If you’ve run into me in New York City since I moved here six months ago I’ve probably badgered you about Sleep No More. It was something I saw in my first weeks after moving here after two aborted attempts on previous trips to New York. Best described as an immersive theatrical experience, it has [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Conceptual'
Museums and making the ‘digital shift’
March 11th, 2012 27 Comments
I’m mid-way through writing a number of articles that explore the challenges for museums in pulling ‘digital’ into their core operations. As a result I’ve started to formulate this idea – museums will not be able to properly understand and integrate ‘digital’ into their organisational DNA until they have substantial born-digital collections. Libraries have had [...]
Tags: digital shift · ideas · short
The museum as a text adventure – Inform7 and TourML/TAP
March 2nd, 2012 7 Comments
Today I was sitting at WebWise 2012 listening to Rob Stein talk about TAP/TourML and he started talking about games and stories referencing Marc Reidl’s work. It reminded me a lot of the world of interactive fiction and it got me thinking about whether it would be possible to use TourML to generate text adventures. [...]
Tags: interactive fiction · TourML · webwise 2012
Metadata as ‘cultural source code’
March 1st, 2012 2 Comments
A quick thought. Last week I wrote about collection data being ‘cultural source code’ in the context of the upload of the Cooper-Hewitt collection to GitHub. As I wrote over there, Philosophically, too, the public release of collection metadata asserts, clearly, that such metadata is the raw material on which interpretation through exhibitions, catalogues, public [...]
Tags: collaboration · collection management
Back to reality. Returning from the Horizon Retreat.
February 1st, 2012 2 Comments
Last week I was at the Horizon New Media Consortium 10 Year Retreat – The Future of Education. It was a fascinating glimpse into the world of bright-eyed educators and a few museum people who want the future of education to be something far better than it is now. If that sounds a little utopian, [...]
Tags: economics · future of education · morose · NMChz
The museum website as a newspaper – an interview with Walker Art Center
December 3rd, 2011 14 Comments
There’s been a lot of talk following Koven Smith’s (Denver Art Museum) provocation in April – “what’s the use of the museum website?”. Part driven by the rapid uptake of mobile and part driven by the existential crisis brought on Koven, many in the community have been thinking about how to transform the digital presence [...]
Tags: visual design · walker art center
A new Powerhouse Walking Tours App and a Q&A with Glen Barnes
July 20th, 2011 No Comments
About a month ago our second walking tour App went live in the AppStore and was promptly featured by Apple leading to a rapid spike in downloads. The Powerhouse Museum Walking Tours App is a free download, unlike our Sydney Observatory App, and it comes pre-packaged with two tours of the suburbs surrounding the Museum [...]
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Three short links – quantified self
September 25th, 2010 No Comments
Here’s a few short and interesting things I’ve been playing with for a little while. Each of these revolves around the idea of documenting ones own behaviour by laying down data – Kevin Kelly’s notion of the ‘quantified self‘. I’m very interested in how this personal behavioural data can be used to better improve our [...]
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Museum implications of the Columbia report on metrics for digital journalism
September 21st, 2010 No Comments
Web analytics is a tricky game and often the different ways of measuring things confuse the very people they are there to help make better decisions. For the museum sector, analytics seems even more foreign, largely because we’ve never had a very good way of generating such huge amounts of quantitative data about our visitors [...]
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