It’s now just over a month since I gave up my smartphone and began an experiment with a Nokia 3310.
Much has already been written about smartphone sanity. Books, blog posts, tweets – just Google it to see other people doing the same, or poke this blog or my links to see some of the stuff people are saying about health, attention, kids and phones, life balance, etc.
So, I don’t want to go into this side of things – but it has been interesting, so here are a few thoughts.
The context
Prior to giving up my smartphone I already had a bunch of worries about technology use and what it does to family life and sanity – so had already done what (frankly) any sane person should do, right now, with their phone – stuff like this:
I’m also one of the 3 people on the planet without a Facebook account. I have been this way since being a very early Facebook adopter way back and deciding back then that:
I was, however, a news junkie – with a bad “first thing in the morning” addiction to the Guardian / BBC / Hacker News. I’ve also been through patches of getting a little bit Instagram obsessed (it’s easy to post narcissitic-fuckpump pictures of how great your life is when you live in Cornwall) and managed to get around not having a Twitter app (see above) by using the mobile web version.
I was also an information junkie – mid-way through a conversation I’d need to look up that word or fact, take a note, check my calendar, etc. Actually (more below) – not just mid-way through a conversation but mid-way through articles in the paper, books, magazines…
Even given the fact that the above pretty much doesn’t position me in the loony-check-it-all-the-time smartphone user category – I increasingly didn’t feel happy with the total, unremitting reliance that I felt on this device. The fact that I’d rather leave home without my wallet, without my keys or without my children than without my smartphone was a warning siren to me. I don’t like these sorts of external pressures – and when you start looking around and seeing THE ENTIRE WORLD looking out through a 3″ screen, you have got to start thinking big questions about why we’re here, what we’ll regret when we die, how we’re being and – frankly – what it’s all about.
Giving it up
So, I gave it up. And I can say – only a month in – that it has been absolutely transformative, in ways that I was completely not expecting.
The biggest, most important and most profound thing for me has been my attention and presence. I’ve found myself massively less distracted while doing, well, pretty much everything – but most noticeable is that I can read again for stretches of time without feeling the jitter and without having to look up every other word. It is incredibly ilberating to sit and not even think about whether I should check the news or a fact but to simply not have that option. And, bizarrely, I actually feel better informed than I did before. When I watch the news or read something I actually get into it rather than dotting around endlessly snacking on shit news-snippet-morsels.
Connected to this – it is strangely amazing to not have to take a damn picture every 5 fucking minutes, but just to be able to look at the sea or my kids or whatever and not be thinking about what a great shot that’d make. For me this isn’t “..what a great shot…for my [social] account..” because I didn’t really do that stuff anyway – but just being able to be in the picture rather than thinking about taking it all the time – this is pretty wonderful.
Having bored moments was also pretty strange at first: “go for a shit, take your phone” became instead ..take a book – or – nothing, and just think. Stand in a queue – just stand. Wait for a friend – just….yeh, wait..
It is also a royal fucking pain in the arse
Being in London this week highlighted the utility that comes with a smartphone. Most obviously: maps, having a podcast player, being able to look up when the next train is… and, fuck, no damn Spotify either…
..but also: wow, sending a text without being able to do it properly is truly, mind-blowlingy, appallingy awful. Dumbphones pretty much force your grammar into a ditch where it is left bleeding to death: my capitalisation has gone to shit, I simply cannot bring myself to deal with apostrophes, and YES I may be a mere 45 years old but fucking HELL I look like an old person when I am trying to text. I lean over the screen in a way which is just incredibly lonely and old and sad – I might as well switch the fucking key tones on as well..
The upside is: it’s SO awful I have started actually “ringing” people. I know. This is when you speak into the phone and the other person replies, and you hear what they say and then…anyway, yes, that. And it turns out this is really quite nice, to hear my friends and talk to them properly.
The Not Mobile Saviour
The real learning for me here is this: put all your shit – all your email shit, all your social shit, all your podcast and music shit – even What’s App – and put it on your desktop machine or laptop.
Why? Because here, you have a huge amount more control. You can – and I do – use an app like Focus to make sure there are good chunks of time when none of this is in your face. You aren’t carrying this thing around with you all the time; you don’t pop it on the table in the cafe or bar or have it open when your kids are trying to talk to you over food: or at least – you sad fucker – you really shouldn’t.
The compromises
A few of these:
My smartphone lives on my desk where I can get to it for critical things like Google Authenticator or my banking apps. But I’ve also realised it’s ok to take it out and about sometimes without the SIM in it so I can listen to podcasts in the car or whatever.
I’ve realised I probably will want some kind of camera at some point – but actually a good one, one which is a joy to use and which I will choose to use with some distinction rather than in the scattergun smartphone way of fucking-hell-another-shot-better-take-that-and-never-look-at-it-again way.
[ I realise absolutely by the way that this would be a story of terrible irony if I ended up with a pocket full of other gadgets which merely replaced the previous really rather elegant single gadget solution – this is not the intention… I am aware… ]
Finally
Will I be doing this forever? I honestly don’t know. I feel way, way more connected to the world than I have done for a long time, which given the promise of connectivity spouted by the tech is supremely ironic – and as of right now I don’t think I’ll be going back any day soon. But who knows.
Is this for everyone? No.
Should everyone try it? Yes, I think you really should, even if it is for a day or a weekend or a week. Give it a go, see how it makes you feel. You may be very surprised.
In the way of the old Buddhist saying (“If you don’t have ten minutes to meditate, you should sit down and meditate for twenty minutes”) – if it makes you uncomfortable not having your smartphone for a day, maybe you should try not having a smartphone for a week…
I was fortunate to sit down for a rare interview with Fred Salvucci on the final episode of this season of the What’s New podcast. Fred is now at MIT, but he is well-known in the Boston area for conceiving and being the champion of a massive engineering project which came to be known as the Big Dig, and which completely transformed the city of Boston for the twenty-first century.
For most of its postwar existence, downtown Boston was split by a giant elevated highway called the Central Artery. The Artery was an artifact common to many cities in twentieth-century America, a terrible byproduct of the car-centric culture and suburbanization that flourished in the 1950s. Elevated roadways were aggressively cut through small-scale livable neighborhoods so that people could get into the city from the suburbs, and so that others could drive through a city without entering its local roadways on their way to distant destinations. Homes were often taken from people to make way for these elevated highways, and the walkability and attractiveness of cities suffered.
The Big Dig not only put the Central Artery underground, but added a massive linear park in the center of Boston, a marquee bridge that aptly reflected the famous Bunker Hill Monument, and another tunnel to Logan Airport. It thus completely reshaped the city and improved not only its transportation, but Boston’s skyline and its ground-level fabric and beauty. It reconnected neighborhoods and people.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Fred spoke to me about how the Big Dig was engineered—it was one of the biggest engineering projects in history, at a cost of $15 billion, through a 400-year-old city ($1 billion just to relocate ancient pipes and wires)—but also how he was able to get so many people on board for such a gigantic project. Indeed, as you’ll hear, Fred saw it more as a political and socio-economic project than a transportation initiative.
Moreover, Fred provides some good thoughts about the future of transportation, including the impact (likely negative, in his view) of self-driving cars, and whether we can ever find the will—and the funds—to do something like the Big Dig again. Do tune in.
I’m delighted that the news is now out about the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation‘s grant to Northeastern University Library to launch the Boston Research Center. The BRC will seek to unify major archival collections related to Boston, hundreds of data sets about the city, digital modes of scholarship, and a wide array of researchers and visualization specialists to offer a seamless environment for studying and displaying Boston’s history and culture. It will be great to work with my colleagues at Northeastern and regional partners to develop this center over the coming years. Having grown up in Boston, and now having returned as an adult, it has a personal significance for me as well.
I’m also excited that the BRC will build upon, and combine, some of the signature strengths of Northeastern that drew me to the university last year. For decades, the library has been assembling and working with local communities to preserve materials and stories related to the city. We now have the archives of a number of local and regional newspapers, and the library has been active in the gathering of oral and documentary histories of nearby communities such as the Lower Roxbury Black History Project. We also have strong connections with other important regional collections and institutions, such the Boston Public Library, the Boston Library Consortium, and data sets produced by Boston’s municipal government and other sources, through our campus’s leadership in BARI.
My friends in digital humanities will know that Northeastern has a world-class array of faculty and researchers doing cutting-edge, interdisciplinary computational analysis. We have the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, the Network Science Institute, numerous faculty in our College of Arts, Media, and Design who work on digital storytelling and information design, and the library has its own terrific Digital Scholarship Group and dedicated specialists in GIS and data visualization. We will all be working together, and with many others from beyond the university, to imagine and develop large-scale projects that examine major trends and elements of Boston, such as immigration, neighborhood transformations, economic growth, and environmental changes. There will also be an opportunity for smaller-scale stories to be documented, and of course the BRC itself will be open to anyone who would like to research the city or specific communities. As a place with a long and richly documented history, with a coastal location and educational, scientific, and commercial institutions that have long involved global relationships, the study of Boston also means the study of themes that are broadly important and applicable.
My thanks to the Mellon Foundation for their generous support. It should be fascinating to watch all of this come together—stay tuned.
I am extremely fortunate to work in a library, an institution that is designed to help others and to share knowledge, resources, and expertise. Snell Library is a very busy library. Every year, we have two million visits. On some weekdays we receive well over 10,000 visitors, with thousands of them in the building at one time. It’s great to see a library so fully used and appreciated.
Just as important, Snell Library fosters projects that help others in our Boston community and well beyond. Our staff has worked alongside members of the Lower Roxbury community to record, preserve, and curate oral histories of their neighborhood; with other libraries and archives to aggregate and make accessible thousands of documents related to school desegregation in Boston; and with other institutions and people to save the personal stories and images of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath.
Our library is the home of the archives of a number of Boston newspapers, including the The Boston Phoenix, the Gay Community News, and the East Boston Community News, with more to come. The Digital Scholarship Group housed in the library supports many innovative projects, including the Women Writers Project and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive. We have a podcast that explores new ideas and discoveries, and tries to help our audience understand the past, present, and future of our world better.
It’s National Library Week, and today is Northeastern’s Giving Day. So I have a small request of those who read my blog and might appreciate the activities of such a library as Snell: please consider a modest donation to my library to help us help others. And if at least 50 students, parents, or friends donate today—and I’d really love that to be 100, even at $10—I’ll match that with $1,000 of my own. Thank you.
On the latest What’s New Podcast from Northeastern University Library, I interview Woody Hartzog, who has a new book just out this week from Harvard University Press entitled Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies. We had a wide-ranging discussion over a half-hour, including whether (and if so, how) Facebook should be regulated by the government, how new listening devices like the Amazon Echo should be designed (and regulated), and how new European laws that go into effect in May 2018 may (or may not) affect the online landscape and privacy in the U.S.
Woody provides a plainspoken introduction to all of these complicated issues, with some truly helpful parallels to ethical and legal frameworks in other fields (such as accounting, medicine, and legal practice), and so I strongly recommend a listen to the episode if you would like to get up to speed on this important aspect of our contemporary digital lives. Given Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony today in front of Congress, it’s especially timely.
[Subscribe to What’s New on iTunes or Google Play]
Maybe it’s a subconscious effect of my return to the blog, but I’ve found myself reading more essays recently, and so I found myself returning to the nonfiction work of David Foster Wallace.1 Despite the seeming topical randomness of his essays—John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, the tennis player Tracy Austin, a Maine lobster fest—there is a thematic consistency in DFW’s work, which revolves around the tension between authority and democracy, high culture intellectualism and overthinking and low culture entertainment and lack of self-reflection. That is, his essays are about America and Americans.2
Nowhere is this truer than in “Authority and American Usage,” his monumental review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.3 DFW uses this review of a single book to recount and assess the much longer debate between prescriptive language mavens who sternly offer correct English usage, and the more permissive, descriptive scholars who eschew hard usage rules for the lived experience of language. That is, authority and democracy.
The genius of Garner, in DFW’s view, is that he is an authority on American English who recognizes and even applauds regional and communal variations, without wagging his finger, but also without becoming all loosey-goosey and anything goes. Garner manages to have his cake and eat it too: he recognizes, with the democrats, that English (and language in general) is fluid and evolves and simply can’t be fixed in some calcified Edwardian form, but that it is also helpful to have rules and some knowledge of those rules so that you can express yourself with precision and persuade others. Even democratic descriptivists should want some regularity and authoritative usage because we all speak and write in a social context, and those we speak with and write to, whether we like it or not, pick up on subtle cues in usage to interpret and judge your intent and status within the community. Garner’s fusion of democracy and authority is immensely appealing to DFW; it’s like he’s figured out how to square the circle.
But Garner’s synthesis only works if the actual communication of your well-chosen words is true to what you had mentally decided to use, and here is where the seemingly odd inclusion of emoji in the title of this post comes into play.4 Emoji upset Garner’s delicate balance and upend DFW’s intense desire to communicate precisely because they are rendered very differently on digital platforms. Emoji entail losing control of the very important human capability to choose the exact form and meaning of our words. (The variation in emoji glyphs also contributes to the difficulty of archiving current human expression, but that is the subject of another post.) See, for example, the astonishing variety of the “astonished face” emoji across multiple platforms:
This is, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, an artifact of the legal status of emoji, which, unlike regular old English words, apparently (or potentially) can be copyrighted in specific renderings. So lawsuit-averse giant tech companies have resorted to their own artistic execution of each emoji concept, and these renderings can have substantially different meanings, often rather distant from authorial intent. As legal and emoji scholar Eric Goldman summarizes, “Senders and recipients on different platforms are likely to see different implementations and decode the symbols differently in ways that lead to misunderstandings.” Think about someone selecting the fairly faithful second emoji from the left, above (from Apple), and texting it to someone who sees it rendered as the X-eyed middle glyph (from Facebook; Goldman, deadpan: “a depiction typically associated with death”), or the third from the left (from Google, who knows).
In short, emoji are a portent of a day when the old debate about authority vs. democracy in English usage is a quaint artifact of the twentieth century, because our digital communications have another layer of abstraction that makes it even more difficult to express ourselves clearly. There is no doubt that David Foster Wallace would dropped many foul-mouthed emoji at that possibility.
When I was in sixth grade our class got an Apple ][ and I fell in love for the first time. The green phosphorescence of the screen and the way text commands would lead to other text instantly appearing was magical. The true occult realm could be evoked by moving beyond the command line and into assembly language, with mysterious hexidecimal pairs producing swirling lines and shapes on the screen. It was enthralling, and led to my interest in programming at an early age. I now have an almost identical Apple ][ in the corner of my office as a totem from that time.
Of course, very few people learn assembly language anymore, and for good reason. The history of computing is the history of successive generations of coders moving up the technical stack, from low-level languages like assembly to higher languages that put all of the rudimentary calculations behind a curtain.
I’ve been thinking about this coding escalator recently because of my kids and the still-vibrant “learn to code” movement. My kids are in their early teens and I can say as a proud parent that they are very good at all of the skills needed to be great programmers. They also go to a public school that was the archrival of the public school I went to—in the Boston-area math league. The school is filled with similar kids, sons and daughters of highly educated people, many of whom work in technical and scientific fields, or at one of Boston’s many universities.
Yet I would characterize the general interest of my kids’ generation in coding as being lukewarm. They get it, they see the power of programming, and yet they are much more interested in the creativity that can occur on top of the technical stack. I suppose we should not be surprised. They are the first generation whose interactions with computers were with devices that do not have a command line—that is, with smartphones and tablets. So naturally they are drawn to the higher-level aspects of computing, which doesn’t seem like computing at all to my generation. While some may roll their eyes at Apple adding an “Everyone Can Create” initiative this week as a counterpart to “Everyone Can Code,” my kids thought this was a truly interesting development.
To be sure, those who know how to code, and code well, will always be able to shape computer platforms and apps in powerful ways, just as those who understand what’s under the hood of their car can maximize its performance. The skills one learns in programming are broadly applicable, and under the right circumstances coding can stir the imagination about what is possible in the digital realm. But most of us just want to drive, even in a suboptimal automobile, and get somewhere for some other reason, and many “learn to code” programs are frankly not especially imaginative.
In Digital History, Roy Rosenzweig and I wrote that although they are both noble professions, “historians planning a digital project should think like architects, not like plumbers.” I suspect my kids’ generation may see coding as plumbing, and would prefer to work on the design of the overall house. I’m not sure that we have fully accounted for this next generation’s shift yet, or have even come to realize that at some point the coding escalator would reach the top, and those on it would step off.
I’ve had a dozen great guests on the What’s New podcast, but this week’s episode features a true legend: Ted Landsmark. He is probably best known as the subject of a shocking Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph showing a gang of white teens at a rally against school desegregation attacking him with an American flag. The image became a symbol of tense race relations in the 1970s, not only in Boston but nationwide.
(photo credits: Stanley Forman/Brian Fluharty)
He should be better known, however, for his decades of work shaping the city of Boston and the greater Boston area, and for his leadership in education, transportation planning, architecture, and other critical aspects of the fabric of the city. The assault on him on City Hall Plaza in Boston only intensified his activism, and set him on a path to be at the center of how the city would be developed over the last 40 years. It’s a remarkable story.
On the podcast Ted Landsmark recounts not only this personal history, but the history of a Boston in general, and he provides a 360-degree view of how cities are designed, managed, and are responsive (or unresponsive) to community needs and desires. His sense of how urban feedback systems work, from local politics to technology like the 311 phone number many cities have implemented to hear from their citizens, is especially smart and helpful.
I hope you’ll tune in.
If timing is everything, history professor Mills Kelly didn’t have such great timing for his infamous course “Lying About the Past.” Taught at George Mason University for the first time in 2008, and then again in 2012—both, notably, election years, although now seemingly from a distant era of democracy—the course stirred enormous controversy and then was never taught again in the face of institutional and external objections. Some of those objections understandably remain, but “Lying About the Past” now seems incredibly prescient and relevant.
Unlike other history courses, “Lying About the Past” did not focus on truths about the past, but on historical hoaxes. As a historian of Eastern Europe, Kelly knew a thing or two about how governments and other organizations can shape public opinion through the careful crafting of false, but quite believable, information. Also a digital historian, Kelly understood how modern tools like Photoshop could give even a college student the ability to create historical fakes, and then to disseminate those fakes widely online.
In 2008, students in the course collaborated on a fabricated pirate, Edward Owens, who supposedly roamed the high (or low) seas of the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s. (In a bit of genius marketing, they called him “The Last American Pirate.”) In 2012, the class made a previously unknown New York City serial killer materialize out of “recently found” newspaper articles and other documents.
It was less the intellectual focus of the course, which was really about the nature of historical truth and the importance of careful research, than the dissemination of the hoaxes themselves that got Kelly and his classes in trouble. In perhaps an impolitic move, the students ended up adding and modifying articles on Wikipedia, and as YouTube recently discovered, you don’t mess with Wikipedia. Although much of the course was dedicated to the ethics of historical fakes, for many who looked at “Lying About the Past,” the public activities of the students crossed an ethical line.
But as we have learned over the last two years, the mechanisms of dissemination are just as important as the fake information being disseminated. A decade ago, Kelly’s students were exploring what became the dark arts of Russian trolls, putting their hoaxes on Twitter and Reddit and seeing the reactive behaviors of gullible forums. They learned a great deal about the circulation of information, especially when bits of fake history and forged documents align with political and cultural communities.
As Yoni Appelbaum, a fellow historian, assessed the outcome of “Lying About the Past” more generously than the pundits who piled on once the course circulated on cable TV:
If there’s a simple lesson in all of this, it’s that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.
History unfortunately shows that erring on the side of skepticism has not exactly been a widespread human trait. Indeed, “Lying About the Past” showed the opposite: that those who know just enough history to make plausible, but false, variations in its record, and then know how to push those fakes to the right circles, have the chance to alter history itself.
Maybe it’s a good time to teach some version of “Lying About the Past” again.
One of the most-read pieces I’ve written here remains my entreaty “Professors Start Your Blogs,” which is now 12 years old but might as well have been written in the Victorian age. It’s quaint. In 2006, many academics viewed blogs through the lens of LiveJournal and other teen-oriented, oversharing diary sites, and it seemed silly to put more serious words into that space. Of course, as I wrote that blog post encouraging blogging for more grown-up reasons, Facebook and Twitter were ramping up, and all of that teen expression would quickly move to social media.
Then the grown-ups went there, too. It was fun for a while. I met many people through Twitter who became and remain important collaborators and friends. But the salad days of “blog to reflect, tweet to connect” are gone. Long gone. Over the last year, especially, it has seemed much more like “blog to write, tweet to fight.” Moreover, the way that our writing and personal data has been used by social media companies has become more obviously problematic—not that it wasn’t problematic to begin with.
Which is why it’s once again a good time to blog, especially on one’s own domain. I’ve had this little domain of mine for 20 years, and have been writing on it for nearly 15 years. But like so many others, the pace of my blogging has slowed down considerably, from one post a week or more in 2005 to one post a month or less in 2017.
The reasons for this slowdown are many. If I am to cut myself some slack, I’ve taken on increasingly busy professional roles that have given me less time to write at length. I’ve always tried to write substantively on my blog, with posts often going over a thousand words. When I started blogging, I committed to that model of writing here—creating pieces that were more like short essays than informal quick takes.
Unfortunately this high bar made it more attractive to put quick thoughts on Twitter, and amassing a large following there over the last decade (this month marks my ten-year anniversary on Twitter) only made social media more attractive. My story is not uncommon; indeed, it is common, as my RSS reader’s weekly article count will attest.
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There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.
I’ve already mentioned the relative ease and short amount of time it takes to express oneself on centralized services. People are chronically stretched, and building and maintaining a site, and writing at greater length than one or two sentences seems like real work. When I started this site, I didn’t have two kids and two dogs and a rather busy administrative job. Overestimating the time regular people have to futz with technology was the downfall of desktop linux, and a key reason many people use Facebook as their main outlet for expression rather a personal site.
The technology for self-hosting has undoubtedly gotten much better. When I added a blog to dancohen.org, I wrote my own blogging software, which sounds impressive, but was just some hacked-together PHP and a MySQL database. This site now runs smoothly on WordPress, and there are many great services for hosting a WordPress site, like Reclaim Hosting. It’s much easier to set up and maintain these sites, and there are even decent mobile apps from which to post, roughly equivalent to what Twitter and Facebook provide. Platforms like WordPress also come with RSS built in, which is one of the critical, open standards that are at the heart of any successful version of the open web in an age of social media. Alas, at this point most people have invested a great deal in their online presence on closed services, and inertia holds them in place.
It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.
When I left Facebook eight years ago, it showed me five photos of my friends, some with their newborn babies, and asked if I was really sure. It is unclear to me if the re-decentralizers are willing to be, or even should be, as ruthless as this. It’s easier to work on interoperable technology than social psychology, and yet it is on the latter battlefield that the war for the open web will likely be won or lost.
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Meanwhile, thinking globally but acting locally is the little bit that we can personally do. Teaching young people how to set up sites and maintain their own identities is one good way to increase and reinforce the open web. And for those of us who are no longer young, writing more under our own banner may model a better way for those who are to come.
The role of mobile applications in the museum field has been a matter of discussion since the debut of the iPhone a decade ago. Since then, many museums have developed mobile apps, explored way finding, and experimented with other uses for these ubiquitous devices. Five years ago, we developed a experimental application called Heist which connected mobile devices to digital collections found on touch tables using a captive portal and HTML5. Ahead of its time, Heist was difficult to scale and implement broadly, but we hung on to the idea, wrote another grant (with our partners) and have since developed a new Heist-like system called The Omeka Everywhere Collections Viewer.
Omeka Everywhere is an IMLS-funded project that has brought together Open Exhibits and Omeka to make collections more accessible to the public in a variety of settings. The Omeka Everywhere project is a collaboration between the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Ideum, and UConn’s Digital Media and Design Department. The software we’ve developed allows museum visitors to pair their mobile devices with a collections viewer application optimized for a multitouch table or a touch wall. Visitors can then favorite collection items and share them on their preferred social media platforms.
As the video demonstrates, we used a mobile app and simple numeric code in the table software to pair devices with stations on the touch table. It is a simple and highly reliable way to connect the applications. The advantage of a full mobile application (as opposed to an HTML5 captive portal page used with Heist) is that the mobile application will travel with visitors after their museum experience ends. The challenge may be getting the museum goers to take the time to download the application in the first place. A possible solution would be to make it easier to download the application at the museum itself, through a captive portal. That may increase adoption. We will soon see how museums use this software and how many visitors opt to participate.
At the moment, there isn’t a simple way to connect to people’s personal devices in museums. Visitors bring their iOS and Android phones with different hardware specs and various OS versions. Sharing between devices in a public setting isn’t seamless. Along with hardware and software fragmentation, general concerns about privacy and security are real, so for the foreseeable future there will be imperfect methods for these types of experiences. Still, for those visitors who do participate, our usability testing strongly suggests that they will have an enhanced experience at the museum and they will take the collection (and their favorites) with them as they leave to share, study, and re-experience on their own terms.
The Omeka Collections Viewer and its mobile application companion will be available later this summer to museums, cultural organizations, and others via Open Exhibits and Omeka. The applications will be free and open. Attendees of this year’s American Library Association Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago will have a chance to see the Omeka Collections Viewer in person at Ideum’s exhibition booth 5237.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [award number MG-30-0037-1].
Next month, Ideum will be exhibiting, for the first time ever, at the American Library Association (ALA) Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, IL, June 23-26. We’re excited to bring our multitouch hardware and software to the thousands of information science professionals who attend ALA every year. We will be showing Omeka Everywhere, a touch table collection viewer and mobile app that allows collections be viewed and shared between platforms. Omeka Everywhere is a collaboration between the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Ideum, and the University of Connecticut’s Digital Media Center. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Please join us at booth number 5237, where Ideum team members will be happy to speak with you and demonstrate our Drafting Table and Duet Coffee Table, both with 49″ 4K Ultra HD displays, and examples of our library and museum collections-focused multitouch, multiuser software. Ideum tables have been purchased by academic, public, and special collections libraries all over the world for youth, student, and maker spaces, information and wayfinding stations, collaborative learning labs, and special exhibitions. Come see what we’re all about!
Next month, Ideum will be at InfoComm in Orlando, Florida from June 14-16. We will have a 43″ Duet Coffee Table in 3M’s booth, number 1467. This fall, Ideum will also be exhibiting at the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Annual Conference in San Jose, CA from October 21-24 in booth number 821.