Changing contexts: museums, audiences and technology

[A presenta+on for the Interna+onal Training Programme run by the Bri+sh Museum for museum professionals from around the world] For those who dont know me, Im Mia, freelancer and a PhD student at Open University. Ive been a cultural heritage technologist for over a decade, and have worked interna+onally as a programmer, analyst, researcher and consultant. Lately Ive been working on crowdsourcing metadata for museum objects through games, and in my PhD I’ll be working with specialist users around the digi+sa+on and geoloca+on of historical materials. This is an angel with a mobile phone on St. John’s Cathedral, Netherlands and I’ve chosen it because it symbolises the way the world is changing around us; genera+ons are skipping the desktop computer and going straight to netbooks, tablets, mobile phones... The world is changing rapidly, and I’ll discuss some of the challenges this brings, but ul+mately it’s about the amazing opportuni+es it creates. Image source: hRp://technabob.com/blog/2011/04/11/angel‐with‐mobile‐phone/ Sculpture by Ton Mooy for St. John’s Cathedral, ’s‐Hertogenbosch, Netherlands.   1 

First of all, its important to acknowledge that audience expecta+ons are set by their experiences outside the museum ‐ in school, visitor aRrac+ons, cinemas, online, at home.  Facebook teaches them to tag images, Foursquare to mark their loca+on, TwiRer to ﬁnd engaged communi+es. TV tells them that anyone can be a star. Every bit of social media teaches them to share and be sociable.  Some of them may be carrying cameras, game consoles and phones that are more modern than anything you could install and maintain in gallery. Image source: Horia Varlan hRp://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4269333919/  2 

But I s+ll think we’re lucky to be working in cultural heritage now... Its not about compe+ng with the changing technology and behaviours outside museums, its about working with it. Designing an engaging visitor experience should be your star+ng point, then think crea+vely about how it could be enhanced with technology.  And its not all about technology ‐ some+mes post‐it notes are as good as an interac+ve kiosk. But that said, these are some digital trends Im going to discuss… Image source: Mia Ridge  3 

Augmented reality layers can be triggered by loca+on and orienta+on, as in this Wikitude example showing facts about a castle... More info at hRp://www.delicious.com/miaridge/augmentedreality hRp://lefrightandcentre.net/2009/06/17/augmented‐reality‐what‐are‐we‐looking‐at/wikitude‐500x396‐real/  4 

Simple way to provide mul+‐lingual access to informa+on – this example links to pages on Wikipedia rather than informa+on wriRen speciﬁcally for  the object in the museum context, but it’s a quick solu+on to providing informa+on for a broader audience. QR codes can contain any wriRen text as well as URLs, so don’t always need internet access, though explaining them can require thought. Image source: hRp://twitpic.com/3x2duc More info on what Nick Moyes, Terence Eden and Roger Bamkin did at hRp://nickmoyes.blogspot.com/2011/04/when‐glam‐met‐wiki‐wikipedia‐and.html  5 

Or by loca+on and markers such as QR codes… and in this case, the museum has taken artworks to where the people are ‐ a music fes+val. Stedelijk Museum at Lowlands fes+val See hRp://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/papers/augmented_reality_and_the_museum_experience for more Images from hRp://wluture.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/ﬁrst‐impressions‐the‐stedelijk‐museum‐art‐collec+on‐in‐augmented‐reality/  6 

This example gives people without smart phones an experience of the story you’re trying to tell, as well as providing a lot more informa+on online.  It’s a great example of taking history back to the places where it happened. More at hRp://popupcity.net/2011/03/qr‐storytelling/  7 

A bus stop in the Civic Center/Tenderloin district in San Francisco with a poster about the history of the place instead of the usual ad Image source: Mia Ridge  8 

‘Then and now’ is a great way to help people understand the relevance of history to their own lives.  It may be accessed through being in the place, or through views of the loca+on like maps You can take interpreta+on outside the walls of the museum with images, text, QR codes, soundscapes and other evoca+ons... When you release your data and/or images under an open licence, people can do brilliant things with it.  This early mashup (hRp://www.paulhagon.com/thenandnow/) uses images from Flickr Commons (hRp://www.ﬂickr.com/commons) and puts them into modern Google street view. Because this uses images from the Commons, it’s ins+tu+onal images only...   9 

But you can use/create services that will let anyone add images. This is Historypin, which is one of many ‘then and now’ sites around. Historypin are unusual because they want to bring diﬀerent genera+ons into the same place to work together to create ‘social capital’ – it’s not just about the history or the technology.  10 

This is ‘what was there’ – this screenshot shows an overlay of an photo from the Brixton riots on the modern streetscape.  11 

I worked on the Hidden Histories pilot with the Science Museum, UCL, BT Archives (funded by the AHRC).  The project explored ques+ons like, ‘What if we could re‐connect the history of technology found in museums and scholarship to the mobile user? What if the public’s experiences and memories can be channelled back into the app? Can the full poten+al of ci+zen mobile for history of technology be tapped? Can geolocated heritage increase public engagement with and access to museum collec+ons?’ We learnt a lot about the issues around presen+ng objects (which museums love), facts (which museums and academics love) and stories (which people love) in the same interface. Also, how do you deal with bandwidth issues for media like video when you’re aiming for serendipitous discovery in the loca+ons where there are hidden stories to tell?  How can you best take advantage of the na+ve capabili+es of a device (e.g. camera, GPS), and can you develop a mobile web (rather than app) site to enable access for a wider range of devices? More at hRp://sciencemuseumdiscovery.com/blogs/loca+ngheritage/  12 

The pilot highlighted many of the constraints of mobile devices... e.g.  • Tension between desire for small and portable devices vs desire for larger screens for viewing media and easier text entry, longer baRery life • Bandwidth – roaming and data charges – people are ofen s+ll scared of unexpected data charges • Time and place to concentrate and watch? What if the bus you’re wai+ng for comes while you’re using the app? • If you’re playing video or sharing images, can everyone in your group see the screen or does it isolate the person with the device? Ar+cles like hRp://uxmag.com/design/peanut‐buRer‐in‐denver are a good start for thinking about these issues  13 

There are more experts outside the museum than within, and the general public is gifed with the ability to describe your collec+ons in the ordinary language that will help make it discoverable and engaging. If youre not sure whats best, why not ask your visitors? Everyone wins. But make sure you follow best prac+ces – e.g. user‐centred design is more than just user tes+ng, and even though you want to get certain pieces of informa+on out of the crowdsourcing process, it should be designed to op+mise the user experience over the organisa+onal constraints (par+cularly if you want to encourage the widest possible par+cipa+on and engagement with your content). Examples: transcrip+ons (Old Weather shipping logs, NYPL menus), image cropping (V&A), Map rec+ﬁca+on (Map Warper, NYPL), Metadata (steve.museum, metadata games), Audio‐visual tagging (Waisda?) Image: hRp://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest‐post‐visitor‐par+cipa+on‐to.html  14 

May 11, 2011  04/04/11 Crowdsourcing games have a lot of poten+al as ‘par+cipa+on engines’.  They can lower the barrier to entry and encourage on‐going par+cipa+on, but be careful of cheap gamiﬁca+on that can turn intrinsic into extrinsic mo+va+on.  Stats from Waisda?, GWAP, DigitalKoot etc hRp://blogs.forrester.com/elizabeth_shaw/11‐05‐25‐star+ng_to_play_with_social_gamers Image source: hRp://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/logicalrealist/25638338/  15 

A quick overview of my research... Unlike art objects, which are more accessible ‐ even non‐experts can describe them in terms of colour, the things they depict, mood or individual emo+onal response ‐ everyday and technical historical objects can be less accessible to non‐experts. Social history collec+ons can contain tens or hundreds of similar objects, including technical items, reference collec+ons, objects whose purpose may not be immediately evident from their appearance, and objects whose meaning may be obscure to the general visitor.  So my project asked whether metadata games could help people have fun with crea5ng useful content about diﬃcult objects.  How many versions of almost iden+cal telescopes could people bear to see?  And could the public give us useful informa+on about our telescopes? The results of the project were Dora, a tagging game; and Donald, an experimental trivia game that explored emergent game‐play around longer forms of content, including things we might not know about our own collec+ons.  The code was designed to be re‐usable by other museums, libraries and archives, contact me if you’re interested in making games for your organisa+on. Image sources: Powerhouse Museum  16 

May 11, 2011  04/04/11 In the tagging game Doras lost data, the player meets Dora, a junior curator who needs their help replacing some lost data, asking them to add words that would help someone find the object shown in Google.  My results suggest that invoking the magic circle is key for encouraging wider par5cipa5on in museum content projects. When audiences can immediately iden+fy an ac+vity as a game – in this the characters and a minimal narra+ve really helped ‐  their usual reserva+ons about contribu+ng content to a museum site disappear. The clearly defined task (refined through itera+ve cycles of design and play‐tes+ng) is a strength of the game Dora. Image sources: Mia Ridge, hRp://museumgam.es/donald/  hRp://museumgam.es/dora/  17 

One result of gameplay was ac+ve engagement with museum collec+ons.  Example tags added for what at ﬁrst seems like a visually boring object... The same game could be re‐designed to encourage mul+‐lingual content. The game was played by people who would never otherwise spend more than a second glancing past an object like this...  Image source: hRp://museumgam.es/  18 

May 11, 2011  04/04/11 Usage sample: in a single evening (approximately 6 hours), a call for players through one personal status update on Facebook yielded 180 turns (176 tagging turns, 4 fact turns), 1179 tags and 4 facts about 145 objects from 26 players.  The games are s+ll very much prototypes, they need a few more itera+ons to polish them and improve the design and gameplay, and I didnt have a marke+ng budget, so imagine the poten+al for a proper project... If I can do this on my evenings and weekends, your museum can do it too. Image source: hRp://museumgam.es/  19 

200 million people play casual games online.  In 2010, UK research said 67% of the online audience (17 million people) play casual games on social networks, 20 million on mobile devices, 18 million on casual games portals.  Games arent new but theyre powerful, and gamiﬁca+on is a buzzword to watch out for. Image source: starmud hRp://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tek/4372275755/sizes/m/in/photostream/  20 

Our audiences are (gexng) used to being heard… are we used to listening?  Technology is not a babysiRer, if cant deliver expecta+ons think carefully before crea+ng them.  Are you in a dialogue with audiences or are you just broadcas+ng at them? Given the events of the past spring across Africa and the Middle East, it’s something to think about – how does that change how an audience expects to interact with formal ins+tu+ons? Image: spray paint, plant tree here’, source: Mia Ridge  21 

And change has always been constant because the world we live in is always changing… Image source: Eire Sarah hRp://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/eiresarah/3019976448/  22 

So change is constant ‐ how do you cope? Holis+c strategies for public engagement as a basis for decision‐making, that in turn determine your exhibi+on and online programmes… Work together across departments towards your museums mission. Your content should be ﬁndable, engaging, linkable. Be authorita+ve ‐ exchange links between peers to say your Ma+sse or Newton is the same as their Ma+sse or Newton. Help people discover more from your pages…  Open data helps others create services that you can’t aﬀord to – either for specialists, or sites (mashups) that cut across disciplines and object types to put your content in context with other cultural heritage etc datasets Image: Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, on their free entry Sunday  23 

24 This image of the angel with a mobile phone also sums up the way mobile experiences change the social and physicImage source: hRp://technabob.com/blog/2011/04/11/angel‐with‐mobile‐phone/ Sculpture by Ton Mooy for St. Jo 24 

Changing contexts: museums, audiences and technology

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Changing contexts: museums, audiences and technology — Document Transcript

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