Category Archives: objects

Omeka – an online exhibits framework

Tom Scheinfeldt contacted me through a comment on the Electronic Museum blog. He’s MD of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) who among other things produce Zotero – a kind of semantic webby bookmarking toolbar.

Omeka logoCHNM have recently produced an open source application called Omeka (Swahili for “to display or lay out goods or wares”..) – a product specifically pitched at museums or other cultural institutions wanting to put their collections and exhibits on the web.

To date the offerings in this space tend to follow one of two distinct and reasonably unsatisfactory flavours: Either you choose an ‘out of the box’ templating and publishing system (albeit with the promise that you can “edit your own templates”) which come with systems like MultiMimsy or TMS, or you choose to start from scratch and build the entire thing from nothing.

Omeka - ExhibitThe former is generally pretty bad form for the user: most of these products are generic, badly designed and force museums to follow a prescribed path of development with little flexibility to change or choose their collections management system. The latter is complex and expensive, and although carries with it huge amounts of flexibility, it also has the burden of any bespoke system.

Tom and his team noticed that over the course of several years working with the museum sector that:

“We found ourselves building more or less the same website over and over again, or at least the feature set”

They also noted that although there were tools for curators, there weren’t any for educators or webmasters: the ‘front of house’ people who wanted to create online exhibitions. They decided that they would build some of these common approaches into a framework application for delivering narrative exhibitions online.

Omeka AdminOmeka is an open source application which you download and install on your LAMP web environment. It draws content in real time (i.e isn’t a “tick and publish” like many of the other systems in this space). At the moment you export your data from your collections management system and import it into Omeka for delivery to the web, but Tom was quick to point out that this is “just an intermediary step” and that they’re working on a database abstraction layer which will allow for “live sync” with existing collections managements systems. This is great news, and absolutely the direction that needs to be taken more in our sector.

Tom and his team used the metaphor of a blog to guide their thinking on development. They:

“…thought it should be as easy for museums to publish online exhibitions as it is for individuals to start a blog…and in many ways WordPress has been our model…”

They have a drag and drop exhibit builder, a strong API and also a plugin architecture which allows users to add their own functionality. All of this is very positive news given the approaches taken to date with the systems I’ve mentioned above – very clunky, very web1 and with bad UI’s for both users and administrators.

I’m in the middle of installing Omeka to do some “real world” testing but it certainly looks and sounds very positive to me. If anyone out there has experience using Omeka (or the other systems I’ve been rude about) then please comment away. Examples of institutions using Omeka can be found on their website.

Everyware

I got a notice in my inbox today that Chumby Industries are finally (after what seems a loooong time) beginning to ship the first Chumbies to early adopters. I tried very hard last year with a series of increasingly sycophantic emails to Chumby to secure myself an beta model, and failed dismally, but at least I seem to be on the mailing list for the first people allowed to buy one…

chumbyThe Chumby, for those who haven’t come across it before, is a small Linux-based wifi device with screen – er, ok – it’s a computer – which sits on your wireless network. The content it displays is entirely hackable – you can point it at any number of Chumby widgets which sit within the Chumby network. These range from simple clocks to news to just plain weird stuff. The basic idea is that the plain ole’ desktop or web widget is now beginning to show itself in the real world.

I think this is exciting for two main reasons: 1. I reckon that widgets (in general, but right now, web and desktop based ones) are the biggest thing happening to content consumers right now, and 2. Ubiquitous computing / internet of things / the spime – the whole pervasive “internet in real world” thing is going to change the way we use web resources in a big way.

So what else is there? Well, mobiles, obviously – generic computing devices which we all carry with us, everywhere. Offshoots from here include SMS, MMS, QR tagging and mobile web browsing. When commentators like Tom Standage start saying things like

“…mobile phones are the most numerous digital devices on the planet, and truly deserve to be called “personal computers…”,

and major telcos start concentrating on the mobile web (T-Mobile’s “Web n Walk” and Vodafone “The internet is now mobile”), you know that these kind of approaches are leaving the steep bit of the hype curve and entering the mainstream.

MarcelAnother device in the Chumby space is the Nabaztag. Those lovely types at the Science Museum got me one of these as my leaving present and I’ve been hacking it every since. Marcel (picture on left, looking only mildly like a drug dealer..) connects to the web through my wifi network much like the Chumby and receives emails, weather reports, podcasts. Most usefully, I’ve also discovered that he has much more authority for telling my 3 year old to go to bed than me… ;-)

Meanwhile in the museum space, Ross Parry and associates recently presented on the concept of the Live!Label – small screen-based labels for exhibits which can be updated anytime via a wifi network.

The general premise of all of these devices is the same: the real world is where we live and move but the internet can start to be layered on top of that world, Matrix style, rather than separated from it. As wire-free (wifi, 3G, GPRS, EDGE..whatever!) access gets faster and more ubiquitous, this layered internet will begin more and more to play a part in our real, not just virtual, lives.

Object locating: have you done it?

I’ve been very interested for some time in how you might go about tracking objects around a space, but I haven’t yet had a conversation with anyone in a museum who has actually done it.

This could well be because it isn’t yet do-able, or more likely I just haven’t found the right people to talk to yet.

Caution - RFID!As far as I can see there are a number of technologies which could be brought to bear, including RFID (limited range, not so much “tracking” as “identifying”, and even then of variable usefulness in a museum system). The systems recently written about on the BBC, however, use a series of wireless network points to pinpoint items within a space. I’d already looked at one of the systems written about – Ekahau – but hadn’t got much further than a brief email correspondence with their technical team.

The Ekahu system requires that you set up a number of (standard) wifi network points and then do a survey of the space – you essentially walk around and the system then maps out the various signal strengths, building up a map of the room or gallery.

The nice thing about this system is that to a certain extent it uses existing technologies – you may have to extend your wireless network points and install some software but that’s about it. The failure is that the accuracy is limited to metres – ok for tracking “assets” (including people!) in hospitals or schools, but limited for on-gallery or object store room use.

Where I know many institutions fail on this front is that it isn’t clear at all who should drive an object-location project. It’s very much the domain of curatorial staff, but IT, new media and interactive teams are all obviously involved as well.

I’d love to hear about any projects that have actually been done using location based technology. I’ve done lots and lots of reading of papers suggesting various solutions but what I’m interested in here is real world application. Has anyone done it?

Virtually real

I’m fairly sure I stole that title off someone, or maybe a bunch of someones. Let’s hope it’s Creative Commons.

Anyway, it’s one of the things I bang on about a lot of the time – bridging the gap between the virtual world (“sit forward, single-focus, move mouse, engage”) and the real (“sit back, multi-focus, move head, engage”). Mobile devices are the obvious contender for this kind of interaction – not only are they ubiquitous (especially phones) – but they also don’t tend to get in the way during any kind of experience. They are tending towards the “invisible technology” which Tom Standage focuses on in his book The Victorian Internet.

Surface computerThis kind of “overlaid on the real world” approach is where Microsoft is going with the new “Surface computing” project talked about all over the web today. See TechCrunch, Channel 10 and Brightcove as well as Google News for further coverage. There’s a bunch of videos on many of these, and if you can stomach the cheesy slowness of the MS promotional video, there’s that too.

The multipoint touch-sensitivity is groovy but nothing entirely new – we ooo’d and aah’d plenty when the iPhone came out with almost exactly this functionality. What really stands out here is the interaction with real world devices such as phones, cameras or anything else which you care to stand on the device. It has a bunch of sensors ~ apparently ~ which take input from whatever has been put on the top and, er, do stuff with that input.

Microsoft’s promotional video is multo-formaggio, as you would expect, pushing the device into both our living rooms and into pubs and bars (imagine this down your local – 6 pints later you’d be trying to steal the thing, or your lager would have seeped into the OS..)

I love this stuff – the BumpTop video on YouTube (apparently the most watched video, ever..) has a fantastic feel to it – the breaking of the mouse/pointer paradigm is going to be crucial as the technology and access to that technology improves. There’s some other similar technologies which I had bookmarked on YouTube here and here.

The issue of course is about what you actually do with the thing. It’s fine for photos, shuffling stuff about, showing off to your mates, music – but what about the dull stuff: typing, browsing, coding? I have a tablet PC and tried for a while to get it to recognise handwriting or voice. It’s amusing if you want to write weird off the wall poetry – the randomness of what it produces is pretty cool – but for actually *doing some work* it’s a bummer. I guess you could connect a keyboard to the Surface but then you’re going to be in a kind of weird environment to interface with your documents on a flat rather than vertical “screen”…

Arcade machineImagine the Surface in a museum setting, though – take an object and place it on the table: an RFID tag plays detail back about the object, what’s inside it, how it works. Fantastic…

The amusing thing here of course is that taking a computer and putting it into a table has been done a number of times before. Maybe the Surface will come with a retro gaming module for those of us old enough to remember those space invader moments…

metacrap, plam pilots, implicit and explicit miscellany

My god you can make a blog post look good if you just bung in some random words into the title…

I just stumbled across a great interview between Cory Doctorow of boingboing fame and David Weinberger whose book “Everything is Miscellaneous” is due out in May.

Cory says some fascinating things – as usual – about what metadata means for us nowadays, and also gives some hints on how us purveryors of fine taxonomies might go about approaching the apparent challenge of the folksonomy.

His original article on metacrap is based around a bunch of realities which will seem remarkably familiar to anyone who has ever spent any time with a museum collections management system. People, he argues, are lazy, tend to lie, are stupid, don’t have a neutral schema, etc etc. The net result is, essentially, that explicit metadata needs to be taken with at least as big a pinch of salt as implicit metadata.

The really interesting point he makes about tags is summed up as follows:

“But as you point out, the most important thing that tags do–the most important, effective tags–is the implicit effect. It’s the effect of noticing that these people treat this kind of information in same way, and then deriving some conclusions from it in the same way that Google has this implicit ability to understand the Web by looking at links that are made.”

Essentially, Google starts to break down when its implicit nature is challenged, either by google bombing, link spamming, etc. It works hard to maintain the fact that they don’t want users to think that when they add a link to another site that they’re essentially voting for it.

The big bit of non-news here – but something that isn’t stressed often enough in museums – is that you really should do both – tagging and taxonomy have a place for different audiences and purposes. Both stand up well next to each other.

The final part of the interview covers ground about IP. Cory talks about folk copyright – the set of rules which govern how we use other people’s materials – without needing to resort to lawyers, contracts or rules. As he puts it:

“the single most important thing that we can do to insure our on-going use of material and the on-going cultural production of material is to bifurcate the rules again, so that we have a set of rules for commerce and a set of rules for culture”

update: I just discovered how to do this:

wayhay!

Physical world connection

Here’s a question. Has anyone done anything in the museum context with 2d barcodes, semacodes, phone barcode readers…?

Nokia is piloting some stuff which is going to help the momentum – barcode readers are now standard on a few of their N series phones. Also Microsoft is sniffing around too. At one point there was a link to some stuff on their “Live Ideas” pages but it seems to be redundant now.

The basic idea in case you don’t know is to tag real world stuff (including, potentially, museum objects) with “2d barcodes” (see example below). Pointing your cameraphone at the code – provided it has software installed – delivers content, or takes you to a url.

Until now this has been a great idea but problematic – as per my previous post about My Art Space, the number of people likely to install software on their mobile is extremely limited. But once a telco begins taking this seriously and shipping phones with software pre-installed, stuff will definitely begin to happen.

Have a look at The Pondering Primate for a great lowdown on what’s happening in this space. There’s also a list of the Physical World Connection companies – it’s an absolutely saturated space, just waiting for a leadning standard to emerge

Here’s the Nokia barcode for www.electronicmuseum.org.uk:

Electronic Museum