New Work: MoMA Exhibition Spelunker

Installation photograph from The Museum Collection of Painting and Sculpture exhibition, held 20 June 1945 to 13 February 1946

On September 7, 2016, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York cracked open a new repository on the code repository service, Github. In addition to the release of their popular collection dataset, the museum also made the unprecedented decision to share the exhibition history of the museum (from 1929 to 1989), which also included a ton of archival material like press releases, installation photographs, and catalogues. You can see the official version on moma.org.

MoMA asked Good, Form & Spectacle to make a spelunker to showcase this data, and we were thrilled to oblige.

Voila!   http://spelunker.moma.org

First Steps

As with all our previous spelunkers, the first step we usually take is to map out a basic plan for the information and how you’ll move around in it. This is often a basic List -> Item pattern, where List can be made up from any of the main data elements. In the case of MoMA, that was Exhibitions, Roles, People/Orgs, and Departments. From each list view, you can move to a single instance of that type of thing, and from that single instance, back out into others, like from an exhibition to the year it happened, or to an artist in that exhibition. (We also get a Python project running on Heroku, and pop our own first commits on Github.)

The main reason we enjoyed making the MoMA Exhibition Spelunker so much was because the data was of a different nature to a collection dataset. As well as listing each exhibition over that period, the data also shows all the people who were involved, both the artists, but also, interestingly, museum staff and other collaborators. We’ve looked a little at how metadata can represent institutional dynamics with Week 1 of the What’s in the Library? project with Wellcome Library, but this was altogether more fine-grained. Who are the actors in this institution? Can  you see their influence?

First Impressions

So, once we have the basic List -> Item scaffold in place, it’s really a matter of trying to answer the questions that come up for us as we poke around all the corners of the data. One of the first simple visuals we added as the basic timeline, to show quickly and clearly what happened, and when.

Straight away, even a simple graphic like this asks questions. What’s that peak in World War II? Why the dip in the 50s? Why was 1978 such a full year?

It’s important to say at this point that a lot of what I’ll write next about what I discovered in the MoMA Spelunker is pure conjecture and presumption, based on looking at this data quite a lot. It may not be true, at all. (See Open Data, Assumptions and Naïvety below.) 

The Museum & People Dynamics

We don’t often get to see or know the dynamics and politics that go on within the walls of a museum. It can be such a designed space, all about the art or objects, that often the people who made an exhibition come true are almost entirely invisible. It was a real pleasure to work on this data from MoMA specifically because it isn’t about the art, but about the people. When we first began the project, I was keen to be able to show the art, but that desire was quickly supplanted by interest in, and display of, who was doing what.

One of the visualisations we made was about directors of departments, how long they were directors, and in some cases, showing where people went as they moved around the museum, in some cases in careers spanning 40 years. You can see in this screenshot what we can highlight a single individual as they move around too, so you can see who skipped where and when, like John Elderfield…

It was bordering on titillating to imagine who might have worked together and how such long term tenures really did shape the museum as it is today. But, it’s also crystal clear that a little map like this can reveal nothing about why people moved around. You’ll need to look in the Archives to learn those stories.

MoMA Characters Emerge

I was enjoying the way that showing this kind of data over time helps you spot blobs and trends and gaps in the data. I was interested to try to uncover whether we could show who the key staff were that really got MoMA off the ground in the early years. By taking a role – Curator – and drawing it over time, you can see quickly see who was kicking things off, in this case, the founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., curated 36 exhibitions, and worked there for about 40 years.

Something interesting happens when you change how that list is sorted. We can show the same data, but order by who curated the most exhibitions, to get a really different picture that shows the curators who’ve worked on the most exhibitions, and how much they made in any given year. It’s there that you start to notice the effort of curators like William S. Lieberman, who led three different departments over his career, or Dorothy C. Miller, who worked at the museum for about 30 years, and was head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture for a relatively short time, too. Did they work together? Did they like each other?

We liked this “most appearances” view much more, so set that as the default.

This list view is cool too, when you’re looking at artists. There’s a lot of info squished into that single list view, and the overall impression is mostly that MoMA has an incredible collection full of heavyweights (and very good relationships with collectors and other museums), and shares it with the world a lot! Here are the most exhibited artists in the 1929-1989 data… could you infer Jasper Johns blasted on to the scene at some point there?

One small design thing I introduced was to show a small ♀ symbol in big lists of people, so you could spot women quickly. This revealed a little gap in the data, where gender isn’t always noted. Since perfect is the enemy of good, rather than remove the feature, I’m trying to help by slowly making additions/corrections to a copy of the data, which MoMA is welcome to. (Want to help?)

World War II and The Responsive Museum

Something that piqued my curiosity almost immediately was about how the museum operated in World War II, 1939-1945. They were exhibiting a lot, and browsing 1942 and 1943 in particular, there were clearly lots of exhibitions related to the war.

I first noticed the annual exhibitions called Useful Objects of American Design under $10.00 that opened in 1939, and repeated for a few years thereafter. I found myself wondering if this was austerity-related, but then realised I didn’t know the equivalent of $10 in today’s money! Nevertheless…

Useful Objects of American Design under $10.00

Then I noticed several others that were much more specific to war, starting to emerge in 1940 and many more in 1942/1943, and beyond, like War Comes to the People: A Story Written With The Lens, National Defense Poster Competition, Art in War: OEM Purchases from a National Competition, Wartime Housing, Road to Victory, Camouflage for Civilian Defense, United Hemisphere Poster Competition, The Museum and the War, National War Poster Competition, Art Education in Wartime, War Caricatures by Hoffmeister and Peel, Airways to Peace, Magazine Cover Competition: Women in Necessary Civilian Employment, and more.

Airways to Peace (and a cool interactive dymaxion globe!)

With a little further digging beyond our dataset, I quickly discovered that “numerous exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art were produced in collaboration with the United States government,” as it continued to exhibit the very best in modern art, including Starry Night, which MoMA acquired in 1941, and exhibited soon after.

I simply don’t know how data like ours could possibly show that Victor D’Amico chaired the Committee on Art in American Education and Society, which established as “art education’s answer to Fascism and its contempt for creative art. We hope to mobilise the art educators and students of America, combining all their art efforts, large and small, throughout the nation to work for victory.” It’s just one or two steps away from his basic data, and you always have to stop making new columns in data at some point, don’t you?

The committee worked throughout the year to keep art on the educational agenda. There’s a lot more background about the museum and the war available in this archival finding aid online: The Museum and the War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for “The Cause”. (It’s worth a read.)

I have to say it makes me wonder how and if museums in the USA (and elsewhere) are mobilising to produce a “vast program of art activity” in this way to combat the 45th president. Ahem. In any case, I actually removed a bunch of other “this was interesting” and “I enjoyed this” links and stuff. You can find your own way!

What did the critics say?

NATURE and social satire are the themes of two current shows here. Both are important and well worth seeing.

Jacob Deschin, on Elliott Erwitt: Improbable Photographs

Remember mashups? When publicly accessible code-level interfaces (or APIs) became a thing back in the day, the fantasy was that all manner of mashups could be made to combine and recombine data from all over into compelling new presentations.

One of our early ideas for this spelunker was to try to bring in content from the fabulous New York Times archive, a treasure trove of history around New York City and its surrounds from 1851 to the present. We knew that The New York Times regularly reviews events and exhibitions at MoMA, so it was simple step to try to combine that with the MoMA exhibition data. Luckily, too, the MoMA team had already done a lot of the work to connect exhibitions to articles, which was hugely helpful.

Could we show what The New York Times critics said about MoMA through the twentieth century? Yes! Critics such as Edward Alden Jewell, who was watching from the start in 1929, or Jacob Deschin, who often wrote about photography exhibitions from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, also form part of the fabric of the exhibition history at MoMA.

(Note that you can’t see full articles unless you’re a subscriber. We can show first paragraphs, which is a start.)

Open Data, Assumptions & Naïvety

This work for MoMA has been interestingly different from previous spelunkers we’ve made. In other projects, we’ve made exploratory interfaces into object-level metadata, which is (arguably) simply factual, representing objects and their attributes. While there may be errors or omissions in this kind of metadata, each object is as well-described as possible. Sometimes, viewing this data in the aggregate can bring insights — like seeing instantly that prints form the largest group of things by type at the Victoria & Albert Museum — but there’s really not much ‘colour’ to it.

Part of the provocation of the spelunker concept is to challenge the notion that people know what they’re looking for when they encounter a new museum’s collection, and I’m wondering if that could be extended to museum datasets. It seems to me that “drawing” this data makes it easier  to hypothesise about and ask questions of than examining a big .CSV file. You follow your instincts or an image that appeals or a person you recognise or a theme you’re into, and, I think, start to form your own opinions pretty quickly. The challenge is that this metadata can be quite rich, but, at least in our experience so far, also pretty superficial, so the picture that’s drawn for you is just a surface view. Perhaps though, it’s like a physical exhibition where you don’t read any labels (or there aren’t any), and you’re left to make your own judgements, some of which may be wrong, but all are personal.

As we were fleshing out the interface to the MoMA spelunker, I found myself making all sorts of assumptions about the institutional dynamics at the museum related to who was working when, and why they might have moved around, their areas of interest or speciality, and things like that. I’d written about some of that sort of stuff on the About page, but the kind folk at MoMA archives were good enough to let me know that some of those assumptions were just plain wrong! Maybe it was more that the data we were able to display only gives you a tiny glimpse into the actual dynamics, and it’s simply a must to explore more deeply with experts or other source material. I don’t want to draw wrong conclusions, and experts in house, who live with this information day to day, surely don’t want to express things that are wrong. Of course not. I think what I’m coming around to is that these sorts of explorers help orient viewers towards questions they’d like to answer, once they’re acclimatised to the terrain. That seems good!

More broadly speaking, we’ve now made six spelunkers at G,F&S, and it’s probably about time I had a proper think about how well they’ve worked and whether they’re useful. More on that later…

The team for this project was George Oates (design, project lead), and Phil Gyford (engineering). Thanks, Phil!

A Commission from Het Nieuwe Instituut, Part II

Since this commission began, there’s been a visit to MVRDV in Rotterdam, a Part I blog post, and an interview about these ideas with Annet Dekker published on the HNI website. Annet also wrote a great scene-setting post there too, about the challenge of this kind of digital archiving, with a great reading list: Bringing out subjective relationships: Relations of technics, concepts and actors in digital archives.

I must admit, it’s taken me much longer to complete this speculative commission that I’d first thought. I’m now sure answering the questions it asks could be a life’s work, and that made it a bit daunting to try to collapse the huge range of initial ideas into two blog posts (and the interview). In any case, I’d be curious and appreciative of any reactions you have to it.

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New Representations of Work

One theme that’s emerged through conversation and research is that we’re missing an opportunity to do better, more relational, and richer archival representations of organisations. There is very much more available to us than the more traditional “bucket of files” which is often deemed the equivalent of an archive (when really it’s just a backup of a bucket of files.

In a previous life, I was art director at Stamen Design in San Francisco. When we had a design intern join us for a few months, Zoe Padgett, I wasn’t sure how to keep her busy and engaged from the outset, so I dreamt up a piece of work that could simmer away while she was with us: to visualise the company itself. In this project now, I’ve found myself returning to what she made. It feels like a new representation of corporate life, and has a particular focus on the people in the company, not necessarily the company’s output. During her internship, Zoe conducted a bunch of interviews, surveys and other chats, and painted a picture of us that we’d never seen before, even though we lived it each day.

Zoe studied us and the studio, figuring out who we were, where we’re from, and what we liked to eat when we were in the office. One of her interview questions was ‘what is your favourite animal?’ and that resulted in one of my favourite staff lists ever.

The other thing I enjoyed about Zoe’s approach was that it wasn’t particularly about our projects, our output, but about us. There is (and has always been) so much more material available to us about the whole company that what it makes public, to illustrate and even explain the company dynamics.

MVRDV is a titan in the architecture world. It’s a big, successful firm that’s made hundreds of projects, many of them built, and the public facade online reflects that. It’s ultra-professional, and (interestingly) specialises in creating hyper-real aspirational imagery around its projects. One tricky part with architecture archives though, is that it’s almost never possible to collect The Thing made by architects. Inevitably they’re about process around the thing, and in fact, it’s actually quite rare that an architecture project gets built in the world, in which case it’s all process.

Today though, there’s a pretty big gap between representing the process of creation and what we often think of as the archive… The digital archive is handed over as a bucket of files, like someone dragged a backup disk onto another backup disk, so what you’re seeing is files and folders and files and folders. No sense in there of who did what when and why.

The disk

A working file

Browsing bucket of files

Tree skeletons

 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still interesting to look at working files. But, what I can’t know from the bucket of files in its current form is who made them, at whose request, for what stage in the project, whether the boss was happy with it, whether it reached the client, or anything like that. We can’t know that from Zoe’s Stamen Menagerie either, to be fair.

(Does this mean I want to be a social historian?)

This problem is hard, and most companies probably don’t really record this kind of information in a organised or archival way. Is there more of an opportunity than ever to witness the people involved in the creation of raw archival material? How does having a named account on a web service where you upload stuff (Dropbox, Google, Instagram, Flickr) improve potential for identity in archives? It’s no longer endless folders of IMG_3467.jpg, is it? Can we do better? How can we do better?

Actors in the Archive?

I wanted to know much more about the who, so I set about a quick study of the MVRDV actors to see if I could figure out anything about who worked there. The first piece was a bone simple survey that asked a few simple questions:

1. What are the four most important projects at MVRDV?
2. What’s your job title? optional
3. What year did you start at MVRDV? optional

With the caveat that the staff probably didn’t know anything about me or this commission so why would they do the survey, we ended up with 25 responses from the company. Even in these responses, the results were as expected: respondents would probably mention the famous projects.

MVRDV Stage 1: Staff Survey, Top 4 Projects

#	Project	Votes	%
TP261	Markthall	19	76%
TP065	Expo2000	15	60%
TP010	Villa VRPO	7	28%
TP028	Silodam	6	24%

I’ve published the raw results and some cooked views on it as a Google sheet, with permissions set to ‘anyone can comment’. I liked that because people had been asked for their Top 4, it seemed like there were quite a few personal favourites mentioned in the results too. 33 projects got a special mention in the end.

Another highlight for me was a glimmer of something that you probably wouldn’t find in a bucket of files; someone’s answer to “When did you start?” was “I don’t wanna know”.

The Soylent Archive: It’s Made of People

I’m drawn to projects that put people in the centre. Here are some of my favourite examples.

1. Hacking Rambert
You’ve probably heard of Leila Johnston, and if you haven’t, you should have a look at her work. She’s a prolific writer, thinker, and maker who’s constantly putting out incisive, original work around the collision of art and tech. Anyway, I watched with interest as she worked on her latest project called Hacking Rambert, installed as ‘digital creative in residence’ at Rambert Dance Company in London.

I looked into a lot of interesting things. Time. The building. Code. Rendering sound. Musicality. Portraits. Heat. I looked at people – especially dancers. How is it possible that most people never get really good at anything, yet other people find themselves here, doing such an extraordinary thing for a living?

I particularly enjoyed Johnston’s portraits of the dancers, especially in the context of the ephemeral performance. I love that she made digital captures of the dancers, and then printed them in 3D physical form, and even more so that a lot of it was very ‘lo-poly’ or low resolution. As Johnston suggests, low resolution can mean high fidelity and that’s not something traditionally witnessed in archives, I’d suggest, except maybe after years of work?

She also published a short book about her reflections on the residency, and one phrase struck me, her conceptual prompt, “how can I ensure I’m not doing ‘interior design’ or simple illustrations of dance concept on stage etc, but show something of the authentic situation of digital and its relationship to dance, as it stands in 2016?”

Hmm… authentic situation of digital… in 2016.

2. Tracking Transcience
Is a much older piece of work, but still living, which is sort of nuts for a digital thing. Tracking Transience was started in 2002 by an artist called Hasan Elahi (who has gone on to make all sorts of brilliant things). After 9/11, Elahi got hassled a lot as he travelled, always getting bothered at borders and airports and questioned unfairly, so he did something amazing. He put his whole life online, in remarkable detail. Where he was all the time, what he ate, what he bought… the lot. So the next time he was hassled, he could point to precise evidence of his whereabouts.

In 2002, this was a radical act, and I think that level of transparency still is radical. As much as the world has turned since then, and many of us post a lot of ourselves online, it’s rare to show ourselves wholly. It’s even more rare for a company. Transparency can be threatening, but maybe if there’s a company who would be up for it, perhaps it’s MVRDV.

3. Who lives in the Wellcome Library?
A project I’ve been working on over the last ten months or so with the Wellcome Library touches on this idea of trying to find the actors in a collection system. Library websites can be really dry, and almost always rely on people knowing what they’re looking for, so we tried to directly reveal the WHO and not just the WHAT.

With our What’s in the Library? project, we looked at the data from a bird’s eye view, and were able to display the people in it. Visualising people in a dataset like this can show you a really different dynamic in the collection. Just by clicking around and exploring interconnections of people and subjects, you can learn something about who was writing what, and when.

It’s simple, but a nice way to explore.

Who are the actors in the MVRDV performance?

Even though this commission wasn’t about making a piece of software, I did a few sketches about showing people, who they worked with, and how many of their projects ended up getting built. I wonder what data you’d need to drive a visualisation like this?

When I began this project, I started following MVRDV on the popular web services like Facebook. I noticed an announcement that they appointed five new partners, and immediately wondered about all the things that had led to that announcement.

Then I wondering how the staff at the firm has changed over time, and who worked together a lot and formed great collaborations. Which of the lots of fresh interns made a great impression and stuck around? What might be interesting about mapping job titles and pay rates over time?

Turns out you can start to see this sort of thing, if you look, on LinkedIn. I spent an afternoon looking up everyone who listed the company in their profile, and made a note of when they started, and you can easily see the growth of the company over time:

Start dates for MVRDV staff listed on LinkedIn

This is just a small thing I suppose. I remember on the visit to the company back in November last year wondering if I could access the more HR-related records. I’m looking for some kind of overlay of all the digital output of the company with the people that made it.

But, what about born-digital work?

It’s really hard! You must be indefatigable, and not many of us are.

• Track and manage all external systems. In my first three months of making Good, Form & Spectacle, I’d used about 30 online services in some way.
• Try to use a common thread across your projects, like an sequential identifier. MVRDV does this, and I’ve started to. (HNI is #011.)
• Make plan for documenting and packaging near-past work. Teach all staff, and even better, collaborate and talk over it all together. Add this step of describing together to your workflow.
• At some point you’ll have to attack the early projects. As a first step, you could archive at least one born-digital element for each?
• Determine “important” projects by interview and/or data analysis (cost, profit, built/not built, staff happiness, press attention etc). This sort of analysis will be interesting for future visitors too. Even imagining that your company may be interesting enough to be poked at by a future researcher is a good thought, because it’s useful to imagine an audience for your archival narrative.
• Assess whether old works need to be able to be re-run or just well-documented. Even though a Proper Archivist would want to truly encapsulate it, that just might not be possible. These vast software systems we see today (Facebook, etc) would require archival infrastructure the like of which has not been seen in order to be encapsulated for posterity.

A Live Archive?

Let’s just say you’ve done the hard work of going back over your work and archived it all beautifully. What might you do into the future, as you work?

Since very many of us are now using computers to do our daily work, we create and hold  dates, files, IDs, assets etc for all sorts of things as we go. This is broadly good. It’s a lot more raw material than we’ve had before, and it has some automated metadata that’s useful (instead of being ‘in the shoebox under the bed covered in dust and only brought to an archivist posthumously’).

For me, one of the main revolutionary aspects of Web 2.0 was this idea that you could be looking at a live dataset in a webpage. Before that, everything was fixed (if updated here and there). Since then, a lot of the web and its design has become centered on liveness, or recentness. It’s possible to know in bizarre but fascinating detail who did what and when.

Look at this animation of six weeks of coding on the open-source Linux operating system:

So what could a live archive be like? What if archiving things was a moment-by-moment active task? Remember that a backup is not the same as an archive, mostly because it’s not especially described separate to its existence. Perhaps there are instant or daily uploads into it, like you’d upload to Dropbox or Google or wherever. Perhaps there’s also a daily ingest by a local institution or one you’re a member of. (So for me, that would be Islington Council Libraries and Heritage Services, or maybe even the British Museum). Perhaps it’s about drip-fed longevity instead of great globs. Perhaps a junior archivist could actually be a computer program. It might compute things about your work, a bit like Slack’s weekly updates, or the lovely, now defunct Dopplr Annual Report.

When I was starting up Good, Form & Spectacle, I was fantasising about what sorts of roles I’d like to have make up the company, and archivist was hire no. 2. Therefore, I was envious when I came across an LA design studio that has created a position called Studio Mirror, whose main role is to document things, and then report back after projects are finished. What luxury!

The studio mirror is a distinct role and a job title. In our studio Luke’s role was to archive our work and reflect it back to the team in a unique way, much like the documentation of these principles. Pursued with persistence and the eye of a journalist, the Studio Mirror should capture not only WHAT is being made but HOW and by WHOM. This isn’t simply dumping files on a server but rather curating the content in a way that is compelling and consumable for the team. For example, our studio created a quarterly magazine. You can read ADQ2.1: The Launch Issue here.

There are many reasons to identify a single person to own the documentation process. First and foremost, the details of a project are easy to forget, especially when projects last several years. Archiving work is both productive and functional; a reflective studio believes that the work can always be done a little better. Finally, a well-documented project also makes it easier for new studio members to enter a project quickly and efficiently.

But perhaps the most important value for persistently documenting the collective work of a studio is that it is a sound investment in the future. The longer I work the more I have come to appreciate how people behave throughout the entire design process. Thus, the story of the product is not only how the product itself evolves, but also how the individuals and team grew while making it.

In a world which demands so much in the present, I value that at some point in the future I can look back through our quarterly magazines with a glass of whiskey in my hand, examining the process of what was made and how we made it, and think, “That was a good place to work, I learned something and we made great things.”

https://medium.com/@rhysys/no-dickheads-a-guide-to-building-happy-healthy-and-creative-teams-7e9b049fc57d#.2qjb1n672

There’s a mountain of live reporting tools to show you exactly where your devops systems are at, and the smallest changes in performance of massive systems (and small ones) like web services or data centres.

the web is covered in dashboards

These sort of things tend to show you what’s happening, and not always why, and I think that’s the tricky part and not just with born digital stuff.

I’m afraid I don’t have a mind blowing conclusion. It’s a combination of creator-awareness, small bit archival just-in-time processing, and humans to keep an eye on it all.  It’s helpful to imagine yourself leaving notes to the future, and how they might be read. I’ve enjoyed reflecting on my own work through this, and making small interventions.  I’ve started a Slack channel where I post photographs of every whiteboard before we erase it, annotated and dated, with the view to making an artefact of it at some point down the line. I’ve started writing README files for all client and project folders, about how the work came about. And one thing I’ve tried to do from the outset is write a lot about what’s happening along the way.

So what could this mean for MVRDV? There’s some thinking to do about how transparent they might like to be with Het Nieuwe Instituut. There’s an opportunity to share company machinations in very great detail, very much more than a back-up bucket of files. In order to fully do that, and fully embrace the capacity for our born digital work to generate all this metadata, there must also be spiritual confidence that this level of revelation around client correspondence, finances, HR, good times, bad times, failures and so forth must be as easily discoverable as the folder of working files for TP261, the Markthall.

If I had another twenty years to think about I might be able to figure something out. I guess the main thing is that we’re not just what we produce.

New Work: Wellcome Library Alpha

Phase 1: Sketching in code, drawing the data

About 11 months ago we started working with the web team at Wellcome Library on a project called What’s In The Library?. We were installed on site at Wellcome for a month and had been asked to explore four themes, one per week: Scope of the Catalogue, Show the Thing, Content/Context, and Scaling the Work. It was a fast-moving, exploratory month, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. You can see the work we made at whatsinthelibrary.com, and we also blogged something like once a day about what we were doing. (I love that we have this record of that now.)

For background, you could poke at the project outline from the G,F&S blog back in July 2015, or have a look at our That’s a Wrap post of Phase 1; a write-up I did of our final presentation to the staff.

It was great to see the Wellcome Library staff engage via comments on the What’s in the Library blog too, like June, who works directly with the library catalogue and surrounding metadata standards. (Emphasis mine.)

Speaking on behalf of the cataloguing team, I just wanted to say how useful we have found this work to be for data clean up. Inevitably, in a vast bibliographic database where records are drawn from a variety of external sources, errors can creep in. Thanks to the work of the project team, we have been made aware of these errors and have been able to correct most of the genuine ones by running global updates. It would be fantastic if the tools to do this continued to be available after the project has ended.

However, it should be noted that some things, such as the problematic dates, are not really errors at all. Commonly, resources present without dates and have to be recorded as ‘date unknown’ (that’s when a ‘u’ would be supplied) in order to avoid recording inaccurate information. As a rule of thumb, we feel it is better to give no information than to give the wrong information.

It is certainly true that using external data services is not the answer to everything although it can help to speed up our work enormously. Library resources are complex which means that the task of describing them is difficult and relies on cataloguer judgement more than machine processing. I hope we can bring together all of the tools and skills needed to make our collections more visible and interesting to Wellcome Library users.

I thought June’s reaction was spot on. It was great to hear that she felt there was potential in the sorts of visualisations we were presented, but I could totally understand her point that “the task of describing [library resources] is difficult and relies on cataloguer judgement more than machine processing”.

There’s a very interesting challenge wrapped up in that. We were deliberately naive as we began working with the metadata, just visualising it very straightforwardly and steering clear of the intense detail that the humans have encoded in it. So often, when I ask a simple question of folks who work with this kind of data every day, their answer begins with “it depends…”, which I love. It is difficult to throw computing at this sort of subjectivity. And, I like that it is deeply subjective, even though there’s such a strong desire to work with agreed standards. One thing I continue to try to reveal is that exactly that: there are humans in this work, and always have been. That simple fact implies that catalogues will be inevitably different, because we all have personal, subjective, educated ways of interpreting what’s in front of us. That’s what makes cultural heritage so special and interesting.

Phase 2: Simple performance improvements, basic editing

Anyway. We returned to the library around Christmas 2015 to continue the work. We had been very careful to describe our initial spurt of work as rough, and very much not production-ready. It was much more about sketching and exposition, than making something intended for anyone other than the Wellcome team themselves. Everyone was also aware that there’s sometimes a tendency to rush “production-ising” a cool web thing, perhaps particularly in the cultural heritage sector. Even knowing that, we returned to work on making the explorer we ended up with in Week 4 a little more stable, and a little more performant. We added some monitoring and fixed some bugs that hung around after Phase 1.

Our main exploring pivots were entities that already existed in the data, but weren’t particularly surfaced in the “classic” catalogue:

1. People – there are 00,000s of “actors” in the Wellcome collection. From 15th century Italian scholars to 20th century German painters to a contemporary British neurologist, surfing around the people in the system helped me to explore the beginnings of medicine as a discipline, and see subject matter experts and the things they made. No search required.
2. Subjects – it was really fun to explore the Wellcome-specific subject headings. It’s quite an eclectic reflection of Wellcome’s interests in medical history, travel, and other cultures.

Frankie is going to write a little more about how we were able to construct these entities and connect them with other services like Wikipedia, LC, and VIAF, from a technical point of view.

Showing the Work

Everyone who works with a catalogue every day has great muscle memory using it, and that can make it really hard to re-imagine it from a standing start, or to witness features that new visitors don’t understand. We were keen to show some normal humans the alpha, so we did an afternoon of user research in the Viewing Room at the Wellcome Collection, luring people with the promise of free chocolate.

It was quick and cheap and hugely informative. I quite enjoyed seeing people as they found the room where the free chocolate was. It reminded me a little bit of raccoons wandering looking for tasty morsels. It’s surprising what humans will do for a) free stuff, and b) chocolate. We were able to make simple modifications that day and the next in direct response to people’s questions, and that was very satisfying.

The challenge of rigid, centralised tools

It’s difficult for the broader Wellcome team to make small modifications or corrections to the catalogue if/when you spot them, and their using tools they don’t specifically control, purchased from big vendors in other countries who have lots of clients and a long list of bugs to fix. This is a huge issue, and not just for Wellcome. I found myself encouraging the idea that if Wellcome was able to hire a crack team like us that they could start to assume more control over their own data, instead of off-shoring it. It’s great to see they’ve just put out a bunch of job ads looking to hire more software folks.

In any case, we wanted the site we were making (and now beginning to call “Alpha”) provide a little flexibility. We added basic tools for staff to do editorial things like picking popular subjects so they show up on the homepage, or connecting a person to a blog post or exhibition about them. It’s not about correcting metadata yet, because Alpha is not connected to the live catalogue database, so it’s just a little way to give the web team the ability to highlight fun and timely subject matter, like Beards, Sex, and Florence Nightingale.

Phase 3: More exploring, more collections, real-time activity, “alpha”!

We left Phase 2 with a set of nice-to-have features to keep working on. It’s funny how that always seems to happen when you make software… In Phase 3, we built a set of new features:

1. Collections – to show existing sets of digitised things, like a handy list of the art in the Reading Room
2. Types of thing – also known as “format” although that can be a tricky term to understand, and
3. New Stuff! feed – designed to illustrate all the digitisation activity at Wellcome. That turns out to be a great way to stumble on things. Thanks to long-term Wellcome collaborator, Tom Crane at Digirati, for helping us with a special hook into this feed.

Now our little alpha sketching crew had developed something which was starting to show potential for broader deployment. It was also at the point where the higher ups wanted to see that our alpha concept was actually an improvement on the existing online experience. I was a bit hesitant about trying to demonstrate this, mainly because all in all, we’d worked on our site for a total of about 6 weeks, and the main library site was a mature, long-standing product. We had to figure out a simple way to try to compare the two systems, and it seemed like it should be something about the efficiency of getting people to stuff.

One more general thing I’ve noticed in the stats for the other explorer-y projects we’ve made at Good, Form & Spectacle is that these “generous interfaces” increase people’s time  on the site. What we don’t know is their state of mind as they’re exploring, but we like to think that they’re happy bouncing around looking at things that attract them, and not just looking for a search box! So, time on site is a key metric we’re using to compare the “classic” site and this new alpha. Another simple goal to try to track is about  how many people see 3+ “items” using each system – that’s a work in progress. Chloe from Wellcome introduced us to Optimizely, which looks great for filtering different users into different versions of your site. We’ve set it up so you might enter the Alpha site from the existing www website to try to get more traffic into the Alpha.

Finally, some questions from Jenn Phillips-Bacher

Jenn has been our key collaborator at Wellcome, and towards the end of Phase 3, we chatted about what we would like to hear from the other. You can also have a look at Jenn’s presentation about the experience from her perspective, or follow her on Twitter @MrsAudiac.

These were Jenn’s prompts for me:

1) What’s it like to be embedded in a team?

It’s great. Getting to know everyone was a big part of this work, and to have direct access to people literally across the desk was very helpful. If there was a question about a data field or a process, we could just ask. I will say, though, I don’t think we’d set up the project particularly to analyse and/or report on what we saw in terms of the organisation and its workflows, and this is something I’ll be thinking about for future projects. I suppose it’s the blessing and curse of the consulting designer who comes up with all sorts of ideas about processes they witness but haven’t created a space to report back on observations. I know that’s a bit coy, but it’s turning into something I might try to give a talk on.

In any case, I’ve found the people I’ve met at Wellcome to be hugely welcoming,  forthcoming and flexible, and that’s been a real pleasure. I’m really happy we’ve come this far with the work, and that’s largely because room has been made for it, even though it’s quite experimental.

2) What kind of data or content were you expecting?

I’ve had a little exposure to library data thanks to my job running the Open Library project a while back. We were dealing with a system that contained some 30 million records, mostly in MaRC format, with lots of duplicates or empties. It was fun to see Frankie and Tom encounter library land for the first time, and, pragmatic as they both are, ask perfectly reasonable questions about why things are the way they are. That was another good part about working on site, because we were able to chat with June and Branwen, who know the catalogue backwards, and could explain its idiosyncrasies.

In terms of content, I didn’t really know what to expect. Generally speaking, the amount of available content is normally dwarfed by the available metadata in a catalogue, especially one as large as Wellcome’s. I didn’t know before I started that Wellcome has an amazing medically oriented art collection though, lovingly collected over the last 40 years or so by one person at the institution. You can get a taste for it through the digitised Art Collection view. We stumbled on loads of kooky, beautiful, old, anatomical bits and pieces as we built out the explorer. It’s a fun, unique collection.

3) How would you compare Museum vs Library generous interfaces*?

At their hearts, they’re sort of similar. They contain people, subjects, chronology, and items. A simple difference is that with libraries you end up at a book, which is a little slower to digest than a thing. Often libraries also have objects or artworks in them (like Wellcome does), and museums that hold books, so it’s often a bit of a data melange anyway.

I also enjoy that in libraries, chances are you’re describing a copy of something instead of a unique object, which is perhaps more common in, say, an art museum. I think that leads to interesting descriptive challenges to try to say that one library has a “manifestation” of this “edition” of a “work”, and another library has another “manifestation” of that same “edition” of the same “work”. And there you have a totally weird but sort of useful “conceptual entity relationship model” called Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) which is trying to address this puzzle. It was also interesting to touch the surface of the Wellcome Archives in this project too. We realised pretty quickly that our base interface for exploring the library was simply unsuitable for showing the more narrative descriptive style, vast hierarchies, and not necessarily single items per record that the archives data seemed to show. That’s work for another day, and I’ll be interested to try to design an explorer interface that’s specific to the nature of archives…

So, there you have it.

We’re really happy that what started out as a very R&D and sketching sort of project has now transformed into this Alpha. The next little while is about trying to observe how people use it, and see if there’s really really real potential to move this type of catalogue explorer into mainstream adoption.

If you’ve read all that and still possess the mettle to visit the Alpha, here’s a link, and we hope you enjoy it!

• http://alpha.wellcomelibrary.org

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* A “generous interface” is a term coined by Mitchell Whitelaw. It’s about not forcing people to search, but helping them explore instead.

Visiting Researchers, ahoy!

Charlie Cattel-Killick contacted me a while back because he’d been thinking about 3D and museums and boxes, and saw that we had been working on it a bit already and could he come and say hello and work with us for a bit. Yes.

It was great to have Charlie around, and if I’m honest, he made me feel really old! He was insanely productive during his stint with us, and came along to some client meetings too. We’re about to release a video about Museum in a Box, and Charlie shot and edited it (while Tom did the sound beautifully). There are a handful of rough box designs from him, and he was able to help us move a prototype idea forward into a demonstrable state. I’ve also asked him to write a post for us on what it was like. He’s in the throes of final hand-ins now, but will hopefully put something up soon, if he can still stand to write.

Thank you, Charlie! It was our pleasure.

I’m excited that our Visiting Researcher program seems to be gaining a little traction. I met with Jen Smit last year in Tasmania, when I was (very luckily) there to visit MONA and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery while I was in Australia for Museums and the Web Asia 2015. It’s brilliant that she’s decided to come to London to work on research into libraries as a ‘primary user interface’, and her work also dovetails spectacularly well with a commission I’m working on with Het Nieuwe Instituut about digital archives of the famous Dutch architecture firm, MVRDV. You might call it a perfect storm.

From Jen:

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The research topic to be investigated concerns the Library of the Future.

Both public libraries and libraries attached to educational institutions are seeing their role as ‘receptacles of knowledge’ shift in an era that progressively adopts  the ‘digital archive’ in favour of a physical one.  In this scenario the library becomes less a repository for a catalogued collection and more a portal to that collection. Its role as ‘portal’ is an interesting one as it suggests the notion of gateway: that there may be something physical that organises access to the ‘archive’.

The focus on the curatorial function of architecture as the primary user interface is of interest here. How might architecture provide a framework, indeed a gateway to accessing information? Does the architecture itself provide the first moment of interpretation of that archive?

Researchers in the field of education are suggesting that the library’s role is one of providing a place for learning rather than a storehouse for books: a ‘Learning Commons’. A recurrent area of discussion concerns whether the ‘digital’ is supplanting the ‘physical’, as if the two realms might be not mutually compatible. A better question may be ‘how might the digital collection extend on and reframe (or provide an intelligent or curatorial portal for) the physical?’

Another relevant issue for the future of the library concerns the value of the physicality of books— the primacy and importance of the physical collection in an increasingly digitized environment. The question of how the collection is organized and displayed seems more important, rather than less so.

Does the phenomenology of the book become foregrounded? Recent examples of libraries might indicate that this is so: MVRDV’s “Book Mountain” in Spijkenisse, The Netherlands, centralizes the collection such that not only the envelope of the building is a direct expression of the size and organization of the collection, but its very transparency communicates the importance of the accessibility of the collection to the community.

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It’s brilliant. Part of the support G,F&S will provide is to host a salon with interested design/architecture/culture folks, and Jen and I are hoping to co-publish a paper together. Can’t wait.

 

 

The Small Museum V4

For some reason, I started a second blog to capture our major R&D project called The Small Museum. This may be a mistake.

In the meantime, you might be interested to see that we’re cooking up the next thing.

Welcome, George Weyman

George is a fellow of the prestigious Clore Leadership Programme for 2015/2016. I was intrigued (and slightly shocked) to get an email from George last year asking if I’d be willing to host him at Good, Form & Spectacle for his “placement in a cultural organisation very different from the Fellow’s usual working environment”.

 
It’s absolutely brilliant to have George join the team for the next few months. In his proper job, he runs the digital operations of the Qatar Foundation Partnership at the British Library, so let me tell you, this fellowship will definitely be working both ways.

He’s already very useful. Apart from carrying heavy stuff from Sainsbury’s for our little office warming, he’s absorbing our current goals and projects into pitch-ready documentation to show what we’re up to for potential funding partners and programmes. We’re building partnerships around our Museum in a Box work, and George’s experience in business planning, operations, and reporting is hugely helpful.

In return, we can involved George in how we like to work — small moves, make demonstrative things, work fast and brightly — back to the start-up scale that seems a bit elusive in larger institutions.

Welcome, George. I’m sure we’ll both get used to having a second George in such close proximity soon.

Museum in a Box V3

Our Museum in a Box project seems to be gaining momentum. Tom Flynn, Adrian McEwen and I set up a display area at the Remix conference in December, and it was great. We were also ably assisted by our visiting researcher, Eliza Gregory, who also helped get our three display boxes together in the preceding week, talk with interested folk, and document the event. She took these photos too.

Adrian and a Visitor

Edith Cavell

One of our banners

Touch everything!

Talking with visitors

The Table Display

Our V2 prototype was made with paper, mainly to help start to think through how interaction between the human, the objects, and the brain in the box could work. V3 was all about working brains and connected objects. I knew that our display would get lots of traffic all at once, and we’d be getting loads of quick reactions and feedback for the idea. That’s when I asked if Gill Wildman could come along for the day too, to help capture what people were telling us, and prompt both the audience and us with questions and ideas about how to frame the idea and product. Apart from being into the general idea, Gill is also an expert designer and facilitator, and specifically helps early stage companies figure out how to explain themselves. This was hugely helpful (and will hopefully continue).

Last week, Tom and I were very happy to head to Manchester for the Museum Tech 2016 Museums Association meeting. As well as each of us giving a presentation about the work, we showed people the boxes over the lunch break. It’s exciting to watch people interact with it for the first time. There’s a smiling surprise when they place their object on to the brain and hear content come out. It’s that reaction that’s giving us a bunch of energy about all this. The product always generates ideas with people too, about how they could use it, or what a cool box might be.

Here are our slides. I was honoured to open the day’s proceedings with an overview of the idea and our work so far:

Part of what we’re trying to show museums in these early days is that 3D digitisation can be very simple and cheap. Tom explained the various techniques and also put together a live rendering of a 3D sheep! “Here’s one I made earlier”…

It was also meet three students whose areas of interest overlap with Museum in a Box in really interesting ways. We’re always happy to meet with students, and indeed, hope to attract visiting researchers who would benefit from spending time researching their theses through practice. If that’s you, please get in touch.