conferences

Ross Parry chairs Gail Durbin and Dan Phillips.

Gail talks about user contributions at the V&A site. There's a good model in their work for the transformational power of openness and simple interaction, and the additive nature of many small experiements: the chair, knitting, tatoos. Some things she notes:

- Users can fill gaps: "offer emotion, enthusiasm, and experience".
- Encouraging interaction requires a clear invitation; make it clear what people can do and the role that they can play.
- Good content encourages good content (now adding ranking to user contributed sites)
- Understanding where museums have expertise and where users have expertise, and how they are complementary is critical.
- Sue Lawtey artists in residence blog exposes creative process and inspires reaction in unanticipated places (NZ)
- Tiles as an example as a great sandbox where users perturb tool to communicate with each other

John Pratty chairs Mukti Bawa (PhD student at the University of Central England) and Mike Greenwood/Kati Streten

Mukti worked with the Birmingham Art Gallery to explore how users find museum web sites: directly, through a search engine, by a reference, through an academic site... two groups of users were compared, museum professionals and the general public. Preliminary results show personal interests are less specific, more likely to be satisfied by events listings, exhibitions, than by details about a specific object. 4 test sites: Birmingham, CMC, British Library online, User observation of different tasks:
1. personal interests / explore
2. unidentified image / find out about it
3. information card / find this work [how characteristics are extracted from print]
--> browse, search and find

Mike Lowndes chairs Brian Kelley and Caroline John.

What tools are there beyond web log analysis, and what kind of intelligent analysis methods can we use to build our understanding of what people do on museum web sites.

Brian#039s talk looked at impact analysis: interesting that web 2.0 applications, like technorati and flickr can point out where people cared enough about an event to make a note of it.

Caroline John reviewed the evaluation stages that her project in Birmingham reviewed; they#039ve used learning styles and learning outcomes as a way to define and articulate the nature of their audiences.

i am at the annual UK museums and the web conference http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/meetings/2-2006.shtml (no affiliation with our MW conferences), where i have just given the keynote presentation, following Simon Waldman of the Guardian Unlimited. Simon -- who has been with the on-line edition of the paper since 1999, wandered through The New Content Landscape, drawing some useful parallels between publishing a newspaper on-line and making cultural content accessible in the networked space. I was intrigued to hear him struggling with the realization that they had accumulated a significant legacy of on-line content, and that a full 1/3 of their traffic was to stories more than 3 months old. A big challenge for an organization attuned to recreating the view of the wold every day.

Steve Mayer gave one of the closing talks at ichim05 -- at the Bibliotheque nationale de France -- on "integrating museum and videogame sensibilities, or museums should not be 'where objects go to die'..."

He began with the observation that "going to a museum is like having a wonderful meal without having time to digest it". Steve then spent an engaging hour exploring a question he's been thinking about a lot  lately: "How do we integrate the interactivity of the game and the public / social space of the museum  when the cultures are so different, and the attitudes to time and experience are often opposing"

where do art and informationi intersect? Two presentations at ichim05 explored the possibilities for using digital artistic strategies to engage visitors with the more abstract notions of content and its presentation [visualization].

George Legrady's installation in the Seattle Public Library

Making the Visible Invisible

http://www.georgelegrady.com/ (under projects)

- a beginning of the kind of data visualization that is possible based on collections

ars electronical futurelab presentation

Gulliver's World

http://www.aec.at/en/futurelab/projects_sub.asp?iProjectID=12800

an interactive 3-D virtual world that encourages participation and cross-over between the virtual and the real, demystifying the technology and bridging the division.

This morning in a plenary at ichim05, Ted Nelson http://www.xanadu.net/ challenged us to think beyond the  Web [as implemented] to a richer and more complex model of hypertext authorship and experience. Pushing beyond unidirectional, single-target links, his proposal for "Trans-citation" builds on the premises that "documents" are built on precident (in all aspects of its meaning, including historical citations and chronological developments), that incorporation is a fundamental part of the act of authorship, and that access to a source in its original context is a fundamental part of "reading" in an environment of networked information.

We're in Paris for ichim05 - the 9th conference in the ICHIM series. It began in 1991 as the International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums. At least a few of those words are applicable now... 

In 1999, when it was clear that no-one knew what ICHIM stood for, we started using the International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting. But does anyone know what “informatics” means? Here in Paris, because of the “faux ami” informatique it seems to have some meaning, but elsewhere? Certainly Medical Informatics now means something, and there's an emerging discourse of Social Informatics ... but in culture and heritage?

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