Singing monsters and museum selfies, exactly what do they have in common?
The kids app My Singing Monsters is about collecting monsters on an island, which is in fact the head of a giant. When you have collected all the monsters for this island, the giant awakes. This means you are ready to move on to the next island, where you start collecting entirely new monsters. The monsters are singing, all a different tune or rythm. The reward is that when combining them all together you have created a melody, and depending on which monsters sing the melody turns out differently. It’s addictive.
My point is that it is great fun, creative, and entirely possible to spend a lot of time on. It’s interactive. Active. Not passive. And it provides a new experience each time. Over and over.
And so museum selfies. So far I have mainly focused on museum selfies as an act of creating personal narratives. Which is extremely interesting of course. At the same time, what if we look at museum selfies as a way of creating interactivity in static settings, it becomes even more interesting. The act of photography requires physical involvement, placing yourself (often) in front of a museum object. Sometimes you interact with other people, and you raise your arm to get the camera (smartphone) in position. And you interact with your own audience through social media, for example posting on Instagram, using hashtags. Bringing the audience (followers) into the museum. You create a personal experience.
What if many museum selfies is a sign of your museum lacking interactivity? What if it’s in fact… boring? Or at least a quickly consumed experience. (Yes I am being slightly provocative here).
There is of course a possibility of activating the visitors, like with Cooper Hewitt’s The Pen or Rijksmuseum’s campaign to draw art. What if museums were to scale this, what if museums would entirely stop making exhibitions? (And now I am being even slightly more provocative). And instead create rich interactive experience all together. A very tempting thought.
But before going that far, here’s my advice for a starter:
Embrace museum selfies
Create other possibilities of interaction
Engage with the visitors, and harvest the visitors creativity when taking photographs (if and when they want to)
Monitor visitor photography in your museum, to learn and to improve
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Oh and for all of you interested in My Singing Monsters, here’s a short video:
Instead of wrapping up 2015 I decided to make a list of topics that will get special attention from me in 2016. I don’t mention specific methods or technologies like AR, VR, Big Data, mobile solutions, Makerspaces, 3D-printing, etc. Instead I look at a few areas that are essential for digital transformation. To merge analogue and digital work practice presents the biggest challenge for museums in 2016, and if done successfully will enable the transition towards the postdigital museum.
(Ed. Jan. 12, extending section on ecosystem, Jan. 15 adding to last section The Big Challenge, Jan. 19 link to HBR).
Mapping the visitor ecosystem – and walking the last mile
Illustration: Kajsa Hartig, CC-BY.
Where physical meets digital and paying attention to the last mile: Mapping (and understanding) the visitor experience, and the ecosystem in which the visitor encounters the museum, will move museums one step towards the postdigital realm. As the visitor experience now has to be delivered through multiple channels in a coherent and relevant way, digital and physical must be considered as one:
”Understanding visitor journey also means understanding that a visitor’s experience doesn’t start and end with a physical visit to the Museum. The visitor’s experience starts before they arrive, exists during the visit and extends after they leave. It starts with anticipating, planning and discovering. The experience doesn’t end when the visitor leaves.Thinking about extending the visitor journey with digital channels also requires understanding where your visitors physically are at various stages of the journey, and the digital channels and content types that make the most sense at each stage. A journey may comprise many digital channels, designed to fit specific stages and information needs and types and contexts. They do not expect multiple digital experiences, but one seamless experience with information that hands off from one channel to another and that makes sense for what they need at each stage. Visitors expect information when they want it, how they want it, and specific to the purpose.” Catherine Devine, The Museum Digital Experience: Considering the Visitor Journey
In this effort to embrace and to deliver the omni-channel experience, an experience that might not ever involve a visit to the gallery space, museums will need to re-think organizational structures and competences. They will have to move towards multi competence teams that master digital as well as physical spaces as well as social media, storytelling and extraordinary user experience design. In this team educators have to be involved.
Challenge: Museums will have to think carefully about who will lead the omni-channel experience productions.
Rethinking photograph collections
Analogue and digital work practices collide: Photography today is conversation. In the age of social media it has become distanced from its predecessors, the material objects closely associated with memories, as it has spread across different platforms with complementary functions. As Professor Daniel Miller states it:
When these conversations, public or private, make their way into museums there are several challenges arising. One is to preserve the character of the photographs in the new context, the formal social memory as it is created by the museum. A museum that strives to preserve the cultural objects in fixed forms ”as a way of maintaining its historical accuracy and authorial integrity…” (Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito in Re-Collection, 2014).
And given that ”Records and archives are devices used in the process of transforming individual memories into collective remembering” (professor Laura Miller in Rinehart & Ippolito, 2014) the problem becomes clear. The digital infrastructures of the museum, the databases harbouring our collective social memory and preserving digitized physical objects, are constructed to maintain fixity, ”the world in a bottle, separated from mundane worldly time, in which philosophical objects hand like stars in suspended eternity.” (Rinehart & Ippolito, 2014).
Preserving the social media photographs requires museums to revisit their collection policies, extending documentation and preserving this information in the collection databases, and understanding what needs to be preserved (and how) to accurately present photographs in the future (and then I haven’t even adressed, technological, legal and ethical issues, that will be for upcoming blog posts).
Here are some of my previous blog posts on photography, digital and museums:
Challenge: Museums will have to re-think collecting, as well as preserving and disseminating photograph collections, an effort that will inform other fields within the museum. Please read more about topic at the website of Nordic project Collecting the Digital: From a Photographic Perspective.
Content
Prepare for omni-channel: Take content strategy seriously. When approaching the omni-channel world of museums, that require content adapted for physical, print and digital to be presented as a seamless experience, there is a strong need to prepare for new editorial efforts and skills. This area is important when moving towards the post-digital museum, as it requires skills that span across digital (social, mobile, web), print and physical spaces indoors and outdoors.
Challenge: As more content and skillful multimedia storytelling is required for omni-channel experiences, museums need to scale and coordinate their editorial efforts.
Organizational change
Moving towards a postdigital museum inevitably brings us to the topic of organizational change. Only by looking at the three areas mentioned above, user experience, collecting/disseminating photograph collections and content production we see several challenges, the need for new skills and competences when bridging physical and digital, the need to create and distribute content more efficiently etc. To withstand increased competition and to become a more flexible and responsive museum, adressing organizational change is a must in 2016.
Challenge: Identifying which parts of the organization that need restructuring, and implementing the changes.
The Big Challenge
For the past few years I have paid extra attention to the need for digital transformation in museums, and the rigid structures that prevent this change. Sensing that museums in many ways still are far from a strategic and sustainable response to technological changes, as Simon J. Knell concludes in Museums in a Digital Age (Ed. Ross Parry), 2010, the need to identify the road to success becomes even more important.
Spending the Christmas weekend reading Re-collecting by Rinehart & Ippolito I got more confident in my opinion that the challenges for achieving the postdigital museum lie not so much in the lack of catalysts, or competence or even strategy as in the built-in fear of change:
”…an institution’s plasticity is measured not by the sweeping innovations promised in its mission statement, but by the habits o fits everyday operations staffed by ordinary people.”
It’s about organizational culture, and acquiring a strong digital mindset. Rinehart & Ippolito come down quite harshly on organizational cultures that punish any missteps contradicting the museum’s often ad hoc rules, rules that prevail professional standards.
They even go as far as saying that the employees striving to ”climb up the ladder of their institution’s organizational chart…tend to reinforce the most conservative interpretation of their jobs.”
Supporting this theory are Harvard Business Review who in a recent post state that: ”The very best strategic leadership helps the entire organization understand that all of its choices result in the strategy that customers experience, creating a framework by which every person in organization makes the choices he or she needs to make.” Again, choice is here referring to the individual choices, among staff.
There is a point worth considering here. Many brilliant digital efforts have come from bottom up rather than top down, by individuals who have done outstanding work for their museums in terms of embracing digital. Indeed it has been in many ways, and still is, a path of ”…creativity, diversity, individualism and opportunism.” (Knell, 2010).
Which means that even though many museum leaders today do understand the importance and complexity of digital, truly moving towards the post-digital museum requires moving away from individual efforts (that can be supportive or not to the digital transformation), challenging rigid structures, changing work culture and embracing a digital mindset, perhaps some of the biggest challenges ahead in 2016.
This is NOT the cave that I visited, but a random French cave. Photo: Gilles Bonin, Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA.
During the holidays this summer I visited a few museums in southern France and one of the pre historic caves in the region. Connected to this cave there is a small local museum. I will not explicitly point out which cave and which museum.
On this particular day we started by visiting the cave. At the entrance of the cave there was a sign indicating that photography was forbidden. Already here I seriously hesitated to enter though I had paid the entrance fee. The reason for the no photo policy was……copyright (!?). Confusion.
After a short walk we entered into a large, amazingly beautiful and impressive cave. Though an extensive light installation completely disguised the cave, not to mention loudspeakers suddenly filling the cave with Mozart’s Requiem (!). The guide assured us, slightly sarcastically, that the different species of bats living in the cave however seemed to endure the concert that played every time a group of visitors came by. In another cave further ahead there were more art installations, that were as well totally irrelevant to the historical and natural aspects of the cave.
I do appreciate art, but when the art becomes a reason for prohibiting photography in a pre historic cave, there is something terribly wrong. And again, the art did not, in any way whatsoever contribute to the understanding of the magnificent history of the cave, the people living there and the beauty of the environment.
Apart from the art, the no photo policy was what truly ruined my personal experience. Taking photographs and publishing them on social media is how I create my narrative. Many museum visitors visualize their visit and communicate their photos to a personal audience, as a way of creating a personal narrative. It is a way of remembering and understanding, even though the photograph in itself rarely materializes as a physical memory (apart from being looked at closely in the smartphone, held in the palm of the hand). But more importantly the photographs become a social glue in an ongoing conversation, to reassure and strengthen relationships in a community. It puts me in touch with the museum. And I am not even mentioning here the benefits of visitor photography to the museum. That is for another blog post.
After visiting the cave we visited the local history museum, which was displaying artifacts from the cave. Again, a no photo sign at the entrance. Watching rather sad showcases filled with arrowheads and beads without being able to take pictures, again limited my experience of amazing historical artifacts.
The point of this blog post is not to point out a singular tourist attraction. I believe the lack of understanding the role of photography in the visitor experience is widely spread and of course not limited to southern France. I am also very much aware of small museums lacking enough funding to create awesome experiences.
The point is that truly understanding the museum audiences as well as being able to take a step back and fully understand the museum experience, from an audience perspective, and meeting the needs of the audience, is something vital and also achievable without a large budget. Though in this and most other cases of inadequate museum experiences, I am positive that this problem is primarily the result of either poor digital competence within the management (which was probably not fully the case here as they did have a few interesting digital installations in the cave), or decisions driven by personal agendas.
As a museum professional I am of course trying to understand why, and analyze the consequences. I am sure I will visit the cave agin some day, but most probably choose another cave and museum to visit next time.
The trend to acknowledge and embrace visitor photography is vital for all museums. To what extent it can be encouraged varies of course depending on the museum. The issues with selfie sticks have to be resolved. But the benefits are undoubtedly many, and I would urge all museums to further explore the possibilities of visitor photography.
The Art in Island museum in the Philippines creates environments for the visitor to enter, and a possibility to create personal narratives that includes the museum. The settings encourage visitors to act in a playful way. It’s humour and it’s fun!
Uncertain Images (eds: Elizabeth Edwards and Sigrid Lien)
One of the most important books on photography and museums was published last year at Ashgate: Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of photographs, It is a book that brings ”into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums.”
Photographs have through the decades been acquired by museums, and depending on the contemporary museum practices they have changed from scientific evidence, to documentation, to art, and also representations of museum objects.
So what is the different between a museum object and a photograph in the museum collections (and why does it matter)? First photographs are rarely documented on an object level and neither digitized as single objects – this indicates a different status than the objects that are always documented individually.
Secondly they are reproducible and as such they lack originality as an historical object. , ”with their authenticity, originality and cultural capital suspect, photographs, for the most part, lie outside the systems of value that produces museum objects. They sit low in that hierarchy.”
Thirdly, they are not considered as part of the holy object collections, but rather clotted together with documents, and placed in the Museum Archive.
Despite this uncertain and ambiguous status of photographs, they are today central to the museum’s own narrative.
The book Uncertain Images challenges the lack of attention to the roles, purposes and lives of the mass of humble photographs within museums.
The digital aspect of the role of photographs in museums are, in part, adressed by myself in Chapter 13: Digital Dilemmas: The Impact of Digital Tools on Photograph Collections. More on that topic in an upcoming blog post.
This blog post is mostly about looking back at trend reports from 2014, though the conclusions are just as important in 2015.
If you aren’t already onto producing content for mobile devices, now is certainly the time. According to the annual report “Swedes and the internet 2014” between 92–98 % of all Swedes age 12-45 have access to a smartphone. Between 74-88% use them to connect to internet on a daily basis. 73 % of all Swedish adults use smartphones (compared to 58 % of adult US citizens according to the Pew Internet Research Study on Cell Phone Ownership and Usage, January 2014)
The use of smartphones in museums is about more than accessing the museum website before the physical visit. It is about possibilities for participation, social sharing, mobile shopping, Near Field Communication, visitor photography and much more. And it is about mobile being one device among others, and visitors effortlessly moving across devices. Besides producing a mobile strategy for museums, a content strategy is just as important as well as deeper understanding of museum audiences. 2015 will be the year we hopefully see most museum websites completely responsive. That’s a good start.
The film roll by Alberto Korda. From Wikimedia Commons.
I am very fascinated by photographs that become icons, claimed by people all over the world. There are by now countless examples of photographs of this kind, perhaps the most famous one is the portrait of Che Guevara, by Alberto Korda. Another one is The Scream that I have written about in a previous post. Now the photographer and visual storyteller Platon tells in this video by CNN about the portrait of Putin that by now has been claimed by numerous communities.
Since I’ve just written a long blog post at Mot nya medier (Towards New Media) on evaluating social media efforts, tonight’s blog post here will be short.
Isn’t this awesome? A camera that gives you text instead of a picture. 🙂 The Descriptive Camera was launched in 2012, but is still very much an interesting initiative.
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype uses crowd sourcing to output a text description of the scene. Matt Richardson, Creative Technologist
About two years after publishing photos of myself screaming on Flickr, I discovered that my face was ‘for sale’ in several stores around the world, as well as on the Web and spotted it in places like Spain, Iran, Mexico, England and many other places. Noam Galai, photograper
One of my great passions is photography. I have done a year long training to become a photographer. Then I pursued my academic career and ended up with a MA in Visual Anthropology. I have also spent eight years in charge of the Swedish Secretariat of Photographic Collections, an initiative by the Nordiska museet running between 1992-2010.
Working with digital in the heritage sector I am convinced more than ever that photograph collections are at the very center of the digital revolution that is taking place within museums. One reason is that the social arena that social media provides to a very large extent is made up by visual communication.
When I around 2011 started to look into the visual world of social media I realized there are many different ways that photographs are used, remixed and shared. One example is The Stolen Scream, a ”selfie” that soon after the photographer uploaded it to Flickr became one of the most shared and remixed photographs.
This self portrait has become an icon, living its own life. It is being printed on T-shirts and used as posters or illustrating magazines. The photographer has by now no chance to control the use of his image, and those who use it are seemingly regarding it as public property. That the photograph no longer can be understood in itself is not new in the digital world, but today we are starting to grasp the difficulties of documenting a photograph as it travel across the internet.
At the same time as the public are uploading, using and remixing photographs, photographers themselves are reusing and remixing other photographs than their own. In 2011 Michael Wolf received an honorable mention at the World Press Photo Award for his remix of Google Street View photographs in ‘A series of unfortunate events’. He had taken photos of the computer screen where the Google Street View photographs were displayed.
‘A series of unfortunate events’, all photographed from Google Street View, taken by placing a camera on a tripod in front of a computer screen in Paris. www.wordpressphoto.org
Another example of professional photographers that explore online photography is the Swiss photographer Corrine Vionnet who in her series Photo Opportunities from 2011 combined a large amount of tourist snapshots of well known landmarks into new works of art.
These three cases of photography taking a new step in the era of social digital caught my eye in 2011, and they still intrigue me today when looking back. The different ways of stretching the boundaries of the traditional photograph (intentionally or unintentionally) are examples of new challenges that social media is bringing, and that photography – as well as collection management – are facing. This I will explore in a couple of upcoming blog posts.
Recently there has been a vivid discussion going on about Pinterest and copyright. The issue is whether or not grabbing photos from a website and pinning it to a virtual board is violation of the copyright law.
So what is Pinterest?
”Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The site’s mission statement is to ”connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.”
The website is tremedously popular among women, and uniquely not so popular among early adopters. It has appealed to a target group who is not the first to adopt new services or technologies. It’s hitting right on a need for virtual scrap booking.
The very essence of the website is to harvest the internet of images and pinning them onto personal pinning boards. As in the description of the website, it’s goal is to connect people through their interests.
Another aspect, that I find even more interesting, is that the very essence of Pinterest is to go walkabout in the apparent public domain that internet is made up of, collect, pin and share. The images are just there. And curating them suddenly creates new domains of knowledge, experiences and personal opinions that, in my point of view, adds value to the grand resources online.
Copyright
But then, we have the issue of copyright. Are people violating copyright law when pinning copyrighted images to their pin boards? Yes, when pinning a copyrighted image to which you don’t have copyright, you violate copyright law. Pinterest is in fact a huge file-sharing site. It’s been compared to Napster and Megaupload (Business Insider),
I am not whatsoever an expert in copyright law, but I do understand that there is a grey zone in which the website is operating.
A groundbreaking site
Dispite, or thanks to, the fact that Pinterest is pushing the frontiers ahead when it comes to file sharing. I am absolutely sure there are thousands, if not millions already, pinned photos that are protected by copyright and pinned without permission.
And I am not surprised. First of all the main part of the people using Pinterest probably aren’t familiar with copyright online. Mainly because photographs have no lobbyists like in the music or film industry.
Secondly the huge success of Pinterest indicates that there is a great need to integrate photographs into people’s daily lives online, in a way that matters to the individual.
Photographs are used in an almost language like way. At Imgur.com people post a picture and others reply with images (often animated gif’s!).
Lego Cake, posted at Imgur.com
Image answer to Lego Cake. Posted at Imgur.com.
Image answer to Lego Cake.Posted at Imgur.com.
Very quickly a photo online is spread in thousands of copies all over the world (see for example The Stolen Scream by Noam Galai). Not used for commercial purpose but as a way for people to express themselves, curate and develop deeper understanding of a subject, amuse, make a statement, etc. etc.
I don’t have to say that copyright law and we, ourselves, need to get compatible with the digital world, there are plenty of advocates for that. This blog post is just an eye opener for culture and social life online, in a way that matters for cultural heritage institutions.
How do people use photos online (nota bene not necessarily photographic collections, they aren’t yet that available)? And how can we change our (museums, archives, libraries) online presence in a way that collections actually become relevant, like in the case of Pinterest? I believe sites like Pinterest will have an impact on the cultural heritage sector, in a very positive way, where we maintain authenticity and origin of photographic collections and still become relevant to our audiences.
Kajsa Hartig 