geek speak with Erika Taylor

This month’s culturegeek is museumgeek’s first curator and first Australian. Erika Taylor is the Curator of Science, Technology and Industry at the Powerhouse Museum, and she is one of a whole collection (boom tish) of passionate museum tech people who work at the institution. Before I met Erika, I kept seeing her name pop up on Twitter – and always in interesting conversations – so I thought I would try to find out just how a science curator ended up so interested in the digital world. As always in geek speak, I’ve asked Erika to write a post responding to the question “How on earth did you end up here?” Enjoy her story.

Erika Taylor - Curator of Science, Technology and Industry at the PHM - being awesome.

First and foremost I guess I am a science nerd. I grew up wanting to know how stuff works, I went to uni and found out how much I could drink stuff works, and I discovered a love of teaching other people about how stuff works (except magnets).

After I finished my science degree, I wandered the world for a while working in backpackers hostels, drinking, eating, and visiting museums, until I returned to home to look for a prestigious, well paid, and stable job in science. Shockingly that didn’t work out.

So what could I do with my love of science, learning, teaching, and museums? Masters in Museums Studies fit the bill, so off I went to learn about the history of museums, how to do paperwork, how to dodge bureaucracy and red tape, and that you must wear gloves when touching old things. The best part of the course was the opportunity to do two internships. My first internship was project managing a website build for a special interest group of Museums Australia. My supervisor was none other than the wonderful Ms Lynda Kelly at the Australian Museum. My second was at the Powerhouse Museum, which eventually led to them hiring me as a science curator.

I did what “curators do”. I researched, published, interpreted material culture, put on exhibitions, and gave talks and presentations. This was at a time when museums were just starting to discover social media, and experimenting with its uses, it was also a time when the Museum’s 300,000+ collection had been digitised. I started to become interested in curators and the digital world, and concerned at the growing gap between the two.

I found mentorship under two of the most influential people thus far in my professional life, Seb Chan, and Paula Bray, and began working in that gap between curatorial and digital practice. I wrote a paper about the current state of play between curators and social media and presented it at Museums and the Web 2010, in Denver. I was inspired by some of the most amazing digital and web people from all over the world, learnt that Dutch really is the language of the future, and became Chief Curator in Charge of the Spinny Bar Historical Society.

I was the only curator there. Why? Why were museums doing such cutting edge and amazing things on the web, yet curators were so disconnected from it all?

Since then I have been working at getting curators involved in everything from blogging, basic web editing, using social media for things other than posting photos of yourself drunk on the weekend, making iPhone and iPad apps, and everything in-between.

So that’s me. I work in the gap. I am passionate about finding creative ways to use digital mediums to tell stories and interpret collections. I am specifically interested in how the future will shape museum curators, and plan to be an active participant in its evolution.

Erika Taylor is the Curator of Science Technology and Industry at the Powerhouse Museum. When not developing exhibitions on climate change, historical plastics, or strange medical implements, you can find her teaching someone to write blog posts, making iPad games, or user testing mobile walking tours.

Biophilia – Björk

Björk’s app album Biophilia is pretty well the coolest thing I’ve come across in ages. I downloaded the app this afternoon, and promptly lost myself exploring music and music-making, games and visuals. Have a listen to David Attenborough’s introduction to the app/album below:

This is everything that an app should be. It just spills over with creativity, and invites participation and creativity from its users in kind. Through experiments with science, and essays enclosed within, the app promotes learning too. Mind you, if this is the start of a new wave of creativity in apps then museums and other institutions who pride themselves on making knowledge and education accessible could be left fighting for relevancy. Or maybe we should just be looking for awesome and creative new partnerships to explore.

Takeaways from THATCamp Canberra, 2011

The last few weeks have been very intense. Between attending Reprogramming the Art Museum, presenting work at the Powerhouse Museum, speaking on a panel at Critical Animals, preparing for and presenting at the Digital Culture Public Sphere, and more, I have been pretty exhausted.

Thus it was that I was in two minds about attending THATCamp Canberra. I had been looking forward to going to THATCamp for ages, ever since I first heard about the concept in relation to THATCampMCN. But by the time the event actually rolled around, I was so brain-sore that I didn’t think I would have anything left in me to contribute (and that is, after all, the point of an unconference).

But fortunately, the event was so stimulating that I didn’t need to worry. There is no way that I can write a post that sums up everything I learned however, so here are some of the highlights and takeaways that I got from attending.

The first day was bootcamp, and it brought with it an awesome opportunity to find out more about data visualization in a big double-session with Mitchell Whitelaw. I recently learned about Mitchell’s cool commonsExplorer project (with Sam Hinton), which visualizes the relationships between tags and images on Flickr Commons, so I was pretty keen for this session. Data visualisation is something that I think has a great place in relation to museum data as we move towards increased linked data, and I was super glad to have the chance to learn more about the back end of the process.

It turned out that I was entirely in over my head, because the session was pitched at people who had some basic coding experience – and I still don’t really have any. Since my post on wanting to learn to code, I have started trying to master some of the basics, teaching myself a little Ruby after borrowing a book on it from the PHM web team library. However, Mitchell’s bootcamp session was the first time I’d really had a chance to sit in a class with people going through this type of thing, and it was so cool to start to get the sense of how the thought patterns develop when actually coming up with programming. I’d heard people talk about coding as being about problem solving, but in my mind, I didn’t really understand the extent to which that was true. I’d been so conscious of my lack of programming language that I hadn’t really clicked into the fact that programming really is about using the code as a tool. It’s such an obvious takeaway, but something that I didn’t really understand until I was in that context.

I managed to hold my own for the first half of the class, when Mitchell ran us through some basic ideas in Processing, and helped us create our first data visualizations, but completely lost my way in the second half of the session. Having said that, I am more and more starting to see the value in visualization, and the session really got me thinking about new ways to use and conceptualise data.

Really basic coding, but it's a start.

Thinking about museum data rather than simply museum objects is probably one of the things that I’m starting to do a lot more in recent weeks, and I think it’s really beneficial to my PhD research. One of the sessions on Saturday at THATCamp built upon this, as it looked at visualization from a broader perspective. Some of the real benefits of visualisation were seen to be the way it could help tease out new findings from data, and create big picture perspectives. Although there was some debate over the use (from an academic perspective) of visualisation, there was a general sense that it could lead to the asking of new questions, which is always a worthy pursuit.

The other sessions that really rocked my world and got my mind cogs ticking over were the ones on “Stories in Shoeboxes” about community storytelling websites and the conditions that lead to engagement; a session that I organised on authority and control in the Internet age; and a session to follow up on the Public Sphere.

Each of these sessions led to some really interesting discussion and thoughts, although no real conclusions (which is natural, due to the complexity of the issues at stake). The session on community storytelling/history/culture websites was very interesting. We discussed the fact that communities are generally self-selecting, and so it can be difficult for outsiders to really create an appropriate online space, even with the best intentions. It was also acknowledged that there needs to be something compelling, some ‘hook’ to get communities to engage online – there has to be something in it for them. In many cases, Facebook now seems to fulfill this role for self-forming communities, so maybe we need to learn from that and create simple and engaging spaces and leave the rest to the community?

The other two sessions that I loved and had great discussions in were both sessions that I proposed. The first session, which was on authority, was inspired by my coming panel on What’s the Point of Museum Websites, coming up at MCN in only a month. This session started with a seemingly simple question: what is authority, and how do you get it? In trying to answer just this, we ended up tangled in knots. Authority can be earned with time, it is culturally contextual, it can be conferred by another with authority. It is tied up with respect, but precisely how it is earned or maintained is unclear. In some ways, authority seems able to be likened to porn, in that it might be difficult to define, but is able to be known when seen.

The most interesting question that came out of the session however, and one that has certainly left me thinking ever since, was on the authoritative nature of Google online and whether “if you can’t find something on Google, do you trust that means it’s not online?” This brings up very interesting issues around transparency and manipulation of information, and also just on how much currency we are giving to this company that has no clear reason to be trusted, except that we have learned (rightfully or wrongfully) to trust it. After all, to Google is now shorthand for searching online, which is a great responsibility for a single company, and one that had interesting implications in a conversation about authority.

Finally, on Sunday morning we had an excellent (sober, rational) conversation about the Digital Culture Public Sphere that everyone who was attending THATCamp participated in. The discussion was quite different from the roundtable events on the day itself, because there were people drawn from a wider field at THATCamp. There were very useful contributions from people who would not necessarily self-identify as being from the digital culture sector, whose knowledge and experiences were very relevant. We’ve drawn up some results and will publish them to the digiculture wiki shortly, but it was generally a good and interesting session.

THATCamp whiteboard notes from our Public Sphere session. Thanks to Cath Styles for capturing the board.
Whiteboard notes #2

Of course, the best things about something like THATCamp are the new relationships that accompany the new conversations, and I met lots of interesting people working in very different areas to me. With an emphasis on the digital humanities, this was a far more academic conference than I’d been to in many ways, with lots of other Uni-focussed people in attendance. What was missing however was ego, as everyone seemed incredibly open to new ideas and new perspectives. What was particularly beneficial to me was the openness that surrounded the conversations, that left space and headspace for playing with ideas not yet fully formed. THATCamp felt like a place for incubating ideas, not just publicising fully-formed ones. Even in the last two weeks, despite my increasing busyness and lack of formal research, I’ve really found that playing through ideas in my head and working out how to describe and discuss them with others has made a very significant impact upon my PhD thinking. Yesterday I looked over some of my existing notes, and was aware of a number of gaps that I need to work through and include that had not yet been articulated in my work. I think this has been the greatest benefit to me of THATCamp – the chance to still engage with ideas but with a little critical distance from my more formal research.

THATCamp was also a place for karaoke (woo!), which was also beneficial, although maybe in different ways.

Thanks to the generosity of the Kress Foundation and THATCamp for awarding me a THATCamp Fellowship to attend the unconference. It was a brilliant experience, and I cannot wait to attend again next year.

The Internet, GLAMs and the production of new knowledge

In line with my involvement in the Digital Culture Public Sphere in the last week, one major question that has been surfacing time and time again during the discussions: How do we pitch GLAM organisations as being for the future, rather than simply about old things, and nostalgia? Or, in other words, how can we make GLAMs sexy to politicians?

Museums are often thought of as being about ‘old stuff” and stories. Much of our publicly recognised value still seems to be in the kind of nostalgia or memory arena. We can absolutely see this in the kind of language that was used within the National Culture Policy Discussion Paper, in which cultural institutions have the following “pitch”:

The Government also funds national collecting institutions which perform a central role in preserving and making Australia’s art and culture accessible. These institutions have traditionally centred their activities on collections management which includes documentation, conservation and exhibition. However, changing community expectations of access and service have created additional areas of common interest, including education, interpretation, regional delivery and digitisation of collections.

Even in this policy language, the view of cultural collecting institutions is really only about preservation and accessibility of art and culture. The value of our collections is seen to only reach so far as education and interpretation.

But right now, GLAMs have far greater potential in the creation of new knowledge, particularly with the incredibly rich data that’s held within and around our collections. In a data economy, we are actually incredibly rich with the sort of data that no one else has.

Ben Goldacre at the Guardian published an article on Friday, arguing for the incredible value of everyday government data. He writes

Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures. If you’ve ever wished you were born in the 19th century, when there were so many obvious inventions and ideas to hook for yourself, then I seriously recommend you become a coder, because future nerds will look back on this time with the exact same envy. But that leap forward will be tediously retarded if we don’t make the government allow us to use the pavements.

This is the same argument that I’ve started making in regards to GLAM collections. As I said in my Public Sphere presentation:

We cannot now even imagine the full possibilities that might come from the uploading of our collections to the Internet… 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… will lead to incredible new opportunities for cultural institutions to gain new relevance in the global knowledge economy.

GLAM collecting institutions have incredible information resources that can tell incredible, and hitherto hidden, stories about the development of society and of the natural world. We should be partnering with researchers, scientists and data visualisation specialists. Although we might hold expertise on our collections at an object level, or even a collection level, there is new knowledge that is held within our collections that will be liberated when we can pull together the individual pieces of information, and find new meanings.

The Internet, and Linked Open Data, really do liberate our cultural institutions to be more than just the sum of their parts. Now might be the time that GLAMs really do come into their own, as public institutions that truly serve the public both off- and online.

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?

Mark Zuckerburg launches Facebook Timeline

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.

Funding found for MCN2011 – WAHOOOOOOO!

All the way back in July I wrote a post about my attempts to find funding to get to MCN2011… at that point I had no money (PhDs are not super conducive to international travel twice in one year), and really didn’t hold out much hope for getting there. But since Koven Smith had asked me to be a part of his panel asking What’s the Point of Museum Websites? I knew I had to find a way.

I applied for both the MCN2011 Conference Scholarship and for an ArtsNSW Quick Response Grant. I also entered an art prize that had a first prize of a $1500 travelling scholarship.

A month or so ago I found out that I got the MCN Scholarship. Then I won the art prize. Suddenly it looked like MCN might be possible (although I was still going to be eating pretty cheaply).

Well about two hours ago, I found out that I have also been awarded the ArtsNSW Quick Response grant, which will give me $3000 to travel to the States to attend the conference – and also visit Washington or Colorado (maybe both!) to visit museums there.

I could not be more excited, or more humbled by the wonderful opportunities that this year has brought. There are lots of other exciting things coming up as well, which my next blog post will discuss (including a new Museum Professionals Networking group in Newcastle that I’m starting up, and three conferences in two weeks)… but right now, I just wanted to say thanks to ArtsNSW, MCN and everyone else that has invested in me. I cannot wait to meet so many of the amazing people I’ve connected with lately online, and to catch up with others that I met at MW2011.

I’ll keep you all posted on plans.

Museums in Melbourne and Newcastle, and the cultural making of community

During the last week, I’ve been visiting family in Melbourne, which provided a great excuse to go and check out the Melbourne Museum. Although I’d been to Melbourne before, I’d never had the chance to visit the museum, and so I seized upon the chance to lunch with Tim Hart and get a tour of the building and the current exhibitions with him.

It was great. Getting ‘backstage’ at different institutions is still thrilling to me, and it was super-exciting to get insight into the cool work that happens at the Melbourne Museum. There were some simple architectural features – like walls of a certain colour which indicate that collection items are stored within – that ensured the building was not only attractive, it was also functional (I love good planning).

The museum displays concentrate on both local (Melbourne and Victorian) stories, as well as more universal stories, and I really enjoyed the diversity of exhibits. Unfortunately due to a minor family emergency, I had to cut my visit slightly shorter than intended, but I can not wait to get back to Melbourne to explore the museum again. And that’s always a great sign of success for a museum… that a visitor not only enjoyed their time there, but actively wants to get back and spend more time.

In the mean time, good news for my own art gallery hit the local papers last week as well, when the Federal Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, announced that the Federal Government will contribute $7 million to the redevelopment of Newcastle Art Gallery. This has been a long-planned for redevelopment, and federal support will no doubt bring the redevelopment forward significantly (I think stage one should start really quickly). Phase one will include increased gallery exhibition spaces and storage, as well as a cafe and retail outlet. It’s very exciting news, particularly given the new life that has been given to the Newcastle Museum by its recent overhaul.

It’s a really interesting time for culture in Newcastle right now. Just over ten years ago, the BHP Steelworks in Newcastle closed down, which really impacted our city. Until then, Newcastle had primarily envisioned itself as an industrial town, and after that time, there was a real sense of depression around the region. However, in the years since, the city has slowly been remaking itself, and interesting initiatives like Renew Newcastle and festivals like TINA (This Is Not Art) have played a part in creating a very strong grassroots cultural industry. It’s credited with being one of the reasons that my hometown was named (maybe surprisingly) as one of Lonely Planet’s Top Ten Cities for 2010.

With this kind of government investment in the redevelopment of major cultural institutions such as the museum and the art gallery however, it seems that there is growing recognition in the role of arts and cultural organisations in the rebuilding of our city.