miaridge

The subject of centrally managing visitor comments from museum interactives and online spaces keeps coming up on various discussion lists, so I thought I’d start a post about some work I’ve done on this that I can refer people to.  It’s very draft-ish at this stage, in part because I haven’t had time to go back to the original requirements and architecture documents and verify my vague memories.  I have no idea if posts like this would be useful for other people or what I could include to make it more useful – I’d love to know what you think.

Background

When I started at the Science Museum, I discovered there were lots of different systems running the various in-gallery interactives, which meant lots of different usernames and passwords, server addresses and interfaces to master to do things like approve new visitor comments or update content.  The redevelopment of the Wellcome Wing galleries (Antenna and Who Am I?, and the new gallery Atmosphere) was an opportunity to create a centralised backend system that would make it easier to add new content and manage the sometimes huge levels of user-generated content that comes from the galleries.

Sample requirements: Antenna

The updated ‘Antenna’ contemporary science news gallery also had a vision of integrating the in-gallery and online experiences, not only with content flowing seamlessly into different interfaces, but also by bringing responses from visitors in the galleries and online into shared spaces. The system had to be able to manage polls, quizzes, ‘likes’, etc as well as helping manage and publish visitor comments. The galleries are visited by thousands of school children a day, and they can generate an immense number of comments, many of which are unsuitable for publication (i.e. kids will be kids, and they will think it’s funny to swear or be rude about a classmate, and of course there’s a lot of repetition along the lines of ‘I like exhibit x’).

Selecting a platform

After some thought, I settled on WordPress as the backend platform to publish our content and store user-generated content and related activity.  It’s based on PHP so it’s extensible and it’s not too difficult to find developers, it’s widely used so there are lots of decent plugins and themes*, it’s capable of supporting high traffic sites, and it has an API, which meant it would also work with the gallery’s Flash interactives, web and mobile interfaces – anything that can use a web service to push and pull content.  User experience for the content developers and UGC moderators was also important to me, and WordPress was pretty good on that front.

As I posted to the Museums Computer Group list once, ‘As the gallery is about the latest in science news, it had to be easily updateable, and using a customised WordPress system means the same museum content and visitor comments can be shared on the Antenna website and in the gallery.  The system manages content and interaction for the daily (ish) science news stories, the short-term displays, and the in-depth ‘Feature’ exhibitions.  I’m happy to answer questions on the technical architecture and development process (or direct you to the Science Museum/NMSI web team), but questions about the in-gallery kiosk hardware etc are best directed to the New Media team.

Some of the ‘have your say’ applications in the Atmosphere and Who Am I? galleries also run on the same system, which means visitor comments can be moderated via the same central WordPress installation.  I don’t know how often the questions or polls change, but it should help the galleries keep their interpretation up-to-date over the life of the installations.’

* the art of selecting a plugin is a whole different post, and generally I’d say it’s useful to use them for rapid prototyping and early user testing but unless you’re really happy with the way a plugin is written you might want to write any bespoke plugins yourself – this doesn’t have to be difficult process.

I ran a three and a half hour pre-conference workshop (abstract below) at MCN2011 on Hacking and mash-ups for beginners at MCN2011 – slides below, and I’m happy to share the exercises on request.

Have you ever wanted to be able to express your ideas for digital collections more clearly, or thought that a hack day sounds like fun but need a way to get started with basic web scripting? In this hands-on workshop you will learn how to use online tools to create interesting visualisations to explore a cultural dataset and create your own simple ‘mash-up’.

The workshop will be a fun, supportive environment where you will learn by playing with small snippets of code. No scripting knowledge is assumed.

I was interviewed for the Microtask crowdsourcing blog.  Their abstract:

Culture heritage technologist Mia Ridge is a champion of crowdsourced museum gaming. Mia has worked as a developer for several world-class museums and is now writing her PhD on crowdsourcing digital heritage. She describes games as the “participation engine” of crowdsourcing.

Taking time out from her busy speaking schedule, Mia told us how and why museums should be raising their game…

‘Games at the museum: Mia Ridge interview‘.

I was one of two keynotes at Europeana Tech in Vienna in October 2011. I’ve posted my talk notes at My Europeana Tech keynote: Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation. There’s a video of the talk on YouTube (but I haven’t watched it so have no idea if it works as a video).

Some of my other notes from the conference are at Notes from EuropeanaTech 2011.

Katy Beale and I ran a workshop on ‘hacking culture’ at the V&A Museum on Friday 15 July. I’ve put the photos for ‘Culture (paper) hack at V&A’s Web Weekend‘ but still haven’t written this workshop up properly.  Briefly – we explained what hack days are, the types of hacks people create, how CultureHack started – then we handed over to the participants to ‘create their perfect museum experience’ with paper, markers, scissors, glue and some printouts of objects from the V&A’s collection online. People came up with some wonderfully creative ideas, and it was interesting to see where they overlapped with the kinds of things you see at hack days, and where they were completely different.

From the V&A Web Weekend Programme:

Katy and Mia explore the idea of museums as objects, stories, experiences, people and places. If you could take objects out of the museum, where would you put them? If you could have access to any part of the museum, what would it be? You’ll hear about recent Culture Hacks and then create your own paper prototypes, bringing to life your own simple solutions or seemingly impossible ideas.

A presentation for the International Training Programme run by the British Museum for museum professionals from around the world. This is based on a presentation I prepared for OpenCulture 2011, but includes additional material on mobile phones/devices including the ‘Hidden Histories’ pilot.

A presentation on ‘The future of museums and learning to live with love change’ for OpenCulture 2011 in Birmingham, UK, on June 8, 2011.

Owen Stephens live-blogged my talk, his notes are at
Open Culture 2011 – Looking to the Future.

A presentation called ‘Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums’ for MuseumNext in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 26, 27th. The link to my slides was retweeted so much the slides made it onto the front page of slideshare, which was especially nice as I’d had a lot of fun making the presentation interesting enough to combat the post-lunch slot and to help non-tech/game people stay engaged for the whole talk.

A presentation on ‘Museum Games and UGC: Improving Collections Through Play’ for ‘UGC4GLAM – Joint Workshop on User-Generated Content for Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums‘, Vienna, Austria, May 16-17, 2011.

My slides for ‘Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections’ for Museums and the Web, 2011 in Philadelphia, USA. They cover the material in my MW2011 paper, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections.