Year: 2010

'Museums meet the 21st century' – OpenTech 2010 talk

These are my notes for the talk I gave at OpenTech 2010 on the subject of 'Museums meet the 21st Century'. Some of it was based on the paper I wrote for Museums and the Web 2010 about the 'Cosmic Collections' mashup competition, but it also gave me a chance to reflect on bigger questions: so we've got some APIs and we're working on structured, open data – now what? Writing the talk helped me crystallise two thoughts that had been floating around my mind. One, that while "the coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else", that doesn't mean they'll know how to build it – developers are a vital link between museum APIs, linked data, etc and the general public; two, that we really need either aggregated datasets or data using shared standards to get the network effect that will enable the benefits of machine-readable museum data. The network effect would also make it easier to bridge gaps in collections, reuniting objects held in different institutions. I've copied my text below, slides are embedded at the bottom if you'd rather just look at the pictures. I had some brilliant questions from the audience and afterwards, I hope I was able to do them justice. OpenTech itself was a brilliant day full of friendly, inspiring people – if you can possibly go next year then do!

Museums meet the 21st century.
Open Tech, London, September 11, 2010

Hi, I'm Mia, I work for the Science Museum, but I'm mostly here in a personal capacity…

Alternative titles for this talk included: '18th century institution WLTM 21st century for mutual benefit, good times'; 'the Age of Enlightenment meets the Age of Participation'. The common theme behind them is that museums are old, slow-moving institutions with their roots in a different era.

Why am I here?

The proposal I submitted for this was 'Museums collaborating with the public – new opportunities for engagement?', which was something of a straw man, because I really want the answer to be 'yes, new opportunities for engagement'. But I didn't just mean any 'public', I meant specifically a public made up of people like you. I want to help museums open up data so more people can access it in more forms, but most people can't just have a bit of a tinker and create a mashup. “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else” – but that doesn’t mean they’ll know how to build it. Audiences out there need people like you to make websites and mobile apps and other ways for them to access museum content – developers are a vital link in the connection between museum data and the general public.

So there's that kind of help – helping the general public get into our data; and there's another kind of help – helping museums get their data out. For the first, I think I mostly just want you to know that there's data out there, and that we'd love you to do stuff with it.

The second is a request for help working on things that matter. Linkable, open data seems like a no-brainer, but museums need some help getting there.

Museums struggle with the why, with the how, and increasingly with the "we are reducing our opening hours, you have to be kidding me".

Chicken and the egg

Which comes first – museums get together and release interesting data in a usable form under a useful licence and developers use it to make cool things, or developers knock on the doors of museums saying 'we want to make cool things with your data' and museums get it sorted?

At the moment it's a bit of both, but the efforts of people in museums aren't always aligned with the requests from developers, and developers' requests don't always get sent to someone who'll know what to do with it.

So I'm here to talk about some stuff that's going on already and ask for a reality check – is this an idea worth pursuing? And if it is, then what next?
If there’s no demand for it, it won’t happen. Nick Poole, Chief Executive, Collections Trust, said on the Museums Computer Group email discussion list: "most museum people I speak to tend not to prioritise aggregation and open interoperability because there is not yet a clear use case for it, nor are there enough aggregators with enough critical mass to justify it.”

But first, an example…

An experiment – Cosmic Collections, the first museum mashup competition

The Cosmic Collections project was based on a simple idea – what if a museum gave people the ability to make their own collection website for the general public? Way back in December 2008 I discovered that the Science Museum was planning an exhibition on astronomy and culture, to be called ‘Cosmos & Culture’. They had limited time and resources to produce a site to support the exhibition and risked creating ‘just another exhibition microsite’. I went to the curator, Alison Boyle, with a proposal – what if we provided access to the machine-readable exhibition content that was already being gathered internally, and threw it open to the public to make websites with it? And what if we motivated them to enter by offering competition prizes? Competition participants could win a prize and kudos, and museum audiences might get a much more interesting, innovative site. Astronomy is one of the few areas where the amateur can still make valued scientific contributions, so the idea was a good match for museum mission, exhibition content, technical context, and hopefully developers – but was that enough?

The project gave me a chance to investigate some specific questions. At the time, there were lots of calls from some quarters for museums to produce APIs for each project, but there was also doubt about whether anyone would actually use a museum API, whether we could justify an investment in APIs and machine-readable data. And can you really crowdsource the creation of collections interfaces? The Cosmic Collections competition was a way of finding out.

Lessons? An API isn't a magic bullet, you still need to support the dev community, and encourage non-technical people to find ways to play with it. But the project was definitely worth doing, even if just for the fact that it was done and the world didn't end. Plus, the results were good, and it reinforced the value of working with geeks. [It also got positive coverage in the technical press. Who wouldn’t be happy to hear ‘the museum itself has become an example of technological innovation’ or that it was ‘bringing museums out into the open as places of innovation’?]

Back to the chicken and the egg – linking museums

So, back to the chicken and the egg… Progress is being made, but it gets bogged down in discussions about how exactly to get data online. Museums have enough trouble getting the suppliers they work with to produce code that meets accessibility standards, let alone beautifully structured, re-usable open data.

One of the reasons open, structured data is so attractive to museum technologists is that we know we can never build interfaces to meet the needs of every type of audience. Machine-readable data should allow people with particular needs to create something that supports their own requirements or combines their data with ours to make lovely new things.

Explore with us – tell museums what you need

So if you're someone who wants to build something, I want to hear from you about what standards you're already working with, which formats work best for you…

To an extent that's just moving the problem further down the line, because I've discovered that when you ask people what data standards they want to use, and they tell you it turns out they're all different… but at least progress is being made.

Dragons we have faced

I think museums are getting to the point where they can live with the 80% in the interest of actually getting stuff done.

Museums need to get over the idea that linkable data must be perfect – perfectly clean data, perfectly mapped to perfect vocabularies and perfectly delivered through perfect standards. Museums are used to mapping data from their collections management systems for a known end-use, they've struggled with open-ended requirements for unknown future uses.

The idea that aggregated data must be able to do everything that data provided at source can do has held us back. Aggregated data doesn't need to be able to do everything – sometimes discoverability is enough, as long as you can get back to the source if you need the rest of the data. Sometimes it's enough to be able to link to someone else's record that you've discovered.

Museum data and the network effect

One reason I'm here (despite the fact that public speaking is terrifying) is a vision of the network effect that could apply when we have open museum data.

We could re-unite objects across time and place and people, connecting visitors and objects, regardless of owing institution or what type of object or information it is. We could create highlight collections by mining data across museums, using the links people are making between our collections. We can help people tell their local stories as well as the stories about big subject and world histories. Shared data standards should reduce learning curve for people using our data which would hopefully increase re-use.

Mismatches between museums and tech – reasons to be patient

So that's all very exciting, but since I've also learnt that talking about something creates expectations, here are some reasons to be patient with museums, and tolerant when we fail to get it right the first time…

IT is not a priority for most museums, keeping our objects secure and in one piece is, as is getting some of them on display in ways that make sense to our audiences.

Museums are slow. We'll be talking about stuff for a long time before it happens, because we have limited resources and risk-averse institutions. Museum project management is designed for large infrastructure projects, moving hundreds of delicate objects around while major architectural builds go on. It's difficult to find space for agility and experimentation within that.

Nancy Proctor from the Smithsonian said this week: "[Museum] work is more constrained than a general developer" – it must be of the highest quality; for everybody – public good requires relevance and service for all, and because museums are in the 'forever business' it must be sustainable.

How you can make a difference

Museums are slowly adapting to the participation models of social media. You can help museums create (backend) architectures of participation. Here are some places where you can join in conversations with museum technologists:

Museums Computer Group – events, mailing list http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/ #ukmcg @ukmcg

Linking Museums – meetups, practical examples, experimenting with machine-readable data http://museum-api.pbworks.com/

Space Time Camp – Nov 4/5, #spacetimecamp

‘Museums and the Web’ conference papers online provide a good overview of current work in the sector http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/mw.html

So that‘s all fun, but to conclude – this is all about getting museums to the point where the technology just works, data flows like water and our energy is focussed on the compelling stories museums can tell with the public. If you want to work on things that matter – museums matter, and they belong to all of us – we should all be able to tell stories with and through museums.

Thank you for listening

Keep in touch at @mia_out or https://openobjects.org.uk/

What would you change about your workplace? A survey for museum technologists

[Update: I've shared the data]

This week I launched a survey designed to help me understand and communicate the challenges faced by other museum technologists.

It's research for a chapter in a forthcoming book on museums on the web and social media in the first instance, but I'd left the terms and conditions fairly open as I wanted to be able to share and/or re-use the data in future – I wasn't sure if this would put people off, but I figured it was better to be upfront than to end up with great data I couldn't share.

Someone wrote to me to ask what the questions were – they didn't feel qualified to take it themselves but couldn't see all the questions without starting the survey.  I figure it'll also help with the bounce rate if I share them, so here you go:

1. As a museum technologist, what are the three most frustrating things about your job?

For this survey, I'm defining 'museum technologist' as someone who has expertise and/or significant experience in the museum sector and with the application or development of new technologies.

2. List any solutions for each of the problems you listed above

3. Any comments on this survey or on the issues raised?

4. What's your main job role? (if you don't mind it potentially being quoted)

5. Please enter your institution name and/or type (e.g. art gallery, history museum, local authority museum, science centre). (if you don't mind it potentially being quoted)

It's pretty simple – 'what are the three most frustrating things about your job' is the main question, the rest are aimed at providing just enough additional information to provide pointers to the effects of different factors. I didn't want to ask people for so much information that they'd be identifiable as I felt that might make people hold back.  I thought about saying 'things other than lack of resources/time/money' as they're pretty much a given and they're not unique to the museum sector, but I figured they're also too important too ignore.
For further context, when I posted it to the MCG and MCN lists I said:

I'm particularly interested in opportunities and problems that arise when (new) technologies meet (old) museums. … Your answers will help build a body of evidence that could help make a case for improvements in the way museums understand the issues and expertise around using technology to engage audiences, or at least help us understand what the solutions might be. And at the very least you get to vent a bit!

I'm running the survey until August 31 and my initial analysis will be completed by mid-September.  If you'd like to take the survey, or know someone who should, the address is http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/348155/Challenges-facing-museum-technologists (or http://bit.ly/95oGtr if shorter is easier).

Finally, thanks to the person who suggested making the text boxes wider – I've done that now.

Ask a cultural heritage technologist?

I'm speaking at Open Tech 2010 (book your ticket now, only £5!) and it feels like the situation (and the mood) in the UK has changed since I first wrote my proposal and I'm not sure it suits anymore.  So I wanted to throw a few questions open to you to help me re-focus on the things that matter now:

  • what do you value about museums and technology, particularly the web, social media, open data? 
  • what do you want to know from someone working behind the scenes in museum technology?
  • what suggestions would you make if you were able to talk to museums?
  • what aren't museums asking our audiences (including our geek audiences) that we should be asking?
  • what's your favourite biscuit (or cookie)?
The title, by the way, is a play on 'ask a curator', an online event of some sort where you can ask whatever you've always wanted to ask a curator by using the hash tag #askacurator on twitter (or possibly also by commenting on a museum's blog, Facebook wall, twitter account, etc).

Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage – meetup in London July 7

Somehow I've ended up organising an (very informal) event about 'Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage' on Wednesday, July 7, at a pub near Liverpool St Station. I have no real idea what to expect, but I'd love some feisty sceptics to show up and challenge people to make all these geeky acronyms work in the real museum world.

As I posted to the MCG list: "A very informal meetup to discuss 'Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage' is happening next Wednesday. I'm hoping for a good mix of people with different levels of experience and different perspectives on the issue of publishing data that can be re-used outside the institution that created it. … please do pass this on to others who may be interested. If you would like to come but can't get down to that London, please feel free to send me your questions and comments (or beer money)."

The basic details are: July 7, 2010, Shooting Star pub, London. 7:30 – 10pm-ish. More information is available at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/July-2010-meetup and you can let me know you're coming or register your interest.

In more detail…

Why?
I'm trying to cut through the chicken and egg problem – as a museum technologist, I can work towards getting machine-readable data available, but I'm not sure which formats and what data would be most useful for developers who might use it. Without a critical mass of take-up for any one type, the benefits of any one data source are more limited for developers. But museums seem to want a sense of where the critical mass is going to be so they can build for that. How do we cut through this and come up with a sensible roadmap?

Who?
You! If you're interested in using museum data in mashups but find it difficult to get started or find the data available isn't easily usable; if you have data you want to publish; if you work in a museum and have a
data publication problem you'd like help in solving; if you are a cheerleader for your favourite acronym…

Put another way, this event is for you if you're interested in publishing and sharing data about their museums and collections through technologies such as linked data and microformats.

It'll be pretty informal! I'm not sure how much we can get done but it'd be nice to put faces to names, and maybe start some discussions around the various problems that could be solved and tools that could be
created with machine-readable data in cultural heritage.

'Game mechanics for social good: a case study on interaction models for crowdsourcing museum collections enhancement'

I've been very quiet lately – exams for my MSc and work on the digital infrastructure for two new galleries (and a contemporary science news website) opening next week at the Science Museum have kept me busy – but I wanted to take a moment to post about my dissertation project. (Which reminds me, I should write up the architecture I designed to extend our core Sitecore CMS with WordPress to support social media-style interactions with Science Museum-authored content.)

Anyway. This project is for my dissertation for City University's Human-Centred Systems MSc. I'm happy to share the whole outline, but it's a bit academic in format for a blog post so I've just posted an excerpt here. I'd love to hear your comments, particularly if you know of or have been involved in creating, crowdsourced museum projects or games for social good.

'Game mechanics for social good: a case study on interaction models for crowdsourcing museum collections enhancement' is the current title – it's a bit of a mouthful but hopefully the project will do what it says on the tin.

Project description
The primary focus of this project is the design and evaluation of interactions applied to the context of an online museum collection in order to encourage members of the public to undertake specific tasks that will help improve the website.

The project will include a design and build component to create game-like interfaces for testing and evaluation, but the main research output is the analysis of museum crowdsourced projects and 'games for social good' to develop potential models for game-like interactions suitable for museum collections, and the subsequent evaluation of the proposed interaction models.

Aims and Objectives
This project aims to answer this question: can game-like interactions be designed to motivate people to undertake tasks on museum websites that will improve the overall quality of the website for other visitors?

More specifically, which elements of game mechanics are effective when applied to interfaces to crowdsource museum collections enhancement?

Objectives

  • Design game-like interaction models applicable to cultural heritage content and audiences through research, analysis and creativity workshops
  • Build an application and interfaces to create and store user-created content linked to collections content
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of game-like interaction models for eliciting useful content

Theory
Recent projects such as Armchair Revolutionary[1] and earlier projects such as Carnegie Mellon University's 'Games with a purpose'[2] and InterroBang?![3] are indicative of the trend for 'games for social good'. Crowdsourced projects such as the Guardian newspapers examination of MPs expense claims[4], the V&A Museum's image cropping[5], Brooklyn Museum's tagging game[6], the National Library of Australia's collaborative OCR corrections[7]; Chen's (2006) study of the application of Csikszentmihalyi's theory of 'flow' to game design; and Dr Jane McGonigal's ideas about multiplayer games as 'happiness engines'[8] all suggest that 'playful interactions' and crowd participation could be applied to help create specific content improvements on museum sites. Game mechanisms may help make tasks that would not traditionally considered fun or relaxing into a compelling experience.

Within the terms of this project, the output of a game-like interaction must produce an effect outside the interaction itself – that is, the result of a user's interactions with the site should produce beneficial effects for other site visitors who are not involved in the original interactions. To achieve this, it must generate content to enhance the site for subsequent visitors. Methods to achieve this could include creating trails of related objects, entering tags to describe objects, writing alternative labels or researching objects – these will be defined during the research phase and creativity workshops.

Methods and tools

The project is divided into several stages, each with their own methodology and considerations.

Research
The preliminary research process involves a literature review, research into game mechanics and the theory of flow, and research into museum audiences online. It will also include a series of short semi-structured interviews with people involved in creating crowdsourced projects on museum sites or game-like interactions to encourage the completion of set tasks (e.g. games for social good) in order to learn from their reflections on the design process; and analysis of existing sites in both these areas against the theories of game design. This research will define the metrics of the evaluation phase.

Creativity workshop(s)
The results of this research phase sets the parameters for creativity workshops designed to come up with ideas and possible designs for the game-like interfaces to be built. Possible objectives for the creativity workshop include:

  • designing methods for building different levels of challenge into the user experience in an environment that does not easily support different levels of challenge when museum-related skills remain at a constant level
  • creating experiences that are intrinsically rewarding to enable 'flow' within the constraints of available content

Build and test
In turn, the creativity workshops will help determine the interfaces to be built and tested in the later part of the project. The build will be iterative, and is planned to involve as many build-test-review-build iterations as will fit in the allocated time, in order to test as many variant interaction models as possible and support optimisation of existing designs after evaluation. User recruitment in this phase may be a sample of convenience from the target age group.

The interfaces will be developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and published on a WordPress platform. This allows a neat separation of functionality and interface design. Session data (date, interface version, tester ID) can be recorded alongside user data. WordPress's template and plug-in based architecture also supports clear versioning between different iterations of the design, allowing reconstruction of earlier versions of the interfaces for later comparison, and enabling possible split A/B trials.

Analysis and write-up
Analysis will include the results of user testing and user data recorded in the WordPress platform to evaluate the performance of various interface and interaction designs. If the platform attracts usage outside the user testing sessions it may also include log file or Google Analytics analysis of use of the interfaces.

[1] https://www.armrev.org
[2] http://www.gwap.com/
[3] http://www.playinterrobang.com/
[4] http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/
[5] http://collections.vam.ac.uk/crowdsourcing/
[6] http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start.php
[7] http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home
[8] http://www.futureofmuseums.org/events/lecture/mcgonigal.cfm

Edward Tufte on 'Beautiful Evidence'

Tonight I went to see Edward Tufte lecture on 'visual thinking and analytical design' at the Royal Geographic Society tonight. The room was packed, perhaps because lots of people were in town for UX London already. The event was organised by Intelligence Squared, who are apparently 'dedicated to creating knowledge through contest', which is an interesting goal in its own right.

It's been a long week, so I suspect my notes are pretty sketchy, but I'm posting them in case they're useful. Let me know if you spot any corrections. On with the talk…

[His basic thesis:] The method of production interferes with production [of knowledge?].

We do most of our serious visual thinking inside, on unreal flatland [2D] screens, looking at representations of real things, instead of being outside looking at real things. In the real world, most of our thinking would be about way-finding, rather than deep analysis.

Evidence is evidence. Information doesn't care what it is. The intellectual tasks remain constant regardless of the mode of production/consumption – we need evidence to understand and reason about the materials to hand. We might care about mode of production but we shouldn't segregate the information by modes of production. We need content-oriented design.

In manuscripts, the hand directly integrates words and image. When marks all come from same source e.g. hands then material is integrated. When technology has different modes of production e.g. type and drawings, then content is segregated by modes of production.

[He showed a 9th century centaur – the image was made of Latin words, a unification of text and image.] Visual meaning of Latin centaur is still clear despite language. The universality of images, the stupefying locality of languages. Images are cosmopolitan, words are local and parochial. When the language is unknown to the viewer, image and language are separated into comprehensible image and incomprehensible language.

'Content indifference' is the result of teaching that only design matters. The essential test is how well each assists understanding the understanding of the content, not how stylish they are. You must know the meaning of the content to design it.

The point of information display is to assist analytical thinking. One common task is to make comparisons. Take the intellectual task (e.g. 'make smart comparisons') and turn them into design principles. Tasks become instructions to the design. Otherwise it's just based on fashion or latest technology.

[He then had the lights turned up so people could view copies of Minard's map of Napoleon's Russian campaign in 1812. He used this to illustrate his Six Grand Principles of Analytical Design.]

  1. First Grand Principle of Analytical Design: show comparisons, contrasts, differences e.g. difference between those who left and those who returned.  Principles guide the design but also the content. A lot of his work is secretly about analytical thinking.
  2. Second Grand Principle of Analytical Design – show causality, dynamics, mechanisms, explanation. For policy thinking, intervention thinking – to produce an effect, you need to know about and govern the cause – show causality.  Thinking about how these are derived are producer commandments. But as they're derived from fundamental intellectual task they're also consumer tasks – you should be asking, as an audience, what is your task?  Minard's map shows causality with temperature.
  3. Third Grand Principle of Analytical Design – show multivariate data. Three or more factors, variables. i.e. show more than two variables. Reality is inherently multivariable.Minard showed six dimensions – the size of army, direction, temperature, dates, location (lat,long). It's not about the method of display. The design is so good that it's invisible. Good web design has to be enormously self-effacing. The task is for users to understand information, not admire the interface. People should be too busy going about their business to notice the design.
  4. Fourth Grand Principle of Analytical Design – the principle of mode indifference – completely integrate all content. No segregation by mode of content. Videos and tables should be embedded in text, not set aside with captions elsewhere. Information don't care what it is, cognitive tasks don't care what the mode of production is. Minard had paragraphs of text, statistical bits, annotations all over.  Cognitive styles in approaching material – really good analysts are indifferent to the mode of evidence, spirit is 'whatever it takes to explain it'. Driven by explanation. Enormous difference between process driven and content driven explanation. Academics make industry from process driven design but it should be whatever it takes to explain it – not what's lying around, not what I'm good at.
  5. Fifth Grand Principle of Analytical Design – document everything and tell people about it. Document sources, scales, missing data. It's the credibility argument. Two things you need to get across in a presentation – what the story is and why the audience should believe you. Audience has two tasks – trying to figure out the story and whether they can believe the presenter. An important way to have credibility is to have care and craft with respect to the data. Minard's two paragraphs are about documentation – assumptions, scales of measurement. Minard was a great engineer who designed bridges and canals – this has the facticity of an engineer. Minard didn't want quibbles about the facts – he wanted people to appreciate the disaster of war. It was meant as an anti-war poster right from the start. It was meant to show the horrors of war. Precision and accuracy in evidence helps his credibility.  Documentation is part of the fundamental quality control mechanism for preservation of credibility. As a consumer, you should be sceptical if people don't say where the data came from e.g. URLs or full data sets. Very few people look at the original data but making sure it's available is important.  Cherry picking is a big threat to the credibility of presenters – am I seeing the results of evidence, or of evidence selection? Providing source is a way of showing you're not a cherry picker.  Overall, incompetence is more likely to be an explanation than conspiracy. Intimacy with the evidence helps convince of credibility.
  6. Sixth Grand Principle of Analytical Design – serious presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance or integrity of the content. 'Just fancy that.' ' If that's not true of presentations where you work, maybe you want to work somewhere else.'  His great insight into design from his books is that content matters, but 'it's a shame we live in a world where that counts as an insight'.The best way you can improve your presentation is to improve the content.
  7. [Then I think a Seventh Grand Principle of Analytical Design snuck in:] We want to try as much as we can to show information as adjacent in space than flip backwards in time. If information is stacked in time e.g. one slide after another, you have to try and make comparisons between something that's gone away and something you're not seeing. Important comparisons should be try to be made in the eye span. This seventh principle has all kinds of consequences for design. Power users have multiple monitors – trying to get more content real estate adjacent in space.

Digression 'strange word, users', only two industries describe their customers as users, illegal drug industry and computer industry.

The principles makes you think about how you display information to viewers – put the data in front of the user, show the comparison. The human eye is really good at comparing things, so having content rich screens and use just about every pixel that you can to carry content.

Trust the users optical capacity. New York Times has 400 links on its homepage. When working on a model for site for site reporting transparency, he suggested news sites.

User testing is not 'having some temps come in and look your screen over' but rather how your website performs in the wild. Know New York Times and Google News work because of the sheer number of visitors. Websites that are very successful in the wild provide models. Look at people who report – first rate news websites.

[He then turned to the sparklines handout.]

Bonus real live 'Powerpoint sucks' comment.
Sparklines – intense, high resolution display.
Graphics should have resolution of typography [not thickness of pencil]. 'Graphics are no longer a special occasion.' They can be anywhere that a word, image or number can be.

Grey band [in the handout ] is based on the types of tasks that clinicians want to do – they don't care about normal values, only exceptions. [The whole visualisation is based on the task, the user and the context]

'We want to be approximately right rather than accurately wrong'. An approximate answer to the right question is better than an accurate answer to the wrong question. [I think I misheard 'accurately' for 'exactly', judging by people's tweets]

We're subject to the recency effect – sparklines show most recent change but put it in context – patterns in change, other similarly shaped changes.

Data analytical design is about showing reality in flatland.

In response to questions: a lot of websites get corrupted because they're pitching, bringing the ethics of the marketplace into the design – important alongside the intensity of a good news website is its spirit – reporting spirit, not pitching.

Qu re current trend for data visualisation e.g. artists animating visualisations
'I think they can do exactly what they please' One reason it's alright is they're not making other claims about the content, just using it as a found object.

[Finally, out of interest – you could compare these written notes to this sketched version of his talk by @lucyjspence.]

The challenge for museums in the 21st century?

Nick Serota, Director of the Tate, writes about modern museums in 'Why Tate Modern needs to expand'. I'm not sure he convinces me that the expansion needs to be physical, but it's a brilliant case for expanding Tate's online presence:

The world also sees museums differently. Wide international access, directly or through digital media and at all levels of understanding offers the opportunity for new kinds of collaboration with individuals and institutions.

The traditional function of the museum has been that of instruction, with the curator setting the terms of engagement between the visitor and the work of art. But in the past 20 years the development of the internet, the rise of the blog and social networking sites, as well as the more direct intervention in museum spaces by artists themselves, has begun to change the expectations of visitors, and their relationship with the curator as authoritative specialist. The challenge for museums in the 21st century is to find new ways of engaging with much more demanding, sophisticated and better informed viewers. Our museums have to respond to and become places where ideas, opinions and experiences are exchanged, and not simply learned.

…

The museum of the 21st century should be based on encounters with the unfamiliar and on exchange and debate rather than only on an idea of the perfect muse—private reflection and withdrawal from the "real" world. Of course, the museum continues to provide a place of contemplation and of protection from the direct pressures of the commercial and the market. It has to have some anchors or fixed points for orientation and stability, but it also has to be a dynamic space for ideas, conversations and debate about new and historic art within a global context.

The Tate's Head of Online, John Stack, has put the Tate Online Strategy 2010–12, including their 'Ten principles for Tate Online'.  Go read it – with any luck UK parliament will have managed to form a government by the time you're done.

So, do you agree with Serota? What are the challenges you face in your museum in the 21st century?

Slides and talk from 'Cosmic Collections' paper

This is a lazy post, a straight copy and paste of my presentation notes (my excuse is that I'm eight days behind on everything at work and uni after being grounded in the US by volcanic ash). Anyway, I hope you enjoy it or that it's useful in some way.

Cosmic Collections: creating a big bang?

View more presentations from Mia .

Slide 1 (solar rays – Cosmic Collections):

The Cosmic Collections project was based on a simple idea – what if we gave people the ability to make their own collection website? The Science Museum was planning an exhibition on astronomy and culture, to be called ‘Cosmos & Culture’. We had limited time and resources to produce a site to support the exhibition and we risked creating ‘just another exhibition microsite’. So what if we provided access to the machine-readable exhibition content that was already being gathered internally, and threw it open to the public to make websites with it?  And what if we motivated them to enter by offering competition prizes?  Competition participants could win a prize and kudos, and museum audiences might get a much more interesting, innovative site.
The idea was a good match for museum mission, exhibition content, technical context, hopefully audience – but was that enough?
Slide 2 (satellite dish):
Questions…
If we built an API, would anyone use it?
Can you really crowdsource the creation of collections interfaces?
The project gave me a chance to investigate some specific questions.  At the time, there were lots of calls from some quarters for museums to produce APIs for each project, but would anyone actually use a museum API?  The competition might help us understand whether or how we should invest in APIs and machine-readable data.
We can never build interfaces to meet the needs of every type of audience.  One of the promises of machine-readable data is that anyone can make something with your data, allowing people with particular needs to create something that supports their own requirements or combines their data with ours – but would anyone actually do it?
Slide 3 (map mashup):
Mashups combine data from one or more sources and/or data and visualisation tools such as maps or timelines.
I'm going to get the geek stuff out of the way and quickly define mashups and APIs…
Mashups are computer applications that take existing information from known sources and present it to the viewer in a new way. Here’s a mashup of content edits from Wikipedia with a map showing the location of the edit.
Slide 4 (APIs)
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a way for one machine to talk to another: ‘Hi Bob, I’d like a list of objects from you, and hey, Alice, could you draw me a timeline to put the objects on?’
APIs tell a computer, 'if you go here, you will get that information, presented like this, and you can do that with it'.
A way of providing re-usable content to the public, other museums and other departments within our museum – we created a shared backend for web and gallery interactives.
I think of APIs as user interfaces for developers and wanted to design a good experience for developers with the same care you would for end users*.  I hoped that feedback from the competition could be used to improve the beta API
* we didn’t succeed in the first go but it’s something to aim for post-beta
Slide 5: (what if nobody came?)
AKA 'the fears and how to deal with them'
Acknowledge those fears
Plan for the worst case scenario
Take a deep breath and do it anyway
And on the next slides, the results.  If I was replicating the real experience, you’d have several nerve-biting months while you waited for the museum to lumber into gear, planned the launch event, publicised the project in the participant communities… Then waited for results to come in. But let’s skip that bit…
Slide 6: (Ryan Ludwig's http://www.serostar.com/cosmic/)
The results – our judges declared a winner and a runner-up, these are screenshots – this is the second prize winning entry.
People came to the party. Yay! I'd like to thank all the participants, whether they submitted a final entry or not. It wouldn't have worked without them.
Slide 7: (Natalie and Simon's http://cosmos.natimon.com/)
This is a screenshot from the winning site – it made the best use of the API and was designed to lure the visitor in and keep drawing them through the site.
(We didn’t get subject specialists scratching their own itch – maybe they don’t need to share their work, maybe we didn’t reach them. Would like to reach researchers, let them know we have resources to be used, also that they can help us/our audiences by sharing their work)
Slide 8: (astrolabe – what did we learn?)
People need (more) help to participate in a geektastic project like this
The dynamics of a competition are tricky
Mashups are shaped by the data provided – you get out what you put in
Can we help people bring their own content to a future mashup?
Slide 9: (evaluation)
I did a small survey to evaluate the project… Turns out the project was excellent outreach into the developer community. People were really excited about being invited to play with our data.  My favourite quote: "The very idea of the competition was awesome"
Slide 10: (paper sheet)
Also positive coverage in technical press. So in conclusion?
Slide 11: (Tim Berners-Lee):
“The thing people are amazed about with the web is that, when you put something online, you don’t know who is going to use it—but it does get used.”
There are a lot of opportunities and excitement around putting machine-readable data online…
Slide 12: Tim Berners-Lee 2:
But:  It doesn’t happen automatically; It’s not a magic bullet
But people won't find and use your APIs without some encouragement. You need to support your API users. People outside the museum bring new ideas but there's still a big role for people who really understand the data and audiences to help make it a quality experience…
Slide 13 (space):
What next?
Using the feedback to focus and improve collection-wide API
Adding other forms of machine-readable data
Connecting with data from your collections?
I've been thinking about how to improve APIs – offer subject authorities with links to collections, embed markup in the collections pages to help search engines understand our data…
I want more! The more of us with machine-readable data available for re-use, the better the cross-collections searches, the region or specialism-wide mashups… I'd love to be able to put together a mashup showing all the cultural heritage content about my suburb; all the Boucher self-portraits; all the inventions that helped make the Space Shuttle work…
Slide 14: (thank you)
If you're interested in possibilities of machine-readable data and access to your collections, join in the conversation on the museum API wiki or follow along on twitter or on blogs.  Join in at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/
More at https://openobjects.org.uk/ or @mia_out

Image credits include:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100415.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100414.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100409.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100209.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100315.html
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/Centenary/Home/Icons/Pilot_ACE_Computer.aspx

Mash the state

'Cosmic Collections' – my MW2010 paper online

My Museums and the Web 2010 paper is up at Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang and I'm working on the slides now and I'm curious – what would you like to see more of in a presentation?  It's only short (6 minutes) so I'm currently thinking setup (including lots of definitions for non-geeks), outcomes (did the project succeed?), and a bit on what I think the next steps are (basically a call to get your data online in re-usable formats).

I'm thinking of leading with this Tim Berners-Lee quote from an article in Prospect, Mash the state:

"The thing people are amazed about with the web is that, when you put something online, you don't know who is going to use it—but it does get used."

Dorothy Hodgkin – Ada Lovelace Day 2010

This Ada Lovelace Day I'd like to tell you about Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. As the BBC put it, she was 'responsible for crucial developments in the techniques of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of complex organic molecules'.

She's inspiring because she was a brilliant scientist – a Nobel prizewinner for chemistry and an early woman fellow of the Royal Society – and because she was committed to hold scientists responsible for the technological and ethical changes their research created.

I'm neck-deep in assignments and work this week, so this is a very brief entry! The BBC and Wikipedia links can explain her work better than I can anyway.

[Update: I was so busy I didn't look at the time, but it turns out the Science Museum has Dorothy Hodgkin's model of pig insulin. I'm now inspired to see how many of the Royal Society's 'Most influential British women in the history of science' we can link to our collections and write about on our collections blog. If you haven't come across the blog before then I'd recommend it – I know I'm biased but the posts our curators write just keep getting better.]