Cultural Digital newsletter #158
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we have yet more VR, plus social media, and a big hotchpotch of other stuff. But first, here are some ways to make a computer mess around with text.
Poem Portraits is a collaboration between Es Devlin and Google. It's an "experiment at the boundaries of AI and human collaboration". You may recognise this from last year's 'Please Feed The Lions'.
And while we're at it, Talk to Transformer will show you "how a modern neural network completes your text". If you're writing a book then this should help speed things along.
VR
How Magic Leap, Video Games Are Defining Future of Royal Shakespeare Company. Variety with a good piece on the RSC and Magic Leap's forays into mixed reality storytelling.
ARTE TRIPS. "Seven new experiences that intersect animation, digital creation, 360 ° film or even video games to embark the viewer in a world that requires no prior knowledge: just the desire to be surprised and move". Here's a write-up from Liberation.
Story Technologies That Changed The World. A TEDx talk by Intel's Suzanne Leibrick which ties into all of this.
Social media
How to land an absolute unit (or become Elon Musk for a day). "Q&A with Adam Koszary as he leaves the MERL for pastures new". The kicker being that, at the MERL, social media is what he does when he has time left over from his other jobs.
Why Social Media Campaigns Don't Always Lead to Ticket Sales …at least not totally directly. And anyway, this really differs between audiences and artforms. Gigs, comedy, and live podcast shows often sell a very healthy % of tickets off the back of social media.
Being open
CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.
Coyote is a piece of open source software "developed by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to support a distributed workflow for describing images in our web CMS and publishing those descriptions to our public website".
Miscellaneous
Interview with Douglas Hegley. He has this to say about how cultural organisations fund their digital work "In my opinion, if it’s less than 7.5% of the total budget, it is likely to be undervalued and under-resourced, and also likely to be seen as ineffective no matter how hard the staff might work. That percentage is the lowest from which digital can be effective".
New Ways of Working: Airtable. Nicky Hand from Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust on using Airtable for their content calendar.
What kinds of questions do users ASK us about art? Sydney Stewart has been delving into ASK app data at the Brooklyn Museum. Here are the rest of her posts on the subject. Btw, if anyone's looking for a digital analyst in the NY area then I'd definitely give Sydney a shout.
Volumetric Cinema Explores the 360-Degree 3D Holographic Experience. Michael Bove and David Levine collaborate with MIT students to push the boundaries of 3D cinema.
Do museums still need a Collections Online? Adam Moriaty's talk at the 2018 National Digital Forum. TLDR: yes, but these days your stuff should be elsewhere too.
Museums and the web 2019: a recap. Conxa Rodà's round-up from the conference.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at the House of Commons, and Westminster Abbey.
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Chris Unitt