A new home for the Museum of Computing
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Computing, Museums
The UK’s Museum of Computing has secured new premises situated in Swindon’s town centre. Thanks to a 3 year lease donated by Swindon Borough Council, the museum is due to re-open in July.
Read more about the Museum of Computing reopening on Culture24 or their own press release for more background on the museum.
Friday 23rd May 2009 - We are delighted to announce that the Museum will be reopening in July 2009 in Swindon town centre. Our volunteers are now hard at working transforming what was previously retail units into one of the most exciting and original venues in Swindon. The museum will be located at 6-7 Theatre Square, an section of the town that has been designated a cultural area in Swindons regeneration plan. We are very grateful to Swindon Borough Council for making these premises available and to all the people who have worked so hard to make this happen.
Tags: Computing, museum, Swindon
Archaeopix: a Creative Commons archaeology photo search tool
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Apple Mac, Archaeology, Creative Commons, Heritage, Photography, Web Technology
Alun Salt and I have been working on a new website to help simplify the process of finding archaeology and heritage-related photos that have a Creative Commons license attached to them.
Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!
The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:
This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:
The clever bit is the search page.
Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.
Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.
Link: Archaeopix
Tags: Archaeology, archaeopix, Creative Commons, photographs, Photography
Creative Spaces - some more thoughts
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Galleries, Museums, Web Technology
It’s been an interesting day so far on the Museums Computer Group email list. The debate on Creative Spaces has been fast-paced with passion, criticism and defence. I won’t reiterate exactly what has been said, as you could catch up on the threads in the list archive, but I have had some more thoughts that I wish to share.
Despite the criticism from some of the more vocal members of the museum technology community, I stand by my previous post in that I can’t help but like the idea of the Creative Spaces project.
Why will people like it?
I think people (i.e. ‘normal’ users, not museums professionals per se) will like it because:
- It encourages users to interact with the museum spaces and objects within
- It fosters a sense of connection with the museum, which, in my unscientific experience, people like
- It is an online space endorsed by the museums and galleries themselves, so it’s ’safe’
- You are free to do what you like on the site - sign up to groups, create notebooks about things you find interesting, comment on other notebooks and items within, etc.
It will, of course, only ‘work’ if a genuine community builds up around and within the website. Getting people to use it shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know the exact visitor numbers for the nine museums involved with the pilot, but it’s certainly in the millions. Something as simplistic as a sign reading “Interact with this museum online. Share your experiences on Creative Spaces.”, displayed in prominent physical as well as virtual spaces ought to do the job. Maybe a place to have an experiment with QR codes too.
Homepage
Much of the criticism (e.g. Mike Ellis, New Curator) about Creative Spaces is that people have, when faced with the homepage for the first time, not known what to do, or how it will benefit them. This is generally true. It’s hard to design the perfect homepage (believe me, I know!), but I can suggest some improvements.
Firstly, we need people to know immediately what the site is all about. Currently we have: “Connecting with your favourite Museums! Creative Spaces connects you with nine UK national museums and galleries allowing you to explore their collections, find like-minded people and create your own content.”
Maybe it could be ““Interact with museums and galleries. Upload your own experiences. Search the collections of 9 museums. Connect with like-minded people. Expand your visit online.” This explains why I might want to create an account and get involved - I don’t want to “create my own content”, I want to upload my stuff to share!
Those big buttons could do with a very short description (click to see a larger version):
(as I write this, Frankie has written echoed some of my ideas, and had some great new ones)
Should Notebooks be called Notebooks? They’re more like your own collection. Whichever way it is done, I do think that it could be a tad clearer.
URLs
However, on the sign, you would have to display a URL. It would make sense to make this a single, memorable URL. I confess to being somewhat confused as to why there are so many URLs - one for each participating insitution:
| British Museum | http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
|---|---|
| Imperial War Museum | http://iwm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
| National Portrait Gallery | http://npg.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
| Natural History Museum | http://nhm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
| Royal Armouries | http://ram.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
| Sir John Soane’s Museum | http://sjs.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
| TATE | http://tate.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
| The Wallace Collection | http://twc.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
| V&A Museum | http://vna.nmolp.org/creativespaces/ |
The only difference I can see when looking at these sites is the “Popular collection items” display. Perhaps a gateway page with a single URL would be an option, say at creativespaces.info (which is available, and easy to remember)? You could select which museum you wanted to see popular items from. There are many ways of doing this - I hope the stakeholders explore some of them.
Search
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I did find the search facility to be somewhat lacking. It’s great for casually browsing objects by keyword, but like many people, once you can see the power of a cross-collection search that previously (to the best of my knowledge) didn’t exist, I want more.
I found it very hard to locate objects that have an Iron Age date, for example. If I was to use this in an educational context I’d like to see a few more options in the search, such as provenance, period, and location.
In the search results, clicking “View larger image” opens a new browser window showing the result from the institution’s own website, which in turn often requires another click to view a larger version. If this could be integrated in a better way, that would be great (but it’s a start). Maybe using a “lightbox” style effect (using jQuery, for example) to float the detail page over Creative Spaces might make it seem slightly better integrated?
RSS
I’d like to see personalised RSS feeds for notebooks and groups. This would allow me, as a slightly more tech-savvy user, to display my Creative Spaces content elsewhere, such as here on Past Thinking, or even in Facebook.
Beta & User Help Forums
If the site is going to be in “beta”, it ought to be described somewhere on the site what this means in layman’s terms. Frankie Roberto suggested needs to be some kind of help forum (like GetSatisfaction). This should be separate from the “Groups” (as it wouldn’t be about museum/gallery content, but about the website itself), that is looked after by the Creative Spaces staff. They can listen to suggestions, and inform people of forthcoming changes. Communication needs to work both ways if there is a community involved.
Conclusion
Creative Spaces is in beta. Things will change as more people use the service, and those who designed it learn how it is used, and where its limitations lie. Any amount of user testing is no match for thousands of people trying to actually use it. It’s the approach Flickr took, and some radical changes have occurred there too over the years (for good or for bad - you can’t please everybody). They listened to their users.
With a better homepage, I think this could really work. Once that is improved, and people can see straight away why they would want to use Creative Spaces, it will gain more users, and begin the evolution of the beta site into a strong, vibrant community of, as the BBC put it “Museum lovers”.
Here’s to its success!
[Update] Mike Ellis’s post on his Electronic Museum blog has a really good conversation going on in the comments. It’s really worth heading over there to catch up on who’s saying what.
Tags: community, creative spaces, Galleries, improvements, Museums, suggestions, website
Creative Spaces - Social Media and Museums
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Galleries, Museums
[Update] I’ve had some more thoughts on Creative Spaces. Feel free to follow this post with my first follow-up.
The National Museums Online Learning Project “Creative Spaces” is a social media project that links 9 major UK museums and galleries. Currently in beta, participating institutions include the Natural History Museum, The V&A, British Museum, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Royal Armouries, The Wallace Collection and the Imperial War Museum.
Explore the beta of Creative Spaces.
Creative Spaces encourages visitor interaction:
The site allows you to search all the collections at once, tag and store items in notebooks and groups, and upload your own images, videos and notes to share creative inspiration with others. This is a nonprofit, public sector project, and it’s the first time that national museums have collaborated in this way.
Visitors can create a Creative Spaces account and make “notebooks” of their favourite objects by browsing the federated collections of the nine museums, and clicking “Save to” next to the object description. I was able to, for example, create a Notebook which I called “Iron Age goodies” and quickly add a few objects to it. Objects can be tagged, which is nice. If you don’t want to add an item to a group, you can simply add it to your favourites, perhaps to add to a notebook later.
One of the nice things about Creative Spaces notebooks is the ability to add your own content.
This is the important bit for me. The ability to augment the museum-supplied content with my own photos, videos, links etc from my own visits is just lovely. A quick (but important) look in the site’s Terms & Conditions reveals that all copyright of contributed material remains with the creator, so no worries there. I will certainly contribute some of the photos and videos that I’ve taken, and I hope that many others do too. A nice touch is that your notebook page contains a social bookmarking widget allowing you or visitors to your notebook to easily add it to their bookmarking/social service of choice.
Groups allow people to join special interest groups which can be public, public but with a membership approval process, or private. Anyone can create a group. It will be interesting to see how these are used, but at the time of writing it seems as if every group wants me to request an invitation to join, regardless if membership is open or not. But still, this is a beta, so I’m sure it will take a while to iron those bugs out (as a web developer myself, I know how tricky this can be).
The site also contains videos produced by participating museums, so you can also see ‘official’ videos on different themes.
Creative Spaces has a huge amount of potential, and it’s one of the few recent developments in the heritage sector that genuinely excites me. It has potential to allow people to interact with museums in a central place, and share the experiences they had during their visit. The federated search opens up the collections, and can even help to plan a visit, or conduct research from a distance. The notebook functionality can even be used to add links if users prefer to post content to their own sites. It’s a really good idea.
Where could there be improvements? Having only used the site for a short while, here are a few suggestions:
- Incorporate OpenID. I have so many accounts with websites, I don’t really want yet another username/password combination!
- Create an advanced search form. Searching for Iron Age objects was hard.
- Give me a nice URL for my page (http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/?page=profile&uid=211). I’d like http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/tomgoskar, for example.
- Create a feed of status updates - it seems as if only the latest one is displayed.
- Let us know if Museum staff will interact back with us. Or is the site going to be just for visitors to interact with each other? Will our content be accessioned back into the collections databases in any way?
- Can I have an RSS feed for my notebook please :-)
- It would be great to allow other users to add tags to my notebook entries.
I also think that it is a great idea to provide this kind of experience for many museums in one place. Too many duplicate sites will mean too much dilution. I hope that other museums can come on board and add their collections as funding permits.
All in all, it’s a great idea, well executed for a first version. It heralds a further change in the way that museums are perceived, opening them up, making them less stuffy, and allowing us mortals to engage and interact with their collections (and each other). All we need now is for the Creative Spaces website (when they are ready) to be widely publicised, as every social networking site needs an audience.
I for one will be participating. See you on there.
Tags: creative spaces, Galleries, interactive, Museums, social media, website
Bringing President Lincoln “back to life”
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under 3D, History, TV
Combining laser scans of casts of Lincoln’s ‘life mask’, with photogrammetric techniques, specialists in the USA have created a highly accurate-looking computer generated model of President Lincoln for a documentary entitled “Stealing Lincoln’s Body”. Using photographs, they have created highly detailed texture maps to make his face look as natural as possible.
The documentary explores plots by a Chicago gang to steal his body in 1876. The clip below gives you a taste of how they have achieved this ambitious project.
Read more on History’s (”History ™” is the new name for The History Channel…) Lincoln website.
Tags: documentary, History, photogrammetry
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Archaeology
Formerly “National Archaeology Week”, the newly named “Festival of British Archaeology 2009″ will take place between Saturday 18th July and Sunday 2nd August at venues and sites across the UK.
The Festival of British Archaeology (formerly National Archaeology Week) is your unique chance to discover and explore the archaeological heritage of the United Kingdom. During this two-week archaeological extravaganza, which will run from Saturday 18th July to Sunday 2nd August, you can take part in excavation open days, hands-on activities, family fun days, guided tours, exhibitions, lectures, ancient art and craft workshops and much, much more.
The aim of this annual event is to encourage everyone, including young people and their families to visit sites of archaeological/historical interest or museums, heritage and resource centres, to see archaeology in action and to take part in activities on-site.
The Festival is a celebration of both British archaeology and of the presentation of archaeology from around the world in Britain. Events take place annually all over the UK.
The Festival of British Archaeology is the new name for National Archaeology Week (which has been taking place since 2005, as an expansion of National Archaeology Days, which were established in 1990). The Festival retains the general format of National Archaeology Week but gives everyone even more opportunity to participate in a wide range of archaeology related activities and events across the UK, by spreading the events over a fortnight.
More details can be found at the Festival of British Archaeology website.
Tags: Archaeology, CBA, events, festival
Lasers and Light
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under 3D, Archaeology
Lasers and Light from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.
This is an animation that I put together at Wessex Archaeology for the Society of Antiquaries‘ Making History exhibition at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.
I posted some more information about the animation over at the Wessex Archaeology Computing Blog, so I won’t repeat myself here!
Tags: 3D, Amesbury Archer, Archaeology, laser scanning, Stonehenge
Exhibition in Salisbury - Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707-2007
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Museums
From Saturday 4th October 2008 until 3rd January 2009, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum will be home to the exhibition “Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707-2007“.
The exhibtion, presented in association with the Society of Antiquaries of London, explores the development of archaeology, from antiquarianism to the rise of modern professional archaeology. It features original works of art, manuscripts and artefacts from their wonderful collections.
Making History is a travelling exhibition, and after Salisbury it will move to Stoke on Trent, Sunderland, and Lincoln. It will be tailored to include relevant exhibits from each region, in addition to the exhibition’s core collection.
Following on from my work on the Making History exhibition in London at the Royal Academy last year, I have contributed a short animation to the Salisbury exhibition.
Entitled “Lasers and Light”, it contains some new footage generated from the Stonehenge LiDAR dataset, close-range laser scans of some bones (and skull) from the Amesbury Archer, and some laser scans of WWI and WWII graffiti carved into trees on Salisbury Plain. In the next week or so I will put it online and embed it here.
If you can make it to Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Making History will certainly be worth a visit, and will give you an opportunity to explore the rest of this fabulous museum.
Tags: exhibition, Making History, Salisbury, Society of Antiquaries of London
Photographs of Brunel’s Structures
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Photography
A recent comment alerted me to the photographs by David White of Brunel’s engineering feats.
He had a camera built to a specification similar to that used by Robert Howlett, Brunel’s photographer who took the famous photo of Brunel standing in front of a backdrop of giant chains from the Great Eastern. He used a lens made just a year after that famous photo was taken, mounted on a box made by a cabinet maker out of mahogany and brass.
White then travelled around the UK taking photos of surviving Brunellian structures, such as Paddington Station and the Tamar Bridge. The resulting photographs are beautiful.
David White has compiled a slideshow with a commentary by him.
His ingenious idea could be applied to so many technologies from the past.
Tags: Brunel, Photography, Victorian
Making People Believe text now online
Posted by Tom Goskar | Filed under Archaeology, Articles, Computing
Back in April, I blogged about a new article on archaeological computing written by myself and two colleagues. It is entitled “Making People Believe” and appeared in the 100th edition of the Council for British Archaeology’s British Archaeology magazine.
I am happy to announce that the full text of Making People Believe is now online (without images due to restrictive copyright agreements).
Feel free to discuss the article in a comment below.
Tags: Archaeology, Articles, British Archaeology, Making People Believe
