The @Platea Project

Ever wonder how a street performance would look like when it is moved to the Internet? This was a question that artist An Xiao asked, and you will get to see and experience first-hand how that would be like, soon within the next few days!

After a first "tw"erformance called "The Great Yawn", An is launching yet another public performance for all to participate, this time by the name of "Co-Modify". It is going to take place between May 3 to 9, on all social media networks for all those who want to take part. The project addresses the ubiquity of Internet advertising, and the extent of commodification that are happening in our lives. During the week, participants will endorse a brand or multinational company of their choice, and use their creativity to sponsor the products on their social media networks. If you'd like to participate, find out more on the @Platea blog and follow it on Twitter. Sign-up deadline is approaching!

To learn more about the artist, I have also previously mentioned another project of hers in conjunction with the brooklyn museum. Hope to see you during Co-Modify!!

Frontiers of Interaction 2009

Hi Folk,
I would like to highlight an interesting event namely Frontiers of Interaction 2009, it will be in ROME on June the 8th, I will go for sure!
ciao elisa

Museums & the Web '09 updates

I had some particular directions in mind in selecting my path in the sessions to attend at Museums & The Web, this year, namely web 2.0 solutions (was especially interested in co-creation of cultural contents), mobile interpretation & mobile technologies, and tangibles in museums. Some other great insights came from unexpected sources (some of these are mentioned in My best below). Here are some glimpses from the sessions I attended and further readings from the papers available online on the M&W09 website.


Photo: educational area at the IMA

Web 2.0
As it applies also for mobile interpretation, the presentation of achievements and best practices in the use of social technologies is by now outrun by visionary insights as to “where do we go from here”. In the presentation of practical achievements, the name that continues to set the standard is the Brooklyn Museum, winner of the Best of the Web Awards, category On-line Community or Service: Brooklyn Museum Collection, Posse, and Tag! You are It! The Brooklyn Museum collection has also won the distinction for the Best of the web overall, and I would also mention that the distinction for the best exhibition, went to Brooklyn Museum's Click! A Crowd-curated exhibition.
A session at M&W was dedicated to the use of wikis for expanding museum communities. I found inspiring the presentation of the Minnesota Historical Society team, Collaborative History - Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community. The presenters shared strategies for creating and maintaining a community of contributors around a wiki, based on their experience of creating the wikis MN150 (for the exhibition MN150) and Placeography (meant to allow sharing of memories around places and buildings in Minnesota).
The Steve.museum social tagging project team reported the results of a survey administered on tagging contributors of the past two years, meant to assess the motivation for tagging, the perception of the tagging experience and how the type of artwork might influence the tagging activity. Read paper

Plenty of place dedicated this year to the use of GIS technology and geocoding/geotagging by museums or popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr; an inspiring paper is The Interpretation of Bias (and the Bias of Interpretation) , by A S Cope, on the lessons learnt by Flickr from offering their photo geotagging service; see also the ppt presentation on slideshare.

Going mobile
This was one of the best represented subjects at M&W this year. From devices for mobile tours in the demo sessions, to best practices, survey results from museums having offered mobile tours, to identification of trends and insights into future strategic actions whether in terms of contents or devices.
Last year in August I had visited the exhibition Frida Kahlo, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I took an audio-video mobile tour that I personally considered of excellent quality and a great, unobtrusive complement to the visiting experience. It was interesting hence to hear about the results of an evaluation carried at SFMOMA around visitors’ preference for various interpretive materials, including traditional and digital, in the presentation held by Peter Samis and Stephanie Pau. Their presentation includes other two case-studies apart from the Frida Kahlo exhibition, 246 and Counting; and the Art of Participation; the overall results suggest that traditional materials are still preferred by visitors rather than multimedia interpretive materials; however, who actually took the multimedia tour gave a highly positive feedback and for the Frida Kahlo exhibition, it appears that taking the audio tour considerably improved the overall satisfaction with the visit. In answer to the debate over the best device to use – offered by the museum or owned by the visitor, and again between one’s owned iPod/mp3 player over mobile phone - participants in the study respond in an overwhelming majority that using the device offered by the museum is preferred rather than using their own mobile phone; and between a mobile phone and their personal iPod/mp3 player the majority express preference for the latter. See presentation Or read paper
Another inspiring paper is Koven Smith’s The future of mobile interpretation, which accompanied the mini-workshop The Handheld Handbook: Capturing best practices in mobile interpretation for museums . For the emerging ideas during the workshop as well as a great deal of other resources on mobile interpretation, you may check http://tatehandheldconference.pbwiki.com/ (a wiki that continues to be updated through the input of experts in mobile experiences in museums, after it has been initially set up to document Tate's 2008 Handheld Conference: From Audiotours to iPhones)

Tangibles
The demonstrations featured two multitouch tables, one developed by Ideum, represented at M&W this year by Jim Spadaccini and Paul Lacey; while the second demo was the Library of Congress’s interactive multi-touch application, History at Your Fingertips: U.S. Presidential Nominating Conventions. The Ideum team have also held a one-day workshop, Make it multitouch, which dealed with technical aspects in developing multitouch technology as well as design considerations. More about the workshop in this Ideum blog post

TEC-CH students and graduates at M&Web
Shelley Mannion’s demonstration showcased the use of the steve art tagger for the project Seeing Tibetan Art, an initiative which involved young Tibetans from New York and Switzerland into the tagging of visually and narratively complex Tibetan thangka paintings from the collection of the Rubin Museum of Art.
Daniela de Angeli was present in the demonstration session with her supervisor and one of her colleagues at the New Mexico Highlands University, PICT program, where she is currently conducting an exchange semester. The demo included the showcase of projects developed by PICT students in past years, and the on-going project that PICT students, including Daniela, are developing for an exhibition in a New Mexico museum, an installation which gives the visual illusion of being dressed up in historical clothes. Daniela and her colleague showed the laser-scanning software for the acquisition of the 3D volumetry of historical clothes and explained the process through which the resulting 3D images would be then edited adding colour and texture. More about this in a blog post to come.

My best
Whether in the categories above or in others, there are some presentations or papers that I particularly enjoyed or found thoughtful and useful.
Slavko Milekic’s Action, affection and control: interface guidelines for complex visual content
A vivid presentation of a tool for editing visual content that excels through its user-friendliness and simplicity – ShowMe Tools™ – together with three simple guidelines for interface design: action, affection and control. A thoughtful paper with an extensive overview of the relevant literature which supports the validity of the three simple guidelines mentioned above, as well as their illustration through examples.
Nina Simon’s Going Analog: Translating Virtual Learnings into Real Institutional Change
First, Nina writes great, fluidly and with ease, reading her paper was a pleasure and the insights she brings invaluable. She is presenting a simple 5-step plan for developing on-site experiences starting from online or virtual experiences. Nina illustrates her points with evocative examples, showcasing the imaginative use of strategies for connecting, sharing information or personalization in unusual offline contexts such as an ice-cream vendor’s shop, or a casino.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art
http://www.imamuseum.org/
A beautiful museum, from architecture to display and the place given to art educational activities and interactivity, and a young, dynamic and full of ideas team. One of the latest IMA web-based projects is ArtBabble, a showcase of video art and contextualizing information (interview with artists, documentaries, talks etc) from IMA and other museums such as SFMOMA, NY MOMA, etc. See more on http://www.artbabble.org/

elance.com - Try Your Hand at Being a Freelancer

Whether you are currently looking for a job, or wanting to try applying your skills and earn money at the same time, elance is a great resource for landing interesting individual projects. It is intended as a project bid site for freelancers, where jobs are posted and users with provider profiles can compete for them by submitting proposals. Project areas of particular interest may include web & programming, writing & translation, and also design & multimedia.

As a TEC-CH student or graduate, the website is useful as it lists many projects that utilize the technical skills that you may have learned from the programme. Some are even highly relevant to cultural heritage, so in helping out at these projects you may accumulate more hands-on experience and meet more people in the field. The projects also tend to be one-off so likely they would not be too much of a burden to your existing workload. Plus, let's be honest, extra pocket money is always nice.

Museums and the Web 2009

Every year, somewhere in North America, Museums and the Web is a major conference for tech and museum professionals to mingle, share ideas and exchange latest progress in the museum field. This year it's taking place in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA from April 15 to 18. The Opening Plenary on Thursday summed up this year's theme - Moving from Virtual to Visceral. It is a call to bring the virtual world down to earth, so that museum applications, just like its physical venue will be usable by real people from all walks of life.

The writer personally cannot be there for this wonderful event, but a few members of the TEC-CH community are among the crowd. Please stay tuned and once they return there will be more on the conference.

For now, you can check out all of the papers and presentations online at the MW2009 conference site. Also whenever the conference is taking place, you will find a lively Twitter conversation going on in the background - participate in the conversation with #mw2009 or search it to see what people are talking about!

Matt Held: Painting Faces on Facebook

Here's possibly one of my favorite rags-to-riches story (well, fame definitely if not riches for the moment): Once there was an almost unknown Brooklyn artist having a painter's block, struggling for inspiration at his in-house studio with two children running around (one crawling to be more precise), then all of a sudden he got his "A-ha!" moment as he painted his wife's new Facebook portrait. He started making more of such portraits, starting with his friends - the project then takes off and becomes an internet phenomenon. He received coverage from publications such as New York Magazine, Juxtapoz, and of course, numerous bloggers - the media attention goes even as far as across the continent in countries such as Germany and Italy. He was also recently invited to a talk for the 1stfans member community at the Brooklyn Museum and now preparing for an exhibition at a gallery in New Haven, CT in May, along with many other exciting things to come.

Matt Held has a group on Facebook, by the name of "I'll have my portrait painted by Matt Held." For the members who joined the group and added him as a Facebook friend, he would look through their profiles and select the interesting ones (and yes, it is as subjective as it sounds) to paint as portraits. There are some rules however: the picture must be in color, no pets and no children. Small props and quirkiness would help. His goal was to paint 200 pieces, and now the group has close to 4,000 members - the odds are 1 in 20, not too bad for now, is it? Once a portrait gets painted, the sitter (facebooker rather) would get a free JPEG for the finished work and priority in purchasing the portrait.

It is interesting to see that there is an increasing amount of artists that begin to utilise social network and the whole networking phenomenon as their media platform and inspiration. In Matt's case, he brings in the age-old idea of portraiture and re-appropriate it to the modern world of Facebook. The project itself, is perhaps best explained by the artist's own statement:

With the development of social networking sites, I've developed an interest in how people take simple or complex snapshots of themselves, post them to their page as a representation of who they are and what they want people to see. It is an interesting form of control and, in a way, self-preservation. However, there is a strong likelihood that many people who don't know you will see this photo representation and make passing judgments as to who you may or may not be, much in the same way we make passing judgments on people we see in our neighborhoods every day.

Take a collection of these portraits and put them into the context of a gallery space or like setting, and you see a community of individuals - their likeness elevated and memorialized like the original commissioners of portrait painting; the rich and powerful – displayed as a portrait's original intent: expression of an individuals' character and moral quality.

This year’s seminar Digitizing Rare Books and Manuscripts and Creating Digital Libraries

“The world is changing and we all—students, teachers, as well as Library Directors—need to keep up with those changes”, says Chet Grycz, seminar leader for Digitizing Rare Books and Manuscripts and Creating Digital Libraries, in a discussion as to how this year’s seminar is different from the last two versions of it and how the instructor updates seminar information, case-studies and examples or articles he recommends to students. In its approach to digitization as process and digitization as strategic step for providing widespread access to information, the seminar manages to involve students in the topic from the perspective of decision-makers who need to develop strategic thinking. It manages, at the same time to provide a rich overview of technical details involved in the process of digitization and publishing of digital materials – from data-capture, to post- processing, storage and e-publishing. One of the class exercises required students, for example, to put on the shirt of a Library Director who needs to make real decisions about developing a digital collection.
As I am writing now, students are receiving feedback on their contributions to a different class activity, in the context of intellectual propriety management, the topic of this last seminar afternoon. Students had to think of the detailed steps to be taken by a team working at a distance to develop the, by-now, famous video "A Fair(y) Use Tale", which summarizes the main exceptions to copyright law by using short clips from Disney animation movies (see it in YouTube). This exercise made it pretty obvious that a strategic as well as an in- detail approach is needed to managing even a seemingly simple activity such as the collaborative development of a video. Students did an excellent job at identifying the main conceptual steps, but fell short of thinking of step-by-step technical aspects including such things as deciding, at a distance, on file formats or transmitting detailed database information as to exact clips to be used. Earlier today the seminar approached issues in the appropriate taxonomizing of digital information to provide easy and fast access. “A picture is worth 1,000 words.. but it takes 1,000 words to find one picture", is the tagline used by Chet to underline the importance of using the appropriate metadata sets for providing paths of access to digital materials. An extensive approach to digitization and the use of digital materials is provided in the book Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage by MacDonald, Lindsay (ed.); Chet’s contribution to the book is its second chapter, entitled "Digitizing Rare Books and Manuscripts".