You are hereMuseum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
We're all looking at the stars: citizen science projects at ZooCon13
open objects - mia ridge - June 29, 2013 - 12:57pm
Last Saturday I escaped my desk to head to the Physics department at the University of Oxford and be awed by what we're learning about space (and more terrestrial subjects) through citizen science projects run by Zooniverse at ZooCon13. All the usual caveats about notes from events apply – in particular, assume any errors are mine and that everyone was much more intelligent and articulate than my notes make them sound. These notes are partly written for people in cultural heritage and the humanities who are interested in the design of crowdsourcing projects, and while I enjoyed the scientific presentations I am not even going to attempt to represent them! Chris Lintott live-blogged some of the talks on the day, so check out 'Live from ZooCon' for more. If you're familiar with citizen science you may well know a lot of these examples already – and if you're not, you can't really go wrong by looking at Zooniverse projects.
Aprajita Verma kicked off with SpaceWarps and 'Crowd-sourcing the Discovery of Gravitational Lenses with Citizen Scientists'. She explained the different ways gravitational lenses show up in astronomical images, and that 'strong gravitational lensing research is traditionally very labour-intensive' – computer algorithms generate lots of false positives, so you need people to help. SpaceWarps includes some simulated lenses (i.e. images of the sky with lenses added), mostly as a teaching tool (to provide more examples and increase familiarity with what lenses can look like) but also to make it more interesting for participants. The SpaceWarps interface lets you know when you've missed a (simulated, presumably) lens as well as noting lenses you've marked. They had 2 million image classifications in the first week, and 8500 citizen scientists have participated so far, 40% of whom have participated in 'Talk', the discussion feature. As discussed in their post 'What happens to your markers? A look inside the Space Warps Analysis Pipeline', they've analysed the results so far on ranges between astute/obtuse and pessimistic/optimistic markers - it turns out most people are astute. Each image is reviewed by ten people, so they've got confidence in the results.
Karen Masters talked about 'Cosmic Evolution in the Galaxy Zoo', taking us back to the first Galaxy Zoo project's hopes to have 30,000 volunteers and contrasting that with subsequent peer-reviewed papers that thanked 85,000, or 160,000 or 200,000 volunteers. The project launched in 2007 (before the Zooniverse itself) to look at spiral vs elliptical galaxies and it's all grown from there. The project has found rare objects, most famously the pea galaxies, and as further proof that the Zooniverse is doing 'real science online', the team have produced 36 peer reviewed paper, some with 100+ citations. At least 50 more papers have been produced by others using their data.
Phil Brohan discussed 'New Users for Old Weather'. The Old Weather project is using data from historic ships logs to help answer the question 'is this climate change or just weather?'. Some data was already known but there's a 'metaphorical fog' from missing observations from the past. Since the BBC won't let him put a satellite in a Tardis, they've been creative about finding other sources to help lift 'the fog of ignorance'. This project has long fascinated me because it started off all about science: in Phil's words, 'when we started all this, I was only thinking about the weather', but ended up being about history as well: 'these documents are intrinsically interesting'– he learnt what else was interesting about the logs from project participants who discovered the stories of people, disasters and strange events that lay within them. The third thing the project has generated (after weather and history) is 'a lot of experts'. One example he gave was evidence of the 1918-19 Spanish flu epidemic on board ship, which was investigated after forum posts about it. There's still a lot to do – more logs, including possibly French and Dutch – to come, and things would ideally speed up 'by a factor of ten'.
In Brooke Simmons' talk on 'Future plans for Galaxy Zoo', she raised the eternal issue of what to call participants in crowdsourcing: 'just call everyone collaborators'. 'Citizen scientists' makes a distinction between paid and unpaid scientists, as does 'volunteers'. She wants to help people do their own science, and they're working on making it easier than downloading and learning how to use more complicated tools. As an example, she talked about people collecting 'galaxies with small bulges' and analysing the differences in bulges (like a souped-up Galaxy Zoo Navigator?). She also talked about Zoo Teach, with resources for learning at all ages.
After the break we learnt about 'The Planet 4 Invasion', the climate and seasons of Mars from Meg Schwamb and about Solar Stormwatch in 'Only you can save planet Earth!' from Chris Davis, who was also presenting research from his student Kim Tucker-Wood (sp?). Who knew that solar winds could take the tail off a comet?!
Next up was Chris Lintott on 'Planet Hunting with and without Kepler'. Science communication advice says 'don't show people graphs', and since Planet Hunters is looking at graphs for fun, he thought no-one would want to do Planet Hunters. However, the response has surprised him. And 'it turns out that stars are actually quite interesting as well'. In another example of participants going above and beyond the original scope of the project, project participants watched a talk streamed online on 'heartbeat binaries', and went and found 30 of them from archives, their own records and posted them on the forum. Now a bunch of Planet Hunters are working with Kepler team to follow them up. (As an aside, he showed a screenshot of a future journal paper - the journal couldn't accept the idea that you could be a Planet Hunter and not be part of an academic team so they're listed as the Department of Astronomy at Yale.)
The final speaker was Rob Simpson on 'The Future of the Zooniverse'. To put things in context, he said the human race spends 16 years cumulatively playing the game Angry Birds every day; people spend 2 months every day on the Zooniverse. In the past year, the human race spent 52 years on the Zooniverse's 15 live projects (they've had 23 projects in total). The Andromeda project went through all their data in 22 days - other projects take longer, but still attract dedicated people. In the Zooniverse's immediate future are 'tools for (citizen) scientists' - adding the ability to do analysis in the browser, 'because people have a habit of finding things, just by being given access to the data'. They're also working on 'Letters' - public versions of what might otherwise be detailed forum posts that can be cited, and as a form of publication, it puts them 'in the domain'. They're helping people communicate with each other and embracing their 'machine overlords', using Galaxy Zoo as a training tool for machine learning. As computers get more powerful, the division of work between machines and people will change, perhaps leaving the beautiful, tricky, or complex bits for humans. [Update, June 29, 2013: Rob's posted about his talk on the Zooniverse blog, '52 Years of Human Effort', and corrected his original figure of 35 years to 52 years of human effort.]
At one point a speaker asked who in the room was a moderator on a Zooniverse project, and nearly everyone put their hand up. I felt a bit like giving them a round of applause because their hard work is behind the success of many projects. They're also a lovely, friendly bunch, as I discovered in the pub afterwards.
Conversations in the pub also reminded me of the flipside of people learning so much through these projects - sometimes people lose interest in the original task as their skills and knowledge grow, and it can be tricky to find time to contribute outside of moderating. After a comment by Chris at another event I've been thinking about how you might match people to crowdsourcing projects or tasks - sometimes it might be about finding something that suits their love of the topic, or that matches the complexity or type of task they've previously enjoyed, or finding another unusual skill to learn, or perhaps building really solid stepping stones from their current tasks to more complex ones. But it's tricky to know what someone likes - I quite like transcribing text on sites like Trove or Notes from Nature, but I didn't like it much on Old Weather. And my own preferences change - I didn't think much of Ancient Lives the first time I saw it, but on another occasion I ended up getting completely absorbed in the task. Helping people find the right task and project is also a design issue for projects that have built an 'ecosystem' of parts that contribute to a larger programme, as discussed in 'Using crowdsourcing to manage crowdsourcing' in Frequently Asked Questions about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and 'A suite of museum metadata games?' in Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections.
An event like ZooCon showed how much citizen science is leading the way - there are lots of useful lessons for humanities and cultural heritage crowdsourcing. If you've read this thinking 'I'd love to try it for my data, but x is a problem', try talking to someone about it - often there are computational techniques for solving similar problems, and if it's not already solved it might be interesting enough that people want to get involved and work with you on it.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Social Media, Citizen Media, Online Tools Are Shaping Brazil’s Protests and Politics
Digital Media and Learning - June 28, 2013 - 4:05pm
What started earlier this month as a protest against the cost of public transportation has spread like wildfire across Brazil. One estimate said protests have taken place in 430 cities. The range of issues has grown too, including education reform, high taxes, healthcare and public corruption. I’m not sure there has ever been so much discussion about the country by so many people using social media – and it has created some instability for the government.
To begin to understand the story that is unfolding, two colleagues, Fabio Malini from the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo and Marco Bastos from London School of Economics and Political Science, and I started to monitor and collect online data about the protests and begin to conduct an analysis. It’s raw and events are still unfolding but I want to share some of the data in this post.
On June 17 and 18, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Brazil, especially in cities where games of the Confederation Cup were being held.
While the vast majority were peaceful protesters, there were clashes with police, and several people were beaten and arrested without a clear cause. Stories of people being attacked by police spread via social media and traditional media. The stories about police violence inflamed people all the more. Several hashtags emerged. Memes about the prohibition of "vinegar" (vinegar inhibits the effects of tear gas and the police started arresting anyone who was carrying vinegar) began trending. Fabio Malini explained part of this "battle of vinegar" in this post.
From the beginning, social media has played a key role. People have used Twitter to narrate the protests and to share how best to take precautions for personal safety. I plotted two graphs with the hashtag #protestoRJ used by Rio de Janeiro protesters during the June 18 event. The first graph (below) is from the beginning of the demonstration and the second one, more dense, shows activity at the height of the protest. They show how much people were Tweeting about the protest, taking pictures, creating videos, and spreading them online.
As the number of protesters expanded and the volume of online activity grew, the focus of people’s demands shifted from anger about public transportation to more general complaints – for example "more health,” "more education," and "stop corruption.” At the same time, several competing groups started countering the protests with their own issues. Mainstream media started criticizing the loss of focus.
In response to the many competing demands, several groups used social media to organize (and focus) the citizens’ demands. “Anonymous Brazil” created a video that quickly went viral, proposing five points for the protests to focus on. Facebook groups popped up, articulating proposals and priorities. New words and calls to action started to appear in social media, such as "impeachment” and "get Dilma out (the president).” For some, the president became the focal point and many people started criticizing her government and her party's politics.
As the protests escalated, so did the violence. On June 20, while more than one million people were in the streets in several cities in Brazil, protesters in Brasilia (the country’s capital) broke into the Itamaraty Palace and set fire to the building (The Itamaraty is the headquarters of the Ministry of External Relations in Brazil). Other cities also saw a night of violence and rioting. Even though most of the violence was carried out by small groups, it had a strong impact on media coverage.
On June 21, president Dilma Rousseff made her first official remarks on TV and radio to talk about the people’s demands. She was short on details and mostly emphasized how open she was to meeting with the leaders of the protests. The president also condemned the violence and riots. While the president addressed the nation, several people started using the hashtag "#tamojuntoDilma" (we are with you, Dilma) and it started trending quickly on Twitter. On Facebook, several posts had the result of changing the focus of people’s anger from the president to Brazil’s congress. Quickly, online criticism of the president lost intensity. (Below is a graph I plotted from 18,000 tweets that used the tag #tamojuntodilma during her address. You can see, in the middle, the efforts of a small group of Tweeters who published and retweet messages supporting the president).
Here is another graph of some 5,000 tweets collected at the same time, with the tag #CalaABocaDilma – “shut up, Dilma” – which shows a less connected group and a more diluted focus and effectiveness:
Ever since, the intensity of the protests has eroded. Marco Toledo Bastos, a Brazilian researcher from London University who also has been working with me and Fabio Malini monitoring the protests, has data on his blog about some of the most used hashtags on Twitter and how the volume of traffic dropped sharply after the pro-Dilma messaging efforts.
With protests still taking place in the streets, both violent and peaceful, Dilma again addressed the nation on June 24. During this pronouncement, she proposed five "pacts" to address a portion of the protesters’ demands with the Congress, the state governors and major cities’ mayors: 1) a pledge to spend $50 million to improve public transportation; 2) a pact for a better education system; she endorsed the idea that 100% of the country’s oil royalties could go towards education; 3) a proposal to improve health care by contracting with Cuban doctors (itself a point of controversy); 4) More fiscal responsibility and inflation control; and 5) a proposal for a referendum on political reform (a change in the Brazilian Constitution). Details of how these pacts were to be implemented were not given.
Despite many skeptics, her announcement seems to have had an impact on protesters. Public assemblies started forming to make practical proposals to the government. Many of these assemblies have taken place in the same places where protests are also still happening.
There are indications Brazil’s Congress has been influenced by the events of the week. In recent days, votes on two significant issues indicate that the protesters seem to have been heard. The first vote was about a constitutional amendment that would have resulted in limiting the ability to investigate prosecutors and police for wrongdoing. Its rejection was one of the calls to action in the Anonymous Brazil video, and it was one of the consistent themes in social media and at protests. While this was previously an issue that closely divided the Congress, this time it was strongly rejected by 430 votes against, only nine in favor, and 2 abstentions. The second vote involved the use of oil royalties. While the government had previously not allocated the funds to things like education and health, that’s what the Congress voted to do this time – designating 75 percent of the royalties for education and 25 percent for health services. During the proceedings, many politicians acknowledged "the voice of the streets.”
Banner image credit: Afonso Henrique Menezes Fernandes https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=485431608200711&set=pb.100002016291762.-2207520000.1372445997.&type=3&theater
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 27, 2013 - 5:15pm
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 27, 2013 - 5:15pm
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 27, 2013 - 5:15pm
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 27, 2013 - 5:15pm
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
GardenLab@510
Mattress Factory - June 27, 2013 - 2:22pm
As Pittsburgh moves into warmer and sunnier weather, consider visiting one of the Mattress Factory's outdoor projects: Rose Clancy's GardenLab@510. This summer marks the fourth year that Clancy has worked with abandoned sites neighboring the Mattress Factory. GardenLab@510 is the second of two reclaimed spaces that Clancy has used to explore the relationship between neglect and nurture. Clancy experiments using aspects of archeology, gardening, sculpture, and her personal history. In the spirit of the Mattress Factory's focus on how a site influences how an artwork is developed, Clancy reflected on how her more recent GardenLab@510 has evolved:
Originally, the GardenLabs project began when I transplanted potatoes from a former project to 516. Once GardenLab@516 ended, I made elements of that project portable and moved them to 510. During GardenLab@510's first year, I observed the natural conditions of the site and then worked with those conditions to maximize the success of a garden in that space. I also kept some of the elements that already existed in that space: some plants and some man-made items. In contrast to 516, the garden at 510 is not completely enclosed. This has allowed for more community access: there have been tours, an ArtLab performance with children dressed as bees, and many impromptu conversations with neighbors passing by. As this became apparent to me, I wanted to show appreciation to my neighbors so I grew communal herbs. This year's focus at 510 is on the garden as a studio. I'll be making work in a bean house that will house a workbench. Some of the work that I make could make its way back into the community...
Clancy works with aspects of gardening, but she does not consider herself a gardener. She makes choices in her GardenLabs primarily on how: elements can be metaphors for her personal history, how plants respond to being neglected or nurtured, and also how the community responds to the plants and overall project. While Clancy highlights the conceptual aspects of her GardenLabs, she recognizes that she is working with actual plants in a real neighborhood and that she must be sensitive to how this ecosystem evolves. Her choices affect nature and the neighborhood, and their evolution affects the practical and conceptual choices in her artmaking. Clancy invites visitors to stop by anytime, but encourages people to make more than one trip since the space changes so much from week-to-week.
Check out images of GardenLab@510 on Rose Clancy's Facebook page.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
One Small Step for Detroit, One Giant Leap for Museum Ethics (Maybe)
Museum 2.0 [Nina Simon] - June 26, 2013 - 12:31pm
Over the past three years, the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) has served as the museum poster child for the debate on the public value of the arts. Last year, the DIA was saved from financial crisis by voters in its three neighboring counties who elected to take on an additional property tax to support the museum. And now, in the past month, Michigan's Attorney General and State Senate have blocked the emergency manager of Detroit from seizing the DIA's collection to pay off the city's debt.
Like last year's tax, this newest development is an important step for the DIA, but it has even greater impact on the field overall. From a non-museum person's perspective, it's a little mysterious.
What's Happening in Detroit
Detroit is in serious trouble financially. The city's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, is pursuing many options to avoid bankruptcy. One option he put on the table in May is to sell off the DIA's multi-billion dollar collection of art. The DIA and its collection are owned by the city, which makes it a city asset.
Museum supporters and art lovers were up in arms about this proposal, arguing that these "cultural gems" are held in the public trust and should not be shed to pay off creditors. But this argument for the public value of the art is tough to uphold in a time of severe challenges. Detroit's city leaders are looking at a host of tough choices, and it's hard not to be sympathetic to the idea that a bunch of artwork matters less than emergency services, schools, parks, and any number of other city programs and assets that might be slashed to avoid bankruptcy.
For museum wonks, there's a more specific ethical reason that the DIA's collection should not be treated in this way: we don't see museum collections as assets on the balance sheet the same way Kevyn Orr does.
The American museum profession has an ethical standard that says "in no event shall they [funds raised by deaccessioning collections objects] be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections."
In other words, in the museum world, if you sell artwork, you must put the proceeds into a restricted fund to either purchase or preserve other artwork in the collection.
Of course, Kevyn Orr doesn't see it that way--he sees the DIA's artwork as assets, and that's not unreasonable. This DOES come up when museums go bankrupt, at which point collections can be seen as assets by creditors. However, in this case, it is not the DIA that is going bankrupt but the city. If the city (or state) forces the DIA to violate museum ethics to satisfy city debts, it will have grave consequences for the museum and for the museum world.
Think of Artwork like Organs
Here's a weird but apt analogy: organ donation. For large organs like the heart and lungs, there is a national body that governs all organ donation and distribution in the US. All organs are given voluntarily without compensation (usually by dying people), and then the national body manages a list with complicated algorithms to determine who receives which organ.
Imagine if Detroit's largest hospital had an organ donation program, and Kevyn Orr required that the hospital violate medical ethics by selling any large organs received to the highest bidder. This could be a significant income stream for the city and help settle debts.
At the same time, it would likely lead to that hospital and its surgeons facing grave consequences in the medical world... just like the DIA will face if the city forces it to violate museum ethics.
I know organs and artwork are different, but the situation is functionally the same: a professional field with a particular code of ethics whose rules may or may not be recognized by government bodies. That's why it is so significant that the Michigan Senate voted to take on the American Alliance of Museum's code of ethics regarding collections - it functionally means that the state is acknowledging and abiding by the professional standard in the museum field.
Complications and Ethical Dilemmas
But let's not start cheering just yet. There is an ironic sidenote to this "victory" for museum ethics. At the same time as this controversy is playing out in the public arena via Detroit, museum professionals are in the midst of debate about whether the ethics of deaccessioning still apply. A recent article in Museum magazine (published by the American Alliance of Museums) talks about the ugly realities of how a collection may be sold if a museum goes bankrupt. The Center for the Future of Museums, which is also run by the American Alliance of Museums, has been hosting a virtual "ethics smackdown" on its blog about the ethics of deaccessioning over the past several weeks. Only a small percentage of museums are formally signed onto the AAM code of ethics. While deaccessioning may be a museum sacred cow, it is not broadly considered our field's most important challenge.
I feel conflicted about this whole question. On the one hand, it drives me nuts that the ethical rules around deaccessioning force museums to protect objects in a way we do not comparably protect other core aspects of our work. There is no requirement that if you cut an educational program that you have to use the funds saved from that to fund other educational experiences. I've worked with museums that have hefty collections and restricted acquisition funds but are closed to the public because all of their dollars and assets are wrapped up in objects and none in public service or access. I can also see the argument that it actually makes museums MORE relevant if our assets are considered fair game in a situation like Detroit's--just as important and just as endangered as other core services.
On the other hand, I feel strongly that as arts are generally misunderstood and marginalized in the public eye (and funding sphere), it's important for us to do whatever we can to help people understand WHY artwork is like organs, and why these objects remaining in the public trust matters. In an offline conversation about Detroit, Margy Waller, who is brilliant at framing the public value of art, put it this way:
The arts are already pretty much ALWAYS seen as a low priority among things of public value. In fact, they're (I want to say we're) often seen as a private matter -- and not a public good at all.
The arguments about sale of DIA art strike me as forming inside that frame. And if it happens, I worry that it would reinforce what is already the dominant way of view of the arts --- and set back our case-making: that the arts create places where people want to live, work, invest, and visit -- all things Detroit desperately needs right now.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Bulb Banter: Museums bring out your bulbs!
Digital Nerdosaurus [Clairey Ross] - June 26, 2013 - 10:39am
Large Ediswan bulb UCL Museums
Over the past 6 months I have been curating an exhibition in UCL Museums newest exhibition space, the Octagon. The exhibition is all about digital technology and illustrates the power of emerging applications and poses questions about technology and culture in the past and in the present. Its been a brilliant experience and I have learnt so much. During the process I have become a bit obsessed with Light Bulbs.
Light bulbs seem so mundane now, but have you actually stopped to think about how they work, the history behind them and had a close look? They are really quite pretty and have a fascinating history! I might be a bit bias.
Bulb history the basics:
The invention of the light bulb is often credited to two men; Thomas Edison, from Ohio, USA and Joseph Swan, from the North East of England. In 1883 Edison and Swan went into partnership to form the Edison and Swan United Electric Company also known as Ediswan. The newly formed Ediswan started to sell incandescent light bulbs which became the industry standard.
Last night I shared my obsession with Light Bulbs at Museums Showoff and now loads of #bulbbanter is popping up. I can’t really express how excited this is making me! Loads of Bulbs!!! Brilliant.
Here are some of the highlights from today:
Lightbulb lamp – Horniman Museum
Electric filament lamps made by Swan (left) and Edison (right), 1878-1879 – Science Museum
If you know of some interesting light bulbs in any museum collections or happen across any brilliant bulbs, please let me know!
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
tr.im
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 26, 2013 - 9:35am
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
tr.im
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 26, 2013 - 9:35am
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Ethics Smackdown: For the Resolution
Center for the Future of Museums [AAM] - June 26, 2013 - 8:51am
This is the fourth and (for now) final installment of our report on the debate held at the Alliance in May regarding the future of museum ethics. In today’s post, James Bradburne, director of the Palazzo Strozzi in Firenze, Italy, makes the case for the resolution:
Resolved: American museums should revisit the Code of Ethics for Museums and relax the restriction on the use of funds from the sale of deaccessioned collections.
The Code of Ethics for Museums states: “Disposal of collections through sale, trade or research activities is solely for the advancement of the museum's mission. Proceeds from the sale of nonliving collections are to be used consistent with the established standards of the museum's discipline, but in no event shall they be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections.”
This debate is not about de-accessioning, which American museums consider legitimate, but the use of the funds generated by de-accessioning. We are also not arguing about the elimination of the concern that the well-being of the museum must be the first priority. What is being debated is the need to change the specific wording of the current Code of Ethics in order to allow funds raised by de-accessioning to be used across the full spectrum of the museum’s mission, as determined by its Trustees and Statutes.
Point 1. THE WORDING OF THE CODE OF ETHICS IS CONFLICTED. In the first phrase it rightly asserts that any funds realized by sale of museum assets should be used to further the museum’s mission (rather than paying dividends, taking holidays in Rio etc.). This is clearly a correct ethical stance. However, the last phrase limits the use of the funds solely to one – sometimes secondary – part of the museum’s mission: “acquisition or direct care of collections.” Even if we respect Robert Veach Noble’s definition of the museum’s mission ‘to collect, preserve, study, interpret and exhibit’, which has been superseded by more recent, more vague ICOM definitions, the museum mission – and its stewardship – is not only of collections, but of the historical, scientific and social value their interpretation and exhibition represents. To privilege collection and preservation over interpretation and exhibition seems willful and unwarranted.
Point 2. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A MUSEUM? The Code assumes that a museum has the responsibility, as a steward of material held in the public trust, to maintain the value of the collections —that total value can be allowed to expand, but never contract. But the notion of value is highly elastic, in both quantity and in quality. The value and nature of museum assets are not stable – they vary with time. As an institution deeply involved with time, the museum cannot exempt itself from history. An Impressionist purchased in Paris in 1903 as an unknown or emerging artist, a purchase that may have represented a small percentage of the museum’s acquisitions budget, acquires a value of millions as the markets increase the value. The costs of insurance make it impossible for the museum to afford keeping the work. However, if the value of the object has increased over time, why should the full sale value be re-invested in the collections? Preserving collections is not the only “public trust” responsibility of museums. We already acknowledge we are responsible for more than merely storing collections. We have equal responsibilities to share our content in meaningful ways that are accessible to a broad swathe of the public. Seen in this way, a museum’s resources are a portfolio that can be distributed across many investments: in collections, staff, facilities, infra-structure and delivery mechanisms. Creating a portfolio that is profoundly unbalanced (for example, investing in the building while understaffing its functions, or maintaining collections without building the capacity to make them accessible to the public) is not acting as a good steward of the resources it holds in the public trust.
Point 3. WHAT IS THE GOVERNING AUTHORITY’S HIGHEST RESPONSIBILITY? It has long been accepted that a governing authority’s primary responsibilities are the duties of care, loyalty, and obedience: Care of the museum’s resources; loyalty to the museum before personal concerns, obedience to the mission. The consequence of the current ethics restriction leads to a potentially self-destructive situation in which, by making maintaining the value of collections the overriding concern, the governing authority neglects its other duties. An institution could collapse entirely at the same time it was using resources, per the Code, to increase or preserve its collections. This is the argument of the cancer cell: the right to grow and thrive at the expense of the host. Our overall responsibility is to maintain the health of the organism, not the individual cells. Many museums have a wide variety of ‘objects’ in their collections: a hands-on science centre, with a mission to foster a working understanding of science, may accomplish that mission through interactive exhibits, paintings, working models etc. For that science centre to sell a painting to build an interactive exhibit – does this violate the Code of Ethics?
SUMMARY ARGUMENT. As with so many issues that museum professionals would like to characterize as being about “standards” this argument is really about difficult and subtle choices regarding rights, responsibilities and stewardship. Museums often want clear guidelines that would relieve them of the need to have messy, uncomfortable conversations. They want a “standard” that there should be term limits for the board, so that they don’t have to ask an underperforming board member to step down. They want there to be a “standard” that the temperature and RH be exactly X or Y, so they don’t have to justify to the board the investment they want to make in environmental controls. For the most messy and uncomfortable issues, they up the ante by characterizing an issue as being not just about standards, but about ethics. Should a museum board member be allowed to exhibit their collection? How handy if one can politely evade the issue that theirs is a subpar collection by saying “ethics say we can’t do that.” If you do accede to an exhibit, much easier to say “you can’t ethically be involved in developing the exhibit or its interpretation [even though you are an amateur expert, steeped in the topic for many years]” rather than negotiating a productive dialog between the board member and the curator, drawing and enforcing reasonable boundaries.
I put to you that the argument regarding ethical restrictions on the use of funds from deaccessioning has taken exactly this lazy path of avoiding a deeper exploration of the issue. What are a museum’s overall stewardship responsibilities to its public? When is a board trying to use deaccessioning as a fast and irresponsible way to raise funds, and when are they making reasoned and reasonable choices about allocation of resources within a museum’s portfolio of stewardship? Why should the fluctuating and largely arbitrary monetary value of a museum’s collections dictate so many of its other choices? Ethics should be boundaries that delineate realms where we can never safely venture, not excuses to avoid exploring unmapped but navigable terrain.
Most importantly of all, perhaps, is deciding what we believe of existing museum governance and governors, and, as a consequence, where we choose to intervene in creating an ethical framework. If we believe that museum governance is inherently flawed, and that trustees cannot be trusted to understand the museum’s mission and act in its best interests, then the correct place to intervene is not in restricting the board’s ability to decide how to use funds, but in strengthening the rules that have an impact on the museum’s governance – how it selects trustees and what informs their decisions. If, on the other hand, we believe that museum governance is robust, and that museum boards and trustees as a rule act in the best interests of their institutions, then it makes no sense to limit their use of funds to a single – and not always central – aspect of the museum’s multi-facetted mission.
Your turn: I encourage you to review my introduction to this series, Sally Yerkovich's preamble to the Smackdown, and John Simmons arguments against the proposition and then weigh in, below. Which argument do you find most compelling? What reasoning would you advance that has not yet been brought to bear? This is not an academic debate--it is one that my have very real consequences for museums and the standards to which we choose to adhere.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 25, 2013 - 10:15am
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 25, 2013 - 10:15am
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Do You Want to Live Forever?
Center for the Future of Museums [AAM] - June 25, 2013 - 9:00am
Phil and I read far more broadly than we can travel, so when Rohit Talwar of Fast Future was kind enough to arrange a complimentary registration to the Global Futures 2045 conference in New York City earlier this month, we tapped Paul Orselli, President and Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop) to attend on our behalf. Little did we realize we were sending Paul into a convening of transhumanists (who believe we are on the cusp of discovering how to upload human consciousness into machines.) I’ve written that scanning should encompass fringe as well as mainstream sources. Consider this your monthly dose of news from the fringe.
When the fine folks from AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) asked me to attend a “futurism” conference at Lincoln Center in New York City, I jumped at the chance.I imagined discussions and demonstrations regarding robots, space, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the like. I expected that an international conference entitled GF2045 (Global Future 2045) would stretch my mind in unexpected ways.
Which it did. But little did I realize that the primary focus of this conference would be, in a word, immortality. Immortality as in living forever. Immortality as in downloading the complete contents of your brain, your human essence, into some sort of machine. I looked at the back of my fancy plastic nametag that I received upon check-in to discover what I would characterize as the GF2045 “manifesto” from the Conference’s founder, Dmitry Itskov:
“Cyborgs or AI would not cause a civilization catastrophe. Homo Sapiens’ primitive, selfish, short-sighted thinking however could. If we are willing and able to change that mindset and change the world, then why would we have to die in this new world? Why would we not have the right to choose? Why would immortality not be part of a positive scenario for human development?”
And now I’ll admit that I started to get intensely uncomfortable. (I’ll also mention parenthetically that I had just gotten off a red-eye flight from Albuquerque a few hours before at JFK and came directly to Manhattan, so I was feeling a bit fuzzy.) Was this really the conference I had committed to attending for two full days!?!?
I took a deep breath and started scanning the Conference program for reassurance. Here were some of the session titles that immediately jumped out at me: “Intelligent Self-directed Evolution Guides Mankind’s Metamorphosis Into An Immortal Planetary Meta-Intelligence” (had to read and parse that one several times!) “The Goal of Biotechnology is the End of Death“; “Whole Brain Emulation: Reverse Engineering A Mind” and “How Human Consciousness Could Be Uploaded Via Quantum Teleportation.”
Clearly, even as a science person, I was in over my head. WAY over my head. But what could I do? I had made a commitment to the CFM team, and really isn’t the point of a Futurism Conference to push us out of our comfort zone, and make us think beyond mere incremental steps and predictions about what lies ahead?
With another deep breath, I grabbed a seat near the rear of the Alice Tully Hall auditorium inside Lincoln Center and told myself that I would resist judging the content being presented and just experience the ideas of the conference as they happened and try to take notes to be able to mentally unpack and collate my thoughts.
So allow me to unpack my “mental laundry” a bit and share my impressions of the future as viewed through a decidedly GF2045 lens:
There are clearly many completely sincere people from a variety of spheres: science, spirituality, engineering, and business who firmly believe in the importance and efficacy of pursuing the goal of human immortality.
Personally, I still find the notion of immortality (even in the digital brain download sense) baffling. I love life, but I do not want to live forever. Nothing I heard at the GF2045 Conference has changed my personal ideas about that. It often felt like answers in search of questions.
Nigel Ackland & his Bionic ArmHowever, having the opportunity to see Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro’s robotic “avatars” or to hear the gratifying story of Nigel Ackland who lost his arm in an accident, and then to see his amazingly cool prosthetic arm controlled by his brain gave me enormous hope for the future and the continuing intersections of human ingenuity and technology.
So perhaps, in the end, immortality is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps a different measure of immortality is not an individual life lived forever, but rather a collective human spirit that leads into the future, pushed forward by interesting ideas and discoveries contributed from all of us.
You can read an extensive review of the conference with a list of speakers in Digital Trends, and hear Dimitri Itskov on the subject of immortality for yourself in this video.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 25, 2013 - 8:25am
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 25, 2013 - 8:25am
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Big Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness
Digital Media and Learning - June 24, 2013 - 8:35pm
Openness has become the buzzword for everything in India right now. From the new kids on the block riding the wave of Digital Humanities investing in infrastructure of open knowledge initiatives to the rhetoric of people-centered open government data projects that are architected to create 'empowered citizens', there is an inherent belief that Opening up things will make everything good. I am not an Open-data party pooper. In fact, I firmly believe that opening up data – through hardware, through software, through intellectual property regimes on content – and enabling access to information and data is one of the most basic needs of the information age. I also advocate for strong policies that curb corporate and government control and monopolies over data and information. Along with my colleagues at the Centre for Internet and Society, and the many networks we work with, I have thought of myself as an open data advocate and have worked towards examining openness not only at the level of content, but also openness in infrastructure and conditions of access, distribution and storage. More than ever, it is necessary to build systems of Open Data that not only have distributed, collective and ethical ownership but also ensure the fair use and integration of information in our everyday life – especially given the sinister age of relentless remembering, as lives get incessantly archived through ubiquitous and pervasive technologies of portable computing.
Having said that, there is a strange thing happening around Openness right now. Openness seems to have been separated from the fact that it is a response to things being gated and closed. Openness, as it is being deployed right now, in e-government initiatives or rapid digitization processes in university libraries, seems to suggest that Openness is merely about making things in the physical format available in the digital medium. Hence, for example, the National Mission for Education through Information and Communication Technologies, India’s largest flagship government initiative to build learning conditions of the future, is investing almost all of its budget on digitizing historical and local language material in digitally intelligible and legible records that can be easily distributed. While the effort at building the infrastructure and preserving this material is absolutely worth supporting, making it the be-all and end-all of Open data initiatives is symptomatic of what I call the ‘politics of the benign’. We need to realize that Openness is not merely about making already available content in physical formats in the digital domain. Openness is about battles with Intellectual Property Regimes, which charge an extraordinary amount of money for high-value knowledge to anybody who wants to access it. In other words, openness is not about digitizing our grandparents’ pictures; it is about claiming access to knowledge and information hidden behind paywalls and gateways that is often produced using public resources.
As you can imagine, the perpetuation of this politics of benign fits many agendas; there are numerous stakeholders and actors who seek to neuter the radical nature of demands made by the Openness movements while retaining the vocabulary of political change. And that is why, if you look at the ways in which openness debates have changed, they get immediately deflected to questions around infrastructure, access, last-mile, etc. – which are all presented to us as the infrastructure of being political and being open. In the last few years, especially with Digital Humanities emerging as the playground where politics is not allowed, I find too many instances where the Humanities and Social Sciences questions get morphed into similar sounding questions that pretend to be the same but dislocate the political content and intention from the engagement.
One of the ways this works really well is by a separation of data from the lived reality of people. Data is seen as something that is out there – something that is about the real rather than the real. It is seen as an abstraction, which, when it further enters the circuits of pretty visualizations and graphic representations, becomes so entrenched in questions of reading and coding that it often becomes a surrogate for the larger realities that it is supposed to intervene in. So, for example, in India, the concerns around agriculture infrastructure and conditions of the farmers have easily been replaced by agriculture informatics – leading to a strange paradox where the states with the highest community informatics infrastructure also have the highest incidences of farmer suicides. I am not suggesting there is a cause-and-effect relationship here. However, it is a telling story that the community informatics infrastructure which was supposed to change the bleak realities of agriculture and farming in India has definitely not changed the nature of the reality it set out to solve.
Or in a similar vein, the ways in which the landscape of education is changing in the country, because of the emergence of the digital as the new organizing principle and in some instances, the raison de etre for building education infrastructure also needs to be examined. So, for instance, India has seen a rapid improvement of the Gross Enrollment Ratio in education that measures the annual intake and successful completion of education programs by students in the country. The GER shows that with remote education processes, the attempts at building distributed learning environments and the building of digital infrastructure has led to more students in different parts of the country getting enrolled in formal education systems. There is a celebration that more children are entering schools and colleges and are also in a state of socio-economic mobility. There is a clear causal relationship established in producing digital infrastructure and greater access to education and learning resources for an emerging information society like India.
However, this particular mode of looking at education, through the lens of access and inclusion, is no longer able to reflect on the core concerns that education institutions in the country were historically supposed to address. If the primary function of education was to address the questions of inequity, uneven modernity, disparate wealth distribution, and widespread socio-cultural conservatism, these are no longer questions that are featured in the Data-Technology driven education programs. These problems, which have been at the center of education debates in the country – leading to widespread affirmative action and violent resistance to it – have now been reformulated around quantifiable parameters of intake, credits, employability, affordability, accessibility, merit, etc. So there is silence about the nature of the students who enter education. There is an implicit push for the disinvestment of the state from education resources in favor of privatization. We remain enamored by the numbers joining the system, without worrying about the categories of discrimination – caste, gender, sexuality, language, location – that have affected the quality, intention and function of education. These issues have become moot points, to be replaced by visualizations and data sets that remain opaque in looking at the negotiations of identity politics and the need to embed education processes in lived realities of the students who enter formal education.
These problems are not new. And the intention of this articulation is not to deny the power of digital technologies or the opportunities they produce. Instead, it is a call to say that we need to stop thinking of data – an abstraction, an artifact, a manual product – as a natural state of being. We need to remind ourselves that engagement with data is not a sterile engagement, rendered beautiful through visualizations and infographics that can make reality intelligible. It is perhaps time to realize that Data has replaced People as the central concern of being human, social and political. Time to start re-introducing People back into debates around Data, and acknowledging that Data Informatics is People Informatics and data wars have a direct effect on the ways in which people live. And Die.
Banner image credit: sugree http://www.flickr.com/photos/73462957
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 24, 2013 - 5:35pm
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
mwconf.com
Sites of Interest, tagged museweb - June 24, 2013 - 5:35pm
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff