Discover Top Posts Tagged with #museum technology

Museum Post-Digital

The post-digital movement for museum advocates for digital integration into the heart of museum operations, and stepping away from being a side venture. We have learned about its impact on the museum field. There has been notable increase in digital or “experience” leadership in museum over the last five years. Some museums are taking on digital projects, like the Brooklyn Museum’s ASKing About Art, that require full institutional investment to function. These are good signs for a future of more innovative, engaging museums. But, there is still a level of slow adaptation in the museum field. My final paper for the class is a look at the Cooper Hewitt, and “The Pen” project, something that surface level is a fantastic example of a post-digital, innovative museum and application. Through my reading, I learned more about their team structure. The museum definitely has championed strong digital and experience higher leadership, but also contracted out the work for the pen. They note the challenge of contracting includes being reliant on outside contractors to maintain something that is central to the museum’s experience, and it can cause a lack institutional knowledge on the mechanics of their projects. So there still is this tension of value in higher organization, but not neccesarily having the corresponding specialized work-force. So I see post-digital as there in thinking and leadership, but still struggling to fully flesh out in practice due to the nature of the field. This class on the whole has been a look at this tension, because museums do not have the same affordances as the private sector. They have specialized circumstances of resources and institutional culture that can make it difficult to reach the post-digital in actuality.

#museum technology #museum tech #post-digital

Audio and Story-Telling

Museums often work in tangible means of story-telling (based in objects), but as pointed out in this weeks readings on usability and user experience, other tools like audio can create impactful museum experiences. I was particularly interested in Tiffanie Wen’s article in The Atlantic on empathy and story craft. Museums, cultural museums in particular, do collect oral histories and stories of their subjects, which can effectively allow for this empathy that transports a visitor into the world of the storyteller. There are a variety of tools at the storyteller’s disposal, like distinctive character voice, personal perspective, and sound effects.

One example of an exhibition that uses audio to highlight the power of a good story is in Objects of Wonder at the National Museum of Natural History. The exhibition highlights distinctive objects from the museum’s collection (these are varied from insect specimens, to gems, to cultural objects). In this exhibition, there is the 1875 Tsimshian House Front that comes alive through audio story-telling. The voice of David A. Boxley, a member of the Tsimshian tribe, tells the story of Northwest Coast formline design artwork and the culture that created it. He tells the story of the mythical Undersea Chief Nagunaks, which is painted on the house-front and as he tells the story, characters on the house-front are spotlighted, so listeners to can connect Boxley’s story to the object infront of them. Noticeably in this case, audio is used to help visitors interpret an object in detail, hear a representative of the culture the object came from, and perhaps feel immersed in the story. Storytelling and audio experience like this can really enliven a museum’s collection.

#museum audio #museum technology

Museum Social Media, Social Media Museums

The readings this week seemed to focus on crafting voice and the ins and outs of establishing a social media presence, specifically catered to the museum side of the equation. But social media isn’t just shouting into a vacuum (hopefully, I empathize with content creators out there who feel like it’s exactly that), it’s ideally a conversation. The presence museums construct for themselves is as important as the institutional impression visitors create on their own channels.

A post shared by MUSEUM OF ICE CREAM (@museumoficecream) on Oct 25, 2017 at 5:49pm PDT

(Image 1) An instagram post from the Museum of Ice Cream in Los Angeles

(Image 2) A sampling of pictures from the Hirshhorn run of Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors on Instagram.

I would argue that visitors most commonly absorb and express museum content through pictures. That’s where exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at the Hirshhorn Museum or Wonder at the Renwick Gallery, have fascinated me when thinking about this lens of visitor social media. These exhibitions have become, for better or worse, hugely popular not only because of their content, but also because of their Instagram-worthy share-ability. Are exhibitions like this a calculation for entertaining the masses (like The Museum of Ice Cream) or not? Are these exhibitions diminished by the impulse to photograph, share, selfie. or not? Are these sorts of the presentations crafted to fulfill a museum mission or attract numbers in the door? This line of questioning may be getting too much into the weeds, but I do wonder how successful exhibitions like these might influence how museums, especially art museums, stage future exhibitions to engage photo-sharing impulse (side note Wired wrote an interesting article on the idea of the “made-for-Instagram” museum that’s definitely worth a read).

This all seems to get back to museum control of content, familiar from our dive into open cultural heritage last week. So I will leave you with this Ted Talk from Jia Jia Fei, Director of Digital at Jewish Museum and the former Associate Director, Digital Marketing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, that does a good job at tackling social media and open access for museums.

#museum social media #museum technology #social media

In Gallery Technology

In gallery technology can be great a way to encourage play, curiosity, “deep dive” learning, creation, and exploration of a museum’s collection and exhibition topics. When it is at its most successful, it is supplementary, engaging component that is in line with exhibition and institution. Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope’s look at in gallery technology in the Cooper Hewitt gets at a lot of these criteria, and is something I can comment on since I have been to the Cooper Hewitt.

The most successful in gallery tech, that I though connected the museum’s technological aspirations with its mission/collections focus, was the immersion “wallpaper” room. The tech makes sense (i.e. isn’t just tech for tech’s sake) because the museum has an extensive collection of North American wallcoverings. It encourages creation by the part of the visitor, and is a social experience. The drawing screen has room for two creators, so when I went I not only chatting with my friend about what pattern to make, but also got input from the little girl and her parent who were working next to me. And, of course, it’s big, graphic, sharable, and distinctive, so you remember that experience in that museum as something special.

Having high impact, creative in gallery technology is not always necessary (perhaps overwhelming?) or attainable, but this particular example shows that tech can go beyond the screen and has so much potential to connect to a museum’s mission in an innovative way.

#in gallery technology #museums #museum technology

Linkdump post-finals (December 7th, 2013)

whoooooooooooooooooooo I swear I saw all these images in a tumblr post about "pretty libraries guyz" but this one has text that maybe says something: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-evolution-of-the-college-library/282023/ I'm kind of ambivalent on "museums" but pretty into the death part: http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.ca/ Again with museums, but big on this as an example of a museum finding its audience online (aka by hiring away a video-blogger from somewhere else and then giving her a backstage pass -- the gem collection is crazy you guyz): http://www.youtube.com/user/thebrainscoop?feature=watch This is the eighth time I've heard of d3 and meant to play with it, I swear it'll happen soon: http://d3js.org/ Hrmmm, to volunteer at Museums and the Web or not to volunteer at Museums and the Web .... http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/scholarships-volunteering/ Digital humanities yadda: http://www.allc.org/news-events/digital-humanities-without-borders-2014-annual-meeting-canadian-society-digital-humaniti# http://congress2014.ca/about-congress http://brocku.ca/congress2014/about-congress/ The privacy commissioner's exit interview, after ten years of technological disruption: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Exit+Interview+Privacy+Commissioner+Jennifer+Stoddart+tenure/9229678/story.html OCLC annual report: http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/oclc/publications/AnnualReports/2013/2013.pdf That silent-film-collection loss everyone's talking about: http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/13-209.html GLAM TECHNOLOGISTS SHOULD APPLY FOR THIS: http://www.tides.org/impact/awards-prizes/pizzigati-prize/ (Honestly who do I know who could apply for this, heck) Cool new heritage-inventorying system: http://archesproject.org/what-is-arches/