Digital Museums: Met is Tops

Without a doubt, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City has one of the best museum websites. As a dedicated educational institution, their website has been at the forefront of the collection of digital images and of usable facts. Lately, they have been working on improving their search engines in order to make these images more accessible to the individual that may know that Van Gogh painted an image of the night sky, but may not know that it is called "Starry Night" or that it was painted in 1889.

Tags and labels seem to be the next step in their process. Rather than having to search for "Starry Night," one could search using tags; sometimes up to 1,000 tags per image, according to the New York Times. Would these same search parameters work in the classroom? Clearly, the base of knowledge in an Art History classroom is such that a professor would know the name of an artist or artwork, but what about other faculty who wish to utilize the database? Humanities faculty who need to teach Classical Roman Art, or the biologist who wants to use images of human figures throughout time to discuss body image?

In addition, though we, as Art Historians, think of these database systems as functions for art images, what about including things like scientific drawings, video clips, podcasts, etc.? The utilization of tags (a process that we have begun to investigate in our own database) seems like the most ideal way to make a system user friendly to the largest audience. Now the hard part...the tags themselves! It's easy for me to apply tags to Van Gogh, because I know where he should go...Impressionism, 19th century, French, Expressionism, etc. But now we have to also think like the non-art historian. How would someone else search for this work? Is this even something that we should do, or is this were the public forum comes in? Allow anyone using the database to add their own tags, thus making the system increasingly easy to utilize?

Social Tagging of Art in Philly

Re: Sarah's post below....

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has just created a user-generated database of search terms for the works in its collection. Online users can tag objects, and these tags will organize and categorize the content for future web users. I believe this wiki-motivated, cream-floats-to-the-top approach can take us far in this e-world!

Techno-Tut: The Golden Age?

We were lucky enough to have the King Tut blockbuster come through Philadelphia. There was much hype in the paper (for whatever that’s worth) about the integration of technology used throughout the exhibit, so I took my class to the show with high hopes of seeing something fresh and edgy. Word was this was to be a 21st century art exhibit that would not be such an educational bore (I assume like all the others?) It may be worth noting that the designers of the event are a production team whose last gig was putting on shows for Janet Jackson - I was certainly not expecting lasers or wardrobe malfunctions, but was prepared to be dazzled.

Your first experience of the show is more Disneyland than Educational – those lucky enough to have a $30+ ticket in hand are shuffled through a series of roped chutes and ramps until the gatekeeper permits exactly fifty bodies to pass into the exhibit at one time. Shuttled into a dark room you are greeted by security personnel, rather than by an Egyptian scholar or educator – you know the “educational bore” type. The security person treats you like you are waiting to go into the fun house, they do some shtick, ask you to turn off your mobile phones, runs down a list of rules and finally cue a three-minute introductory video on three plasma screens high on the far wall narrated by Omar Sharif! I have nothing against the man, but it had a hokey theme park feel that set a bad tone for the exhibition.

The show was populated by room upon room of traditional-looking museum cases replete with Tut artifacts, more anthropological than art historical. The introductory text projected on the walls between the rooms was interesting but there really was no evidence of anything resembling a technological display until the final room of the show where the body of Tut was projected in Hologram on a broad surface made to resemble a sarcophagus. I tried to be amazed as the Hologram displayed one after another projected layers of King Tut from the outer coffin to the body itself, but effect was so underwhelming I found that many people overlooked the display all together.

Overall, coupled with the disappointment of not seeing the death mask Death Mask that seemed to be displayed on all of the posters (it was actually a close up of a 6” coffinette that happened to look just like the mask), the show was a bit of a yawner and certainly not the 21st century groundbreaking show I have been waiting for.

Museum 2.0: Brooklyn and Beyond

I went to the Brooklyn Museum over the weekend to see Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, newly installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. It was impressive and beautiful, as I had imagined it would be.

In the helpful little booklet that described each place setting and the woman to whom it was dedicated were the codes for the cell phone audio content. After dialing the gallery telephone number, the code provides access to audio that further explains each setting with comments by the artist, or a curator from the museum.

Cell phone tours are a fairly new concept, although the underlying purpose is nothing particularly different from traditional audio tours. But what is new is that visitors can also leave comments for each piece, and the museum plans to incorporate in some way these comments into future broadcasts.

This makes me wonder: where does the museum stand in the web 2.0 world of user-designed content? Can we (should we) take this idea further? Where is the appropriate place for a "playlist" or "rate this work"? Users who like Richard Diebenkorn also chose Mark Rothko..... Based on your artists' ratings, we recommend the work of Helen Frankenthaler.... In what ways can this approach be helpful?

CAA and Digital Images

At CAA in NYC a few weeks back, I attended a panel sponsored by the Visual Resources Association entitled "Practical Tips for the Classroom Instructor: Get What You Want from Digital Tools." It was a wonderful panel. The presentations were provocative and full of useful information, but what was perhaps most interesting was the reaction from the audience in attendance. It was glaringly obvious from the question and answer session how unprepared teachers seem for the digital revolution. There was a string of discussion-stopping questions like, "so if I want to digitize my slides where do I begin?"

Christine Sundt, a visual resource consultant on the panel, seemed to be speaking directly to this disconnect between those who are deep in the water and those still left standing on the shore when she said, "teachers should consider leaving the acquiring and manipulating of digital images to professionals." This is a striking comment. Does it represnt a new elitism or rather it is an honest appeal to the need to establish a standard of quality in digital images?

Of course, the question hangs like fire, where will the images come from? Are we to return to the publishing companies who are of late offering high quality images with new textbooks or pushed to licensing deals with the likes of Saskia?

in and out of the classroom

All this digital technology also enables us to teach/reach our students outside the classroom. They can watch an enhanced podcast on their iPods, or get daily emails with art history news. And these art history learners might not even be our own students. Christopher Witcombe, who has mainted the Art History Resources on the Web site for years, has begun a series of "Art History in Just a Minute" video podcasts. The Last Supper episode has been downloaded more that 20,000 since December 2006, and the Mona Lisa episode was viewed 300 times in the first 30 minutes it was available. How far can we reach?

Pixel Power: Has Anything Really Changed?

I love it all -- podcasts, rss, digital slides -- never met a wiki I didn't like. But do these things change the way we teach? Should they? I really value my interactions with my students, and I don't want any jpegs or gigabytes getting between us. What I think digital technology can do -- and what it is best at -- is to change the way our students learn.