Cultural Digital newsletter #67 - lots of bots
Cultural Digital
Hello
It turns out mid-March is a busy old time on the Cultural Digital front. I went away for a little while and have come back to mountains of very includable links. This week, I've got bots, data, a couple of strategy-related things and some other bits and bobs. There are also loads of good jobs going at the moment.
Interested in the idea of screenless interactive projections? Then you'll like No-logram from Joanie Lemercier.
Strategy
Digital at the Museum: Important, really? Distinctive, how? Part of a series of articles from Alex Morrison about digital strategy and museums.
Europeana Content Strategy: getting the right content to the right user at the right time. The defining principles being "Quality instead of quantity, and Demand-driven content acquisition and publication".
Data
A Library of Congress Lab: More Use and More Users of Digital Collections. "Michelle Gallinger and Daniel Chudnov were asked by NDI to study how libraries and other research centers have developed services that use computational analysis, design and engagement to enable new kinds of discovery and outreach".
Guest Blog by Andrew Lewis: Reflections of a data hack judge. Observations, and a round-up of what was made at the recent Science Museum hackday. Some really interesting stuff here.
The Ramones. Punk is Data, Too | R-bloggers | R-bloggers. "The starting point of this post is a simple question: can we use R to analyze punk bands ? And, as a result: what can we learn from applying data analytics methods to punk music?"
Revenge of the maths mob: Why literature is the ultimate big-data challenge. "In a few decades, statistical analysis of literature has gone from crackpot theorising to cutting-edge research".
Advancing computational and data literacy skills schools for life scientists. The Natural History Museum is running a course using their 'behind the scenes' collections as a case study.
Data Visual | Artlink Magazine. "This edition profiles work by artists and data specialists who use data as part of their practice, for diverse educational, exhibition and presentation outcomes in physical, virtual and screen spaces".
Online course: Connecting the Dots "Would you like to better engage audiences? This course is designed to help arts leaders use data to build loyalty and increase revenue". From DataArts and TRG Arts.
Lots of bots
Strangely Compelling 'Shybot' Roams California Desert Avoiding Humans "A lone little robot roamed California’s Sonoran Desert for a week this month. Its only mission: Avoiding humans. It was designed by the Italian artist Norma Jeane and engineers for the Desert X Biennial".
Leila Johnston on the Beauty of Bots: Taking a Look at The Many Faces of A.I. "From the heartfelt gibberish of SeeBotsChat to the teenaged naivety of Eugene Goostman, the first machine to fool the human judges in the Turing test in 2014, (his opening line: “You’re a woman, if I’m not mistaken…”), there’s something about bots that charms the socks off people".
Introducing the New Yorker Poetry Bot "Starting today, our poetry bot, available on Twitter and Facebook Messenger, will send out a poetry excerpt at random every day for the next ninety-two days"
Unlimited fines for bulk buying ticket touts. Hoorah!
Other stuff
How we iterate: redesigning our highest traffic pages step-by-step Jo Bligh explains what they did at the Watershed in Bristol.
How to take AI far beyond gaming. Luba Elliott and Peter Zhegin analysed 94 companies and corporate or academic initiatives and found "at least four distinctive applications of AI to creative industries: content search and discovery, personalization, interaction, and creative process augmentation/automation". And here's a follow-up that charts those 94 examples - Creative AI landscape.
We Used VR To Walk Through A $10 Million Surrealist Painting "I was immersed in a special virtual reality experience that put me squarely at the center of Magritte’s utterly fabulous Le Repas de Noces work".
Koven Smith was annoyed by that "How to Fix the Met" article "There's lots of good stuff in there, but I want to focus on digital, where I think he gets it wrong".
Meet the West Virginia teen taught himself how to build a rapping AI using Kanye West lyrics. This week in 'robots are going to take our jobs' news. Well, Kanye's, at least.
[this is aaronland] numbers for the record "What follows are copies of two emails I posted on the iiif-discuss mailing list, describing some of the nuts and bolts of tiling all those images, and then a third email sent privately explaining why to pre-tile instead of running a production server". Niche, but then I figure someone on this list will be interested.
Random Exhibition Title Generator. Heh.
New websites
Artsworx, Bushstock Festival, Culture Republic.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at the Royal Academy of Arts, Science Museum, Barbican, English National Opera, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and Philharmonia Orchestra.
Events
30 March, London: Purposeful 2 - VR with Purpose
1 April - 1 October 2017, Birmingham, UK: I Want! I Want!
5 April 2017, London: Museums in a Digital World
6 April 2017, London: Posthuman Curating: curating authenticity or the question of content online
19-22 April 2017, Cleveland: Museums and the Web 2017
May 26-29, London: Remix the Ship at HMS Belfast
Phew! If you made it through all of that then give yourself a pat on the back. And if there's anything in there you thought was interesting then please don't keep it to yourself (you don't have to tell people how you got to be so knowledgeable if you don't want).
More next week. In the meantime, be excellent to one another.
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.