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.

Deaccessioning friends and Intel’s “Museum of Me”

A glib exchange on Twitter this morning left a far greater impression on me than it should have when Bruce Wyman tweeted about Intel’s new Museum of Me. In what was almost certainly trolling, Bruce mentioned his appreciation for the MoM and I couldn’t help but take the bait. My reply touched on the fact that the MoM makes poor choices in deciding which friends to highlight in it’s so-called “journey of a visualization that explores who I am”, to which Bruce replied:

This response, strangely reminiscent of something from The Importance of Being Earnest, stuck with me and gnawed at the edges of my brain. Was Bruce right? Should I start deaccessioning my friends until the MoM became more accurate? The Museum’s multimedia display was strangely lacking too where I’d failed to input data about my favourite tv shows and movies. Should I work harder to fill in the gaps in the digital collection of my life, to ensure that my exhibition stayed up-to-date with all the latest trends? I started to consider that maybe I needed a collections management policy for the digital me.

I’m sure by now you can see why I was concerned. It’s not that the MoM is a soulless and narcissistic paean to the culture of me-ism. It’s that its ‘me’ is wrong. It’s cobbled together from the leftover remnants of digital interactions, the little communicative gifts bestowed on my facebook page. And in some ways, that means that it’s just like a real museum collection. After all, museums frequently begin with an act of benefaction – a gift to a city or a university from a private citizen whose personal collecting biases inform that collection for perpetuity. Further gifts will continue to shape the collection, and so-called gaps are often only filled when their absence becomes prominent. And so although I can probably shape the message of the MoM to make it more indicative of who I am, it will take quite a bit work and there are limitations… after all, explaining to my friends that I have to deaccession them so that my MoM collection more fully reflects who I am might be a little tough. Though they might understand the problem because no doubt they all have their own MoM too.

Of course, if I was to look at each of their MoM, I’d probably be in for a fairly cold experience. By necessity (let’s be honest, it is just a quirky marketing ploy) the MoM takes a one-size-fits all approach to exhibition design and collection management. The gallery space isn’t exactly tailored to different people with different interests, needs and wants, so it’s no surprise that it can’t be all things to all people. And even more critically, without the memories and stories of my friends to animate their MoM, any pleasure that could be derived from the experience would be superficial at best.

The whole MoM experience reminds me of this post on the Interactive blog. Regan Forrest writes of her experiences preparing design proposals, and says that many of the stock portfolio images:

depicted beautifully finished, perfectly lit, crisp, clean . . . empty spaces. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for projects where the aesthetic was a big part of the whole point (fine art exhibitions for instance). But I felt they really sold interactive spaces short – even the most interactive and engaging exhibition in the world looks sterile and passive without visitors there to breathe life into it.

Which is the very point. The MoM ultimately fails for me because it is nothing more than a sterile approximation at representation, but it’s still worth thinking about for the perspective it brings.

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

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.

Speaking trumpets: blowing the museum’s horn

I am reading Ken Arnold’s Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums at the moment. Arnold uses a comparative approach to consider contemporary museums in context of the founding principles of museums of the 17th century.

He discusses “three dominant strategies for knowledge creation in museums… the telling of stories, the use of objects, and the imposition of order upon them” (Arnold 2006, 4). As I’ve been reading the book, it has really struck me that, online at least, museums seem to be renegotiating these key strategies – moving away from both the use of objects to construct knowledge and away from strict taxonomies (since the Internet is much more rhizomatic than hierarchical). Instead there seems to be a renewed interest (also here, and here too) in the telling of stories as a primary driving force for knowledge creation online, and in making that relationship dialogic, rather than unidirectional.

Therefore, it was with interest that I read this paragraph in Arnold’s (2006, 90) book (emphasis mine):

The urge to tell stories in museums can only be understood once the role of people as well as the object within them has been fully grasped, and this is crucially on both sides of the collector/curator – visitor/audience divide. Museums have always been places for people’s discursive lives: spaces for teaching and learning, but also quite simply for sounding off. This is why it was quite natural for the sixteenth-century naturalist Athanasius Kircher to equip his museum with speaking trumpets, ensuring that curators and visitors were audible to each other – as if the significance of the spoken word was too great simply to be left to the vagaries of the unaided voice.

I love that almost 500 years ago the creators of museums were grappling with – and finding solutions to – the same questions that we ponder today.

Kircher’s speaking trumpets, from the Special Collections and University Archives of Stanford University Libraries

For a more contemporary take on Kircher’s speaking trumpets, the Scapes exhibition/app created by sound artist Halsey Burgund for deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts seems like a pretty cool way of inviting interactivity and story-telling into the museum environment. From the description, Scapes:

creates a two-way audio experience for museum visitors influenced significantly by their physical location on deCordova grounds. Participants will use handheld wireless devices and headphones to listen to audio and also to make their own recordings which will be immediately assimilated into the piece for everyone to hear.

Check out the below video to get a better sense of it, or read reviews by Nancy Proctor and Ed Rodley.

Scapes Intro from Halsey Burgund on Vimeo.

Review: Artfinder.com

An interesting start-up caught my eye today when featured on Mashable (although it turns out the company was at Museums and the Web – so it’s a shame I didn’t see them there). Artfinder combines a website, an artwork-identifying smartphone app, and a pile of iPad apps. According to their website, the company is:

partnering with a growing number of large and small galleries, museums and picture libraries worldwide, in particular with Bridgeman Art Library and Cabinet UK. On the Artfinder website, consumers can create their own personal ‘art gallery’, collect their most-loved artworks, and share them with their friends via Facebook, Twitter and email. Additionally, Artfinder’s innovative ‘magic tour’ helps consumers discover art whilst also exploring works that are recommended by friends and passionate experts.

Options for interacting with the site include an Art Shuffle option and the aforementioned Magic Tour (although the ‘choose your favourite’ images that the tour used to decide which path to send you down seemed a bit limited in range, and I wasn’t actually very excited by the art I was recommended – but the idea was fun). Each work of art on the site links to its originating gallery, and can be shared via Twitter or email and ‘Liked’ on Facebook. On the bottom of each work of art, there is a discussion question (How does this make you feel? What do you think about this artist?) which again links to Facebook. And in the Art Guides there are short descriptions of art movements, like the Renaissance (below).

But I think the really interesting thing about the site is that the works of art have been commercialised, with visitors given the opportunity to buy a copy of the artwork. According to the stats on Mashable, the Gallery currently has over 500,000 works of art, and has partnered with about 6,000 galleries, and this gives those galleries an interesting new opportunity for gaining a bit of commercial profit for merchandising – not to mention a new way to find out which works of art in their collections are the ones that people really want to buy. Imagine if the Bridgeman Art Library discovers that hundreds of people all want to buy one work of art they’ve never even considered merchandising… it could be a pretty interesting way to get some market research on the demand for merch for the collection.

One of the co-founders of the website used to be COO at Last.Fm, and I think that there are some obvious cross ideas at play conceptually… the notion of discovering and sharing art in this context isn’t too far from the idea of musical discovery on Last.fm. But unlike Last.fm which has a lot of great current and contemporary music on it, most of the art currently on Artfinder seems to be from a previous era (one where copyright has lapsed, I imagine)… The page on Postmodernism doesn’t seem to include any links to art – although some key artists are profiled – and there seems to be little discussion taking place about what’s happening within current art conversations. This is something I think could make the site more interesting, and is no doubt something that will come with time.

So what do I think of it as a site? Artfinder has some cool ideas, but I do think it is missing the expertise and authority that museums can and should have. I don’t necessarily trust the Artfinder brand to teach me about art in the same way I would a more established museum (rightly or wrongly).

The site still operates as a silo. It might link works of art across lots of galleries – which is cool because it brings together disparate collections into one place – but the information contained on the site seems to be entirely derived from within, rather than linking to external information sources and leading to a more interesting and serendipitous journey of discovery. There also doesn’t really seem to be much narrative accompanying the site/works, and it would be nice to have great sense of a story when looking at interesting art.

But possibly my biggest criticism of the site is that it asks nothing of me. I can flick through the pretty pictures, but there’s nothing compelling to really engage me – yet (though maybe as more people interact with the works online, that will change). As Jonathan Jones writes, in his review of the site, “Artfinder is another fine way of skimming the surface of art history. What the web needs next is a deeper exploration of great art.”

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s thoughts on the site. Have you used it? Would you use it? Did anyone see their demonstration at MW2011? And if so, what impressions did you get?

The end of scarcity and the economics of everything (including knowledge)

Earlier today I read an interesting piece by James L. McQuivey on Mashable.com titled Why the End of Scarcity Will Change the Economics of Everything [OPINION]. In it, he asks:

what happens if the economics of scarcity are exchanged for the economics of plenty? For those industries that provide information or experience as a primary good, scarcity is rapidly evaporating. The media business is undergoing a similar change with the rise of citizen journalists, bloggers, and YouTube performers — all of which circumvent the traditional systems that once dictated production norms and processes. Most of these companies have sought to restore order by reinstating scarcity rather than celebrating its passing. It’s not a good sign of things to come.

McQuivey argues that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter have staked their territories online precisely because they have given their product away. By creating unlimited potential for people to become invested in the product, these companies are renegotiating the rules on the economics of plenty. As he writes, “In their world, the costs to exploit scale revert to zero. The best ideas, no matter how small or underfunded, have the largest potential impact, and a company that gives its value away may stand to gain more value in return.”

Following on from this, McQuivey delivers a fairly bleak outlook for those industries like education that deal primarily in information in the context of an economy of plenty (emphasis added):

Education reformers have long predicted a world where top professors spread their knowledge across the globe through electronic tools. But the knowledge students need is not only located in those few professors’ minds. Once we digitize not just the distribution of knowledge but the production of it, the existing university system loses its raison d’etre. Why would people come to a single physical location at higher and higher costs when the knowledge it houses is no longer scarce?

Now, whether McQuivey’s predictions on the growing economy of plenty come to pass in the way he is imagining or not, it’s still something we should be considering as online museums in the twenty first century. Why would someone visit the Louvre’s website to find out about the Mona Lisa, when they could just click on the first link to pop up in Google? Even assuming they knew that the Mona Lisa was at the Louvre, what would compel them to invest time in learning how an unfamiliar site works, instead of just visiting Wikipedia?

Legona Lisa

In other words, what are we offering to our digital visitors that they can’t get elsewhere on the web? Is it expertise (or access to expertise)? Is it the curation of culture? In an economy that relies on scarcity, museums in their current format make a lot of sense. But what about one that doesn’t?

Examining the Rosetta Stone

As I was writing this post, Jasper Visser from the Dutch Museum of National History sent me a copy of the museum’s vision. The opening page simply states: THE NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM STIRS THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION. Now that’s a pretty awesome goal, and might be just the sort of thinking that can translate to compelling digital content and context in the online museum. Maybe the goal of the digital museum in a content of plenty is not simply to provide content and information – which can indeed be gathered from almost everywhere – but to stir the historical (or scientific or artistic) imagination. Maybe rather than relying on the scarcity of their product, museums online can find a way to do what arguably they have always done extraordinarily well and get people to ask questions, instead of seeking simply to provide answers.

Addendum: I was thinking about this on the cycle home, and I started wondering about whether any museums do include information about what is still unknown about their collections, as well as providing known information. What I mean is, surely there are works of art or objects in the museum that still raise questions. And if so, would providing those questions in context with the work and the associated text give people a compelling reason to invest in museum collection websites? I am guessing that one reason Wikipedia became so popular is that it asked of investment of people’s knowledge, and gave them opportunity to contribute to the collected intelligence of the world. Maybe museums need to do a bit more of the same. Rather than simply allowing people to tag works of art etc, we should actively seek new expertise by opening up about the gaps in our collections, and in our knowledge. Solving puzzles is a pretty addictive thing to do. No doubt that’s why Google have just started their A Google A Day page… The difference is the puzzles on their pages have known answers. Maybe one of the sweet things about museums is that the answers to our puzzles have not yet been found. Just a thought…

On “The Museum of the Future”

The Atlantic recently unearthed a couple of rather sweet articles from its great archives (a reminder that everything we know now is connected to that which has been previously discovered).

One of the articles is Walter Lippman’s 1948 vision for The Museum of the Future. He makes a pretty lovely case for the importance of museums:

The experience of man, and the creations, inventions, discoveries of men throughout the ages and in an infinite variety of circumstances, transcend our personal lives and our immediate interests. This inheritance is worth collecting and preserving and using—whatever our transient hopes and fears… Without the accumulated achievements of the past to work upon, the freedom of men would be limited by the necessity of rediscovering and of repeating endlessly that which has already been discovered and experienced. And since life is short and art is long, not much would be discovered, and little would be created.

However, his sentiments are preceded in an article from 1893 by Edward S Morse, titled If Public Libraries, Why Not Public Museums? I find it fascinating to realise not much longer than a century ago, in America at least, the case for museums is not yet made… So what does Morse see as being the special role of the museum? He writes:

the building of a museum requires special gifts and special training. Besides, one thoroughly imbued with the spirit of a collector should have charge of a museum… The absence of a public demand for museums in the past has arisen from the methods of public instruction. Lessons from books, and not from nature, have been the tiresome lot of school children. Questions and answers, cut and dried, have tended to deaden the inquiring spirit.

Thomas Greenwood, the author of a special work on museums and art galleries, expresses his belief that “the museum of the future must stand side by side with the library and the laboratory, as a part of the teaching equipment of the college and the university, and in the great cities cooperate with the public library as one of the principal agencies for the enlightenment of the people.”… A museum seems as much an integral part of the public library as are the experiments part of a lecture on chemistry or physics. If the public library is established primarily for educational purposes, surely the public museum should come in the same category. The potency of an object in conveying information beyond all pages of description is seen in the fact that in the museum a simple label associated with a veritable object is often sufficient to tell the story at a glance; the eye seizes the essentials at once.

Taken together, we get a sense that the legacy of the museum is to enliven learning and to leave the traces of man’s experience writ large upon the world so that we can truly understand who we are, and how our world works (oh were it only so simple). But maybe these early visions can provide some perspective to the question that keeps popping up from those working in digital heritage: what would a museum look like if it was invented today?

Despite being written in 1948, Lippman’s vision seems almost slightly prescient of what the future could hold for museums as we move further into the digital age (emphasis added):

One can imagine, I venture to think, that the museum of the future will have two departments—one the sanctuary where the unique objects, the irreplaceable relics, are preserved and exhibited for the veneration and the enjoyment of those who make the pilgrimage; the other department in effect a library for the student, the scholar, and the amateur, where they can find, as in any library, collected in one place and readily accessible to them various editions of the unique objects which are scattered in the sanctuaries all over the world.

Lippman’s vision for a museum of the future so articulated does not sound so different from the clearly delineated ‘departments’ we now find as museums move online, with the physical museum akin to Lippman’s sanctuary, the the digital collection likened to his library. How the second of these develops further is the next interesting question… So what will the museum of the future really look like?

Is content enough? What about wonder?

When I was in NYC earlier this month, I went to a pile of museums and galleries – the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Frick Collection, the American Museum of Natural History, the International Centre for Photography, the Pierport Morgan Library, the New York City Library and more. One thing that they inspired in common was a sense of wonder. I gaped, open-mouthed at the beauty, the history and the stories of the world. Sitting under the giant blue whale at AMNH, I felt a childlike reverence for the universe around me – the sort of feeling that opens your mind to learning, to trying to take everything in.

The blue whale at AMNH

It’s one of the most compelling reasons why people go to museums. Standing in context of something so impressive as the blue whale or a work of art by Pollack (I am a sucker for abstract expressionism) is a very physical and affective experience. It can be wondrous in the true sense of the word.

It’s something that I don’t think the AMNH website replicates or captures in any way – that sense of perspective, where you have an almost physical sense of your place in the natural world, in history, or in context of the lost lives and civilisations that have come before. I’m not sure of many museum websites that do yet.

But there are moments of wonder online. I experienced it most recently watching this TED talk by Janna Levin, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College/Columbia University in which she plays mathematical models of the sounds that black holes might make. It’s a long clip, but pretty imagination-capturing. (Although her work makes me wonder if Professor Farnsworth’s Smelloscope isn’t entirely far off…)

I also get it looking at the detail in this interactive 360 panoramic of the Strahov Library (though imagine how cool it would be if you could actually select a book from the shelf and look through it!), and from You are listening to Los Angeles – an amazing sound space that combines random drone tracks from Soundcloud with the feed from the LAPD scanner.

I was talking to a fellow museum/web geek yesterday about wonder, and he mentioned that it’s little things that bring him wonder, not big hit-you-in-the-face moments. He sent me to this beautiful site, and it reminded me that wonder and inspiration can come from simplicity too.

So what about museums? Can we, should we, seek to capture people’s imaginations online in the same way we can in the flesh? Do we put the museum collection online only so that it is accessible for its own sake, and so that people can explore it if they are motivated enough? Or is there a way to create that same sense of perspective and discovery that the physical museum invokes, so that the museum website becomes as exciting a place to explore as the museum proper?

Could something like this underwater diorama be developed to be as marvelous and informative as the actual ocean display at AMNH (with less glitchy looking animals)? Could you could click on the animals as they interact with each other, and get a grab of information about them, and explore hidden worlds through controlling where the viewer goes? Is this already happening? And could something like this, done well, inspire the sort of wonder and sense of exploration that the actual museum has?

On his blog, Koven recently asked

what things do museums do *exclusively* because of tradition? If you were building a museum from scratch, what would you do differently?

I’m almost interested in the opposite question. What do museums do awesomely? If you were building a museum from scratch, what things would you try to replicate? I reckon wonder would have to be part of that.

I don’t really know the answers, but I’d be interested in hearing whether there are any sites online right now that invoke wonder – museums or otherwise.

Wait! Is MY museum a Mac or a PC?

So, after my earlier post, I started wondering about my own institution… Are we a Mac or a PC at heart (according to the rad Hunch infographic)?!?

To start with the core demographics, PCs are 22% more likely to by aged 34-49, while Macs are more 22% more likely to be aged 18-34. According to the 2011 NSW Guess who’s going to the gallery? report 2/10 gallery visitors in NSW will be aged under 34, and 3/10 will be aged between 35-54. (PC 1 – Mac 0).

And what else? Well, PCs are 18% more likely to live in the suburbs and 21% live in a rural area, while 52% of Macs live in the city. In NSW at least 50% of people will live in the Local Government Area of the gallery that they are visiting… so, given that my gallery is located in a regional centre, I guess we don’t quite count as being a city… (so PC 2 – Mac 0).

Finally education… according to Hunch, 54% of PCs have completed a 4 year college degree or higher, whereas 67% of Macs have done the same. In NSW 55% of gallery visitors will have an undergrad degree or higher… which again means that PCs get one up. (PC 3 – Mac 0).

So we are looking pretty much as if we are a PC at my institution, if these basic stats for NSW hold true. But what about our fashion, taste and aesthetics?

Well, PCs are 21% more likely to prefer impressionist art, whilst Macs prefer modern art and are design enthusiasts. I think our gallery sits well with both these areas… Some of our big exhibitions are more traditional, like the Hans Heysen exhibition. But CURIOUS COLONY A twenty first century wunderkammer was a huge hit, and the high school exhibition ARTEXPRESS is always popular. And our annual Look Hear art and design talks are always popular with a hip young crowd who would probably describe themselves as being designer/chic (even if they’re really just hipsters)… Not to mention that right now, visitors to the NRAG can buy raffle tickets to win a vespa decorated by a contemporary artist, which is the Mac vehicle of choice.

So I think once we include fashion we can get the rating closer to PC 3 – Mac 3… But when I look at the full list, I think that all things considered, my gallery really is a PC. No matter how fashionable and contemporary visitors to my gallery might look, those core demographics probably hold the truth of where my institution lies. So when we think about our audience and the web, it’s probably worth keeping in mind that our audience is less likely to be made up of computer savvy gear-heads and early adopters, and more likely to be those for whom the computer is less natural and intuitive. And that we probably can’t go wrong if we serve chardonnay at openings.