Cultural Digital #47 - beauty and the beast
Cultural Digital
Hello
I've got conference notes, stuff about collections, politics (because you need more of that like a hole in the head), and I dashed out a quick blog post too. But first…
LACMA have teamed up with Disney (specifically their Buzzfeed-y site, Oh My Disney) to retell Beauty and the Beast via Snapchat. How much sense would that sentence have made just a few years back?
Links
The Museum Computer Group Conference happened last week (hello to everyone I saw at the reception afterwards). By all accounts it was a good one. To catch up, most of the slides are online here and here's a selection of #musetech2016 tweets.
More conference notes, these from last month's BigData.BigMovies event.
Online fundraising: donate buttons and the need for context. I wrote this. It's not a purely cultural sector thing, but might be of interest.
The Sounds That Changed America. The Barbican giving their Reich, Glass, Adams season the Snow Fall treatment (using a tool called Shorthand).
There's an ongoing spat between two anonymous Twitter accounts - @Save_ENO and @theatre_n3rd. Hilarious/depressing depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing.
Future Museum is "the plan that is transforming Tāmaki Paenga Hira - Auckland War Memorial Museum and ensuring we deliver our mission and vision over the next 20 years. The Future Museum project is ambitious and visionary. We are seeing changes across the Museum - from our onsite galleries to our offsite offerings and online presence".
Collections
AllMusic: The Story of the Big Data Jukebox. "When AllMusic launched 25 years ago, it wasn’t an obvious big data play. But it became one. Hidden in its millions of entries is music’s collective history".
New Conversations: The Creative Reuse Potential of Collections. All sorts of interesting nuggets in this by John Coburn at Tyne & Wear Archives. "We have a small Digital team. Like most museum digital departments, our job is broadly to develop digital projects that increase public access to collections. We have the creative freedom to work across collections with multiple departments and external partners. The team’s role is increasingly one of R&D. Not just experiments with new technology but R&D into the digital creative reuse potential of collections".
Collections as Data: Stewardship and Use Models to Enhance Access was an event at the Library of Congress. Click that link to watch all 8 hours, and/or check the schedule to see the bits you're interested in. That Deep-Fried Data talk I linked to last week was from this event.
A couple of political pronouncements
Councils urged to give museums more freedom online. "The culture and digital minister for England, Matthew Hancock, has urged local authorities to give the museums they run greater independence over their digital communications". The aim being to put a stop to daft comms and procurement processes.
And this from the University Museums Group Annual Conference: Better Together? "As Minister for Digital and Culture, I want to drive this synthesis of culture with digital technology, and when it comes to the digitisation and dissemination of our great collections, I want Britain to be a world leader".
New website
Everyman Cinemas, Heath Robinson Museum, Houston Ballet, Somerset House.
Events
17 November, Leicester: Creative Technologies in the Public Realm
2 December, London: Arts Marketing Association - Digital Marketing Day
7 December, online: Tessitura's Innovator Series
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs up for grabs at the Royal Institution, Natural History Museum, Young Vic, and Edinburgh International Festival.
Big thanks to the email forwarders out there. Catch 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.