Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 1: Engaging Audiences: Increasing Access and Improving Experiences Beyond Reach: Reassessing ‘best practice’ for digital audience engagement
For many small and medium sized cultural heritage organisations, following the lead of larger institutions within the sector has been the only way to keep apace with burgeoning trends in digital audience engagement. These larger organisations tend to have the resources to ‘buy in’ appropriate technical and strategic expertise for all things digital, and so it makes sense that the case studies formed from such projects are packaged and promoted as ‘best practice’ for the sector. Or does it? Digital audience engagement has become markedly more important to cultural heritage organisations – and this was suddenly pushed to fore during the Coronavirus pandemic. The highlighted internally, the different levels of maturity in digital strateg Excavating complexity to engineer delight: Qualitative research strategies and outcomes at The Met
This paper will explore a number of qualitative practices that The Metropolitan Museum of Art\’s digital product design team employs to better understand its audiences, gauge the potential impact of its products, and iterate on its existing ones. Through multiple examples of research projects, it will present our learnings around the most effective methodologies to use per audience, product type, and project lifecycle stage. The paper will also discuss the practical application of these research projects: how our learnings gave rise to digital products and guided our process of ideation, design, and iteration.
To better understand the complex range of audiences that museums typically attract, The Met recently embarked on a seri Striving for Universal Access: Image Descriptions at the National Gallery of Art
Since the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 fully accessible textual descriptions of works of art in the National Gallery of Art’s collection have gone live, and they cover 60% of traffic to museum’s collection pages. Learn how we leveraged a large-scale, interdepartmental project to make this a reality, from documenting the process through publishing description guidelines, and focusing on all users through an inclusive design approach that supports the National Gallery’s mission for universal access. Description is the cornerstone of scholarly interpretation, but in that context, description will be selective, and will always be in service to that interpretation. By developing a specific approach to composing descriptions for the sake of |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 2: Rethinking How and Where Users Interact with your Collections and Video MIT Museum’s digital (r)evolution
MIT Museum’s new home is open and welcoming the diverse communities of Cambridge, Mass. This paper will detail how a new online home was delivered in parallel to the successful physical move to the museum’s new location at Kendall Square. With the aim of laying solid digital foundations for the museum’s programmes to thrive in the coming years, MIT Museum, in collaboration with Cogapp, have developed a modern, accessible, API-based, headless, web frontend. Presented in its fullest form to date, the museum’s collection interface enables casual browsing and research on a level that, until now, has not been possible online. In this paper we will describe the thinking behind this approach as well as the benefits and learnings that we hav Current Futures for Online Collections
A collecting museum cannot deliver on its mission today without an online collection. This argument begins with the first curator’s indecipherable scrawl in a leather-bound ledger, traces the handed-down human poetics of collection data, and ends at digital transformation. Along the way, the online collection allows objects to circulate through cultural networks, while safely stored away. Museums must preserve not just physical objects, but their stories and context as well—the traces of objects and ideas in contact with people over time and through space. The online collection is where such traces are saved and shared. Moreover, it’s where new paths are made possible: the online collection allows new context to be generated, in new places, Hammer Channel: an open source bring-your-own-DAMS video archive
Hammer Channel presents over 1,000 recordings of programs, performances, and artist interviews from the last decade, and is a repository for more than 100 videos produced each year by the museum. The website presents the videos with features that encourage engagement with the content, such as full, searchable transcripts for every video, and a clipping tool that allows users to create and share their favorite moments. Most videos in the archive are recordings of public programs held at the Hammer since 2005. They comprise a broad range of lectures and conversations featuring renowned artists, authors, musicians, scholars, and experts from a variety of fields. Compiling this wide-ranging collection together for the first time, the website |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 3: Image and Sound – Beyond the word: experimenting with aural, immersive, and experimental experiences Without words. Design informative digital experiences for a post web world.
Tell me about … , but wait, because as soon as you put fingertip to keyword and begin to write, you are throwing up barriers to access. Pre-readers – gone, early readers – intimidated, visitors who don\’t know your language – excluded. MOTAT is a science and technology museum in Auckland, New Zealand. Our audience is primarily local families and schoolchildren. Our city is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world with the fourth highest foreign born population. Our science and technology topics are frequently complex. Our collection is often unknowable without explanation. The success of our mission to educate and inspire relies upon our ability to communicate facts, concepts, and context. Are written words – the defaul Exploring Sonification: Representing Data with Sound
The Georgia Tech sonification lab defines sonification as representing data with nonspeech audio Studies show that sonification, combined with visual data displays increases accuracy for people with normal vision. Additionally, sonification, representing data with sound facilitates access for people who are blind. There is a growing community of researchers, scientists and educators developing software to create sonification. With the exception of the Harvard/Smithsonian, sonification has not been explored for museum contexts. This paper will give examples of sonification. Software can be developed using programing languages such as python. Sonification can be produced on websites using the SAS Graphics Accellerator or the IMAGE brows The Cabinet: Turning an Open storage into a Game of Interpretation
What does it mean to have an open storage in the middle of the galleries? What opportunity does it pose for to exploring digital and interactive element within the galleries? In M+, there is a gallery where 40 panels displaying 200 paintings, posters, and photographs move in front of your eyes and are shuffled every two hours. There are no detailed work descriptions on wall labels, only questions on a screen asking what you think about what you see. It is The Cabinet, an open storage system and interactive digital experience that is distinctly different from the typical white cube gallery. The inspiration for The Cabinet came from sixteenth-century collections of wondrous and eclectic objects: the Wunderkammern, otherwise known as the |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 4: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge I Robots in museum settings: exhibits, lego mindstorms, primary school students and museum education
Robots and robotics in museums first arrived at the end of the 20th century and comprise mostly a 21st-century development. Robots in museum settings can offer dynamic, constructive, educational, and communicative mechanisms between museums and their visitors. Robots have initially appeared as museum tour guides onsite and online. They then served as museum exhibits in the form of animatronics and within museum educational activities (Pang, Wong, & Seet, 2017). Also, as telepresence devices offering the opportunity to visit the museum remotely via a robot (Lupetti, Germak, & Giuliano, 2015). Studies on the role and integration of robots in exhibiting and promoting heritage in museums and cultural places are of particular i |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 5: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge II From sea to screen: Bringing the ocean inland with online learning at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
While museums have been providing distance learning opportunities for over thirty years, the demand for online education programs skyrocketed in the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Environmental organizations faced the added challenge of moving outdoor education to digital platforms. The Monterey Bay Aquarium responded by rapidly developing English and Spanish self-paced online courses for PK-12 students and their caregivers. In 2022, the Aquarium partnered with Audience Focus for an in-depth study of the online courses, uncovering the motivations and satisfaction of the courses’ main audiences. It also measured how well the courses met the intended learning outcomes, and how they impacted user affinity for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Building User Experience (UX) Capacity to Support Digital Transformation in Museums
To take full advantage of the potential offered by the digital space, museums and cultural institutions must be able to consistently apply User Experience (UX) methods to create enjoyable and understandable digital interfaces. Unfortunately, many of these organizations lack internal UX expertise, which means they need to partner with costly outside vendors to provide digital expertise, rely on internal staff and struggle through a process of trial and error, or do nothing and fall further behind in their digital offering. The COVID-19 crisis has intensified the digital transformation of museums. Although many museums are welcoming people back into their galleries, visitors’ demand for enjoyable digital experiences will persist. Absent a foc |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 6: Emerging Stories and Technology Dibaajimowin – Stories from this Land: History, Land, and Decolonial Curatorial Approaches in a Contemporary Museum
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum collaborated with the local Indigenous community in the area and researchers from the Universities of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier on Dibaajimowin: Stories from this Land. The impetus behind this exhibit began with the removal of a series of murals, The History of Waterloo County, from public display. These 1950 paintings depicted an industrial and capitalist interpretation of local history and emphasized the settler experience over that of Indigenous inhabitants. Public artwork hence provided the opportunity to create a museum exhibit that might reframe the region’s history and better engage with Indigenous perspectives and historical representations. The researc Bearing Responsibility: The Digital Witness Blanket Project
This paper presents a case study on a decolonizing approach to creating an inclusive user interface, education, and content design. Witnessblanket.ca, a collaborative effort between Carey Newman, CMHR, Media One, Camosun College, and Animikii. A virtual extension that expands public access to the voices of the Survivors of Indian Residential Schools and emphasizes empathy through an inclusive content development process, trauma-informed design features, and various visual and auditory components. The case study reviews the technical and content choices, solutions, and impact measurement considerations while developing a relationship with the community. |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 7: Reimagine Your Tech Stack Rethink the Link: How to accomplish Linked Data on a budget
Over the past five years, Getty has built out a comprehensive suite of linked data applications and infrastructure—the tools needed to try out the technologies that we\’ve all been writing about over the past decade and see if they work in practice. Spoiler: they do. However, some of the parts that we thought most important turned out to be inconsequential, and other parts were critical in a way that was unexpected as we began. In particular, the benefits of linking over semantics, the power of reconciliation, the reuse of off-the-shelf tools, and the importance of local expertise over global knowledge. These will be framed within a discussion of the six levels of linking within Linked Data: No code? No problem. Using no-code methods to build and ship projects with minimal staff support, budget, and timeline.
Imagine this: you work for a museum that does not have a dedicated programmer on staff fluent in Python, Java, or PHP. Okay, maybe that\’s not so hard to envision. Having worked in digital communications with smaller-sized museums for nearly 15 years, I have been involved in dozens of digital projects and found that there has never been an easier time to produce high-quality, custom products without the need for code. You probably used no-code tools before, whether you realize it or not. Think Squarespace, Wix, or Mailchimp. But there is also a wealth of new low-code and no-code tools that may not be as familiar to you. These new platforms rely less on templates and are far more viable for complex projects. I want to introduce (or perhap |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 8: The Future of Museums Situating openness in the new museology: A social constructivist approach to the MuseWeb archive
Adopting the social construction of technology as a theoretical framework and analytical method, this study explores the archive of the MuseWeb conference and conducts a content analysis of papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of openness. It traces how museum professionals have socially constructed the changing meanings of openness in the past twenty years, demonstrating a gradual, albeit not definitive, shift away from an institution-oriented understanding to an access-oriented interpretation that increasingly centered on the needs of the public. Deep Viewpoints: Using Citizen Curation to challenge the Participation Gap
Many countries observe a participation gap in engagement with cultural heritage: people from lower socio-economic groups, members of ethnic minoritized groups and people with disabilities are less likely to visit museums and other cultural institutions. The UK Warwick Commission proposed that this is not due to cost but rather many public cultural institutions having a perceived lack of relevance to their potential audiences. Taming the numbers: automated and interactive reporting from heterogeneous data sources
Modern museums rely on several disparate data sources to capture operational information such as visitor counts, revenue, ticket sales, demographics of visitors such as age and home location, times spent in different sections of museums, usage patterns of interactive exhibits, group/school visits, special tours, museum store sales, donations, and memberships. These data are of crucial importance to museums for tracking performance in terms of multiple metrics including financials, visitor engagement, outreach, etc. Analysis of forecast vs. actual numbers also feeds into tuning of predictive models used for planning and strategy development. These analyses play a crucial role in operations planning, future development, advertising, organizin |
Sunday, February 12th
|
test Chair(s)
What is Lorem Ipsum? |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 1: Engaging Audiences: Increasing Access and Improving Experiences Beyond Reach: Reassessing ‘best practice’ for digital audience engagement
For many small and medium sized cultural heritage organisations, following the lead of larger institutions within the sector has been the only way to keep apace with burgeoning trends in digital audience engagement. These larger organisations tend to have the resources to ‘buy in’ appropriate technical and strategic expertise for all things digital, and so it makes sense that the case studies formed from such projects are packaged and promoted as ‘best practice’ for the sector. Or does it? Digital audience engagement has become markedly more important to cultural heritage organisations – and this was suddenly pushed to fore during the Coronavirus pandemic. The highlighted internally, the different levels of maturity in digital strateg Excavating complexity to engineer delight: Qualitative research strategies and outcomes at The Met
This paper will explore a number of qualitative practices that The Metropolitan Museum of Art\’s digital product design team employs to better understand its audiences, gauge the potential impact of its products, and iterate on its existing ones. Through multiple examples of research projects, it will present our learnings around the most effective methodologies to use per audience, product type, and project lifecycle stage. The paper will also discuss the practical application of these research projects: how our learnings gave rise to digital products and guided our process of ideation, design, and iteration.
To better understand the complex range of audiences that museums typically attract, The Met recently embarked on a seri Striving for Universal Access: Image Descriptions at the National Gallery of Art
Since the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 fully accessible textual descriptions of works of art in the National Gallery of Art’s collection have gone live, and they cover 60% of traffic to museum’s collection pages. Learn how we leveraged a large-scale, interdepartmental project to make this a reality, from documenting the process through publishing description guidelines, and focusing on all users through an inclusive design approach that supports the National Gallery’s mission for universal access. Description is the cornerstone of scholarly interpretation, but in that context, description will be selective, and will always be in service to that interpretation. By developing a specific approach to composing descriptions for the sake of |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 2: Rethinking How and Where Users Interact with your Collections and Video MIT Museum’s digital (r)evolution
MIT Museum’s new home is open and welcoming the diverse communities of Cambridge, Mass. This paper will detail how a new online home was delivered in parallel to the successful physical move to the museum’s new location at Kendall Square. With the aim of laying solid digital foundations for the museum’s programmes to thrive in the coming years, MIT Museum, in collaboration with Cogapp, have developed a modern, accessible, API-based, headless, web frontend. Presented in its fullest form to date, the museum’s collection interface enables casual browsing and research on a level that, until now, has not been possible online. In this paper we will describe the thinking behind this approach as well as the benefits and learnings that we hav Current Futures for Online Collections
A collecting museum cannot deliver on its mission today without an online collection. This argument begins with the first curator’s indecipherable scrawl in a leather-bound ledger, traces the handed-down human poetics of collection data, and ends at digital transformation. Along the way, the online collection allows objects to circulate through cultural networks, while safely stored away. Museums must preserve not just physical objects, but their stories and context as well—the traces of objects and ideas in contact with people over time and through space. The online collection is where such traces are saved and shared. Moreover, it’s where new paths are made possible: the online collection allows new context to be generated, in new places, Hammer Channel: an open source bring-your-own-DAMS video archive
Hammer Channel presents over 1,000 recordings of programs, performances, and artist interviews from the last decade, and is a repository for more than 100 videos produced each year by the museum. The website presents the videos with features that encourage engagement with the content, such as full, searchable transcripts for every video, and a clipping tool that allows users to create and share their favorite moments. Most videos in the archive are recordings of public programs held at the Hammer since 2005. They comprise a broad range of lectures and conversations featuring renowned artists, authors, musicians, scholars, and experts from a variety of fields. Compiling this wide-ranging collection together for the first time, the website |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 3: Image and Sound – Beyond the word: experimenting with aural, immersive, and experimental experiences Without words. Design informative digital experiences for a post web world.
Tell me about … , but wait, because as soon as you put fingertip to keyword and begin to write, you are throwing up barriers to access. Pre-readers – gone, early readers – intimidated, visitors who don\’t know your language – excluded. MOTAT is a science and technology museum in Auckland, New Zealand. Our audience is primarily local families and schoolchildren. Our city is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world with the fourth highest foreign born population. Our science and technology topics are frequently complex. Our collection is often unknowable without explanation. The success of our mission to educate and inspire relies upon our ability to communicate facts, concepts, and context. Are written words – the defaul Exploring Sonification: Representing Data with Sound
The Georgia Tech sonification lab defines sonification as representing data with nonspeech audio Studies show that sonification, combined with visual data displays increases accuracy for people with normal vision. Additionally, sonification, representing data with sound facilitates access for people who are blind. There is a growing community of researchers, scientists and educators developing software to create sonification. With the exception of the Harvard/Smithsonian, sonification has not been explored for museum contexts. This paper will give examples of sonification. Software can be developed using programing languages such as python. Sonification can be produced on websites using the SAS Graphics Accellerator or the IMAGE brows The Cabinet: Turning an Open storage into a Game of Interpretation
What does it mean to have an open storage in the middle of the galleries? What opportunity does it pose for to exploring digital and interactive element within the galleries? In M+, there is a gallery where 40 panels displaying 200 paintings, posters, and photographs move in front of your eyes and are shuffled every two hours. There are no detailed work descriptions on wall labels, only questions on a screen asking what you think about what you see. It is The Cabinet, an open storage system and interactive digital experience that is distinctly different from the typical white cube gallery. The inspiration for The Cabinet came from sixteenth-century collections of wondrous and eclectic objects: the Wunderkammern, otherwise known as the |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 4: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge I Robots in museum settings: exhibits, lego mindstorms, primary school students and museum education
Robots and robotics in museums first arrived at the end of the 20th century and comprise mostly a 21st-century development. Robots in museum settings can offer dynamic, constructive, educational, and communicative mechanisms between museums and their visitors. Robots have initially appeared as museum tour guides onsite and online. They then served as museum exhibits in the form of animatronics and within museum educational activities (Pang, Wong, & Seet, 2017). Also, as telepresence devices offering the opportunity to visit the museum remotely via a robot (Lupetti, Germak, & Giuliano, 2015). Studies on the role and integration of robots in exhibiting and promoting heritage in museums and cultural places are of particular i |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 5: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge II From sea to screen: Bringing the ocean inland with online learning at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
While museums have been providing distance learning opportunities for over thirty years, the demand for online education programs skyrocketed in the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Environmental organizations faced the added challenge of moving outdoor education to digital platforms. The Monterey Bay Aquarium responded by rapidly developing English and Spanish self-paced online courses for PK-12 students and their caregivers. In 2022, the Aquarium partnered with Audience Focus for an in-depth study of the online courses, uncovering the motivations and satisfaction of the courses’ main audiences. It also measured how well the courses met the intended learning outcomes, and how they impacted user affinity for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Building User Experience (UX) Capacity to Support Digital Transformation in Museums
To take full advantage of the potential offered by the digital space, museums and cultural institutions must be able to consistently apply User Experience (UX) methods to create enjoyable and understandable digital interfaces. Unfortunately, many of these organizations lack internal UX expertise, which means they need to partner with costly outside vendors to provide digital expertise, rely on internal staff and struggle through a process of trial and error, or do nothing and fall further behind in their digital offering. The COVID-19 crisis has intensified the digital transformation of museums. Although many museums are welcoming people back into their galleries, visitors’ demand for enjoyable digital experiences will persist. Absent a foc |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 6: Emerging Stories and Technology Dibaajimowin – Stories from this Land: History, Land, and Decolonial Curatorial Approaches in a Contemporary Museum
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum collaborated with the local Indigenous community in the area and researchers from the Universities of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier on Dibaajimowin: Stories from this Land. The impetus behind this exhibit began with the removal of a series of murals, The History of Waterloo County, from public display. These 1950 paintings depicted an industrial and capitalist interpretation of local history and emphasized the settler experience over that of Indigenous inhabitants. Public artwork hence provided the opportunity to create a museum exhibit that might reframe the region’s history and better engage with Indigenous perspectives and historical representations. The researc Bearing Responsibility: The Digital Witness Blanket Project
This paper presents a case study on a decolonizing approach to creating an inclusive user interface, education, and content design. Witnessblanket.ca, a collaborative effort between Carey Newman, CMHR, Media One, Camosun College, and Animikii. A virtual extension that expands public access to the voices of the Survivors of Indian Residential Schools and emphasizes empathy through an inclusive content development process, trauma-informed design features, and various visual and auditory components. The case study reviews the technical and content choices, solutions, and impact measurement considerations while developing a relationship with the community. |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 7: Reimagine Your Tech Stack Rethink the Link: How to accomplish Linked Data on a budget
Over the past five years, Getty has built out a comprehensive suite of linked data applications and infrastructure—the tools needed to try out the technologies that we\’ve all been writing about over the past decade and see if they work in practice. Spoiler: they do. However, some of the parts that we thought most important turned out to be inconsequential, and other parts were critical in a way that was unexpected as we began. In particular, the benefits of linking over semantics, the power of reconciliation, the reuse of off-the-shelf tools, and the importance of local expertise over global knowledge. These will be framed within a discussion of the six levels of linking within Linked Data: No code? No problem. Using no-code methods to build and ship projects with minimal staff support, budget, and timeline.
Imagine this: you work for a museum that does not have a dedicated programmer on staff fluent in Python, Java, or PHP. Okay, maybe that\’s not so hard to envision. Having worked in digital communications with smaller-sized museums for nearly 15 years, I have been involved in dozens of digital projects and found that there has never been an easier time to produce high-quality, custom products without the need for code. You probably used no-code tools before, whether you realize it or not. Think Squarespace, Wix, or Mailchimp. But there is also a wealth of new low-code and no-code tools that may not be as familiar to you. These new platforms rely less on templates and are far more viable for complex projects. I want to introduce (or perhap |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 8: The Future of Museums Situating openness in the new museology: A social constructivist approach to the MuseWeb archive
Adopting the social construction of technology as a theoretical framework and analytical method, this study explores the archive of the MuseWeb conference and conducts a content analysis of papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of openness. It traces how museum professionals have socially constructed the changing meanings of openness in the past twenty years, demonstrating a gradual, albeit not definitive, shift away from an institution-oriented understanding to an access-oriented interpretation that increasingly centered on the needs of the public. Deep Viewpoints: Using Citizen Curation to challenge the Participation Gap
Many countries observe a participation gap in engagement with cultural heritage: people from lower socio-economic groups, members of ethnic minoritized groups and people with disabilities are less likely to visit museums and other cultural institutions. The UK Warwick Commission proposed that this is not due to cost but rather many public cultural institutions having a perceived lack of relevance to their potential audiences. Taming the numbers: automated and interactive reporting from heterogeneous data sources
Modern museums rely on several disparate data sources to capture operational information such as visitor counts, revenue, ticket sales, demographics of visitors such as age and home location, times spent in different sections of museums, usage patterns of interactive exhibits, group/school visits, special tours, museum store sales, donations, and memberships. These data are of crucial importance to museums for tracking performance in terms of multiple metrics including financials, visitor engagement, outreach, etc. Analysis of forecast vs. actual numbers also feeds into tuning of predictive models used for planning and strategy development. These analyses play a crucial role in operations planning, future development, advertising, organizin |
Sunday, February 12th
|
test Chair(s)
What is Lorem Ipsum? |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 1: Engaging Audiences: Increasing Access and Improving Experiences Beyond Reach: Reassessing ‘best practice’ for digital audience engagement
For many small and medium sized cultural heritage organisations, following the lead of larger institutions within the sector has been the only way to keep apace with burgeoning trends in digital audience engagement. These larger organisations tend to have the resources to ‘buy in’ appropriate technical and strategic expertise for all things digital, and so it makes sense that the case studies formed from such projects are packaged and promoted as ‘best practice’ for the sector. Or does it? Digital audience engagement has become markedly more important to cultural heritage organisations – and this was suddenly pushed to fore during the Coronavirus pandemic. The highlighted internally, the different levels of maturity in digital strateg Excavating complexity to engineer delight: Qualitative research strategies and outcomes at The Met
This paper will explore a number of qualitative practices that The Metropolitan Museum of Art\’s digital product design team employs to better understand its audiences, gauge the potential impact of its products, and iterate on its existing ones. Through multiple examples of research projects, it will present our learnings around the most effective methodologies to use per audience, product type, and project lifecycle stage. The paper will also discuss the practical application of these research projects: how our learnings gave rise to digital products and guided our process of ideation, design, and iteration.
To better understand the complex range of audiences that museums typically attract, The Met recently embarked on a seri Striving for Universal Access: Image Descriptions at the National Gallery of Art
Since the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 fully accessible textual descriptions of works of art in the National Gallery of Art’s collection have gone live, and they cover 60% of traffic to museum’s collection pages. Learn how we leveraged a large-scale, interdepartmental project to make this a reality, from documenting the process through publishing description guidelines, and focusing on all users through an inclusive design approach that supports the National Gallery’s mission for universal access. Description is the cornerstone of scholarly interpretation, but in that context, description will be selective, and will always be in service to that interpretation. By developing a specific approach to composing descriptions for the sake of |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 2: Rethinking How and Where Users Interact with your Collections and Video MIT Museum’s digital (r)evolution
MIT Museum’s new home is open and welcoming the diverse communities of Cambridge, Mass. This paper will detail how a new online home was delivered in parallel to the successful physical move to the museum’s new location at Kendall Square. With the aim of laying solid digital foundations for the museum’s programmes to thrive in the coming years, MIT Museum, in collaboration with Cogapp, have developed a modern, accessible, API-based, headless, web frontend. Presented in its fullest form to date, the museum’s collection interface enables casual browsing and research on a level that, until now, has not been possible online. In this paper we will describe the thinking behind this approach as well as the benefits and learnings that we hav Current Futures for Online Collections
A collecting museum cannot deliver on its mission today without an online collection. This argument begins with the first curator’s indecipherable scrawl in a leather-bound ledger, traces the handed-down human poetics of collection data, and ends at digital transformation. Along the way, the online collection allows objects to circulate through cultural networks, while safely stored away. Museums must preserve not just physical objects, but their stories and context as well—the traces of objects and ideas in contact with people over time and through space. The online collection is where such traces are saved and shared. Moreover, it’s where new paths are made possible: the online collection allows new context to be generated, in new places, Hammer Channel: an open source bring-your-own-DAMS video archive
Hammer Channel presents over 1,000 recordings of programs, performances, and artist interviews from the last decade, and is a repository for more than 100 videos produced each year by the museum. The website presents the videos with features that encourage engagement with the content, such as full, searchable transcripts for every video, and a clipping tool that allows users to create and share their favorite moments. Most videos in the archive are recordings of public programs held at the Hammer since 2005. They comprise a broad range of lectures and conversations featuring renowned artists, authors, musicians, scholars, and experts from a variety of fields. Compiling this wide-ranging collection together for the first time, the website |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 3: Image and Sound – Beyond the word: experimenting with aural, immersive, and experimental experiences Without words. Design informative digital experiences for a post web world.
Tell me about … , but wait, because as soon as you put fingertip to keyword and begin to write, you are throwing up barriers to access. Pre-readers – gone, early readers – intimidated, visitors who don\’t know your language – excluded. MOTAT is a science and technology museum in Auckland, New Zealand. Our audience is primarily local families and schoolchildren. Our city is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world with the fourth highest foreign born population. Our science and technology topics are frequently complex. Our collection is often unknowable without explanation. The success of our mission to educate and inspire relies upon our ability to communicate facts, concepts, and context. Are written words – the defaul Exploring Sonification: Representing Data with Sound
The Georgia Tech sonification lab defines sonification as representing data with nonspeech audio Studies show that sonification, combined with visual data displays increases accuracy for people with normal vision. Additionally, sonification, representing data with sound facilitates access for people who are blind. There is a growing community of researchers, scientists and educators developing software to create sonification. With the exception of the Harvard/Smithsonian, sonification has not been explored for museum contexts. This paper will give examples of sonification. Software can be developed using programing languages such as python. Sonification can be produced on websites using the SAS Graphics Accellerator or the IMAGE brows The Cabinet: Turning an Open storage into a Game of Interpretation
What does it mean to have an open storage in the middle of the galleries? What opportunity does it pose for to exploring digital and interactive element within the galleries? In M+, there is a gallery where 40 panels displaying 200 paintings, posters, and photographs move in front of your eyes and are shuffled every two hours. There are no detailed work descriptions on wall labels, only questions on a screen asking what you think about what you see. It is The Cabinet, an open storage system and interactive digital experience that is distinctly different from the typical white cube gallery. The inspiration for The Cabinet came from sixteenth-century collections of wondrous and eclectic objects: the Wunderkammern, otherwise known as the |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 4: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge I Robots in museum settings: exhibits, lego mindstorms, primary school students and museum education
Robots and robotics in museums first arrived at the end of the 20th century and comprise mostly a 21st-century development. Robots in museum settings can offer dynamic, constructive, educational, and communicative mechanisms between museums and their visitors. Robots have initially appeared as museum tour guides onsite and online. They then served as museum exhibits in the form of animatronics and within museum educational activities (Pang, Wong, & Seet, 2017). Also, as telepresence devices offering the opportunity to visit the museum remotely via a robot (Lupetti, Germak, & Giuliano, 2015). Studies on the role and integration of robots in exhibiting and promoting heritage in museums and cultural places are of particular i |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 5: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge II From sea to screen: Bringing the ocean inland with online learning at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
While museums have been providing distance learning opportunities for over thirty years, the demand for online education programs skyrocketed in the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Environmental organizations faced the added challenge of moving outdoor education to digital platforms. The Monterey Bay Aquarium responded by rapidly developing English and Spanish self-paced online courses for PK-12 students and their caregivers. In 2022, the Aquarium partnered with Audience Focus for an in-depth study of the online courses, uncovering the motivations and satisfaction of the courses’ main audiences. It also measured how well the courses met the intended learning outcomes, and how they impacted user affinity for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Building User Experience (UX) Capacity to Support Digital Transformation in Museums
To take full advantage of the potential offered by the digital space, museums and cultural institutions must be able to consistently apply User Experience (UX) methods to create enjoyable and understandable digital interfaces. Unfortunately, many of these organizations lack internal UX expertise, which means they need to partner with costly outside vendors to provide digital expertise, rely on internal staff and struggle through a process of trial and error, or do nothing and fall further behind in their digital offering. The COVID-19 crisis has intensified the digital transformation of museums. Although many museums are welcoming people back into their galleries, visitors’ demand for enjoyable digital experiences will persist. Absent a foc |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 6: Emerging Stories and Technology Dibaajimowin – Stories from this Land: History, Land, and Decolonial Curatorial Approaches in a Contemporary Museum
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum collaborated with the local Indigenous community in the area and researchers from the Universities of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier on Dibaajimowin: Stories from this Land. The impetus behind this exhibit began with the removal of a series of murals, The History of Waterloo County, from public display. These 1950 paintings depicted an industrial and capitalist interpretation of local history and emphasized the settler experience over that of Indigenous inhabitants. Public artwork hence provided the opportunity to create a museum exhibit that might reframe the region’s history and better engage with Indigenous perspectives and historical representations. The researc Bearing Responsibility: The Digital Witness Blanket Project
This paper presents a case study on a decolonizing approach to creating an inclusive user interface, education, and content design. Witnessblanket.ca, a collaborative effort between Carey Newman, CMHR, Media One, Camosun College, and Animikii. A virtual extension that expands public access to the voices of the Survivors of Indian Residential Schools and emphasizes empathy through an inclusive content development process, trauma-informed design features, and various visual and auditory components. The case study reviews the technical and content choices, solutions, and impact measurement considerations while developing a relationship with the community. |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 7: Reimagine Your Tech Stack Rethink the Link: How to accomplish Linked Data on a budget
Over the past five years, Getty has built out a comprehensive suite of linked data applications and infrastructure—the tools needed to try out the technologies that we\’ve all been writing about over the past decade and see if they work in practice. Spoiler: they do. However, some of the parts that we thought most important turned out to be inconsequential, and other parts were critical in a way that was unexpected as we began. In particular, the benefits of linking over semantics, the power of reconciliation, the reuse of off-the-shelf tools, and the importance of local expertise over global knowledge. These will be framed within a discussion of the six levels of linking within Linked Data: No code? No problem. Using no-code methods to build and ship projects with minimal staff support, budget, and timeline.
Imagine this: you work for a museum that does not have a dedicated programmer on staff fluent in Python, Java, or PHP. Okay, maybe that\’s not so hard to envision. Having worked in digital communications with smaller-sized museums for nearly 15 years, I have been involved in dozens of digital projects and found that there has never been an easier time to produce high-quality, custom products without the need for code. You probably used no-code tools before, whether you realize it or not. Think Squarespace, Wix, or Mailchimp. But there is also a wealth of new low-code and no-code tools that may not be as familiar to you. These new platforms rely less on templates and are far more viable for complex projects. I want to introduce (or perhap |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 8: The Future of Museums Situating openness in the new museology: A social constructivist approach to the MuseWeb archive
Adopting the social construction of technology as a theoretical framework and analytical method, this study explores the archive of the MuseWeb conference and conducts a content analysis of papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of openness. It traces how museum professionals have socially constructed the changing meanings of openness in the past twenty years, demonstrating a gradual, albeit not definitive, shift away from an institution-oriented understanding to an access-oriented interpretation that increasingly centered on the needs of the public. Deep Viewpoints: Using Citizen Curation to challenge the Participation Gap
Many countries observe a participation gap in engagement with cultural heritage: people from lower socio-economic groups, members of ethnic minoritized groups and people with disabilities are less likely to visit museums and other cultural institutions. The UK Warwick Commission proposed that this is not due to cost but rather many public cultural institutions having a perceived lack of relevance to their potential audiences. Taming the numbers: automated and interactive reporting from heterogeneous data sources
Modern museums rely on several disparate data sources to capture operational information such as visitor counts, revenue, ticket sales, demographics of visitors such as age and home location, times spent in different sections of museums, usage patterns of interactive exhibits, group/school visits, special tours, museum store sales, donations, and memberships. These data are of crucial importance to museums for tracking performance in terms of multiple metrics including financials, visitor engagement, outreach, etc. Analysis of forecast vs. actual numbers also feeds into tuning of predictive models used for planning and strategy development. These analyses play a crucial role in operations planning, future development, advertising, organizin |
Sunday, February 12th
|
test Chair(s)
What is Lorem Ipsum? |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 1: Engaging Audiences: Increasing Access and Improving Experiences Beyond Reach: Reassessing ‘best practice’ for digital audience engagement
For many small and medium sized cultural heritage organisations, following the lead of larger institutions within the sector has been the only way to keep apace with burgeoning trends in digital audience engagement. These larger organisations tend to have the resources to ‘buy in’ appropriate technical and strategic expertise for all things digital, and so it makes sense that the case studies formed from such projects are packaged and promoted as ‘best practice’ for the sector. Or does it? Digital audience engagement has become markedly more important to cultural heritage organisations – and this was suddenly pushed to fore during the Coronavirus pandemic. The highlighted internally, the different levels of maturity in digital strateg Excavating complexity to engineer delight: Qualitative research strategies and outcomes at The Met
This paper will explore a number of qualitative practices that The Metropolitan Museum of Art\’s digital product design team employs to better understand its audiences, gauge the potential impact of its products, and iterate on its existing ones. Through multiple examples of research projects, it will present our learnings around the most effective methodologies to use per audience, product type, and project lifecycle stage. The paper will also discuss the practical application of these research projects: how our learnings gave rise to digital products and guided our process of ideation, design, and iteration.
To better understand the complex range of audiences that museums typically attract, The Met recently embarked on a seri Striving for Universal Access: Image Descriptions at the National Gallery of Art
Since the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 fully accessible textual descriptions of works of art in the National Gallery of Art’s collection have gone live, and they cover 60% of traffic to museum’s collection pages. Learn how we leveraged a large-scale, interdepartmental project to make this a reality, from documenting the process through publishing description guidelines, and focusing on all users through an inclusive design approach that supports the National Gallery’s mission for universal access. Description is the cornerstone of scholarly interpretation, but in that context, description will be selective, and will always be in service to that interpretation. By developing a specific approach to composing descriptions for the sake of |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 2: Rethinking How and Where Users Interact with your Collections and Video MIT Museum’s digital (r)evolution
MIT Museum’s new home is open and welcoming the diverse communities of Cambridge, Mass. This paper will detail how a new online home was delivered in parallel to the successful physical move to the museum’s new location at Kendall Square. With the aim of laying solid digital foundations for the museum’s programmes to thrive in the coming years, MIT Museum, in collaboration with Cogapp, have developed a modern, accessible, API-based, headless, web frontend. Presented in its fullest form to date, the museum’s collection interface enables casual browsing and research on a level that, until now, has not been possible online. In this paper we will describe the thinking behind this approach as well as the benefits and learnings that we hav Current Futures for Online Collections
A collecting museum cannot deliver on its mission today without an online collection. This argument begins with the first curator’s indecipherable scrawl in a leather-bound ledger, traces the handed-down human poetics of collection data, and ends at digital transformation. Along the way, the online collection allows objects to circulate through cultural networks, while safely stored away. Museums must preserve not just physical objects, but their stories and context as well—the traces of objects and ideas in contact with people over time and through space. The online collection is where such traces are saved and shared. Moreover, it’s where new paths are made possible: the online collection allows new context to be generated, in new places, Hammer Channel: an open source bring-your-own-DAMS video archive
Hammer Channel presents over 1,000 recordings of programs, performances, and artist interviews from the last decade, and is a repository for more than 100 videos produced each year by the museum. The website presents the videos with features that encourage engagement with the content, such as full, searchable transcripts for every video, and a clipping tool that allows users to create and share their favorite moments. Most videos in the archive are recordings of public programs held at the Hammer since 2005. They comprise a broad range of lectures and conversations featuring renowned artists, authors, musicians, scholars, and experts from a variety of fields. Compiling this wide-ranging collection together for the first time, the website |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 3: Image and Sound – Beyond the word: experimenting with aural, immersive, and experimental experiences Without words. Design informative digital experiences for a post web world.
Tell me about … , but wait, because as soon as you put fingertip to keyword and begin to write, you are throwing up barriers to access. Pre-readers – gone, early readers – intimidated, visitors who don\’t know your language – excluded. MOTAT is a science and technology museum in Auckland, New Zealand. Our audience is primarily local families and schoolchildren. Our city is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world with the fourth highest foreign born population. Our science and technology topics are frequently complex. Our collection is often unknowable without explanation. The success of our mission to educate and inspire relies upon our ability to communicate facts, concepts, and context. Are written words – the defaul Exploring Sonification: Representing Data with Sound
The Georgia Tech sonification lab defines sonification as representing data with nonspeech audio Studies show that sonification, combined with visual data displays increases accuracy for people with normal vision. Additionally, sonification, representing data with sound facilitates access for people who are blind. There is a growing community of researchers, scientists and educators developing software to create sonification. With the exception of the Harvard/Smithsonian, sonification has not been explored for museum contexts. This paper will give examples of sonification. Software can be developed using programing languages such as python. Sonification can be produced on websites using the SAS Graphics Accellerator or the IMAGE brows The Cabinet: Turning an Open storage into a Game of Interpretation
What does it mean to have an open storage in the middle of the galleries? What opportunity does it pose for to exploring digital and interactive element within the galleries? In M+, there is a gallery where 40 panels displaying 200 paintings, posters, and photographs move in front of your eyes and are shuffled every two hours. There are no detailed work descriptions on wall labels, only questions on a screen asking what you think about what you see. It is The Cabinet, an open storage system and interactive digital experience that is distinctly different from the typical white cube gallery. The inspiration for The Cabinet came from sixteenth-century collections of wondrous and eclectic objects: the Wunderkammern, otherwise known as the |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 4: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge I Robots in museum settings: exhibits, lego mindstorms, primary school students and museum education
Robots and robotics in museums first arrived at the end of the 20th century and comprise mostly a 21st-century development. Robots in museum settings can offer dynamic, constructive, educational, and communicative mechanisms between museums and their visitors. Robots have initially appeared as museum tour guides onsite and online. They then served as museum exhibits in the form of animatronics and within museum educational activities (Pang, Wong, & Seet, 2017). Also, as telepresence devices offering the opportunity to visit the museum remotely via a robot (Lupetti, Germak, & Giuliano, 2015). Studies on the role and integration of robots in exhibiting and promoting heritage in museums and cultural places are of particular i |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 5: Extending Reality – Technology as a Bridge II From sea to screen: Bringing the ocean inland with online learning at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
While museums have been providing distance learning opportunities for over thirty years, the demand for online education programs skyrocketed in the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Environmental organizations faced the added challenge of moving outdoor education to digital platforms. The Monterey Bay Aquarium responded by rapidly developing English and Spanish self-paced online courses for PK-12 students and their caregivers. In 2022, the Aquarium partnered with Audience Focus for an in-depth study of the online courses, uncovering the motivations and satisfaction of the courses’ main audiences. It also measured how well the courses met the intended learning outcomes, and how they impacted user affinity for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Building User Experience (UX) Capacity to Support Digital Transformation in Museums
To take full advantage of the potential offered by the digital space, museums and cultural institutions must be able to consistently apply User Experience (UX) methods to create enjoyable and understandable digital interfaces. Unfortunately, many of these organizations lack internal UX expertise, which means they need to partner with costly outside vendors to provide digital expertise, rely on internal staff and struggle through a process of trial and error, or do nothing and fall further behind in their digital offering. The COVID-19 crisis has intensified the digital transformation of museums. Although many museums are welcoming people back into their galleries, visitors’ demand for enjoyable digital experiences will persist. Absent a foc |
Tuesday, April 4th
|
Paper Session 6: Emerging Stories and Technology Dibaajimowin – Stories from this Land: History, Land, and Decolonial Curatorial Approaches in a Contemporary Museum
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum collaborated with the local Indigenous community in the area and researchers from the Universities of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier on Dibaajimowin: Stories from this Land. The impetus behind this exhibit began with the removal of a series of murals, The History of Waterloo County, from public display. These 1950 paintings depicted an industrial and capitalist interpretation of local history and emphasized the settler experience over that of Indigenous inhabitants. Public artwork hence provided the opportunity to create a museum exhibit that might reframe the region’s history and better engage with Indigenous perspectives and historical representations. The researc Bearing Responsibility: The Digital Witness Blanket Project
This paper presents a case study on a decolonizing approach to creating an inclusive user interface, education, and content design. Witnessblanket.ca, a collaborative effort between Carey Newman, CMHR, Media One, Camosun College, and Animikii. A virtual extension that expands public access to the voices of the Survivors of Indian Residential Schools and emphasizes empathy through an inclusive content development process, trauma-informed design features, and various visual and auditory components. The case study reviews the technical and content choices, solutions, and impact measurement considerations while developing a relationship with the community. |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 7: Reimagine Your Tech Stack Rethink the Link: How to accomplish Linked Data on a budget
Over the past five years, Getty has built out a comprehensive suite of linked data applications and infrastructure—the tools needed to try out the technologies that we\’ve all been writing about over the past decade and see if they work in practice. Spoiler: they do. However, some of the parts that we thought most important turned out to be inconsequential, and other parts were critical in a way that was unexpected as we began. In particular, the benefits of linking over semantics, the power of reconciliation, the reuse of off-the-shelf tools, and the importance of local expertise over global knowledge. These will be framed within a discussion of the six levels of linking within Linked Data: No code? No problem. Using no-code methods to build and ship projects with minimal staff support, budget, and timeline.
Imagine this: you work for a museum that does not have a dedicated programmer on staff fluent in Python, Java, or PHP. Okay, maybe that\’s not so hard to envision. Having worked in digital communications with smaller-sized museums for nearly 15 years, I have been involved in dozens of digital projects and found that there has never been an easier time to produce high-quality, custom products without the need for code. You probably used no-code tools before, whether you realize it or not. Think Squarespace, Wix, or Mailchimp. But there is also a wealth of new low-code and no-code tools that may not be as familiar to you. These new platforms rely less on templates and are far more viable for complex projects. I want to introduce (or perhap |
Wednesday, April 5th
|
Paper Session 8: The Future of Museums Situating openness in the new museology: A social constructivist approach to the MuseWeb archive
Adopting the social construction of technology as a theoretical framework and analytical method, this study explores the archive of the MuseWeb conference and conducts a content analysis of papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of openness. It traces how museum professionals have socially constructed the changing meanings of openness in the past twenty years, demonstrating a gradual, albeit not definitive, shift away from an institution-oriented understanding to an access-oriented interpretation that increasingly centered on the needs of the public. Deep Viewpoints: Using Citizen Curation to challenge the Participation Gap
Many countries observe a participation gap in engagement with cultural heritage: people from lower socio-economic groups, members of ethnic minoritized groups and people with disabilities are less likely to visit museums and other cultural institutions. The UK Warwick Commission proposed that this is not due to cost but rather many public cultural institutions having a perceived lack of relevance to their potential audiences. Taming the numbers: automated and interactive reporting from heterogeneous data sources
Modern museums rely on several disparate data sources to capture operational information such as visitor counts, revenue, ticket sales, demographics of visitors such as age and home location, times spent in different sections of museums, usage patterns of interactive exhibits, group/school visits, special tours, museum store sales, donations, and memberships. These data are of crucial importance to museums for tracking performance in terms of multiple metrics including financials, visitor engagement, outreach, etc. Analysis of forecast vs. actual numbers also feeds into tuning of predictive models used for planning and strategy development. These analyses play a crucial role in operations planning, future development, advertising, organizin |
Sunday, February 12th
|
test Chair(s)
What is Lorem Ipsum? |
