A participatory audio-tour experiment

I was just directed to an interesting article on NYTimes.com: A Museum That Lets Its Visitors Become Part of the Art.

Halsey Burgund's exhibition "Round", at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, offers up a museum audio tour that solicits contributions from viewers and gives them equal voice in the discussion of art.
... For [Burgund], the main point here is not so much to provide information about the artworks, but to create an experience that can enhance somebody's time in the museum. To take pleasure in this oddball installation, you have to countenance such a motivation and get past all expectation that you will learn something from the audio guide.

Some future trends for the Internet and museums

I was part of a panel at a seminar - "Collections and the Web: Audiences, Content and Technologies" - organised by CAN (Collections Australia Network) on Tuesday, 27 May: "Future Trends". I began with a short presentation in which I attempted to plot a number of future possibilities in terms of probability and desirability:

• Spam to increase (almost certain), which may lead to...
• The total collapse of email, as we now know it, under the weight of spam. While this would undoubtedly be a major disaster, it may have at least one beneficial consequence:
• RSS (syndication) to become mainstream.
• Internet connections to become faster and/or cheaper, which should allow...
• Rich content (video, audio) to increase.
• Online advertising to increase (but there is evidence that returns are diminishing).
• Smart commercial links (in which success depends on how useful the user perceives it to be) to also increase.
• Semantic web to become more pervasive (content not just for human consumption but for also machine consumption, making mashups possible - eg: US Presidents) But, perhaps more importantly...
• Semantic web to become easier for non-tech people (MIT's Simile project is a step in the right direction).
• Visitor-generated content to increase. (But there needs to a move towards quality visitor- generated content.)
• Copyright restrictions to decrease (at least for the museum/cultural/non-profit sector). This is more of a hope than a prediction!
• Open standards to increase, allowing...
• Greater separation of content and presentation, and hence...
• Greater diversity of platforms and personalisation.
• Will non-standard (Flash) navigation increase? Hopefully not.

Here's the actual plot (sorry if it's a bit hard to read):

(This has also been posted to Museum 3.0)

Update: See the video

The machine is us/ing us

Here's a good introduction to the 'new' web, by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University:

User-generated content: useful links

On the museum-ed discussion list recently, someone asked for recommendations of books or papers on the topics of producing quality user-generated content, the process of reviewing/analyzing user-generated content, and the amount of time that should be dedicated to reviewing and editing user-generated content. Here's my reply:

The annual Museums & The Web conferences are a good source of online papers:

Attraction by Interaction: Wiki Webs As A Way To Increase The Attractiveness Of Museums' Web Sites - Peter Hoffmann and Michael Herczeg, Germany

Storymaker: User-generated Content - Worthy Or Worthwhile? - Graham Howard, Jon Pratty and Mike Stapleton, United Kingdom

Visitors' Voices - Mariana Salgado and Lily Diaz-Kommonen, Finland

Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy and Museums - Susan Chun, Rich Cherry, Doug Hiwiller, Bruce Wyman, USA, and Jennifer Trant, Canada

Using Open Source Software to Facilitate Collaboration Among Artists, Exhibitors and Patrons - Michael Knapp and Ellis Neder, USA

Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies - Kevin von Appen, Canada, and Bryan Kennedy and Jim Spadaccini, USA

Beyond the On-line Museum: Participatory Virtual Exhibitions - Jonathan Cooper, Australia (beating my own drum :-))

Towards Community Contribution: Empowering Community Voices On-line - Angèle Alain, Canada

My Evidence: Who's the authority here? - Lowell Robinson, David Beck, Valerie Knight-Williams & Pearl Tesler, USA

Building an On-line Community: Web 2.0 and interpretive materials at the Brooklyn Museum - Nicole Caruth & Shelley Bernstein, USA

Radical Trust: The state of the museum blogosphere - Seb Chan, Australia & Jim Spadaccini, USA

Web 2.0: How to stop thinking and start doing: Addressing organisational barriers - Mike Ellis & Brian Kelly, United Kingdom

Remixing Exhibits: Constructing participatory narratives with on-line tools to augment museum experiences - Matthew Fisher & Beth Twiss-Garrity, USA

Tapping at the window

A good analysis of the privacy issue with regard to social networking sites, in particular Facebook, by Nicholas Carr.

“What we've learned from the commercialization of the Web is that people are more than happy to exchange their privacy for free stuff and greater convenience as long as you allow them to maintain the fiction that their activities are not being monitored and recorded....
“Privacy is lost not in one great flood but rather through steady erosion. Eventually, the Peeping Tom taps on your window and waves, and you don't recoil in horror and embarrassment. You wave back.”

Read the full article

Participation through Collaboration: Making Visitors Feel Needed

On the Museum 2.0 blog, there is a post which makes the case for real, as opposed to "fake" online collaborations.

Here's an excerpt:

I think we have to couch participatory museum experiences in terms of collaborating with visitors. Collaboration is only meaningful when the parties involved actually have some stake in and influence over the outcome. Have you ever been part of a fake collaboration, one in which a project leader purported to want everyone’s input but really just wanted everyone to say yes to theirs? Those situations are exasperating at best, and at worst, can make you lose faith in the leader’s (and the institution’s) commitment to the team approach.

Someone (Alan M) then left a comment, which said in part:

Imagine something called Public Lecture 1.0: My wife & I pay $10 each for a ticket to hear a speaker talk for an hour about, oh, Biblical archaeology, followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. Then, audience applause... a wave from the podium... and the speaker exits, stage left. On our way home, I talk with my wife about what we'd just heard & seen....

Here's Public Lecture 2.0: We pay $10 each for a ticket to hear a speaker talk for 10 minutes, and then engage in an hour-long Q&A, a good portion of which is sucked up by people "participating" and "collaborating" with their own windy wind-ups & commentary. Their contributions may or may not be interesting, but it's not what we paid twenty bucks to hear.

Both formats have their merit, of course, but they serve entirely different purposes. In 1.0, the presenter has something to say, to transmit, to share; I attend 1.0 to enjoy what someone else has to offer -- expertise, advice, insight, a story, perhaps. Whereas 2.0 is a group exercise, a collective creation. 1.0 is a traditional dinner party that requires me to prepare an entire meal; 2.0 is a pot-luck that requires less cooking, more coordination.

Here's an edited version of my reply:

Alan gave an illustration in the form of two scenarios:
1. attending a one-hour lecture by a renowned expert in a field (e.g. Biblical archaeology), followed by a ten-minute Q&A, and...
2. attending a ten-minute lecture by the same expert, followed by an hour of questions and comments by people in the audience.

The assertion seems to be that, just as scenario 1 would be better value for the participants, visitors to museum websites are often better served by content prepared by experts than by large collections of (mediocre) community contributions.

I think there are at least three significant characteristics or assumptions in this illustration:

• The speaker is a skilled presenter, as well as a renowned expert
• The audience must experience the content (i.e. the lecture) sequentially and in real time; skipping or random access are not possible
• One must choose between the two scenarios.

However, on the web:

• Different scenarios can be offered simultaneously - from scholarly essays to collections of public commentaries and reflections.
• Different scenarios can even be gathered together or linked.
• Visitors can choose - in their own time - which scenario(s) they prefer.
• Expertise can also be exercised in the selection and/or sorting of public contributions. E.g. myVirtualGallery (which I manage), in the approval process and the "Featured Exhibitions" section.

Read my full comment, in context.

HyperCard in 1990

One of the precursors of hypertext and the Web was HyperCard, introduced by Apple in 1987. This video, from The Computer Chronicles in 1990, looks at the status of HyperCard applications including HyperComposer, Take One, Culture 1.0, Mission: The Moon and CAMEO. It also looks at the HyperCard clone, SuperCard. Guests include the creator of HyperCard, Bill Atkinson.



Related videos:

• Introducing HyperCard (1987)
• HyperCard 2.0, PLUS 2.0 and Guide 3.0 (1990)