Last week, around 500 museum digital practitioners were thrown together in a resort in San Diego for MCN 2019. This was my eighth MCN, and it was the first one since I first attended in 2011 that I had absolutely no hand in shaping. When I first went to MCN, I was both a scholarship recipient and […]
April 20, 2017
I’m sitting in my office in Washington, DC, following the Tweets from the annual Museums and the Web conference. The keynote speaker is Tim Phillips from Beyond Conflict, who’s tackling the topic, Building More Inclusive Communities: Lessons From 25 Years On The Front Lines Of Peace. There is some great discussion surrounding this keynote, including a […]
December 19, 2016
Earlier today nikhil trivedi and I wrapped our long-form letter-based conversation on museums, the nature of institutions, structural change, and oppression. The conversation, which is our contribution to A Series of Epistolary Romances, includes thoughts sparked by the election, and considers everything from institutional reform all the way through to the abolition of current institutions. It’s been a rewarding […]
January 27, 2016
Digital transformation is really about something else that often isn’t openly talked about – transforming audiences. – Seb Chan What does it mean to transform an audience? Is it a shift in the make-up of an audience, how that audience is conceived, how an audience behaves and interacts with an institution, or all three? I’ve been trying […]
January 21, 2014
I am fascinated by power. When I was involved with the music industry, and my friends were busy dissecting the production values of obscure indie records, I was reading the street press to find out who the power brokers were. I wanted to know which individuals shaped what I heard, or could make or break […]
October 29, 2013
I just happened to stick my head up from the books for a moment to catch a wild discussion taking place on Twitter about whether 3D mash-ups of masterpieces are ‘sacrilege’ or merely ‘winking irreverence’. Arts journalist Lee Rosenbaum Tweets that the ‘@MetMuseum‘s digerati should serve the curators, not the other way around’, and is […]
August 26, 2013
There was an interesting article in the NYTimes Sunday Review yesterday. Unlike that article about museums and high culture, this one isn’t about museums. It’s about who should bear the moral responsibilities of new technologies: Adapting to a new technology is like a love affair, said Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and a writer of […]
July 8, 2013
One of the coolest ideas that I picked up at Museums and the Web this year was the Imperial War Museums‘ Computer Club; an “informal club for all staff that aims to provide a hands-on experience with technology.” It was so cool, in fact, that I’ve asked Carolyn Royston, Head of Digital Media at the IWM, […]
June 4, 2013
Does a repeat visitor to your museum have more value than a unique visitor? How often does someone have to visit your museum to be considered loyal or ‘repeat’? How do you know whether people are engaged with your museum? These are questions I’ve been thinking about since visiting Dallas back in April (this year […]
November 14, 2019
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