Cultural Digital #200
Subversiveness, games, and data.
Hi there. Welcome to Cultural Digital #200.
[fanfare]
I’ve taken this opportunity to move things over from Mailchimp to Substack. I hope you like the new digs.
I’ve not been sending these emails too frequently over the past few months, so that means I’ve got a backlog of older stuff to mix in with the newer bits. But then maybe that’s no bad thing. Better get on with it then…
Brainstream is an interactive animated film, written and directed by Caroline Robert. Get to know ‘D’ (and her while massaging her brain.
Subversiveness
The Uncensored Library provides access to articles forbidden by oppressive regimes via Minecraft.
The Unfiltered History Tour is an alternative interactive tour of the British Museum that features “stories of disputed artefacts, as told by people from their homelands,
with immersive audio and video episodes”.
Mexican activists hack Viennese museum’s audioguide in protest over its ownership of the Montezuma headdress. ‘Hack’ is a bit strong. They “managed to sneak their audioguides into the Viennese museum by swapping headsets in the toilets over a period of a few days”.
Games
Art of Fury is a podcast about “the place where art and video games overlap”. Hosted by Emma Bearman and Leila Johnston.
Prattle is a word game from the Folger Shakespeare Library. I bet you can guess what this looks like.
The “Onsite Mobile Experience Canvas” and the importance of context in digital development. Martha Henson has created “a canvas for organisations such as museums and galleries developing digital tours, games, apps or other mobile experiences to be used onsite by visitors”.
Data
Datathon | Data to Power. A bunch of sessions (recordings are now available) looking at the possibilities around collections and exhibitions in immersive environments.
Unsupervised "emerges from such an aesthetic/scientific vision and processes 138,151 pieces of metadata from the vast collection of The Museum of Modern Art in the mind of a machine".
Heritage in a World of Big Data: re-thinking collecting practices, heritage values and activism. A special issue examining “the dynamic relationships between production, availability and uses of big data, contemporary collecting, heritage value-making and social activism”.
Getting It Together. A report from the Collections Trust on "how the sector might work differently with collections data and proposes a ‘framework for change’".
Miscellaneous
An interview with Nick Sharp, Chief Digital Officer at The National Gallery of Art, talking “digital strategy and the importance of an authentic voice”. Actually, the discussion goes to all sorts of interesting places. Well worth a read.
The Nation's Family Album. Ancestry have partnered with the National Portrait Gallery to add over 125,000 portraits from their collection to their website.
DASH report 2021: from pandemic to future planning. The results of the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s second survey into how the UK heritage sector's use of digital has evolved during the pandemic.
And there we have it.
One last plug: if you’d like some regular observations on good cultural sector digital content then check out Cultural Content from my One Further colleague, Georgina Brooke.
See you next time.