American Wing Interpretive Technology
Description
This was a four-year project to re-think and re-design the digital interpretation strategy for three key pieces of the Met’s massive American Wing: the Luce visible storage galleries, the American per[…]
Luce Center Visible Storage
Elevator and Elevator Lobbies
Period Rooms
The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece AR Translations
Description
This application provided visitors to the exhibition The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece with real-time Augmente[…]
Using commercial software, we created an augmented reality (AR) application that allowed visitors to hold a tablet up to the cases and see English translations of each language on top of the original […]
Process
We used off-the-shelf commercial software for creating the AR layer, which kept the entire process fairly lightweight. English translations for each object were already available on the Morgan Librar[…]
Response
Visitor response was positive. AR, despite being commercially available for over a decade, is still a technology that few people have really experienced in the wild, so it still feels a bit magical. T[…]
Art Primers
Description
Art Primers are designed as the Blanton Museum of Art’s answer to the typical online collection. Instead of simply presenting objects from the Museum’s newly-reinstalled permanent collection in a sear[…]
Process
The Art Primers were written by a cross-departmental team consisting of curators from each collecting area, educators, and the Blanton’s content strategist/social media manager. The group would collec[…]
The Blanton’s collections database did not have an API, so we set up an Omeka site (taking advantage of its built-in API) and imported collections data into that. This import was refreshed on a weekly[…]
Blanton Site Redesign
Description
When I arrived at the Blanton in late 2014, its site was running on an aging version of Expression Engine that was no longer supported by the University of Texas’ site admins. The site was extremely b[…]
Process
The project to fix all this proceeded in three phases. The first phase involved convening a cross-functional team with representatives from across the museum to identify requirements for a replacement[…]
The second phase involved a complete replacement of the site’s back end and a total overhaul of the site’s information architecture. We stood up a new Wordpress site and migrated content from the old […]
The third phase involved a complete redesign of the front end of the site with the Blanton’s design partner, Tilted Chair Creative. Some additional functionality and flexibility (page content blocks b[…]
Outcomes
The CMS back-end of the site proved to be extraordinarily responsive to the Museum’s needs. Several new content types were added to the site post-launch, and the entire events management infrastructur[…]
Public response was as we’d hoped, with significantly more traffic landing on events and exhibitions pages and an overall 10% increase in traffic year-over-year.
Blink! Light, Sound, and the Moving Image
Description
Blink! was a temporary installation of over 30 time-based media artworks from the Denver Art Museum’s permanent collection of multimedia art. My team was charged with the following:
- Ensuring the artworks were functioning properly, securing (often obscure and difficult-to-procure) components to ensure continuous operation;
- Working with the DAM’s conservators to ensure that the works were conserved in an ethical and appropriate manner;
- Working with DAM’s registrars and conservators to secure necessary permissions from artists and artists’ estates for making modifications to works as needed;
- Working with the DAM’s installation crew to install and activate the works;
- Forging partnerships with outside partners (such as the University of Denver’s Emergent Digital Practices department) to secure additional expertise and assistance as needed.
This was a massive undertaking for the DAM’s small technology team. My role was to project-manage the entire undertaking, mapping out project plans, installation schedules, and budgets. The exhibition[…]
Website Redesign
Description
When I arrived at the Blanton in late 2014, its site was running on an aging version of Expression Engine that was no longer supported by the University of Texas’ site admins. The site was extremely b[…]
Process
The project to fix all this proceeded in three phases. The first phase involved convening a cross-functional team with representatives from across the museum to identify requirements for a replacement[…]
The second phase involved a complete replacement of the site’s back end and a total overhaul of the site’s information architecture. We stood up a new Wordpress site and migrated content from the old […]
The third phase involved a complete redesign of the front end of the site with the Blanton’s design partner, Tilted Chair Creative. Some additional functionality and flexibility (page content blocks b[…]
Outcomes
The CMS back-end of the site proved to be extraordinarily responsive to the Museum’s needs. Several new content types were added to the site post-launch, and the entire events management infrastructur[…]
Public response was as we’d hoped, with significantly more traffic landing on events and exhibitions pages and an overall 10% increase in traffic year-over-year.
‘Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s Cassette Mixtapes’
Project Description
This project, which accompanied the travelling exhibition Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, was designed to provide musical[…]
Process
The process involved encouraging visitors to submit playlists via social media and other channels, dubbing those playlists onto cassette tapes, having visitor[…]
Response
The response to the mixtape project was wildly positive, with a takeup rate of well over 40%. We found that, during the run of the exhibition, the word of mouth on the mixtapes was surprisingly specif[…]
‘Research Report: Digital Transformation’
Description
I co-authored Digital Transformation: An Assessment of Grants Supporting Digital Staff in Museums for the Knight Foundation with my colleagues Sarah Lutman and Greta Rudolph at [8 Bridges Workshop]([…]
We interviewed all eight grant-supported staff members, along with the executive teams at their institutions. After consolidating and analyzing the findings, we outlined a set of key observations and […]
‘Drinking About Museums’
Description
Drinking About Museums was (and depending on where you live, maybe still is!) a network of informal meetups for museum professionals. It began as a good idea (namely, that museum people should not hav[…]
Drinking About Museums started as a meetup that Kate Livingston and I organized in Denver, CO in 2011 or so. I came up with the name while watching _Doctor W[…]
In the early days of the pandemic, a few of us pulled together a global #DrinkingAboutMuseums event: a rolling[…]
Ephemera Mobile App
Description
Ephemera was the Blanton’s first-ever mobile app, designed in partnership with Best Fit Mobile. It was an experimental prototype that made use of iBeacons infrastructure that had been installed for […]
As a visitor enters a gallery, she will receive a short message via her device’s lock screen. This message might be witty, poetic, informative, or even nonsensical. The message might encourage her to […]
Throughout the course of a visit, these messages stack up to create a narrative that is unique to that visitor and that visit. The next time she returns to the museum, she’ll receive different message[…]
Process
The messages themselves were written by a rotating four- to six-person cross-departmental team (typically the curator in charge of the gallery, an educator, a gallery assistant, a visitor services spe[…]
The process for adding the messages to the app was fairly straightforward. The messages would be transcribed and added to a CSV file. The messages would be matched to gallery codes in the CSV file and[…]
Sample messages from the app
- Do you feel the need to whisper more in this gallery than in others?
- This Bill Viola piece is 82 minutes long, but you can get the full effect by watching for a mere 79 minutes.
- The dense arrangement of paintings in this gallery resembles the way most paintings were hung before the 20th Century.
- Pairs of people. Arm-in-arm. Hand-in-hand. Side by side. In the ring.
- Find one wall label, and actually read the entire thing.
‘Knight Art + Tech Expansion Fund’
Description
The Knight Art + Tech Expansion Fund was a 5-year, $8M open call program that was conducted in four cities: Charlotte, Akron, Detroit, and Miami. I designed the Fund to provide critical technical infr[…]
- Purchase and installation of hardware and/or software
- Technology infrastructure (e.g., live streaming, networking, outdoor projection)
- Staffing or contract support (e.g., developers, videographers, digital content managers)
- Website or mobile app development
- Digitization, archiving and digital preservation
Individual applicants could request up to $25K in support, and non-profit organizations up to $100K. Key to the intentions of the Fund is that it is not a project fund, but instead provides *operati[…]
What I did
I developed the application criteria and overall approach to the Expansion Fund. I ran the open calls themselves by managing incoming applications, conducting one-on-one office hours with applicants, […]
Results
The Knight Art + Tech Expansion Fund awarded over 100 grants in a five-year period. The grants ranged from the very small (a single iPad), to the very large (multi-year grants to support interactive l[…]
‘Ignite MCN’
Description
In 2012, while serving as program co-chair of the Museum Computer Network, I kicked off Ignite MCN, a series of five-minute Ignite/Pecha Kucha–style talks that opened each annua[…]
In that time, 58 speakers took the stage to cover everything from Linked Open Data to the experiences of low-vision museum visitors—and, inexplicably, a magical appearance by the Digital Humanities […]
After my final year hosting, Nik Honeysett (Balboa Park Online Collaborative) invited me back to give an Ignite-style recap of those seven years. (Video starts with shenanigans; actual content kicks i[…]
IMA Collections Management Overhaul
Description
This project involved a complete overhaul (and eventual replacement) of the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s collections management technology. The project, one of my first in a museum, involved several c[…]
- Normalizing decades of messy collections data with custom Perl scripts (it was 2003);
- Automating the production of accession cards and exhibition checklists and publishing them directly from the CMS for the first time;
- Developing and publishing a logical workflow for the entering of collections data;
- Applying controlled vocabularies to data entry;
- Developing more efficient reporting based on the newly-normalized data;
- Evaluating multiple replacement collections management systems;
- Migrating data and reports from the old CMS (Argus) to the replacement CMS (Ke Emu, now Axiell).
A majority of these components were completed in the first year of the project, with the final CMS replacement and migration occurring in the year following.
“Greek and Roman Study Gallery Kiosks”
Description
The first permanent interactive devices ever installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these kiosks were designed to house, display, and surface label content for the hundreds of objects contained […]
Digital Asset Management Strategy
Description
When I arrived at the Blanton in late 2014, its site was running on an aging version of Expression Engine that was no longer supported by the University of Texas’ site admins. The site was extremely b[…]
Process
The project to fix all this proceeded in three phases. The first phase involved convening a cross-functional team with representatives from across the museum to identify requirements for a replacement[…]
The second phase involved a complete replacement of the site’s back end and a total overhaul of the site’s information architecture. We stood up a new Wordpress site and migrated content from the old […]
The third phase involved a complete redesign of the front end of the site with the Blanton’s design partner, Tilted Chair Creative. Some additional functionality and flexibility (page content blocks b[…]
Outcomes
The CMS back-end of the site proved to be extraordinarily responsive to the Museum’s needs. Several new content types were added to the site post-launch, and the entire events management infrastructur[…]
Public response was as we’d hoped, with significantly more traffic landing on events and exhibitions pages and an overall 10% increase in traffic year-over-year.
‘Knight Digital Maturity Model’
Description
The Knight Digital Maturity Model is a framework for assessing the digital capacity of arts organizations. It emerged from a key finding in a [2021 report on digital transformation](../digital-transfo[…]
Arts organizations often feel perpetually “behind” with technology. While that’s sometimes true, they also have underrecognized strengths, like collaborative content teams or well-structured col[…]
In collaboration with 8 Bridges Workshop and my Knight Foundation colleague [Ricardo Mor](https://web.archive.org/web/20250711095224/https://knightfoundation.org/emplo[...]
Witness Voices
Description
Witness Voices is a website that was designed to accompany the travelling exhibition Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s. Rather than a typical exhibition microsite, Witness Voices was de[…]
Process
We set up a dedicated Wordpress site with some light custom theming and used that as the final repository of all content. A few posts were designated as the in-gallery prompts, we then set up a proces[…]
Response
The initial response to the site was somewhat muted, as there was far less direct conversation there than we had initially hoped for. The real value of the site became clearer over time, as traffic to[…]