Museum London Goes Digital (and It's Not On The Web!)

While working on my museum visit report for Museology I stumbled across a special event going on at Museum London this week that I thought might be of interest to some of you considering the content of our Digital History discussions over the past few weeks.

This Thursday, October 22nd at 7:30pm, Museum London is showing RiP! A Remix Manifesto as part of their film series.

The following is taken in its entirety from the Museum London website (although the hyperlink emphasis is my own):

"In RiP! A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor, 2008, 86 min, 14+), Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and breaking down the wall between users and producers. The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film."

Admission for the movie is free, but Brett Gaylor has also set up a pay-what-you-want approach for US residents at ripremix.com. It's nice to see that not only is he walking the walk, but he's talking the talk as far as open source and accessibility go.

"You're So Vain" - Google & the Vanity Search

Tim's tweet last week about finding himself during a vanity search sparked my curiosity - what would a similar search for my own name reveal about me?

I should be upfront and tell you that this isn't my first vanity search. I vaguely remember typing my name into the Google search bar a few years ago to see if there were any other "Catherine Caughell"s out there. It turns out that there were only two, both born in the 1800s and they are long since deceased, so it's possible that I'm the only living person with this name.

Anyway, the only results I remember that came up pertaining to me was an OHASSTA reference and a broken link to a project that I did in my OAC chemistry class back in 2002. With that in mind, I was curious to see how my electronic footprint had changed over the last few years.

Here's a list of what comes up when you Google my name now:

• A lesson plan containing a virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau that I created in my first teacher's block and posted on the OHASSTA (Ontario History and Social Sciences Teachers' Association) website two years ago.
• My Blogger User Profile
• Minutes from a GLTBQ Youth Advisory Committee Meeting that I attended as part of my extracurricular responsibilities during my first teaching block. The meeting was part of the research that the school's guidance counselor and myself were doing in consideration of setting up a GLTBQ support group in the high school.
• Entries from my blog The Perpetual Student
• Room and bus confirmation for a cultural excursion I went on in South Korea
• Links to comments I posted on Dana and Tasha's blogs
• my name on a list of PhD and MA students currently enrolled in the History Department at UWO
• Description and results of an experiment I did in high school as part of an ISU
• A thank you for a minor contribution I made to The Brock Press a few years ago

I was completely surprised by all of the new links my search turned up. In the last two years, my presence on the web (or at least in Google's search results) has skyrocketed. Instead of only a few small references buried underneath a mile-long list of unrelated 'Catherine' or 'Caughell' results, I am now the top search result for my name. And thankfully, my increased exposure didn't come about as a result of being tagged in dozens of embarassing Facebook photos; the majority of them are evidence of the electronic footprint that I've been making professionally over the last few years, something that I'd be happy for any employer to see. I look forward to all the ways that the rest of our public history year will allow me to continue to make my mark on the world wide web.

As a side note, it's also interesting to see Google search results at work. Three different types of results came up attached to my blog - my user profile, example blog posts and comments that I have left on other people's blogs. I'm sure that all of these results were broken down into separate elements and pushed forward because Blogger is powered by Google and I used the Google engine for my search. (Running a similar search in the Yahoo! engine, the only blog result that comes up is the main page, itself.)

Wordle Wordle Wordle

It's amazing what you can find and/or learn when you're surfing the web on a whim rather than as a means to an end.

Sandra's mention of Twittersheep today in Digital History got me thinking about Wordle, a similar tool that I discovered a few months ago. Like other word/tag cloud generators, Wordle takes any given text (from a website, a blog or a list you input) and uses it to create a colourful and attractive visual design. The program uses font sizes and colour to show you those words that are used most frequently in the text. Once the inital generation of the image has been done, most programs will allow the user to tweak colour schemes, add or delete words, fiddle with the layout (presenting the words vertically, horizontally, both, or placed randomly), etc. Pretty neat idea, right?

Wanting an excuse to play with this technology, I decided to use the labels that I had attached to my blog entries so that I could see what a more visual representation of The Perpetual Student looked like (the image at the top of this blog is the result). It's amazing to be able to see at a glance the breadth of topics that I've been inspired to blog about as a result of class discussions, course readings, newspaper and magazine articles, etc. It's immediately apparent that my studies this year are concerned with public history, digital history and museums. It's also pretty obvious that I'm a student at UWO and that I have a personal interest in human rights issues and the Holocaust.

I'm curious; what would a similar Wordle look like in another month? Six months? A year? Would it show the same trends or new ones? Would it be an accurate visual representation of my Public History interests, or might it reflect a conscious effort on my part to include new topics in order to diversify my posts?

I also found myself wondering about other ways data clouds could be used. I remember reading a blog post when I first discovered Wordle that suggested that data clouds might be used to visually display the slant that newspapers take on particular topics. For instance, by taking an article from the Globe and Mail and and using Wordle to compare it to coverage of the same event in The Toronto Star, one might be able to visually discern the journalist's or newspaper's bias depending on the words that are given more or less emphasis. Or maybe the image could be used to determine the focus within an event - is it on the people involved? The politics? The geography? Wikipedia also provides an example of a word cloud that used information that might traditionally have been expressed in graph form (in this case population data) and re-imagined it as a cloud, with population densities attached to specific colours within the cluster. And I can easily imagine a student using it to determine the topics a professor has emphasized in their lecture notes (and therefore the material to study for the exam) or a secondary school teacher using it to show the themes of a novel. I suppose the options are endless for a person willing to use a little imagination.

But Wordle is not all moonbeams and roses. Due to their use of Java Script, you aren't able to save your Wordle image to your computer using the obvious cut and paste options. You have to jump through the hoops of using the "Prt Scrn" option, pasting it into a Paint document and editing it from there. (Conveniently, though, you can choose to save your Wordle image to their database and share it with the online community hassle-free)

In my case, however, the print screen option on my computer wasn't playing nice and I was forced to troubleshoot (something that I always resent, and yet feel smug about when I eventually find a method that works). Anyway, I did what I always do, which is to Google it and came up with a handy About.com entry that led me to a new and fascinating discovery - the Vista Snipping Tool. I had no idea I even had a feature like that on my computer. And from the Snipping Tool I was given the option of saving my file as a GIF, a PNG or a JPEG. I had no idea what these acronyms even meant, so I was then forced to go look that up and figure out which would be most useful for my situation.

It was like tumbling down the rabbit hole. What should have been a quick and playful experience turned into hours of playing, troubleshooting, contemplating and blogging. Before I knew it, all those wonderful intensions I had of doing my Museology readings tonight had slipped away. But, as the saying goes, "The More You Know."

Fee-Free Museums a Good Idea?

This past weekend was Thanksgiving, and for me that meant coming home to Whitby to see my family, gorge myself on turkey and mashed potatoes and get my hot little hands on the newest issue of The Beaver.

Although the magazine’s front cover promised me an article about Canadian spies outwitting the Nazis in WWII (always a fun time), it was a smaller article by Christopher Moore entitled “Land of the free museum” that initially caught my attention. Just a few hours before, we’d been discussing the cost of entrance fees in our Museology seminar and Professor Sendzikas had raised the question of how much we were willing to pay to go to a museum. We all answered the question in dollars and cents (in case you’re wondering, my threshold is around $20 before I really start to question my desire), but I think the discussion should have been bigger than that. Perhaps what we really should have been asking was: how much is our history worth to us (metaphorically speaking, that is)?

Moore’s article started out in generally the same way that our class discussion did – in terms of cold, hard, cash. He went through a list of Canadian museums and galleries and quoted the prices for a family of four at each of the institutions; they ranged from the relatively inexpensive ($18 for the National Gallery) to the moderately expensive ($47 for Fort Henry) to the exorbitant ($74 for the ROM... before the addition of any of the “blockbuster” exhibitions).[1] Moore’s next step was to compare our entrance fees to the entrance fees at even more prestigious institutions in the United States and England. I have to admit, I was intrigued. Canada has some amazing museums, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that any of them are in the same league as the Smithsonian or the Tate Modern.

Do you want to take a guess at how much admission costs for a family of four at the Natural History Museum or Museum of American History in Washington, DC? How about at the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum or the British Museum in London, England? You could guess, but you’d probably be wrong. There is no price; admission at all of these truly remarkable museums and galleries are free. [2] That’s right – zip, zero, zilch, nada.

I was floored when I saw these figures (so much so that I went to all of their websites and double-checked Moore’s data. For the record, it’s accurate). How can those museums afford to offer their visitors free admission?! How do they pay their staff, maintain their collections, or acquire new artifacts? The more I thought about it, however, the more I began to wonder how we, as Canadians, can afford not to do the same.

As I see it, high admission fees aren’t really in keeping with the values of our society. With our ridiculously expensive ticket prices, the museums and galleries in Canada have managed to commoditize our history to an extent that puts seeing and experiencing much of it outside the reach of a large number of Canadian citizens. This fact doesn’t sit well with me. Think of the message that this prohibitive pricing is sending to Canada’s poorer sections about their present and future worth in our society. Moore even suggests that museums teach people to appreciate their country and be better citizens. Do our high fees suggest that Canadians only care about middle- and upper-class citizens becoming “good” citizens? Possibly.

What real purpose do high entrance fees serve, anyway?

Although they contribute to the running of museums and galleries, the majority of funding for these institutions comes from government grants and private donations, not their admission fees. And if American and British museums have found a way to make up the shortfall caused by free admission, why can’t we do the same?

Some would argue that paying a higher entrance fee creates a perceived value of the contents of a museum in the mind of its visitors. This view may have some validity, but I would argue that those that visit free museums still appreciate them as repositories of our history and culture. It’s not like anyone walks away from the Smithsonian going, “Man, that sucked. If only they had made me pay to see it....”

Sources:

[1] Moore, Christopher. "Land of the free museum." The Beaver, October-November 2009, 13.
[2] Ibid.

Gimme Your Two Cents... For Every Paragraph I Write

Perhaps one of the more interesting tidbits I picked up from this week’s Digital History readings, (beyond the content itself), was to notice the form and function of the webpage Christopher M. Kelty set up for his book, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. His web pages are essentially broken down into three columns: The actual content of his book on the left, a comments overview that floats with the reader as they scroll down the page in the centre, and his book’s table of contents and a Browse Comments option on the right. I’ve never seen a website designed in quite the same way before, but I think it’s awesome and I think more people should do it.

Although I can appreciate that the parts of the web page combine to make a cohesive whole, it is the centre column, and how Kelty uses it, that I find of critical importance to his site’s success. Kelty has provided a tracking system for comments in the centre column that allows both the author and the reader to see at a glance what areas of the author’s writing are generating the most buzz or the greatest confusion. He does this by providing the means for his readers to comment on his writing on a per paragraph basis. This format not only offers a quick visual breakdown of activity on the site, but it also allows the readers and author to carry on an immediate dialogue about the pressing issues of his piece. By doing so, it engages the reader continually throughout the piece and works to stave off what I’ll call “reader exhaustion.”

This approach to web page design reminds me of our class’ discussion a few weeks ago surrounding the digitization efforts that have been going on that include the ability to cross reference different versions of a text and annotate them directly in front of you on the screen, essentially creating another version of the document with an entirely new meaning. It seems to me that Kelty is doing close to the same thing by using new technologies and design to reach out to his readership and involve them in the process of his thought creation and writing. Interesting.