Cultural Digital #039 - contains drawing robots
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week's email contains a lot of links to Medium. There's a fair bit of website building chat, some bits about museum data, and a couple of pieces about transformation. No games this week, sadly.
I've just come across Patrick Tresset's 5 Robots Named Paul. It's an installation where you sit down for 40 mins to be sketched by five robots. Each comprises two arms bolted to an old school desk - one arm holding a pen; the other a camera.
Links
A few people have been writing about the process of developing websites. Lucie Paterson at ACMI has written What is ‘product management’ in a museum? Shelley Bernstein at The Barnes Foundation wrote about knocking a microsite together with Squarespace (an increasingly popular option, for better/worse), and Jackie Armstrong at MoMA has written Sorting through moma.org about a recent card-sorting exercise.
Leila Johnstone asks (somewhat pointedly) What does Digital R&D Mean in the Arts? What's The Value in the Arts Economy? "For a scene that claims to want novelty and diversity, it is striking that all the digital artist call-outs at the moment look exactly the same. They all award bonus points for the same areas of interest: Internet of Things, Sensors, Wearables, Futures, Interaction, Disruption, and of course, Innovation".
Museums are experience factories. So says Gavin Mallory. "The best online collection in the world…EVER is not an online collection. It’s a visitor experience, powered by your online collection".
Katherine Howells takes issue with the Use and misuse of digital cultural examples: Pokémon Go and the Rijksmuseum Teenagers in particular.
Dana Allen-Greil has updated her list of Museum Hashtags.
I often wish Arts Hacker was a bit more focussed (although you could say the same about the email you're reading), but there's some useful stuff in there.
In open/linked data news, here's A Conversation with the Getty’s New Semantic Architect. Also, Art Tracks is "an initiative of the Carnegie Museum of Art that aims to turn provenance into structured data by building a suite of open source software tools".
Digital transformation in the museum industry "this report draws on the views of more than 70 professionals working in museums across the world to explore the digital strategies of today’s museums and how they link to visitor engagement plans and focus areas for investment".
Startups transforming cultural spaces with @WeAreMuseums "Museum rocket is the startup accelerator of We Are Museums. It is the first museum entrepreneurship fair which took place on June 8th bringing together the most promising startups from across Europe with applications for galleries and cultural spaces".
New websites
BFI - Britain On Film, Confluence, Nottingham Theatre Royal Concert Hall.
Events
23 August, Edinburgh: The Space and BBC Academy Day
4-5 November, Berlin: STATE Festival 2016
18-19 January, Paris: Museum Connections
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs going at Tate, Bush Theatre and the Barbican.
Aaaand we're out. Thanks for reading, and double thanks to everyone who forwards this on.
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.