Cultural Digital newsletter #147
Cultural Digital
Hello
Welcome to the last one of these emails for 2018. Ready for one last bunch of links?
All At Once is a Studio TheGreenEyl project where they display all the objects from a museum’s digitised collection "in a large-scale printed grid that organizes them by visual similarity". I'll let you decide whether that's a good idea.
Museums
‘Maintaining’ the Future of Museums. Chad Weinard says "Museum technology infrastructure is bad. Everything is harder than it should be. It’s demoralizing" and says it'd be a good idea to improve things.
We Love Dinosaurs, but we Don’t Want to Become Them. Carnegie Museums talking about "building an ecommerce platform from scratch that is on track to account for over $1.8 million in sales in 2018". Not a great title though. Who wouldn't be a dinosaur, given the opportunity?
Cast Courts, 3D Scans, and Mass Dissemination of Museum Collections. Michael Weinberg draws the parallels between then and now.
How Do You Think About A Museum? An interview with ACMI's Seb Chan. Interesting to have an interviewer who isn't necessarily that au fait with museums.
Notes from talks
Notes from Future Now. I did a couple of talks at the Arts Marketing Association's Digital Marketing Day the other week. They were both about getting value from data - one was very tactical the other more strategic. Here are my slides and a bunch of links.
Digital Works #7: Content Strategy & Content Design. A very thorough write-up from a really good event. With talks from the Royal Academy of Art, Cancer Research UK and Content Design London.
Other things
Charity Digital 2018. Dan Papworth-Smyth looks back on charity and non-profit digital campaigns and activity from the past year.
Reading Machines — Technology and the Book. A reading list from the English Department at Northeastern University Spring.
20th Century Fox is using AI to analyze movie trailers and find out what films audiences will like. "Machine vision systems examine trailer footage frame by frame, labeling objects and events, and then compare this to data generated for other trailers. The idea is that movies with similar sets of labels will attract similar sets of people".
Letting neural networks be weird • Imaginary worlds dreamed by BigGAN. "a neural network that generates high-resolution, sometimes photorealistic, imitations of photos it’s seen". Nothing is real anymore. I mean seriously, just look at what 3D animation software can do these days.
That'll do for this week, and for this year. Have the happy festive time that's applicable to you, thanks for reading, and I'll catch you in the new year.
Chris Unitt
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