May 23, 2007

Post Conference Thoughts

First let me add my thanks to our participants and audience who made the two sessions possible. Some quick thoughts. The audiences from both sessions indicated, during a show of hands (the rooms were filled), that they were supportive of employing visitor authored techniques in the museum setting. Our sense is that the audience was already predisposed to embrace these techniques and probably not fully representative of the entire museum community. Matthew and I did hope for a lively debate on the subject. The absence of any vocal skeptics in the audience may indicate that many in the museum community may be hoping that this issue is a passing fad and will just go away. Hard to tell.

I have also been pleasantly surprised by the number of museums already experimenting with these techniques. We have managed to list over fifteen links so far on this site.

It is our hope to keep this blog active as a resource and a forum to continue the conversation regarding visitor-authored experiences.

3 comments:

mel said...

Hi
perhaps you might consider the Flickr initiative by Picture Australia as a visitor authored experience to add to your blog.
It is and it aims to encourage individuals to add their photographs to the online collections of Picture Australia, which is a part of the National Lbrary of Australia.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Mel,

I took a look at the website and appreciated the "Picture Trails" feature where particular themes are created linking a series of pictures. As far as I can tell, one can suggest a theme but not create a picture trail themselves, which might be an interesting next step. It might be in the very process of viewing, selecting and thinking about themes that a much richer or unexpected theme may emerge from a user.

Flickr has a similar explore feature which is based on a filter call "interestingness" which somehow compiles a series of photos based upon visitor inputed metadata (did I just say that?). Perhaps a next step would be to allow the visitor to the website to pick and prioritize metadata filters to create their own "interestingness" filter.

Here is an interesting development by Blaise Aguera y Arcas called Photosynth, I saw this on the TED website. This is software that can weave together photos from across the globe by creating hyperlinks between images based on the content therein...your better off viewing the link below:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

John

Unknown said...

This is fascinating.
I’d been taught that left-aligned labels are preferred, to support the prototypical F-shaped eye-tracking heatmap of web browsing. The idea is that it supports easy vertical scanning.
online learning