Blogs

papers are now on-line for ICHIM07 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 24-26, 2007. over 50 groups will be reporting at ICHIM07 on the state of the art in cultural heritage informatics, and plotting the issues we face in the future. see the list at http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/speakers/index.html

well, true to form, we've been watching the proposals for Museums and the Web 2008 flow in all day. what is it about our always on culture that's embedded this last minute madness in the way we work?

i know that even though it's late on friday (most places) we'll see some more filter in tonight. and then there's tomorrow and the next day (did anyone notice it was a weekend?); we didn't when we set the deadline...

ah well – we know that there's a problem in museum culture: a lack of time to be reflective, even though that's one of the things we try to provoke in our work [thinking, learning, seeing anew – aren't these what we want our visitors to do?].

as our small contribution to collective memory, we've insisted on written papers for Museums and the Web (and we keep them all online).

so now, make that reflexive jump towards the next deadline: September 30, 2007. Museums and the Web, Montreal, April 9-12, 2008. Call for Particiption. we want to see your best work, and participate in the process of discussing, documenting and sharing it. we can all take some time out to learn.

/jt

The NOSO site has been out there for a bit -- indeed there was a presentation @ the de Young the end of June -- but i don't recall anyone mentioning it in the museum sphere.

it's a great observation on our dependence on tools to organize our selves, and our [social] lives, and our need to maintain identity through personal space.

drop in, tune out ... i think this is why we have an island.

/jt

 

got a corvair in my yard

hasn't run in 15 years

it's a home for the birds now

it's no longer a car.

 

Jim White, Corvair, No Such Place

Jon Pratty's posted some new photographs of Museums and the Web 2007 in our MW2007 flickr group. it's nice to know that i'm not the only one who takes a while to get my pictures organized -- and to see some changes in the images in the right nav bar of this site. no matter how random flickr says it is, it definitely favours some images over others (or seems to start in the same place). maybe there's a setting i've missed?

thanks Jon!

/jt

Virtual clone of the Old Masters Picture Gallery Dresden in Second Life

The State Art Collections Dresden (Germany) are the first museum to have responded to the new challenges of the web by producing a genuine 1:1 clone of the Old Masters Picture Gallery. This concept is therefore fundamentally different from the many purely fictitious museum creations on the web which have no counterpart in real life.

thanks seb, for the rather nice write-up of the steve.museum update podcast.

you've hit on one of the real problems of conducting research in the museum context -- the task of making what seems 'academic' relevant and useful. it's hard, in our project-driven culture, to step back from what we think we 'know' to see if there is any evidence for our prejudices. Lorcan Dempsey blogged about this not long ago, pleading for an 'evidence base' in library catalogue development.

we need research in order to do what we do better, but we can't have research for research's sake in a sector devoted to public service.

i've been thinking about this in the context of how we structure and report both the steve.museum research agenda and its results. obviously, there's a need to distill the research rationale into something that's easily digestible to the professional. but doing that without dumbing down is a challenge. make it seem to easy and the need for the research gets lost; make it too applied, and the product takes the place of the questions and the research environment starts to look like an answer in itself.

Xavier @ ICHIM03 in Paris: Xavier and the sixth finger, at l'École du Louvre.

/jt

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I've been invited to give an update on the activities of steve.museum at the Dublin Core Annual General meeting. While I can't be in Singapore, this invitation did provide the motivation to do a podcast providing an update on where we are with the steve.museum research and highlighting some very early research results. You can download the podcast here.

We're definitely seeing differences in behaviour between tagging on the single-institution site at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the multi-institution site at http://tagger.steve.museum. And we're seeing differences in tagging depending on whether users see object descriptions or not, and whether they see works of art in related sets or not.

The current data collection phase is exploring the effect of showing others tags. In the fall, we'll move on to explore what happens when users can select works to tag. We had some great discussion about what 'choice' means at the steve summer meeting on Grindstone.

 

 

ICHIM07 is dedicated to the memory of Xavier Perrot, our partner and friend, who attended every ICHIM conference and co-chaired the meetings in 2003 (Paris), 2004 (Berlin) and 2005 (Paris) before his untimely death from cancer on July 20, 2007.

His convivial and inquisitive spirit continues to inspire us all.

The McCord Museum has launched a 'keyword matching game'. Players are asked to supply up to 10 keywords for each of a group of images, within 3 minutes.

It took me a few minutes to figure out the interface -- and i found myself peering at the images [maybe that's just because i've had a long day at the screen, but i was looking for details, and found i was squinting.]

Seminar on Comparative Museology took place at the Department of History of Art, University of Oxford, on June 8th 2007.

The daylong seminar brought together eight museum curators and academics from various institutions to consider aspects of museums’ development in the Middle East, the Balkans, China and in Diaspora. All speakers shared the common background of having conducted extensive field research in the countries whose case studies they presented; half of them also had many years of curatorial experience at a number of prominent institutions.

The Seminar was attended by audiences of up to 40 (maximum capacity) students and senior staff from a number of Departments at Oxford University (History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Politics, and the Oriental Institute). There were also academics, curators and an artist from the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the British Museum, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Warwick and Leeds Universities. Majority of participants attended the entire program. The Seminar’s proceedings will be published by the Duke University Press journal of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME). Homa Nasab will serve as guest editor of the special issue dedicated to Comparative Museology.

Detailed Report: http://www.museumviews.com/JCP/Comparative_Museology.htm

we've just deployed the second phase of the steve.museum tagging experiment. at http://tagger.steve.museum

the steve tagger (a piece of open-source software) is a key tool in our IMLS-funded study of the contribution social tagging and folksonomy can make to on-line access to art collections. throughout our experiement we'll be varying the interface of the tagger to find out what encourages

and we'll also be studying the results of tags, to see if they are:

• real words (we're using word net)
• terms from our discipline (we're using the AAT and ULAN)
• new to the museum (we're comparing to museum documentation)
• appropriate to the work of art (we're doing term-by-term review).

the research process is described in the attached diagram.

we're looking forward to sharing the results of our study with the community. If you'd like to participate, please come by.

• go to http://tagger.steve.museum
• create an account [this is important for our research]
• Tag Art!

/jt

ICHIM07 - International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meetings
Toronto, October 24-26, 2007
http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/

The preliminary program for ICHIM07 is now on-line. Thanks once again goes to the Program Committee who helped review proposals and recommend selections. Speakers are coming from 20 countries around the world: