Cultural Digital newsletter #101
Cultural Digital
Hello
Good news for people who like weekly arts/digital newsletters - my appendix officially didn't kill me and I've just got out of hospital. Hoorah! Thanks to all the people who sent nice messages last week.
Learn Calligraphy With AR.js lets you… well, you get the idea. Full disclaimer - I've not actually tried this yet so I've no idea whether it works. I like the concept though.
The tech around museums
Words from Collaborating Around Collections at ANU Canberra 8/11/17. "I’ve come to a point where I think that as a sector it’s time we rethought some of our assumptions and refocused efforts in our digital activities". Seb Chan wondering whether, at this stage, it might be more worthwhile improving visitor-focused info and in-gallery experiences, rather than digitising the more esoteric end of the long tail of collections.
The Art of the Prototype: Museums and Technology. An interview with Chris Barr from the Knight Foundation. You may remember back in May they announced $1.87 million in support to 12 art museums.
#OpenAccess, now what? – Christophe Buffet. "Just a few curious people willing to openly share what they were working on, gathering in the same space for a few hours". A write-up of what sounds like a very nice day at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh’s Innovation Studio. The Digital Labels project looks good.
Exhibitions online is a new thing from Bristol Culture. "A place to translate our in-house exhibitions for an online audience".
Arty stuff
Picasso, Matisse, or a Fake? Automated Analysis of Drawings at the Stroke Level for Attribution and Authentication. A paper that proposes using AI to analyse strokes in line drawings to help spot fakes and attribute works where the artist is unknown.
Artsy and the rise of the matchmaker market. A piece about online auctions. "No single seller has achieved critical mass, and the model that has gained the most traction is the third-party marketplace, which functions not as a threat to existing, trusted brands but as a facilitator for them". References the 2017 Hiscox Online Art Trade Report.
Practice your Spanish
Radar Creativo Fase 2. Some digitally-minded artists from Somerset House Studios - Libby Heaney, Matthew Plummer-Fernández, and Werkflow - have been over to Peru to work with ESPACIO Fundación Telefónica recently.
Telefónica enseña al Museo Reina Sofía cómo utilizar el Big Data. I don't quite get this one. Some of the press releases about this project are all "97% of tweets about the exhibition were positive!" as if that's of any interest to anyone. But this one seems to be saying Telefonica tracked the mobile phones of people visiting a Picasso exhibition and figured out things about them that way.
Things to get involved with
WeAreCulture24 | Phase 6: Digital social purpose. You can now apply to this if you're a museum, gallery or heritage organisation and you fancy working with others to "understand and create digital social purpose".
Call for agencies, web designers or artists active in the 90s and early 2000s. "The Museum of London is embarking on a new digital collecting project around the first generation of web designers, digital agencies, artists that created the very first websites in London".
Art & Culture (Museums) On The Web Community Group. "The Art & Culture (Museums) On The Web Community Group is an open forum for collaborative discussions about making the Web a better place for the artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance in the museums worldwide".
Other things
Getting events on sale with GLAMkit and Trello. Very inside baseball, but this is how ACMI moved from multiple Word documents to automating their process using our Trello and Slack.
ITY 2017: The ticketing industry bible returns. "The third International Ticketing Yearbook – available now as a free digital resource – highlights the accelerated pace of change in the global ticketing business". The country-by-country breakdowns are interesting.
Test+Build for Charities: a new tool to support volunteering and fundraising. This is from the Behavioural Insights Team - you might know them as the Nudge Unit (Richard Thaler's so hot right now). They've released a new version of their platform that uses behavioural science to support charities with their volunteering and fundraising efforts.
Every Frame A Painting has come to an end. There's a really interesting thing in this postmortem about how the stylistic choices for the video essays were made in reaction to YouTube’s Copyright ID system.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at the Royal Opera House, Art UK, Scottish Ballet, Squint Opera, the Jewish Museum, and Belgrade Theatre.
That'll do us. Please do the decent thing and share the good stuff with others. More next week.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. Find out more about The Library.