Kinetic Museums

If you don't currently read Dan Hon's daily newsletter, you should probably be doing that. With all of the fallout and follow-up from my "Becoming Authentically Digital" talk at MuseumNext (excerpted here and here) swimming in my head, Dan said something in today's newsletter that really resonated with me. In talking about the relative crappitude of wearable tech, he said this:

I love the idea of non-needy smartness. Smartness just in every day things, without the lure of a screen. And also, because screens are *lazy*. You put a screen in something and suddenly, hey, now you have 24 bit problems with an alpha channel at a 200dpi+ resolution. Congratulations. 

Or rather, maybe museums collectively only need to have about three or four apps. I'm at MuseumNext right now, and Mike Ellis and Jim Richardson are getting into an interesting conversation about the relative need (or lack thereof) for museums to create mobile apps. I really struggle with defining what the actual need is for a museum app. In the olden days before responsive design, I suppose a museum could argue that an app was the best way to get basic information to visitors and whatever, but I don't think that argument holds anymore.

I've written about the concept of authority in museums here before, and it's something I'm still grappling with. "Authority" is a word that we in museums use all the time without, I think, really knowing 1) if it's something our public truly values or 2) if it even exists.

It would be interesting to do some research into the history of the use of the words “authority” and “authoritative” in museum discourse. It seems that at the close of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, as museums entered a pretty severe identity crisis, we increasingly reached for the concept of “authority” as justification for our existence. I’d be curious to know if “authority” as a concept appears regularly in the literature in the pre-web days. Did we care about being “authoritative” before it conveniently became a thing that we and only we possess? I'm sure there's someone out there who's done a lot more research on this than me (which, um, wouldn't be hard). I'd love to know more.

So I just saw yet another presentation from yet another mobile vendor trying to create an app that tries to house collections/event/ticketing data from multiple museums in one place. The pitch is always the same: this app is totally going to take off, and museums need to "be mobile" and we want your museum to get in on the ground floor to take advantage of how awesome this is going to be. Now when people go to City X (usually New York, because sure) they'll have information about every museum at their fingertips! Won't that be great?

Guh.

The path to museum mobile valhalla is littered with these crapety apps. I know why mobile vendors from outside the museum space think this is a good idea--it allows them to build a single app that (supposedly) works for a whole bunch of museums, which makes things easier on both the marketing and development teams than bespoke apps for individual museums does. But damn--vendors have been trying this model now since the iPhone was introduced, and not a single one has taken off. Why keep trying? It doesn't work.

The problem is that the idea is based in total fantasy. One, it assumes that I identify as a cultural tourist to the extent that when I visit a city, I will want an app that restricts information to just cultural properties (and not also, say, restaurants, bookstores, used record stores, etc.) Two, it assumes that even if I am this person (which is incredibly unlikely), I will somehow be aware that this app exists. Which I won't be, unless I'm just hammered relentlessly with marketing messages. And if I'm the kind of cultural tourist you're targeting, I'm also the kind of person that hates that kind of marketing.

My students in the Johns Hopkins "Museums in the Digital Age" course got into a really interesting conversation last week around the cost/benefit concerns around the digitization of collections. We were talking specifically in this case about animal specimens, but I think you could extend this topic to include other non-unique collections like books or mass-produced materials. I brought up a concern I've always had about these sorts of non-unique collections, which is what aspect(s) of any given non-unique item would justify the labor that goes into digitizing it, particularly when a digitized version of an (almost) identical item already exists elsewhere?

Now admittedly, I am nowhere near being an expert in this kind of cataloguing/digitization, so maybe these issues have already been addressed elsewhere. My question to my students was essentially this: why would you take the time to digitize this one specimen, rather than just linking to great images of an identical specimen that already exist? Wouldn't that be faster? 

Then one of my students, Nicholas Griffith, said that discoveries are made out of the minute differences between specimens all the time. The trick is that you can't necessarily know which of those differences will be important in the future. So you catalogue and digitize the whole thing, and hope that you've captured enough to be useful for future science.

Hm. Surely there must be a way to catalogue the differences between specimens (or rather, deviations, no matter how minute, from a "standard" or "norm") that's better than this. This starts to feel like a system-level problem now, rather than an object-level one. Could we take a chaos theory approach to this, and examine the overall and emerging differences in a cataloguing category in a systemic way, rather than an atomic way? It just feels in this case that individual object records are far less important than the data coming from the field as a whole.

So yeah, I'm really liking Vox.com so far. There's so much about it that works, from both mission and design perspectives. It's rare, as I look around for things that we could be doing with our museum websites, to really land on something that seems like it could work for us right away, but there's a bunch here that I think we could be doing.

The card sets are great, to begin with. They're a visually succinct way of putting a bunch of narrative content together in one place in a way that reads like a book, but still feels web-native. You can share (or link to) the entire card stack, or just an individual card out of the stack. If you think about a truly blown-out object record, in which you might display literally everything you know about it, this would seem like a really intuitive way to organize that content that still preserves some degree of narrative control. Sweet.

An exclusive interview with the design mind behind the much-discussed new profile pages.

In a great lunch time conversation today, several of us got into talking about the use of maps in museum mobile apps. Aaron Straup Cope was talking about the usage statistics for Art Lens; a big chunk of the usage (apparently--I'm remembering and severely paraphrasing here) occurs outside the museum. He said that, that being the case, a blueprint of the museum's floorplan is a relatively poor method of finding information/objects/etc. But alternate forms of "mapping" could be really interesting, though. There's a great book called You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Maps of the Imagination that shows all sorts of wonderful examples of different kinds of maps (narrative, non-linear, descriptive, etc.) that might be fun for us to think about. I think it would be kinda bad-ass if a mobile device gave you some information about where things were using a Native American story map or similar.

Perhaps the most interesting thing I found out about here at MW2014 was Brooklyn Museum's decision to pull out of a big chunk of their social media efforts (Flickr Commons, Foursquare, Historypin, iTunes U, and others). This is a really fascinating move, and as usual, Brooklyn Museum is out in front of the rest of us on this. That Brooklyn Museum was so well-known (at least in my community) for these efforts makes this decision to abandon many of them that much more interesting.

I had a great conversation with Tim Svenonious (SFMOMA) a few months ago about whether or not there is finally room for the technology skeptic in the digitial media/technology structure inside the museum. For the longest time, digital efforts were always fighting for survival inside museums, and there wasn't a lot of room for the skeptic. By necessity, we all had to be cheerleaders. I think that situation is changing, but in many ways we (as in "museum technologists" or whatever) haven't. We're still always cheerleaders when we should (at least occasionally) be skeptics. It's how we'll make the best work. 

Douglas Hegley just said something really interesting in this morning's lightning talks. He said that history and authority are intertwined, and if we lose the sense of history, we actually lose a big part of our authority. There's a whole lot to unpack in that statement, but I think I might (surprise!) agree. I've always had issues with the concept of authority in museums, which is a term we use almost like currency (does this thing we're contemplating doing cause us to have more authority, or less?) without really understanding where it comes from or, frankly, whether its actually something our users/visitors truly value.

Simon and Carolyn's excellent presentation on digital transformation has me thinking about where (and how) digital activities would ideally be integrated into a museum, and I keep thinking about how much easier it would be to do this if I knew what our product was. Like, as an art museum, what is the main thing that we make? It's not the collections; it's not probably even the objects. Is it the scholarship? The interpretation? I don't know.

I'm really starting to have an issue with our usage of the word "digital" as a noun. I guess it bothers me because as soon as we use this word in this way, it becomes easier for us to generalize in ways that I don't think are particularly helpful. We start talking about "what digital can do for you" or "how digital changes us" or whatever. It starts to feel as if "digital" is a sentient being that has its own morals, values, and desires. And I just don't believe that that is true.