Cultural Digital newsletter #70 - combative
Cultural Digital
Hello
Lots to get through (again). I'd have skipped this intro entirely, but I wanted to highlight the survey about pay-per-click advertising and the discount code for CultureGeek. You'll see them below. Onward…
WeMake an Artbot from Derby Museums is brilliant. That's all I need to say about this one.
In fact, it's so great, I had to put it up there instead of Reddit's /place which, if you missed it, was a sprawling 72 hour collaborative/combative digital painting… thing. Here's a gif showing how it all played out.
A small request
A quick one for the marketers out there. Please could you spare a minute to answer some very quick questions about pay-per-click advertising?
Governmental goings-on
For their Arts in a Digital World push, the Canada Council for the Arts has "commissioned an analysis of the digital strategies adopted by leading governmental organizations in Canada and elsewhere. It also commissioned a survey on how the arts sector in Canada uses digital and the extent of the sector’s digital sophistication".
#CultureIsDigital is a thing from DCMS (a dept in the UK government, for all the non-UK readers). "This project builds on our commitment in the Culture White Paper to review the digitisation of our public collections and the enhancement of the online cultural experience".
Data
Data Portals in Art and Culture. James Doeser has compiled a "mini anthology of data portals, visualisation outputs and widgets that attempt to help people understand, analyse and generally enjoy what data exists about arts and culture".
An Excavation Of One Of The World’s Greatest Art Collections The good people of FiveThirtyEight have "analyzed half a million pieces in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and glimpsed the history of civilization — and a museum struggling to evolve".
Futuristismic
The Future of Museums, Past and Present: Pitt Rivers AD 2065 "Dan Hicks explores the potential and implications of digital technologies for museums in the future".
The Future Agency. This is about those agencies that create those glossy 'imagineerings of future possibilities' and such - you know the ones, they give their projects codewords and love a portmanteau. Ridiculous people. Anyway, it mentions artists a bit, so I'm including it here.
Other stuff
If interoperable images and collections are your thing then this IIIF Letter to DAMS may interest you. Also, the awesome-sounding EuropeanaTech Task Force would like you to complete this quick Survey on Sharing Digital Resources.
Are Mobile Apps Worth It For Cultural Organizations? Of course not, but Colleen Dilenschneider explains why.
Manual of Digital Museum Planning is big book about "digital planning, development, and operations".
Every Noise at Once isn't much to look at, but it's a music recommendation tools and it's got some very clever things going on.
CreativeAI is a big list of creative artificial intelligence projects.
New websites
Boundless Theatre, English National Ballet, Ivan Aivazovsky — 200ᵀᴴ Anniversary, Lichfield Festival, Lyric Hammersmith, The Beguiling Siren (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw), Young Vic.
CultureGeek (sponsor)
CultureGeek is a conference that brings together leading organisations from around the world to share how they're adapting to the changing cultural landscape.
Find out more and use discount code 'CulturalDigital' to get a 20% discount.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at Tincan, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Christies, Conway Hall, and the National Trust.
Events
22 April 2017, Los Angeles: Arts Datathon
14 June 2017, Riga: Tech Loves Culture (part of We Are Museums)
27 July 2017, London: Building cultural heritage knowledge
Please impress your friends with your knowledge by sharing your favourite links. Otherwise, thanks for reading and I'll catch you next time.
Cheers.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt
When not writing emails like this, I run a digital analytics and user research consultancy called One Further. Give that link a click if that sort of thing's of interest.