What is your favourite museum tech idea or project?

I’ve just been asked to give a guest lecture at my university next week, which I am super-excited about. The talk will be a casual lunchtime lecture pitched primarily at Fine Art students, but will also include others from around the University. Because the talk isn’t for a particular subject, I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about all the interesting projects and ideas that are emerging out of the museum tech field.

Obviously I have my own favourite projects, ideas, blog posts, talks etc that I will be discussing, but this seemed like a really lovely opportunity to ask for your favourites too. Which muse tech projects are rocking your world right now? What is your favourite use of mobiles in museums, or your favourite website? Which blog posts should I direct people to, so as to inspire them to think further about the issues? Which talks/youtube videos have left you thinking and rewatching them time and again for inspiration? Whose work are you loving? Which books/journals etc are you reading?

With the nominations for Best of the Web closing last week, many of you will have already been thinking about some of these questions anyway, but if not, now is a great time. And although recent projects are great, I’d also love to hear about any older projects that inspired you and led you to rethink your work practices or your next project. Where have you drawn inspiration from? What work in other fields has influenced you?

I’d love to hear exactly what inspired you, in the hope that it can inspire other people to be excited about this field too. My hope is that by catching the interest of these hapless young university students early, I can convert them into being totally pro-tech museum-lovers, goers or workers.

So… What is your favourite museum tech idea or project? And what do you love about it?

Thinking differently and making change

Museums are pretty strange. They exist simultaneously as a conceptual space, an actual physical place and as a kind of practice, which means there is constantly a sense of redrawing the borders of what a museum is, and why a museum is. Because the context in which museums exist is always fluctuating, museums too are subject to perpetual evolution. These interconnected elements of theory, practice and place make the museum a very interesting world in which to work, because what works for one area (say, the museum as concept) might not marry with the other elements.

Despite this, the theory of museums does have very real impact on the business of museums (if not always immediately). As our conceptual ideas of museums change, so too does museum practice (often later down the track). This is why now is such an interesting time to be working as a museum theorist, because the Internet is raising so many interesting questions about what a museum should be, and how it should conduct its business, in the age of information. New theories, new discussions are emerging, and these discussions impact on museum practice itself. It really feels like there is a chance to shape the museum of the future, through ideas. Amazing.

With this in mind, I draw your attention to Koven Smith’s latest blog post, which is also the abstract for his upcoming MuseumNext talk. The post is titled The Kinetic Museum, and in it, Koven asks:

What if a museum’s overall practice were built outwards from its technology efforts, rather than the other way around? What would a museum built from the ground up for speed and agility, rather than stability and longevity, look like?

This is a fascinating line of thinking, because it really starts to question the very foundational processes upon which museums are constructed and their appropriateness in an age of networked knowledge and endless connectivity. Rather than relying traditional models for museum practice and hoping they still suit the external context in which museums now find themselves, these sorts of questions prompt a complete rethink not only of how museums do business, but also of why and what a museum is. They are the sort of conceptual questions that could impact the physical and practical elements of the museum too. (This means they are also very important questions, given the changing state of information and knowledge – the stock and trade of museums.)

The very process of questioning these ideas in a public forum raises the possibility that the museum itself will change as a result (a question asked cannot be unasked); that it will be re-conceived in a new context. Such large-scale abstract questions remind me of an article that did the rounds recently about the mission that Steve Jobs set his first iPhone development team. Jobs

wasn’t focused on conceiving a device that would run all sorts of apps and media but instead laid out a simple mission to his team: to create the first phone people would love so much, they’d never leave the house without it.

In response to these somewhat idealised goals, Apple designed something that changed the marketplace. The article continues:

Apple’s success largely stemmed from focusing on only a handful of fundamental concepts: break the rules but do so in an exceptionally well manner, pay attention to detail and make people “think differently” about the relationship they have with their device, especially given that smartphones already existed in the market.

Questions like Koven’s, that ask us to rethink museum practice in a connected world, are so important, because they actually open the possibility that we can remake this essentially nineteenth century institution in a way that is far more suited to our time. If we were to take the fundamental elements of a museum (say, the selection, preservation and dissemination/communication of elements of the past and present for their potential future use), and be willing to discard the rest if it was not useful, I wonder how we would design a museum for today’s circumstances.

In Mia Ridge’s round-up of our MCN2011 panel, she includes a Titter quote from Bruce Wyman that “current visitors most frequently give *incremental* ideas. You need different folk to take those great leaps forward. That’s us.” The way I see it, it is through asking these questions and thinking of the practice and concept of the museum in new ways that we will make those great leaps.

What do you think? Are we asking the right questions? And if not, what questions should we be asking?

One provocation for Big Data

I’ve started thinking a lot about Big Data and what it could mean for museums in a time when, as Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford write “The era of Big Data has begun.”

The two have put forward an excellent and provocative paper about some of the weaknesses and problematics associated with the use of Big Data, titled Six Provocations for Big Data. Chief amongst these is the idea that Big Data is changing the very way we research. They write:

Big Data not only refers to very large data sets and the tools and procedures used to manipulate and analyze them, but also to a computational turn in thought and research (Burkholder 1992). Just as Ford changed the way we made cars – and then transformed work itself – Big Data has emerged a system of knowledge that is already changing the objects of knowledge, while also having the power to inform how we understand human networks and community…

We would argue that Big Data creates a radical shift in how we think about research. Commenting on computational social science, Lazer et al argue that it offers ‘the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale’ (2009, p. 722). But it is not just a matter of scale. Neither is enough to consider it in terms of proximity, or what Moretti (2007) refers to as distant or close analysis of texts. Rather, it is a profound change at the levels of epistemology and ethics. It reframes key questions about the constitution of knowledge, the processes of research, how we should engage with information, and the nature and the categorization of reality. Just as du Gay and Pryke note that ‘accounting tools…do not simply aid the measurement of economic activity, they shape the reality they measure’ (2002, pp. 12-13), so Big Data stakes out new terrains of objects, methods of knowing, and definitions of social life.

This is merely one of the fascinating propositions that the two put forward, as they argue for a serious interrogation of the way Big Data will shape research, and problematise the problems of both the nature of the data, and the way it is used in analysis.

It is a very interesting paper, and one that discusses a very real issue that I think museums will more and more have to confront in coming years, vested as we are in “the nature and the categorization of reality.” Museum collection databases are a significant cultural resource – and a knowledge asset in their own right. However, to date, they have rarely been treated as such. Museum collection data is still generally considered as secondary to the object itself as an interpretive tool. It merely supports the object.

However, as we move further into this new era – an era when data can be related, mined and aggregated with new viscosity, when the value of data for knowledge production increases, then museums need to address this issue. We need to think about the quality of our data, and how we want people to be able to access and use it. We need to ask who should manage and take care of our data, and what data should be included. If it has the potential to be as valuable (maybe even more so?) to society as our objects, then surely it needs to be taken care of with the same level of priority.

In my recent post on whether museums should still be treating the physical space as the main one, Mia Ridge made the following comment:

And to play devil’s advocate… there are probably lots of people who can do more interesting things with museum content online than your average museum can currently manage. That might be because of resourcing or recruitment issues, a lack of imagination, because the organisation doesn’t know how to value or get excited about online content, whatever… but maybe if they’re not going to do digital well, then museums should just open up their data and let other people get on with creating the next wave of museums online.

This too raises interesting issues for museums about how to best make their data available for others to use, however, because effective data modelling is often complex. As Daniel W. Rasmus writes, in his article on Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich, Or Pretty

Combining models full of nuance and obscurity increases complexity. Organizations that plan complex uses of Big Data and the algorithms that analyze the data need to think about continuity and succession planning in order to maintain the accuracy and relevance of their models over time, and they need to be very cautious about the time it will take to integrate, and the value of results achieved, from data and models that border on the cryptic.

So, if Big Data is becoming increasingly important in research and the constitution of knowledge, and yet museums are not themselves necessarily likely to be the ones using it internally (assuming that our expertise lies elsewhere) how can we then think of continuity and succession planning for our data, to ensure it is useful for other researchers? Is this something we can even achieve?

The Linked Open Data movement is obviously going to be a part of this, but I wonder how much further we need to go. Surely the notion of moving from object-based knowledge to knowledge that integrates Big Data starts to essentially change the very core of how museums function as a knowledge institution? And if it does, what does that mean? Is it even possible for museums to tackle this without knowing what an anticipated end result might be? Or is this something that is too complex to be dealt with for all but a very few institutions (if any)? And if so, do we just withdraw from what some believe will be the fifth wave in the technology revolution?

This zippy little article shows what 100 million calls to 311 revealed about New York. What patterns could emerge from our collections if we could analyse information about our collections on such scale? Would it become feasible to see both the trees and the forest of the museum collection – the objects, and the large-scale contexts in which they exist. Could utilising museum collections data in this way recomplexify museum objects and collections, adding new layers of meaning and reconnecting them back to the wider world of information?

I have no answers here. These are still ideas in sketch, and there is much more to be discussed as my ideas evolve on this subject. But I think it is something we should be talking about.