#174 - Too highbrow
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we have a fair amount of museum stuff, AI art, tech in theatre, and Nic Cage.
Edward Anderson has been sorting every artwork in the Rjksmuseum by similarity. So maybe watch this and save yourself a trip (joking - definitely pay it a visit). The thread has a description of the method used in case you want to have a go yourself.
Rijksmuseum Pastec Matches is sort of similar. It's a Tumblr full of visually-similar images from the Rijksmuseum, as determined by the Pastec image recognition system that we all know and love.
If this is all too highbrow, then don't worry - someone's done the same with Nicolas Cage posters.
Museum websites
Getty’s Website Redesign to Bring New Features and a New Look. "Perhaps the biggest change of all, and one we’re proudest of, is a shift in the way we work". By which they mean iteration, content and user-experience strategy, goal-driven and evidence-led practices, and universal design. All the modern buzzwords.
The Museum Platform will be a go at building a museum-centric web publishing platform. Building a museum website from scratch is a case study looking at using a headless CMS to knock together a basic museum website.
Collaborative publications
Open a GLAM Lab. "16 international peers, working in the gallery, library, archive, museum and university cultural heritage Lab sector (GLAM), got together in a hotel in Doha, Qatar, to write a book in 5 days".
Humanizing the Digital is a book inspired by the MCN's 2018 conference and its ideas.
20/20 for #MWXX. This is sort of in the same vein. "20 guest editors volunteered to select the papers from past proceedings that stand out to them in terms of impact in the year they were first published, and resonance today".
Miscellaneous
How Technology Is Augmenting Traditional Theater. Featuring the National Theatre, RSC, SOMNAI, AR Show, Cosmos Within Us and The Under Presents.
Why can’t we just use Google?. A key question at the heart of the Collections Trust’s recent feasibility study for DCMS on mapping digitised collections.
AI Art Gallery. "A collection of art, music and design using machine learning" as curated by Luba Elliott.
Kultur Digital. Germany's Kulturstiftung des Bundes are funding 15 projects to the tune of €13 million.
Das Museum im digitalen Raum. While we're being all European, have a read about "zum status quo in Österreich".
Sophie Gadd on Twitter: "me: how much is museum entry?" This tweet clearly hit a nerve, but the perception doesn't really match reality these days, does it? As a quick test I got a few people to go to the websites of the first three museums they thought of and the admissions info was always easy enough to find.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at Cog Design, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Belgrade Theatre, and Town Hall Symphony Hall Birmingham.
That'll do for now. Thanks for reading or, if you're anything like me, skimming down the links.
Chris Unitt
PS: one more plug for the webinars I'm doing for the AMA on Google Tag Manager and Website Accessibility, plus the workshop for London Museum Development on Understanding Online Audiences.