Cultural Digital #83 - a different look
Cultural Digital
Hello
Don't worry, I'm back again (did anyone even notice there was no email last week?) and have returned to enough interesting stuff to fill one of these emails many times over.
Odra from Marpi Studios is described as "An everlasting underwater music experiment. A different look at generative sounds". Which means it's one of those things you can prod and it'll make interesting sounds. I like those things.
Setting Our Apps Free. JiaJia Fei at the Jewish Museum explains why they've moved all the audio from their app-based audio tours over to Soundcloud (Spolier alert: it's to be "truly accessible and responsive to the evolving digital needs of our visitors, as well as those who may never have the opportunity to visit us in person".
SoundCloud is apparently in a spot of trouble at the moment, which prompted this piece - SoundCloud matters because artists and labels depend on discovery.
5 things we learned by experimenting with Snap Spectacles at The Royal Ballet. "we decided to test-drive them by handing them over to one of The Royal Ballet’s dancers, Beatriz Stix-Brunell. The brief: to showcase a day in the life of a professional ballet dancer from a performer’s point of view". More good experimenting.
From the conferences
Museums and Digital Strategy Today. The speakers on the panel at the 2017 Museums and the Web Conference with their "key takeaways from the discussions and helpful reference materials for those of you who are wrestling with digital strategy inside your own museums".
Four reasons to cry (if you are a museum educator). Eylan Ezekiel's notes and slides from his talk at the Digital Learning in Museum conference.
SMG Digital Lab. An overview of the work of the Science Museum Group's Digital Lab, presented at MuseumNext 2017.
Different ways of seeing collections
Using facial recognition to bring portraits to life. From Cogapp "In this post I’ll detail the trials, tribulations and successes of Team Face Swap as we position randomised portraits over our faces via live video as part of the second Coghack hackathon".
Visualizing Cultural Collections (Visualisierung kultureller Sammlungen) is a research project investigating "graphical user interfaces and the potentials inherent to visual exploration of digitized cultural".
Mapping Paintings. "Explore the provenance records of hundreds of paintings and visualize your own research across time and space".
Other stuff
#CultureisDigital is "a conversation between Government, the cultural sector and tech companies, led by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport". I eagerly await this being rolled out across the DDCMS remit so we get #DigitalisDigital.
Google criticised over Ed Sheeran ticket adverts. A campaign group set up by artists and their managers "searched Google for 100 popular UK tours, typing in the artist's name and the word "tour". The group discovered 77 times out of 100 a secondary website had paid to be the top result of the Google search". Let's hope retargeting didn't skew things.
Pokemon Go: How Britain's Parliament, Museums and Transport Responded To The Madness. Features the British Museum, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, and the V&A.
Classical music app to send programme notes to your phone as orchestra plays "The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is the first in Britain to embrace a new app, trialled in Cadogan Hall earlier this year and set to be used at a new “Myths and Fairytales” season in a specially-designated seating area".
A Piece of Work is a new MoMA podcast about modern and contemporary art hosted by Abbi Jacobson of Broad City fame. Very chatty and not too arts-insidery, although the % of the show taken up with ads seems a bit high.
Get an Introduction to Opera. King's College, the Royal Opera House, and the V&A have worked together to produce this online course on FutureLearn.
New websites
Brussels Museums, Contact, entropie festival, Okela Sormen Lantegia, Theatre503.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at the Natural History Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Theatre, and Museum of London.
Thanks for reading! Please pass this on to people who might be interested and I'll be back with more next week.
Cheers
Chris Unitt
When not writing emails like this, I run a digital analytics and user research consultancy called One Further, working with some truly excellent cultural organisations.