On December 2, 2008 I was fortunate enough to speak to a large Cultural Connections group at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The topic of the night was visitor participation in the museum experience and included myself along with Stephanie Pau, Manager of Interpretation at SFMoMA; Kathleen McLean of Independent Exhibitions; and Catharine King, Vice President of Exhibitions and Programs from the International Museum of Women. We were all asked to speak by Mandy Smith of Cultural Connections who put together an outstanding program that was attended by about 70 people from Bay Area organizations, institutions, and companies. The group was engaged and had a lot of great questions which made for fun and lively discussion.
The topic I spoke on was a recent video that we made for our exhibition Road Trip at the San Jose Museum of Art. The video acted as both a marketing tool to promote the exhibition and a vehicle for gathering postcards for an interpretive component in it.
Thanks to all that attended and to Mandy Smith for asking me to speak! Here are the slides from the talk:
Parts: XHTML and CSS Development, PHP Hacking, Cloud Computing, RSS Development
SJMA Interactive Landing Page
SJMA Artist of the Week Podcast Page
Summary: Adding a page to the San Jose Museum of Art website is no easy task. What was required to make the two pages above work was a lot of hacking of the PHP code and tweaks to the CSS file. It’s difficult trying to stay within the confines set up by the original developers of the site.
The first page is a page that was created for the main purpose of acting as a landing page to our digital content. The museum has been actively building a large archive of audio and video around exhibitions and artwork which we wanted to make available to the public. The videos are embedded around the site on the various exhibition pages so they can be difficult to find. By going to the Interactive page you can quickly access which exhibitions have media content available. Additionally the page has images culled from the SJMA Flickr group and various ways to access our content, i.e. iTunes, YouTube, Flickr and plain old RSS feed, as well as a description of our iPod Touch Tour.
The second page was created in conjunction with our Artist of the Week PodCast which we created in November and December of 2006 for the exhibition New Year, New Gifts. The exhibition drew from the museum’s permanent collection and featured a lot of work that had recently come in. For the podcast we selected 8 works in the exhibit and each week for 8 weeks we delivered a new episode showcasing the artist of one of those works. My colleague, Lucy Larson, and I were fortunate enough to win a 2007 MUSE Award for the museum in the area of Extended Experience. This page utilized the web service Odeo to allow us to embed the audio on the page.
It’s been a while since I posted about the iPod Touch/iPhone prototype tour that I was working on at the San Jose Museum of Art. The last time was in October of 2007. A lot has happened since then including the actual launch of the tour itself. We launched it in May of 2008 in conjunction with a tour we created for Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon. For the launch of the tour there were some preparations and changes.
One of the main focuses was to upgrade the wifi in the museum. We were operating with 2 networks. One was used by patrons of the cafe (which was pretty unreliable) and the other was used for exhibitions. For the upgrade we combined the two into one network and added two more access points using HP enterprise grade wireless routers.
The new set-up reaches most parts of the museum. There are a few spotty areas that we will need to focus on should we expand the use of handhelds into galleries other than our two main ones. Another issues that we’ve encountered is the lag time that occurs when you move from the gallery downstairs to the gallery upstairs. This causes a switch from one access point to another. The units pick up the new access point fine, but the lag time occurs when it switches to a different channel. It can take up to a minute for this to happen which you can image could frustrate a visitor. My request to Apple about how the iPod Touch handles channels was unfortunately not answered. Thankfully we have not had a lot of exhibitions where visitors move between access points.
When users select the Robots exhibition from the Exhibitions screen they are presented with a list of artists.
One of the major changes that was made was to the user interface. Basically the tour is a web application similar to what you might see if you navigate to Facebook or Twitter on the iPhone. To construct it I spent a lot of time on the iphonewebdev Google Group reading threads about how to create web apps. One thing that I discovered was a javascript framework that a lot of people were using. The framework called iUI (iPhone User Interface) was developed by Joe Hewitt a developer for Facebook who was working on the iPhone version of the site. The framework mimics the page slide from side to side that the iPhone is so famous for. It also adds AJAX to the mix which helps to speed up the tour by loading only what is requested by the user and nothing extraneous. I downloaded the framework and tweaked the CSS file to make the screens that you currently see above in the video.
The artist page for this particular exhibition included a Curator's Video Label and an Artist's Video Label.
One other feature that I added was a feedback page. It has not been very popular usage-wise. There have only been about 30-40 forms collected and a lot of them are duplicate submissions. The feature was added more as an experiment than anything else to see if it would be used and to learn from it. I created the survey using a form creation website called Wufoo. You can sign up on their website for a variety of different plans ranging from free to $199.99 dollars a month. The service is great! You sign-up, create a form and then you are given a snippet of code to embed the form on your site. You can also adjust the appearance of the form through customized CSS. While the form works effectively on the iPods, there are some issues with customizing the CSS for it. There was another iPhone optimized solution that I came a month or two ago which I forgot to bookmark and I have been feverishly trying to find it again. If I do find it I will post it here.
There are many other updates that I have been trying to experiment with. I will try and share my findings once I have implemented or tested. I hope to make a post soon about WiFi delivery via web browser vs. locally stored data.
These are the slides for the presentation that I gave at the Tate Handheld Conference From Audiotours to iPhones. The conference was in London on September 4th and 5th, 2008 and there were about 150 people in attendance. The focus of the presentation was the San Jose Museum of Art’s iPod Touch tour. You can read more about the conference or more about the tour. Whatever tickles your fancy!
The San Jose Museum of Art hosted the Annual meeting of the Museum Computer Network’sCalifornia Special Interest Group (say that fast five times) in August of 2008. The day long meeting had several presentations from local museums including History|San Jose, the Magnus, the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco and our museum. For the meeting I spoke about our iPod Touch tour and then invited the 20 participants to check it out for themselves in the gallery. The day was a success and it was great to meet so many new people and learn about their organizations.
