PowerPoint Presentation

BRIDGING GAPS, MAKING CONNECTIONSUKMW15 Museums on the Web

KEYNOTE

Finding space for the experiment:

digital collaborations and their influence on the museum

John Coburn | @j0hncoburn | Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Good afternoon,

First of all, thanks to Mia for the invitation to speak. Its very nice to be here.

This is my 7th or 8th UK Museums on the Web and Ive never had the pleasure of standing up here before you all.

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Just by way of an introduction. This is where I work. This is Discovery Museum where most of us are based

TWAM has 9 museums and galleries across Tyneside and 1 archives service for Tyne & Wear. 1.1 million objects. 12 miles of shelf in the archives.

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Im always very interested to understand what a museums Digital team looks like and how their remit changes year on year.

Our Digital department comprises 2 people. This is us. Weve had no in house web team since 2008.

But clearly Digital is integral to the work of other teams, communications and collections teams, who we work very closely with but who are departmentally separate. 4

The Digital programme is 100% internal and external collaboration

So internal and external collaboration is a necessity of everything we do.

To my knowledge the digital team has never produced a digital project in isolation. We havent the capacity to do this and it would make absolutely no sense. Part of our role is to advocate and support staff to take ownership of digital projects.

So the digital programme is a result of ongoing internal and external collaboration.

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Collaboration as probe into the practice of the museum

What is new is the increasing attention were paying to how collaboration isnt merely the structure or the means that allows us to produce the digital work.

Were interested in understanding How the process of collaboration can influence what we can do as an organisation and outside just the digital department. 6

Collaboration as probe into the public value of the collections

I always like to argue our Digital projects are asking fundamental questions about the role of our museum and the public value of our collections.

Whats a museums online collection for ? Whats a museum collection for? Whats a museum for?

I sometimes think digital, perhaps more than any other department, is given permission to look for new answers to questions. At its most basic, the question being how do audiences want to engage our collections in ways we havent previously allowed or thought of?

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What do we really mean we talk about Digital at TWAM? We know digital means different things to different people, to different departments.

Im sure like many of the people in this room, when were asked by a colleague to consider what the digital bit could be for a new exhibition or event, were compelled to ask them to reframe the question. What is it theyre actually trying to do and who is it for? What do they mean by digital? If its just replicating the physical offer virtually, then probably were thinking about it wrong. I think its healthy to always question what we mean by digital we try and make it a live conversation at TWAM.

Following a chat about this very subject with my colleague Michael in the Outeach dept, Digital made it onto his list of banned words where overuse has engendered ill-defined blandness. Banning seems an extreme measure but I get his point. And think its admirable he banned his overuse of the f word

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Digital in the museum can be a Trojan horse through which we can legitimately test the ideas we might have been afraid to try out under any other departmental name.

This is an interesting and perhaps cynical counter argument. Its a slightly bastardised quote from John Bowers whos the Professor of Digital Creative Practice at Newcastle University.

His point being that while definitions of digital are slippery and stretched year on year, in practical terms Digital with a capital D can be very helpful. It can be a byword for experimentation- having the responsibility to actively try out the new and different and perhaps riskier stuff. 9

access museumsobjectsinnovationcollectionsgalleries cataloguesdigitisation preservation technologies visits engagement

The language that surrounds Digital at TWAM, and its perceived potential has expanded a little over the past few years. From a language purely of utility, access, high level engagement and technology. 10

storytelling questioning new human experiences design for user behaviours meaningful experimentation untested ideas latent potential of collections objects as source materialreuse new curatorial practice

to something a lot more audience and behaviour focused, something that holds collections and interpretation up to scrutiny. A language that has evolved in part through collaborating with people who see very different value in artefacts and museums spaces and talk in different terms.

Were interested in working with partners who ask new questions of our collections and help us reach a wider public.

A digital project at TWAM needs to be one of meaningful experimentation first and foremost. 11

Collaborations: projects, case studies.

12For this presentation Ill be talking through a couple of collaborations and offering them as case studies.

But Ill also try and share how we used these projects to not only create public impact

Collaborations: projects, case studies.Reflections: their influence and learning for TWAM.

13But how we used them as research to better understand what they tell us about audiences and about the practice of our organisation.

Digital programme as ongoing R&D

14And how the reflections that come from a new and different project should influence the principles that inform our future work.

For me Its about contextualising digital as a programme of internal research through public engagement- rather than a programme of loosely connected digital outputs. Were learning as we go and we need to honest about that with colleagues.

Guiding principles:

Seeding a culture of collaboration demands we start from a position of openness

(Release collections Enable reuseBe generous to ideas from outside TWAM)

Like other heritage organisations, we began to get very interested in the collaborative process when we released our some of collections openly online and enabled their reuse.

Public reuse for us was on social media, it was blog posts about social justice, artworks on moustaches, schools resources about criminality, films about the construction of a transport network, books on calligraphy. People started getting in touch about what else they could do with our stuff.

Creative reuse is the manifestation of what audiences tell us is the value of collections- when theyre given permission.15

Guiding principles:

We can inspire new public engagement with collections by enabling new and imaginative articulations of their value

1616For us this is about allowing audiences to become collections advocates to a wider, more targeted public. And theyre able to do it with with credibility

Metric for success

Fewer people saying Wow, I had no idea I could use the museum in this way

The challenge to me seems to be in influencing what the public see as the role of the museum and the permissions we allow to our collections.

Quite often on collaborative projects the partners had no idea this digital or physical access was permitted. It doesnt occur to them that the museum would even be remotely interested. Or they fear the museum will say NO. Can I install a large scale automated drawing machine on the side of your art gallery? The answer is clearly yes, lets try and find some funding.

So depressingly we do find the image of the museum as the cautious Victorian curator is alive and well in the minds of many of the people we go on to collaborate with. Which is something we have to fight against.

With all this mind, Im now going to run through 2 short case studies of creative collaborations weve worked on this year. Ill talk a little about the key insights weve gleaned from both, and then Ill focus on the one piece of learning that seems unite all of projects of this nature.

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http://decoded1914.org.uk

As part of the World War 1 commemorative programme we produced Decoded 1914-18.

Following an open call to creative producers across Newcastle University and their extended networks, we produced a 2 week long programme of digital and AV installations, events and workshops in our museums and public spaces.

We supported the development of 7 projects, including 1 one with the BBC sound recordist Chris Watson- who actually lives round the corner from Discovery Museum. He turned a basement museum store into a dimly lit radio receiver base.

It was the responsibility of the producers to identify collections as a starting point for a piece of work that would explore histories the museum hasnt talked about in its other WW1 programmes. 18

Musicians and sound artists John Bowers and Tim Shaw were very interested in WW1 sound technologies.

This is John standing in front of a sound mirror in Sunderland. For those of you who dont known them, these concrete structures were a listening technology.

Theyre dotted along our coastline and they allowed us to detect the low frequencies of approaching enemy aircraft. The structures are still there. And in the minds of John and Tim, theyve continued to listen for the last hundred years. 19

So Ill allow John and Tim to talk a bit more about what they produced for Decoded.20

11,000 people visited and participated with the produced work/events in museums and public spaces,

3,500 people experienced the work online.

Over the course of Decoded

I concede these stats dont tell us a great deal21

Gaps in a collections as a jumping off point for creative enquiry

What did we learn from these collaborations?

Many of the other producers we worked with were interested in not just responding to objects, but in finding the gaps in a collection and gaps in a museums knowledge base and using them as a jumping off point for creative enquiry.

The collaborators wanted to explore histories that the museums didnt necessarily have the answers to. They wanted to produce work that contributed to a collective imagining of the past.

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Alternative perspectives on where the public engagement happens

We learnt about new methods for creating engagements in the museum.

John and Tims maker workshops were situated right in the middle of a science gallery in Discovery museum. They deliberately used the spectacle of the process as a provocation to passing visitors- people were compelled to ask what the hell was going on. It formed a gathering point for public dialogue.

There were some really interesting conversations between very different types of visitors- retired grandfathers who worked in communications industries chatting at length with a creative technologist using arduinos to make crude morse code signals.

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The maker process as museum intervention is something weve exploring further. Earlier this year TWAM worked with a record label to get hands on with our 100 year old wax cylinder sound recorders, and we invited the public to record and capture their own sounds.

And we ran this event only yesterday- public building of hydrophones (under water microphones used to detect German U-boats in WW1).

So following Decoded some of the history team are now really interested in getting people into the museum to play with defunct mechnical objects. I should say that on a practical note, as long as we keep the shell of the object intact the conservators are happy.

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http://collectionsdivetwmuseums.org.uk

Collections search does easily support broad thematic enquiry

The most difficult aspect of many creative collaboration is that people expect a high quality and consistency collections data. The idea that not everything is digitised and that the quality of the data varies can be disappointing, occasionally creative research is abandoned for this reason.

Another major challenge is collaborators want to be able to conduct visual and thematic online search of our collections. A lot of these people dont havent the mental tools or the inclination to search using standard keywords and collections types.

We struggle when people ask questions like What do you have that relates to death & Mortality? European urbanism? Streetlife?

Our catalogue data is generally not rich enough to support this. A conversation with a member of staff is usually the most effective way to interpret search enquiries.

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http://collectionsdivetwmuseums.org.uk

So we know theres a need for more visual, thematic search interfaces. This partly contributed to our recent R&D project funded by the Digital R&D for the Arts programme.

This is a browse-based interface. It thematically links and visualises collections in response to user browse behaviours. Its really just a prototype and will be refined further but weve so far collected useful research into what extent audiences will engage with collections when objects are visualised and connected thematically. To date about 70% people in users studies enjoyed this novel browse experience. 25% didnt like it so much wanted much more control over the experience.

Report published today! Codebase available on Github26

Fatigue with prevailing historical themes & a drive to push beyond the usual museum interpretations

A lot of the people we collaborate are driven to present alternatives to the prevailing historical themes and narratives that heritage institutions like ours talk a lot about (which in the North East is mainly industry and rivers)

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http://twmuseums.org.uk/half-memory

About 3 years ago in response to this finding we put out an open call to the public to contribute any sounds that disrupted a sense of the North Easts past. We did this with Tusk Music and Tyneside Cinema .

We collected oral histories, found sounds, musical recordings, recorded conversations, imagined soundtracks to the construction of the Tyne Bridge.

We then turned this publicly contributed audio into a 37 hour broadcast on the internet radio stream Basic FM28

8000 listeners from 26 countries listened for an average of 14 minutes

We received29

Total number of public hours contributed to the project:

491

Most satisfyingly audiences proved that they will dedicate themselves to creative collaborations when we identify themes that resonate with them.30

http://tributaries.org.uk

Another collaborative project produced this year as part of the World War 1 programme was Tributaries.

Tributaries was also very much about a new presentation of untold histories from the 1914-18 period31

This was a Trans Atlantic collaboration with the artist Halsey Burgund. This is him. Halsey is currently a research fellow at MIT and has previously done work with Smithsonian and other US museums and galleries.

Halsey is very interested in voice. He uses technology, primarily apps and his open source software Roundware, to capture and augment physical landscapes with multitudes of geo-located voices.

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And the reason we asked Halsey was because maybe the most interesting thing about our WW1 materials was they represented of hundreds of unheard Tyneside voices. Diaries, postcards, letters, logbooks weve not worked with much before.

Voices not necessarily of historical importance but quiet voices and snapshots of lives lived between 1914-18. 33

The World War 1 team spent months scouring the archives and collections for material that provided glimpses of civic life in Tyneside from the time.

We used classified ads, newspaper columns, recipes.34

Weather logbooks that recorded ordinary weather every day between 1914-1835

We also found songbooks from the time which Halsey used as a starting point for a musical score to sit behind the voices. 36

Just over a month ago we released Tributaries for iOS and Android.

I know apps get a bit of a kicking from museums these days but from our experience we know that when theyre designed for known mobile behaviours and create experiences distinct from the usual museum object experience they can work.

Our previous app Hidden Newcastle, first released in 2012 and redeveloped last year, was downloaded 17,000 times with an average dwell time of around 5 minutes. 20-30 thousand uses a month which is difficult to make sense of. Most usefully it demonstrated to us some audiences are prepared to engage with historical content across physical locations on their phone.

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Tributaries is optimised for Tyneside users.

It does only 2 things. You can listen or you can record sounds.

When you listen you tune into an immersive audio score of voices and music. The score is geolocated so the sounds automatically change depending on where you are. Every listening experience is unique. There are over one thousand excerpts of voice in there currently.

The idea is when users record sounds they create strands of connection between reflections on the present day and of life from 100 years ago. The web of sound will continue to grow and expand. It was intended to spark present day audiences to emotionally connect with lives lived before them, some in familiar locations.

Its difficult to measure success this early in but weve had only a few hundred downloads though dwell time has been high.

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But what did we learn from our collaboration with Halsey?

On a practical level, this extreme form of remote collaboration was actually possible despite only one face-to-face meeting over the course of a year.

Bug testing and making incremental changes to a geolocation app can be pretty difficult though when you are separated by an ocean.

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Imagining new museum experiences

The key learning for us was in how working with people like Halsey allows us to play around with what a museum experience can look like.

Halseys interest in voice and of untold histories being released into the ether, his idea that ongoing public contributions help evolve this web of historical sounds- these ideas were new to us and exciting.

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Eerie and haunting. Listening to the voices I forgot where I was and was taken somewhere else.

We have evidence that we will reach people who might not otherwise use museums or their collections. 41

I want HISTORY, not art or music or the other stuff that gets in the way.

We also know some audiences will react strongly against a different use of objects.

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The challenge: increasing creative space and freedom in the museum

The 2 things we learn from all of our collaborations above all else

Firstly, having the creative space and freedom to play with the collections is crucial to the development of any of these projects And secondly, creative space and freedom usually exists more often outside the museum than it does inside it.

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The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happenwe can drive it out with our busyness and plans

Iain McGilchrist

At TWAM weve been really wrestling with this challenge. Stretched time and resources, busyness, perceptions of this sort of stuff as superfluous. Interesting but only if we can find time away from the desk.

But to me finding the time to reflect and the space to evolve is massively important. Its strategic. Its fundamental to considering how we might exist in the future.

So how do we effect this positive organisational change?44

All of these projects are cross-departmental

Creating a synergy between like-minded people who see the benefit of sharing, not work make

TNT

Through the use of violent force. 45

All of these projects are cross-departmental

Creating a synergy between like-minded people who see the benefit of sharing, not work make

TNT

TNT(Try New Things)

That was a pun.

TNT is a structure weve set up to support staff from across all museums to develop small scale R&D projects.

This is still pretty new and its finding its feet. So I cant honestly share this as best practice but I can maybe share it as our best current attempt.

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All of these projects are cross-departmental

Creating a synergy between like-minded people who see the benefit of sharing, not work make

TNT

Meaningful experimentation, not digital first and foremost.

Pilot questions or methodologies innovative to practice of TWAM.

Public engagement & new audiences focus.

Learning is transparent and shared with colleagues.

TNT was set up by 5 people from 5 different departments. The initiative connects departmentally disparate staff with ideas and energy. It provides a structure and modest amount of funding to create small scale projects that can be tested quickly.

TNT is about supporting the development of innovative and digital public engagement projects but to avoid confusion about what innovative and digital might mean, we emphasise meaningful experimentation and new questions. We make it very clear this is all strategic.

The group meets every other month and invites proposals throughout the year to be developed and shared with staff.

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25 people have joined the group since we started 3 months ago. From front of house to senior management.

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Can the museum collect and interpret public biometric and socioeconomic data as new format of social histories?

Proposals include Can we collect and interpret public biometric and socioeconomic data as a new format of social histories? 2 keepers of history are currently working with data visualisers and digital creative technologists to pursue this.

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Were honest with the group that this process might not work. That the structure will likely evolve but the principles remain the same.

Weve found so far the transparency of this organic process has helped give it authenticity. Enough staff see the value in it for it to exist. And those that dont arent obliged to participate!50

Leading (the most effective change) does not mean coming up with answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.

Jim Collins, Good to Great

What feels important with this approach is that we arent advocating ourselves internally as the people with the visions and the answers. Were not motivating everyone to follow our messianic vision.

A truly collaborative process for us needs to be one where colleagues are invited to participate in in the earliest stages of a project, not just when theyre needed to contribute their specialist skill set. They need to be able talk about it as their project on their own terms.

The challenge of creative space and freedom is ongoing and far from resolved and Id really like to hear how you are approaching this with your own organisations. 51

Thank you

@j0hncoburn

john.coburn@twmuseums.org.uk

Thanks for listening and please do get in touch52