Hey, so apparently I have a blog! Who knew? At any rate, it looks like I’m going to be speaking at this year’s MuseumNext conference (travel budget permitting) in Barcelona, where I’ll be joining Nancy Proctor, Nate Solas, Robin Dowden, Hein Wils, Ferry Piekart, and lots of other museum smartsies for several days of kicking presentations and conversations. I’ll try and fill this out in greater detail later, but for now, here’s what I’m planning on talking about…
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How much of museums’ total overall effort is bound up in potential? How much time do museums waste
defining “best practices” instead of simply moving ahead with a solution that just works? Because the
museum as it exists today is still essentially built on the 19th-century model, changes in practice still tend
to evolve over years, if not decades. In a culture that now evolves at web-speed, the pace of museums’
own evolution is fundamentally unsustainable, if not suicidal.
Digital and technology practice in museums has, like a jet plane strapped to a hand cart, been artificially
grafted onto this ancient model, with checkered results. Technology has been used by museums primarily
as a tool of efficiency (produce label copy out of our CMS, stat!) or of strained relevancy (participatory
culture! gamification!), rather than as a foundational concept. But what if this weren’t the case? What if
a museum’s overall practice were built outwards from its technology efforts, rather than the other way
around? What would a museum built from the ground up for speed and agility, rather than stability and
longevity, look like? This presentation will speculate on this idea by examining the possible evolution of
museum practice from a number of perspectives, including (but not limited to):
Scholarship and Content Development: What would the equivalent of GitHub look like for
scholarship? How could museums leverage the work of hundreds of thousands of curators and
scientists working together towards a common repository of knowledge, rather than duplicating
efforts from museum to museum?
Variable Media Conservation: Artists are inventing, implementing, and discarding means of
creating works of art orders of magnitude faster than conservation practice is evolving. How can
the practice of conservation change to accommodate web-speed innovation?
Constituent Software Systems: Collections management, digital asset management,
development, and other primary museum software systems are generally built on a cataloguing
paradigm, with distribution, publication, and collaboration tacked on as “premium features,” when
present at all. How would systems built for action and outcome, rather than simply cataloguing,
change the practice of museums from the ground up?
Staffing: Digital media teams tend to be a tiny minority on an average museum’s staff, even though they are responsible for the vast majority of the museum’s interactions with the public. What would be the effect of inverting this model?
This presentation will pose many more questions than it will answer, but in so doing, will suggest new
frameworks of understanding as attendees work towards building the museum of the future.
Allow me to take a moment away from my thrilling and dynamic series of posts on “Museums and the Digital Domain” to post a photo of my costume from from this past weekend’s Halloween shenanigans, courtesy of Ms. Morgan Holzer:
Oh yeah, that’s me, your humble narrator, dressed like freaking Number Six! Although I ended up having to explain all night long who I was supposed to be, and the balloon I was using as Rover flew away during the day, it was still totally worth lining my good jacket with gaff tape and wearing white pants. You can clearly see from the expression in my face that my life is my own, and that you won’t hold me.
So if next year, I finally get David Byrne’s Big White Suit together for Halloween, the circle will be complete.
…because I’m on vacation and it’s time for me to get off of the computer and on the beach. The first thing is that I have a guest post up on Nina Simon’s Museum Two (2.0?) blog called “Language Matters.” It’s a collection of vaguely useful tips and tricks on how to sell technology projects to those who are not predisposed to doing them. It’s delivered in my standard rant format, so hopefully it’s entertaining.
Another thing that I’ve been loving lately is the “Museum Pipes” blog, written by my colleague at the Met, Piotr Adamczyk. Piotr is pushing the boundaries of what might be done with museum data when it’s exposed via APIs and pushed through Yahoo Pipes. As making collections data available this way moves from being exceptional to ordinary over the next year, it’s good that people like Piotr are already figuring out how to do more. Check his site out; it’s the jam. You’ll need an API key from the Brooklyn Museum to test many of the pipes.
Also, if you haven’t checked out the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s ArtBabble yet, go there right now. So awesome. It’s currently still by invitation only, but I have a few beta invites left; contact me if you’d like one.
Also, last thing: in a few short weeks, I’ll be heading to London for the second of two design sessions around the ConservationSpace project. If you’re in the neighborhood, and would like to hang out a bit, lemme know.
While trying (mostly successfully) to avoid work over a delicious Thanksgiving weekend, I discovered this excellent BBC documentary from 2003 about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The Radiophonic Workshop, with its stable of composers including Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson, and the amazing John Baker, was a lab for the production of electronic music, mostly for BBC radio and television programs (the most famous example being the Workshop’s “realization” of Ron Grainer‘s theme music for Dr. Who). Growing up in the U.S. of A., I grew up mostly ignorant of the pioneering electronic work created by these folks, but boy howdy, these composers were doing work that was easily the equal of their more heralded counterparts at IRCAM or in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. That all of this unbelievable work was done with such limited resources makes it even that much more astounding. If you have an hour or so at your disposal, I highly recommend checking this documentary out. Amazing.
So there you go. After eight years, I waited in line for 90 minutes and pulled the damn lever. I have to say, the spirit in line at my voting precinct here in Prospect Heights was amazing–everyone was in great spirits, moms from PS9 were offering baked goodies to folks waiting, and people were driving around the neighborhood with Obama speeches blaring out of their windows. I wish that there were something truly momentous I could actually say, but I just don’t think I’m that good of a writer. I’ll leave my friend Kraig Smith over at Boy Hates Girl to write the things I wish I had the pithy prose to write. Suffice to say, I’ve never, in all my 15 years of voting, felt happier about a vote. Let’s do this thing, people.
So there you go. After eight years, I waited in line for 90 minutes and pulled the damn lever. I have to say, the spirit in line at my voting precinct here in Prospect Heights was amazing–everyone was in great spirits, moms from PS9 were offering baked goodies to folks waiting, and people were driving around the neighborhood with ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=82aad9cf-a61f-4fa2-9814-326ffb5f48ee)
