Art Collections, Technology, and the Museum University of Denver, Emergent Digital Practices February 17, 2016 David Newbury / @workergnome
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Art Collections, Technology, and the MuseumUniversity of Denver, Emergent Digital PracticesFebruary 17, 2016
David Newbury / @workergnome
Thank You• University of Denver• Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran, Emergent Digital Practices• Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
Who am I?• I am not representing the Carnegie Museums• I am not a museum professional• I am not representational of museums
Who am I?• I work with computers• I work with artists• I work with data
Museums are in Transitionfrom object-driven...
Museums are in Transitionfrom object-driven...
...through vistor-driven...
Museums are in Transitionfrom object-driven...
...through vistor-driven...
...to data-driven
What does it mean to be a museumin the world of Google and Wikipedia?
The history of the Museum is:The transferral of collectionsfrom the private to thepublic domain.
Cabinets of Curiousity15th — 18th century
A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist should make one. — Carolus Linnaeus6
6 Philosophia Botanica (1751), aphorism 11. Trans. Frans A. Statfleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735-1789 (1971), 38.
The Encyclopedic Museum18th — 20th century
Encyclopedic museums hold to the principle of universal access to knowledge.— James Cuno 4
4 Cuno, James (2011), Museum Matters: In praise of the Encyclopedic Museum, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The British Museum1753
“not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public.”
The Smithsonian Institution1846
...an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.
The Collections1950s — 1990s
There was a perceptible shift from serving the scholar...to providing for a lay public as well.— Geoffrey D. Lewis 5
5 http://www.britannica.com/topic/history-398827
Museum Services1980s — Today
In the span of a century we have gone from cabinets of curiosity, to period rooms, to carefully curated thematic exhibitions, to open storage, to digital surrogates. Are we meeting the access needs of our visitors any better today than we did in 1911?— Rainey Tisdale14
14 http://aaslhcommunity.org/historynews/files/2011/08/RaineySmr11Links.pdf
History of the Museum
What does it mean to be a museumin the world of Google and Wikipedia?
What are museums excellent at?
What visitors think a museum doesand what the museum thinks it doescan be wildly different.
Museums as Businesses
Art museums are all about design and creativity—a vital component to our global competitiveness.— John Wetenhall, Former President, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh8
8 http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/feature.php?id=332
Museums as Educators
The opportunity to be of profound service...must certainly outdazzle any satisfactions that the old salvage, warehouse, or soda-pop business could ever possibly have offered.— Stephen E Weil 16
16 Weil, Stephen E.. “From Being About Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum”. Daedalus 128.3 (1999): 229–258.
Museums as Databases
Museums that maintain collections hold them in trust for the benefit of society and its development.— ICOM Code of Ethics11
11 http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/Codes/code_ethics2013_eng.pdf
For certain professionals,preservation, documentation & researchof the collection represent the main objectives for museums.
— Izabela Luiza Pop7
7 http://www.academia.edu/10950015/WHY_DO_MUSEUMS_MATTER_A_CASE_STUDY_ON_THE_MARAMURES_COUNTY_MUSEUMS
Information Excess vs. Information ScarcityThe problem of the 21st century willnot be how to find information,but how to filter information.
Humanity shares1,800,000,000photos a day.
Amazon gets90,000,000visitors a month.
Rich Data, not Big Data
The meteoric rise of data is now estimated at 2.5 quintillion bytes daily,90% less than 2 years old.— IBM
MetadataMuseums are in the business of metadata. Behind the galleries of every great museum is a meticulously organized card catalog, file cabinet, or collection database being reshaped and repackaged for digital appetites.— Alana Miller, Huge Inc 3
3 http://www.hugeinc.com/ideas/perspective/dealing-with-data-in-museums
Cleveland Museum of Art
Every museum is searching for this holy grail, this blending of technology and art...— David Franklin, Director, Cleveland Museum of Art10
10 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/arts/artsspecial/at-cleveland-museum-of-art-the-ipad-enhances.html/
The APIBy developing the API, we can create this one thing that will work for many people so it no longer become a project every time we are asked to take part.— Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum 1
1 http://blog.variousbits.net/2009/04/16/the-brooklyn-museum-api-qa-with-shelley-bernstein-and-paul-beaudoin/
Cooper Hewitt
The Cooper Hewitt has transformed into an organization not unlike Wikipedia, Pinterest, or, for that matter, The Atlantic: Somewhere between a media and a tech firm, it is a Thing That Puts Stuff on the Internet.— The Atlantic 2
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/how-to-build-the-museum-of-the-future/384646/
Cooper Hewitt's API
Open DataBeing promiscuous means spending more effort on creating and spreading, and less on trying to control access...Promiscuity is one way to demolish the perception of exclusivity that has dogged museums for longer than I’ve been around.— Ed Rodley9
9 https://medium.com/code-words-technology-and-theory-in-the-museum/the-virtues-of-promiscuity-cb89342ca038#.u8nx50fnt
Copyright & Fair Use
Although members of the [visual arts] community may rely on fair use in some instances, they may self-censor in others, due to confusion, doubt, and misinformation about fair use...— Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts 12
12 http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/fair-use/best-practices-fair-use-visual-arts.pdf
Creative Commons Zero
While releasing this data with “No Rights Reserved” was a significant milestone for MoMA, a bigger cultural shift lies behind the records that are marked “not curator approved.” — Fiona Romeo, Director of Digital Content & Strategy at MoMA. 13
13 https://medium.com/digital-moma/thousands-of-exhausted-things-or-why-we-dedicated-moma-s-collection-data-to-the-public-domain-7e0a7165e99#.s82xw6ncx
Who puts artin a museum?As digital interaction becomes more complex, when does it become art?
Linked Open Data
• Open data• Linked data• Linked open data
The Getty Vocabularies
The Getty vocabularies are the premiere references for categorizing works of art, architecture, material culture, and the names of artists, architects, and geographic names.— Wikipedia 15
15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Vocabulary_Program
Carnegie Museum of ArtArchivesThe digital archives at the Carnegie Museum of Art contain documents, photos, and the collected history of the museum's past 120 years.
records.cmoa.org
Data VisualizationAvoid human weaknesses• Limited memory• Terrible at counting• Prone to obsession• Easily bored
Data VisualizationLeverage human strengths• Amazing pattern recognition• Wonderful at connections• Capable of gestalt• Constructs meaning
The Tate metadata
https://github.com/tategallery/collection
The Metadata published by Tate is available free of restrictions under the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain Dedication.
The Tate Explorer
Art Tracks
Art Tracks is an digital initiative of the Carnegie Museum of Art that aims to turn provenance in to structured data through open standards supported by a suite of open source software tools.
museumprovenance.org
Durand-Ruel, Paris, August 23, 1872 [1];Catholina Lambert, New Jersey;Lambert sale, American Art Association, Plaza Hotel, New York, NY, February 21, 1916 until February 24, 1916, no. 67; Durand-Ruel, Paris, until at least 1930; purchased by Simon Bauer, Paris, by June 1936 [2]; anonymous sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., February 25, 1970, no. 19 [3]; Sam Salz, Inc., New York, NY; purchased by Museum, May 1971.
NOTES: [1] bought from the artist. [2] Listed and illustrated in "List of Property Removed from France during the War 1939-1945" (no. 7114, as belonging to Simon Bauer). [3] "Highly Important Impressionist, Post-Impressionist & Modern Paintings and Drawings", illustrated.
Museums preserve, promote and protect one of the few irreplaceable public assets:the nation’s collective memory, knowledge and history.
— National Museums Director's Council
Any Questions?David Newbury@workergnome
Special thanks to the NYPL Digital Collections for making available the images from most of these slides.
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