Un-tour Unconference session

Here are my notes from our un-conference session; I didn't catch everything, so please add to & correct these!

We were interested in talking about mobile experiences that are not tours in any traditional sense: what functionality would they include, what would the experience feel like, and how would they fit into the museum's larger interpretive mix?

• Rose: Minnesota Historical Society, building an exhibit about 1968: want to move it beyond the walls of the museum into the spaces where 1968 happened, e.g. AR mobile experience w/ photo of students in Grant Park, space of riot (can do this with Layar already); music important; in Atlanta, segment of MLK speech; pull multiple layers of content into phone and feed back personal stories/perspectives; exploring “Tag What?” App – can tag from mobile or fixed web
• Silvia: La Cité has used AR on phones they distributed on-site
• Mara: Untravel Media uses AR in historic walking tours in Boston; Boston Aquarium project showed impacts of global warming
• Jareen: fixed AR “panoramic navigators” at Melbourne Museum identify animals hanging on the wall and give info on them
• Sherri: When is it appropriate to use AR vs other techniques, e.g. when does it make sense to look through a lens and see layered visuals
• Nancy: LBS: on-site and not
• Koven: what about ways of using content without having made a choice “I just happen to be in Grant Park and there’s some museum content there” – impacts how you think about layering & how deep you want to go with it; introduce serendipity and adventure (esp. outside the museum where the actual object isn’t there to work its magic)
• Rose: Infiltrating commercial platforms with cultural content – but without having the content be all labeled “History Channel”
• James: Foursquare: can we do more than offer ticket discounts?
• Jareen: Broadens online audiences, makes them more relevant to peoples’ lives – this is the next step for museums, think of going beyond their walls
• Dina: How can mobile link content across collections?
• Koven: Will collaboration work if it can be more passive, through linked data?
• Susan: Europeana is exactly this kind of network
• Gail: how can the new technology enable us to really engage our visitors? Are there things we can ask our visitors to do? Not just the museum telling me – but often I have plenty of info (carrying my iPhone in the museum) – I’m more interested in doing things, e.g. photographing collections
• Ken: Do we need to reinvent the wheel? Eg isn’t Flickr doing a good job geo-tagging images already? So invite people to add those photos to Flickr and not to our own app
• Koven, citing Richard McCoy: can we use Gowalla, etc – go where people already are
• Sherri: not about providing new technology platforms but framing access/use of them in museum context that facilitates communities of interest to form who might be lost in more mass-market forum – build on what people are already doing
• Gail: Flickr is good for some things, but not deep engagement; what really works is combining niche interest content from users with content from museum – highest levels of engagement happen on museum sites
• Koven: we could treat social media platforms as data collection points, use that info to create content & opportunities for deeper engagement elsewhere
• Ken: at a Science Center, main audience are kids – they are not engaged; less engagement with out-of-town visitors; happy to drift in and out of engagement with visitors as they have time for us, but hard to get them to engage on museum’s own website; much easier where they already are – Flickr etc.
• Nancy: Multiplatform vs Distributed Network: each node is good for different things, the problem is how to connect them, which activities/content are appropriate for each
• Jon: Why don’t we connect visitors in the museum with web visitors via mobile
• Susan: Intertextuality: Europeana is using widgets to achieve this
• Gussie: taking the museum outside – important for Museum of American Indian where collection was taken from other places – ways of putting them back in context; making the invisible visible in situ, enabling ‘stumbling upon’ history where it happened but has now been visibly erased; also enables native people to define their spaces
• Michael: working on a historic trading post on a reservation, still inhabited; wants to collect the stories of residents, but how to tag & manage them? Give them mobile devices through which they can tell their stories & select levels of sharing
• Nancy: need to have this feature for all UGC – users select with whom they’ll share their comments/content
• Koven: need filters too for content from various sources
• Rose: Tag What allows you to create channels within it (like filters); no feedback yet
• Sherri: there is still a place for curation; at National Sept 11 Memorial museum talking about an “I was here” button for the handheld experience, because a living history and one that without multi-faceted experience we’ll never understand; curators still need to bring the primary to the fore, but also make accessible all the rest so visitors can make their own choices; not all or nothing;
• Ken: can you also use the wisdom of the crowd to curate those stories?
• Koven: syntax analysis, raw text parsing can help manage the content
• Mara: visitors aren’t interested in what other visitors say
• Nancy: that’s true at blockbuster level, but we are interested in hearing what people who share our niche interests say
• Sherri: how can we leverage our niche strengths?
• Jon: how can we facilitate those communities coming together?
• Heidi: How do we decide what we’re going to focus on?
• Rose: do museums use Yelp? When the app is useful, people will read content
• Vivian: But it’s not coming from above, it’s coming from people like you
• Koven: the trick with Yelp sentiment turns into usable information; may not be the case in a museum, but over time would be fascinating (e.g. what visitors thought in 1857)
• Nancy: and in volume
• James: important not to treat mobile like one unitary thing; e.g. Flickr isn’t just a platform, it’s a community; every application of mobile technology is its own community, e.g. RSS a community of data junkies; Twitter is going from being a community to becoming a platform because so big
• Silvia: has spent past year evaluating “traditional multimedia tours”; lots of people come in with 2 hours to find out about the best of the British Museum – not interested in hearing what others think, but want more content from the museum; how