A few years ago the Museums Computer Group committee started inviting people attending our events to join us for drinks the night before. For locals and people who've travelled up the night before an event, it's a nice way to start to catch up with or meet people who are interested in technology in museums. These days people around the world are organising events under the #drinkingaboutmuseums label, so we thought we'd combine the two and have a #drinkingaboutmuseums in Manchester on Tuesday July 10, 2012. Come join us from 6:30pm at the Sandbar, 120 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HL.
And of course, the reason we're gathering – on Wednesday July 11, 2012, the MCG (@ukmcg) are running an event with the Digital Learning Network (@DLNet) on 'Engaging digital audiences in museums' in Manchester (tickets possibly still available at http://mcg-dlnet.eventbrite.com/ or follow the hashtag #EngageM on twitter) so we'll have a mixed crowd of museum technologists and educators. You're welcome to attend even if you're not going to the conference.
If you've got any questions, just leave a comment or @-mention me (@mia_out) on twitter. We'll also keep an eye on the #drinkingaboutmuseums tag. You can find out more about #drinkingaboutmuseums in my post about the June New York edition which saw 20-ish museum professionals gather to chat over drinks.
Museums should stick to what they do best – to preserve, display, study and where possible collect the treasures of civilisation and of nature. They are not fit to do anything else. It is this single rationale for the museum that makes each one unique, which gives each its own distinctive character. It is the hard work of scholars and curators in their own areas of expertise that attracts visitors. Everybody knows that the harder you try to win friends and ingratiate yourself with people, the more repel you them. It would seem however that those running our new museums need to learn afresh this simple human lesson.
Source: Josie Appleton, "Museums for 'The People'?" in 'Museums and their Communities', edited by Sheila Watson (2007).
We just think that Creative Commons data is real data. It’s data that people can really use. It’s all about access, and access is about several things: licensing and publishing the raw data. Any data that you capture should be available to be the public. … The other important thing is to put the data in places where people can find it… The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. … The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original…
…
…people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. Digitization is a way to address that issue, in a way that with medieval manuscripts, it simply wasn’t possible before. People go to museums because they go and see what they already know, so you’ve got to make your collections known. Frankly, you can write about it, but the best thing you can do is to put out free images of it. This is not something you do out of generosity, this is something you do because it makes branding sense, and it even makes business sense. So that’s what’s in it for the institution.
The other main reason to do it is to increase the knowledge of and research on your collection by the people, which has to be part of your mission at least, even in the most conservative of institutions.
Btw, if you're in New York and fancy meeting up for a coffee before June 17, drop me a line in the comments or @mia_out. (Or ditto for Indianapolis June 17-30).
Over time I've noticed the repetition of various misconceptions and apprehensions about crowdsourcing for cultural heritage and digital history, so since this is a large part of my PhD topic I thought I'd collect various resources together as I work to answer some FAQs. I'll update this post over time in response to changes in the field, my research and comments from readers. While this is partly based on some writing for my PhD, I've tried not to be too academic and where possible I've gone for publicly accessible sources like blog posts rather than send you to a journal paywall.
[Last updated: February 2016, to address 'crowdsourcing steals jobs'. Previous updates added a link to CCLA events, crowdsourcing projects to explore and a post on machine learning+crowdsourcing.]
What is crowdsourcing?
Definitions are tricky. Even Jeff Howe, the author of 'Crowdsourcing' has two definitions:
The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
For many reasons, the term 'crowdsourcing' isn't appropriate for many cultural heritage projects but the term is such neat shorthand that it'll stick until something better comes along. Trevor Owens (@tjowens) has neatly problematised this in The Crowd and The Library:
'Many of the projects that end up falling under the heading of crowdsourcing in libraries, archives and museums have not involved large and massive crowds and they have very little to do with outsourcing labor. … They are about inviting participation from interested and engaged members of the public [and] continue a long standing tradition of volunteerism and involvement of citizens in the creation and continued development of public goods'
Defining crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
To summarise my own thinking and the related literature, I'd define crowdsourcing in cultural heritage as an emerging form of engagement with cultural heritage that contributes towards a shared, significant goal or research area by asking the public to undertake tasks that cannot be done automatically, in an environment where the tasks, goals (or both) provide inherent rewards for participation.
Good question! One tension underlying the 'openness' of the call to participate in cultural heritage is the fact that there's often a difference between the theoretical reach of a project (i.e. everybody) and the practical reach, the subset of 'everybody' with access to the materials needed (like a computer and an internet connection), the skills, experience and time… While 'the crowd' may carry connotations of 'the mob', in 'Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation', Melissa Terras (@melissaterras) points out that many 'amateur' content creators are 'extremely self motivated, enthusiastic, and dedicated' and test the boundaries between 'between definitions of amateur and professional, work and hobby, independent and institutional' and quotes Leadbeater and Miller's 'The Pro-Am Revolution' on people who pursue an activity 'as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a professional standard'.
There's more and more talk of 'community-sourcing' in cultural heritage, and it's a useful distinction but it also masks the fact that nearly all crowdsourcing projects in cultural heritage involve a community rather than a crowd, whether they're the traditional 'enthusiasts' or 'volunteers', citizen historians, engaged audiences, whatever. That said, Amy Sample Ward has a diagram that's quite useful for planning how to work with different groups. It puts the 'crowd' (people you don't know), 'network' (the community of your community) and 'community' (people with a relationship to your organisation) in different rings based on their closeness to you.
'The crowd' is differentiated not just by their relationship to your organisation, or by their skills and abilities, but their motivation for participating is also important – some people participate in crowdsourcing projects for altruistic reasons, others because doing so furthers their own goals.
I'm worried about about crowdsourcing because…
…isn't letting the public in like that just asking for trouble?
@lottebelice said she'd heard people worry that 'people are highly likely to troll and put in bad data/content/etc on purpose' – but this rarely happens. People worried about this with user-generated content, too, and while kids in galleries delight in leaving rude messages about each other, it's rare online.
It's much more likely that people will mistakenly add bad data, but a good crowdsourcing project should build any necessary data validation into the project. Besides, there are generally much more interesting places to troll than a cultural heritage site.
And as Matt Popke pointed out in a comment, 'When you have thousands of people contributing to an entry you have that many more pairs of eyes watching it. It's like having several hundred editors and fact-checkers. Not all of them are experts, but not all of them have to be. The crowd is effectively self-policing because when someone trolls an entry, somebody else is sure to notice it, and they're just as likely to fix it or report the issue'. If you're really worried about this, an earlier post on Designing for participatory projects: emergent best practice' has some other tips.
…doesn't crowdsourcing take advantage of people?
XKCD on the ethics of commercial crowdsourcing
Sadly, yes, some of the activities that are labelled 'crowdsourcing' do. Design competitions that expect lots of people to produce full designs and pay a pittance (if anything) to the winner are rightly hated. (See antispec.com for more and a good list of links).
But in cultural heritage, no. Museums, galleries, libraries, archives and academic projects are in the fortunate position of having interesting work that involves an element of social good, and they also have hugely varied work, from microtasks to co-curated research projects. Crowdsourcing is part of a long tradition of volunteering and altruistic participation, and to quote Owens again, 'Crowdsourcing is a concept that was invented and defined in the business world and it is important that we recast it and think through what changes when we bring it into cultural heritage.'
[Update, May 2013: it turns out museums aren't immune from the dangers of design competitions and spec work: I've written On the trickiness of crowdsourcing competitions to draw some lessons from the Sydney Design competition kerfuffle.]
"when you treat a crowd as disposable and anonymous, you prevent them from achieving their maximum ability. Disposable crowds create disposable output. Simply put: crowds need a sense of identity and community to achieve their potential."
…crowdsourcing can't be used for academic work
Reasons given include 'humanists don't like to share their knowledge' with just anyone. And it's possible that they don't, but as projects like Transcribe Bentham and Trove show, academics and other researchers will share the work that helps produce that knowledge. (This is also something I'm examining in my PhD. I'll post some early findings after the Digital Humanities 2012 conference in July).
Looking beyond transcription and other forms of digitisation, it's worth checking out Prism, 'a digital tool for generating crowd-sourced interpretations of texts'.
…it steals jobs
Once upon a time, people starting a career in academia or cultural heritage could get jobs as digitisation assistants, or they could work on a scholarly edition. Sadly, that's not the case now, but that's probably more to do with year upon year of funding cuts. Blame the bankers, not the crowdsourcers.
The good news? Crowdsourcing projects can create jobs – participatory projects need someone to act as community liaison, to write the updates that demonstrate the impact of crowdsourced contributions, to explain the research value of the project, to help people integrate it into teaching, to organise challenges and editathons and more.
What isn't crowdsourcing?
…'the wisdom of the crowds'?
Which is not just another way of saying 'crowd psychology', either (another common furphy). As Wikipedia puts it, 'the wisdom of the crowds' is based on 'diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals'. Handily, Trevor Owens has just written a post addressing the topic: Human Computation and Wisdom of Crowds in Cultural Heritage.
…user-generated content
So what's the difference between crowdsourcing and user-generated content? The lines are blurry, but crowdsourcing is inherently productive – the point is to get a job done, whether that's identifying people or things, creating content or digitising material.
Conversely, the value of user-generated content lies in the act of creating it rather than in the content itself – for example, museums might value the engagement in a visitor thinking about a subject or object and forming a response to it in order to comment on it. Once posted it might be displayed as a comment or counted as a statistic somewhere but usually that's as far as it goes.
And @sherah1918 pointed out, there's a difference between asking for assistance with tasks and asking for feedback or comments: 'A comment book or a blog w/comments isn't crowdsourcing to me … nor is asking ppl to share a story on a web form. That is a diff appr to collecting & saving personal histories, oral histories'.
Crowdfunding (it's often just asking for micro-donations, though it seems that successful crowdfunding projects have a significant public engagement component, which brings them closer to the concerns of cultural heritage organisations. It's also not that new. See Seventeenth-century crowd funding for one example.)
Data-mining social media and other content (though I've heard this called 'passive' or 'implict' crowdsourcing)
General calls for content, help or participation (see 'user-generated content') or vaguely asking people what they think about an idea. Asking for feedback is not crowdsourcing. Asking for help with your homework isn't crowdsourcing, as it only benefits you.
Buzzwords applied to marketing online. And as @emmclean said, "I think many (esp mkting) see "crowdsourcing" as they do "viral" – just happens if you throw money at it. NO!!! Must be great idea" – it must make sense as a crowdsourced task.
Ok, so what's different about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage?
'The process of crowdsourcing projects fulfills the mission of digital collections better than the resulting searches… Far better than being an instrument for generating data that we can use to get our collections more used it is actually the single greatest advancement in getting people using and interacting with our collections. … At its best, crowdsourcing is not about getting someone to do work for you, it is about offering your users the opportunity to participate in public memory … it is about providing meaningful ways for the public to enhance collections while more deeply engaging and exploring them'.
[This was written in 2012. I've kept it for historical reasons but think differently now.]
First, another definition. As Fiona Romeo writes, 'Citizen science projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of amateurs to analyse scientific data. In doing so, such projects further both science itself and the public understanding of science'. As Romeo points out in a different post, 'All citizen science projects start with well-defined tasks that answer a real research question', while citizen history projects rarely if ever seem to be based around specific research questions but are aimed more generally at providing data for exploration. Process vs product?
I'm still thinking through the differences between citizen science and citizen history, particularly where they meet in historical projects like Old Weather. Both citizen science and citizen history achieve some sort of engagement with the mindset and work of the equivalent professional occupations, but are the traditional differences between scientific and humanistic enquiry apparent in crowdsourcing projects? Are tools developed for citizen science suitable for citizen history? Does it make a difference that it's easier to take a new interest in history further without a big investment in learning and access to equipment?
I have a feeling that 'citizen science' projects are often more focused on the production of data as accurately and efficiently as possible, and 'citizen history' projects end up being as much about engaging people with the content as it is about content production. But I'm very open to challenges on this…
What kind of cultural heritage stuff can be crowdsourced?
I wrote this list of 'Activity types and data generated' over a year ago for my Masters dissertation on crowdsourcing games for museums and a subsequent paper for Museums and the Web 2011, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections (which also lists validation types and requirements). This version should be read in the light of discussion about the difference between crowdsourcing and user-generated content and in the context of things people can do with museums and with games, but it'll do for now:
Activity
Data generated
Tagging (e.g. steve.museum, Brooklyn Museum Tag! You're It; variations include two-player 'tag agreement' games like Waisda?, extensions such as guessing games e.g. GWAP ESP Game, Verbosity, Tiltfactor Guess What?; structured tagging/categorisation e.g. GWAP Verbosity, Tiltfactor Cattegory)
Tags; folksonomies; multilingual term equivalents; structured tags (e.g. 'looks like', 'is used for', 'is a type of').
Debunking (e.g. flagging content for review and/or researching and providing corrections).
Linking (e.g. linking objects with other objects, objects to subject authorities, objects to related media or websites; e.g. MMG Donald).
Relationship data; contextualising detail; information on history, workings and use of objects; illustrative examples.
Stating preferences (e.g. choosing between two objects e.g. GWAP Matchin; voting on or 'liking' content).
Preference data; subsets of 'highlight' objects; 'interestingness' values for content or objects for different audiences. May also provide information on reason for choice.
Categorising (e.g. applying structured labels to a group of objects, collecting sets of objects or guessing the label for or relationship between presented set of objects).
Relationship data; preference data; insight into audience mental models; group labels.
Creative responses (e.g. write an interesting fake history for a known object or purpose of a mystery object.)
Relevance; interestingness; ability to act as social object; insight into common misconceptions.
You can also divide crowdsourcing projects into 'macro' and 'micro' tasks – giving people a goal and letting them solve it as they prefer, vs small, well-defined pieces of work, as in the 'Umbrella of Crowdsourcing' at The Daily Crowdsource and there's a fair bit of academic literature on other ways of categorising and describing crowdsourcing.
Using crowdsourcing to manage crowdsourcing
There's also a growing body of literature on ecosystems of crowdsourcing activities, where different tasks and platforms target different stages of the process. A great example is Brooklyn Museum’s ‘Freeze Tag!’, a game that cleans up data added in their tagging game. An ecosystem of linked activities (or games) can maximise the benefits of a diverse audience by providing a range of activities designed for different types of participant skills, knowledge, experience and motivations; and can encompass different levels of participation from liking, to tagging, finding facts and links.
A participatory ecosystem can also resolve some of the difficulties around validating specialist tags or long-form, more subjective content by circulating content between activities for validation and ranking for correctness, 'interestingness' (etc) by other players (see for example the 'Contributed data lifecycle' diagram on my MW2011 paper or the 'Digital Content Life Cycle' for crowdsourcing in Oomen and Aroyo's paper below). As Nina Simon said in The Participatory Museum, 'By making it easy to create content but impossible to sort or prioritize it, many cultural institutions end up with what they fear most: a jumbled mass of low-quality content'. Crowdsourcing the improvement of cultural heritage data would also make possible non-crowdsourcing engagement projects that need better content to be viable.
Platforms aimed at bootstrapping projects – that is, getting new projects up and running as quickly and as painlessly as possible – seem to be the next big thing. Designing tasks and interfaces suitable for mobile and tablets will allow even more of us to help out while killing time. There's also a lot of work on the integration of machine learning and human computation; my post 'Helping us fly? Machine learning and crowdsourcing' has more on this.
Find out how crowdsourcing in cultural heritage works by exploring projects
There's a lot of academic literature on all kinds of aspects of crowdsourcing, but I've gone for sources that are accessible both intellectually and in terms of licensing. If a key reference isn't there, it might be because I can't find a pre-print or whatever outside a paywall – let me know if you know of one!
Thanks to everyone who responded to my call for their favourite 'misconceptions and apprehensions about crowdsourcing (esp in history and cultural heritage)', and to those who inspired this post in the first place by asking questions in various places about the negative side of crowdsourcing. I'll update the post as I hear of more, so let me know your favourites. I'll also keep adding links and resources as I hear of them.
I was at the Imperial War Museum for an advisory board meeting for the Social Interpretation project recently, and had a chance to reflect on my experiences with previous audience participation projects. As Claire Ross summarised it, the Social Interpretation project is asking: does applying social media models to collections successfully increase engagement and reach? And what forms of moderation work in that environment – can the audience be trusted to behave appropriately?
One topic for discussion yesterday was whether the museum should do some 'gardening' on the comments. Participation rates are relatively high but some of the comments are nonsense ('asdf'), repetitive (thousands of variants of 'Cool' or 'sad') or off-topic ('I like the museum') – a pattern probably common to many museum 'have your say' kiosks. Gardening could involve 'pruning' out comments that were not directly relevant to the question asked in the interactive, or finding ways to surface the interesting comments. While there are models available in other sectors (e.g. newspapers), I'm excited by the possibility that the Social Interpretation project might have a chance to address this issue for museums.
A big design challenge for high-traffic 'have your say' interactives is providing a quality experience for the audience who is reading comments – they shouldn't have to wade through screens of repeated, vacuous or rude comments to find the gems – while appropriately respecting the contribution and personal engagement of the person who left the comment.
In the spirit of 'have your say', what do you think the solution might be? What have you tried (successfully or not) in your own projects, or seen working well elsewhere?
"One of the most discussed issues was about what we have termed ‘gardening comments’ but to put it bluntly it’s more a case of should we be ‘curating the visitor voice’ in order to improve the visitor experience? It’s a difficult question to deal with…
We are at the stage where we really do want to respect the commenter, but also want to give other readers a high value experience. It’s a question of how we do that, and will it significantly change the project?"
Update, March 2014: I've just been reading a journal article on 'Normative Influences on Thoughtful Online Participation'. The authors set out to test this hypothesis:
'Individuals exposed to highly thoughtful behavior from others will be more thoughtful in their own online comment contributions than individuals exposed to behavior exhibiting a low degree of thoughtfulness.'
Thoughtful comments were defined by the number of words, how many seconds it took to write them, and how much of the content was relevant to the issue discussed in the original post. And the results? 'We found significant effects of social norm on all three measures related to participants’ commenting behavior. Relative to the low thoughtfulness condition, participants in the high thoughtfulness condition contributed longer comments, spent more time writing them, and presented more issue-relevant thoughts.' To me, this suggests that it's worth finding ways to highlight the more thoughtful comments (and keeping pulling out those 'asdf' weeds) in an interactive as this may encourage other thoughtful comments in turn.
Reference: Sukumaran, Abhay, Stephanie Vezich, Melanie McHugh, and Clifford Nass. “Normative Influences on Thoughtful Online Participation.” In Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3401–10. Vancouver, BC, Canada: ACM, 2011. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979450.
Last November I went to the Museum Computer Network (MCN2011) conference for the first time – I was lucky enough to get a scholarship (for which many, many thanks). The theme was 'hacking the museum: innovation, agility and collaboration' and the conference was packed with interesting sessions.My rough notes are below, though they're probably even sketchier than usual because I had a pretty full conference (running a workshop, taking part in a panel and a debate). (I thought I'd posted this at the time, but I just found it in draft, so here goes…)
Pre-conference workshop, Wednesday I ran a half-day workshop on 'Hacking and mash-ups for beginners', which had a great turn-out of people willing to get stuck in. The basic idea was to give people a first go at scripting 'hello world' and a bit beyond (with JavaScript, because it can be run locally), to provide some insight into thinking computationally (understanding something of programmers think and how ideas might be turned into something on a screen), to play with real museum data and try different visualisation tools to create simple mashups. My slides and speaker notes are at Hacking and mash-ups for beginners at MCN2011 and I'd be happy to share the exercises on request. I used lots of cooking/food analogies so have a snack to hand in case the slides make you hungry! I had lots of good feedback from the workshop, but I think my favourite comment was this from Katie Burns (@K8burns): '…I loved the workshop. I nerded out and kept playing with your exercises on my flight home from ATL.'.
Thursday Kevin Slavin's (@slavin_fpo) thought-provoking keynote took us to Walter Benjamin by way of the Lascaux Caves and onto questions like: what does it do to us [as writers of wall captions and object labels] when objects provide information?. He observed, 'visitors turn to the caption as if the work of art is a question to be answered' – are we reducing the work to information? We should be evoking, rather than educating; amplifying rather than answering the question; producing a memory instead of preserving one; making the moment in which you're actually present more precious… Ultimately, the authenticity of his experience [with the artwork in the caves] was in learning how to see it [in the context, the light in which it was created]. Kevin concluded that technology is not about giving additional things to look at, but additional ways to see.
Friday One of the sessions I was most looking forward to was Online cataloguing tools and strategies, as it covered crowdsourcing, digital scholarly practices and online collections – some of my favourite things!
Digital Mellini turned 17th C Italian manuscript (an inventory of paintings written in rhyming verse) into an online publication and a collaboration tool for scholars. The project asked 'What will digital art history look like?'. The old way of doing art history was about solo exploration, verbal idea-sharing, physical book publications, unlinked data, image rights issues; but the promise of digital scholarship is: linked data opens new routes to analysis, scholars collaborate online, conversations are captured, digital-only publications count for tenure, no copyright restrictions… I was impressed by their team-based, born-digital approach, even if it's not their norm: 'the process was very non-Getty, it was iterative and agile'. They had a solid set of requirements included annotations and conversations at the word or letter level of the text, with references to related artworks. They're now tackling 'rules of engagement' for scholars – where to comment, etc – and working out what an online publication looks like and how it affects scholarly practices.
Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) Online Collections's goal was search across all YCBA collections. All the work they've done is open source – Solr, Lucene – cool! They're also using LIDO (superceding CDWA and MuseumDat) and looking to linked data including vocabulary harmonisation. As with many cross-catalogue projects, they ended up using a lowest common denominator between collections and had to compromise on shared fields in search. I'm not sure who used the lovely phrase 'dedication to public domain'… Both art history presentations mentioned linked data – we've come far!
The final paper was Crowdsourcing transcription: who, why, what and how, with Perian Sully from Balbao Park talking with Ben Brumfield about how they've used his 'From the Page' transcription software. Transcription is not only useful because you can't do OCR on cursive writing, but it's also a form of engagement and outreach (as I've found with other cultural heritage crowdsourcing). They covered some similar initiatives like Family Search Indexing, whose goal is to get 175,000 new user volunteering to transcribe records (they've already transcribed close to a billion records) and the Historic Journals project whose goal is to link transcriptions with records in genealogy databases (and lots more examples but these were most relevant to my PhD research).
Reasons for crowd participation (from an ornithology project survey) included the importance of the programme, filling free time, love of nature, civic duty and school requirement. People participate for a sense of purpose, love of the subject, immersion in the text (deep reading). The question of fun leads into peril of gamification – if you split text line by line to make a microtask-style game, you lose the interesting context.
They gave some tips on how to start a crowdsourced transcription project based on your material and the uses for your transcription. The design will also affect interpretive decisions made when transcribing – do you try to replicate the line structure on the page? – and can provide incentives like competition to transcribe more materials, though as Perian pointed out, accuracy can be affected by motivation.
I had to leave Philosophical Leadership Needed for the Future: Digital Humanities Scholars in Museums early but it all made a lot more sense to me when I realised Neal wasn't using 'digital humanities' in the sense it's used academically (the application of computational techniques to humanities research questions) – as I see it, he's talking about something much closer to 'digital heritage'.
I still haven't sorted out my notes from History Museums are not Art Museums: Discuss! but it was one of my favourite sessions and a great chance to discuss one of my museumy interests with really smart people.
Saturday I popped into a bit of THATCamp/CultureHack and had fun playing with an imaginary museum, but unfortunately I didn't get to spend any time in the THATCamp itself, because…
The MCN 'Great Debate' I was invited to take part in the Great Debate held as the closing plenary session. I was on the affirmative side with Bruce Wyman, debating 'there are too many museums' against Rob Stein and Roseanna Flouty. For now, I think I'll just say that I think it's the hardest bit of public speaking I've ever done – the trickiness of the question was the least of it! I think there's a tension between the requirements of the formal debating structure and the desire to dissect the question so you can touch on issues relevant to the audience, so it'll be interesting to see how the format might change in future.
Finally, a silly tweet from me: '#mcn2011 I've decided the perfect visitor-friendly museum is the Mona Lisa on spaceship held by a dinosaur. That you can buy on a t-shirt.' lead to the best thing ever from @timsven: '@mia_out- this pic is for you- museum of the future: trex w/ mona lisa riding millenium falcon #MCN2011 http://t.co/37GdAD1O'.
I was invited over to New Zealand (from Australia) recently to talk at Te Papa in Wellington and the Auckland Museum. After the talks I was asked if I could share some of my notes on design for participatory projects and for planning for the impact of participatory projects on museums. Each museum has a copy of my slides, but I thought I'd share the final points here rather than by email, and take the opportunity to share some possible workshop activities to help museums plan audience participation around its core goals.
Both talks started by problematising the definition of a 'museum website' – it doesn't work to think of your 'museum website' as purely stuff that lives under your domain name when it's now it's also the social media accounts under your brand, your games and mobile apps, and maybe also your objects and content on Google Art Project or even your content in a student’s Tumblr. The talks were written to respond to the particular context of each museum so they varied from there, but each ended up with these points. The sharp-eyed among you might notice that they're a continuation of ideas I first shared in my Europeana Tech keynote: Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation. The second set are particularly aimed at helping museums think about how to market participatory projects and sustain them over the longer term by making them more visible in the museum as a whole.
Best practice in participatory project design
Have an answer to 'Why would someone spend precious time on your project?'
Be inspired by things people love
Design for the audience you want
Make it a joy to participate
Don't add unnecessary friction, barriers (e.g. don't add sign-up forms if you don’t really need them, or try using lazy registration if you really must make users create accounts)
Show how much you value contributions (don't just tell people you value their work)
Validate procrastination – offer the opportunity to make a difference by providing meaningful work
Let audiences help manage problems – let them know which behaviours are acceptable and empower them to keep the place tidy
Test with users; iterate; polish
Best practice within your museum
Fish where the fish are – find the spaces where people are already engaging with similar content and see how you can slot in, don't expect people to find their way to you unless you have something they can’t find anywhere else
Allow for community management resources – you’ll need some outreach to existing online and offline communities to encourage participation, some moderation and just a general sense that the site hasn’t been abandoned. If you can’t provide this for the life of the project, you might need to question why you’re doing it.
Decide where it's ok to lose control. Try letting go… you may find audiences you didn't expect, or people may make use of your content in ways you never imagined. Watch and learn and tweak in response – this is a good reason to design in iterations, and to go into public or invited-beta earlier rather than later.
Realistically assess fears, decide acceptable levels of risk. Usually fears can be turned into design requirements, they’re rarely show-stoppers.
Have a clear objective, ideally tied to your museum’s mission. Make sure the point of the project is also clear to your audience.
Put the audience needs first. You’re asking people to give up their time and life experience, so make sure the experience respects this. Think carefully before sacrificing engagement to gain efficiency.
Know how to measure success
Plan to make the online activity visible in the organisation and in the museum. Displaying online content in the museum is a great way to show how much you value it, as well as marketing the project to potential contributors. Working out how you can share the results with the rest of the organization helps everyone understand how much potential there is, and helps make online visitors ‘real’.
Have an exit strategy – staff leave, services fold or change their T&Cs
I'd love to know what you think – what have I missed? [Update: for some useful background on the organisational challenges many museums face when engaging with technology, check out Collections Access and the use of Digital Technology (pdf).]
More on designing museum projects for audience participation
I prepared this activity for one of the museums, but on the day the discussion after my talk went on so long that we didn't need to use a formal structure to get people talking. In the spirit of openness, I thought I'd share it. If you try it in your organisation, let me know how it goes!
Pick two strategic priorities or organisational goals…
In 5 minutes: generate as many ideas as possible
In 2 minutes: pick one idea to develop further
Ideas can include in-gallery and in-person activity; they must include at least two departments and some digital component.
Developing your idea… Ideas can include in-gallery and in-person activity; they must include at least two departments
You have x minutes to develop your idea
You have 2 minutes each to report back. Include: which previous museum projects provide relevant lessons? How will you market it? How will it change the lives of its target audience? How will it change the museum?
How will you alleviate potential risks? How will you maximise potential benefits?
You have x minutes for general discussion. How can you build on the ideas you've heard?
For bonus points…
These discussion points were written for another museum, but they might be useful for other organisations thinking about audience participation and online collections:
What are the museum’s goals in engaging audiences with collections online?
What does success look like?
How will it change the museum?
Which past projects provide useful lessons?
How can the whole organisation be involved in supporting online conversations?
What are the barriers?
What small, sustainable steps can be taken?
Where are online contributions visible in the museum?
It should be fairly simple to answer the question, 'what's the point of a museum website?' because the answer should surely be some variant on 'to further the mission and goals of the museum'.
But what is it about being online, about being on or of the web that problematises that answer?
Is it that there are so many other sites providing similar content, activities and access to knowledge? Is it that the niche role many museums play in their local communities doesn't translate into online space? Is it that other sites got in earlier and now host better conversations about museum collections?
Or is the answer not really problematic – there have always been other conversations about collections and ways of accessing knowledge, and the question is really about where museums and their various activities fit in the digital landscape?
I don't know, but it's Friday night and I should be on my way out, so I'm going to turn the question over to smarter minds… What are the right questions and why is it difficult for a museum to translate its mission directly to its website?
Update, the next day… This quote from an article, Lost professors: we won’t need academics in 60 years, addresses one of my theories about why translating a museum's mission into the online context is problematic:
…there are probably several hundred academics in Australia who lecture on, say, regression analysis, and very few of us could claim to be in the top 1% – actually only 1% of us.
The web allows 100% of the students to access the best 1%. Where is the market for duplication of mediocre course material by research academics?
I'm not saying any museum content is mediocre, of course, but the point about the challenges of the sudden visibility of duplicated content remains. If the museum up the road or in the next town has produced learning activities or expert commentary about the same regional/national history events or objects, does it further your mission to post similar content? What content or activities can you host that is unique to your museum, either because of your particular niche collections or context or because no-one else has done it yet?
Recently there's been a burst of re-energised conversations on Twitter, blogs and inevitably at MW2012 (Museums on the Web 2012) about museum technologists, about breaking out of the bubble, about digital strategies vs plain old strategies for museums. This is a quick post (because I only ever post when I should be writing a different paper) to make sure my position is clear.
If you're reading this you probably know that these are important issues to discuss, and it's exciting thinking about the organisational change issues museums will rise to in order to stay relevant, but it's also important to step back and remind ourselves that ultimately, it's not about us. It's not about our role as museum technologists, or museums as organisations.
Museum technologists should be advocates for the digital audience, and guide museums in creating integrated, meaningful experiences, but we should also make sure that other museum staff know we still share their values and respect their expertise, and dispel myths about being zealots of openness at the expense of other requirements or wanting to devalue the physical experience.
It's about valuing the digital experiences our audiences have in our galleries, online and on the devices they carry in their pockets. It's about understanding that online visitors are real visitors too. It's about helping people make the most of their physical experiences by extending and enhancing their understandings of our collections and the world that shaped them. It's about showing the difference digital makes by showing the impact it can have for a museum seeking to fulfil its mission for audiences it can't see as well as those right under its nose.
I'm a museum technologist, but maybe in my excitement about its potential I haven't been clear enough: I'm not in love with technology, I'm in love with what it enables – better museums, and better museum experiences.
The updated Google Art Project has been launched with loads more museums contributing over 30,000 artworks. The interface still seems a bit sketchy to me (sometimes you can open links in a new tab, sometimes you can't; mystery meat navigation; the lovely zoom option isn't immediately discoverable; the thumbnails that appear at the bottom don't have a strong visual connection with the action that triggers their appearance; and the only way I could glean any artist/title information about the thumbnails was by looking at the URL), but it's nice to see options for exploring by collection (collecting institution, I assume), date or artist emphasised in the interface.
Anyway, it's all about the content – easy access to high-quality zoomable images of some of the world's best artworks in an interface with lots of relevant information and links back to the holding institution is a win for everyone. And if the attention (and traffic) makes museums a little jealous, well, it'll be fascinating to see how that translates into action. After all, keeping up with the Joneses seems to be one way museums change…
Reading some online stories about the launch, I was struck by how far conversations about traditional and online galleries have come. From one:
As users explore the galleries they can also add comments to each painting and share the whole collection with friends and family. Try doing that in the Tate Modern. Actually, don’t.
Although, of course, you can – it's traditionally known as 'having a conversation in a museum'. But in 2012, is visiting a website and sharing links online seen as a reasonable stand-in for the physical visit to a museum, leaving the in-person gallery visit for 'purists' and enthusiasts? (This might make blockbuster exhibtions bearable.) Or, as the consensus of the past decade has it, does it just whet the appetite and create demand for an experience with the original object, leading to more visits?
I've spent the last week as 'geek-in-residence' with the Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies team at the Powerhouse Museum. I wasn't sure what 'geek-in-residence' would mean in reality, but in this case it turned out to be a week of creativity, interesting constraints and rapid, iterative design.
When I arrived on Monday morning, I had no idea what I'd be working on, let alone how it would all work. By the end of the first day I knew how I'd be working, but not exactly what I'd focus on. I came in with fresh questions on Tuesday, and was sketching ideas by lunchtime. The next few days were spent getting stuck into wireframes to focus in on specific issues within that problem space; I turned initial ideas into wireframes and basic copy; and put that through two rounds of quick-and-dirty testing with members of the public and Powerhouse volunteers. By the time I left on Friday I was able to handover wireframes for a site called 'conversations about collections' which aims to record people's memories of items from the collection. (I ran out of time to document the technical aspects of how the site could be built in WordPress, but given the skills of the team I think they'll cope.)
The first day and a half were about finding the right-sized problem. In conversations with Paula (Manager of the Visual & Digitisation services team) and Luke (Web Manager), we discussed what each of us were interested in exploring, looking for the intersection between what was possible in the time and with the material to hand.
After those first conversations, I went back to Powerhouse's strategy document for inspiration. If in doubt, go back to the mission! I was looking for a tie-in with their goals – luckily their plan made it easy to see where things might fit. Their strategy talked about ideas and technology that have changed our world and stories of people who create and inspire them, about being open to 'rich engagement, to new conversations about the collections'.
I also considered what could be supported by the existing API, what kinds of activities worked well with their collections and what could be usefully built and tested as paper or on-screen prototypes. Like many large collections, most of the objects lack the types of data that supports deeper engagement for non-experts (though the significance statements that exist are lovely).
Two threads emerged from the conversations: bringing social media conversations and activity back into the online collections interfaces to help provide an information scent for users of the site; and crowdsourcing games based around enhancing the collections data. The first was an approach to the difficulties in surfacing the interesting objects in very large collections. Could you create a 'heat map' based on online activity about objects to help searchers and browsers spot objects that might be more interesting?
At one point Nico (Senior Producer) and I had a look at Google Analytics to see what social media sites were sending traffic to the collections and suss out how much data could be gleaned. Collection objects are already showing up on Pinterest, and I had wild thoughts about screen-scraping Pinterest (they have no API) to display related boards on the OPAC search results or object pages…
I also thought about building a crowdsourcing game that would use expert knowledge to data to make better games possible for the general public – this would be an interesting challenge, as open-ended activities are harder to score automatically so you need to design meaningful rewards and ensure an audience to help provide them. However, it was probably a bigger task than I had time for, especially with most of the team already busy on other tasks, though I've been interested in that kind of dual-phased project since my MSc project on crowdsourcing games for museums.
But in the end, I went back to two questions: what information is needed about the collections, what's the best way to get it? We decided to focus on conversations, stories and clues about objects in the collections with a site aimed at collecting 'living memories' about objects by asking people what they remember about an object and how they'd explain it to a kid. The name, 'Conversations about collections' came directly from the strategy doc and was just too neat a description to pass up, though 'memory bank' was another contender. I ended up with five wireframes (clickable PDF at that link) to cover the main tasks of the site: to persuade people (particularly older people) that their memories are worth sharing, and to get the right object in front of the right person. Explaining more about the designs would be a whole other blog post, but in the interests of getting this post out I'll save that for another day… I'm dashing out this post before I head out, but I'll update in response to questions (and generally things out when I have more time).
My week at the Powerhouse was a brilliant chance to think through the differences between history of science/social history objects and art objects, and between history and art museums, but that's for another post (perhaps when if I ever get around to posting my notes from the MCN session on a similar topic).
It also helped me reflect on my interests, which I would summarise as 'meaningful audience participation' – activities that are engaging and meaningful for the audience and also add value for the museum, activities that actually change the museum in some way (hopefully for the better!), whether that's through crowdsourcing, co-curation or other types of engagement.
Finally, I owe particular thanks to Paula Bray and Luke Dearnley for running with Seb Chan's original suggestion and for their time and contributions to shaping the project; to Nicolaas Earnshaw for wireframe work and Suse Cairns for going out testing on the gallery floor with me; and to Dan Collins, Estee Wah, Geoff Barker and everyone else in the office and on various tours for welcoming me into their space and their conversations.
Photo: behind the scenes at the (then) Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
