My talk for the Digital Culture Public Sphere

On Monday night, I found out that I had been slated to talk at the Digital Culture Public Sphere, which ran on Thursday 6 October 2011. This was both a fantastic opportunity, and responsibility, and I’d like to thank Senator Kate Lundy and Pia Waugh for inviting me to be involved. Below are rough notes from my speech. Get involved on the Wiki or Tweet to #publicsphere to contribute your thoughts.

DIGITAL CULTURE PUBLIC SPHERE
SPEECH 6 OCTOBER 2011

My colleague Tim Hart painted a broad picture of the current state of digital culture in GLAM institutions. He illustrated the close ties the sector has to education, and the role we must play in telling our local, state and national stories. Of particular note was Tim’s salient point that even if we don’t engage online, our communities do; we still live in a world that is shaped by digital.

BARRIERS TO ACCESS

Theoretically, the Internet enables new opportunities for developing and delivering Australian cultural content to the world. The National Broadband Network will enable organisations in regional areas notable opportunities for connecting with national and international audiences and markets.

However, there are some simple yet significant realities that prevent many cultural institutions from being able to fully engage with digital opportunities.

There are cultural institutions within Australia that are locked behind strict Internet Use policies, which prevent staff from accessing social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Although permission can be sought to access these sites, such policies create immediate barriers to adoption of simple technological advances in the creation of cultural communities. Similarly, such policies ensure that only one or two members of staff are designated as the online intermediary between the institution and its online publics.

Similar policies also prevent some institutions from accessing online cultural resources, including Flickr Commons, where photographic collections from the National Library of Australia, the Australian National Maritime Museum, Australian War Memorial, the State Library of Queensland and the Powerhouse Museum are made available for use.

Despite increased access to the Internet, these simple Use policies prevent affected cultural institutions from developing a strong digital proficiency.

These are local issues, but they still provide simple barriers to access mean that cultural professionals in affected organisations are dissuaded even from participating in today’s Public Sphere consultation. While no doubt many of you are Tweeting even as I speak, cultural professionals trapped behind limiting Internet usage policies are not enabled to engage in these conversations.

Local issues do impact upon our cultural institutions’ abilities to meet the global marketplace.

LOW DIGITAL PROFICIENCY

There are instructive lessons from a recent study conducted by Infoxchange, with the Victorian Department of Human Services Community Sector Investment Fund, which examined the capacity level and use of information and communication technology in small to medium community sector organisations.[1]

The study found that organisations with low digital proficiency were excluded from new ideas and innovation delivered by digital means. These organisations accept and expect slower systems and response times and have less access to information and less capacity to advocate for their needs. Such organisations were unlikely to improve digital proficiency, because it was not required or valued internally to the same extent as it was by organisations that had already developed digital proficiency.

Similarly, increasing digital proficiency within cultural institutions will lead to new opportunities to link to global networks and ideas from around the world; to greater potential to connect with donors and funding organisations; and provide important new opportunities to serve Australia’s communities and participate in the telling of local, state and national stories.

In order to develop an active and proficient digital cultural sector, there must be increased access to better training, and a more open online environment.

GEEK IN RESIDENCE

One innovation that could lead to way that such change draws inspiration from the Geek in Residence program; a pilot grant scheme run by the Australia Council for the Arts through the Arts content for the digital era strategic priority. The program places artistically confident technicians, and technically confident artists into host arts organisations on a subsidised secondment. The idea is to create a cultural shift within that host arts organisation, increasing their digital skills and confidences.

Similar programs could be created that would see technologically minded “geeks” inserted into cultural organisations to teach staff within the organisation how to better adapt to advances in digital technology.

EVOLVING AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS

Global advances in technology today shape the expectations of cultural audiences. This is a key point made in the 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition, by the New Media Consortium. The Report lists six significant challenges for technological adoption in museums, among them the fact that:

Many in museums still fail to grasp the notion that audiences have high expectations with regard to online access to services and information. It is often difficult enough for museums with scarce resources to serve their physical visitors and to keep audiences in their geographical region satisfied; the notion that museums must, in addition, provide information and services via the Internet and mobile networks is too often seen as frivolous or unnecessary.[2]

The Report goes on to identify other key challenges to technological adoption, as well as four key drivers to adoption in the lead up to 2014. These are the increasing value of ‘rich’ media – images, videos, audio etc – in digital interpretation; the expectations of museum visitors to be able to work, learn, study and connect with their social networks in all places and at all times using the device of their choosing; the abundance of resources and relationships offered by open content repositories and social networks challenging us to revisit roles as educators; and significantly, that digitization and cataloging projects will continue to require a significant share of museum resources.[3]

DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

As the report notes, museums – and with them, other collecting institutions such as libraries and archives – are distinguished by the content they keep and interpret. As discussed in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, collecting institutions perform a central role in preserving and making Australia’s art and culture accessible.

According to the 2007–08 Survey of Museums, museums held a total of 52.5 million objects and artworks. Of these, about 5% were held by art galleries, 1% by historic properties, 11% by social history museums and 82% by natural, science and other museums. Museums which had 100 or more employees held 77% of these 52.5 million objects, with approximately 1.3% of the objects on display.[4]

In order to meet the growing expectations of visitors to be able to readily access accurate and interesting information and high-quality media, collecting institutions need to plan strategically for the digitization and cataloging of collections. However, undertaking this process, particularly at institutions that have low digital proficiency, requires hard choices in the allocation of money, personnel and time.[5]

WHY DIGITISE?

So why should we as a sector commit to such a task?

The Internet has become the true cultural hub of our time. At no previous time in history have people been so connected to so many opportunities for information, entertainment and communication. Now ubiquitous, expedient and on-demand information is available via seemingly endless sources at almost any time, and on virtually any subject. Because of this, the nature of knowledge itself is shifting, and the effects of this change will be far reaching.

If cultural institutions do not engage, if our collections are not online and able to be used, interpreted and reinterpreted by the public in ways more vital than anything we have hitherto imagined, then we risk being accused of irrelevancy to this changing world. If our collections are not made available as freely as possible, then our nation’s most significant objects and stories will risk being lost.

The Australian Library and Information Association lists first amongst its core values that it promotes the free flow of information and ideas through open access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works.

Similarly, the Museums Australia Constitution states that

A museum helps people understand the world by using objects and ideas to interpret the past and present and explore the future. A museum preserves and researches collections, and makes objects and information accessible in actual and virtual environments. Museums are established in the public interest as permanent, not-for-profit organisations that contribute long-term value to communities.[6]

We cannot now even imagine the full possibilities that might come from the uploading of our collections to the Internet.

CITIZEN SCIENCE AND NEW RESEARCH

Only last month, Kalev H. Leetaru published research that showed that “computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events.” He applied tone and geographic analysis to a 30–year worldwide news archive and discovered that global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, amongst other things.

Similarly, citizen science projects like the Galaxy Zoo project have made significant developments in helping solve the world’s scientific and medical problems. The delightfully-named Zooniverse is home to the Internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects.

With Galaxy Zoo, participants were asked to help classify galaxies by studying images of them online and answering a standard set of questions about their features. In the first year, 50 million classifications were made by 150,000 people. Galaxy Zoo became the world’s largest database of galaxy shapes.

Likewise, it was recently announced that crowdsourcing online gamers playing a protein-folding game called Foldit helped unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme that the scientific community had been unable to unlock for a decade.

Who knows what possibilities for new discovery, new knowledge and new insight lie hidden in the collections of our museums, galleries, libraries and archives? Digitising our collections and making them available online in usable forms, such as has been done by the Powerhouse Museum and Museum Victoria, who have each uploaded their collection API for use by the public, will lead to incredible new opportunities for cultural institutions to gain new relevance in the global knowledge economy.

We need to look at new partnerships for this process, and new skills for staff (I’d love to see data visualization specialists working in museums).

The arts and creative industries are fundamental to Australia’s identity as a society and nation, and increasingly to our success as a national economy. The National Broadband Network connects us to new global opportunities for engaging with communities and telling out national, state and local stories.

But unless digital proficiency is increased right across the sector, we will never meet the lofty ideals of being cultural world leaders. Planning for digital culture must by included right at the start of the strategic planning process. Too often, it is an afterthought, both in terms of planning and funding.

The Internet liberates our public cultural institutions to be truly public. But we need to address this across the sector, not just in those few institutions that already have high digital proficiency.

[1] Infoxchange, “Digital Proficiency in Small to Medium Community Service Organisations: Consumer Report, Executive Summary and Key Findings,” (Infoxchange with the support of the Victorian Department of Human Services Community Sector Investment Fund., 2010).

[2] L. Johnson et al., “The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition,” (Austin, Texas.: The New Media Consortium, 2010). 5

[3] Ibid. 4.

[4] Brian Pink, “Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview,” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010).

[5] Johnson et al., “2010 Horizon Report.” 4.

[6] Museums Australia, “What Is a Museum?,” http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/site/what_is_a_museum.php.

Australia, Museums. “What Is a Museum?” http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/site/what_is_a_museum.php.

Infoxchange. “Digital Proficiency in Small to Medium Community Service Organisations: Consumer Report, Executive Summary and Key Findings.” Infoxchange with the support of the Victorian Department of Human Services Community Sector Investment Fund., 2010.

Johnson, L., H. Witchey, R. Smith, A. Levine, and K. Haywood. “The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition.” Austin, Texas.: The New Media Consortium, 2010.

Pink, Brian. “Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview.” Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010.

Reprogramming the Art Museum @ AGNSW

This week has been quite a rush. On Monday and Tuesday, I attended a great symposium run by a new research group at COFA. The symposium was on the topic Reprogramming the Art Museum, and really emphasised strategies for engagement in museums. It featured fabulous keynote speakers Adam Lerner (MCA Denver), Dominic Willsdon (SFMOMA), Lawrence Rinder (Berkeley Art Museum) and Justine McLisky (National Portrait Gallery, UK). There were also some shorter papers presented, including a wonderful presentation by Elizabeth Mead from MONA on the effect of bringing an outsider’s voice into the art museum (I am officially a massive fangirl of Mead’s following the presentation – must get to MONA soon).

Similarly, I loved and was super-excited by Adam Lerner’s presentation on his work at MCA Denver. I think one reason I’ve been drawn to museum tech is because most technologists that I’ve met are actively thinking about/tackling questions about how to engage audiences, and how to make the museum meaningful in an online space. What I loved about Adam’s work – and really all the presenters actually – was that they were doing the same thing, but in the physical space. It made me really wonder whether what I am working towards is not necessarily museum tech, but museum engagement – online or offline, and preferably both. I think this is the reason I love Jasper Visser’s work with the Dutch Museum of National History (including the national cultural vending machine) – although much of INNL’s work happens online, their truly awesome initiatives are the ones that marry the virtual with the real.

That term engagement is an interesting one. I had a conversation with a friend recently about a philosopher he was studying, and my friend mentioned that he thought that often people think that he is smarter than he is because he has really connected with this philosopher’s work. People seemed to associate intelligence with engagement, with a passion for intellectual pursuit. Simply by choosing to really focus on and connect with an issue, my friend was going over and above what others do, and thus found that he gained significant respect for that fact. He also found that it left him a little fearful about the expectations that he had created for himself more generally… that it would no longer be ok for him to just be ‘ordinary’ in his work on this, or related subjects, because the expectations had changed.

Similarly, I think the situation is the same with museums. Creating engaging exhibitions, programs or websites is wonderful, because it brings the opportunity for an extra layer of credibility with the actual community with whom you are trying to connect. But of course, it also brings expectations. In talking to a gallery director I met at the conference, I mentioned my love for programs such as those run at MCA Denver, because they are precisely what I think museums should be seeking to do. She agreed, but with some hesitation, and then expressed a feeling that sometimes she wanted to simply be able to display art without needing to be more than that, and without the added expectation that came with starting a culture of more. I’d love to hear from any of you who have been involved with these kinds of programming choices in museums to hear about your experiences too, and whether starting a program of intentional engagement has also brought with it changed expectations. Has this been sustainable?

Overall it was a really thought-provoking two days, with lots of cumulative takeaways (although the big one for me is that this is going to be an ongoing and important issue for my own career). Hopefully in.site will run another symposium again soon. I will definitely go along.

“All your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are” – Did Facebook just become a social history museum?

Wow. So Facebook just took an interesting step into the memory market, didn’t it? In launching Facebook Timeline, Mark Zuckerberg made the statement “We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life.”

Fascinating. It’s not a massive surprise to see Facebook trying to stake out more territory in the memory and identity market. The more they become associated with people’s memories, the less likely it is that people will jump ship like they did with social networks like myspace. But this move could have some really interesting implications for the way for both the way we use the site, but also for the way we record memory.

Lately I’ve been talking to a number of curators at the Powerhouse about how they conduct collection-related research, and more than one has indicated that the required fields in the museum’s collection software in part dictate the information they seek out. That’s only natural – there are fields that need to be filled in, and therefore no research feels complete until all are populated. But I wonder whether Facebook’s moves into the (commercialised) memory market could have similar effects. Will people start locating their old photos (such as ones of their parents when they got married etc) simply because Facebook gives them a box to fill out? I think they will.

Belinda Barnet makes a really interesting point in her 2003 article, The erasure of technology in cultural critique. She writes:

There is no lived memory, no originary, internal experience stored somewhere that corresponds to a certain event in our lives. Memory is entirely reconstructed by the machine of memory, by the process of writing; it retreats into a prosthetic experience, and this experience in turn retreats as we try to locate it. But the important point is this: our perception, and our perception of the past, is merely an experience of the technical substrate. It is a writing with traces, a writing of traces.

This binding together of memory and the prosthetic way it is constructed external to ourselves is something addressed by José van Dijck in her 2004 paper Memory matters in the Digital Age. When discussing the choice of saving one of two types of objects from a burning building – a box full of pictures and memory objects, or a box of precious jewellery and identity papers – Dijck suggests that we have an attachment to the memory objects because they are an irreplaceable link to our past and who we are. She writes:

memory objects apparently carry an intense material preciousness, while their nominal economic value is negligible. The loss of these items is often equated to the loss of identity, of personal history inscribed in treasured shoebox-contents.

This is where the Facebook timeline starts to get a little interesting. In this digital age, our shoeboxes of memory items are not always tangible. I would guess that most photographs that people take don’t end up stored in physical photo albums any longer, but instead end up in digital storage spaces, on Facebook and Flickr! The traces to which our memory is attached are being stored by commercial companies, and we have no real control over how they could be used into the future.

But more than that, if Facebook continues to move into the territory of memories, I wonder whether it come become something akin to a universal museum that maps the stories of the world. After all, soon it will not only have hundreds of millions of users, but it will be able to map the relationships between them, and store their digital objects as well. By getting people so invested in the site, and being able to aggregate their data, Facebook is starting to do something that no museum has ever done in telling the stories of the world today. If Facebook timeline starts to extend all the way back into the past and people scan and post their memory objects of their parents and grandparents, and even their full family trees, it will have a really unique control over our historical information. For social history museums in particular, this could be an incredibly rich datasource. Maybe instead of teaming up with Google like art museums have started to do in Art Project, social history museums should be teaming up with Facebook?

In museums, we constantly talk about how objects are animated by their stories, and that stories are anchored by their objects. When, the way it looks right now, Facebook is making a claim for both. On the introduction page to Timeline, the tagline is “Tell your life story with a new kind of profile.” Soon Facebook could have our digital objects, and our stories. It’s a very interesting move.

Australia’s Digital Culture Public Sphere consultation

Last week I got a call from the awesome Pia Waugh, tech advisor to Senator Kate Lundy, to give me a head’s up about the Digital Culture Public Sphere consultation – an initiative being run in Australia by the Office of Senator Lundy in collaboration with the Office of Minister Simon Crean.

The Digital Culture Public Sphere consultation will “look specifically at the digital arts and industries as well as opportunities for cultural institutions around digitisation, public engagement and collaboration [and] will result in a submission that will be presented directly to [Minister Crean] as part of the broader National Cultural Policy consultation.” The industries at the centre of the discussion are games development, film & animation, media & music, digital arts and GLAM institutions.

As iterated on the Digitculture Wiki, the focus for Cultural Heritage is on the following key areas:

Ideas for a Long Term Sustainable Vision
How do you imagine the sector could look in the future? How could Australia excel? What would a 10 year plan look like?

Ideas for What Success Would Look Like
What are some tangible ways we could measure progress in this area?

Ideas for How to Get There
Ideas to achieve the vision for Australia.

Additional References
Any additional information you think might be useful, including case studies, success stories, research papers.

Case Studies from Around Australia
Leading case studies from the sector to help contextualise Australian innovation in this area.

It’s really exciting to have a chance to think about these issues, and to work towards a broader vision for the country’s digital culture future. I don’t really know what I think a long term sustainable vision would look like yet, nor how we could measure success. But over the next couple of weeks on the blog, I might try to explore a few of these issues and come up with my personal vision (which I will then contribute to the discussion). I’d love your thoughts/feedback too – even from overseas readers. You can comment here on the blog, or touch base with me on Twitter.

On the 6 October 2011, the Public Sphere consultation is going to culminate in a Live Event which should facilitate discussion within and between the different sectors being targetted here. I would LOVE to be a part of the event in Sydney – but I think my local arts community might be better served by having its own roundtable to discuss the issues as they will be affected, and I might have to host that. One thing I’ve noticed about digital culture is that for all its possibilities, there are still a lot of people who haven’t embraced it, and who still don’t have a voice in these conversations. After all, if you don’t tweet or blog, it’s a lot harder to make noise and impact in a digital environment. And while their concerns will not always be my concerns, I do think it’s important to make sure they are included in this discussion. After all, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, it’s important to talk to people who have different ideas and priorities from your own. If this Digital Culture Public Sphere is to be truly inclusive, we need to ensure diversity of input.

mining the museumgeek – meta-museology in the art show

You museumers have something to answer for! You’ve started getting into my head and disturbing my otherwise sane thoughts and now I’ve spent the last three days installing my first “meta-museological” experiment in my local student gallery.

Every year, my University Art Gallery holds an art prize focussed around a central theme. The exhibition usually passes me by, but this year the theme – Classify Me – caught my attention. The exhibition was premised on a political discussion that took place in Australia earlier this year, when a Senator called for all art to be classified prior to exhibition, in order that age limits (similar to restrictions placed on television) could be imposed. Tantamount to a call for censorship of the arts, it was something that Amy Hill – curator of the 2011 Prize – thought would make a great subject.

And she was right! The topic has garnered some great responses. However, my take on the subject was very different from that of the other participants.

Calling my work Classify Me2.0, I conducted a museological exercise in which I “classified” every work of art in the exhibition according to the ICONCLASS classification system, and through tagging. I then uploaded all of my classifications to a website (the first I’d created!), which could be accessed via either a computer in the Gallery, or utilising proximate QR codes in situ with the works of art themselves.

It has been an incredibly interesting experiment.

First of all, I am not an expert at classification, and so my categorisation of works has been inexact at best. I was armed with very little information about the works themselves. I had not read any artist statements, and so I was only able to make the classification based on the appearance of the work, and its name. In some ways, this is different from the way objects would be classified within a museum – although it did reflect a situation in which a politically driven classification system might work, including some of the difficulties that might be encountered.

I expected that I would find the process of classification interesting, but I didn’t realise that it would significantly affect me. Classifying objects into categories that in no way reflected my feelings about the works was strangely emotive. Of particular note was a small bronze sculpture of a pregnant girl, with one foot shod in a ballet shoe (in a nod to Degas), and the other limb a silver prosthesis. It’s a beautiful sculpture – gentle and delicate. However, the prosthetic limb is the most outstanding element of the piece, which placed the work in the category 31AA4 disabilities, deformations and monstrosities; diseases – AA – female human figure.

It shocked me that something so lovely could be associated with such ugly concepts. Similarly stunning was the fact that disability was, and is, classed as a monstrosity in the classification system. The system is obviously derived from a particular historical art paradigm, but given that it is still used, the grouping together of such concepts is pretty dismal. More than anything else, classifying this work really brought home the fact that classification has no room for nuance.

The second aspect of this experiment that has been fascinating is the conversations that it has started.

During the classification process, the curatorial and installation team in the Gallery (mostly artists) would talk about what I was doing. Until I started classifying works actively in their presence, many had only ever thought about classification in context of censorship. Few were cognisant of the fact that museum objects are always categorised – whether by genre, materiality or era. They had never considered that classifications create proximal relationships between works that might be completely unrelated, and give works different meanings from those originally intended.

One member of the installation team was even concerned for me, worried that in creating this piece and categorising works like the dancer in particular ways (as honestly and fairly as possible) I would be opening myself up to hate in the local arts scene. Although it had crossed my mind that this piece could provoke some small reaction, I had not really considered that Classify Me2.0 could be really controversial.

And is still might not be. Most likely no one will blink. But even these conversations demonstrate that the classification of works of art – in public – has the potential to be very powerful.

Yesterday, too, I chatted to some exhibiting artists and discovered that a painting I had classified as 25G21(+1) fruits (+ plants used symbolically) based on first impressions was both that… and something else. What looked initially like a giant purple apple hanging upside down was also a painting of a well-disguised-but-instantly-obvious-once-you-know-it’s-there vulva. My classification of the object as a fruit was both accurate, and not. Yet to someone with access only to the ICONCLASS classification, this plurality of meanings would be lost.

So Classify Me2.0 has proved to be a great experiment. As a piece of art, it’s terrible. The in-gallery QR codes are inaccessible to audiences who don’t know what they are, or what to do with them (or who don’t own a smart phone). Because I’ve entered the work as part of a competitive art prize, I was not allowed to give too much explanation about the codes in the space (as it was thought to be disadvantageous to the other artists). Additionally, the computer upon which the Classify Me2.0 website is accessible is in an odd place in the Gallery, and people don’t seem to know how to interact with it. The website, too, has faults since it’s my first one. The design isn’t ideal, and the works of art are mis-ordered (because many works changed location between me classifying them and the final hang).

Yet as a conversation piece, and an experiment on the nature of classification, Classify Me2.0 has been incredibly successful. I’ve had rich and deep discussions with people about art and Museology – something that I hope will continue (I’ve approached the Curator and Director to see whether we can organise some kind of forum on classification in the Gallery within the coming weeks). And I’ve learned heaps from putting my ideas into practice in the real world.

The exhibition opens formally tonight, so I will keep you posted on any updates. But regardless, I hold you all accountable for starting me on this path.

Visit Classify Me2.0.
UPDATE: Well, apparently it turns out that Classify Me2.0 actually won the art prize. I wasn’t at the exhibition opening as I was on the train home from the Powerhouse Museum, but I just received a text from the curator, telling me I came first. I think the first prize is a $1500 travel scholarship – which will nicely pay for some of my flights to MCN2011. Um, I’m in a little shock right now.

Groupthink vs diversity (It’s the dorks that give it a real go)

When I was growing up, we moved around a lot. I was perpetually the new kid, and being an only child, this meant that I was also a bit of a loner. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to do things alone – I just struggled to meet people with whom I connected.

It’s a pretty common experience. Lots of kids, particularly those with a creative bent, struggle to find their niche. It is all too easy for children who didn’t grow up with the rest of the gang, or who don’t instantly gel with the group, to feel completely isolated – the freaks and geeks of society. This is not entirely a bad thing however. After all, as put so eloquently by Australian band TISM, in their ode to cricketer Glenn McGrath, “There’s never been a popular teenager yet who’s done rat’s with their life. Its the fucking dorks that give it a real go.” (Apologies for the swearing.) There is actually a lot to be gained by being an outlier; by being one of the kids who never fit in and who survived despite not running with the cool kids. You develop a bit of moxie.

Having said that, one of the coolest things about the Internet is its ability to connect us with like-minded folks. No longer do the dorks of the world need to exist in social isolation. Instead, they can find a community to belong to no matter where they are located. After all, prior to MW2011 I had never met a single person who cared about museum tech. Now, my life is filled with them.

But the thing is, when you only talk to people like yourself, your thoughts are never challenged. No one pulls you out of the crowd, and makes you back your opinions. No one teases you for being the freak disturbing the status quo.

And if we lose that, then who is going to come up with the amazing ideas and the paradigm-changing insights that only come from being the sole geek or the black sheep that never fit in???

This post from Michael Michalko on Psychologytoday.com outlines common thinking strategies of genius… and unsurprisingly, groupthink is not one. Instead Michalko notes that geniuses make novel combinations and force relationships; they think in opposites and prepare themselves for change – all of which is much more likely to occur if your knowledge is drawn from diverse sources. After all, many of the researchers – like Michel Foucault or Marshall McLuhan – whose work has made huge impact upon museum thinking have not been museologists, and it is their diversity of opinion and external insight that has forced new thoughts and considerations within the field.

So if we are now self-curating our worlds into smaller and smaller circles of like-minded people online, where will these innovative and often provocative thoughts come from?!?

One answer is the museum itself. Modern museums exist at least in part to educate the public, a role that equips them perfectly to take up the challenge of exploring contrasting ideas, and bringing novel combinations into effect. Rather than simply reinforcing people’s existing beliefs, curators and exhibitions coordinators can work to ensure the museum is a safe environment in which views can be presented that might clash with the visitor’s own assumptions. After all, simply coming into the museum space indicates that a visitor is open to new and potentially uncomfortable experiences, and that receptivity is an ideal starting place for the exploration of new thoughts.

But it would be great to be able to do the same thing online too, so that visitors to the museum website were not only able to find what they were looking for, but also enticed to look further at something that might challenge them. Can museum websites encourage creativity and new discovery, and get people to think about ideas that they would not normally be confronted with? Can a museum website actually stand in place for a physical museum as an affective device?

I’m don’t know the answers, but I do know that our lives are richer when we do not cushion ourselves away from difference simply because it’s uncomfortable. And with that in mind, I’m off to find someone new to follow on Twitter whose experiences and opinions do not match my own…

NB – This post was in part inspired by a conversation I had with Seb Chan the other day. Thanks Seb!

‘Knowledge is power, but secret knowledge is also power.’

I came across the title for this post in the comments section of an article discussing the recent releasing of JSTOR academic documents by Aaron Swartz, where fred_bauder writes: Knowledge is power, but secret knowledge is also power.

It’s an interesting sentiment. Around the time of the wikileaks US diplomatic cables leak I remember reading an article about privacy in this age where the author asserted that the only way that people could now guarantee that secrets would be kept secret was to ensure they were never recorded or written down; that governments, businesses and individuals could all now be called accountable for everything ever committed to paper/email/device. In some ways, this has always been true… people have always been held accountable by what was recorded – be it on paper or tape – but things are publishable now with renewed vigor and ease, and that changes the game somewhat. The relationship between secrecy and power seems to be shifting.

Shortly after the wikileaks scandal, I had a conversation with a psychiatrist about the implications of the above, and he mentioned that for similar reasons he no longer records (non-critical) material in someone’s files that could one day be used against them. He no longer trusts in the sanctity of the files, because there is the possibility that with time, anything recorded could become public (if in doubt, check out this article about the Mug-Shot Industry [That] Will Dig Up Your Past, Charge You to Bury It Again).

Knowledge is power, but secret knowledge is also power…

So why do I think this is important for museums? As museums put their collections online, they may be held newly accountable for what is and is not recorded within them. The public may (if they choose to look) become aware of ways in which museum records are incomplete, or even contain information that has been shown to be false since it was initially written down. This is not necessarily a negative thing. As Seb Chan noted in his MW2007 paper Tagging and Searching – Serendipity and museum collection databases on the Powerhouse Museum’s OPAC2:

the exposure of these records, and their increased searchability, especially through Google, has led to the Museum receiving additional contextual information about objects, or corrections to research. Sometimes this additional information comes from international experts, collectors and researchers, but at other times, as was the case with a convict love token, it comes through community members researching their family histories – and simply searching for a series of family names in Google.

But it is indicative of the fact that as museum collection documentation becomes available online, it is open to new scrutiny.

Paradoxically, this openness does little to challenge the fact that museums are, and have always been, secret societies filled with people who have special knowledge about the objects in the collection that not everyone is privy to. In their earliest iterations, museums were places for philosophical societies to meet, serving as a locus for research about the world. Even once museums became public institutions, the aim was to teach those without knowledge about the world and the collection. However, there is always a power imbalance between those with knowledge (and power) and those without it. All knowledge is secret knowledge if it is not freely and fairly available to all parties, and to some extent this is precisely where museum power is drawn from.

Museum knowledge is stored not only in our artefacts and documentation but importantly also in our people. We speak in secret languages (taxonomies) and have often-silent rules of accepted and acceptable behaviour that can be daunting to the ‘uninitiated’ (a term which is itself loaded with implications). Museum power is not in the things that have been committed to print – it’s in the knowledge of staff and their intuitive understanding of objects and collections. It’s in the judgements made when curating exhibitions. It’s in all the silent things that can never be fully recorded.

Julia Noordegraaf, in her book Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture, writes about a similar schism that occurred in museum display in the nineteenth century. She writes (emphasis mine):

There is a paradox in the fact that most nineteenth-century museums were designed to accommodate large groups of visitors, while at the same time provided little information about the objects on display. Whereas the museum was thought to be a civilising and cultivating institution, its presentation was aimed at people who could find their own way through it and could interpret the objects on display by themselves. According to James Sheehan, this tension between the general and the exclusive lay at the code of nineteenth-century culture and society, ‘[…] the tension between the aspiration to have institutions that would be open to everyone and the structural inequalities that made these institutions inaccessible to all but a minority of the population.’

The paradox can perhaps be explained from the fact that in the nineteenth century, museums were conceived as places as much for the research or the advancement of knowledge as for popular instruction or the diffusion of knowledge. Until the end of the century, when museum innovators like Henry Flower recognised the need for different types of display for these different aims, museums were trying to fulfil both aims with one and the same type of display. It seems that in the nineteenth century, museum managers designed the script of museum presentation from the idea that educating the people simply meant opening the museum doors to everyone.[1]

Museums may be opening the virtual doors to their collections to everyone. However, this doesn’t mean that the audience is equipped with the same knowledge as the museum curator or educator. Even with digital openness, museums still have secret knowledge – and secret knowledge is also power.

[1] Julia Noordegraaf, “Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture,” ed. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2004). 80. Noordegraaf quotes from Sheehan: Museums in the German Art World 2000: 115.

Reflecting on museumgeek’s first three months

This blog has now been running for just shy of three months. In that time, I’ve written 31 posts, and received double that many comments (yep – you’re starting to talk back, which is awesome). Within a day or two, I should hit 2500 views, which is significantly more than I imagined I would have at the start (and even more surprising because my Mum has only read the site once – so it’s not just her!). I’ve been shocked (and excited) to find people responding to my ideas by writing entire posts of their own (and here), and have been honoured to discover my site listed in blogrolls of people whom I respect.

With all this, museumgeek has thoroughly exceeded my expectations.

What has surprised me is finding out the posts that get the most reads and reactions. When I started blogging, I thought I’d post a fair bit about technical innovation in museums. After all, that’s what the people whose blogs I read write about, and they’re always interesting to me.

What I quickly learned however is that the difference between those bloggers and me is that I’m not actually a tech geek. I might love technology and enjoy seeing the technological advances taking place in museums, but I have neither the background nor the mindset needed in order to best exploit the possibilities of technology.

Instead, it’s my more philosophical posts like Museum objects and complexity, Visualising the museum collection, Who owns the virtual space in your museum? and Who are you collecting for? that have drawn the greatest interest. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by this… museums are inextricably linked with philosophy, and my own bent of inquiry leans towards the existential. I probably write more passionately on these issues than on other things. Despite this, I didn’t expect that these would be the posts that would inspire the greatest response.

So there is that. In the last few days, this feedback has led me to start reconsidering the approach I was intending to take in my PhD. Although I need to discuss this with my supervisor, I’m starting to think that my research should be a philosophical inquiry, rather than a strictly “scientific” one. This is probably a silly idea… It will involve far more work, and be a lot harder. But I also think it will be a very interesting approach, and will certainly push me to look deeply into the issues. Hmm. I’ll keep you posted on this idea once I talk to my supervisor…

On a personal level, I’ve discovered that blogging is a lot of work, but very enjoyable. My writing muscles are growing stronger from regular use, and writer’s block is far less tyrannical than it was. Writing for an audience is great for helping me clarify my thoughts – although I still get scared every time I hit the “publish” button in case I’ve said something really stupid… although even if I do, hopefully you guys will take me to task for it so I can learn something new as a result.

In the mean time, thanks for reading and being part of my first three months!

Thoughts on the closure of the Dutch Museum of National History

My first guest geek Jasper Visser (don’t worry – there’s another geek speak coming soon) has just announced on his blog that his museum – the Dutch Museum of National History (INNL) – will no longer operate from 1 January 2012, following the announcement of funding cuts by Netherlands’ secretary of state responsible for culture.

This is a terribly disappointing – although not entirely surprising – thing to have happened. When I first met Jasper at MW2011, I spoke to him a little bit about the INNL network – the museum website that won the Best of the Web award for innovation – and at the time, he mentioned that it was possible that his institution could close at any time. I dismissed the possibility… coming from Australia, where our politicians are generally fairly centrist in action if not always in rhetoric, I didn’t really take seriously the threat that someone might close such an interesting and innovative project for seemingly political reasons.** And yet only months later, here we are.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Seb about the INNL and he remarked how vulnerable it was, being a national museum in a politically unstable country, and moreso being a museum without objects. And its true. After all, our very concept of what a museum is and should be is grounded in the fact that museums are the places that house objects. In Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums, Ken Arnold writes (p4) that early museums had three strategies for creating knowledge, being “the telling of stories, the use of objects, and the imposition of order upon them.” The INNL did use objects – like the National Vending Machine, or selected objects through which stories could be told – but it did not house a permanent collection. Instead, it sought to excite people about Dutch national history through stories and projects. And with concepts like “The ‘Land of What If’, a room with alternative Dutch histories”, no wonder it was vulnerable at a time when cultural institutions were threatened by politics.

Despite – and possibly because of – its short life, the INNL raises lots of questions for me about the nature of museums, and what a museum is and should be. Can a museum preserve the past without objects? Does the provenance of a museum come from the provenance of its objects, or its people?

As much as I love and am captured by the ideas behind the INNL, I wonder whether it was always going to be a time-limited project. Reading the vision of the project, I always feel inspired – but without objects, a museum of this nature can only ever be as successful as the people who are behind it, and it is likely that with time and staff changes, a sense of inertia would gain hold.

Yet the fact that it was (or appeared to be) successful during its short life should absolutely inspire those of us working in museums with exhibits to consider how we too could excite people about what we do if we didn’t have our objects to rely on – if we were forced to find new and more creative ways to tell stories.

In the mean time, I’m not sure what Jasper plans to do – or if he will stick around in this field… He has something of the entrepreneurial/world changing spirit about him and I imagine he might want to move on. But I look forward to seeing what he turns his hand to next.

**NB: I’ve recently learned that funding has been cut for This is Not Art – an arts festival that runs annually in my home town. This year might be the first year in over a decade that it doesn’t run, and I am fairly sure that the reasons behind this are political as well… so maybe even in Aust, culture is never safe from politics.

Who are you collecting for?

Who is your museum collection for?

This might seem like a strange (and even silly) question for a museum geek. After all, I really hope that on some level the objects in your collection are for me! But since last week, when I asked “if you have objects in your collection that could be useful to human society – whether to a researcher or someone else – and they can’t find or access that information (even just at a basic level to know that the object is in your collection), does that object have any purpose?” I’ve been thinking about just who and what we are collecting for.

At the Art Gallery where I work, we might have at most 200 collection objects on the floor at any one time (and many times, far less than this). This is out of a collection of almost 6000 works of art, and so most of the collection once acquired and preserved is rarely seen. We seem to hold onto some wonderful art objects for no one to use or even see.

And so I want to know for whom this wonderful collection – and all the other great collections of art; of specimens; of useful and not-useful objects – has been created. Is it for the silverfish? Or simply for the annals of history, in the hope that some day someone will have a purpose for it?

I am not the only person asking this. The Centre for the Future of Museums recently held a Twitter chat on the Future of Museum ethics (discussed here), and one of the questions raised was:

“[What are] The ethics of museums having many artifacts in storage which are never shown and are “inaccessible”[?] … In the digital age, with all materials potentially accessible in some way via the internet, what are a museum’s ethical obligations to invest in such access?”

And yet even once people can access a collection online, we are uncomfortable about letting go of control over our objects and collections – something that runs counter to mash-up culture. In 2010, Kristin R. Eschenfelder and Michelle Caswell published research on Digital cultural collections in an age of reuse and remixes that explored the control of non-commercial reuse of digital cultural works, and found that there were three main motivations for cultural institutions to seek control over their collections. These were “Controlling descriptions and representations,” “Legal risks and complexities” and “Getting credit: fiscal and social costs and revenue.”

Each of these does presents a significant reason why museums might seek to control the way that people can use the digital objects in their online collections. Further, Nick Poole recently published an excellent post about the Europeana Foundation’s new licence agreements, which would allow the publishing of Europeana digital cultural content as Linked Open Data. A significant number of museums expressed concern about signing the agreements, and Poole writes on why he thinks this is so:

As a linguist, I am used to talking about the signified and the signifier – broadly, there is the thing itself and the word which points to and describes the thing. For museums, this connection is very significant – there is the object, the material artefact, and then there is the meta-information which describes the object (the object number and its corresponding catalogue record). But this meta-information is neither simply factual nor simply descriptive. It, and the artefact it describes are part of an integral whole, connected by the object number as a persistent identifier.

Ergo, our collections are not simply about the objects. They are also about the history of the object, and even the history of the object’s interpretation. And online, that collection is signified by the way it is presented and represented digitally.

And as such I imagine that many institutions would still be incredibly uncomfortable about a member of the public ‘remixing’ the digital simulacrum of their collection objects (even those objects which are no longer under copyright). Which leads me back to my original question. Who is your collection for? If we feel the need to prevent the public from being able to reuse the digital object in a very vital and contemporary way, then does this mean our collection isn’t for them? And if we are not collecting for the public, then whom are we collecting for? Academics and researchers? Other museum professionals? Abstract people who live in some imagined future iteration of our world?

Early collections started in private homes and to satisfy personal whims. Answering this question a couple of hundred years ago would have been incredibly simple. The answer would have been limited to an individual and his social circle. But I’m not so sure that this question is so straight-forward now, and particularly in light of the fact that we can now make museum collections available to the general public online.

Now, I am not calling for cultural institutions to cede control of their online collections. There are legal, fiscal and cultural implications to such action, and this is not the argument I am trying to make. I guess I’m just trying to work out exactly who it is museums are holding onto their objects for.

Oh – and BTW – if you do know who your collection is for, I’d love to know if that impacts on your online collection, and in what ways.