Brooklyn Museum announce ArtShare on Facebook

From the post announcing it, ArtShare on Facebook!:

What can you do with ArtShare? Well, you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display on your profile. But then, because social networking is about connecting and seeing what others contribute to the social fabric, anyone can also use ArtShare to upload their own work and share it with others. You can use ArtShare to select a wide variety of work, then each time your profile is loaded a different work will be displayed at random from your selections.

They contacted contemporary artists who still held copyright over their works and asked if they would give their permission for this use. They’ve even offered their application functionality to other museums:

If you work at another institution and want to share your museum’s collection this way, we can set you up with your own tab in ArtShare. When we set this up for you, your institution’s logo will be displayed alongside the works that you upload, so they are easily identifiable as being a part of your collection.

So congratulations to Mike Dillon and Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum, and thank you for letting us know so that we all get to learn from your experience.

(Actually I’ve just noticed one problem – given the recent fuss about Facebook, advertising, applications and privacy, I wanted to read the application Terms of Service, but you have to add the application to read them, so you have to agree to them before you’ve read them. It’s not a criticism of their application as I’m sure this isn’t specific to ArtShare but I guess it does show that concerns over Facebook’s privacy model are going to affect how cultural institutions engage with it.)

A golden age before copyright was king?

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the pop art exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery:

Does this show – paid for with public money, with some works that are themselves owned by public institutions – seek to inspire us to become 21st century pop artists, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is it supposed to inform us that our chance has passed and we’d best settle for a life as information serfs who can’t even make free use of what our eyes see and our ears hear?

Perhaps, just perhaps, this is actually a Dadaist show masquerading as a pop art show. Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the delicious irony of celebrating copyright infringement while simultaneously taking the view that even the “No Photography” sign is a form of property not to be reproduced without the permission that can never be had.

Warhol is turning in his grave

New ways of experiencing museums

This article presents a lovely perspective on the ways different audiences now engage with museums. It’s also interesting to wonder how these changing perspectives affect the online experience of a museum, exhibition or single object.

The idea of a museum visit as a kind of promenade theatre event is a comparatively new one for me. I am typical of my generation, I suspect, in still expecting a trip to a gallery to be improving – with the emphasis on it as a place where one will be educated, and above all, somewhere one will be infused with morally uplifting sentiments.

Younger gallery-goers, by contrast, go in search of a more immediate experience – looking for something emotionally challenging, against which to measure the tide of information that floods us, in our engulfing sea of online information.

Or, in the case of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall or the V&A’s Friday Late, they simply go to hang out with similarly inclined others, for the shared sense of occasion.

Last weekend’s outing to Tate Modern succeeded in convincing me that the excitement of the encounter is an important part of today’s visit to the museum.

According to the French intellectual Andre Malraux – Minister for Culture under General de Gaulle for 10 years from 1959 – whereas once the visitor went to a museum to be provided with answers, now, the responsibility lies with us, the visitors.

The museum experience exists most richly in our own imaginations, created out of a collection of images we each carry with us, gleaned from books, magazines, photographs and film. We bring remembered visual material with us into a museum space which has thereby become imaginary. The installation or exhibition merely acts as a catalyst, prompting us to ask our own questions which we look to the artist to answer.

From the BBC, Making contact

Where should social networking ‘live’?

Chris Anderson says social networking is a feature, not a destination:

Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy–social networking as a feature, not a destination.

So far, so good – but Chris Anderson’s day job is at Wired, which is definitely a destination site with a huge audience. Cultural heritage sites are useful for a range of people, but I suspect most people stumble across our content incidentally, through search engines and external links – they don’t think “I’ll spend my lunch break browsing the Museum of Whatever’s website”.

But another of his projects is much smaller so the issues are more relevant to the cultural heritage sector:

So we’ve been debating internally whether we want to shift to a distributed functionality strategy (AKA “go where the people are”), where most users interact with us via a widget on third party sites, clicking through to our site only when they want to go deeper. We’re embarking on some experiments with a few partners we like to see how that goes. Hopefully a distributed strategy will help us reach critical mass as a destination, too, but right now we’re simply experimenting to see what works.

I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I’m sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I’m placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.

So how would this work for us? Would our visitors gather around specific institutions, around institutional collections, around meta-collections that span several institutions, or around the sector as a whole? Would they, for example, gather around a site like Exploring 20th Century London, which has a very specific temporal and regional focus? Or are these potential users already on sites that meet their needs, at least to some extent? Our collections will inevitably still form a valuable resource for discussion, no matter where that discussion takes place.

Who knows? I think it’ll be fun finding out.

I keep meaning to post about Ning. As the post above says, “Ning is not a destination itself–instead, it provides hosted social networking tools for niche sites to create their own destinations.”

It could be a useful tool for smaller organisations who want to get into social software but don’t have the means to build their hosts or applications, or for small ad hoc team working.

ENO goes 2.0

The English National Opera’s site for their production of Carmen is all ‘Web 2.0’ – they’ve made use of ‘behind the scenes’ video interviews and blog posts and there’s also a Flickr group and Facebook profile. It’s great to see this kind of experimentation, especially as it helps us all find out if there’s an audience for this type of content and level of engagement, how sustainable that engagement is and on which platforms it works best. It also helps us learn how organisations react to this kind of direct engagement with their audiences – the comments on this post show that sometimes this can be a difficult relationship.

Interesource, the company who made the site said:

Carmen also features tagging, user comments and some beautifully rich video and audio that will turn the production inside out to provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes back story. We are also integrating with several external services such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook that provide users with additional ways of participating. We’re going to bring the production to life online using ‘people media’ throughout the Social Web.

The New York Times on what the American public want in a history museum, and some discussion of the value of multimedia and interactive exhibitions:

if memorizing dates and place names hold little appeal, history museums still rate very highly with the American public. “What people say they’re excited about in terms of history museums is contact with real stuff of the past,” he explained.

They also want to find themselves — spiritually, socially and intellectually — among all that material

“In the visitation research that’s been done for many years,” Ms. Davis said, “the thing that we hear most is that people want to see something about themselves and that they trust information the museums are giving them even more than they trust what schools are telling them and even the stories their grandmothers are telling them.

“People want to see themselves in the exhibit. And the research done at individual museums suggests that when they do find themselves there, they fare much better.”

All fair enough. But the article concludes with a quote, “The greatest danger is not that people get a version of history that is dramatized. It’s that people don’t pay attention to the past at all” but to me that contradicts the responsibility museums have as trusted institutions. The stories we present should be real; if they’re not real, both the sources and the areas of fabrication or uncertainty should be clear.

History’s Real Stuff (Sorry, Miss Grundy)

A recent Alertbox talked about Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings:

The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.

The heatmaps also show how users don’t fixate within design elements that resemble ads, even if they aren’t ads

I guess the most interesting thing about the post is that it acknowledges that unethical methods attract the most eyeballs:

In addition to the three main design elements that occasionally attract fixations in online ads, we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing’s main ethical principles by making the ad look like content:

  • The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it.
  • Not only should the ad look like the site’s other design elements, it should appear to be part of the specific page section in which it’s displayed.

This overtly violates publishing’s principle of separating “church and state” — that is, the distinction between editorial content and paid advertisements should always be clear. Reputable newspapers don’t allow advertisers to mimic their branded typefaces or other layout elements.

I think it’s particularly important that we don’t allow commercial considerations to damage our users’ trust in cultural heritage institutions as repositories of impartial* knowledge. We’ve developed models for differentiating user- and museum-generated content and hopefully quelled fears about user-generated content somehow damaging or diluting museum content; it would be a shame if we lost that trust over funding agreements.

* insert acknowledgement of the impossibility of truly impartial cultural content.

Libraries and Web 2.0

Via Wired’s article on Web 2.0 in libraries, I found the fabulous resources ‘Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software‘ and 23 Learning 2.0 things: “23 Things (or small exercises) that you can do on the web to explore and expand your knowledge of the Internet and Web 2.0” at Learning 2.0, an “online self-discovery program that encourages the exploration of web 2.0 tools and new technologies”.

Exposing the layers of history in cityscapes

I really liked this talk on “Time, History and the Internet” because it touches on lots of things I’m interested in.

I have a on-going fascination with the idea of exposing the layers of history present in any cityscape.

I’d like to see content linked to and through particular places, creating a sense of four dimensional space/time anchored specifically in a given location. Discovering and displaying historical content marked-up with the right context (see below) gives us a chance to ‘move’ through the fourth dimension while we move through the other three; the content of each layer of time changing as the landscape changes (and as information is available).

Context for content: when was it written? Was it written/created at the time we’re viewing, or afterwards, or possibly even before it about the future time? Who wrote/created it, and who were they writing/drawing/creating it for? If this context is machine-readable and content is linked to a geo-reference, can we generate a representation of these layers on-the-fly?

Imagine standing at the base of Centrepoint at London’s Tottenham Court Road and being able to ask, what would I have seen here ten years ago? fifty? two hundred? two thousand? Or imagine sitting at home, navigating through layers of historic mapping and tilting down from a birds eye view to a view of a street-level reconstructed scene. It’s a long way off, but as more resources are born or made discoverable and interoperable, it becomes more possible.