museumsandtheweb.com - narrative

Blogging the Past: Recreating History and Creating Community with Bound for South Australia

dpeacock — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 05:10:21 +0000

MW2012

Darren Peacock, Sweet Technology with Margaret Anderson and Allison Russell, History SA, Australia

http://www.boundforsouthaustralia.net.au

Abstract

Bound for South Australia 1836 is a digital reenactment of the sea voyages made 175 years ago to establish the British Province of South Australia. Using captains’ logs, passenger diaries, letters, and other original source material, the Bound for South Australia blog retraced—through weekly real-time updates—the journeys made by nine vessels from England to Australia between February and December 1836. Over ten months, website visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers were able to relive and engage with the unfolding story of the first 500 settlers as they made their way to an unknown land across the globe. The Bound for South Australia experiment demonstrates the possibilities of history to engage and connect communities using contemporary web technologies. It explores blogging as a narrative form and shows how the retelling of historical events can create and sustain communities of interest and identity.

Program Item Reference:

CANCELLED Blogging the past: Recreating history and creating community with Bound for South Australia 1836

MEMA : using tags, posts, and tweets to help users build a personal narrative of the Teeny Harris Exhibition

yiling — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:23:44 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

cultural heritage

Keywords:

narrative

Keywords:

social media

Keywords:

microblog

Abstract:

Museum visitors have different perspectives and interests based on how they relate their personal experiences and knowledge to the objects on display in the museum. Many museums and cultural institutions would like to collect these perspectives to complement and augment the content of the museum’s official interpretation. With the temporal and spatial constraints of a user’s visit to a museum exhibition, it has been difficult to collect as much information as the museum would like to obtain from visitors. The emergence of the Social Web has inspired a number of museums to extend the experience of their exhibits by using social features to engage users to contribute opinions and feedback about their museum experience. However, current usage of social technologies focus mostly on the information flow from museums to visitors by the use of blogs and other social media in order to increase the visitors’ awareness of museums’ events and collections.

Although a fraction of existing projects attempt to engage online users as contributors, most often the opportunities to contribute are limited to simple commenting, tagging and microblogging artifacts because of their appealing immediacy and portability. They allow users to publish small elements of content and instantaneously broadcast them to other users of the service. The content produced through those fast feedback mechanisms has been analyzed from many directions. Those studies clearly indicate that those short messages from commenting, tagging, and microbloging not only reflect individual and collective responses in real time but also can capture profound and personal meaning for the contributor. As a result, the short messages might be important components as base for composing personal narratives for a specific object or exhibition.

MEMA (Museum Exhibition MAnagement) is a personalized and interactive community-oriented system with mobile and Web features. MEMA supports a rich feature set that facilitates the sharing of users’ feeling/opinions of the exhibition experience through their mobile devices and further helps the creation of users’ personal narratives with tags, posts, tweets, and other microblogging artifacts. MEMA is built upon a collection with approximately 80,000 photographs by Charles "Teenie" Harris, a photographer for an influential local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier.

This paper focuses on providing a convenient way for users to share information and to use short messages from potential microblogging technologies to increase the chances of getting users to contribute their own narratives. The paper explores a solution for achieving the goal of gathering users’ personal narratives and experiences by collecting their short messages from diverse social media including Twitter and Facebook through mobile devices In this study, we are conducting an empirical experiment starting on October 29th, coinciding with the opening of the exhibition “Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story”. Actual visitors to the exhibition will be our subjects. All of their activities will be recorded in our session logs. We expect to see that the proposed solution could assist narrative creating in terms of convenience and efficiency.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations I

Site:

http://jade.exp.sis.pitt.edu/mema/

Authors:

Yi-Ling Lin

William Real

Xiaoning Bai

Yuanyuan Ye

chenxi zhao

Exploring Heritage in Participatory Culture: The MuseumApp

Dickvandijk — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:24:36 +0000

MW2011

Dick van Dijk, Waag Society, The Netherlands

http://www.waag.org

Abstract

The development of the MuseumApp in so-called 'Locative Labs' – a short, repetitive, interdisciplinary and intense collaboration, 2 days per week, for 6 weeks – took place in a unique meeting of curators, media professionals, concept developers and technical colleagues in the Amsterdam Museum and Waag Society. The joint development is based on experiment: rapid prototyping and testing of city tours; and on the spot content development. The Lab setting is one of the methods used by Waag Society to do creative research: explore interaction principles and demo innovative solutions in a real setting, with real stakeholders and real users.

The MuseumApp is a first step in creating a GPS-based, location aware heritage platform on which museums can create their own multimedia city tours and location-based games: connecting history and current events to locations in the city in an interactive and fun way, allowing the users to be the curators of their own experiences. They can also publish their own images, comments or suggestions related to the tour to other audiences on other (social) platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.

In the Labs the partners explore novel media practices as a new way to engage audiences with heritage. Connecting it to personal accounts and social network communities might help in getting more, new, different audiences meaningfully involved.

Keywords: locative media, social media, creative research, user experience, narrative

Program Item Reference:

The Amsterdam Museum App – exploring heritage in participatory culture

From Knowledge to Narrative – to Systems? At the junction of game design and museum education

davidschaller — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:43:57 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

From Knowledge to Narrative – to Systems? Games, Rules and Meaning-making

Keywords:

games

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

education

Keywords:

design

Keywords:

learning

Keywords:

constructivism

Keywords:

narrative

Abstract:

Laura Robert's landmark book "From Knowledge to Narrative" (Roberts, 1997) analyzed a paradigm shift in museum exhibition in the late 20th century as educators moved museums from traditional methods of knowledge transmission to constructivist interpretive methods such as narrative. Today, museum educators wishing to adopt game-based learning methods face a similar challenge: to move from now-familiar narrative methods to a systems-based approach. Games are, at heart, a set of rules that define player choices and subsequent consequences. Applying a strong narrative to a game usually results in neither a good story nor a good game. Instead, we must learn to think like game and system designers, finding the rules intrinsic to our content.

In some ways, this shift from narrative to systems is less formidable than was the shift from knowledge transmission, since both narrative and systems are rooted in constructivism, the notion that learning is, as Hein (1998) says, “is not a simple addition of items into some sort of mental data bank but a transformation of schemas in which the learner plays an active role and which involves making sense out of a range of phenomena.” Games, one could argue, are even more constructivist than narratives, since the player's role is by definition active, evaluating various phenomena to inform successful tactics to win the game.

Nevertheless, this shift from narrative to systems is often difficult for museum educators, particularly art and history educators schooled in the humanities rather than science. Exhibits and education materials generally explore the idiosyncrancies of a given topic, whether they be the expressive and interpretive aspects of an artwork or the narrative arc of an historical event. The meaning to be made from this approach is powerful, often pulling us back in even when we struggle toward a systems approach. For example, inspired by game designer Sid Meier's fabled definition of a good game as "a series of interesting choices," we might use a "choose your own adventure" branching story design. This approach appears to serve both the idiosyncratic arc of an historical narrative while providing the meaningful choices so central to a game. In practice, though, this approach serves both the history and the gameplay poorly, as it forces players into increasingly less-meaningful choices simply to keep the number of story branches manageable.

Instead, we must adopt a true rules-based design, digging into our content to find even a few rules inherent in the subject matter that can then define the gameplay. This paper will explore this challenge, drawing on both game design theory (core dynamics, rules, actions, skills, chance) and published commercial and non-profit games to show how the heterogeneous realworld content of museums can indeed be turned into exciting and meaningful learning games.

References:

Hein, G. (1998). Learning in the Museum. London: Routledge.
Roberts, L. (1997). From Knowledge to Narrative. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Games

Authors:

Dave Schaller

The Amsterdam Museum App – exploring heritage in participatory culture

Dickvandijk — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:35:11 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Exploring Heritage in Participatory Culture: The MuseumApp

Keywords:

mobile technology

Keywords:

social media

Keywords:

creative research

Keywords:

user experience

Keywords:

narrative

Abstract:

People have always wanted to tell stories about their experiences and to connect to shared meaning and values. The advent of social media enforces this even more. At the same time our mobile phones are steadily turning into digital Swiss Army Knives full of informative, creative and social potential. To make sure the development of new tools and systems is “culture smart” and to explore how “mobile ready” cultural audiences are the Amsterdam Historical Museum (AHM), media lab Waag Society and cultural funder DOEN develop in close collaboration the Amsterdam Museum App.

Strengthening a visitor’s sense of place and context (the outside world, the city) to the museum experience — and therefore, connecting a living society with our formal heritage — means exploring the social dimensions of formal and informal heritage sites and creating new ways of engaging with an audience.

The Amsterdam Museum App is a first step in creating a GPS based, location aware heritage platform, in which museums can create their own multimedia city tours and location based games, that does just this: connecting history and current events to locations in the city in an interactive and fun way, allowing the users to be the curator of their own experience. Publishing their own images, comments or suggestions related to the tour to other audiences on other (social) platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. The core technology is a proven technical backbone (7scenes.com) publishing location based content to iPhone and Android devices, which is developed further in close collaboration with the project partners.

The development of the Museum App in so called ‘Locative Labs’ – a short, repetitive, interdisciplinary and intense collaboration, think 2 days per week, for 6 weeks - is a unique meeting of curators, media professionals, concept developers and technical colleagues in the AHM and Waag Society. The joint development is based on experiment: rapid prototyping and testing of city tours; and on the spot content development. The Lab setting is one of the methods used by Waag Society to do creative research: explore interaction principles and demo innovative solutions in a real setting, with real stakeholders and real users.

AHM will be the launching customer of the Museum App, after which the platform will be open to all cultural organizations. The Amsterdam Museum App will feature four interactive routes exploring the fundamental aspects of the city of Amsterdam, the creative, the entrepreneurial, the tolerant and the civic agency; connecting the outside experience closely to the narrative of the new permanent indoor exhibition Amsterdam in Close up (opening, May 2011).

In the Labs the partners explore novel social media practices as a new way to engage audiences with heritage. Connecting it to personal accounts and social network communities might help in getting (more / new / different) audiences meaningfully involved.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

User-Generated Community

Site:

http://www.waag.org/project/ahmlocativelab

Authors:

Dick van Dijk

Protecting treasures: engaging communities and recreating narratives

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:53 +0000

Mann, S., & Russell K. (2010). Protecting treasures: engaging communities and recreating narratives. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.

Museums and the Web: Maturation, Consolidation and Evaluation

jtrant — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:03:08 +0000

Bearman, D., & Trant J. (2004). Museums and the Web: Maturation, Consolidation and Evaluation. Museums and the Web 2004.