Cultural Digital #046 - embracing
Cultural Digital
Hello
Another slightly late one this week. What can I say? It's a busy time of year.
Also, there's no pretty picture or video to kick things off with this week. Instead, I have a quick request.
If anyone knows of people regularly writing good stuff about digital stuff related to the performing arts (production, promotion, administration - whatever) then please do send links my way.
There's always loads to read about museums or digital art, but not so much about theatres, orchestras, dance (unless you want to read yet another article debating the merits of livestreaming). For that matter, anything about digital education and fundraising in a cultural context stuff seems to be thin on the ground too. Thanks!
Links
Museums in the US are doing a lot of embracing:
The Atlantic covers how Museums Are Embracing Selfies, Social Media, and Virtual Reality.
While I'm not sure the Huffington Post totally embraces the concept of L’Atelier des Lumières given the title of this piece: A New Digital Art Museum In Paris - What The Heck Is That? It'll be "dedicated to immersive art exhibitions. Created by CultureSpaces and using innovative projection technology paired with original musical scores, the exhibits will showcase some of the most famous names in art history". Sounds kinda Cast Courts-ish.
Mark Carnall is definitely not embracing the latest efforts from Google Cultural Institute and The Natural History Museum. "It’s so frustrating because with the technology we have, we should be doing so so so much better than this. This should be revolutionising the way we communicate about things, with each other and instead we’ve got big images of empty microscope slides and videos perpetuating the worst of science communication tropes. This is why museums are by no means ‘post digital’. This is why we have to keep saying the word ‘digital’ before other nouns in our funding applications, strategic plans and audience evaluation".
Can Big Data Make for Better Exhibitions? This is mostly (but not only) about beacons and the answer given is pretty much 'yes, but some people aren't going to like it'.
Understanding a museum’s digital audience "Ahead of her talk at UX New Zealand 2016, Lana Gibson from Lanalytics writes about a project she worked on with Te Papa".
Music’s Salvation Might Be Selling Not Songs, But VR. Some interesting stuff in this from WIRED. Can't say I'm totally convinced by the 'salvation of music' stuff, but still. Interesting.
In this week's instalment of 'how to do what's on listings', Lindsey Green chips in with Do visitors really use a museum website to plan their visit?
Culture24 are doing another round of their Let’s Get Real Young Audience Project. Sign up by 31 October.
New websites
Britten Sinfonia, Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar, UK Theatre.
Events
27 October, Manchester: Let's Get Real Conference
12-13 December, Glasgow International Symposium on Evaluating Digital Cultural Resources
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs up for grabs at the Royal Court, Cog Design, Art UK, and LAMDA.
Thanks for reading, and to all the wonderful people who've shared this email with other people. See you next week.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt
I work with lots of really good cultural organisations on projects involving digital analytics, user testing, and all sorts of other related things. Visit One Further (just be aware it's a new website and a work-in-progress) for more on that.