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/