10. The Museum has become a Distributed Network Nancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu
11. Photo by Mike Lee, 2007; from SAAM Flickr Group Our audiences now access American Art through a wide range of platforms beyond the museum’s walls and website Nancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu
12. The Museum is transforming from Acropolis… Nancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu
How many people have taken an audio or multimedia tour? Did they enjoy their experience?
First, I assume if you’re here today it’s because you understand the need for interpretation in our museums. Like Tate, you do not assume that meaning is self-evident for the exhibits on display. In fact, inviting visitors to see our spectacular exhibitions and collections without offering them interpretation is like spreading a beautiful banquet before our guests - and then denying them cutlery to enjoy it with. sure, they may be able to partake, but it won’t be easy, or necessarily pleasant for our guests to eat with their hands or whatever ad hoc utensils they find nearby. They are almost certain to go away unsatisfied, and feeling insulted. Our multi-faceted virtual museum, awash in data and digital resources, requires multimodal access to turn that sea of information into meaningful insights for our publics.
As an example: It would be quite reasonable for us to think of my museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as this bricks & mortar edifice, affectionately known as the Post Office Building.
Except that we are in fact at four sites, two of them open to the public. Here, Renwick and POB.
But in fact, I think of SAAM like this: a multinodal and multimodal network - a distributed network, in fact. My aim is to build content, experiences, and services that reach visitors wherever and whenever they happen to be on this network.
* Has this ever happened to you taking an audio tour? Expresses the aim of interpretation, be it in the gallery or elsewhere: to help us connect with what we’re seeing, care about it, and thereby open up to learning about it.
Yet all too often, visitors complain that audio tours give them this sort of experience: http://geschiedenis.vpro.nl/themasites/mediaplayer/index.jsp?media=19799217&refernr=19265092&portalnr=4158511&hostname=geschiedenis&mediatype=video&portalid=geschiedenis Although this video shows an example of one of the earliest tour technologies from the 1960s, excavated by Loic Tallon, the perception of audio tours is that they are not terribly different today in terms of inspiring a herd mentality among users, producing crowding around exhibits and a sort of dumbed-down, one-size-fits-all experience. All the issues that have plagued audio tours throughout their history are visible here: The linearity of the tour lead to a herd-mentality among visitors and crowding around exhibits In addition the challenges of: Hygiene: led to one of the earliest audio tour technology debates: headphones vs wands? Distribution issues always a challenge, but complexity also driven by technology choices, including the headphones or wand choice Very homogenous audience
Whether given by live guides, broadcast, or prerecorded on tape, the first museum tours were linear: ----------
From starting point A to end point N, the exhibits interpreted on the tour were strung along the tour's linear route like pearls of wisdom on a necklace: -o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- The value of the tour was measured in stops: o e.g. “The Louvre’s tour has over 1,500 stops!”
The messiness, but also the magic, happened in the spaces between the exhibit commentary or 'stops' on the tour: -
In the best linear tours, the spaces in-between were where it all happened: that was where you got the background information and context that brought the exhibits to life: -o!o!o!
The connective tissue of the tour immersed you in music and storytelling that carried you along effortlessly from one stop to another, transporting you to a different, magical world. In some courageous tours, the liminal spaces were an opportunity for audience participation. The tour could issue challenges to the visitors to play games, complete tasks, or simply give time to share impressions with a companion. The more marketing-minded tours gestured towards galleries and exhibits along the way as opportunities to return and find out more in a future visit: -o+o+o+
But people got lost in the interstitial spaces, uncertain of where to find the next stop (o), or lost track of where they were in the audio tour tape: -o-o-o-?
Or they got bored, or distracted, or tired of following the herd, or simply decided to get off the tour before the last stop:-o-o-o~§
So fear and impatience with the messiness prevailed, and the digital generation of audio tour technology introduced 'random access' tours. Visitors could choose which exhibits they saw and hence which stops they listened to absolutely at random. o 0 o o o o o o oo o o
This shift was driven by a change in audio tour technology. With cassette technology, the playing field in the audio tour industry had been levelled. In order to get a decisive jump on the competition, vendors began investing in new platforms that overcame many of the limitations of the linear analogue players. It was the first digital 'personalization' in museum tours, and was promoted in Modernist terms as a liberation from the herd by ambitious vendors, eager to recoup their investment in the new technology and steal a march on the competition. Thanks to the new technology, we could finally 'do our own thing' in the museum. In order to recoup their significant investments in the new digital players, vendors heavily promoted the benefits of random access, to the exclusion of linear tours.
But as several veterans of the audio tour industry have noted: "We lost something when we moved away from the linear tour." Dangers of allowing technology to lead visitor experience and content design.
This is a manifesto for recovering that magic - and even some of the messiness – of linear museum tour … The new architecture for museum tours can be summarized in two steps: 1. Show them what the curator sees in both overview and detail. -^-+-o-/-?- 2. Then give them access to everyone else's vision. * ! $ % @ "" ?
Another way to represent this is as a multi-tiered architecture with up to three kinds of content: 1. -+-+-+-+-+ The Soundtrack 2. o o o o o The Soundbites 3. / | / | / Links
One way to look at soundtrack and soundbites is through the ways they’re delivered to the end user. Soundtracks, being longer audio or even video pieces, tend to be downloaded and played back from local memory on the player. Soundbites are shorter and generally very focused in their message, so with good metadata they are more easily made searchable or associated with specific object records, for example.
Reading the curator’s intention Keys to understanding the exhibition/display in its entirety Faster than reading (usually stops are slower than reading)
What I like about this soundtrack; Given by the curator: visitors always like hearing from the expert, as long as s/he speaks relatively well! He gives us an overview with basic tools to understand Twombly’s work, both in this exhibition and beyond. He gives us a behind-the-scenes view, insight into what curation and the work of the museum is all about.
Museums are very good at soundbites: the wall label can be seen as a very basic, text-based soundbite. Although writing for the ear or video is not the same as writing for a label or catalogue, it is not such a huge task for museum staff to gain these skills and be able to produce good quality scripts for stops in-house. By contrast, you want a good storyteller writing your soundtracks if you don’t have someone as eloquent ‘off-the-cuff’ as Nicholas Serota!
An example from an SFMOMA podcast. Like the Tate soundtrack, starts with an introduction and overview of the exhibition, followed by a couple of stops that take us into depth on specific objects.
But both the Tate & SFMOMA examples are linear media: not perhaps the best interface for accessing information on a mobile device, whether used inside the gallery or outside. ArtBabble offers a model for what could be an ideal interface for combining soundtrack, soundbites and links to third party content. It allows us to choose either to watch or hear a soundtrack overview of the exhibition or collection linearly, but also offers a notation system that can create ‘stops’ or soundbites at any point along that linear timeline. William Christenberry example Need to redefine 3 rd party content and think about it beyond ‘user-generated content’: e.g. SmartHistory.org