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Museums and the Web 2008 Conference – Tagging

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

On Social Tagging by Native Communities

Tagging can help museums understand how visitors perceive the objects in their collections. While the goal of many tagging projects is to provide better access for the public to online collections, Shelley Mannion, at the University of Lugano, is using it to learn how native communities respond to their own art. Mannion’s findings have implications for how museums can help these communities strengthen their connections to their own culture. She described her research in a lucid presentation, “Seeing Tibetan Art Through Social Tags.”

Seeing Tibetan Art tagging screen

Working with the open source tagging tool available at http.steve.museum, she asked young Tibetans in Zurich and a control group of Swiss Germans to participate in her research project by tagging six images – five traditional works and one contemporary one. She also interviewed the Tibetans in order to understand how they felt about tagging these works.

What she discovered was that often the young Tibetans didn’t have a lot of knowledge about their own culture, and they felt bad about that, which made them somewhat reluctant to tag the images. Tagging by both the Tibetans and the Swiss Germans showed misunderstandings about the images – what Jennifer Trant calls “teachable moments.” “Tag vocabulary is a window into what people notice. It’s interesting as much for the aggregate, (what many people notice) as for the outlier (what’s noticed by only one).” J.Trant’s blog, March 7, 2008.

Through tagging, visitors “teach” curators what they know about the works, what interests them, what they see and don’t see. Since tagging can expose where the gaps in people’s knowledge are, curators also learn what they need to be “teaching.”

Also, tagging can help to identify individuals in the native community who can translate the concepts of one culture into another. These “translators” can help the museum create materials to support the community’s engagement with objects from their own culture. Mannion’s presentation concludes with some advice to bear in mind when designing tagging systems for communities: Think about what would motivate them to participate, and what type of interface would facilitate their participation – something game-like, perhaps.

Mannion’s research, funded by The Rubin Foundation, is ongoing. The tagging project website Seeing Tibet Through Social Tags is inviting Tibetans and non-Tibetans living in New York to participate in the tagging research project. So, log on and tag. It will make you think.

Posted in museums, mw2008, social tagging, teens, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Museums and the Web 2008 Conference – YouTube

Monday, June 9th, 2008

More About YouTube

Museums are starting their own channels on YouTube in ever greater numbers. At this session presenters from The Exploratorium, San Jose Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, MoMA, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art shared their goals, frustrations and insights about operating a channel on YouTube.

The subjects of the videos on the Exploratorium’s channel expand the definition of “science” to incorporate things you might not normally think of. For example, live web cam videos where you can watch scientists in the Antartic getting suited up to go out to work. It takes a while! Or you can watch visitors to the Museum respond to an invitation to drink water out of a toilet, in Mind, a new exhibition where you get to explore how your own mind works.

Exploratorium on YouTube

They have staff curated playlists on their channel, and are training teen docents to shoot their videos. Nicole Minor, presenting for the Exploratorium, made an important observation based on their experience: building a social network on your channel is a real challenge. Yet building that community around your content is the goal, it’s the reason to be on YouTube – so your museum can reach out to and nurture a new audience who are interested in your content. YouTube offers your museum a different way of presenting itself to people, of enlarging its “persona” on the web, showing a new side of itself. The network grows in response to the effort you make to find interested people and engage them in “conversation,” as The Indianapolis Museum of Art learned.

IMA accidentally found success on YouTube by producing “how to videos” targeted to small but dedicated audiences interested in origami and calligraphy. As Dan Dark said, they had to get over the fact that people were not looking for the IMA brand; they were looking for content that mattered to them. Instructional videos are popular, easy to produce, and easy to promote by linking to subject blogs and participating in subject based community forums. Dan understood that IMA needed to participate as a member of the YouTube community so he looked for similar videos on other channels, used the same tags, and engaged in a dialogue with others interested in these subjects. Their origami videos have been viewed several thousand times.They feature Dr. Robert J. Lang, a physicist and engineer with a passion for origami, who has used this expertise to design the way airbags are folded to deploy immediately when needed, and to enable expandable space telescopes, among other amazing things!

IMA on YouTube

IMA’s videos feature Lang creating origami ducks, swallows and scorpions, but you can begin to see the kind of connections that are possible. IMA has also posted other types of videos of course, and you can watch them all here.

David Hart at MoMA picked up the community theme when describing the situation of MoMA’s channel. It’s very time consuming to moderate comments, at least half of which are spam. Occasionally they see negative comments, but there are some really great ones too. Is it worth all the trouble? How do you evaluate the success of your channel? Is it number of views? Probably not since, as David stated, the farting panda video will definitely get more views than our videos will, even the artist Doug Aitkin’s, which had over 100,000 views.

But two people who watched Aitkin’s video on MoMA’s channel were inspired to produce and upload response videos, and there are more than 75 comments, some in response to the video and some in response to other peoples’ comments. I got the impression that the people who made most of the comments were familiar with Aitkin’s work already, and love it or hate it and wanted to let MoMA know how they felt. This channel has become a place for people to speak to the Museum and to each other. You can see how the next step is for MoMA to respond to the commenters and begin to have to a real conversation.

While I was at MW2008 I interviewed Kevin von Appen, Associate Director of Daily Operations at the Ontario Science Center, about their web video strategy, and in particular their YouTube channel. Kevin and OSC have been active in this area since October 2006. He’s a firm believer in the potential and value of the conversations that are possible, and has some wonderful insights and useful advice for how to think about representing your museum using video on the web. That interview will appear here in the next few weeks.

Posted in Ontario Science Center, Youtube, teens, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Museums and the Web 2008 Conference – Usability

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

On User Expectations & Personalization

Steven Smith, whose consulting firm United Focus is based in Australia, ran a mini-workshop on User Expectations. He discussed the types of personal factors that influence users, as well as the external factors – such as a visitor’s level of web experience, previous knowledge of your museum, their entry point, the page they land on when they arrive on your website.

 

He ended by highlighted key factors influencing web visitor expectations now:

- the rise of social networking sites

- sites that enable user generated content

- the improved speed of access.

- personalization

 

Increasingly sites are emulating Amazon’s personalized approach – that “Hello Robin” greeting I get every time I go there – and people will begin to expect to see content filtered to their taste on every content based site. He left us with this thought: “the visitor is king, not the content.”

 

Of course we all have to be more aware of our visitors these days, but actually content is the only reason that anyone goes to any site on the web, and museums are bursting with content. The challenge is to figure out how to make it more accessible and more appealing. Seeding your content to social networking sites by establishing FaceBook pages, Flickr accounts, etc, lets you create connections with niche audiences anywhere in the world. You need a strategy for how to create this new, expanded presence on the web.

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Museums and the Web 2008 Conference – Metrics

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

The Session on Metrics Was Great

Sebastian Chan of Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia gave an eye opening evaluation of the metrics generally used by museums to understand how successful their websites are. Typically you rely on information about the number of new visitors, page visits, amount of time spent on a page, and podcast downloads, for example, to tell you about the usefulness or popularity of various pages or features on your site. Yet as he explained in his excellent session, these statistics are seriously skewed – by search bots crawling your site, open browser tabs on people’s desktops, and RSS feeds, nor is there a way to track whether podcast downloaders actually watch or listen to your programs.

Powerhouse Museum home page

Chan went on to talk about social networking sites as places where museums can learn more reliable information about how they are perceived in the great big internet community, whether or not they have a formal presence in these spaces.

If your museum has pages on MySpace or FaceBook, videos on YouTube or Blip.tv, hosts blogs or has Flickr accounts or a presence in Second Life, take a look at the interactions occurring in these places to see how people are responding to your content. Chances are you will find comments that don’t appear on visitor surveys.

But even if you haven’t created a presence for yourself in these social spaces, other people will be creating one for you – blogging about a visit to your recent exhibition, posting pictures of your building to Flickr, etc. Chan recommends doing “what are known as ‘ego searches’ for [your] brand name, event or exhibition name.” You can search all of these sites to see what people are posting or saying about you, and do blog searches through technorati.com, for example.

These things will tell you more about how people perceive your museum, more about your “presence” on the web than straight metrics ever will. Then you can use this information to begin, or to continue, to develop your web presence in ways that serve your audience and your museum. His excellent paper is online here.

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Museums and Visitors: Interacting on the Web and in the Galleries – Part 4: Using Facebook

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

This is Part 4 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archives to access the other parts.

Robin: Museums are putting their videos on YouTube and creating a presence for themselves on other social networking sites to cultivate new communities of viewers. An excellent example of how to do this successfully is the Brooklyn Museum.

Brooklyn Museum on Facebook

Why make the commitment to be on YouTube, FaceBook and Flickr? Because that’s where everybody else is – not only your potential visitors but also your competitors. Every other type of major entertainer / content provider – movies, games, sports teams, travel and tourism promoters, etc. – is using these vehicles for the same reason. They’re going to where people are, rather than waiting for audiences to come to them. The Warhol Museum is another example of a success story in this environment. They were so effective at creating an attractive profile on MySpace that 10,000 people wanted to become friends of the Museum, creating quite a backlog of people to respond to!

Holly: In the work we did at the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, we learned many things, but two “rules of thumb” emerged from that experience which are especially relevant here. First, in the matter of engaging audiences, you have to start where people are. You cannot expect the uninitiated to leap in one jump to your level of knowledge and engagement. A second “rule” is that you will be more successful if you cross the river where it’s narrowest – that is, reach out first to people who are most like your current audience. That is not to say that museums shouldn’t try to diversify their audiences culturally, economically, and in other ways, but it will cost a lot less in time, money and effort to reach people who are similar to the museum’s current demographic.

The Warhol Museum on MySpace

Robin: Yes and museums can use social networking technologies to engage their current audience, and through them bring in new visitors. SFMOMA’s use of a blog for the Olafur Eliasson show, which we talked about earlier, is an effective way of doing this.

And of course social events provide some of the best opportunities for reaching out to friends of friends. But I still think one of the most compelling experiences you can have at a museum is talking to the experts – going on a curator led tour, for example. Obviously I’m not the only person who thinks this is cool because often museums offer curator led tours and conversations as a perk for higher membership options – to the people who are already on the bus, so to speak….You know, when visitors get to talk with curators, and see how their passions can breathe life into art, history and science, this greatly enhances the chances they’ll have a positive experience, and come away with new things to think about. We’ve already talked about a few examples like this.

Library of Congress flickr page

Holly: But I go back to where we started this conversation. Shouldn’t the basic motivation for a museum’s public programming be to get people to think – to engage with the strange, the unknown or maybe the very familiar, but basically to stimulate their minds? If that’s really the motivation, then shouldn’t these institutions be interested in what people are thinking as a result of their visit, isn’t that the logical next question? “Okay, we gave you our ideas, now what are your ideas?”

Robin: Yes, web 2.0 applications are all about that – encouraging people to share ideas. All of the content on Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube, for example, comes from people contributing their expertise, opinions, experience, as well as pictures and videos. It’s experts and amateurs coming together. Del.icio.us and other sites allow people to collect and tag the web pages they’re interested in and share that with friends. FaceBook and MySpace allow users to present themselves, what they like and think, and find others with similar interests. And the museums that understand this phenomenon – the Walker Art Center, SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum – are inviting audiences to share their thoughts, pictures, and videos about exhibitions and events. The question is what happens as a result of all these comments? Museums are providing opportunities for people to share their thoughts, but then what? Are they taking action based on the comments? Have they figured out how to sustain an ongoing dialogue that deepens the connection and commitment to the museum? That’s definitely the next step. Our conversation concludes in Part 5: Sharing Content.

Posted in Brooklyn Museum, Facebook, Walker Art Center, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Museums and Visitors: Interacting on the Web and in the Galleries – Part 1: Using YouTube

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Recently I had a conversation with Holly Sidford, President of Helicon Collaborative, a cultural development company.* Holly and I are, to use Salman Rushdie’s term, “museum brats,” growing up near the Mint Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art respectively. We are both very interested in how new technologies have begun to impact cultural institutions, as they try to sustain and expand audiences. Our conversation ranged over a number of themes, including the benefits of using web 2.0 applications.

Brooklyn Museum, courtesy National Archives

Robin: The traditional experience of going to a museum was kind of a silent, private affair where you went to appreciate the artworks or objects, mostly because you were already interested in them. You didn’t need to be convinced of their value or meaning. But that way of thinking has really lost currency in the last decade. These days it seems visitors want to be engaged rather than left to contemplate, and they expect museums to support their particular interests – with audio-video tours, computer interactives and opportunities to share their thoughts.

Holly: It seems to me the vast majority of visitors to museums are sampling, they’re after pleasurable experiences. More and more, people come to museums with expectations shaped by their experience in commercial venues so they expect things to be highly mediated, tailored to their individual interests; they expect things to be very fast moving and stimulating. They expect their opinions to be valued – or at least they expect to be able to share their opinions at some point in their visit.

Robin: They expect a lot more from museums than they used to!

Holly: A good example of this is the video talk-back program that was part of the New York Historical Society’s exhibit, Slavery and New York. The exhibit designers, Richard Rabinowitz and Lynda Kaplan, made it possible for people who attended to share their thoughts about the show, and about slavery itself, about race and racism and other issues, on video – to talk back to the museum and reflect on their experiences. Thousands of people took advantage of that invitation. That’s just one demonstration of people’s hunger to have their own opinions validated and to have some sort of interaction with the material on the wall.

New-York Historical Society Talk Back video on Youtube

Robin: And not only were the video talkbacks available at the Historical Society, they were also posted to YouTube for everybody to see! This is a really good example of using social networking media – YouTube – to link the museum and its exhibition to a broader audience. Most of those clips on YouTube received fewer than 100 views but one of the shorter ones has over 1,000 views. The Historical Society’s new exhibition on the Marquis De Lafayette, by the same curators, continues with video talk-backs so they are demonstrating their commitment to hearing from visitors. In the process N-YHS wlll learn a lot about what their visitors think, and if they continue to post them to YouTube, they’ll carve a niche for themselves with a larger audience and attract new visitors to their galleries. YouTube and other video sharing services will be the focus of another report coming soon.

It seems like a win-win situation, but many institutions don’t see it that way. They’re reluctant to give visitors a chance to voice their opinions. Perhaps they don’t really want to know what visitors think; perhaps they’re afraid to yield some of the power they have to control the exhibition narrative and define the meaning of the objects. It’s understandable, but how can museum staff overcome that resistance? How do curators keep the scholarship bar high, while making visitors feel engaged and respected? The conversation continues in Part 2: Using Blogs, Part 3: Using Podcasts, Part 4: Using FaceBook, and Part 5: Sharing Content.

Posted in New-York Historical Society, Uncategorized, Youtube, museums, web 2.0 | No Comments »

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