading this, can you show me how to do it? Pretty please!? I will buy you cake. Lots of it.
Tweeting art – Most museums are now using Twitter and CASA have taken that information and turned it into really awesome spider like explosions of communication network visualisations. Showing how different museums (the examples given included Tate and MoMA) link in to the wider twitter network and also how they link to each other so in essence how the institutions interact with other users and how this connects them into an entangled social network. For example Tate and MoMa tweet to roughly the same followers but don’t really tweet to each other. I think this is fascinating, particularly if it can show if museums are only using Twitter as a broadcast medium – pushing marketing out, or whether they are creating a engaging discussions and digital experiences with their followers.
It was fascinating to be part of the seminar not only where people were talking about Twitter in a active exciting research context and sensible manner, and where questions from the audience were serious, and probing and engaged in the topic. Rather than asking ridiculous questions from anti social Media people where Twitter is a waste of time, full of pointless babble which makes yooths mediocre there was brilliant questions about how do you model for uncertainty, what proportion of users geotweet? Does this skew the data?what about frequency and text mining to find out more about context. It was brilliant. I was engaged. And it reminded me that I am not out of my depth in this whole digital humanities thang, I do know what I am talking about, and this is a growing research field doing so much cool stuff, I am an alt academic and proud.
Claire Bailey-Ross 