Cultural Digital newsletter #63 - very glorious
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we've got a few people getting opinionated about things, and a veritable smörgåsbord of links to announcements, viewpoints, reports, and awards. Plus the usual new websites, events, and jobs.
Ditching all the high-minded stuff for a minute, this is from @thisjenlewis "The Metropolitan Museum has given the public free access to 375,000 images so naturally I am planning to face-swap all of them" And so @artfaceswaps was born.
That's your reward for opening up access to your collection. How very glorious.
Alice Saville wrote Why theatre needs to love film, not fear it and someone (I'm guessing John Wyver) at Illuminations felt compelled to write a response. That's how blogging used to work. Now it's all Twitter threads and newsletters.
The Social-Mediafication of Museums. There are some fair points made in this. Some terrible ones too. A little sub-editing might've gone a long way.
Winner takes all: Mass entertainment in the digital age is still about blockbusters, not endless choice from The Economist. "Technology has given billions of people access to a vast range of entertainment. Gady Epstein explains why they still go mostly for the big hits".
Post-Launch Update on Exhibition Channels: Metrics Analysis Cooper Hewitt Labs on how people use their website: "Navigation patterns indicate that the two main types of users — those who are planning a visit to the museum and those who dive into editorial content — are largely distinct. There is little conversion from post reads to ticket sales, or vice-versa".
Museum Catalogues for the Digital Age "A Final Report on the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative".
The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster "The most infamous ticket scalper of all time used bots to buy millions of tickets. Now he wants to stop them".
Pixar are now offering a course on Khan Academy called The Art of Storytelling.
The Trampery has accounted alt.barbican a new arts accelerator programme delivered in partnership with the Barbican.
Voting is now open for the Digital Humanities Awards 2016. There are some interesting projects to flick through there.
New websites
Discover the story behind The Goldfinch (from the Mauritshuis), Milwaukee Ballet.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs up for grabs at the Southbank Centre, Creative Carbon Scotland, and the Serpentine Galleries.
Events
21 Feb, London: DrinksThing (Feb 2017)
24-25 March 2017, London: Convergence Sessions. I linked to this last week, but the full line-up's out now and it looks great.
And so we come to the end. Please share this email with others if you think that'd be a good use of your time. Big thanks to the people who have done so over the past week.
Take care now, and I'll catch you next week.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt
I work with lots of really good cultural organisations on projects involving digital analytics and user research. Visit One Further for more on that.