Lovely work, John
Some points from me:
Even though I've now left Arts Council England, it does rankle slightly
when people describe the Digital R & D Fund for the Arts as the 'NESTA
Digital R & D Fund!' Arts Council colleagues from every English region
worked really hard to make the Fund work, and yet it's often credited
wholly to NESTA. The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts was a partnership
between Arts Council England
<http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/about/www.artscouncil.org.uk>, Arts and
Humanities Research Council
<http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/about/www.ahrc.ac.uk> and Nesta
<http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/about/www.nesta.org.uk>.
I looked at both sites you have cited o laptop and smartphone [a 5 inch HTC
M8 running Android 5.0.1]. On the laptop, a low-powered Samsung Netbook
running XP, the site looked great [via Firefox] and worked quite well. I
liked the sizing of the images. On the smartphone all the text was
displaying way too small - a stylesheet issue, I presume.
The 'Explore Connections' facility was the core facet of the project for
me. The ability to show relational connections generated via tags or
metadata seems to me to be a really important thing to be trying to do.
Whether it succeeds at the moment feels less important, to me. It's an
ambitious thing to try to do, because so few online collections try to make
narrative pathways between eras, art forms, curriculum types, names, places
etc.
What seems difficult when exploring this type of connectivity is trying to
work out who it is for. By that I mean, is it for the public, to use as an
interface? Is it for curatorial staff, to use as part of a collections and
content management system? Or both?
To my mind, developing novel online content navigation and discovery
systems might possibly be a red herring, if they are intended only for
public use. The first public are museum staff themselves - they are the
first audience. The biggest challenge, to me, in re-curating collections in
a more data-centric [or semantic] way, is helping museum people make the
connections revealed by projects like yours in the first place.
While I was using and enjoying the sites, I was thinking, 'how would I
re-curate this collection to better suit the capabilities of the new
platform?'
With that research question in mind, I think the project is great. A real
gain, because it's suggested new ways to use it to add further value to
digital heritage practice.
All the best
Jon
Jon Pratty, FRSA
Creative Digital Producer
07739 287392
@jon_pratty
Associate Director, Tech Resort Teens; Associate Director, People in IT Ltd
On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 12:42 PM, John Coburn <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I thought I'd share v1 of a new collections interface Tyne & Wear Archives
> & Museums has been working on over the past year with Newcastle Uni and
> Microsoft Research. It's been funded as part of Nesta's Digital R&D for the
> Arts programme.
>
> It's intended to serve as a novel cross-collections interface encouraging
> 'non-specialist' audiences to browse and stumble across
> intriguing/surprising artefacts. Hopefully providing a simple and
> compelling search experience.
>
> http://collectionsdivetwmuseums.org.uk
> http://greatnorthmuseum.org.uk/collections/collections-search (via GNM:
> Hancock, one of our museums)
>
> The system is designed to present collections in response to our current
> interpretation of how you use it. Ie. How engaged you are with what you're
> seeing. It currently exposes 32,000 records.
>
> It is not intended to replace traditional catalogue/text search (this
> system is also being relaunched very soon). It should complement it and
> provide a simple alternative for anyone without the skills or inclination
> for doing this.
>
> We're still working on a software development kit. The plan is that any
> museum/archive/etc who wants to use it for their collection can adopt it
> relatively easily. I can share more as and when for anyone interested.
>
> Any comments/questions/bugs spotted, feel free email me away from the list!
>
> Cheers,
>
> John.
>
>
>
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Jon Pratty, FRSA
Creative Digital Producer
07739 287392
@jon_pratty
Associate Director, Tech Resort Teens; Associate Director, People in IT Ltd
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