Cultural Digital #035 - what is it good for?
Cultural Digital
Hello
Today we've got gripes about digital projects, plus a bit of musedata, some online fundraising, and a random smattering of other things I've seen in the past week.
We'll start off with news that the University of Vermont in Burlington's Computational Story Lab (the what now?) "have used sentiment analysis to map the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories and then used data-mining techniques to reveal the most common arcs. “We find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives,” they say." More via MIT Technology Review.
Links
Ok, so the Museopunks podcast I linked to in last week's email had been taken down. Sorry about that. Serves me right for not linking to it sooner. Happily, I found it somewhere else, so here's Digital As A Dimension of Everything featuring interviews with John Stack and Keir Winesmith (who I happened to meet yesterday - nice chap).
Digital, huh, what is it good for? "here’s what I think are ten important questions museums need to ask when embarking on a digital project be it, tweaking the website to investing in (the emperor’s new technology) virtual reality. None of these are rocket science but in my experience, they often go unasked." This is from Mark Carnall, a curator at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It's worth reading.
Covering similar ground, How can museums avoid unsustainable, unmaintainable digital projects and reduce the 'digital hangover'? This is a write-up from a discussion at the Museums Computer Group conference.
Related: If you have opinions about the sustainability of digital resources then consider using this survey as an outlet.
Museum data
Organizational design for musedata. This is a really good starter piece if you're wondering how the whole digital analytics/data science thing might fit in at your organisation.
Transforming a museum to be data-driven using R. The British Museum's Alice Daish presented at the recent useR! conference. This is the video of that talk.
Museum Data and What to Do With It: Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh An article looking at how several Pittsburgh museums are making use of various types of data.
Online fundraising
These aren't cultural sector-specific, but relevant all the same:
Other bits and bobs
Mass Digitization: Workflows and Barcodes. From Allison Hale, Digital Imaging Specialist at Cooper Hewitt, this is the first in a four-part series about digitisation.
Making the most of the box office is a series of articles from Arts Professional. Mostly advertorial, so go armed with pinches of salt, but some interesting stuff in there nonetheless.
Creative Review did a nice profile of Mar Dixon who you may know from… well, every cultural hashtag campaign ever.
New websites
Jacob's Pillow, Royal Gorge Bridge & Park, Royal West of England Academy, The Australian Ballet, The New English Art Club.
Events
8 July, London: MakeRobotTech Ideas Lab
That'll do us for now. Catch you again next week. In the meantime, please forward this on to anyone you think would appreciate it.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt
When not sending newsletters like this, I work with really good cultural organisations on projects involving digital analytics, user testing, measuring content performance, and wider digital strategy. Visit One Further for more on that.