Category Archives: digital humanities

SMKE workshop: Social Media and the Museum

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SMKElogo-370x100Yesterday as part of the Social Media Knowledge Exchange project, UCLDH hosted  a workshop on  Social Media and the Museum.It was targeted specifically at doctoral students and early career researchers.

The general workshop theme: how Social Media is changing museum practice and visitor experience; and how Social Media can be integrated into museum exhibitions and events.

Its not news to most of us that museums are embracing social media and use it as a means to communicate and promote their activities, and also to interact and engage with their visitors.  A large number of museums now have a profile on social media sites to post news, promote their exhibitions & events, or disseminate their content; and also to  to interact with visitors by starting conversations, debates and organise participatory projects.   This in itself is brilliant.  But what is less well understood from an academic and a museum professional perspective is the key questions and challenges that are arising out of the use of social media.

Some of the key (well most obvious at least) questions the workshop tried to address were:

  • how do we engage visitors and encourage users of the collections to build an online community?
  • how do we start conversations with visitors in such a way that they feel that it is appropriate for non-experts to contribute?
  • how do we create a feeling of ownership of museum collections amongst the visitors and users?
  • What does this type of social engagement mean for the museum experience?
  • How do we evaluate the impact of social media?

These questions came up throughout the day, and naturally more questions came out of that than answers.

There was a range of talks by academic and museum professionals to discuss how Social Media is changing museum practice and visitor experience:

Social Media in the Humanities: Claire Warwick (UCL)

Claire spoke using social media as a different way to engage people with historical content. The focus of Claire’s talk was around the D-Day as it happens initiative led by Channel 4. Utilising Twitter as a different way of presenting oral history.  Suggesting that social media offers a sense of engagement which is very different to reading from history books. Providing a sense of immediacy. The personification of history.  Claire highlighted how social media allows contemporary voices to be heard, but it can also bring historical figures and events to life. Throughout her talk interesting questions were raised about physicality, immersive theatre and emotional engagement with historical events and how social media can be involved in all three.  In essence are historical figures tweeting in the social media space in the same genre as live interpretation in the museum space?

There has been a lot of discussion about what museums can learn from immersive theatre lately.  See Seb Chan’s post on Fresh & New(er) of 23 May 2012. “What if we made ‘wonderment’ our Key Performance Indicator?” and Ed Rodley’s post,
http://exhibitdev.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/on-immersion-theatre-and-museums/
  and Suse Cairns Rethinking why immersive theatre is compelling. It might not be the immersion after all and I think this is something which will need to be explored further.


Tweeting Moles? Social Media from the Grant Museum: Mark Carnall (Grant Museum)

Mark Carnall, curator from the Grant Museum spoke about their strategic use of social media.  Mark explained that Social media in the museum is a continually changing landscape and questioned how do/should/could museums manage this evolution.

The Grant Museum uses social media in 4 key ways:

  1. Twitter- transitory, irreverent, topical
  2. Facebook – badges and postcards
  3. Blogs- long form, publication, cv
  4. Flickr, YouTube and others – hosting tool.

Mark really hit home the need to think strategically. Museums shouldn’t use social media for social medias sake. There is a need to make time to fit social media into working practice.

Mark also raised some social media issues for museums to think about:

  • Is there an institutional format you should adopt?
  • Institutional buy in and support
  • Get image crediting right.
  • What voice will you use?
  • Dealing with the digital divide. Who is your audience? Social media doesn’t reach everyone. – in reality the people who aren’t using social media are people the museum most wants to reach
  • Sustainability: Social media in museums need to be sustainable and you need to be prepared for infrequently of returns because they aren’t always apparent instantly.

Mark also shared this brilliant infographic from informationisbeautiful.net: Hierarchy of digital distractions.

1276_hierarchy_of_digital_distractions


Social media: worth the time for small museums?: Alex Smith (Islington Museum)

Alex Smith from Islington Museum gave a great example of how small museums can blog, tweet and use social media as a knowledge experience with limited time and budget highlighting the benefits as well as the reasons why small museums show become involved in social media activities.   Alex started by highlighting that the Islington Museum is constrained by council ICT strategy/guidelines and how council museums have to think outside the box to deal with this adequately.

Islington Museum use social media tools in the following ways:

  • Facebook
    • Events management system
    • Sharing Photos
    • Timeline – Ambitious use of Facebook timeline as a general historic timeline of objects and events relating to Islington Museum
    • Community engagement
    • Building brand identity
    • Twitter
      • Discus things that are happening now at the museum
      • Hashtags – the example of the Joe Orton Trial Reconstruction
      • Time management – hootsuite helps schedule and organise tweets
      • Conversations and praise –  Alex says the power of anecdotal evidence as well as statistics helps with convincing management.  Bite sized chunks from socmedia
      • Blogging
        • Example of the Sadlers Wells Theatre Archive blog
        • Found that visitors do interact
        • Important to get time management right
        • Historypin
          • New for the museum
          • Easy for people to use museum images
          • Builds a community of interest
          • Supports our current activities

Collecting Social Media as a museum object: Laura Lannin & Ellie Miles (Museum of London)

Ellie Miles and Larua Lannin from the Museum of London, gave a really interesting talk about the citizen curators project and what they have discovered about trying to collect social media as a museum object.  I attended an event at the Museum of London about collecting social media earlier in the year (My post on the Museum of London social media event: can a museum collect tweets & should it? ) so it was great to continue the conversation.

The Museum of London’s main aim is to be a contemporary collector of objects, events and ideas from and about the city of London, and because of this contemporary collecting policy they began to think about digital capture of events in London quite early on. They now have the experimental role of a digital curator which aims to develop fresh ways of collecting contemporary digital culture.

One of their projects is #citizencurators – a social networking project for London2012.  It’s a great  project and it has some really interesting research questions which you can see at 
http://t.co/g4NNg9zoMS

Production/consumption – museum social media in use: Daniel Pett (British Museum)

Daniel Pett (Portable Antiquities Scheme) gave a mesmerising talk about production and consumption of social media.  Dan’s key message was to ensure that any social media activity in museums needs to be relevant.  Important to have a social media museum strategy and to think about issues like:

  • Who is ultimately responsible for social media content
  • How do museums create interesting social media content? Who decides what is appropriate?
  • How seriously does the institution take social media channels – who are the advocates and for what?
  • Do you have institutional buy in?
  • Impact of social media in museums. can you measure interactions? Is the engagement meaningful? Are stats enough?
  • Multi-vocality. Everyone can have a voice. How do you deal with that?
  • Does anyone in your organisation already have useful social media skills, can you utilise them?
  • Adequate time management
  • Moderation
  • Who is the target audience?

Dan then went on to discuss consuming social media as code and gave some really useful ways that utilising the right code can make archiving and optimising social media a piece of cake.  Check out Dan’s google drive presentation for some great info on how to consume and produce social media using some simple coding.

The rest of the Social Media and the Museum session was a bit more hands on.  We went to see Jeremy Bentham and discussed Transcribe Bentham and the The Bentham Pop-up, which waspowered by QRator, and posed a set of Bentham-esq questions to visitors.  From there we went to have a look at my Digital Frontiers exhibition and asked question about the challenges and benefits of utilising all digital interpretation and social media inside a museum space.   Finally Mark Carnall led a great social media challenge and asked us to work in teams to come up with how we would respond to different social media comments from the public.  It really hit home some of the issues you have to think about when dealing with social media responses.

A really great day full of interesting discussions.

Creating a mini me: Playing with 3D printing

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photo (13)

As part of the Digital Frontiers exhibition I have been experimenting a bit with 3D printing.  This is why working in a university is brilliant as there is so many clever people and bits of kit about who will let you have a bit of a play.

3D tech is becoming quite big in museum discussions right now, and many museums are looking to embed 3D features permanently into their museum services but there are a few challenges to do this. Check out Andrew Lewis’ from the V&A’s post about How ready is 3D for delivering museum services? And my post from bits to blogs about Crapjects.

Because 3D is emerging and is turning out to be a playfully disruptive technology I felt it was important to experiment with just what could be done relatively quickly with 3D tech for an exhibition.

A couple of months ago I had myself scanned quickly by Jan Boehm and John Hindmarch from UCL Engineering,  Virtual Environments, Imaging & Visualisation which was then printed out with Andy Hudson Smith’s (CASA) 3D printer and it produced this prototype:

3D Me!Last night Steve Gray and I had another play, this time creating an object model mesh with a Kinect.  We used a Kinect  and  the software ReconstructMe.

Microsoft’s Kinect is an awesome piece of tech.  Instead of game play you can use its Infrared sensors to do depth of field scanning!  We were trying to work out a re-usable workflow, so we could then scan everybody! We started with a desk drawer and moving the kinect around but that didn’t really cut it.  Eventually with a bit of tinkering we has success with an office swivel chair is to allow the object (aka me) to revolve slowly in front of the Kinect!

The scans produced are not faultless, but they are really very good for such simple and cheap kit.  We (I say we, but actually Steve) cleaned up the scan using free tools. Here is a scan of myself showing the problem areas. This is in MeshMixer:

3D me in MeshMixer

3D me in MeshMixer

The final result was using a mix of MeshMixer and MeshLabs and NetFabb Basic to fix gaps in the models.

3D Steve and Claire

And if you so wish, you can download and print either Steve or me, or both of us out! We added ourselves to thingyverse.  Now everyone can have a mini Claire!  since last night there’s already been 12 downloads of us! weird!

Blimey, Day of DH nearly passed me by!

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It was the Day of DH yesterday, where Digital Humanists all over the world are telling people what they are up to on a specific day.  Its a great opportunity to see what the DH community are up to.  I have taken part every year since I joined UCLDH.  Here are my posts from 2010, 2011, and 2012

However this year has been a bit different.

This is reposting of the blog post I’ve put up on the Day of DH 2013 site:

It’s normally quite quiet at this time of year, the Easter holidays always arrives at just the right time, when everyone really needs a bit of a break.  So there hasn’t been as much email as normal.  which is good because I’m supposed to be focused on one very important document…

I have been working at home, away from the office and the distractions, on my PhD research. I’m in write up stage. Less than a year to go, and I’m piling on the pressure to get it done.   I’m trying to keep all distractions to a minimum, and the aim is to churn out at least 1000 words a day, every day, until I have a full first draft. But shutting myself in the study with only herbal tea to keep me company is actually quite difficult to do and challenges everything that is quite DHy about me.

My PhD in Digital Humanities has seemingly made me less Digital Humanities in real life.  I used to blog, tweet, email, collaborate and tinker regularly. Now I don’t really do anything except write, and procrastinate.

I managed 2189 words yesterday. But Day of DH passed me by, I only realised this morning that it was yesterday.  Does that mean DH isn’t on my radar any more? will I get it back when I eventually finish my PhD? I hope so.

New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC: 1 Mia Ridge and Crowdsourcing

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Last Friday I spent the day in Leicester for the 2nd day of  ‘The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC’ conference at the school of Museum Studies, part of the AHRC-funded iSay project focusing on Visitor-Generated Content (VGC) in cultural heritage institutions.

It was a fabulous conference, and perfectly timed for my PhD research, the organisers, Giasemi Vavoula and Jenny Kidd, did a great job on the conference programme with a great combination of academic papers and practical case studies.

Firstly to be honest, I haven’t really used the term Visitor Generated Content (VGC) before. I don’t really like the term User Generated Content (UGC) and swapping user for visitor doesn’t solve my dislike of the term. But I can see why as terminology both work.

Mia Ridge has already blogged her notes from both days of the conference and there will be lots on the conference blog, so these are my notes of useful concepts that I found helpful for thinking about my own PhD research. I’m splitting it into several posts other wise it will go on and on! Up first is:
Mia Ridge: The gift that gives twice: crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage

I really enjoyed Mia’s keynote, she managed to fit lots in in a relatively short space of time. Mia focused on the different ways of thinking about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, both in terms of the process and the outcomes.

  • Cognitive circus. The spare processing power of millions of humans brains. (edit – Mia has pointed out its cognitive surplus. However I feel cognitive circus is a much better term!)
  • Difference between VGC and crowdsourcing.  When there’s no clearly defined direction, shared goal or research question? This is not crowdsourcing – blurry definition.
  • The importance of creating a space for curiosity
  • The act of  looking creates a relationship with objects
  • Participatory project models -Contributory – the public contributes data to Aerojet designed by the organisation; Collaborative – both active partners, but lead by organisation and Co-creative - But who really has agency?
  • The ethics of crowdsourcing, Leveraging public participation driven by pleasure , not profit
  • Semantic gap, language used to describe objects, is not the same as the search and collection
  • Who participates in crowdsourcing? - Super contributors and drive-bys
  • Crowdsourcing before the web- 19th century natural history collection: 1849 Smithsonian
  • The OED was crowd sourced
  • Long history of crowdsourcing, but transformed by technology

Some useful Crowdsourcing Case Studies

  • Types of Crowdsorcing content: Images multimedia, game levels, research, object identification, family records, objects, documents, the list is en
  • Productive engagement
  • Definitions of engagement are a bit naff
  • What’s ‘engagement’?
  • attending
  • participating
  • deciding
  •  producing
  • Levels of engagement in citizen science –
  • level 1 participating in simple classification tasks
  • Level 2 participating in community discussion
  • Level 3 working independently
  • Crowdsourcing as a gateway to father activity
  • familySearch ‘stepping stones’ -Indexing and then can move to arbitration. Clear progression.
  • Motivations for participation -Altruistic, intrinsic, extrinsic
  • Validating procrastination and Enhancing the visitor experience

Can a Museum collect tweets? And should it?

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citizen curators

image from http://citizencurators.com/

Last week I was invited to a workshop at the Museum of London focusing on Collecting Social Media as a Museum Object .   It was a really interesting workshop with plenty of discussion and questions raised. It’s a discussion that I think would be well worth continuing with more institutions to see what practices are already undertaken when it comes to dealing with social media and museums.

The workshop follows on from a really great project between The Museum of London and the University of Westminster; citizen curators.  MoL are really interested in how social media can be collected as an object in its own right, if at all.

Hopefully there will be more discussion about this in the future; so these are just some of my quick notes that struck me during the workshop.

The main Interesting question of the day: What do you accession into the museum collection when collecting social media?

Peter Ride, University of Westminster – Citizen Curators

  • #citizencurators – a social networking project for London2012
  • What do you accession into the collection?
  • Experimental project
  • Can communities collect and curate without museum curatorial authorship?
  • Aimed to investigate how social media can provide alternative approach that supplement contemporary collections
  • Designed to result in knowledge about how you can collection born digital media.
  • Public call for citizen curator and Several blog posts about the process. See
    http://citizencurators.com/
  • #citizencurator project found that images are an integral part of the tweet experience. But accessioning social media images is difficult.  Museum of London collected textual tweets but not images. Due mostly to copyright issues. MuseumofLondon decided it wasn’t a viable option. They followed the Library of congress precedent: aka text is ok images are not.
  • But this raises issues relating to the place of images within visual culture. Particularly as images are an integral part of the tweet experience.
  • The outcome – over 7,000 tweets were logged by the Museum using the #citizencurators hashtag
  • But by far the most important issue was about working with Twitter – what could they do with the project.  It’s a scary thing for a museum to let go of content control. By its nature being an open project in a public forum the project had no walls, there was no control in management or in terms of the content. And for curators this raises complex issues. Authority, Trust, Control, Authenticity etc.
  • The Citizen Curator In what form can this media be best collected?
  • Is it best kept for future investigation?
  • Can it be made accessible?
  • Steve raised a point during the discussion that Twitter’s T&Cs have changed meaning there are now quite strict conditions on sharing raw data.  Which will make projects like this tricky in the future.

 

Catherine Flood, V&A – Flickr and the Olympics

  • V_and_A‘s Collect London 2012 Flickr project  
    http://www.flickr.com/groups/collectlondon2012 …
  • Aiming to create an archive of images of the Olympics
  • Collect the graphic environment at London 2012
  • Create an archive of images that will preserve a snapshot
  • How do you approach social media as a design object?

 

Helen Hockx-Yo, British Library – Archiving social media

  • Two strands as part of web resources archived in the uk web archive
  • British library collects Facebook data. Can only collect public pages, only as part of a special collections,  due to technical problems – pages dynamically generated via asynchronous JavaScript calls.  How do you archive dynamically generated pages?
  • British Library collects and analyse tweets with Twittervane which can determine which sites are shared most frequently
    http://netpreserve.org/projects/evaluating-twittervane …
     in order to build a web archive collection
  • Prototype/Investigatory project by the British Library to use Twitter to build a web archive collection
  • Current selection process is largely manual by a small number of experts
  • Explore automatic selection
  • Exploit the wisdom of the crowd

Common issues with archiving social media:

  • Copyright: who owns the content?
  • Technical existing technologies not adequate
  • No generic, scalable solutions
  • Will be more difficult as technology advances
  • Curatorial: how do we select social media content? Focus in events, themes or as much as possible?
  • Ethics: privacy and ethical implications
  • Access and usage: how will the archived content be used?
  • What search/discovery/analytics tools should be offered
  • Twitter offering personal archiving services.  Should you archive your followers? Is it not that that provides the context?

 

Ruth Page, University of Leicester – Twitter datasets: a linguists perspective

  • Twitter as a source for data
  • Relatively easy to harvest (see suggestions from the AoIR on scraping tools)
  • Small and large scale corpora
  • What does that [visitor comment] tell us about how they fit into the museum environment?
  • Computer mediated discourse analysis
  • LSE museum and social media
  • Challenges for research
  • Ethics
  • Archiving and usability
  • Longevity (is it just a fad?)
  • What is it for?

 

Workshop discussion and some Twitter chat

  • Why are we collecting?
  • Lack of the visual social media data in collection discussions
  • Twitter and photographers and the network and context. How do you evaluate and analyse that?
  • Visual aspect of social media. Authorship, network, context. Cat meme as an example.
  • There must be a way to solve ethical issues perhaps its a case of a Reserach projects in collaboration with Twitter itself?
  • Higher Education has vast ethical conditions in order to get clearance, can they apply to museums social media projects?
  • What ethical documentation/policies/guidelines do museums adhere to with regards social media?
  •  ‏@ernestopriego tweeted a useful  database of 196 social media policies
    http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php#axzz1qyUufIHG …
  • question about ethical responsibility &displaying social media. Is it the application, the museum or the visitors ethical responsibility?
  • Do any museums include a clause in their social media policies about archiving and curating their own tweets?
  • Do we discuss social media in museums in silos? Should we be looking at the wider context, it’s interdisciplinary nature?
  • Bit of a meta debate about the difference between ownership and access of social media data.