Category: Ideas

When seeing becomes social: How the network is changing the way I look at the world.

In response to the 2010 Edge Annual Question How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think? classicist James O’Donnell proposed that his fingers have become part of his brain. That “the sign of thinking is that I reach for the mouse and start “shaking it loose”… My eyes and hands have already learned to work together in new ways with my brain in a process of clicking, typing a couple of words, clicking, scanning, clicking again that really is a new way of thinking for me.

That finger work is unconscious. It just starts to happen. But it’s the way I can now tell thinking has begun as I begin working my way through an information world more tactile than ever before.”

I, too, often kind of “type” my thoughts into mid-air; a kinetic response to thinking. Is this just a direct response to the time I spend in front of a computer, thinking, and to the devices I use? Possibly. But it isn’t the only response to what O’Donnell terms “the living presence of networked information.” My greater response is far more encompassing than that. Because of my direct connection to my networks – to you – to people with shared interests and frames of reference with whom my buy-in to conversation is the input of interesting content or comment, the way I actually look at the world, the way I listen, and the attention I pay, is shifting. It is as though the network itself is a giant amorphous creature, and I am merely one eye that can see for it; a scout whose role is to look at the world for the information that will benefit the network itself, and bring it back.

When I last visited a museum, you were there with me. I carried you, reader, in my thoughts; in my pocket; in my devices. Though you had no eyes of your own, you stood behind my eyes when I looked at the objects; when I observed the space. Your presence changed my looking. How could I translate what was in front of my eyes and make it meaningful for you? My looking was looking on your behalf as much as my own. Simultaneously, I took note of what interested me and what might interest you. I tried to pay attention to the sorts of things you might want to know, so that if you asked questions, I’d have answers. I did so to have content for this blog; to have reasons for connection. I did so to ensure that I’d have something to contribute to our conversations; something to talk about.

My network, of which you are part, is shifting the way I understand the world. In one way, this is because much of the information that I encounter comes through you. You link to articles, you share news, you provide new perspectives in comments and discussion. You filter forward those things that you think are worth paying attention to, and in so doing shape the way I, as part of your network, understand the world.

But this is not the only way your presence is reshaping how I negotiate or interact with the world. It is actually changing the way I see, and hear. The sorts of Tweetable phrases stories I now listen for, the photographs I take, the anecdotes I file away that might be of use or interest for this blog, they all shape the kind of attention I pay to the world. When I attend a conference without Twitter, I hear entirely different nuance in the presentations from what I hear when I am seeking to translate and Tweet the ideas. The looking that I do; the listening. It is all changed as a result of my interactions with the network; with you.

The perceptions that we have of the world shape the way we understand it, and new technologies lead to new perceptions. Perhaps my greatest shift in this direction came once I had an iPhone; once I began to carry in my pocket a device that would allow me to capture and share what I was seeing or hearing instantly via tools like Twitter – tools that were simultaneously personal and not directed at any single other person. This device, these capabilities altered the way I experienced the physical world. I no longer had to be stuck behind my desk to share content, to make connections; I could do so from the wild. This started changing what I saw by changing what I looked for.

I now see socially. I listen, not just for myself, but for what I can translate and share to my networks. I pay attention to the ideas that you, my network, is interested in, and in so doing, I encounter the world through that lens. The things I notice are not of interest to me alone. I notice those things that I think you would be interested in too, and I think of you when I am noticing them.

When I am in situ in the museum, I encounter the space through the framework of shared assumptions that my digital networks use. My network, who I am connected to, what their interests are, changes how I see and understand the museum and the world. It changes the way I encounter and read objects. It even changes where I go, because I attend events that will be of interest and relevant to the people in my network.

What are the implications of this? We know that the museum visitor does not encounter the object as a tabula rasa, a blank slate. He or she constructs meaning based on existing knowledge and past experiences. But if I’m right about this change in looking, if looking is now taking place socially, then there are new elements and influences at play as well.

What do you think? Are you aware of changes that connection to the network has made to how you look at and interpret the world? Is this any different from the way you encountered spaces or events prior to carrying a networked device on your person?

Is social media writing the new first rough draft of history?

During recent weeks, I’ve felt somewhat suffocated by the media and social media coverage of events like Sandy Hook. I’m normally a news junkie, but lately I’m struggling to cope with the onslaught of information, of bitsy and incomplete pieces of coverage and comment across every platform I use. This is probably no great surprise – public interest in Newtown coverage exceeds all mass shootings since Columbine, so there has been a lot of it. But I think the mass of live-time comment like this has really brought home to me just how much open publishing platforms are really shifting the way we communicate about significant news events. After all, there is no mediation with social media.

Where once news organisations were where we first caught wind of the significant events of the day, it now seems that social media is where the new first rough draft of history is being written. When even the Israel Defense Forces first announce that they’ve just started a military campaign via Twitter, one starts to get the sense that this is where news takes place before it makes it into the capital ‘N’ news.

But the continuous news cycle, which simultaneously feeds into and on social media, does lead to mistakes being made; or as  puts it, it’s not Twitter, this is just the way the news works now. (New research is looking into the possibility of utilising machine-learning to automatically assess the credibility of disaster-related Tweets). This isn’t a new problem. It’s just that, as Ingram writes,

In the past, this chaotic process of journalistic sausage-making was kept mostly hidden from TV viewers and newspaper readers. Inside the newsrooms at these outlets, reporters and editors were frantically trying to collect information from wire services and other sources, verifying it and checking it as best they could, and then producing a report at some later point.

Even with checking and verification, news filed within the first day of an event is often shown to be inaccurate 24 hours later, as this piece on how continuous access to rich digital news archives is presenting complexity shows. The Guardian’s writes:

Readers have hitherto accepted that each edition of a newspaper is a snapshot of the available information at the time the newspaper went to press. For instance, estimates of casualties in a catastrophic event, or details about a suspect in a crime, may change as more information becomes available.

Where these early iterations of the story remain on the site, the Guardian has relied on the date stamp and time of posting to indicate that this was the state of knowledge at the time it went up on the site. Where we find a story was significantly inaccurate or misleading based on knowledge at the time of publication, we amend the article and publish a footnote to explain the change as well as a published correction.

The news archive is flattening out, and becoming super-available (paywalls notwithstanding). Indeed, with so much of the Guardian’s content accessed 48 hours after it was originally posted (nearly 40%), there is growing demand from some judges for news organisations to remove material from their online archives that could prove to be influential to jury members in criminal cases. But at least news organisations have some guidelines and mandate to publish corrections to their work when its found to be inaccurate. Social media users have no such mandate.

Live-time coverage that feeds on and draws from social media still needs the establishment of codes and conventions, perhaps like declaring what a reporter won’t report as well as what he/she will. As this 2011 discussion of the practices of news curator (yeah, I said it) Andy Carvin reports, “[t]here are few established rules or journalistic policies” for real-time, crowd-sourced approaches to news. Still, this social-media form of reporting and comment is adding a new layer of publication on all events of significance.

So what does all of this means for museums exactly? Well, maybe it doesn’t mean anything directly. But if social media is, indeed, where the new first rough draft of history is being written, and museums are heritage institutions, then we need to be paying attention and trying to make sense of how it could impact curatorial practices. Or research. Or history. Or everything about how we understand our world.

How do we – as institutions or society – deal with and make sense of this increasingly unsettled discourse, filled with so many more voices than were ever possible before? I don’t know that we are equipped to do so yet. How do we capture the ones that are, and will be, important (without buying Flickr and other sites)? We cannot simply hold onto the front page of the local or national newspaper and feel that the job is done. It cannot work like that.

I leave you with some thoughts from an interview with David Stout, domestic correspondent for the Continuous News Desk of the NYTimes (2008):

I think we are indeed writing the rough draft of history, although some drafts are rougher than others. I think writing history, as opposed to daily journalism, requires a certain distance in time and dispassionate reflection. It’s also, of course, far more detailed. For that reason, I have read a lot of history. It helps me to keep my perspective, and reminds me that many things run in cycles.

What do you think? Do you agree that social media and live-time reporting is becoming the new first rough draft of history? And if so, what does that mean?

The Political Museum Professional

Well, my 2012 world tour of museum conferences is over. After three conferences in three countries in four weeks, plus time at the Smithsonian and visiting plenty of museums, I have aeons of raw mental material for processing and synthesis. But as I begin doing so, I thought I’d start at the end rather than the beginning, with thoughts inspired by the excellent keynote that David Fleming, CEO National Museums of Liverpool, gave at INTERCOM 2012.

Titled The Political Museum, David’s speech considered museums and the myth of neutrality. One of the standout concepts was the idea that “all cultural activity is political, but some is overt and some is covert.” He argued that museums should be overt in their political positions, acknowledging the inherent politicality involved in museum work, and that they should actively take positions on and around issues.

Unsurprisingly, this was a talk I loved. It aligns with my own feelings about institutions. I want passionate museums that take strong positions on things. In fact, I’d love to see museums that riff off each other’s ideas and exhibitions fluidly, as bloggers do. Last year, when I was at the MCA Denver, they had an event called Mediocre Mud as part of their Black Sheep Fridays, which was positioned in direct reference to the Marvelous Mud exhibition on at the Denver Art Museum. What a great way to create interest within a cultural community: exhibition battles! I want museums that position themselves at the centre for debate and discussion, because that is an exceptionally interesting place to be (if, at times, risky).

But of course I respond to these ideas. I personally love discussion (it’s one reason I blog). I want rich intellectual fodder that gives me new angles through which to understand the world and the particular things that are fascinating at any moment. This is the stuff I value.

It’s not what everyone values. During the last month, I have sat in on a lot of conference sessions and meetings. I’ve had discussions with people within our sector, and external to it. I’ve heard people talk passionately, and fervently about all manner of topic. I’ve heard from lots and lots of people who want museums to change – but all in divergent directions. Those who care passionately for the environment want museums to be more politically overt in their messages and actions towards/about the environment. Those who value the object most want museums to acquire the incredible things they come across, and want to opportunity to work with those objects. Those who are progressive and naturally inclined towards innovation and agility want agile museums because such an environment will let them thrive. Those who value safety and stability at work or life want to avoid the uncertainty of change and hold onto existing practice. Those who want to be included value inclusive practices. Those who are natural peacemakers and uncomfortable with conflict try to make everyone happy, but may never take a strong stance on anything. Those for whom race or sexuality has played a definitive role in life will advocate for particular approaches to museum practice as it relates to their experiences and values. And on and on and on it goes.

This is what I’ve learned. Museum work is personal. We all have personal motivations that we bring to work; that inform our practices. At conferences, when we speak to a particular topic, we often try to move people closer to our own positions, arming them with reasons why they should shift from their place to one nearer to ours. We seek leaders and community members who value what we value, or who at least make it possible for us to pursue those values. We all want self-actualisation. We don’t all want it from work necessarily, but work is still where many of these questions come to the fore. So, museum work is always personal. And as Carol Hanisch’s 1969 feminist paper tells us, the personal is political.

With this in mind, I have a series of propositions to make:

1. All museum practice is political (although not necessarily consciously so), but some is overt and some covert.

2. Cultural change is both more possible and more achievable if you can identify individual motivations and values, and provide mechanisms to keep them in tact.
If, for instance, you are trying to get a new digital project up and running in your institution and finding yourself with little support from other staff, try to find out why; what the real cause of their concern or blockage is. Maybe it’s a fear of additional work. Maybe it’s a worry that flashy technologies in the space will overwhelm delicate works of art. Maybe an exhibition designer has a concern about that a mobile app will change visitor flows, and they don’t know how to plan for such things and therefore just need practical support or research about that. Looking to understand the personal motives/values that underlie actions can give insight into the political positions that people are taking, and can help you tackle the root of the problem. If someone is resisting change, it’s because you’ve given them no reason to change in a way that is meaningful to them. (Something we can also apply to museum visitors; if the people who you want to come to your museum aren’t, it’s because you haven’t provided them with a compelling reason to do so.)

3. Strategic concerns are often political concerns.
Museums are not just political entities in their cultural activity, but also in the way they run. Being conscious of how the political and personal intermingle is useful when seeking to convert something you personally value (like, say, digitising collections) into a strategic priority (because it will help support mission). It is all too easy for overt and covert political activity to blend in this space; being consciously aware of an institution’s (or director’s) strategic and political concerns and contexts is important in order to connect the things that you value personally to the things that are important to the institution politically.

The museum is political, as is museum practice. But it’s also personal. We fight for the things we want because they are personally valuable and meaningful to us. It’s both. When considering institutional change, or even just looking to recruit people for a project that you want to do, paying conscious attention to both the personal and political motives at stake is important.

Before I finish, I thought I’d include the final paragraph of Hanisch’s The Personal is Political here. Although it was written specific to another situation, there is still useful perspective that can be gleaned from reading.

One more thing: I think we must listen to what so-called apolitical women have to say – not so we can do a better job of organizing them but because together we are a mass movement. I think we who work full time in the movement tend to become very narrow. What is happening now is that when non-movement women disagree with us, we assume it’s because they are ‘apolitical,’ not because there might be something wrong with our thinking. Women have left the movement in droves. The obvious reasons are that we are tired of being sex slaves and doing shitwork for men whose hypocrisy is so blatant in their political stance of liberation for everybody (else). But there is really a lot more to it than that. I can’t quite articulate it yet. I think ‘apolitical’ women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear in our minds.

What do you think?

A Museum Genome Project?

Superquick post. I just noticed that Jasper Visser has written about the blurring of boundaries between things; between art fairs and libraries, between shops, restaurants and galleries. The delineations between institutions or organisations once seemingly quite distinct are becoming less so. Or, as Jasper puts it, “The label becomes less important.”

As much as we’ve relied on art or museum classifications to tell us about the things in our collections, as institutions we also rely on classifications to tell us about ourselves and each other. Are we an art museum, or a small museum, or a zoo with only the lesser pandas? Are we a museum, or a library, or a librarymuseum? What relationship does a shop located in an airport that sells goods from the Met have to a museum?

Maybe museums, too, need a classification system more attenuated to nuance, like The Art Genome Project. Could we have a Museum Genome Project; in which all our institutions were assessed according to different characteristics or “genes” so that we could better understand how they relate to one another, and to other like institutions (imagine including the whole GLAM sector)? Genes could be created for factors including size, collecting or non-collecting, live animals or not, and so on. The relationships between a museum with books and a library with objects could probably be far more clearly demonstrated than simply with the labels “museum” or “library”. Taking such an approach to the labelling of museums (rather than just their objects) could provide an interesting and highly descriptive imprint of the sector, and the relationships different institutions have with each other. That knowledge could then be used to develop appropriate standards and best practices; or to correctly advocating for the needs of the sector.

What do you think? Do you think a Museum Genome Project would be a useful way to understand the sector, and the complex ways in which different institutions relate to, or differ from, one another? Could this be a useful approach for tackling sector-wide problems, like advocacy, or developing appropriate standards and best practices? And what would the essential genes include?

P.S. – In case you didn’t notice, my imagination has been captured by The Art Genome Project. Fortunately Matthew Israel is going to be at MCN2012, and I am very much looking forward to picking his brain there.

How could anyone think this little guy was less then a Panda?

Crowdfunding, hype & the Goddamn Tesla Museum

There must have been a collective intake of breathe from museum professionals around the world last month when Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal put the call out to build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, inviting donations and support via Indiegogo.  The crowdfunding project has now raised more than $1.2million, with the city of New York promising to match $850,000 of that money. Imagine that. More than 30,000 people have pledged money towards an as-yet-nonexistent museum/science centre. Science! Nerds! Money for a museum! How totally rock and roll.

Despite the attention that has come to it since Inman’s involvement, the project isn’t a new one. The Tesla Science Center (formerly known as the Friends of Science East, Inc.) has been formally active since February 14, 1996, so although the Tesla Science Center has now come to the fore with the crowdfunding project, it has not simply appeared out of thin air. This has been a long-burning campaign that has just undergone a radical shift in prominence. From being a pet-project and passion for the TSC, something that must at times have seemed no more than a pipe dream, the Tesla Science Center now holds potential to be real. What a colossal shift in the course of a month.

The shift in attention, prominence, and possibility brings with it all kinds of interesting questions. First, let’s assume that the FSE does acquire the property (there are other bidders, like Milka Kresoja). What then? Are the Board of Directors for the TSC in a position to capitalise upon their sudden rush of funds and support? Is the museum actually feasible? And how will those thousands of people who have contributed to the project feel when it starts to move from months into years before the Tesla Museum becomes real?

This is one of the as-yet-untested aspects of such a big crowd-funding project; can a project built on hype and excitement, which invites emotional and economic investment (some of it significant) from people all over the world, continue to hold attention, to live up to its own build up? Or is there an inevitable backlash when projects change, adapt, or even fail?

Back before I dedicated myself to solving the many mysteries of museums, I worked in the music industry, so hype is something I have a fairly keen interest in. I have watched indie bands pick up buzz as early adopters gathered around and invested in them; knowing that they were in on something secret and special; a band with the compelling allure of potential. Once that buzz starts, capitalising upon it relies on timing and maintaining momentum. A band full of potential that waits too long to impress and live up to their early promise may all too soon be written off as a casualty on the hunt for the next big thing. Hype, buzz, potential – whatever word you want to use for it – can be all too fleeting, particularly if the return on investment is a long time coming.

Marketing company Gartner uses hype cycles to help characterise what happens following the introduction of new technologies. The hype cycle follows five phases, being a trigger in which “Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven”; a peak of inflated expectations; a trough of disillusionment, when “interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver… Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters”; a slope of enlightenment; and finally a plateau of productivity, in which “Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.” Although the methodology is intended for technology adoption, such a cycle can likely also apply to this situation.

Gartner Hype Cycle

It is in this space that the Goddamn Tesla Project will prove to be an interesting test case. Mark Walhimer estimates that it takes between 5 and 10 years to start a museum, but if comments on The Oatmeal’s post like this one –  “Good luck Matthew! This Goddamned Tesla Museum needs to happen. RIGHT MEOW!!!!” – give any indication, then the slow-burn from now to then might indeed cause supporters of the project to fall into the trough of disillusionment.

On the Indiegogo fundraising site, it is acknowledged that:

Even if we raise the full amount and end up with $1.7 million, this isn’t enough to build an actual museum / science center. But it will effectively put the property into the right hands so it can eventually be renovated into something fitting for one of the greatest inventors of our time.

Similarly, on The Oatmeal’s FAQs about the project, Matthew Inman has written:

If this is a success, can you build a museum right away? What happens next?
The property the laboratory is on is a bit of mess. It needs to be cleaned up, restored, and there’s a ton of work to be done to actually turn this into something worthy of Tesla’s legacy. The money we’re raising is simply to secure the property so no one can ever mess with it and guarantee that it’s a historic site. It opens up years and years of time to figure out how to build a proper Nikola Tesla museum.
However, I would love to have some kind of Nikola Tesla festival on the property on July 10th of 2013 (Nikola Tesla Day), and have some kind of zany Tesla-coil-BBQ-cookout.

The short-term goal of a Tesla Festival may be enough to satisfy those who have invested in the project to see it as being worthwhile. Such an event would give a sense of culmination and momentum; both important for capitalising upon early hype and potential. But we aren’t likely to get real perspective on whether crowdfunding a museum from scratch can prove to be a rewarding model for either the museum or its funders for many years. In this way, the Goddamn Tesla Museum is likely to prove an interesting test case. It might be here that some real questions around museum innovation can be answered.

What do you think? Can interest in a project like this one be sustained over time, or is it inevitable that those enthusiastic geeks the world over will become disillusioned as the Museum takes years to move from idea to actuality?

Inside/Outside: Criticising museum practice

Given the ostensible parameters and protocols of the call for contributions to this volume, I am given to imagine myself as one of a group of contributors situated “outside” a (museum) “profession” and “looking in,” as a “scholar who has written books about museums but who [is] trained and work[s] in other disciplinary areas.” In accepting the generous invitation to contribute to the collection, I am nonetheless placed, however provisionally, and according to the self-admittedly tentative nature of the editorial formatting of the volume, in a curiously dichotomous relationship to those “looking from within the profession.”

So says art historian Donald Preziosi, by way of locating his contribution to the 2006 book Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (pp74).  His statement raises interesting questions about the positioning of those who write and speak about the museum and its profession, and their space within or external to it. This is particularly the case, given that only pages before, Preziosi issued a provocation that:

There seems to have been, at least among “insiders” or museum professionals, an endemic, across-the-board abandonment of critically engaged and historically responsible attention to the fundamental questions about the functions and social and political roles of museums. The disjunction between the “external” critical and philosophical literature relating to museums, museology, and collecting and that emanating from “within” the profession is very great and growing. (pp70)

He critiques the sector as an outsider, a position he has been “placed” into, simultaneously arguing that those on the “inside” have abandoned “critically engaged and historically responsible attention to the fundamental questions about the functions and social and political roles of museums.” It seems he slays “insiders” for their lack of engagement, whilst distancing himself from such a position.

Is his criticism of museum professionals valid? Honestly, I don’t know. The conversations I have within the sector are often highly engaged and highly critical; in recent years there has seemingly been a noticeable turn towards theoretical and critical discourse. Yet most of the time business as usual continues (as it must). Critical reflection is a great luxury, but one often far removed from the practicalities of actual work.

Still, his ideas leave their stain on me because I can’t identify exactly where I am positioned within the sector. Before my first conference, my PhD supervisor cautioned me that as soon as I mentioned that I was an academic, I might be dismissed summarily as unable to speak to the ‘real concerns’ of the profession. And I know from discussions with now-close friends that this indeed happened (although fortunately not to such a great extent as to prevent later connection). As such, I now go out of my way to prove my credentials as a legitimate member of the museum community. I work in museums, I volunteer. My friends and colleagues, those whose ideas I respect, are museum professionals far more frequently than academics. I spend as much time working in the sector as possible, and hope that it’s enough to clean me of the taint of “outsider”.

But paradoxically, perhaps it is this very mark of difference that gives me the most freedom to criticise and speak to the philosophical concerns of the sector. Were I welded to a single institution, any criticism that I might make could be seen implicitly as a criticism of my home museum. Being outspoken under those circumstances could cut too close; creating internal tension that would make the business of getting work done much harder. Speaking out from the outside comes with a freedom rarely afforded to true insiders, because the possible costs are only personal and not institutional. (Incidentally, I also wonder if this isn’t at least part of the reason that the MuseTrain authors have chosen to stay anonymous thus far.)

This issue is on my mind now for two reasons. The first is because of a conversation I had with an old friend yesterday. He is an artist whose early work highly controversially questioned some unspoken and seemingly unquestionable ideas here in Australia. This work, which he was not “allowed” to make but did anyway (his then youthful naivety giving him a sense of bulletproofness) raised and continues to raise very significant critical questions. It also left him out in the wilderness as an artist, unshowable for a significant period of time afterwards. Now, with hindsight, he questions his own right to make the work that he did, to critique the situation in the way he did; doubts raised in part because of his outsider status from that community. His right and ability to ask questions are diminished because he is on the outside, but they are questions not being raised elsewhere or from the inside. Preziosi’s criticism of the museum profession equally rings true of my friend’s experiences as an artist.

In addition, I am starting to think more carefully on my position in this sector as the end of the PhD looms more forcefully on the horizon. Although I still have more than a year until completion, there has of late been a small chorus of people asking what I intend to do after it’s finished. Will I go into academia, or work in a museum? Where do I want to work? What do I want to do?

They are difficult questions to answer with any certainty or clarity of vision. Once I make a choice, particularly between working in a museum (insider) or as an academic (outsider), then I am effectively choosing to align myself in a particular direction. I am either in; or I’m out. I can speak as one of you, or I can choose a different voice altogether. It will become harder and harder to straddle the divide between the two, which is what seems to make the current space I inhabit so interesting.

Museum philosopher Hilde Hein introduces herself and her position in the sector in the preface to The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective with the inclusion of this paragraph (pp xiii):

My own experience with museum practice and with theorizing about museums has been gained through internships in museums and more than two decades of academic investigation. By following both of these avenues I hope to have found common ground between those who reflect upon museums from a cultural perspective and those who know them by working inside.

She intentionally positions herself as someone who can speak from within, and without. Is this a necessary requirement for those who do wish to consider and critique the institution as theorist? Are her reflections upon museums more or less critical as a result of this urge to bridge the divide between professional and theorist? Are they more palatable than if she did not spend time in institutions? Is it, in fact, the place of museum professionals to critique the institution, or to work towards its effective functioning?

Obviously this post comes by way of my own existential crisis career concerns, but I wonder if it doesn’t scratch at a larger and more pervasive itch. Do museums need “outsiders” to critique and provoke discussion about fundamental issues? Or can those working within the sector, or within particular institutions, ask unanswerable (and sometimes un-askable) questions and continue to function effectively on the inside? Are there people who do manage to successfully straddle the divide between insider/outsider, or is it inevitable that in a relatively short time I will have to choose?

What do you think?

How is the world different because your museum is online?

“How do we measure for epiphany?” Rob Stein’s question from MCN2011 haunts me.

Measurement is on my mind. As a theorist, I don’t tend naturally towards the quantifiable. Neither do museums in some ways. Much of the value of museums is other-than-economic, and not easily measurable. But we live in a society that demands success in quantifiable packaging. We really need a Wondermeter, but since we don’t have one finding the right questions to ask, the right things to measure becomes critical.

It occurs to me, then, that changing the conversation on online collections or museum websites (or anything that we know is important) will demand that we have the right metrics; metrics that funders or board members can make sense of in order to benchmark new ways of thinking about digital against other priorities; metrics that alter the way we think about what we do, and why.

When I think about how I conceive of the online museum collection and its potential role in the broader information ecosystem, it doesn’t make sense to me if success is measured simply by numbers of object records online or visits to the website. That doesn’t tell us anything about whether new knowledge is being created using the collection, or how the collection records are meaningful beyond the museum – and I think those are much more interesting questions. As Jasper Visser put it:

I recently realised that we, cultural institutions, are using the wrong metrics to measure our online success, because we’re measuring just that: generic success. We’re using statistics and software that is perfectly fine when you’re selling Cokes, but might not be ideal for culture, heritage and the arts.

There are some important general questions that should be asked when considering digital success and metrics (Clairey Ross’ post following Seb’s MW2011 web metrics course is a great starting place here). But I’m going to imagine some new metrics, ones that measure the things I think are *really* important, beyond the basics. You might not agree with me that these are the right things to measure. That’s great. What is?

1. What new innovations, knowledge, and digital inventions have come from people using your collection/information?
Patrick Hussey recently considered how crowdfunding is changing culture, and asked “Is it possible that crowdfunding is telling us something rather profound – that the most important and popular form of creativity at this point in history is not ‘useless’ art, but digital invention?” It’s a question that recalls to me one of the conclusions that Koven drew from his unconference session on online collections at MW2012, that “The after-market for collections data may be the most important one.” What if making possible digital invention and new collection-driven discovery was the point of museum collections? How would we measure that? Would the right metric be measuring how many new inventions/innovations have come from people utilising collection data, or what new knowledge had come of it? And if that was a metric, would that change the way your museum acted? Would you run more hack days to encourage innovation around the collection? Would you make sure your data was available as an API? Would you change your image licensing allow image downloads for non-commercial and academic use as the UK National Portrait Gallery have just done?

2. How does your collection link to the broader information ecology?
If we were to start thinking of the online museum collection as a living historical document rather than a mere catalogue, one in which we can discover things about our collections that we’ve never known before, what would indicate success? Would we measure how many Wikipedia entries lead back to the collection? How many external links lead out from the collection to authoritative sources? As Nate Solas has reminded us previously, authority online is conferred by linking to the right sources and places, by making the information that people need and want findable and available. You only have to look at the Walker’s website to see how they are making use of this kind of thinking. What could we measure to encourage more of this?

3. How is the world different because your collection, your museum is online?
Ok, this one is getting more towards the esoteric end of things, but go with me. Maxwell Anderson, in You Get What You Measure writes of answering the question “how is the world different because your museum exists?” It would be interesting to try to find measurements that answer the question “how is the world different because your collection is online?” If we cannot find ways to answer that, maybe we aren’t really having an impact at all? In which case, why bother? Of course, this isn’t something that is easily quantifiable (I told you, I’m a theorist not an evaluator), but I’d love to find new ways to measure the real importance of a museum’s online presence, of its impact as an educational institution, and the impact of the online collection. As Jasper puts it, our significance, not just our success.

I want museums and collections to be meaningful, online and offline. I think they are; or should be; or can be. But maybe they aren’t yet as meaningful as they will be. It’s not quite measuring for epiphany, but maybe it’s not that far from it.

What do you think? Am I completely wrong with my imagined new metrics? What would be better? What crazy things would you want to measure, and how would you do it? Feel free to talk about your own area of fascination, right across the institution. Don’t just limit yourself to mine.

BTW – there are some good general posts about museum metrics that have recently surfaced. Worth reading too.

The Museum of Museum Practice

Following my last post, it might come as a surprise to readers that I don’t actually play the “if I had a museum of my own, I’d…” game very often. I am too early in my career, and still have too much to learn to imagine balancing the complexities of museum management with emerging and pressing issues. My dreams are more coloured by hopes of working in certain institutions, with particular people, or on great projects. (An aside, if you haven’t read Robert Connolly’s great comments on that post yet, go back and do so – lots to think about there.)

But after Paul Rowe Tweeted that he “would love to see a museum exhibition about duplicates – multiple accessions of (almost) the same thing” because “There’s stories behind why multiple copies were collected and what use the duplicates have” I felt the need to share Luke Dearnley’s awesome idea for a museum that I would love to have as my very own, because it is one that captures my own imagination. Ready?

The Museum of Museum Practice

(I know, I know… the suspense would have been greater if I hadn’t titled the post with the name.) For Dearnley, the Museum of Museum Practice would be a place where the bad habits of old museums could be conserved and documented for us to learn from, as well as a space for documenting newer and better practices. Rock and roll.

As a museumgeek, the idea of having a Museum of Museum Practice excites me more than it should. Imagine the exhibitions, which could absolutely be about duplicates; about the how and why one museum has acquired multiple accessions of (almost) the same thing. As Rowe, building upon his earlier Tweet with a post on the museum of duplicate things, writes:

I would love to see a museum exhibition about duplicates. An exhibition could relate the stories behind the multiple copies, shedding light on one element of museum practice. 100 specimens of the same butterfly may have arisen from research into the distribution or variations of that insect. Multiple copies of a similar domestic vase may have been acquired before the museum established a clear collecting policy. One object may be a sacrificial item used for school children to handle on visits, while other examples are more carefully conserved in the storage room. The museum may even manufacture reproductions, particularly for display or education purposes. It’s at times like this that Calvin’s Duplicator would come in handy.

Such fun! An object could be displayed alongside all of the didactic information that has accompanied it in previous exhibitions (if only they had been kept and preserved), and the audience could learn about how the interpretation had changed, how curatorial language has evolved, and even how different technologies had been used (great to have an object accompanied by an early audioguide).

The museum could have displays about displays (a diorama of dioramas?!?), and curators and registrars would have to examine and critique their own work, simultaneously historians and museum professionals. (Yes I know, it’s all getting very meta.) Programming could include public restorations of objects, or open discussions about the ethics of repatriation. Exhibits could at times be subversive (as I gather those in the Museum of Jurassic Technology are), and knowingly self-referential.

But think what we would learn about our own sector, and what insights might be provoked, had we a museum with an exploration of museum practice at the heart of its mission. Ideally the MoMP would be a teaching and research institution, with strong ties to the local museum community. How well might students learn about the changes that have taken place in the sector, and how much better equipped to deal with change when it impacts upon their own museum? How useful (and hopefully interesting) for the broader community to learn more about the behind-the-scenes decision-making that takes place within the museum?

Objects in the museum could be both genuine, and created. Artists and guest curators could be engaged to interpret the work of museums, pulling to mind Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, and Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox. The museum could run a regular museologist-in-residence program, and be a testing ground for prototyping new ideas. It could be thoroughly experimental, all the whilst documenting that which has often been slow to change.

In some ways, all museums are museums of museum practice (particularly those that only rarely update their procedures or exhibitions), but rarely are they consciously so. Through collecting and preserving the practices of museums past and present, the museum of museum practice could help us prototype and develop practices for the future.

What do you think? What would you want to see in the Museum of Museum Practice? What would the Curator of curation unearth? What kind of registration practice should the Registrars adopt? And how to document changes to process when they occur?

What can museums learn from the Register Citizen Open Newsroom Project?

A couple of articles popped into my feed today about US Digital First Media‘s announcement that they were creating a national curation team to

track, collect and distribute curated news in order for newsrooms to focus on local reporting. “Providing context to everything we curate is vital to providing a comprehensive news report,” said digital projects editor Mandy Jenkins. “It’s our responsibility to bring these stories to each of our local markets.”

Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement & Social Media at Digital First, has written a long and interesting post on news curation techniques, types and tips that’s worth reading for insight on the approaches of news organisation to curation. But after reading these two posts, I wanted to investigate a little further. I stumbled upon the Register Citizen Open Newsroom Project and its Newsroom Cafe. Now this makes for fascinating reading. The Newsroom Cafe is based in Torrington, Connecticut and it offers more than just food and drink… There are no walls between the cafe area and the newsroom, and “readers are invited to find the reporter that writes about their community or area of interest – or editors – and talk about concerns, ideas, questions.”

There are a number of strategies that the project employs, like allowing public debate of internal policies, fact checking programs, partnerships with other media and non-media organisations, and digital first reporting, that give useful pause for thought for museum organisations tackling the problems of the integration of digital and non-digital. In addition, the Newsroom Cafe offers a community media lab with a full-time community engagement editor. They also make a space for an artist-of-the-month program(!), featuring the work of local artists in the cafe space itself, while the most popular feature of the Cafe has been public access to the newspaper’s archives from their 134 year history – both of which are things that should catch the attention of museum people.

In addition, the Register Citizen holds their daily story meetings at a table on the edge of the cafe, and the community is allowed to sit in, listen or even participate. This is where it gets really interesting.

Video of the meetings is also live-streamed on RegisterCitizen.Com, and we use a live chat to allow readers to watch from home and type in a question or comment in real time. Those words are displayed on a large monitor above the conference table, so editors and readers can interact and respond to people tuning in from afar.

…A funny thing happened after we moved into the “open newsroom” last December. We stopped having “editorial board meetings,” at least in the traditional sense where an outside organization or politician meets behind closed doors with a committee of editors, reporters and the publisher. We were still getting requests, but when we did, we made sure the industry association or special interest in question knew how we do things now. We’ll meet with you, but it will be in public, our readers will be invited to attend and participate, and we’ll be live-streaming it on the web. For the most part, after that became clear, the party requesting the editorial board meeting said “No thanks.” Others, including Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, embraced it, and the public’s involvement, by all accounts, improved and advanced the discussion. An exciting opportunity has emerged for us to create a new kind of editorial board process.

These movements interest me for a number of reasons. For one thing, as a participatory location, The Newsroom Cafe starts to draw together the news room with its community in a far more immediate way. Rather than simply seeking community involvement online, the local community is drawn into the process even in the physical space but integrates that with digital processes.

The transparency and openness of the process has also changed the dynamics of editorial, in a way that seems to have upended previous practice. What would it be like to hold a curatorial or exhibition meeting in the museum cafe, when anyone could join in? Or, what would happen if museums opened up about the evolution of knowledge that occurs around their collections, and allowed the public into that process? Such a question recalls to me a paper by Bruno Latour on the revision of knowledge. He asks

does it distract visitors to know that there were paleontologists fighting one another, that fossils had a market value, that reconstitutions have been modified so often, that we “don’t know for sure”, or, as another label [in the NY Museum of Natural History exhibit A Textbook Case Revisited] states, “While it’s intriguing to speculate about the physiology of long extinct animals we cannot test these ideas conclusively”? The more fossils there are, we feel the more interesting, lively, sturdy, realistic, and provable are our representations of them; how come we would feel less certain, less sturdy, less realistic about the same representations when they multiply? When their equipment is visible? When the assembly of paleontologists is made visible?

It’s here, in the idea of opening up about the changes in museum knowledge, that I think museum transparency could really come into its own. But examples like the Newsroom Cafe further demonstrates the eroding demarcation of roles that were once more easily differentiated. The news becomes situated in space and time, becomes woven into the community. The digital and “real” have joined more seamlessly there, and such moves make it less easy to know what is to be the role of the museum, and what is the role of, well, some other organisation in the connected age. Boundaries are eroding, and while the material culture role of museums seems unthreatened, the experiential, educational and knowledge roles might be up for grabs. Even shopping centres are getting in on the act, taking on the Internet by stressing experience. Such movements could still have implications for museums, which is why I think we need to be looking to these kinds of projects to learn if and how they work.

What do you think about the Register Citizen Open Project? How would you feel if the public was allowed to sit in on exhibition or curatorial meetings? Do you think that museums should make visible the revisions in their knowledge? Let me know.

An exhibition is an essay in three dimensions

Preface: In a moment of unexpected synchronicity, it seems that Ed Rodley and I have both been thinking about metaphors for museum exhibitions, with reasonably divergent conclusions. My recommendation is that the two posts should be read together, allowing us to cover some different but complementary ground.

 Two of the greatest luxuries that accompany doing a PhD are those of autonomy of time, and the odd opportunity to participate in events like a masterclass with curator Helen Molesworth. Prior to the start of the AAANZ conference in Sydney this week, the AAANZ invited one-two PhD/Masters students from Fine Arts research programs around Australia and New Zealand to participate in masterclasses with each of the two conference keynotes. It meant that around 55 students got to sit down for free for three hours with either Thierry de Duve or Helen Molesworth, and discuss their work, their research and their thoughts.

Conversation in my masterclass crossed a reasonably diverse range of subjects, from feminism and gender perspectives in art through to the power or otherwise of objects. Where things got really interesting for me, however, were discussions about curatorial practice. Helen spoke of her belief that the essay exists as the best or primary way for making an art historical argument, and that when she curates an exhibition, she is motivated by the urge to make an essay-like argument in three dimensions. It was a perspective that really resonated with me. Many of the most compelling exhibitions that I’ve seen are those that make a case for a particular reading or understanding of (art) history – whether I agree with the argument or not.
(The same could be said for the best dissertations, which are often those that make a single clear argument and leave out unnecessary chaff and distractions, but that’s a topic for another day.)

But if the best exhibitions are indeed those that make three-dimensional an essay or argument, how do we carry such an urge into the digital space? How do we make digital an argument that involves physical objects? Are there elements unique to the digital environment that museums can exploit, much as the best exhibitions utilise the things unique to their medium to construct material statements? And what does this mean for current thinking about crowd-curation and getting public input into the exhibition during its creation?

Following the masterclass with Helen, fellow PhD student Travis Cox and I went to explore the current exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, happening upon a Sol LeWitt display. Travis is a bit of a LeWitt junky, and we spent some time discussing the LeWitt retrospective at MASS MoCA in the USA, which is on display for 25 years. If an exhibition is an essay, then this is a textbook; a tome dedicated to defining (and fixing) the impact of LeWitt’s work. Of course, the analogy is not perfect, because a book has an order in which it must be approached, whilst an exhibition can often be sauntered through in any order, leafed through page by page without concern that the order will be wrong.

Still, here we have an idea that a great exhibition is an argument, it’s a proposition. It does not merely reflect what has been discussed before, like oh-so-many undergraduate papers. Instead it makes a stand, it pokes at a new way of thinking without necessarily pretending to the only approach to the topic.

And with this in mind, what I want to know now is how we continue an argument that starts in the museum proper onto the Web? In David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know (p95), there is a discussion about Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books, and a new model for physical books that could make possible the communication of “the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past.” Weinberger offers this succinct capturing of the ideas in Darnton’s essay.

“[S]tructure it in layers arranged like a pyramid.” At the top would be the “concise account.” Second, there would be “expanded versions of different aspects of the argument.” Third, there could be documentation to support the top two layers. Fourth, include “selections from previous scholarship and discussions of them.” Fifth would be teaching tools. The sixth layer would aggregate reader commentary and exchanges.

Could we take a similar approach to the link between the in-museum essay in three dimensions and its online counterpart?

Finally, I cannot explore these subject even for a moment without linking to this amazing description by Elif Batuman of Orhan Pamuk’s museum of innocence, the “world’s first synergetic novel-museum.” This is a completely off-beat way of thinking about this problem, but an interesting and wonderful read and project, and absolutely worth considering in this discussion.

For the next ten years, writing and shopping proceeded in a dialectical relationship. Pamuk would buy objects that caught his eye, and wait for the novel to ‘swallow’ them, demanding, in the process, the purchase of further objects. Occasionally an object refused to be swallowed, as happened with some carriage lanterns and an old gas meter. Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence in 2008. It resembles less a museum catalogue than a 600-page audio guide. A ticket printed in the back of each copy grants one free entry to the museum. By that point he had already acquired nearly all of Füsun’s belongings, so the museum could, in theory, have opened the next day. But Pamuk was worried about the example of Edouard Dujardin, the French writer sometimes credited with pioneering, in a largely forgotten text called Les Lauriers sont coupés, the stream of consciousness. Pamuk didn’t want to be Dujardin. He wanted to be Joyce. It wasn’t enough just to build the world’s first synergetic novel-museum. The museum had to be a thing of beauty. He hired a team of artists and curators and worked full time in the museum for several months, taking naps on Kemal’s bed in the attic.

So, what do you think? Is an exhibition an essay (or an album or a mix tape)? And if it is, how do we continue an argument that starts in the museum proper onto the web?