ECHO Blogging Central

Dear Nico,

I had this written two days ago, on time. Then the web host was broken. We can’t win! Except we do, every day, and then I sit down to write these letters and they don’t come out funny like Dooce’s at all. They come out maudlin and sappy. I’m hopelessly in love with you, is what.

You’re beautiful. I think so, the world thinks so, and Molly and her camera think so too. Lucky us, huh?

photo by Molly Tomlinson

A few weeks ago you said your first Russian word. It’s шляпа, shlyapa, which means any kind of brimmed hat. I have no clue where you picked it up, but you clearly knew from the beginning what the word meant, despite there being no brimmed hats around the first couple of times. So I fixed that.

I’ve woken up in the dark morning bedroom to your tiny little voice next to me, whispering with a breathless wonder: shhhhhhhhlyapaaaaaaaa. The first couple of times you might’ve dreamed of it just prior; now, I’m pretty sure you do it partly to make me laugh. In all, not a bad way to wake up.

My belly button with the birthmark perched on its edge has become a weird little comfort object. You never nurse anymore without fidgeting until your hand finds it. Then you go all still (except for the feeding part) and watch my face, or space out.

You’re becoming measured in your old age. More deliberate in your actions. I can see inklings of little kid in the way you ponder flavors. This month was my birthday, and we had a Cheesemas party, which is just what it sounds like, so then there was a ton of cheese left in the house, and man, you love Dubliner. Even more than you love cheddar.

You also love baby broccoli, chicken, rice, teething biscuits, and your babushka’s cooking. And those homeopathic teething pills, which have a faintly sweet nondescript taste and an inexplicable calming effect on you. Mostly I think homeopathy is bunk, but if it’s doing something to relieve your teething pain, who am I to argue?

Speaking of pain: the older you get, the harder it is for you to let go of pain. You’ve begun processing it as deeply unfair. You’re the most pathetic little thing when you’re hurting. On the other hand, the other weekend when you burned your thumb on the oatmeal pot (all my fault), your lip got all trembly for a few seconds and then you forgot about it, even before I was able to see where you’d gotten burned.

Which is ok, because we’re not lacking for big feelings around here. On top of everything else, transitioning to a single nap during the day is an exercise in flexibility and zen.

But who am I kidding, mostly you’re still delighted with the world. You love watching the snow coming down. You turn up your face to feel the snowflakes, and get mad if I put up the car seat hood to “protect” you. You love the car seat, and riding in the car. You love little plastic Easter egg shells, which older kids are only too happy to give you since you ignore the candy stash. You love the Mystic river with its ducks and swans and wind. You love expeditions outside with shoes on, and sometimes march through the apartment right to the front door and demand to be let out. When it gets warmer, I’ll indulge us both.

You continue to charm your now-international audience. Yesterday you met my dear friend Jon, who lives and writes game-stories in that other Cambridge. Predictably, he’s now firmly on team NAZ. Now, if only we could figure out how to see him and his family more often than once every few years. Fancy a trip overseas?

Speaking of tripping: we’re going to Nebraska in July. What do you say we drive?

Love,
-Mama

PS pix

The academic community I’m most heavily involved in – Digital Humanities – are fairly invested in twitter. At all times of the day there are major figures, students, and newbies in the field on there, just hanging out, debating topics, forwarding links to events, job postings, interesting research and cool things they have stumbled upon. People have studied this – graphing and charting the discussions, especially around the DH conference, and heck, even I have co-authored a paper on the subject.
I’m currently working on a book/project called Defining Digital Humanities  and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to get all – and I mean all – the tweets that contain the hashtag #Digitalhumanities – what fun could be had charting the growth of the discipline, the geolocation of tweets, the networks that exist, the sentiments surrounding it – etc etc. Now, hindsight is a grand thing  - I should have thought to start scraping these back in 2006 – but surely it must be possible to get access to this for research? So I asked.
The first approach was to Gnip – who have “full historical access to the twitter firehose available exclusively”.  They were really very helpful, and we got into a conversation about my needs, their licensing, and – of course – costs. The upshot is that if you want a hashtag, you can get it for a price, with the text delivered in JSON format. I was quoted between $15,000 and $25,000 for the full historical set (depending on the exact volume of the data, they are now looking into it to give me the final figure - I and they dont yet know how many tweets there are containing this hashtag).
The second place I asked was Datasift– “the leading platform for building applications with insights derived from the most popular social networks and news sources”.  They do have access to the historical twitter firehose, but they don’t do one off searches, and licensing will start at $3000 per month to get access to it (on a yearly contract). They will be launching a pay as you go service at some point, they tell me. By the way,  you can get $10 worth of free credit for processing if you sign up and play around with some current searches: I set a set for #digitalhumanities and I had run out of credit within a few hours. (I find the user interface very obfuscating  – I’m still wrangling with it to see what that data actually is!).
Now, these costs are very little compared to the costs to access the full firehose and lets face it – a free service like twitter has to make its money somewhere. These were not vexatious enquiries: I’d really like to do this study. But now I have to find $25k down the back of the sofa to get access to this data (and incidentally, if I do, I wont be allowed to quote it, only to show the stats that emerge from the analysis).  $25k is a fair whack of money in academia-land. It will also take around 6 months (at least) to write it into a grant proposal to raise the money – and how to persuade academic funders that buying this dataset is good use of their money? Frankly, I’m not sure that will fly in the arts and humanities, where complete grant costings can come under £100k for a one year project.
Thinking caps are now on to see how we can get funding put together to get access to the data of the community I – goddamit – helped (in some small way) to create. I love twitter with a passion and it continues to inform and aid my teaching and research. But when we invest so much in a free service, we are selling ourselves. It’s interesting to see how much #digitalhumanities is “worth” to others. Anyone got a free $25k?

So I'm reading Otto Neurath's "Universal Jargon and Terminology" (you know, like you do), and I see this on the first page:

"Bertrand Russell presented his classic thesaurus of symbolic tools;"

What text do you think Neurath has in mind?  (I didn't see any helpful/ illuminating context around this bit.)

If Neurath means the Principia, I think that would be hilarious; the last word I would use to describe that book is 'thesaurus'...

There's a constant dialogue in participatory work about how to make peoples' contributions meaningful. I've written about different structures for participatory processes (especially in museums), and recently, I've been interested in how we can apply these structures to the design of public space. Here in Santa Cruz, my museum has embarked on a major project to redevelop the plaza outside our doors into a vibrant, cultural hub for downtown, and we are trying to make the development process as open and useful as possible.

One of the key constituencies for this plaza are families. While we spend plenty of time talking with parents and adults about what makes a place "family-friendly," there's no substitute for kids' unique perspectives. In January, as part of a series of place-making workshops facilitated by the Project for Public Spaces, we worked with a local dad to coordinate a workshop explicitly for kids (full writeup here). Their ideas were delightful, and their contributions shifted the conversation about what family-friendly really looks like.

I came out of the workshop with a mixture of joy and unease. What should we do with the ideas the kids had generated? How does their participation, which is expressed in a somewhat haphazard and spontaneous fashion, integrate with that of adults? I'm not suggesting that the kids are less valuable as participants than their parents--or even less realistic in their impulses and desires--but that our whole adult approach to collaborative processes doesn't easily absorb youthful exuberance.

Kids frequently suffer from tokenism. We given them a gold star for participating and then sweep their drawings under the rug. Children are easy to applaud, and easy to ignore.

This grappling led me to a fascinating "ladder of participation" about kids' engagement in environmental design written by Dr. Roger Hart of Cornell (1992 paper). While Dr. Hart is focused on the design of public gardens, his overall message is broad: there is participation, and there is tokenism. He's explicit about different project structures and their implications, listing five levels of participation and three of non-participation. Here's a synopsis:

Participation 1. Child-initiated, shared decisions with adults:

• Goal isn’t about “kids’ power.”
• Young people feel competent and confident enough in their role as community members to understand the need for collaboration and that in asking adults for their input, the project may be strengthened.
• Lots of trust involved
• Adults serve as listeners, observers and sounding boards (i.e. they don’t jump in with their own designs on the project, or to organize the project). For example, young people may determine that they want to clean up an old wooded hang out area in their community to create a nature trail. They learn about all aspects of creating such a trail, hold meetings to plan it, but check in with a friend’s parent in local government, several parents, and a teacher with an interest in ecology, for their diverse ways of thinking about certain aspects the project.

2. Child-initiated and directed projects:

• Adults notice a youth-led project emerging and allow them to occur in a youth-directed fashion.
• Hart places this second on the ladder because occasionally young people don’t trust adults enough to seek their input. The caution with this rung is in children carrying out their projects in secret because of fear of adults, or being intimidated by them. An example is a literally secret garden/ landscape that adults are not aware of.

3. Adult-initiated, shared decisions with children:

• Adults assume nothing about what children want in the landscape.
• Children are involved to some degree on every part of the process of garden planning, design, and implementation.
• Children understand issues such as fundraising, garden design, or organization and management
• Children understand how and why compromises are made, if they are necessary. They may also begin to cultivate a “language” of talking about this with others.

4. Children are consulted and informed about project:

• Project designed and run by adults, but the children’s views and opinions are taken seriously.
• A good example is with a survey designed to gather young people’s input into a school garden: children are informed of the purpose, they may be asked to volunteer, and afterward, they are fully informed of the results.

5. Assigned but informed:

• Children are assigned to a project and may not initiate the project themselves, but they are fully informed about it (i.e. a school garden project)
• Children may still have a sense of real ownership of the project.
• A key aspect of this rung is the degree to which children are engaged in critical reflection. For example, are children just viewed as a free source of help for the garden project, or do they have a chance to reflect on it, consider it, and learn from it?

Non-Participation 6. Tokenism:

• The most challenging and most common among very well-meaning adults.
• Adults are genuinely concerned about giving children a voice, but haven’t really begun to think carefully about the best approach for this.
• The appearance of children’s involvement is there, but in fact, they have had little choice about planning the garden project, communication around it, and no time in which to critically reflect and form their own opinions.
• An example is that adults select charming, articulate youth to talk about the garden in a public venue, but those youth haven’t had ample opportunity to critically reflect or consult with their peers. The key here is symbolic versus actual engagement and involvement.

7. Decoration:

• Involves, quite literally, decorating children
• For example, they may sport garden T-shirts with no involvement in organizing or understanding the program.
• Adults use children to bolster the program as if the children were understanding participants.
• For example, adults make children sing garden songs at a harvest festival, and it may even appear that they wrote the song, or that they were involved in organizing the garden or the festival, when in fact they were not.

8. Manipulation or Deception:

• Adults consciously use children’s voices to carry their own message about the gardening project.
• For example, they produce a garden poster, advertisement, or publication with drawings by children, when children aren’t involved in the program planning.
• Adults may deny their own detailed involvement in meetings, planning, shaping the project because they think it diminishes the effectiveness or impact of the project – they may say that children are genuinely engaged, when engagement constitutes weeding or planting.
• Adults may design a garden, have kids do a simple planting, then tell the local newspaper that kids designed and built the garden. 

Reading this ladder reminded me how easy it is to fall into the "non-participation" part of the ladder when working with any amateur participants, but especially with children. The explicit nature of the examples on levels six through eight (especially "decoration") may also be helpful in identifying times that we are treating adults as non-participants in more understated ways. We may not dress them up and make them sing songs about our projects, but sometimes, we might as well.

In the case of my project, level four is probably what is appropriate. We are engaged in active collaboration with so many stakeholders for this plaza, and kids are important but secondary contributors to the process. But more broadly, I can look at this and think about what we DON'T want to be doing--with any of our participants. Thank you, Roger Hart, for reminding me of the range of participatory opportunities and non-opportunities a project can provide... and how disastrous it can be when our words and our actions are misaligned. Let's make sure not to decorate our projects with false participation where real collaboration is possible.

Ken Arnold (Wellcome Collection) and I had a joint sesssion titled “Integrating research, acquisitioning, curation, exhibition making and events in museums” at the Danish national museum meeting in Horsens, two weeks ago. Based on this predistributed session abstract:

Drawing on our experiences from the Medical Museion and the Wellcome Collection, respectively, we suggest that a successful and productive in­tegration of these functions of the museum does not involve creating or­ganisational structures, but rather the cultivation of curiosity and a ‘will to inquire’. A research spirit can stimulate exhibitions, events and curator­ship, and vice versa the handling of material objects can give rise to new and interesting research problems.

we gave two short introductory talks followed by a long general discussion. Here’s my (untitled) intro talk.

Ken Arnold and I are running two venues which are in some ways very similar and yet quite different.

Similar in the sense that we address some of the basic questions concerning human existence – questions about life and death, well-being and disease. We’re dealers in the sublime – because we investigate the future prospects of the human body which are simultaneously very frightening and deeply fascinating.

But different in the sense that the Wellcome Collection is extremely well-endowed and situated in one of the busiest roads in a globalised Metropolis with hundreds of thousands of visitors per year, whereas the Medical Museion is placed in a sleepy part of Wonderful Copenhagen with a much smaller budget and one-tenth of their visitor numbers.

However, our venues are also both similar and different with respect to the theme of this conference – in the way we handle the interaction between the activities we mention in the title of this session: research, acquisitioning, curation, exhibition making and events. In this respect, the similarity between is that we see this integration not as a organisational question, but a question of spirit.

The fundamental spirit here is what we call a research attitude. As we say in the abstract, we both think in terms of what we call “the cultivation of curiosity and a ‘will to inquire’”.

This is an attitude that goes both ways. It means making exhibitions, launch events, handle the collections, and bring in new acquisitions in the spirit of curiosity. It means trying to make all such activities inquiry-driven. On the other hand, it also means that the handling of material objects, images and archives, and the making of exhibitions, is a daily generator of interesting research questions.

The slight difference between our venues in this respect is in the way we have moved towards this position. Wellcome Collection started as an exhibition and event venue, and then Ken, very much through his own initiative and his own research background in the history of science and history of museums, brought an attitude of research, curiousity, and playfulness into these public engagement activities.

Medical Museion, on the other hand, grew out of an academic research project, which then gradually broadened to include more and more of the traditional museum activities. I came to Copenhagen a decade ago — to what was then called a medical history museum and basically was a huge collection of medical historical artefacts — as a professor in the history of medicine and with a traditional university mindset, meaning that research and teaching (from undergraduate to PhD level) is the basic rationale for everything one does.

At that time I was still thinking of research exclusively in terms of the publication of scholarly books on serious university presses and research articles in peer-reviewed journals (as most of my university colleagues still do). From the university’s and my own point of view at that time, public engagement, including exhibitions and events, were pretty subordinate activities. Not to speak about collections; they weren’t even mentioned in the university’s strategy documents and in my view they were largely a burden and a nuisance.

But during the last ten years, I have gradually widened and broadened my notion of research. I began to think about collecting (acquisitions) and exhibition making, and even public events, not just as outreach, or at best as raw experiences for writing research publications, but as a form of creative research activity in their own right. And from then on I began to think about everything we do in the museum from the point of view of the researcher and in terms of an experimental mindset.

To be experimental here means that we try, as far as possible, to think about all activities at Medical Museion — exhibition making, event making, acquisitions, collection management, organising seminars, etc. – as ongoing experiments. We continuously try to work out new and interesting activities, which haven’t been tried before, instead of applying already existing ideas. That part of the rationale of being a university museum.

• For example, we’ve experimented with very narrow exhibition formats, e.g. in the Obesity exhibition, which is not a historical exhibition about obesity as a cultural phenomenon, but focuses on a very special kind of surgical operation, called gastric bypass, and other cutting-edge metabolic research projects at the medical faculty. The experimental attitude here was to try transforming some of the basic concepts and aesthetic aspects of the clinic and medical research laboratory into the exhibition space.
• Another example is our current temporary exhibition Biohacking, which is an experiment in bringing do-it-yourself biology activists into the museum, letting them coproduce a combination of working laboratory, exhibition room, event and public conference around the topic of biohacking.
• A third example is that we’re experimenting with the borderlines between research seminar, curatorial workspace and event. Last week we organized an international workshop called It’s Not What You Think, where we gathered some 40 scholars to not only discuss but also to handle and curate objects in our collections.

To have a research attitude in these and other cases means not only to conceive and perform them as experiments, but also allow time to reflect upon the experiments, and write about and publish them – to bring the experiences into the public sphere. So we still publish a lot in traditional research journals, but increasingly we’ve begun to experiment with the publication medium. So we’re putting a lot emphasis on using a variety of social media – our combined blog and website, Facebook, Google+, and especially Twitter as a medium for discussing the experiments.

Summing up, in my view, museum should, to a much larger extent, become ‘museological laboratories’. Actually, I don’t think museology, or museum studies, should be taught in courses in academic departments separated from museum practice. Museology is not a set of dogmas or principles that can be learned from textbooks and lectures and then applied in museums — it is an experimental and research attitude that must permeat the daily museum work from early morning to late evening.

Visit the new online version of Biohacking – Do It Yourself! and explore the open biology lab at Medical Museion through photos, recipes, texts and videos:

In the online exhibition you can look at pictures and videos from events in the open lab, browse through links to hacker spaces around the world as well as loads of photos, read articles about the exhibition or try our basic biohack recipes and Do It Yourself!

This week, the Santa Cruz Weekly's cover story is about my museum (the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History) and the work we have done to make it a more participatory, community-centered place over the past two years. The article captures a lot about our approach, from prototyping to perpetual beta to working with artists to developing successful frameworks for diverse visitors to participate. The author, Georgia Perry, talks about her own participatory reticence and how our programming invited her into active engagement in a safe and exciting way. Perry describes me as the "conductor" of a community-programmed orchestra. I love this image--not controlling everything, just helping steer the way and keep us moving forward.

I feel really lucky and grateful to live in a community that is so supportive of and engaged in experimentation in museums.

Let me know what you think of the article either here or on the Weekly's site. Enjoy!


INNOVATOR DRIVES MUSEUM'S SUCCESS


The three years I spent as the girlfriend of a stand up comedian taught me one very important lesson: You do not, under any circumstances, sit in the front row. I learned my lesson early on, after a knockoff Adam Sandler-type at a chintzy Long Island club spent three of his allotted five minutes commenting on the simple fact that I was eating a sandwich. “She’s got a sandwich! What kind is it? Turkey? Turkey! Everyone, she’s got a turkey sandwich!” I felt like I was on the bus to middle school and a bully had hijacked the driver’s PA system, announcing the contents of my lunch box to all the other kids. After that I stayed far away from the stage, watching from the backs of dimly lit rooms as other sorry audience members got trapped in the horrifying death march that is “participation.” Because of Nina Simon.And yet, if all of what I described above is true—which it is—why then, did I leave the Museum of Art and History (the MAH) in downtown Santa Cruz on a recent Friday evening having (a) willingly contributed to a chalk-written poem on a staircase, (b) posed jauntily for a photograph intended for public display on the museum’s website while (c) holding up a colorful tissue-paper collage I made at some sort of wax art station, standing shoulder to shoulder with a half-dozen strangers? While arts attendance is dwindling across the country, there is one place where Americans still are participating—the Internet. About 1 billion people use Facebook. YouTube has 800 million users. By contrast, the National Endowment for the Arts found that only 51 million people went to an art museum in the U.S. in 2008 (the most recent year for which they have data). But here in Santa Cruz, Simon is convinced that the two worlds can be merged. Called a “museum visionary” by Smithsonian magazine, Nina Simon and her staff—one of whom moved here from Sweden solely for the chance to learn from her—have transformed downtown’s Museum of Art and History (MAH) from a traditional and largely unknown museum into a thriving, active hub for the entire city of Santa Cruz by asking one question: “How do we take what makes participation work on the web and embed it into a physical space?”  Creators vs. Critics In her book, The Participatory Museum, Simon references a study by Forrester Research, which found that online audiences participate in five different ways. There are “creators” who produce content, “critics” who rate and review, “collectors” who organize and aggregate links, “joiners” who maintain accounts on sites like Facebook, and “spectators” who read blogs and watch YouTube videos.  It is no surprise that there are far more “spectators,” “joiners” and “critics” than there are “creators.” Not everyone wants to be front and center, and thankfully that’s not the only way to participate. Take YouTube for example. “While I agree that museums should not focus on showcasing videos of cats doing silly things, as a platform,” Simon writes, “YouTube is an extraordinary service…your participation as a view affects the status of each video in the system. Just by watching, you are an important participant.” With an understanding of what works on the web, Simon has refocused the goals of the MAH and turned it into a warm, interactive place. The success of the museum since she became executive director in May 2011 is staggering. Attendance more than doubled in her first year, rocketing from 17,349 up to 37,361 visitors. “Nationally, 10 percent growth in attendance is considered astronomical growth in a museum,” says Simon, “and so to have 120 percent growth is just totally wild.”  Rocket Science—With Puppets! Lacking an art history background, Simon instead studied engineering and math in college. She began her career at NASA, engineering prototypes for remote sensing of the Earth’s surface. In her spare time she volunteered at a science museum, doing electronics workshops and puppet shows about math. She eventually left the lucrative job at NASA to pursue museum work full time—a scary decision, especially considering her first museum job after NASA paid seven dollars an hour, and Simon was indeed scared. But she didn’t let that stop her. “It’s not that she’s less worried or intimidated than anyone else at the start of a new challenge, but that she is very determined that she’s gonna overcome that,” says her husband Sibley. “If she needs to change then she will change and learn something new. She has a very strong can-do spirit.” Her engineering brain stayed with her through the career change, and today she successfully uses the tools of prototyping, data-driven experimentation and what she calls “the engineering design cycle” to get back-of-the-room people like me to participate at her museum. And participate they do. People are so involved at the MAH that Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Downtown Association Chip says that audiences not only participate at the museum, they create it. “Nina has been brilliant in that she’s not programming [the museum]. She’s got an amazing staff, and they’re not programming it either. The community is programming the museum,” he says. Sweatshirt Storytelling If Santa Cruz is orchestrating the MAH, it’s safe to say that Simon is the conductor. In an afternoon spent at the museum with her—the careful engineering quietly influencing each participatory exercise, each community member contribution—this becomes clearer and clearer. In her office, which features an entire wall covered in comment cards from the MAH’s visitors, she pulls a blue Post-It note off her computer monitor. “Kept her sweatshirt forever,” it reads. A museum attendee wrote that as a contribution to part of an exhibition called “Love Gone Wrong” in spring of 2012. The staff at the MAH painted a broken heart on the wall with a prompt that said, “After the breakup I…” They left a bunch of Post-Its and pencils and let people finish the sentence. After the breakup I kept her sweatshirt forever. “I keep a lot of things people have made, but this is one of my favorites,” says Simon. “We can’t write a label that tells this story.” But the appearance of that poetic Post-It wasn’t just dumb luck. At a staff meeting prior to the event, she and her staff each wrote a question related to breakups on a piece of paper. Then they passed the papers around and answered each other’s questions. “When you look at the answers it becomes pretty obvious that some questions are good, and some questions are shitty,” Simon says. “We think a lot about how we design these prompts. You start to realize pretty quickly that everybody has good stories in them… And it’s my job as the designer of the space and the experience to figure out what kind of framework I can give you so that you can bring your best, most interesting self forward.” One floor below Simon’s office, painter/sculptor Thomas Campbell is working on a behemoth 75-foot long mural, which won’t be finished for several weeks. But that’s precisely the point—his painting is intended to showcase the process of creating art, thereby making it more approachable. (It was part of the museum’s “Work in Progress” exhibit in March.) Since starting the project, Campbell has played host to a number of school groups, and has tried to instill in them the essence of the MAH: “The first thing I say when school groups come in is, ‘Are you guys artists?’ Pretty much they’ll all say, ‘I don’t know!’ Then I say, ‘So do you guys all do art?’ And they say, ‘Yeah, of course.’ And then I say, ‘That means you’re an artist! You’re artists! Making art is being an artist!’ “Everyone’s an artist until they stop being one,” he adds. Simon nods grandly at this. “I feel like what you’re talking about is what we’re trying to do on a big picture. Saying, ‘Yeah, you are creating, you’re not just here to look at stuff.’” On our way out of Campbell’s gallery she points out an arrangement of three couches and a coffee table in the hallway, saying there used to be a “scary desk” there instead. “We are always about incremental progress,” she says. “We had people donate furniture. Is it the most gorgeous thing it could be? No. But people want to sit down and have a social experience, and it’ll keep getting better.” Unfinished Products “A traditional museum approaches exhibits by saying, ‘We’ll design it. We’ll build it. We’ll open it. And then we’ll see at that point if it works.’ That’s not what we do. We say, ‘Let’s figure out a prototype we can make with just cardboard and some printouts, and let’s take it out onto the floor with visitors to test.’ We’re really comfortable bringing out things that are unfinished and not worrying that everything has to be perfect,” Simon says.   The MAH wasn’t always this way, though. Before she came on board, Simon says the museum “was seen as a cold place. It was seen as a place where not a lot was happening. It was seen as a stuffy place. It was seen as a traditional place.” The museum’s board decided they wanted to cultivate more of a welcoming environment for the community to gather and participate. Simon, who was doing consulting at museums across the globe, was the right woman for the job. Hiring Simon was “a really big moment for the museum and community in terms of the role of museums,” says the Downtown Association’s Chip. He calls what she did at the MAH “revolutionary,” and has been pleased to see how the museum’s makeover impacted Santa Cruz’s monthly First Friday events. “When Nina came on board, right away they were open for First Fridays. They started stepping up and really participating and being active…The museum has played a huge role in First Friday’s growth. A lot of people have the idea, ‘It’s First Friday, let’s go start at the museum, and then we can fan out from there to all over town.’ There’s a certain gravity that has been really valuable to First Friday,” he says. First Friday night events are by far the MAH’s most popular, generally drawing crowds of close to 2,000. Regular weekday attendance is rarely more than eight or ten people. In addition, the MAH holds themed Third Friday events and is open late on second and fourth Fridays, too. Third Fridays are organized by the museum’s Director of Community Programs, Stacey Marie Garcia, and usually bring in between 300 and 500 visitors. For every Third Friday event, Garcia works with anywhere from 30 to 150 different organizations that come together to create themed events with dozens of stations for people to participate. Because of the MAH’s growing reputation as a hub for the community, more and more artists and organizations are coming to the MAH, asking how they can get involved in producing a Friday night event. “Last year we had a woman named Anna Pollack come in and say that there’s this issue about the bee population depleting and she would love to raise awareness about that. So she worked with us to design this entire event around the idea. We showed the bee film, we had bee keepers come in—they stayed in a case, so it was good—we did some activities with encaustics using wax,” Garcia says.   Garcia met Simon while in art history graduate school in Sweden. Simon came to lecture the same day she got the job at the MAH. Garcia immediately asked if she needed an intern, and followed her to Santa Cruz. She has since been hired full time. “I came because I knew [Simon] is doing innovative things in the museum world right now and making huge steps. I wanted to learn from that,” she says. “It’s unique to work in an organization where your boss is pushing you to do the wildest and craziest thing you can. I think that’s why we’ve been successful in certain areas—because we take risks.”  Let It Burn The biggest risk they’ve taken, says Garcia, was last spring’s Glow/Fire Festival. Burning Man artists approached the MAH about doing a fire festival. “Go for it,” said Simon, and Garcia set about coordinating with the city, the fire department and, of course, the artists to ensure the event was a success. It was, and they have another one planned for October 2013. Garcia has been consistently impressed by the community’s contributions, dedicating time to participate in and organize events. “It takes a lot of dedication and drive. We’re lucky. We’re really lucky. Nina’s been a big driver in that. She really changed the way the community viewed the museum and the way the museum viewed the community, too.”
Article reposted with permission from Santa Cruz Weekly.

I'm in Milan for the ifbookthen conference. Corriere della Serra (the leading Italian newspaper) asked me for an opinion piece they could publish in La Lettura, their weekly magazine, on the occasion of the meeting. This is what I gave...

Sometimes opportunities presents themselves out of the blue. When I was asked to give a lecture on social media in emergency settings at the Master of Disaster Management at University of Copenhagen, I didn’t quite feel like an expert on the topic (as I wrote about in an earlier post). But it did not take much research to realised that the combination of social media and disaster/emergency management is super interesting and an example of how social media can play a role in saving lives. It doesn’t get much more public health relevant than that.

Both preparing for the lecture and teaching was a good experience, and I feel I managed in the 3×45 minutes available to get around the topic in a comprehensive way – although with that time frame it can only be an introduction. In addition, I got great feedback from the students who, coming from all over the world, had different experiences with dealing with disasters, which they could contribute with in the discussions.

More than communicating a message

Social Media & Crisis Comm: A Whole New Game

In my experience the first (and sometimes only) thing that comes people’s mind when they think of what social media can be used for in emergency settings is dissemination of information and messages to the public. Social media are simply categorized as yet another communication channel equal to radio, tv etc. But as it is well illustrated in the YouTube video on the right (click the picture) it is much more than that.

With this experience it was important for me in my lecture to highlight some of the other key functions of social media in disasters. Below are four broad categories for the potential use of social media in emergency situations. There are surely other ways social media can be used and as said the four below are quite broad and thus covers lots of sub-functions.

1. Disseminate disaster information to the public by governments, emergency management organisations, and disaster responders
2. Share disaster information with the aim of having journalists and others pick it up so that it can be further disseminated to the affected members of the public
3. Communicate and enter into dialogue with the public, other institutions etc.
4. Gather information about the emergency by monitoring the situation, identifying areas of need and picking up rumours and misunderstandings.

Safe & Well

One advantage of teaching (and of blogging) is that you get so much feedback and suggestions for new things to read, websites to visit etc. I thought I’d share two of these tips with you. The first is a website that a student in the class recommended. It is called Safe & Well and is provided by the American Red Cross. The idea is that after a disaster, people in the affected area can through this website let their family and friends know that they are safe and well. By clicking the button “List Myself as Safe and Well” you register on the site. Relatives can then search the list of those who have registered themselves as “safe and well” by clicking on the “Search Registrants” button. The results of a successful search will display a loved one’s first name, last name and a brief message.

Facebook and extreme weather events

My previous post on social media and disaster management was commented by a researcher from Aarhus University, Andreas Birkbak, who had authored an interesting article about the use of Facebook for informal emergency collaboration during a snow blizzard on the Island of Bornholm in Denmark. A very interesting article that I might use next time I teach. Read the article your self: Crystallizations in the Blizzard: Contrasting Informal Emergency Collaboration In Facebook Group. Thanks for sharing it on the blog, Andreas!

Take home messages

As said, I have quickly come to find social media and disaster management is a very interesting topic and I have a feeling I’ll continue digging deeper into it. This will probably result in more posts on the topic here on this blog, so I think I’ll stop for now. As I ended my lecture I will also end this blog post – with four take home messages:

• Social media is there in the world and will be used in disaster situations whether you like it or not – you can’t afford to disregard it!
• Social media can (and should) be used for much more than dissemination – take advantage of its possibilities to monitor and get into dialogue!
• Social media is not just a tool for you – it is also a tool for the people affected by the disaster – victims as well as relatives
• When working with disaster management don’t hold back from social media because you’re afraid of making mistakes, because you will make mistakes – just make sure you learn from them!

Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece
in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! project. It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement... so I was intrigued when I heard about a recent success from Jeffrey Inscho, Web and Digital Media Manager at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. In this guest post, Jeffrey shares the story behind their big hit with a visitor co-created exhibition.

Several months ago, a cross-departmental group of staffers at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh got together to explore ways the museum could become more flexible, nimble and interactive with respect to way we engage audiences, both on-site and online. The result of those meetings and brainstorming sessions recently manifested itself in our Forum Gallery as an experimental photography project called Oh Snap! Your Take on Our Photographs.

Project Background I don't want to get lost in the weeds with respect to the mechanics and back-end details, but I think it's important to include some context about the project so we can effectively explore what's working and what's not. At its core, Oh Snap! is a project that lets real-world and virtual visitors share their work in our gallery. The museum selected and is featuring 13 works recently added to our photography collection. Each work was specifically chosen for its potential to inspire creative responses. We then invited people to submit their own photographic responses (via the web) inspired by one of the 13 works from the project.

Each day, the museum prints out new submitted photographs and hangs them alongside their inspirations in the gallery. When a participant's work is selected, we let them know via email when it will be on view, and send out a free admission pass so they can visit their submission in the museum.
It's a bit complicated to explain in writing, but this video does a good job of summarizing the project.

We're seeing tons of excitement around this project and a huge level of participation, especially for a museum just dipping its toe in the waters of open authority. Since the project launch on February 21, we've received 685 submissions from participants across the United States, Europe and South America.

Here are some reasons why I think Oh Snap! is killing it:

We See Participants as Partners The thesis of Oh Snap! hinges on the ideas experimentation, uncertainty and partnership. We opened the gallery with empty walls (save the 13 collection works) and it could have very well stayed that way until the project closes in April. We took a HUGE risk when we trusted our audience to help us create something cool, not only on the web, but in a museum.

A website can fail softly, however there's no avoiding the awkwardness if we open a gallery and have nothing on the walls for several months. I think participants realize that we're relying on them to make this work.

We Make it Easy Another key to the success of the project is that we lowered the barrier of entry for participants. Graphically, both on-site and online, the project is very inviting. Warm purple tones invite curiosity and modern iconography convey relevance to a younger, digitally-connected demographic.

We built a responsive website that renders elegantly across all devices and capitalizes on user impulse by allowing participants to submit photos instantly from their mobile phone or tablet's camera roll, as well as desktop computers. We also developed the site so each submitted photo had its own URL and threaded comment stream so discussions could take place around the submitted works. Social integrations are important so we infused easy sharing via Facebook and Twitter wherever possible.

When early feedback indicated users were confused about the submission process, we fine-tuned our language and quickly produced a promo video that distills the complete process in a hilarious 2-minute story.

In the gallery, we hung custom-made Post-It note pads on object title cards so visitors could take a reminder to submit an image with them when they left the gallery. We put couches and a coffee table in the room to entice visitors to spend time with the works and create a comfortable environment.

We did all of this to make it as easy as possible for someone to be a part of the project. We don't have control over whether or not a visitor participates, but we can control the participation environment so it is a delightful experience.

We Blur Digital and Real-World Experiences The biggest difference between Oh Snap! and other crowd-sourced photography projects is the physical manifestation of tactile objects in the gallery. Too often, projects like this live exclusively on the web and have no "real-world" presence. We knew from the beginning that this project needed to effectively marry the digital with the real-world, with the goal of blurring lines between the two.

We found humor and fun to be great bridges between the physical and digital environments. From the language used on the website and in automated emails, to the promo video, to the gallery texts and Launch Party, we took every opportunity to infuse fun at every interaction point, be it online or in the gallery. This common thread unifies a multi-platform project like Oh Snap! and creates a consitent experience no matter how or where a user interacts with the project.

We See No Finish Line Finally, and perhaps the most vital component to the success of the project is its unfinished nature. Oh Snap! is truly an "exhibition in beta." It's evolving and living and organic. We can change up the gallery if we need to. We can change the way the website functions or add elements as we need them. We're not locked into a traditional exhibition format and we have the ability to stay nimble.

We've also structured this project so we can maintain an ongoing dialog with participants even after the Oh Snap! gallery closes. When this project is officially over, we'll take what we learned and apply it to the next experiment, hopefully building on the work and insights gained from this project. We're not sure what that next experiment will be, but we're looking forward to trying something new.

If you have a question or comment for Jeffrey and the Oh Snap! team, please share it. Jeffrey will be checking in here over the next couple of weeks to respond.

In the spirit of this weekend’s workshop It’s Not What You Think in Copenhagen, I am posting a few observations from my visit to the Medical Museion last April.

The trip originated from a discussion about a contemporary museum for the blind in Kaunus, Lithuania and what we (the sighted) could learn from an institution that devoted all its energies towards such a radical shift in visitor experience. One of the high-lights of my April visit, therefore, was a tour by Jan Eric Olsén and Emma Peterson to the former Danish Museum of Blind History.

The blind collection was once part of a historic teaching and therapy collection for blind students dating back to 1811. The Medical Museion acquired the entire collection in 2011, and it has just been moved from the basement of the current Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Hellerup (just outside Copenhagen) to the museum’s new storage facilities.

Touch murals in the hallway of the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired

The Blind Institute is a low, sprawling building with long corridors lined with playful, multi-layered touch murals. We experimented with the walls and slowly made our way into a basement museum (now closed), and then we passed an entrance hallway with fairly traditional historical labels and some curious artifacts.

We then entered what could only be called the Pompeii of blind pedagogy – rooms of objects and instruments that had been part of a creative and ambitious effort to teach blind children subjects such as biology, art history, mathematics, literature and manual skills and crafts.

It is a collection with few equals in the world. We looked at many recognizable items that the educators had bought, adapted or made for tactile learning. There were large insects and plants for learning natural history; there were globes for learning geography; there were specialized technologies for writing and calculating.

The visually stimulating environment, however, seemed to dampen the real story here – the essential role of touch in this community. In the spirit of a demonstration for curators, developed by Thomas Söderqvist and Jan Eric Olsén in 2007,  I shut my eyes and proceeded to examine a number of objects by hand. Jan Eric and Emma happily provided an assortment of challenges.

Plaster bust in the former Museum for the Blind History

I post here an excerpt of my ten-minute examination of a plaster bust and my struggles to describe and make sense of it. My favorite part comes near the end when I recognize two nostrils and with them a sense of the bust’s sudden and surprising tactile symmetries. The exercise was not about how inadequate I was at tactile examination, but rather the opposite – how tactile processes are so deeply ingrained, so taken-for-granted, that I had no way to articulate them, get distance from them and think about them. This was liberating. After the bust examination, I was in a room filled with the hidden experiences and culture of touch, making and learning, a vital lesson for work in any collection.

My entire week last April was about experiencing the familiar in new ways. I had the privilege of participating in the opening of Lucy Lyons’s exhibition Experiences of Ageing,where we speed-sketched everyday objects and technologies related to ageing. Instead of passively enjoying Lyons’s exhibition, we were able to comprehend actively the beauty and dignity of these common items.

In the second session, following the lead of artist Mette Bersang, participants photographed overlooked spaces and features throughout the museum. Again, we discovered value in unexpected places. In the next session we explored “fragility” through Joanna Sperryn Jones’s ‘Breaking is Making’. The latter included a visit to the storage room with medieval skeletons from the Æbelholt monastery, followed by the breaking of Jones’s intricately casted, bone-like plaster twigs. The Ageing event was a model for what museums can do best by combining collections, visitors, exhibitions and a unique museum space into a transformative experience.

Ion Meyer holding a glass monaural stethoscope

These activities derive from a diverse, talented community at the Medical Museion that actively engage their proximate and challenging collection. My guide through the collections, Ion Meyer, spoke regularly about the artifacts and their relations to other artifacts, the unique spaces in the Museion building complex, and the events and exhibitions that take place there. Each object can be seen in the material, medical or collection context, but of equal importance is the immediate presence and multiple potentials for display.

You can see this pre-occupation in the Balance and Metabolism exhibition, which has a strong selection and arrangement of artifacts that reflect on the relations and tensions between these two themes in the collections.

At the Medical Museion these approaches have seamlessly moved into contemporary collecting and display. Thomas Söderqvist and Mikael Thorsted‘s installation Genomic Enlightenment illustrates in a simple, powerful presentation of suspended beadchips the sublime within everyday laboratory genomics. Installations and contemporary art often point to new ways of looking at the cultures of science and medicine far better than we do in science museums.

I thoroughly enjoyed bringing these issues and observations together in discussions with Thomas. There is a collective focus at the Medical Museion to take seriously the immediate presence of artifacts, the surprising insights that follow, and the ways we can share these experiences with the public. What emerges is a museum devoted to the direct, creative and unpredictable dynamic between visitors and a collection.

Two weeks ago, Roberto Bedoya asked several arts bloggers, including me, to write a post reflecting on Whiteness and its implications for the arts. I am in no way an expert in issues related to racial and ethnic representation in the arts. I write this piece in good faith about the organizations I know best: museums.

As a feminist, when I really think about this issue, I realize that it's not solely one of Whiteness. It is one of privilege, and so for the most part, I'm going to cast it in that way.

The vast majority of American museums are institutions of white privilege. They tell histories of white male conquest. They present masterpieces by white male artists and innovations by white male scientists. The popular reference point for what a museum is--a temple for contemplation--is based on a Euro-centric set of myths and implies a white set of behaviors. Other reference points for museums--as community centers, as place-based narrative vehicles, as social or performance spaces--are suspect and often branded as "unprofessional."

Three quick lenses on Whiteness and privilege in museums:

1. Whiteness is in the language we use to describe the objects that we show and the programs we produce. When non-white stories are told, they are always flagged as such--an exhibition of Islamist scientific inventions or women pioneers or African-American artists. I will never forget walking through a major art institution in San Francisco and being shocked by the fact that artwork in the African and Oceanic sections was often labeled with modifiers like "beautiful,"--words intended to legitimize that only exacerbated the sense that these objects were not legitimate artworks in their own right. I never saw comparable adjectives used in the European art labels at the museum. I remember a photography exhibition in Boston where one photograph of three young ballerinas was labeled with their names. A second image, of three ballerinas with Down Syndrome, were labeled with their difference. The message, when museums produce targeted campaigns or events or exhibitions for non-white audiences is: we acknowledge you as others in our midst. Not as humans, or artists, or scientists, or dancers. As others.
2. Whiteness is in the way professionals react to non-white projects. I wrote an angry response post two years ago to Edward Rothstein's New York Times denunciation of "identity museums" as inappropriately attention-seeking and "me"-oriented. As if every white museum is not itself an "identity museum" of the privileged, white "me." The insidious thing about privilege is the opportunity to stop using a modifier like "identity" or "white" and instead refer to your culture as canonical.
3. Whiteness is in the behaviors we expect of our visitors, volunteers, and staff members. I recall one particularly ugly incident in St. Louis in which museum marketers required staff members to delink a signature youth program's web presence from the main site because the kids involved were "too black" for the brand image of the institution. Just last month, there was the story of the low-income family kicked out of a Paris museum for being "too smelly." Privilege sanctions white institutions to make ugly assumptions and choices at cross-purposes to their messages about diversity and inclusivity.

The white privilege frame distorts the extent to which museums can represent and reflect the diversity of humanity. This distortion is not merely political or theoretical. The sad irony is that the Whiteness of museums is crippling their future--not just for multi-racial or marginalized audiences, but for everyone. When the NEA reports twenty years of declining participation in traditional arts institutions, it's not portraying a mass exodus of African-American and Latino audiences. It's talking about white people. One of the odd artifacts of white privilege is the privilege to ignore the fact that an increasing percentage of white people don't find museums relevant.

The "temple for contemplation" construct is the most damaging myth about museums in existence today. It doesn't match actual visitor behavior (most people visit museums in groups and self-report that their social experience is one of the top three reasons for their enjoyment of the museum). It doesn't match visitor motivation (John Falk's extensive visitor identity research has shown that "spiritual pilgrimage" fits a small minority of visit motivations). It doesn't match arts engagement preferences for active, social experiences. And yet it looms in the popular culture, preventing would-be participants of all backgrounds from discovering the ways that a museum visit can fulfill other identity-related needs.

Unsurprisingly, the museums that are bucking these trends are those that have embraced a different reference point: one of an interactive, educational, social experience. I'm talking about zoos, aquaria, science centers, and children's museums--all of which do a much better job supporting and stewarding diverse participation than traditional art, history, and science museums. These museums offer more inclusive experiences, and they reach broader audiences.

The most galling artifact of white privilege in museums is expressed in their extreme reluctance to confront the reality of increasing irrelevance. Only an organization in the most privileged position could experience declining participation and argue that its relevance is increased because of its relative rarity. Only an organization suffering from extreme delusion and a healthy endowment could dismiss inclusive forms of engagement as "pandering." I have worked with white museums in majority-black cities that are neither willing nor forced to accept the fact that they are not representative of their communities. The fact that a city or state history museum could blithely disenfranchise the majority of its citizens is shocking. And it's made possible because of the privileged position of Whiteness.

How is this discussion different in 2013 than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when the "diversity wars" were raging at museums and other arts institutions? When I look back on debates and writings from that time, the statements about inclusion and fairness are just as apt as if they were written today. The difference, I think, is two-fold:

1. On the positive side, there is more data, and therefore more arsenal, to mount an argument that the position of Whiteness and privilege in traditional museums and arts institutions is unrepresentative of our entire population's interests and needs. Shifting ideas about authority, access to information, and arts participation crosses racial, socio-economic, and generational boundaries. White privilege is becoming increasingly antiquated and indefensible. 
2. On the negative side, increased efforts at inclusion have been treated primarily as add-ons and not as necessary changes to the heart of white institutions. Now, when asked about diversity, most white institutions can point to a particular program or initiatives and say, "we've got that covered." In the worst cases, demographically-targeted programs can be used as fundraising shills ("poverty pimping") to protect the white privilege machine that most of the budget fuels. The overall result is that white museums are grossly unprepared to meet the challenge of dramatic shifts in demographics and cultural engagement interests. They've added colorful patches to their garments when the whole cloth needs to change. 

I am a white woman. I cannot change my race or gender. What I can do is acknowledge the privileged frame which I have been granted, and try with humility and openness to relentlessly challenge and expand it. I feel this is something that we have to do both personally and institutionally to make our organizations as relevant and essential as possible.

Have an interest STS and/or digital methods? Curious as to what they are and what the fuss is all about? Want to explore Copenhagen by foot? Enjoy beer? If you answered yes to any of these, then come and take part in the digital methods ‘talk-walk’ on the 8th of March. The idea comes from STS-talk-walkers in Amsterdam and Oxford, two hotbeds for the study of digital methods. It not only provides a chance to discuss digital methods and STS with people from a variety of backgrounds, but by getting off the bicycles it gives a chance to see Copenhagen at a slower pace, from different angles. You’d be surprised what you can discover by just looking up.

Last month was the first walk where the topic was the ‘Digital’. Questions discussed were: What do we mean by the word ‘digital’ and whether and how it is useful or not? I can’t say that we came to any conclusions, but in a world where more and more of daily life is in some way ‘digital’, it was refreshing to be able to take a step back and discuss some issues that as researchers and society we need to be weary of, lest we take them for granted. This all took place while exploring Islands Brygge and ended up in a pub in Christianshavn.

The next walk is scheduled for this Friday, the 8th of March and the topic will be ‘The Link’. How does the (hyper)link or the so-called tie in a network do associative work? In our own work? In other people’s work? The meeting place is the reception of Aalborg University Copenhagen campus, located in Sydhavnen.

Check out the digital methods walks site for more information about time, place and route.

Twenty years ago Roy Rosenzweig imagined a compelling mission for a new institution: “To use digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” I’ve been incredibly lucky to be a part of that mission for over twelve years, at what became the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, with last five and a half years as director.

Today I am announcing that I will be leaving the center, and my professorship at George Mason University, the home of RRCHNM, but I am not leaving Roy’s powerful vision behind. Instead, I will be extending his vision—one now shared by so many—on a new national initiative, the Digital Public Library of America. I will be the founding executive director of the DPLA.

The DPLA, which you will be hearing much more about in the coming months, will be connecting the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums so that the public can access all of those collections in one place; providing a platform, with an API, for others to build creative and transformative applications upon; and advocating strongly for a public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century. The DPLA will in no way replace the thousands of public libraries that are at the heart of so many communities across this country, but instead will extend their commitment to the public sphere, and provide them with an extraordinary digital attic and the technical infrastructure and services to deliver local cultural heritage materials everywhere in the nation and the world. The DPLA has been in the planning stages for the last few years, but is about to spin out of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and move from vision to reality. It will officially launch, as an independent nonprofit, on April 18 at the Boston Public Library. I will move to Boston with my family this summer to lead the organization, which will be based there. It is such a great honor to have this opportunity.

Until then I will be transitioning from my role as director of RRCHNM, and my academic life at Mason. Everything at the center will be in great hands, of course; as anyone who visits the center immediately grasps, it is a highly collaborative and nonhierarchical place with an amazing staff and an especially experienced and innovative senior staff. They will continue to shape “the future the past,” as Roy liked to put it. I will miss my good friends at the center, but I still expect to work closely with them, since so many critical software initiatives, educational projects, and digital collections are based at RRCHNM. A search for a new director will begin shortly. I will also greatly miss my colleagues in Mason’s wonderful Department of History and Art History.

At the same time, I look forward to collaborating with new friends, both in the Boston office of the DPLA and across the United States. The DPLA is a unique, special idea—you don’t get to build a massive new library every day. It is apt that the DPLA will launch at the Boston Public Library’s McKim Building, with those potent words carved into stone above its entrance: “Free to all.” The architect Charles Follen McKim rightly called it “a palace for the people,” where anyone could enter to learn, create, and be entertained by the wonders of books and other forms of human expression.

We now have the chance to build something like this for the twenty-first century—a rare, joyous possibility in our too-often cynical age. I hope you will join me in this effort, with your ideas, your contributions, your energy, and your public spirit.

Let’s build the Digital Public Library of America together.

In this edition of Digital Campus, Tom, Dan, and Mills (Amanda was on a beach somewhere when we were recording) ventured into strange and wild paths of the Internet previously unknown to us, thereby proving that we are, indeed, old in Internet years. After years of talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, and Wikipedia, we set aside those old school web platforms to examine Pinterest and Tumblr. How might humanists, archivists, librarians, and museum professionals make good use of these sites that had (largely) been off our radar all this time? And we wondered whether the fact that traffic on Pinterest now rivals that on Twitter and the growing evidence that young people are moving away from Facebook to services like Tumblr might mean that those of us in the digital humanities ought to be taking a much closer look at how to best utilize these platforms. We also took a look at the 2012 Digital Humanities Award winners and offered up a few favorites from among the many worthy winners and runners up for those awards.

Links:
Maine Historical Society’s Pinterest site
Alan Jacob’s Tumblr blog
2012 Digital Humanities Awards

Running time: 37:02
Download the .mp3

On Saturday, March 2, I gave a workshop on digital (humanities) pedagogy for a group of about 20 faculty and staff at Gettysburg College.  I was impressed by the participants’ energy, openness, smarts, and playfulness.  We had fun!

I designed the workshop so that it moved through four phases, with the goal of participants ultimately walking away with concrete ideas about how they might integrate digital approaches into their own teaching:

1)  We explored the rationale for digital pedagogy (pdf of slides), discussing what students need to know in the 21st century, different frameworks for digital pedagogy (e.g. learning science, liberal education,  social learning, and studio learning), and definitions of digital pedagogy and the “digital liberal arts.” I started the session with Cathy Davidson’s exercise in which audience members first jot down on an index card three things they think students need to know in order to thrive in the digital age, then share their ideas with someone they didn’t walk in with, and finally work together to select the one key idea. (The exercise got people thinking and talking.)

2)   In the second session, I gave a brief presentation (pdf) offering specific case studies of digital pedagogy in action (repurposing some slides I’d used for previous workshops). Participants then broke up into groups to analyze an assignment used in a digital humanities class.

3)   Next participants worked in small groups to explore one of the following:

•  Visualizing Data
•  Mapping Historical Markers
•  Building Digital Collections & Exhibits with Omeka
•  Doing Things with Text or
  
• Creating Timelines

I structured the exercise so that participants first looked at the particular applications of the tool in teaching and scholarship (e.g. Mapping the Republic of Letters and Visualizing Emancipation in the session on information visualization), then played with a couple of tools in order to understand how they work, and finally reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of each tool and their potential pedagogical applications. I deliberately kept the exercises short and simple, and I tried to make them relevant to Gettysburg, drawing data from Wikipedia and other open sources.

4)   Finally participants worked in small teams (set up according to discipline) to develop an assignment incorporating digital approaches.  We concluded the session with a modified gallery walk, in which people circulated through the room and chatted with a representative of each team to learn more about their proposed assignment.

By the end of the day, workshop participants seemed excited by the possibilities and more aware of specific approaches that they could take (as well as a bit exhausted). I got several questions about copyright, so in future workshops I plan to incorporate a more formal discussion of fair use, Creative Commons and the public domain.

Our workshop drew heavily on materials shared by generous digital humanities instructors. (In that spirit, feel free to use or adapt any of my workshop materials. And I’m happy to give a version of this workshop elsewhere.) My thinking about digital humanities pedagogy has been informed by a number of people, particularly my terrific colleague Rebecca Davis.

Looking around on snopes.com for new examples beyond the same old Gödel-Schmidt and Jonah cases, I found this:

I just finished listening to This American Life's incredible two-part series about gun violence at Harper High School in Chicago. It does everything a great documentary story can do: it takes you into another world, introduces you to unforgettable people, defies expectations, and delivers tough realities instead of fairy tales.
 
I've been consuming a lot of documentary stories recently, primarily through Longform.org, my new favorite go-to nighttime reading source. Longform curates superlative non-fiction from a variety of sites and magazines. It has introduced me to corrupt university fundraisers, the true history of Tom Dooley, and the world's oldest marathon runner... and that's just in the last week.

All this delightful non-fiction makes me wonder: why aren't museums great at telling these same kinds of deep, intense stories? Why are exhibitions, which have huge potential as immersive, multi-platform narrative devices, so rarely used to that effect?

Yes, I know that every platform is different, and that the captive attention we afford to radio, TV, and written material doesn't map perfectly to a free-choice wander through an exhibition. But exhibitions have the potential to use all those narrative tools PLUS objects, immersive design, and interactive experiences to tell stories.

Strangely, exhibitions have become incredibly successful at creating immersive environments that tell broad conceptual stories--but not so good at telling tight, focused stories. I've experienced many excellent thematic exhibitions that gave me an overall sense of a story, but few that really dove into a particular object or incident. This seems strange given that museums are organized around objects. Think about how common it is to see an exhibition on a time period, an artistic genre, or a broad scientific discipline that uses a variety of objects and narrative devices as guideposts along a diffuse journey, and how rare it is to see an in-depth experience around just one object or set of objects, as in Peter Greenaway's extraordinary (and fictionalized) delving into Rembrandt's Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum, or Anne Frank's intimate attic hideout.

Too often we pull our punches by using the weakest storytelling techniques--broad generalizations on 50 word labels, an immersive wading pool of narrative bits. We avoid the incredible power that comes from a deep dive into one object, one story, one moment. Social object theory tells us that the most compelling stories exist around individual objects, but we weaken those stories by throwing too much in the same pot. We justify the tradeoff by arguing that we have to tell the broader story, offer more context, integrate more objects.

But tight doesn't have to mean limited. When we experience intense depth, as in the Minnesota History Center's Open House, which explores the stories of residents of one St. Paul home over time, or the Boston Museum of Science's beautiful theater experience about Nikola Tesla, or an incredible single artist show, it stands out. It's unforgettable. The individuals, the nuance, the specificity--the story tattoos itself on your memory in a way that a generalized exhibition cannot. It leads to more interesting conclusions and motivates further exploration. While the story is tighter, the impact is less prescribed, and more powerful.

One of the most surprising versions of this I have ever experienced was in a very small museum in Texas, the Brazos Valley African American Museum. They had a very simple exhibit of single-page laminated stories, transcribed from oral interviews with elders in the community. I was captivated by these first-person accounts because of their clarity and specificity. They led me to places I never would have gone otherwise. The narrative device was almost nil, and yet the content experience was better than I've had in most exhibitions.

Specificity trumps generality when it comes to creating a powerful documentary story. It's easy to imagine a hard-hitting exhibition on teens and gun violence that might tell a "broader story" than that on This American Life--more statistics, more diverse images and voices from throughout the country, more opportunities to reflect and connect. And yet it wouldn't be as powerful as an exhibition on just one story of one high school. It wouldn't be as deep. It wouldn't be as real. And ultimately (and ironically), it wouldn't have the power to expose the bigger issues in the nuanced way that a tight focus can.

When have you experienced this kind of deep dive in an exhibition? What do you think makes it possible, and what do you think makes it so rare?

Dear Nico,

Last month you turned a year old, and I cheated. This month, I’d best come up with something entertaining and new to write, or else face the possibility that you’ll get bored, stop reading these newsletters, and toddle off into the sunset. Happily, for now you’re still not walking independently, my tiny little captive audience.

We had a birthday party for you, which at this age is mostly a party for everyone else. There were so many everyone-elses that we ended up moving the shindig to a nearby frozen yogurt place. This turned out to be a brilliant idea; there was much merriment, which you took in impressive stride given that it lasted three whole hours. You received many fine gifts, most of them letters that we’ll be requesting every year and saving for later reading. (Thanks for the idea, Offbeat Families!)

Baby NAZ, the love you engender in your social world is astonishing. Your first birthday had to be moved out of the house because so many people wanted to attend. I can only hope that whatever magic you carry today will stay with you in the future. But if it starts to wane, there’s always glitter and frozen yogurt.

(Can it really be that I don’t have a single photo from your birthday party? Yes, it can.)

A small list of ways in which you are barreling towards toddlerhood:

• You’ve entered the stage of using a single word (in this case an emphatic tah) to mean most things for which you would like to have words. These are: fan, light, lamp, cat, dog, [pick me] up, and others. I hear this is a common thing in baby language development.
• The above notwithstanding, you have actual words! This development is recent: the first one emerged this past weekend while we were visiting our friends in New York. Avocado is cacacaca (Mark points out: it stands to reason that your first food word is four syllables long). Today you managed to create recognizable versions of apple and stuck.
• Besides all this, in the last few weeks you’ve been holding forth in fairly long conversational tirades. A language explosion is just around the corner, or already happening, depending on how much the whole “intelligible” thing matters.
• Your hair has gotten long enough that civilized people would trim it. I, of course, am compelled to clip it away from your face and let it grow out a bit. Did you know that there are no baby-safe hair clips? Choking hazards, all of them.
• One morning a couple of weeks ago I left you sitting in the middle of the living room while I went to pack up the lunch bag. I returned to find you standing on the other side of the coffee table from where you had been, holding on to it and looking at me, all, what? Yeah, I pull myself up now. No big deal. Since then you’ve been practicing pulling yourself up on the big bed every morning, holding on to the headboard, prompting grim visions of you tumbling off the bed on the side where the foam bumpers aren’t.
• Speaking of heart attacks, knowing that your newly found interest in climbing stairs (carpeted and bare) is healthy doesn’t stop me from wishing sometimes I could superglue you to the floor until you’re eighteen.
• Oh gods, the preferences. You know a lot more about what you want, and of course don’t have the language to get it yet, so you do this point-and-whine thing. We’ve stepped up your exposure to sign language, because babe, the whining a thing I can take only in small doses. Happily, you seem on board with the sign language, and you practice too.

Last weekend we got in a car with Mark and Eleanor and drove due west, into New York, to visit Sianna and her kids. The weekend getaway was perfect—a sprawling farmhouse, glorious homey food, a dance party in the living room, and a museum floor full of big boxes. You sat inside your very own tiny fort for something like half an hour, exploring the adhesive properties of duct tape.

There’s more, always, but it’s time for sleep.

Love,
-Mama

(ps more pix, and videos)

Ngoni Munyaradzi is a Master's student in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, working on a research project on the transcription of the Digital Bleek and Lloyd collection. He kindly agreed to an interview over email, which I present below:

Your website does an excellent job explaining the background and motivation of Transcribe Bleek and Lloyd.  Can you tell us more about the field notebooks you are transcribing?

The Digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection is composed of dictionaries, artwork and notebooks documenting stories about the earliest inhabitants of Southern Africa, the Bushman people. The notebooks were written by Wilhelm Bleek, his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek (Wilhelm's daughter) in the 19th century, with the help of a number of Bushmen people who were prisoners in the Western Cape region of South Africa at the time. The notebooks were recorded in the |Xam and !Kun languages and English translations of these languages are available in the notebooks.

Link to the collection: http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like at least in the case of |Xam, you are working with one of the only representatives of an extinct language. Are there any standard data models for these kinds of vocabularies/bilingual texts which you're using?

There are no complete models - the best known models are still only partial.

I suspect that I'm not alone in wondering why these Bushman people were prisoners during the writing of these texts. Can you tell us a bit more about the Bleek/Lloyd informants, or point us to resources on the subject?

The bushman people were prisoners because of petty crimes and a grossly unfair colonial government.  On the Bleek and Lloyd website there is a story on each contributor.  There is information in various books on the subject as well, but I am not sure there is more that is known than what is on the website. see:
http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/xam.html
http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/kun.html

This is the first transcription project I'm aware of using the Bossa Crowd Create platform. What are the factors that led you to choose that platform and what's been your experience setting it up?

In 2011 when our project began Bossa was the most mature opensource crowdsourcing framework that was tailored for volunteer projects available. Due to this Bossa suited well with the project's requirements. The alternative crowdsourcing frameworks available at the time used payment methods.

Setting up the Bossa framework was a relatively straight-forward task. The documentation online is very thorough and with examples of how to set-up test applications. I also got assistance from David Anderson the developer of Bossa.

The Bushman writing system seems extremely complex with it's special characters and multiple diacritics. I see that you are using LaTeX macros to encode these complexities. Why did you decide on LaTeX and what has been the user response to using that notation?

So the project is part of ongoing research related to the Bleek and Lloyd Collection within our Digital Libraries Laboratory at the University of Cape Town. Credit for developing the encoding tool goes to Kyle Williams. And the reason why he chose to use LaTeX was that; using custom LaTeX macros allowed for both the problem of the encoding and visual rendering of the text to be solved in a single step. Developing a unique font for the Bushman script is something we might look at in the future!

Here's a link to a paper published on the encoding tool developed by Kyle Williams: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-24826-9_28

Overall the user feedback has been good, as most users are able to complete transcriptions using the LaTeX macros. We have gotten suggestions from users to use glyphs to encode the complexities. Currently the scope of my masters research project does not include that. There are talks in our research group to develop a unique font to represent the |Xam and !Kun languages, as this is not supported by Unicode.

User 1 Comment: "I think the palette handles the complexity of the character set very well. This material is inherently difficult to transcribe. The tool has, on the whole, been well thought out to meet this challenge. I think it needs to be improved in some ways, but considering the difficulties it is remarkably well done."

User 2 Comment: "VERY intuitive, after a few practice transcriptions. I actually enjoyed using the tool after a page was done."

This is incredibly useful. So far as I'm aware, yours is only the third crowdsourced transcription project that's surveyed users seriously (after the North American Bird Phenology Project and Transcribe Bentham). Do you have any advice on collecting user feedback at such an early stage?

Collecting user feedback in the early stages will tremendously help project administrators determine whether the setup of the project is easy to follow for participants. One can easily pick up any hindrances to user participation and address these early. From our project, I've found that participants can actually suggest very helpful ideas that will make the data collection process better.

Crowdsourced citizen science and cultural heritage projects have mostly been based in the USA, Northern Europe and Australia until recently -- in fact, yours is the first that I'm aware of originating in sub-Saharan Africa. I'd really like to know which projects inspired your work with Transcribe Bushman, and what your hopes are for crowdsourced transcription projects focusing on Africa?

Our work was mostly inspired by the success of GalaxyZoo at recruiting volunteers, and also the Transcribe Bentham project that explored the feasibility of volunteers performing transcription. I hope that more crowdsourced transcription projects will start-up within Africa in the near future. What would be interesting is to see a transcription project for the Timbuktu manuscripts of Mali. Beyond transcription, I would like to see other researchers adopting crowdsourcing in fields of specialty within Africa.

Thanks so much for this interview. If people want to help out on the project, what's the best way for them to contribute?

Interested participants can simply:

1. Create an account on the project website.
2. Watch a 5 minute video tutorial on how to transcribe the Bushman languages.
3. With that, you are ready to start transcribing pages.