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!

If we had our druthers, we’d be in Indianapolis this week. Not for the Pacers-Broncos game or to see Art Garfunkel with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (though we’ll admit to being tempted by a play called “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot”), but for the 13th annual Museums and the Web conference — “the largest international conference devoted to the exploration of art, science, natural and cultural heritage on-line”.

Today’s schedule was made up of full- and half-day workshops, introducing museum staff to, for example, RSS/Geo-RSS tools and using Drupal as part of integrating remote data — like, perhaps, those tags users add to Commons photos. We probably would have ended up choosing the two workshops offered by the Powerhouse Museum’s Seb Chan: one on social media, leading to greater interaction in user communities, the other on how to know if what you’re doing online is actually doing anything.

But since we’re not there, it’s a good thing Twitter is popular in the museums 2.0 world!

Interested in hearing what Museums & the Web 2009 attendees are learning (along with where they’re gathering for drinks after, and where the good wifi is)? You can follow along with the Twitter hashtag #mw2009.

Here are a few of today’s highlights:

@Auckland_Museum: It appears that geo-linked RSS feeds are more promising than ones based on passive cultural subjects, at #mw2009

@kevinvonappen: Last year , it was what social media tools were cool . This year, we’re asking each other WHY we’re using them. Progress! #mw2009

@smannion: @frankieroberto on levels of user engagement. Various models exist. Commonly spouted ‘rule’ is only 1% of users will contribute. #mw2009

There are photos, too! Check out the conference photo pool on Flickr. More highlights here tomorrow, from the keynote speaker on!

The set of photographs gathered together by the Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian as Exposições is a particularly interesting one to have on a site devoted to exhibiting photographs in new ways.

Exposições displays a selection of documentary photographs of exhibitions, taken by Portuguese photographer Mário Novais (1899–1967). They are documentary in what is often seen as the driest sense: they simply record the exhibition itself, without the human eyes that it is there for. But here and there among the collected photographs are some that begin thinking about what it is to exhibit.

This photograph from a 1957 exhibition celebrating recent Portuguese philosophers, writers, and the like does not let the gallery-goer forget for a moment that the objects here are to be placed in a particular context: they are about writing and books (plural), not, say, objects of beauty in their own right.

Biblioteca de Arte

This next exhibition, however, seems to want to focus us at least as much on the (modernist) drama of the present—presumably as it has been created by the life of Infante Henrique (Henry the Navigator), 500 years and more before. A remarkable companion image can also be found in the set.

Biblioteca de Arte

In this wartime exhibition, Third Reich documentary material is appropriately displayed (if one permits the museum an opinion) behind bars. Yet to the Flickr viewer—with the habit of seeing image first, title and description later, and able often to absorb only the visuals when the rest is in one of the many other languages on Flickr than one’s own—there is also the more generalized idea of an exhibition behind bars: one with which we are forbidden to interact.

Biblioteca de Arte

And then there is this label-less exhibition (which reminds me that the “new” mode of label-less exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario is not, perhaps, so new after all). Unless the original mid-’50s exhibition goers, who could only look at these beautiful 18th-century objects and wonder at them, we can do more. We can ask questions about them, lean in close, and label them ourselves.

Biblioteca de Arte