Museums & the Web 2009: Day 2
Posted by Stephanie Fysh in NewsYesterday, we peeked in on a day of pre-conference workshops (and wifi hunting) at Museums and the Web 2009 in Indianapolis. Today the conference got off to a big start with what word on the #mw2009 Twitter feed says was an opening plenary address by Maxwell Anderson, from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, on “moving from virtual to visceral”. The plenary address will be published, but in the meantime, here’s a teaser …
@kevinvonappen: Museums online can let visitors be voyeurs of staff? Cool #mw2009
@kresin: museums should teach how to practice connoisseurship & help people be more judicious in life choices. #mw2009
@5easypieces: Anderson: “I think museums are afraid of emotion.” #mw2009
And of course …
@mia_out: Brooklyn Museum, Te Papa ‘build a squid’, Flickr Commons getting some love in #mw2009 plenary
After that, attendees had to start choosing from four parallel sessions in the morning and afternoon, before an “unconference” portion of the conference began. (Don’t know what an unconference is? You’ll find out before long if you’re a regular conference goer!)
A Park Ranger, John Harlan Warren, presented to the conference (about video podcasting) — a first for Museums and the Web and a fresh perspective for the more traditional museum crowd, who also apparently like his hat.
But we know you want to hear about Flickr’s own Aaron Straup Cope. Aaron presented today on geocoding and storytelling, showing attendees new ways to think about user-generated data, and showing them the concept of shapefiles. Here’s what some people in Aaron’s audience learned and thought:
@frankieroberto: Aaron: “we boiled the Earth a little. Using a country > region > county > locality > neighbourhood model.” #mw2009
@mia_out: Aaron at #mw2009 ‘Every place has layers of unseen history, I’d like to believe that’s where the value is.’ Museum mapping session
@zbartrout: #mw2009 astraub of Flickr showing the inaccuracy of geocoding. Tags often reflect what people are looking at rather than where they are.
@sebchan: *Beautiful* inaccuracy aka complexity of geocoded data – Flickr shape files fantastic for community projects. #mw2009
@sebchan: Aaron Straup-Cope is hassling Guy Debord. #MW2009
@nikkitimmermans: aaron introducing the word “psychosynthography”… do not underestimate the value of geo and photosynth #mw2009
@mia_out: Aaron at #mw2009, place ‘names become the bridge between experience and the memories that we have’
Sold on geotagging yet?
More from Museums and the Web tomorrow — mini-workshops and professional forums, exhibits, and the Best of the Web Awards!
Tags: Aaron Straup Cope, conferences, geocoding, museums, Museums and the Web, mw2009
April 17th, 2009 at 2:00 am
Another fun summary! Also, this post really exemplifies how Twitter is changing the way we get information. This is great stuff. Love the geotagging info, too!
April 17th, 2009 at 2:21 am
Thnx for the posts. Looking at the Twitter feed and mw2009 site it’s really hard to get a sense of what the big conference issues are. The stuff on organisational change interests me the most but I don’t see anything new in discussions that we haven’t already discussed over on Museum 3.0 – http://museum30.ning.com/ (see the organisational change group in particular).
Will keep having a look at what you do.
April 17th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
There was a session yesterday on organizational change, and some chatter about it afterward, but it didn’t seem to coalesce into anything — at least not from what I could see yesterday. I did get the general impression that what was said wasn’t entirely new, but that it was still something some institutions were struggling with and looking for guidance on.