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Is Yammer really an appropriate communication tool for universities?

Biomedicine on Display - Mon, 05/20/2013 - 14:32

Have you heard about Yammer? If not, you are not alone. Many people, who are otherwise familiar with social media like Facebook and Twitter, haven’t.

The reason for the relative obscurity of this social network service, which was launched in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012, is probably that it is designed for communication within organisations. Users can join a Yammer network only if they have an email address from the organisation’s domain. In that respect, Yammer differs from almost all other social media. Yammer works inside organisations, not in the public domain.

Its relative obscurity shouldn’t be taken as a sign of weakness, however. Described as a “Facebook for business”, Yammer has become a success in the corporate world; it is said to penetrate 85% of the Fortune 500 business, and sales are increasing rapidly. For good reasons — it is actually a pretty well-designed tool and probably well worth the price-tag of $1.2 billion for Microsoft that can now integrate it into its other products and help business customers strengthen their internal communication and culture.

Yammer is also spreading to universities around the world (see examples here). For example, here at the University of Copenhagen, Yammer has recently been introduced as a networking tool for the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences — and other faculties may follow suit.

But while Yammer may be good for business development it is not necessarily good for universities. This has everything to do with what kind of an organisation a university is supposed to be, and what role its staff and faculty members are thought to have in relation to the university versus to the outside world.

Yammer is probably good for universities to the extent that they define themselves as corporate organisations. Which they increasingly do. As former Harvard University President Derek Bok pointed out a decade ago in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press, 2004), the notion of universities as private enterprises has spread throughout the entire university world.

That universities are in the marketplace means not only that they focus on the interaction with the corporate world (commercialisation). It also means that they begin to behave as if they too were companies competing with each other and other knowledge institutions on the global market (corporatisation).

The consequences of this increasing corporatisation of universities is all too well known: it means that students are viewed as customers, that professors and others members of faculty are redefined as ‘employees’, and that the results of research and teaching activities are measured in quantifiable productivity units.

Corporatisation also has consequences for the way universities think about communication. Twenty years ago, hardly any university in the world thought about branding itself like business corporations. Now most universities use considerable amounts of money on branding and they strengthen their communication and business relations departments to become more competitive.

I think this is the context in which the implementation of Yammer in universities has to be seen. Designed as a tool for enterprise social networking (its official name is actually ‘Yammer: The Enterprise Social Network’), might help build a stronger internal university organisation. But since it is explicitly designed not to involve actors outside the organisation, it will not enhance interaction and flow of information and knowledge between universities, or between universities and the public. On the contrary, the more we use tools like Yammer, the less time we will spend on outer-directed communication.

And this is, in my view, highly problematic for a university. Because by operating behind closed doors (you cannot find Yammer conversations through search machines), and by prioritising intra-corporate communication over peer-to-peer and public communication, closed enterprise networks in universities are working against one of the most celebrated norm sets for good scientific conduct (scientific ethos), formulated by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.

The Mertonian norm set includes four basic rules for scientific conduct, viz., communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (the ‘cudos’). Merton’s point was that science and scholarship can only thrive if universities and their researchers and scholars operate in full openness, share their knowledge with all interested colleagues, collaborate on a global scale, and criticize each others work in the public sphere. Science and academic scholarship is about collaborating and sharing, not about keeping information restricted to the own organisation.

So even though Yammer and similar corporate social network tools may be useful for communicating experiences about the administrative work in universities, it is not an appropriate tool for academic interaction and the promotion of a scientific culture. Its focus on closed communication at the expense of universal peer-to-peer and public communication is in direct opposition to the Mertonian norm set — which universities otherwise use to celebrate as a fundamental ethos for responsible conduct of research.

In contrast, most other social media are designed as platforms for communal and universal communication, and not least for organised skepticism. And therefore I think academics are better advised to embrace such platforms to create peer-to-peer bonds across universities and research institutions and engage with the public concerns about science and its technological implications.

So even if Yammer seems to be a business success, and even though it is a nicely designed and easy-to-use web tool, there are good reasons to be skeptical to the implementation of it in universities. I suggest researchers and scholars take an organised skeptical attitude to Yammer — unless we want to accelerate the development of the corporate university further.

(image credit: http://plmtwine.com/2012/06/26/will-microsoft-yammer-kill-social-plm-not-yet/)

PS: Another argument against corporate networking tools in academic settings, which my colleague Louise Whiteley has pointed out to me in a conversation, is that many PhDs and postdocs (actually the majority of the research staff in universities these days) are employed temporarily and expect they should be able to take professional communication with them when they move to another institution. So unlike a business, where your project-related communication belong to the company, in universities communication is part of work that you have ownership over, and so you are unlikely to want to situate intellectual discussions on such a platform.

AAM 2013: Let's Talk in Baltimore

Museum 2.0 - Wed, 05/15/2013 - 13:58
I'm heading to the American Alliance of Museums' annual conference this weekend, and I'm psyched to reconnect with friends and mentors and meet new people who can inspire and stimulate fresh ideas.

This year, I'm involved in two sessions:

Tuesday, May 21, 10:15AM in Room 309 - Success: What Does it Look Like?
This session wil feature varied perspectives on what it means for a museum to be successful from a longtime museum planning consultant (John Jacobsen of White Oak), a director whose museum pushes for environmental stewardship (Stephanie Ratcliffe of the Wild Center), a director whose museum is a beacon of community activism and creativity (Jane Werner of the Pittsburgh Children's Museum), and me. It will be hosted by Eric Siegel, chief content officer at the New York Hall of Science and consummate rabble-rouser. Rapid-fire presentations followed by honest conversation. Join us.

Wednesday, May 22, 10:15AM in Room 322 - On the Edge: A Talk Show about Risk and Reward
Kathleen McLean and I are back again to host a freewheeling talk show in which we chat with unusual guests and terrific audience members--this year, on the topic of risk-taking and its attendant rewards and perils. This year's guests include Ian David Moss of Createquity fame along with museum folks who have thrived and suffered because of the risks they've taken. This session has been so rowdy in the past that this year they dropped my name from the program in hopes it would calm the crowds. No, really. I'll be there, even though the printed program doesn't say so. And we'll be just as loud as usual.

I'm also hoping while in Baltimore to have conversations to explore a few of these topics:
  • Social bridging: how to design for it, how to assess it, who it works for, who it doesn't.
  • Hybridizing programs and exhibitions. How can we look at "experiences" across space and time instead of separating place- and event-based projects?
  • Developing transparent formats for exhibition proposals from outside. How can we invite in new ideas and link them clearly with our institutional goals?
  • Small-scale evaluation for non-professionals. How can small museums with limited resources do some meaningful research with our staff and volunteers?
  • Supporting staff in a time of growth. Growth feels exciting and fabulous, but it's also tiring. We have a strong innovative team right now, and there are some particular issues that come up because of the high energy, creativity, and drive in the office.
  • Creating spaces in the museum for open exploration of the behind-the-scenes. Permanent prototyping, museum inside out, working in public spaces.
If you're interested in exploring any of these topics next week in Baltimore, let's do it. I don't care what type of institution you are from or what your experience is, or even if you are attending the conference. I just care about having good conversations and learning from each other. Monday afternoon is looking particularly open for some meaty chats. Let me know.

And FYI, we will soon be opening a full-time Education Associate job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. If you want to talk briefly about job/internship opportunities at AAM, I'm up for that too.

Newsletter from Medical Museion

Biomedicine on Display - Wed, 05/15/2013 - 11:24
Click here for the newsletter, in Danish and English.

5th newsletter from Medical Museion in 2013.

  • Videos of “It’s Not What You Think” workshop talks now online!
  • This Thursday: Newton’s Chicken. Seminar with Massimiano Bucchi
  • Sneak preview: New psychiatry room
  • Speakers for “The Data Body On The Dissection Table” announced
  • May 30th: Morgan Meyer seminar on labs in museums (PLEASE NOTE: date corrected to May 30th)
  • June 20th: Bruno Strasser seminar

If you want to receive future versions sign up for our mailing list here.

Typologie des méthodes de contrôle de la qualité dans les projets de crowdsourcing

Collaborative Manuscript Transcription - Tue, 05/14/2013 - 14:29
A translation of my 2012-03-05 post "Quality Control for Crowdsourced Transcription" which appeared in "Etat de l’art en matière de Crowdsourcing dans les bibliothèques numériques" by Moirez, Moreaux, and Josse (2013), reproduced for Francophone readers:
  1. «Single-track methods»: le document ne fait l’objet que d’une seule transcription (par un seul contributeur ou de façon collaborative ensemble sur le même document)  
    1. «Open-ended community revison»: (Wikipédia) les utilisateurs peuvent continuer à modifier le texte transcrit, sans limite dans le temps. Un historique des modifications permet de revenir à la version précédente et d’éviter le vandalisme. 
    2. «Fixed-term community revision» (Transcribe Bentham) : convient pour des projets d’édition plus traditionnels, dont l’objectif est la publication d’une “version finale”. Quand une transcription atteint un niveau acceptable, val idée par les experts, elle est close et publiée.  
    3. «Community-controlled revision workflows» (Wikisource) : la transcription est considérée comme une “version finale” non plus par des experts, mais parce qu’elle a traversé un workflow collaboratif de correction/révision/validation - 
    4. «Transcriptions with "known-bad" insertions before proofreading» : dans une première phase, les correcteurs sont invités à transcrire. Puis d’autres correcteurs révisent la transcription en la comparant au texte original; pour s’assurer que la seconde lecture est bien réalisée, des erreurs sont ajoutées dans le texte: si toutes les «fausses erreurs» sont corrigées, le système déduit que les «vraies erreurs» ont dû être corrigées aussi.  
    5. «Single-keying with expert review» : lorsqu’une transcription a été réalisée par un contributeur, elle est validée ou rejetée par un expert (soit un professionnel de l’institution à l’origine du projet, soit un contributeur sélectionné). Si la correction est rejetée, elle est soit à nouveau soumise à correction, soit corrigée par l’expert et validée. 
  2. «Multi-track methods»: ces méthodes conviennent particulièrement à des corrections portant sur des données structurées ou des micro-tâches. La même image de départ est présentée à plusieurs contributeurs qui transcrivent chacun à partir de zéro. Généralement, les contributeurs ne savent pas s’ils sont les premiers correcteurs ou si d’autres transcriptions ont déjà été soumises. Puis les données ainsi collectées sont comparées automatiquement. 
    1. «Triple-keying with voting» (Old Weather, ReCAPTCHA) : l’image est présentée à 3 contributeurs, la majorité l’emporte (au depart, Old Weather proposait l’image à 10 contributeurs, mais ils se sont aperçus que la pertinence était sensiblement la même avec 3 qu’avec 10 contributeurs) 
    2. «Double-keying with expert reconciliation»: la même donnée est présentée à deux contributeurs, et, s’ils ne sont pas d’accord entre eux, un expert tranche.
    3. «Double-keying with emergent community-expert reconciliation» (FamilySearch Indexing): la method est presque similaire à la précédente, sauf que l’expert qui tranche entre deux corrections divergentes est lui-même un contributeur, qui a été promu conciliateur grâce à l’analyse automatique de ses contributions (volume,pertinence). 
    4. «Double-keying with N-keyed run-off votes»: si les deux contributeurs ne sont pas d’accord, la correction est re-proposée à un nouveau duo/trio d’usagers.

David Pantalonys 28 photos from It’s Not What You Think

Biomedicine on Display - Tue, 05/14/2013 - 09:00

David took part in the workshop at Medical Museion on 8-9 March and took these beautiful photos of the event. David Pantalony: “These are a few photos and comments from the workshop “It’s not what you think,” March 8-9 2013 at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, Denmark. They offer merely a glimpse of some of the sights and experiences from what was a creative and inspiring workshop about the challenges of “communicating medical materialities.””

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scitechcurator/sets/72157632999595513/

(Posted with permission from David Pantalony)

All rights reserved by David Pantalony

Professor Jane Macnaughton blogging about the workshop It’s Not What You Think (reblog)

Biomedicine on Display - Tue, 05/14/2013 - 08:43

Professor of Medical Humanities at Durham University Jane Macnaughton reports her experiences with the workshop It’s Not What You Think at Medical Museion on 8-9 March 2013 (excerpt): “Adam and Louise had attracted a very diverse group of scholars, museum practitioners, artists, philosophers, science communicators – and one clinician (that was me) (…) One of the key themes that come out in our discussions was ‘to label or not to label’?  Do artefacts in museums need labels, what should be written on them, and what force do these labels have on the reader?”

Jane Macnaughtons blog post Encounters with Medical Materialities at Medical Museion in Copenhagen was originally posted on the Centre for Medical Humanities Blog on March 11th. Click here to read the full post.

(reblogged with permission from Jane Macnaughton).

Centre for Medical Humanities Blog: News, updates and insights from the Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University

The Data Body on the Dissection Table — a joint Leonardo/Olats and Medical Museion event

Biomedicine on Display - Sun, 05/12/2013 - 08:00

It’s less than four weeks left to yet another event here at Medical Museion — ‘The Data Body on the Dissection Table’ — organised by Annick Bureaud from Leonardo/Olats together with our own Louise Whiteley.

The event takes place in Medical Museion’s unique late 18th century anatomical lecture theatre in the old Royal Academy of Surgeons in Copenhagen in Tuesday 4 June, 6.30 — 9 pm.

Dissection reveals what lies beneath the skin, but for a brief moment in time, and for a privileged few. Depictions, models, and preservations have long been used to share what dissection uncovers; from ancient anatomical drawings to today’s virtual 3D anatomies.

 

In the 18th Century skinned “écorché” figures and anatomical waxes were constructed to reveal systems of interlocking bones, balanced pairs of muscles, and delicately entangled traceries of nerves and blood vessels. The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt, and the écorché The Horse Rider by Honoré Fragonard are famous examples at the border between medicine, science and art.

 

Contemporary medical sciences reveal ever more about the complex systems of the human body – but at a barely perceptible level. The (medical) human body today is understood, tested, and treated as a huge system of data, including complex interactions between our genetic material, our environment, and our host of microbial companions.

 

How do we grab hold of this data? How do we make sense of it and communicate it to others? How do contemporary artists and designers give our ‘data body’ material form through images, sound, and touch? What kind of tools are complex networks science proposing, and what kind of body do they reveal?

 

The Data Body on the Dissection Table brings together scientists, artists, philosophers, and designers to explore these questions, through roundtable presentations and audience discussion. The event takes place in Medical Museion’s auditorium – the Danish Royal Academy of Surgeons’ former anatomical theater.

Speakers at the roundtable include

  • Albert-László Barabási, Distinguished Professor and Director of Northeastern University Center for Complex Network Research, Boston
  • François-Joseph Lapointe, Professor at the Biological Sciences Department, University of Montreal
  • Annamaria Carusi, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Medical Science and Technology, University of Copenhagen
  • Jamie Allen, Artist and Head of Research, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

The event is co-organised by Leonardo/Olats and Medical Museion under the EU Studiolab framework, and in conjunction with the Leonardo Day “Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks” satellite event for NetSci 2103.

Attendance is free within the seat limits, refreshments provided, but for logistical reasons it would be nice of you would like to register in advance at medm.us/databody 

And again — the event is taking place on Tuesday 4 June at 6:30 – 9 pm

Venue: Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen K

Relevant web sites:

  • Leonardo/Olats (for detailed programme)
  • Medical Museion
  • Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks 2013
  • Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks e-Book and web companion 
  • StudioLab

Guest lectures at Medical Museion: Massimiano Bucchi, Morgan Meyer and Bruno Strasser

Biomedicine on Display - Sat, 05/11/2013 - 10:50

Just want to mention three upcoming Thursday afternoon lectures here at Medical Museion  (abstracts will be up on our seminar page soonish):

* Thursday 16 May, 3pm: Massimiano Bucchi (Trento) on “Newton’s Chicken. Science in The Kitchen and its Metaphors” (abstract here for circulation).

* Thursday 30 May, 3pm: Morgan Meyer (Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Paris) on labs in museums.

* Thursday 20 June, 3pm: Bruno Strasser (Science Education and History of Science, Geneva).

Please share with colleagues.

Collecting and displaying healthcare ICT — are medical museums ready for the future?

Biomedicine on Display - Fri, 05/10/2013 - 10:05

Here are some topics that medical museums need to get involved with if we want to engage with contemporary healthcare:

* Ambient Assisted Living for Elderly Care
* Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Service Systems
* Analysis and Evaluation of Healthcare Systems
* Clinical Data and Knowledge Management
* Cloud Computing for Healthcare
* Collaboration Technologies for Healthcare
* Context-aware Applications for Patient Monitoring and Care
* Data mining Techniques and Data Warehouses in Healthcare
* Data Visualization
* Decision Support Systems in Healthcare
* Drug Information Systems
* Design and Development Methodologies for Healthcare Systems
* Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technologies in Healthcare
* Digital Hospitals
* E-health & m-health
* Electronic Health Records (EHR) & Personal Health Records (PHR)
* Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)
* Healthgrids
* Health Portals
* Information and Knowledge Processing in Healthcare Environments
* Middleware Support for Smart Homes and Intelligent Applications
* Privacy, Confidentiality and Security Issues in Healthcare Systems
* Related Real World Experimentations and Case Studies in Healthcare
* RFID Solutions for Healthcare
* Smart Homes and Home Care Intelligent Environments
* Telemedicine and Health Telematics
* Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing in Healthcare
* Usability & Socio Technical studies
* User Interface Design for Healthcare Applications
* Virtual and Augmented Reality in Healthcare
* Virtual Environments for Healthcare

Daunting, right? Or exciting — depending on the museum’s ambitions.

Why do medical museums need to get involved? The list of topics is copied from the call for papers for the 3rd International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and Communication Technologies in Healthcare, a meeting series that brings together “multi-disciplinary researchers, professionals and practitioners from both academia and industry”, who are engaged in different facets of healthcare and information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The list contains some of the most important developments and future trends of ICT in healthcare, medical research, public health and pharma. This is a significant part of the future of technoscience-driven medicine and health care.

And therefore it is a momentous challenge for medical museums. These are among the things museums need to collect, curate, exhibit and engage their public with if they don’t want to be reduced to insignificant repositories of the far past.

The next question is whether museums are intellectually prepared to deal with such future trends of healthcare and medical science. Will our traditional humanistic skills be sufficient? Is it enough to hire ICT specialists as curators? Or do we also need to rethink the way we do humanities research? I’ll get back these questions in a later post.

(featured image from here)

What People Study When They Study Twitter

Melissa Terras' Blog - Thu, 05/09/2013 - 11:57
So, keeping good to my Open Access promises - my latest co-authored paper to go up in preprint, which will be out in print sometime this year in the Journal of Documentation - hot off the presses! Just as it goes up in preprint behind a paywall on the journal pages! is a jointly authored paper with Shirley Williams, from the University of Reading, and Claire Warwick, from UCLDIS. And here it is:

Williams, S and Terras, M and Warwick, C (2013) "What people study when they study Twitter: Classifying Twitter related academic papers". Journal of Documentation , 69 (3). Free PDF Download From UCL repository.

In this paper, we identify the 1161 academic papers that were published about Twitter between 2007 (when the first papers on Twitter appeared) and the close of 2011. We then analyse method, subject, and approach, to show what people are doing (or have been publishing!) on the use of Twitter in academic studies, providing a framework within which researchers studying the development and use of twitter as a source of data will be able to position their work. Oh, we also provide the list of the papers we found, so you can have a look-see yourself.


And the story behind this one? Shirley was introduced to Claire and myself by the late (and much missed) Prof. Mark Baker at Reading, when we undertook the Linksphere project.  Now, I've written about Linksphere elsewhere - it was an ambitious project which really didnt take off due to a variety of factors - but the good things to come out of it were our RA, Claire Ross, and meeting Shirley. We published a paper on the use of twitter by academics at conferences when the Linksphere project was going. A year or so after the project finished, Shirley was granted a research sabbatical, and asked Claire and I if we would be interested in carrying on that work with her. Kicking around a few ideas, we wondered whether it would be possible to round up all the published work on Twitter - what are people using it for? And then to analyse it, to see if we can classify how people are using it, what the datasets are, what the methods are, and what the domains are. Wouldnt it be nice to have a bibliography on the use of twitter in research papers? And so away Shirley went, working with Claire and I, and building up this nice framework in which we can look at twitter based research.

The paper was accepted into the Journal of Documentation last summer, and this month went up in preprint at the Journal of Documentation website, and is now out in Open Access from UCL's research repository, before it even hits the Library shelves. Which is how it should be, non?

Using Social Bridging to Be "For Everyone" in a New Way

Museum 2.0 - Wed, 05/08/2013 - 07:00
Like a lot of organizations, my museum struggles with two conflicting goals:
  1. The museum should be for everyone in our community.
  2. It's impossible for any organization or business to do a great job being for everyone. We're more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them.
How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target? In the past, I've subscribed to the theory that an organization should target many different groups and types of people to serve a constellation of specific audiences across diverse affinities, needs, and interests. 
But ultimately, that's still targeting. It's still grouping. And while it may be effective when it comes to marketing, it's limiting if your mission is to reach and engage with a wide range of people. It can lead to parallel programming: bike night for hipsters, bee night for hippies, family night for kiddies. And rarely the twain shall meet.
At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we're approaching this challenge through a different lens: social bridging. One of our core programming goals is to build social capital by forging unexpected connections between diverse collaborators and audience members. We intentionally develop events and exhibitions that matchmake unlikely partners--opera and ukelele, Cindy Sherman and amateur photographers, welding and knitting. Our goal in doing this work is to bring people together across difference and build a more cohesive community.  
We have been explicitly focusing on social bridging for more than a year now. What started as a series of experiments and happy accidents is now embedded in how we develop and evaluate projects. We've seen surprising and powerful results--visitors from different backgrounds getting to know each other, homeless people and museum volunteers working together, artists from different worlds building new collaborative projects. Visitors now spontaneously volunteer that "meeting new people" and "being part of a bigger community" are two of the things they love most about the museum experience.
This has led to a surprising outcome: we are now de-targeting many programs. This isn't just a philosophical shift--it's also being driven by visitors' behavior. "Family Art Workshops" suffer from anemic participation whereas multi-generational festivals are overrun with families. Single-speaker lectures languish while lightning talks featuring teen photographers, phD anthropologists, and professional dancers are packed. Programs that emphasize bringing diverse people together are more popular than those that serve intact groups. Why fight it?
And so, while we continue to acknowledge that specific communities have particular assets and needs, we spend more time thinking about how to connect them than how to serve each on its own. We're comfortable being deliberately unhip if it means that a seven year old, a seventeen year old, and a seventy year old all feel "at home" at the museum. This approach allows us to sidestep the question of parallel versus pipeline programming and instead create a new pipeline that is about unexpected connections and social experiences.
Focusing on social bridging also leads to tricky questions as to how we develop new programming, especially when it comes to outreach. When we offer programs at a school or neighborhood festival or community center, we do it to work with the group who live or learn there. Ironically and somewhat depressingly, our partnerships with marginalized communities often involve more segregated work because of our desire to engage in their space, on their terms. There are some groups who we work with terrifically in their own space but who we rarely engage in ours. This leads to good bonding, but very little bridging.
I don't have the answer to how we can incorporate bridging across the various ways we work with intact and blended communities. When it comes to school programs, we are now actively exploring how our approach might shift to emphasize bridging--among students in the same school, among students from different schools, among students across their school and home life. When it comes to working with intact cultural and ethnic communities, one of the resources that is helping me think through these questions is a 2004 paper by Dr. Pia Moriarty on Immigrant Participatory Arts in Silicon Valley. In the paper, Dr. Moriarty puts forward a paradigm of "bonded-bridging" to describe the way that ethnically-identified programs and organizations contribute to bridging in a majority-immigrant community. It's a thoughtful and intriguing paper, and I encourage you to read it.
I'm still chewing on the idea of "bonded-bridging" and the limitations and possibilities of a bridging strategy in a diverse community. But for now, I'm happy that we've been able to address some of our hand-wringing over targeted programs and inclusion with an approach that serves both our visitors and our core goals.
Does social bridging make sense for your institution? How do you reconcile inclusion and targeting in program design?

To MOOC or Not to MOOC? What’s In It For Me?

edwired - Tue, 05/07/2013 - 14:25

The title of this post is purely rhetorical because no one has asked me to teach a MOOC. In fact, I have not been involved with MOOCs at all, except as an observer from afar. Instead, the title is the result of me wondering why anyone would teach a course with tens of thousands of students enrolled (maybe more), who you would never meet, and for which there is an enormous amount of start up effort (designing the course, filming the lectures, figuring out the grading algorithms, etc., etc.)?

I understand why universities want to get MOOCs out there with their most prominent professors teaching them. Having a big name professor offer a MOOC brings many, many eyeballs to your campus logo (and even better to the website) and helps burnish your image in a global market for higher education. In short, MOOCs are marketing dollars well spent, even if they aren’t yet showing any sign they are good for the bottom line, given the terms that companies like Coursera are offering colleges and universities.

But why would a professor, especially a prominent (and presumably busy) professor, bother to spend all the time and effort necessary to bring a MOOC to market and then, one assumes, have some connection to its implementation? After all, designing a new course or redesigning an old one takes a lot of time in the analog world. When you consider the time required to film lectures, work with an editor to polish up that film and add in B-roll, design online assignments and assessments, and think through how students are going to progress through the various online materials, a MOOC represents a lot of time and effort.

After puzzling on this question, I can think of two answers.

The first is what we might call educational altruism. MOOCs offer faculty members a chance to make their courses available, for free, to the widest possible audience. As scholars we are supposed to be engaged in the circulation of knowledge, and being able to circulate one’s knowledge of a particular subject to 70,000 or 100,000 students, even if only a tiny fraction of them complete the course, is a potentially wonderful thing. I’m not sure that those students learn anywhere near what they would learn in a well designed face to face class, given that MOOCs largely replicate the lecture/listen binary model that is so ubiquitous in large American universities. That model has been demonstrated in countless studies by cognitive scientists to yield only minimal learning gains, even when taught by famous, or brilliant lecturers. But if the purpose of teaching a MOOC on one’s subject is to make one’s expertise in a given subject available, for free, to as many people as possible, that’s a laudable act. I’m not sure how much of this educational altruism there is out there, but I’m willing to admit that it might really exist.

The second reason is more mercenary and involves the sale of books and/or other collateral products. In particular, I wondered whether MOOCs offered faculty members an opportunity to make some serious money on the teaching and learning products that they have created?

To test my idea that book sales might just be part of the reason why some faculty members would teach a MOOC, I randomly selected eight courses across the disciplines and from various universities on the Coursera website. I tried to do the same thing at the Udacity site, but one cannot read the course syllabi there. What I found was that on all eight syllabi, the only readings students were expected to do were from free and open source/open access materials. However, five of the eight professors recommended or suggested as optional books that they had written, ranging in price from $8 to $110. One of the professors recommends only open source works, and the other two recommend books published by others for either $44 or $142.

If we assume for a minute that some fraction of the tens of thousands of students taking part in a given MOOC go ahead and purchase the “recommended” or “optional” book written by the professor teaching the course, the potential for significant earnings via book sales is very real. For the sake of argument, let’s say that I taught a MOOC that drew 50,000 students and I recommended as optional the ebook version of my new book ($19.95). And, for the sake of this same argument, let’s say that 10% of the students purchased a copy. Under the terms of my contract with the press, I would make just under $7,000 in royalties from the sale of those books. While $7,000 is not enough for the downpayment on that beach house I’ve been wanting, it’s still $7,000 in additional income.

Different states and different institutions have widely varying rules (and even laws) governing whether faculty members can require students to purchase a book from which the faculty member receives income. But those rules were made with the standard course for credit model in mind. MOOCs disrupt that model by not offering credit and in the cases I looked at, by having all textbooks be “recommended” or “optional.” Once MOOCs move to the credit bearing/tuition charging mode, it will be interesting to see whether there is any change in this approach. I suspect there won’t be, if only because the openness of a MOOC begins to break down once it starts to get expensive for students.

Open Thread: Your Stories of Risk and Reward

Museum 2.0 - Wed, 05/01/2013 - 17:37

What's the biggest professional risk you've taken? What happened after you took the risk? 
In three weeks, Kathleen McLean and I are co-hosting a freewheeling talk show at the American Alliance of Museums conference. The theme is "risk and reward," and we plan to explore both individual and institutional relationships to risk-taking. 
Kathy and I have each spent a lot of time advocating for experimental practice and risk-taking in museums, both as consultants and on staff. We've seen the mixed results--lots of excitement, lots of push back, some progress. For me personally, risk-taking has led to incredible professional opportunities, for which I feel lucky and grateful. I'm particularly indebted to Anna Slafer, my amazing boss at the Spy Museum in the mid-2000s. Anna would kick me under the table when I shared ideas out of turn, yet she also fiercely defended me (and our whole team) so we could do creative, risky work.
But many organizations don't have an Anna. Many people struggle with fears of punishment or marginalization for taking risks. It's hard for me to evaluate the extent to which these fears are well-founded, and whether the climate for risk is changing in the arts sector broadly. 
So I'm curious: what is your experience? Did you or your institution take a risk that got rewarded? Punished? Ignored? 
Please share your story in the comments. 

And if you're coming to Baltimore, please join us on Wednesday May 22 at 10:15 for a lively conversation informed by your stories. 

Newsletter from Medical Museion

Biomedicine on Display - Tue, 04/30/2013 - 09:02
Click here for the newsletter, in Danish and English.

4th newsletter from Medical Museion in 2013.

  • “Explore the substance and science of fat” – numbers are limited for this hands-on event.
  • “Under The Skin: Follow the construction of the new exhibition” – Follow the process.
  • “Web exhibition: behind the scenes on ‘Biohacking – Do It Yourself!’” – Explore the field of biohacking.
  • “Save the date! The Data Body On The Dissection Table” – Event on the data body on June 4th.

If you want to receive future versions sign up for our mailing list here.

Auf Wiedersehen, Mein Freund

edwired - Mon, 04/29/2013 - 21:34

Over the weekend my friend and colleague Peter Haber passed away after an extended illness. I was only fortunate enough to know Peter for the past four years, but I benefitted greatly from his friendship, his collegiality, his ideas, and his good humor.

Like my former colleague Roy Rosenzweig, Peter was a “connector” — one of those people who brought others together for the benefit of everyone. Through Peter I have met and begun to work with a number of colleagues in Switzerland and Austria, colleagues I never would have met otherwise. More importantly, though, my understanding of digital history and digital humanities is so much richer for having read Digital Past. Geschichtswissenschaft im digitalen Zeitalter (2011). What Peter brought to the study of digital history was a scientific rigor, a style of analysis, that is so often lacking in English language scholarship on our field. If I could quibble with one thing about the edition of the book that I own, it is the photograph of Peter on the back cover. In that photo, he seems dark and mysterious. Those who knew him well, know he was anything but dark or mysterious.

Perhaps the most tangible evidence of Peter the Connector is his co-authored volume (with Marin Gasteiner), Digitale Arbeitstechniken (2010). When I read these essays I came away with a much better sense of the kinds of work being done by my German-speaking colleagues in digital history — work I would likely not know if Peter and Martin had not collected it. More importantly, though, I began to think about several issues near and dear to me in new and different ways. That is what the best scholarship does for us.

But really, Peter’s greatest academic contribution, in many ways, has been Hist.net, perhaps the longest-lived digital history blog in any language. With his close friend and collaborator Jan Hodel, Peter spent more than a decade making all things digital and historical available and accessible to a wide audience. I knew of the blog before I knew Peter and Jan, and one of my happiest professional moments was the day I received an email from the two of them inviting me to speak at a conference in Basel. For my own family health reasons, I couldn’t attend that meeting and so I was very pleased (and relieved) when they kindly invited me back the following year to speak in Basel. That meeting was the starting point of our three way friendship and collaboration on Global Perspectives on Digital History, a project that kept us connected until he became too sick to continue.

One the most enjoyable days I’ve spent in the past several years was with Peter, when he was still feeling fine, touring the Fondation Beyeler, then returning to Basel for a coffee. That is the Peter I will remember. But I will also remember the Peter who, when you said something he didn’t entirely agree with, would cock and eyebrow, pause, and then ask a probing question that politely disagreed, while trying to find a way that the two of us could agree. I will miss both of those Peters very much.

 

Itinera Nova in the World(s) of Crowdsourcing and TEI

Collaborative Manuscript Transcription - Mon, 04/29/2013 - 18:23
On April 25, 2013, I presented this talk at the International Colloquium Itinera Nova in Leuven, Belgium. It was a fantastic experience, which I plan to post (and speak) more about, but I wanted to get my slides and transcript online as soon as possible.

Abstract: Crowdsourcing for cultural heritage material has become increasingly popular over the last decade, but manuscript transcription has become the most actively studied and widely discussed crowdsourcing activity over the last four years. However, of the thirty collaborative transcription tools which have been developed since 2005, only a handful attempt to support the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard first published in 1990. What accounts for the reluctance to adopt editorial best practices, and what is the way forward for crowdsourced transcription and community edition? This talk will draw on interviews with the organizers behind Transcribe Bentham, MoM-CA, the Papyrological Editor, and T-PEN as well as the speaker's own experience working with transcription projects to situate Itinera Nova within the world of crowdsourced transcription and suggest that Itinera Nova's approach to mark-up may represent a pragmatic future for public editions.
I'd like to talk about Itinera Nova within the world of crowdsourced transcription tools, which means that I need to talk a little bit about crowdsourced transcription tools themselves, and their history, and the new things that Itinera Nova brings.
Crowdsourced transcription has actually been around for a long time. Starting in the 1990s we see a number of what are called "offline" projects. This is before the term crowdsourcing was invented.
  • A Dutch initiative: Van Papier naar Digitaal which is transcribing primarily genealogy records. 
  • FreeBMD, FreeREG, and FreeCEN in the UK, transcribing church registers and census records. 
  • Demogen in Belgium -- I don't know a lot about this -- it appears to be dead right now, but if anyone can tell me more about this, I'd like to talk after this. 
  • Archivalier Online--also transcribing census records--in Denmark, 
  • And a series of projects by the Western Michigan Genealogy Society to transcribe local census records and also to create indexes of obituaries.
One thing these have in common, you'll notice, is that these are all genealogists. They are primarily interested in person names and dates. And they emerge out of an (at least) one hundred year old tradition of creating print indexes to manuscript sources which were then published. Once the web came online, the idea of publishing these on the web [instead] became obvious. But the tools that were used to create these were spreadsheets that people would use on their home computers. Then they would put CD ROMs or floppy disks in the posts and send them off to be pubished online.
Really the modern era of crowdsourced transcription begins about eight years ago.  There are a number of projects that begin development in 2005.  They are released (even though they've been in development for a while) starting around 2006.  Familysearch Indexing is, again, a genealogy system primarily concerned with records of genealogical interest which are tabular.  It is put up by the Mormon Church. 

Then things start to change a little bit.  In 2008, I publish FromThePage, which is not designed for genealogy records per se -- rather it's designed for 19th and 20th century diaries and letters.  (So here we have more complex textual documents.)  Also in 2008, Wikisource--which had been a development of Wikipedia to put primary sources online--start using a transcription tool.  But initially, they're not using it for manuscripts because of policy in the English, French, and Spanish language Wikisources.  The only people using it for manuscripts are the German Wikisource community, which has always been slightly separate.  So they start transcribing free-form textual material like war journals [ed: memoirs] and letters.  But again, we have a departure from the genealogy world.

In 2009, the North American Bird Phenology Program starts transcribing bird observations.  So in the 1880s you had amateur bird-watchers who would go into the field and they would record their sightings of certain ducks, or geese, or things like that, and they would record the location and the birds they had observed.  So we have this huge database of the presences of species throughout North America that is all on index cards.  And as the climate changes and habitats change, those species are no longer there.  So scientists who want to study bird migration and climate change need access to these.  But they're hand-written on 250,000 index cards, so they need to be transformed.  So that requires transcription, also by volunteers. [ed: The correct number of cards is over 6 million, according to Jessica Zelt's "Phenology Program (BPP): Reviving a Historic Program in the Digital Era"]
2010 is the year that crowdsourced transcription really gets big.  The first big development is the Old Weather project, which comes out of the Citizen Science Alliance and the Zooniverse team that got started with GalaxyZoo.  The problem with studying climate change isn't knowing what the climate is like now.  It is very easy to point a weather satellite at the South Pacific right now.  The problem is that you can't point a weather satellite at the South Pacific in 1911.  Fortunately, in many of the world's navies, the officer of the watch would, every four hours, record the barometric pressure, the temperature, the wind speed and direction, the latitude and the longitude in the ships logs.  So all we have to do is type up every weather observation for all the navies' ships, and suddenly we know what the climate was like.  Well, they've actually succeeded at this point -- in 2012 they finished transcribing all the British Royal Navy's ships log weather observations during World War I.  So this has been very successful -- it's a monumental effort: they have over six hundred thousand registered accounts--not all of those are active, but they have a very large number of volunteers. 
Also in 2010 in the UK, Transcribe Bentham goes live.  (We'll talk a lot more about this -- it's a very well documented project.)  This is a project to transcribe the notes and papers of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.  It's very interesting technically, but it was also very successful drawing attention to the world of crowdsourced transcription.
In 2011, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in northern Virginia published the Papers of the United States War Department, and builds a tool called Scripto that plugs into it.  Now this is primarily of interest to military and social historians, but again we're getting away from the world of genealogy, we're getting away from the world of individual tabular records, and we're getting into dealing with documents.
Once we get there, we have a tension.  And this is a pretty common tension.  There's an institutional tension, in that editing of documents has historically been done by professionals, and amateur editions have very bad reputations.  Well now we're asking volunteers to transcribe.  And there's a big tension between, well how do volunteers deal with this [process], do we trust volunteers?  Wouldn't it be better just to give us more money to hire more professionals?  So there's a tension there.

There's another tension that I want to get into here, since today is the technical track, and that's the difference between easy tools and powerful tools, and [the question of] making powerful tools easy to use.  This is common to all technology--not just software, and certainly not just crowdsourced transcription--but it's new because this is the first time we're asking people to do these sorts of transcription projects. 

Historically these professional [projects] have been done using mark-up to indicate deletions or abbreviations or things like that. 
So there's this fear: what happens when you take amateurs and add mark-up?

Well, what is going to happen?  Well, one solution--and it's a solution that I'm distressed to say is becoming more and more popular in the United States--is to get rid of the mark-up, and to say, well, let's just ask them to type plain text. 
There's a problem with this.  Which is that giving users power to represent what they see--to do the tasks that we're asking them to do--enables them.  Lack of power frustrates them.  And when you're asking people to transcribe documents that are even remotely complex, mark-up is power.
So I'm going to tell a little story about scrambled eggs.  These are not the scrambled eggs that I ate this morning--which were delicious by the way--but they're very similar. 
I'm going to pick on my friends at the New York Public Library, who in 2011 launched the "What's on the Menu?" project.  They have an enormous collection of menus from around the world, and they want to track to culinary history of the world as dishes originate in one spot and move to other locations, the change in dishes--when did anchovies become popular?  Why are they no longer popular?--things like that.  So they're asking users to transcribe all of these menu items.  They developed a very elegant and simple UI.  This UI did not involve mark-up; this is plain-text.  In fact--I'm going to get over here and read this--if you look at this instruction, this is almost stripped text: "Please type the text of the indicated dish exactly as it appears.  Don't worry about accents." 
Well, this may not be a problem for Americans, but it turns out that some of their menus are in languages that contain things that American developers might consider accents.  This is a menu that was published on their site in 2011.  They sent out an appeal asking, "can anyone read Sütterlin or old German Kurrentschrift"?  I saw this and I went over to a chat channel for people who are discussing German and the German language, because I knew that there were some people familiar with German paleography there, and I wanted to try it out.
So the transcribers are going through and they're transcribing things, and they get to this entry: Rühreier.  All right, let's transcribe that without accents.  So they type in what they see.  Rühreier is scrambled eggs.  And what they type is converted to "Ruhreier", which are... eggs from the Ruhrgebiet?  I don't know?  This is not a dish.  I'm not familiar with German cuisine, but I don't think that the Ruhr valley is famous for its eggs.
And this is incredibly frustrating!  We see in the chat room logs: "Man, I can't get rid of 'Ruhreier' and this (all-capital) 'OMELETTE'!  What's going on?  Is someone adding these back?  Can you try to change "Ruhreier" to "Rühreier"?  It keeps going back!"

So we have this frustration.  We have this potential to lose users when we abandon mark-up; when we don't give them the tools to do the job that we're asking them to do.
Okay.  Let's shift gears and talk about a different world.  This is the world of TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative.  It's regarded as the ultimate in mark-up -- Manfred [Thaller] mentioned it some time earlier.  It's been a standard since 1990, and it's ubiquitous in the world of scholarly editing. 

Remember, up until recently, all scholarly editing was done by professionals.  These professionals were using offline tools to edit this XML which Manfred described as a "labyrinth of angle brackets."  It was never really designed to be hand-edited, but that's what we're doing. 

And because it's ubiquitous and because it's old, there's a perception among at least some scholars, some editors, that this is just a 'boring old standard'.  I have a colleague who did a set of interviews with scholars about evaluating digital scholarship, and not all but some of the responses she got when she brought up TEI were "TEI?  Oh, that's just for data entry."
Well, not quite.  TEI has some strengths.  It is an incredibly powerful data model.  The people who are doing this--these professionals who have been working with manuscripts for decades--they've developed very sophisticated ways of modeling additions to texts, deletions to texts, personal names, foreign terms -- all sorts of ways of marking this up. 

It has great tools for presentation and analysis.  Notice I didn't say transcription.

And it has a very active community, and that community is doing some really exciting things.

I want to use just one example of something that has only been around in the last four years that it's been developed.  It's a module that was created for TEI called the Genetic Edition module.  A "genetic edition" is the idea of studying a text as it changes -- studying the changes that an author has made as they cross  through sections and created new sections, or over-written pieces. 

So it's very sophisticated, and I want to show you the sorts of things you can do [with it] by demostrating an example of one of these presentation tools by Elena Pierazzo and Julie Andre.  Elena's at King's College London, and they developed this last year. 
This is a draft of--I believe it's Proust's Recherches du Temps Perdu--unfortunately I can't see up there.  But as you can see, this is a very complicated document.  The author has struck through sections and over-written them.  He's indicated parts moved.  He's even -- if you look over here -- he's pasted on an extra page to the bottom of this document.  So if you can transcribe this to indicate those changes, then you can visualize them.
[Demo screenshots from the Proust Prototype.] And as you slide, you see transcripts appear on the page in the order that they're created,

And in the order that they're deleted even.
There's even rotation and stuff --

It's just a brilliant visualization!

So this is the kind of thing that you can do with this powerful data model.  
But how was that encoded? How did you get there?
Well, in this case, this is an extension to that thousand-page book.  It's only about fifty pages long, printed, and it contains individual sets of guidelines.  In this case, this is how Henrik Ibsen clarified a letter.  In order to encode this, you use this rewrite tag with a cause...  And this is that forest of angle brackets; this is very hard.  And this is only one item from this document of instructions, which was small enough that I could cut it out and fit it on a slide. 

So this is incredibly complex.  So if TEI is powerful; and if, as it gets more complex, it becomes harder to hand-encode; and as we start inviting members of the public and amateurs to participate in this work, how are we going to resolve this? 
If there's a fear about combining amateurs and mark-up, what do we do when we combine amateurs with TEI?  This is panic! 

And it is very rarely attempted.  I maintain a directory of crowdsourced transcription tools, with multiple projects per tool.  And of the 29 projects in this directory, only 7 claim to support TEI. 

One of them is Itinera Nova.  I found out about this when I was preparing a presentation for the TEI conference last year, in which I interviewed people running projects doing this crowdsourcing, and found out about their experience of users trying to encode in TEI, and asked, "Do you know anyone else?"

And that's how I found out about Itinera Nova, which is unfortunately not very well known outside of Belgium.  This is something that I hope to part of correcting, because you have a hidden gem here -- you really do.  It is amazing.
So how do you support TEI?  Well, one approach--the most common approach--is to say we'll have our users enter TEI, but we'll give them help.  We'll create buttons that add tags, or menus that add tags.  This has been the approach taken by T-PEN (created by the Center for Digital Thelogy out of Saint Louis University), and a project associated with them, the  Carolingian Canon Law Project.  It's also the approach taken by Transcribe Bentham with their TEI toolbar.  Menus are an alternative, but essentially the do the same thing -- they're a way of keeping users from typing angle brackets.  So the Virtuelles deutsches Urkundennetzwerk is one of those, as well as the Papyrological Editor which is used by scholars studying Greek papyri.
So how well does that work?  You provide users with buttons that add tags to their text.  Here's an example from Transcribe Bentham. 
Here's an example from Monasterium.  And the results are still very complicated.  The presentation here is hard.  It's hard to read; it's hard to work with.

That does not mean that amateurs cannot do it at all!  Certainly the experience of Transcribe Bentham proves that amateurs to the same level as any professional transcriber, using these tools and coding these manuscripts, even without the background. 
But there are limitations.  One limitation is that users outgrow buttons.  In Transcribe Bentham, [the most active] users eventually just started typing the angle brackets themselves -- they returned to that labyrinth of angle brackets of TEI tags. 

Another problem is more interesting to me, which is when users ignore buttons.  Here we have one editor who's dealing with German charters, who uses these double-pipes instead of the line break tag, because this is what he was used to from print.  This speaks to something very interesting, which is that we have users who are used to their own formats, they're used to their own languages for mark-up, they're used to their own notations from print editions that they have either read or created themselves.  And by asking them to switch over to this style of tagging, we're asking them not just to learn something new, but also to abandon what they may already know.
And, frankly, it's really hard to figure out which buttons [to support].  Abigail Firey of the Carolingian Canon Law Project talks about how when they were designing their interface, they had 67 buttons.  This is very hard to navigate, and the users would just give up and start typing angle brackets instead, because buttons aren't a magic solution.
This is where Itinera Nova comes in.  The "intermediate notation" that Professor Thaller was talking about is quite clear-cut, and it maps well to the print notations that volunteers are already used to. 
And what's interesting about this is that what many people may not realize is that Itinera Nova--despite having a very clear, non-TEI interface--has full TEI under the hood.
Everything is persisted in this TEI database, so the kinds of complex analysis that we talked about earlier--not necessarily the Proust genetic editions, but this kind of thing--is possible with the data that's being created.  It's not idiosyncratic.
So as a result, I really think that in this, Itinera Nova points the way to the future.  Which is to abandon this idea that TEI is just for data entry, or that amateurs cannot do mark-up.  Both of those ideas are bogus!  Instead, let's say: use TEI for the data model; for the presentation, so we have these beautiful sliders.  And whatever else will get created out of the annotation tool, out of the transcription tool, let's use that for the data model and for the presentation.  But let's consider let's consider hooking up these--I don't want to say "easier"--but these more straightforward, these more traditional user interfaces [for transcription].

This is something that I think is really the way forward for crowdsourced transcription.  It is being done right now by the Papyrological Editor, it has been done by Itinera Nova for a long time.  And there are now some incipient projects to move forward with this.  One of these is a new project at the University of Maryland, Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities, the Skylark project, in which they are taking those same transcription tools that were used for Old Weather to allow people to mark up and transcribe portions of an image of a literary text that has been heavily annotated--like that Proust--to create data using the data model that can be viewed with tools like the Proust viewer.

So this is, I think, the technical contribution that Itinera Nova is making.  Obviously there are a lot more contributions--I mean I'm absolutely stunned by the interaction with the volunteer community that's happening here--but I'm staying on the technical track, so I'm not going to get into that. 


Are there any questions?  No?  Keep up the great work -- you folks are amazing.

Taking down exhibitions can bring us closer to the objects than building new ones (and create more fun)

Biomedicine on Display - Mon, 04/29/2013 - 09:00

I wrote the other day that taking down museum exhibitions could be as much fun as building new ones.

That was a pretty spontaneous tongue-in-cheek comment triggered by our conservator Nanna Gerdes’ enthusiastic twitter series of images (see @NaGerdes and storified here, here and here) from the process of taking down three old exhibition rooms in our museum’s Tietkens Gaard building.

But the more I think about it, I feel this spontaneous remark has some deeper truth to it. Here’s the way I reason about it:

Most curators will probably think the design and building of an exhibition is more fun than taking it down afterward. Especially if you are interested in ideas and concepts, and in constructing new unseen worlds.

Sure, it can surely be forbiddingly exhausting to design and build: conceptualising and physically constructing a new exhibition in the interfaces between history and the present, between images and material artefacts, immaterial ideas and three-dimensional physical spaces can at times be frustrating and anxiety-provoking.

But all in all it’s a pretty satisfying creative process. And I think it is this combination of hard work and immersion in creative processes that make us think of exhibition making as being ‘fun’.

And in contrast, the taking down an exhibition after closing day sounds, from an exhibition curator’s point of view, like a pretty dull and boring activity. The opposite of having fun. Like cleaning up after the party rather than planning and taking part in it.

However, I think there is another and more fun side to taking down than the immediate connotations of boredom, deconstruction and cleaning up.

Whereas the building and construction process has certain similarities with being on speed (especially in the last couple of weeks and days before the opening), the post-closing process is much more relaxed. If building up is associated with fervour, even hysteria, taking down is more characterised by tranquility, even melancholia.

Now, paradoxically, the creative and conceptual focus in the building phase draws the curator’s attention away from the artefacts themselves. When you build an exhibition you are 110% focused on how to find the right objects and images, and how to make them fit into the overarching theme of the show. You concentrate on the meaning of the artefacts — their history, their social context, their cultural significance, how they play together with other artefacts into a meaningful whole. The concept and the idea are sovereign, the artefacts its subjects.

After closing down, however, the conceptual frame is dead. The curator’s ordering mind has since long continued to other storage room hunting grounds. Now the remaining artefacts are no longer subjected to the powerful mind of the inquisitive and sovereign curator, they are no longer props in the curator’s script. And suddenly we can see them for what they are, as artefacts pure and simple.

So if you really want to see, smell, touch and contemplate artefacts, you’d better not get too involved in the constructive building up of a new exhibition, but rather wait until the last visitor has left the rooms and the catalogue has been removed from the shelves of the museum shop. When the show is over, the curator in the original sense of the word (the one who cares about artefacts) enters the scene and takes a renewed and more intense look at the artefacts.

That intense dealing with the artefacts can be pretty ‘fun’ too. My online dictionary defines ‘fun’ as “a source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure”, and that’s what a less hectic and conceptual dealing with artefacts can be: enjoyable, amusing, pleasurable, playful.

Actually, even if we talk about exhibition making as ‘fun’, there isn’t really much time for pleasure and play in the process. Deadlines must be met, budgets kept, many different wills must be negotiated, and conflicts avoided. That’s hectic fun. But packing the whole thing down afterwards gives us a chance to engage with the things in a more free and relaxed way: that’s playful fun.

And after all, that’s what fun is about, isn’t it?

The colour historians were here

Biomedicine on Display - Sun, 04/28/2013 - 08:39

We’ve had two specialists in colour history visting from the National Museum of Denmark.

They have worked hard grinding down selected areas of the walls and doors in the museum’s Titkens Gaard building to find out what colours the new exhibition room have had since the mid 18th century.

See also Nanna’s tweets here.

For larger images, click the photos below:

newsletter: month fifteen

Word's End: searching for the ineffable - Sun, 04/28/2013 - 01:25

Dear Nico,

Yesterday you turned fifteen months old. As unhappy as this last month has been for your city, and for so many other places, you remain cheerful and loving.

You speak in sentences. We woke up one slow Sunday morning, and you said, “dog say woof.” I said, “oh yeah? What do cats say?” You didn’t answer, but when I asked you where our cats were, you said, “I don’t know!” And fair enough: they aren’t allowed in the bedroom at night, so who knows where they go when they’re behind the closed door! Having said these things, you proceeded to get off the bed safely, butt first.

Physics is a lot better now. Bath time is more awesome for your ability to squeeze the squirt toys. You hold your own bottle, which took an inexplicably long time. You can stand from sitting, slide down a slide, and oh, walk without holding on. No big deal, just walking. This is me not freaking out.

Cognitively? Huge leaps. Earlier this month you got stuck under chairs, which was hilarious; no more of that. You’re way more into stuffed toys. You’ve figured out that feeding yourself may be messier, but is infinitely better. You’re starting to get the concept of “gentle” with cats, babies, and most of the time even my face. You’ve figured out that calling me when you wake from a nap, instead of bursting into tears, totally works to bring me to you.

No more falling asleep at the boob: you’ve started to ask to be put to bed. Settling down after that might be tricky, but is a necessary life skill, so we’re both giving you space to learn this. Plus, falling asleep without being held means you can put yourself back to sleep when you wake, sometimes.

Sometimes. Everything is variable. The variability, and the fact that you’re talking up a storm and I understand about 10% of it, means tricky times at the Launch Pad.

Latest food exploits: you’re very thoughtful about coconut curry. Canned sardines are awesome. Blueberries are the best, except muscat grapes are even better. Cheese makes you tremble with excitement (then you make faces while eating it). Today’s toast with tapenade, tomatoes and feta was a smashing success. Cupcakes and ice cream and cat food… oh, my.

You give slobbery kisses and enjoy a little post-nap back rub. You’re getting more clingy cuddly. Spring is finally here, and you’re loving it almost as much as you love dogs.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you those big feelings you’re having will go away. They never do. But you’ll get much better at handling them! You’ll have no choice: eventually it’ll be either that, or I sell you to the next traveling space circus that comes through town.

Love,
-Mama

ps Pix!

Taking down exhibitions is almost as fun as building them up

Biomedicine on Display - Sat, 04/27/2013 - 11:03

As I wrote in an earlier post, we are now on the track of building up the new semi-permanent exhibition ‘Under the Skin’ in the museum’s Tietkens Gaard building.

In the last couple of months, our conservator Nanna Gerdes has worked hard to take down the three former exhibition rooms and packed the artefacts for remote storage.

Judged by Nanna’s enthusiastic photographing activities, taking down the old exhibitions for storage seems to be almost as fun as building up new ones.

See Nanna’s storified twitter posts of the X-ray study collection with images here; ditto from the Finsen exhibition here, and ditto from the exhibition of anatomical models here.

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(And here’s the ground plan of the rooms exhibition, ca.  25 x 12 meters in all:)

 

 

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