Category: Ideas

If a tree falls in a museum, and no one is there to hear it…

Australian IT policy advisor Pia Waugh has just posted the first of a series of four posts on online culture. This one, titled Unicorns and Doom, investigates some of the ways that the Internet is changing mainstream culture. As she writes

Using the Internet changes your expectations of the world around you, and importantly your expectations of how you can interact with the world.

The entire post is compelling, and I would recommend that everyone should read it. However, I am going to pull out a few of her key points now and dissect them a little bit for what they mean for museums.

Waugh argues that there are four expectations/behaviours that we develop when we engage online. These are the expectation that we can route around damage – or find new paths around any form of artificial interference; healthy skepticism – that we can examine and question information, particularly official information that doesn’t necessarily gel with other evidence; an expectation of transparency and accountability; and an expectation that through “do-ocracy” or people power, it really is possible to make significant changes to the world.

In her post, Pia expands on each of these ideas considerably. However, I’ll now just grab a couple of her ideas in brief for closer examination. She writes:

When we want to know about something, we automatically look it up online. We expect to be able to get information on any subject we choose and when information is not forthcoming we ask why.

This is one of the very real and compelling reasons why I do think that museum collections do need to be online… When Koven asked what’s the point of a museum website at MW2011, and again in his Ignite speech, my first answer was (and continues to be) that as we become more and more reliant on the Internet as the storage space for the sum of human knowledge and information (as seems to be happening) then if something is not online it will almost be as if it doesn’t exist. It’s the tree falling in the woods argument reframed… 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? How can it tell us anything about ourselves/our past/culture if we don’t even know it exists?

Now this is a very different question of how we make that information useful and useable – and I think that is an entirely unresolved problem (see Mia Ridge’s post on death by aggregation). But as our social expectations regarding information change, it really is becoming the case that if information about something is not accessible online, then we look for other information. Even as a researcher, I will look online at my library’s collection to see what books they have that I might be able to use well before I make the trip into the physical location. That’s not to say that serendipity won’t guide my search once I’m there, but the initial impulse usually occurs when I’m not in situ – and my future actions are predicated on the information that I find online.

Waugh’s post continues:

The Internet has democratised both access to and “publishing” of knowledge. The control of knowledge has always been a power mechanism, and we are now seeing a significant struggle as traditional knowledge and power brokers find themselves continually flanked by individuals and communities.

This is something I’ve wanted to write about for a little while now. The publishing of knowledge, and control over information, is something that has obviously been important for museums historically. It was a key aspect of how museums maintained their authority, by making some claim to control over the objects of our past and the information about those objects, and therefore about our past.

However, authority online comes from (appearing to have) visibility of process, rather than from hiding behind safe institutional walls. This means that organisations need to be work harder to ensure consistency between what they say they do and what they actually do, since they will be called to account if people notice gaps between the rhetoric and the action.

Pia argues that the ease with which we can access, engage with and hold accountable anyone online makes it easier for people to make informed choices, and I would agree. This article by Richard Smith from the Journal of Financial Transformation provides an interesting perspective into transparency and trust in the ‘post-Gutenberg era’, or the era of social media (although focussed on business institutions and brands). He writes:

In the Gutenberg world, trust was institutionalized. Organizations worked to establish reputations such that people would trust anything and everything they did without feeling the need to interrogate it for themselves. This worked because it was efficient, from the organization’s perspective, and because individuals recognized that they could not (or could not be bothered to) comprehensively interrogate all the organizations they dealt with. They would accept an organization’s ‘institutionalized representation’ of itself (its brand) — provided they could have a level of reassurance that this representation was reasonably accurate.

Trust within social media is not vested in institutions, it is vested within visible processes. The best way to explain this is to look further at the Wikipedia example and its battle with Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is a classic example of institutionalized trust. You trust its entries based on your knowledge of the reputation for accuracy it has established and carefully nurtured over the years. You do not feel the need to look behind or interrogate this reputation in any way. Wikipedia is totally different. You trust its entries purely on the fact that it has made visible the way that entry was produced and refined. Even if you do not choose to examine the history of every entry, the simple fact that you can do this and there is a process in place which means somebody is doing this, gives you a level of trust. Critically, an element of this trust is based around the need for you to make your own assessment of the process and how much trust you will decide to allocate to it.

It is not that people are going to reject institutionalized trust, but the task of sustaining it is going to become much harder in the world of transparency brought about by social media. Organizations will, therefore, find that ultimately the only efficient way to maintain trust is to switch to a model based on process, which will mean creating the ability to see in much greater detail how an organization goes about its business.

As Pia’s post indicates, mainstream culture is changing as a result of the Internet. What this means for museums – particularly online – is still open to significant debate. But it is important to look at the significant and apparently lasting trends occurring within technology and the ways society is changing as a result to get a sense of how and where the museum website fits.

Who owns the virtual space in your museum?

Yesterday I crashed my first ever ARDevCamp @ the Powerhouse Museum. Despite being late (buses do not replace trains very effectively) and missing some of the morning talks, the afternoon provided plenty of inspiration and lots of think about. True to form, I used my spidey senses to find some incredibly interesting people to sit next to, and got into some great conversations – some of which will no doubt inform this blog over the next few days.

One of the most interesting questions that arose at the Camp was about digital space and augmented reality (AR). Rob Manson from Mob Labs spoke a bit about the question of who owns the digital space – an issue that will no doubt become more important as more companies and individuals start tapping into the AR potential, particularly for advertising (if this stuff interests you, it’s worth reading this article on Mashable). But it’s also an interesting question for museums to think about.

Last October Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek staged a guerrilla AR intervention at MoMA as part of the Conflux Psychogeoraphy festival. The exhibition not only took over the current six floors of MoMA, it created an AR sculpture garden on the “seventh” floor. Check out the video for a sense of the event.

WeARinMoMA seems more akin to performance art than anything else, in part because of the time-limited nature of the performance. But I’m interested in how museums – and I’m probably thinking about art museums in particular – would deal with more of these kinds of interventions. What if Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek decided that they wanted their exhibition to be permanent?

The Stuckists (talking about the Tate) argue that:

An act by an individual which interferes with an existing artwork is termed an “intervention” and the individual termed an “artist” if they are endorsed by a Tate curator or are dead. The same, or similar, act by an individual interfering with the same artwork (or even interfering with the interference to the artwork), if they are alive and are not endorsed by a Tate curator, is termed “vandalism”, and the individual termed a “criminal”.

So what would happen if someone painted an AR beard on the Mona Lisa? Would the Louvre try to prevent the intervention for being vandalism? It does not harm or interfere with the actual work, although may impact upon its interpretation. Could an artist be prosecuted for digital vandalism?

Or conversely, would the AR addition to the painting be recognised as an important part of the painting’s provenance? Could visitors delight in seeing the painting through another artist’s eyes, and comparing that to the original then and there? Would the interpretation be documented and preserved in the artist file? And how would it be done? Would there simply be videos and photos as per a performance, or would the documentation include recording lines of code as well? Could the AR art be collected, and if so, how? Does the long tail of this end with a curator of AR in the museum?

This guy floated over the Powerhouse @ ARDevCampSyd

The AR might not only take place within the Gallery. Yesterday a giant virtual Lego man stood above the Powerhouse Museum, welcoming visitors to ARDevCamp. This could be a great way for museums seeking redevelopment funding to get people enthused about the project, by projecting the architectural models over the physical building.

But what if the layer had been promoting a commercial product instead? While I can see all kinds of awesome applications for this for artists seeking a little notoriety (like emblazoning their own name on the wall of a Gallery), they might not be the only ones interested in claiming the digital space around museums and galleries. What if Coke decided to as well? Or a political party?

Of course, these are all hypothetical situations and will likely never eventuate. The questions that arise out of real world AR interventions in digital space are likely to be far more nuanced – and far more interesting. But these questions demonstrate just how little we can prepare to respond to technology until we know how it’s actually utilised. While the legal and ethical debates around these issues might be fun to think about, it won’t be until there are cases actually in the courts that the actual implications will become clear. After all, laws are made in response to actual events not hypothetical ones, and individual cases often require individual responses. But until then, it’s interesting to consider just who owns the virtual space in your museum – and around it.

Museum objects and complexity

Being in the first six months of my PhD, I am still in the reading/learning/planning stages of my research. This means that I’m spending a lot of time looking at how other people have been approaching the field, and I’ve noticed a number of people working in the museum technology area are utilising complexity theory to inform their work (see Fiona Cameron and Sarah Mengler Complexity, Transdisciplinarity and Museum Collections Documentation: Emergent Metaphors for a Complex World from the Journal of Material Culture 2009 for an example).

My initial reading into the area has led me to some interesting thoughts. According to John H. Miller and Scott E. Page, one of the things that makes a system complex, rather than merely complicated, is that the system cannot be reduced to a simple form for study. They illustrate the point, using the following example:

When a scientist faces a complicated world, traditional tools that rely on reducing the system to its atomic elements allow us to gain insight. Unfortunately, using these same tools to understand complex worlds fails, because it becomes impossible to reduce the system without killing it. The ability to collect and pin to a board all of the insects that live in the garden does little to lend insight into the ecosystem contained therein.
Miller, John H. & Scott E. Page (2007), Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life, Princeton University Press. p10.

It strikes me that this is an interesting metaphor for the museum collection too. Early museum collections were precisely about reducing things to their elements, so that they could be better studied and understood. Ken Arnold succinctly makes this point in his book Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums, when he writes: “… it was the museum’s walls that signalled their defining function: they kept the objects in, whilst simultaneously keeping out other distractions” (Arnold, 5). The museum utilised its walls to isolate, so that the objects held within were able to be studied in a very limited and controlled context. They were liberated from the complex systems within which they originally functioned so we could better understand them as objects.

This might seem almost self-evident when thinking about natural history or science museums, but it’s equally true of art museums. When we remove a work of art from its social environment – from the political and cultural context in which it was created – we isolate that work of art, and put it into a very limited and prescribed context, based on a fairly limited view of art history. Curatorial statements attempt to describe some of the context within which the work was created, but we have still removed the art from its complex system, and isolated it for preservation and study. In doing so, we remove some of the plurality of the work’s meaning, but make it more directly comparable with other collected works within the museum taxonomy. Arnold writes, “taxonomy and classification have for almost three centuries been the most powerful way by which knowledge has been created and then reinterpreted within museums” (Arnold, 243) and this isolation for comparative purposes has been a key aspect of this.

Conversely, the Internet is a complex adaptive system. Therefore when we upload museum collections and allow people to interact with them in new ways, we are actually trying to reinsert our previously isolated objects back into a highly complex system. This is a critical reversal in the way we think about our objects and collections. For possibly the first time, the objects in our collection are not being sequestered away from the world and hidden within the safe space of the museum. Instead, we must now try to reposition those objects and collections within the broad context of the Internet, and indeed, the whole world. No wonder the sector is struggling with how best to cope with this change. Not only are we inviting the public to interact with our collections in ways that have previously been impossible, we are asking the objects in our collection to take their place in a complex environment from which they have previously been quarantined.

On creative risks and PhD blogging

Nina Simon has just written a post entitled Empowering Staff to Take Creative Risks in which she asks “What are you willing to risk to pursue your dreams?” It’s a somewhat timely post for me, because I am stuck deliberating on the role of blogging for me in the PhD process.

Yesterday I drafted a new blog post which I think poses an interesting perspective on moving museum collections to the Internet. Only in its fledgling stage, the idea is probably not particularly groundbreaking – but I think it has the potential to be developed further and it could be relevant to my PhD. And suddenly I find myself stuck as to whether to put it – and other PhD thoughts – online or not.

I’ve asked my supervisors for their thoughts, as well as asking an open question on Facebook and Twitter about what academics think of the issue. The responses have been mixed. Some have said they couldn’t imagine it being a problem, some have warned against the risk that someone would steal my ideas, and one friend pointed out the possible intricacies involved with people posting ideas in comments, and how difficult attribution might be if my ideas were later informed by discussion that took place online.

And so when I read Nina Simon’s post, it made me question precisely what I am willing to risk in the pursuit of my ideas and my career. This blog has become an interesting vehicle for me. Although it has only been up and running for a few weeks, I’ve had quite a few people contact me because of it, and have started some interesting conversations as a result. It is letting me make some interesting new professional (and personal) contacts, and has helped ensure that my mind never completely switches off thinking about the field, because I’m always on the look out for something new to post about.

But until now I have never actually wanted to post thoughts that might later be important to my research. Doing so could be a risk. Someone could indeed steal my ideas without attribution. Having said that, just starting a public blog and putting my ideas – mostly half-formed and in need of work around the edges – into the blogosphere carries with it certain risks. But ultimately, I think that hiding away from criticism and the opportunity to fall flat on my face would be worse. After all, the things that appear safe in life often aren’t. Seth Godin wrote recently on ‘exceptional’ brands, and why they fail:

The problem with brand exceptionalism is that once you believe it, it’s almost impossible to innovate. Innovation involves failure, which an exceptional brand shouldn’t do, and the only reason to endure failure is to get ahead, which you don’t need to do. Because you’re exceptional.

The take home message from both Seth’s and Nina’s posts is that pursuing big things – like dreams, careers and in the case of museums, innovation – is risky, and that risks bring with them real opportunities for failure. But that it’s only by being open to failure that really interesting things happen.

Does this mean that I will upload the post I drafted yesterday? I haven’t yet decided, and will seek further advice first. Though unless anyone can give me a compelling reason not to, I probably will. If someone steals my ideas, at least that means they were worth stealing (is this a Web2.0 attitude?).

In the mean time, I’d love to hear from anyone else who is or has been in a similar situation on what they decided to do. I know that a lot of museum bloggers are also research students, so surely this is something other people have grappled with too.

The New West: Museum frontier towns

As I watched the MuseumNext tweets roll through this week, it occurred to me that one of the things that draws me to this profession is the optimism and idealism that seem to exist within it. Every conversation, every 140-word tweet, seems to ask how we can encourage innovation, participation and the opening up and expanding of knowledge. When I read blogs from the field, I feel that I read the words of visionaries, explorers and philosophers.

Given that we are setting out to conquer previously unexplored territory, this is probably not surprising (nb: I’d be interested in whether some key personality types – maybe adventurers/explorers – are disproportionately found this field… something to consider further). I wonder if this same sense of cooperation and excitement is true across all areas of technological development… the Internet has brought with it so many opportunities for connecting like-minded souls and bringing minds together in conversation that this sense of community and common purpose cannot be unique to this sector. After all, who doesn’t love discovering that they aren’t the only person obsessed with knitting sweaters for their cat?!? In this climate, it truly doesn’t surprise me that now is when the privately-funded space race is taking off.

Koven’s Ignite speech likened museum websites to Conestoga wagons in an age of the automobile. Yet in many ways we are still living in technological frontier towns. We don’t have cars yet because we haven’t yet built the paved roads that could accommodate them. But when I read about the innovations that are already happening in our field, I am sure that it won’t be too long before we have created the equivalent of the transcontinental railroad. People in the field seem willing to share both their successes and their hard-won lessons and there is an almost ennobling sense of purpose in the pursuit of new and better ways forward.

Having said that, as exciting as these movements forward are for those of us exploring this undiscovered territory, we have to ensure that we don’t forget to communicate our journey to those back home in the ‘old country’. Being on the precipice of a new and unshaped world might be exciting, but for those who aren’t part of the journey uncertainty breeds fear. It’s no surprise that in many museums, this interactive world of digital technology might cause consternation. Any adventure into undiscovered territory brings with it a sense of risk and fear. And so it is the responsibility of those who are making new paths through the digital wilderness to map those paths, and show the people who will follow that the way ahead is safe.

The Transcontinental Railroad comes together

Visualising the museum collection

I’ve been thinking today about how we visualise knowledge and information.

Since 1735 – when Carolus Linneas first published Systema Naturae  – we have relied on tree-like hierarchical classification schemes to define and enunciate the similarities and differences between things. These strict binary classifications provide us with an incredibly useful and logical way of relating objects to one another, and organising that information.

But in 2005, David Weinberger asked (PDF) (emphasis mine):

Without trees, how would we organize college curricula, business org charts, the local library, and the order of species? How will we organize knowledge itself?

It’s an interesting question. Weinberger’s piece, entitled Taxonomies to Tags: From trees to piles of leaves, examined social tagging and suggested that it provided the possibility of a new form of classification (one that is, it must be noted, unsystematic). He wrote:

Tags are a break from previous ways of categorizing. Both trees and faceted systems specify the categories, or facets, ahead of time. They both present users with tree-like structures for navigation, letting us climb down branches to get to the leaf we’re looking for. Tagging instead creates piles of leaves in the hope that someone will figure out ways of putting them to use – perhaps by hanging them on trees, but perhaps creating other useful ways of sorting, categorizing and arranging them.

Weinberger’s way of looking at the descriptions we attach to objects acknowledges that there can be multiple relationships between things, each of which can be meaningful in their interpretation. At first glance, it seems much more akin to the information experience online, into which people can jump in at any single point, and follow an unfixed and continually unfolding journey to any other point. But while we can dive straight into a pile of leaves and reconfigure them in countless ways, it probably still helps to know what trees they fell from to understand whether you are rolling around in a pile of poison ivy.

However, where Weinberger’s piece is interesting to me is that it starts me thinking about new ways to organise knowledge.

Over the last week or so, I’ve come across a couple interesting conversations happening in the blogosphere, where other people are also thinking about the metaphors we use to describe our music and our museums.

Ed Rodley’s post on Apps as data visualizations reviews two recent apps – Planetary, a data visualisation app for music; and Biblion, the New York City Public Library’s newest app. Planetary is a data visualisation app that uses the metaphor of the galaxy to describe relationships within your music library. But what really captured me in Ed’s post (and ultimately inspired this response) is the challenge that he throws out, to “Substitute your museum’s CMS for your iTunes library and imagine the possibilities.”

Last week, Mia Ridge proposed that we open conversation on new metaphors for museums. She asks,

…what if we were Amazon? A local newspaper? A specialist version of Wikipedia? A local pub? A student blog? A festival, a series of lectures, or a film group? A pub quiz? Should a museum be at the heart of village life, a meeting place for art snobs, a drop-in centre, a café, a study space, a mobile showroom?

These discussions got me thinking about the very question that started this post. How do we visualise knowledge and information? And how could we? Are there new metaphors that have emerged out of the World Wide Web that could provide us with new ways to see the relationships between things? And finally, how could these new metaphors apply to museums, and only museum collections?

If Planetary can imagine music as the dance of the planets, could we visualise museum collections as a subway network with innumerate nodes where people can choose a direction to begin looking (ie American Modern Art), and travel along that line, stopping as frequently as they want or choosing an express past the objects until they reach their desired location; or until they choose to diverge to a side track (Kandinsky’s greatest hits) with new and spontaneous tracks able to be created in a moment.
(BTW – is it obvious I wrote this post on the train)

Or instead, can we imagine a museum as a city, whose buildings are filled with the markers of those who have come before? Peter M Allen, in his paper from the Complexity Theories of Cities Conference 2009 titled Cities: the Visible Expression of Co-evolving Complexity, argues that:

Towns and cities are the visible external evidence of the complex, historical co-evolution of the knowledge, desires and technology of the multiple agents that have inhabited them. The buildings are monuments, some short lived some long, to the activities and identities of successive individuals whose efforts have been guided by the emerging patterns of ‘demand and supply’ of various activities. Physical, psychological, environmental and technological factors have influenced the particular patterns and structures that have emerged that reflected the co-evolution of technology with our changing desires and aspirations.

I feel that this statement could be equally applied to museums, with museum collections seen as  “the visible external evidence of the complex, historical co-evolution of the knowledge, desires and technology of the multiple agents that have [created] them… Physical, psychological, environmental and technological factors have influenced the particular patterns and structures that have emerged that reflected the co-evolution of technology with our changing desires and aspirations.” Now, doesn’t that sound like the way museum collections evolve, pieced together by different people and influenced by different fashions and gifts to the museum?

And if that is the case, maybe the way we need to consider modelling the information within them requires a more complex metaphor than is provided by trees, or piles of leaves. But what do you think? How could you imagine a museum collection, metaphorically?

Collecting [&] 1000 fans

Last week a post on Open Culture caught my attention. It proposes A New Way Forward for Museums and calls for museums to “get smart and get excited about culture, reach out and forge a new social contract with the public and a new economic contract with industry to create a new offer that is fit for a new generation of audiences.” It’s worth reading when you have time (it’s a longish post, and probably requires more than a quick glance).

But it’s the discussion in the comments that has me interested. Judith writes:

In many museums, such as natural history collections, we curators have difficulty explaining why digitized dead worms would be interesting to the general public and therefore worthy of the monetary layout to make the effort.

I responded to this comment myself, but wanted to explore the idea that I touched on there a little further by considering Kevin Kelly’s concept of 1000 true fans. For Kelly, a true fan is “someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce.” They are the people who are obsessed with what you do. For musicians and artists, these are the people who will follow you around the country to see you perform live, or who will buy (into) whatever you are doing, and talk to others about it etc.

Online, true fans can be spread all over the world, and connect with one another and with the artist (or company or whatever it is). These ‘communities of passion’ can unite and share ideas, expertise and passion despite distance in their physical proximity. And this same philosophy is something that I think that museums should be thinking about when putting their collections online. As I wrote on the Open Culture blog, rather than considering the general public when putting our collections online, we should:

Consider the 1000 people in the world who are absolutely fascinated by worms [or whatever is in your collection], and who know and understand more about worms than you of I ever could. And that those 1000 people might be spread all across the planet with no way to access the information that’s currently stored in your collection… but by putting it online, one of those worm-obsessed people might be able to see something in your worm collection that might prove to be a major breakthrough in ‘wormology’ that makes an impact on better ways of planning for environmental degradation or composting or … something (I’m not a worm expert, so I can’t tell you what it would be).

Ed Rodley agreed, continuing:

Every collection can’t appeal to the masses. They never have and never will. But there is an audience out there for just about any subject. Our challenge is to find ways to connect our content with those audiences.

If Ed is right, then maybe museums should consider trying to identify their target markets more specifically online, rather than trying to be all things to all people. Instead of putting our collections online and hoping someone finds them useful, we should be aiming to find ways to connect our content with the people who will use it best in the way that will most suit them. For a small museum or gallery, that might mean finding effective ways to connect to the local population. But not necessarily. As Owen Thomas at Mashable writes “When we talk about community, we talk about places and spaces. But online communities transcend geography.”

Passionate vermiculturalists are no doubt located all over the world. So how can a museum with a big collection of worms reach and connect with the 1000 true fans who would really care about that collection? What can museums – with our wealth of stored knowledge captured in objects and in our people – bring to this community that they can’t get anywhere else?

Imagine if we could even encourage these niche community to grow and interact on our websites so the the museum becomes a key destination for connection rather than simply a resource. Is the Semantic Web key in making this happen, bringing together disparate information sources into a single resource for a community (like the INNL website, which Jasper Visser describes as “a semantic network of history and heritage websites. Existing online collections and communities are connected in a meaningful way with each other and our website”)? Or can we even utilise a vehicle like online forums to bring passionate people together with experts and the objects that interest them?

Already museums are inviting more interaction with their audiences online through social networking (see what people want from museums on Facebook and Twitter). But these interactions still seek to speak to mass audience, when they might be more effective if we can find a way to service and even cultivate niche communities.

When James Davis launched the Tate’s beta collection at MW2011, he spoke of the three different types of users that they had made the website  to suit: researchers, explorers and dreamers. Each type of user required a different stylistic approach, because each type of user sought different things from their experience of an online collection. It would be interesting if museums could build on the idea of personalising the approach based on a user’s needs and refine it even further to give ‘communities of passion’ a meaningful user experience in context of the online museum.