Lewis Wickes Hine
Work with schools, city history clubs : history club meeting… 1910s
New York Public Library: 434285

Here at Indicommons, we’ve been following the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado, via Twitter. Here’s a short round-up of papers of interest to The Commons being presented there this week.

Buckets and Vessels by Aaron Straup Cope:

With the mass of digital “stuff” growing around us every day and simple tools for self-organization evolving beyond individuals into communities of suggestions, is the curatorial prerogative itself becoming a social object?

This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.

Aaron also led a workshop called Machine Tags: Theory, Working Code and Gotchas (and Robots!)

Common Ground: A Community-Curated Meetup Case Study by Paula Bray and Ryan Donahue:

Why do institutions and on-line communities want to participate in face-to-face meetups such as Common Ground: a community curated meetup? Does this type of experience provide a deeper engagement with audiences and give institutions an opportunity to learn from these experiences? What are we finding in the process?

Can Structured Metadata Play Nice with Tagging Systems? Parsing New Meanings from Classification-Based Descriptions on Flickr by Joseph B. Dalton:

This paper discusses the rationale behind NYPL’s decision to combine existing metadata – in the form of subject headings – with user-generated tags, and demonstrates some of the challenges, benefits and drawbacks for institutions that may be interested in using similar approaches for their own collections.

Flickr as Platform: Astronomy Photographer of the Year by Fiona Romeo and Natasha Waterson:

Variously described as “wonders of the cosmos” (Daily Mail, 2009l) and “the best space porn of the year” (Davis, 2009), Astronomy Photographer of the Year is an annual competition and exhibition organised by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

This paper will outline how we used the Flickr platform to reach new visitors, build a community of practice, develop an innovative standard for identifying and locating astronomy photographs (’astrotagging’), shortlist and judge competition entries, develop an on-gallery interactive showcasing all contributed photographs, and repurpose user-generated content for exhibition labels.

According to Flickr’s developers, “the integration is so seamless… you might as well consider Flickr to be their ‘backend’ serve.” (Kandalgaonkar, 2009).

Museum Commons. Tragedy or Enlightened Self-Interest? This last paper of interest has no true connection with The Commons on Flickr, however it raises and answers a fundamental question regarding the concept of a museum commons.

There has been an exciting surge of interest in the museum sector in expanding access to museum data through the classic idea of creating a commons. A Web-based multi-institutional museum commons could open up public access to collections, deepening contextual knowledge of objects and helping museum professionals recognize the unseen value of their own collections. For example, collections items that seem orphaned or fragmentary in one institution may enjoy a rich life on-line, once reunited with relevant collections and data from other institutions in an on-line commons environment. Commons-oriented intellectual property policies should also enable content sharing for educational and other non-commercial uses, or they may be used to facilitate new innovations or for-profit businesses beyond the scope of traditional rights-and-reproductions activities.

You might also enjoy scrolling back through the social media advice (@edmj/museum-socialmedia-advice) from MW2010’s unconference tweets!

There are plenty more papers to read; we’d love to hear what words of wisdom you found in them!

suggestify

Developer Aaron Straup Cope (he works at Flickr) recently released his impressive geotagging-suggestion Flickr application, Suggestify into the wild. Using this, Flickr users can suggest likely geotags for other Flickr users, including the institutions in The Commons. Aaron says,

This is a site to allow you to geotag other people’s photos on Flickr by suggesting a location to the photo’s owner. Likewise, someone else can offer you suggestions of where your un-geotagged photos were taken.

That location information is stored here until the photo’s owner approves (or rejects) the suggestion. If approved, the photo is geotagged on Flickr (using the Flickr API) and the suggestor is credited by adding a special tag to the photo.

The site is still very much in the alpha-beta-disco-disco-danceball-revolution stage. It works but if something sometimes doesn’t work, I’m not surprised. Now that the basic functionality is in place, I’m slowly going through looking for edge cases and gotchas. Please be sure to take a look at the list of known-knowns

So, anyway, I took it for a little spin up to Oregon. When entering a Flickr user or Commons’ institution name, be sure to enter it exactly as their screen name appears on Flickr. Select the photos you’d like to geotag, enter the place name on the map, and click the buttons to go go go!

Selecting the Flickr user or Commons institution

Click buttons!

We’d enjoy seeing what you end up geo-tagging in The Commons. And, yo, Commons’ institutions – why not sign-up for the service and see what users end up suggesting for your digital photographic collection?

Visit Aaron’s blog for a more in-depth look.

Yesterday, 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!