Cultural Digital #232
Featuring grand theft, music, collections, frogs, and more.
Hello
This week we’ve got musical things, various things related to online collections, and a couple of reports that didn’t fit into a neat category. Plus frogs.
A quick plug before we start. At One Further, we’re putting together a Google Ads Grant benchmarking report. There’s a very short survey and some (anonymised) data sharing, with incentives for taking part.
Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about “two out of work actors attempting the impossible task of mounting a full production of Hamlet inside the ultra violent world of Grand Theft Auto”. Which sounds delightfully daft. Also, since I picked up on this last week I’m now seeing it everywhere.
Music
How Shazam’s UX delivers instant gratification. They just hit 100 billion song recognitions. This is a nice breakdown of what makes the app good to use.
National Gallery Mixtape. “Mix a personalized soundtrack inspired by paintings from the National Gallery with the help of Google AI”.
Three-armed robot conductor makes debut in Dresden.
Ebb and Flow. Sonic Collaborations created this music for the Cutty Sark Soundscape, “a new digital experience that immerses you in the sounds of sailing on a tea clipper 150 years ago”.
Online collections
Unlocking the Potential of Digital Collections. A call to action. The policy recommendations from Towards a National Collection.
Key Insights from One Further's Discovering Online Collections Report. A summary of a talk at one of MuseumNext’s recent summits.
Culture Index "exists to catalog cultural institutions online, and highlight the best practices that inspire us".
Do Museums and Archives with a CMS also Need a DAM? From Cristiano Bianchi.
Reports
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record | Internet Archive Blogs. From the Internet Archive. “In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history”.
The business of digital art: Economic models and insights into the future. Digital Inter/Section, a European project for digital art and cultural orgs, have put out this report. The main opportunities they've identified are "experience-based environments, hybridity, understanding of digital society, and digital literacy".
Other bits
FrogID Week, hosted by the Australian Museum, is “Australia's biggest frog count. Held annually, it's when anyone with a smartphone can help record frog calls through the free FrogID app, and help better understand frogs and environmental health around the country”. This is an excellent example of actual digital engagement (ie beyond just reading/watching something). I like it.
Social Media: Is going viral a useful KPI? From the Young Vic’s Florence Bell.
Digital Culture Podcast episode #1. The Tech Champions at Arts Council England are the latest folks to have a podcast.
Thanks for reading. Please wrap this up and send it on to others who might like it. Perhaps as an early Christmas present.
See you soon
Chris Unitt (and yep, I’m lurking on Bluesky too).