QRator wins a Museums & Heritage Award for Excellence Innovation

In case you missed the excited tweeting last night we were at a posh awards do.

Last night a contingent from UCL including brilliant people from UCLDH, CASA and Museums and Public Engagement, headed down to the 10th Anniversary Museums and Heritage Awards.  The night started badly as a waiter managed to spill a huge jug of milk all down my back and lovely dress.  But once I’d dried myself off, with the help of Claire and Melissa, and tried to mask the smell of quickly souring milk, the awards got underway.

There were 11 awards in total UCL, were up for three: The move of the Grant Museum for Project on A Limited Budget, the Grant Museum’s QRator project for Innovations and Heritage Without Borders for The International Award.

I’m proud to say that we won Museum and Heritage Award for Excellence, Innovations award for QRator: Visitor Participation Through Social Interpretation.

QRator is a collaboration between the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and UCL Museums, to develop new kinds of content, co-curated by the public, and museum staff, to enhance museum interpretation, public engagement and meaning making by establishing new connections to museum exhibit content.

As QRator is a collaborative project there are a lot of people who need thanking. And in the excitement none of us actually had the foresight to prepare a speech on the night! So a really big thanks goes to Jack and Mark at the Grant Museum who were instrumental in the QRator project; Mark Carnall who worked with me originally in trialling QR codes in the Grant Museum and who is the most forward thinking curator I have ever met. Jack Ashby who writes the content and designs the displays for QRator, and who has the patience of a saint.  To Steve Gray who is an absolutely brilliant developer, and who’s skills in usability and interface design are second to none. Andy Hudson Smith, and Ralph and Martin the original team behind Tales of Things from UCL Centre for Advance Spatial Analysis, Melissa Terras and Claire Warwick who have been a the best support, PhD supervisors I could ever ask for.  Susannah Chan from UCL Museums and Public Engagement for inventing the mounts for the iPads, and spending what felt like an eternity installing them into the Grant.  A big thank you to the UCL Public Engagement Unit for their funding and support of the project, Sally MacDonald Director of UCL Museums and Public Engagement who has been a huge driving force behind the project,  it is so refreshing to have Top Down support for digital innovation in the cultural sector. Without them this project would literally be nothing.

A big congratulations to all the other winners. There was a wide range of really fantastic projects from a sector that has been hard hit with funding cuts, you can see the full list of winners, commendations and the full short lists here.

Designing for community-powered digital transformations workshop

Today I have been at the Designing for community-powered digital transformations workshop at Tate Britain, London.  The day focused on how different types of  digital transformations are forcing cultural and media organisations to adapt to a new environment in which communities of participants want to interact, to create, and curate.  I was speaking about “Putting the Visitors first” in order to design better, more user friendly, digital experiences in Museums.  I used examples from the Social Interpretation project at IWM and the QRator project at the Grant Museum.    My prezi is below.  Its a bit of hack of an earlier presentation I did with Tom about the Social Interpretation project.  The prezi might not make sense without the notes, but the pictures are pretty to look at ! Most of them taken from IWM’s Collection Online. Nicola Osborne has done a brilliant live blog of the day.  I honestly dont know how she does it! speed demon when it comes to typing!  I’ll have a think about my notes and write them up over the next couple of days.

QRator and Museums and the Web

I am in recovery from conference fatigue, mixed with a head cold and jet lag from the Museums and the Web Conference in San Diego last week. It was a brilliant conference that brought together some fabulous museumaholics working on some really interesting projects.  Despite suffering from a rather bad dose of cold, turning my voice into that of a duck’s and a fever that struck me out for the middle day of the conference, there was still a lot of interesting projects to be seen, heard and discussed. I’ll be posting my notes from the conference over the next couple of days.

But first, Steve and I presented some of our work on QRator in the Next Gen Mobile Applied session our slides are below.

It was really nice to get some feedback about our work, and to see what people thought.  One point that I hammered home was the success of QRator is down to the Grant Museum staff, trusting their visitors.  I’m getting more and more passionate about this point.  Every museum related meeting I go into, I have the same conversation again and again, it has to do with museum authority, visitors lacking in that same authority, and giving visitors tools to write what they like, means that they will abuse that trust.  Just because they can doesn’t mean they will.  QRator is a fantastic project that encourages a positive relationship between museums and visitors, where visitors are actively involved in creating the museum displays.  For me the best museum experiences, are ones which not only make you think, but inspire you to want to engage in the topic, QRator does exactly that.  Yes I might be bias.  But the visitor contributions speak for themselves. Visitors are actively choosing to engage with the questions posed on the QRator iPads.  Being able to stand up in front of a conference load of museum people and talk about this, made me really happy.

Categorising digital visitor contributions: Should you take God at face value?

Photo UCL, Grant Museum of Zoology / Matt Clayton

I’ve been undertaking some open coded analysis of visitor contributions to the QRator iPad’s in the Grant Museum for my PhD.  It is fascinating to assess the contributions and try and create categories based on the types of visitor comments.  At the most basic there three key categories; comments about the museum, comments about the topic discussed on the iPad and associated specimen cases, and then there’s Spam (not as much as you would expect).  But then there are comments like this one:

“This museum make no sense! Everybody kn[o]ws that GOD created man and beasts and that there is no such thing as evolution. You should be ashamed!!”

I don’t quite know how to categorise this.  This is one of the big problems with analysing textual data, without having any background information on the visitor who provided the comment.  I don’t know if this is a true belief or a joke.  It is really hard to remain neutral and not create researcher bias when a comment like this comes up.  If it is a visitor’s honest opinion, then how cool is that?  It is something that I haven’t really seen reflected in a Science Museum before, that I am aware of anyway (other than the creationist museum).  How do you deal with concepts from religious beliefs when working with zoological or in fact any biological collections?  Should there be an alternative interpretation to that of the scientific?  I’m a firm believer in the idea that there are multiple interpretations to objects, as every visitor brings their own interpretation, whether it is based on ‘fact’ or not, it is always based on previous experience.  So should museums be encouraging more religion based labels in their interpretative programming?  But then again, if it’s a joke, how do I categorise it? Should I take it as face value and class it as a visitor opinion about the museum? Should it count as spam as it isn’t really relevant to the topical discussion? How would you categories comments like this?

Regardless of how to categorise it, comments like this one highlight the usefulness of digital content creation between visitors and the museum.  It’s changing the way people think, not only visitors and curator but researchers like me. I love it when interesting visitor comments make me think differently about how to categorise, how to interpret and how to represent objects in new ways.  Gotta love digital technology for opening up the conversation.

The Horizon Report: 2011 Museum Edition

The main reason I’m in Atlanta is for the release of the Museum edition of the Horizon Report.  A couple of weeks ago we received a very exciting email, saying that the QRator project was to be included in the report!  So it was with very short notice but a big smile that tickets, flights and hotels were booked and here I am.

So yesterday the Horizon report was officially launched, you can download it here.  It is an international report about leading museum technologies, with the main aim to identify and describe emerging technologies which will have a large impact on museums over the next five years.

The 2011 edition highlights six emerging technologies or practices that are going to have an impact on the sector and breaks them down into three distinct time frames or horizons.

Here are the Technologies to watch and some of the case studies:

Near term Horizon (the next 12 months) Mobile Apps examples:

• Balboa Park’s mobile Apps
• MuseumMobile
• Getty Museums partnership with Google Googles

Near term Horizon (the next 12 months) Tablets examples:

• WaterWorx from the Powerhouse Museum
• Wikipop from the Brooklyn Museum

Mid term Horizon (2-3 years): Augmented Reality

• Browsing the Powerhouse Museum Around Sydney
• Who do you think you Really Are? from the Natural History Museum, London

Mid term Horizon (2-3 years): Electronic Publishing

• The British Library’s Turning the Pages
• Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative at the Getty

Far term Horizon (4-5 years): Digital Preservation

• CHIN’s Professional Exchange – Digitization
• The Digital Preservation Coalition

Far term Horizon (4-5 years): Smart Objects.

• QRator at University College London (yay! Us!!)
• Smart Muse at Centre Pompidou, Paris
• NFC at the Museum of London
• The Met and RFID

It is a huge achievement for QRator to be included in the report, identifying our work as a future model for the rest of the museums sector! We’re really excited about it, and cant wait to develop it further.  It’s pretty cool to think that work that is classed as in the far term horizon, we have already implemented  in the Grant Museum.  Really chuffed to bits.

Podcastic: The Global Lab (featuring me!)

I’ve been gibbering on about digital humanities, museums and digital technology on the brilliant Global Lab podcast.  You can donwload it via RSS, iTunes or download the .mp3.  You can almost hear my over enthusiastic hand gestures!  I even managed to nearly knock over the microphone, but thankfully that has been edited out.  So if you want to hear what I sound like, rather than read me, there you go. I mostly spoke about the QRator project which is a collaboration between CASA and UCLDH.

The Global Lab podcast is about cities, spatial analysis, global connectivity and the impact of technology on society produced by two brilliant chaps from CASA; Steve and Martin.  Its very good listening for train journy’s and to whip out anecdotes in dinner party conversations. Check it out

QRator installation day timelapse

Saturday 12th March saw the installation of loads of iPads into the Grant Museum.  Interestingly we had to do it in partial darkness as the electricity to the building was out. But regardless things went relatively smoothly.  It also gave me the opportunity to make my very first timelapse video! I am very excited about this.  I followed a couple of tutorials from Digital Urban and I managed to turn my iPhone into a timelapse camera using  a free ‘Gorillacam’camera app.  Set to take snaps every 10 seconds.  I set the application running at different locations, because I couldnt actually find a brilliant spot to film from. The output of 1600×1200 jpgs added to Microsfort movie maker and the movie was made really simply, getting it on You Tube was a faff, but here it is.  The Music comes from KtA over on unsigned mp3.

its a bit wonky, but I enjoyed giving it a go… I can see a lot more timelapses appearing on here.

How does a museum move 67,000 specimens into a new venue?

I’ll let Jack and this brilliant video explain moving the Grant Museum…

 

I have only been involved in a small part of this move, the digital part of course, but it has been amazing to watch how it has developed, and grown into a fantasticly beautiful, engaging, thought provoking space.

12 Black IPad’s sitting on a wall…

blury action shot

What if 1 black iPad should accidentally fall,
There’ll be 11 black IPad’s sitting on the wall.

So we are all gearing up for the big relaunch of the Grant Museum, which includes a flock of iPad’s from the QRator project! It is very exciting! And its picking up quite a bit of media attention.  Here’s some links to some articles:

Home of dodo pelvises and quagga bones spreads its wings – New Scientist

Museums: Campus treasures – Nature

Pickled Moles And iPads: Grant Museum Set To Reopen – Londonist (my favourite title so far!)

UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology to reopen – Wired (stunning Image gallery)

Dodo bones discovery adds life to museum’s opening – The Evening Standard

Half a dodo found in museum drawer – The Guardian

I’m getting really excited about the launch, fingers crossed it all works.  Steve Gray from CASA and I arrived with multiple iPad’s this afternoon, after some tweaking and wifi dodahness we (I mean Steve – I did press some buttons though) got all the iPad’s running on QRator for the first time! . There is still quite a bit to do before the doors finally open, all the lovely Grant Museum people looked incredibly busy when we rocked up with the tech.  I can’t wait to see it when its all done!

The Future of the Ancient World? Digital Think Drink at the Petrie Museum

Last night saw the Digital Think Drink at the Petrie Museum, it gave us a chance to trial a range of digital projects which aim to change the way we engage with material heritage.  The Petrie Museum has become a living laboratory where real world applications for new technologies can be developed and tested.   It was great to get some feedback and see people using the technology in gallery.

The four technologies (which are all still under development) on display last night were:
 
 
 

• QRator – an iPad-based interactive live object label. Who is ‘the Man from Mitanni’?  Work it out with a glass of wine and find out why you shouldn’t trust museum databases on our iPad label.
• Talesof Things – connect to object information via QR codes and add your own tale. Or Follow the QR code museum trail.
• iCurator– curate your own exhibition in a 3D environment and collaborate remotely.
• 3D Encounters – 3D scanning technologies creating digital models of ancient artefacts.

For the past few months I have been working with UCL Museums and Collections and CASA on QRator, so I am slightly biased about which technology is my favourite…  But all of the technologies on display are fascinating and have positives and negatives conceptually and in terms of usability. It was really interesting to hear what people had to say about them all.

First and foremost I think the Petrie Museum is a really interesting space.  It looks amazing, stuffed full with artefacts dating back 5,000 years.  Every available space is filled with a multitude of objects, so much that you can’t take it all in, in one go.  You sort of lose sight of its context and become incredibly overwhelmed at just how many artefacts there are in such a small space! Over 80,000 objects in fact.  I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing, I like that there is a raw element to all the objects and you can sort of make your own meaning out of it.  I suppose in a way it assumes that most people have a base knowledge of Egypt, as pretty much everyone studied it at school.   It is also an odd juxtaposition to have Victorian style cases crammed full of objects, next to a iPad, or a QRcode and a 3D object, but I think that is what makes it all the more exciting.

I have already written about QRator here, and here oh and here (sorry! It’s probably boring you all) the basic idea is that you can add your own interpretation to the object on display or respond to a question that the museum curators are asking about a object/case/topics.  We want to find out if mobile devices and interactive digital labels can create new models for public engagement and personal meaning making and give members of the public more of a personal connection with museum exhibition subject matter.   There were some interesting responses last night on the iPad as well as some tweets using the #petrieQR tag.  It’s going to be interesting to see how we know go about analysing the interactions.

Tales of Things, I love the idea behind this – ‘The Internet of Things’: the technical and cultural shift where every device is ‘on’, and connected in some way to the Internet. CASA with a little bit of over excitement about the museum potential from me, started working with the Grant Museum as well as the Petrie, and have developed a ‘method for cataloguing physical objects online which could make museums and galleries a more interactive experience’ (Giles, 2010) via means of QR tags.  Last night, the Petrie made use of Tales of Things in the form of a tour round a few of the highlight objects.  Wool socks, a cartonnage mummy mask and a mummified falcon to name a few.

ICurator is an interesting one, it deals with 3D rendered objects, display cases and museum spaces.  Sort of a design layout tool, it has lots of potential for museum designers, particularly of temporary exhibition spaces I think, but also for more gamey create your own museum type thing.  I have just done a user testing session of it, where I think I was overly critical, it’s an early prototype and therefore doesn’t necessarily have the functionality and usability that you might expect, but the idea of it is pretty cool.

Then there is 3D Encounters, which is a partnership between the Petrie Museum and the Ireland-based multimedia company IET (Íomhánna Éigipteach Teoranta).  It’s a really appealing project and the website is quite fun. The kit is pretty cool… mmm lasers.  The aim is to digitally record themed selections of objects and make them more accessible by telling their ‘stories’. The project will also digitally recreate some of the more rare & fragile artefacts, replicated for public handling and as a means of monitoring decay. There is something really compelling about being able to manipulate digital objects and being able to learn more about them in such a tactile (albeit virtual) way.

So yes overall last night was an experiment, I think everyone enjoyed it and it raised an awful lot of questions, how visitor centred is it? What about the digital divide? Exploration or learning? Technology for technologies sake? All of these questions we will be trying to answer as we move forward with the development and research of whether or not digital technology can increase access and engagement with museum collections.

If anyone wants to have a look at the technology in the Petrie, we are doing some more evaluation sessions. Ping me if you are interested.