Beyond the Button

Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art published a manifesto of sorts about technology in museums this last year. Jennifer Trant, on of the organizers of the Museums and the Web conference says that his work is a key reason that Museums and the Web will be in Indianapolis in 2009.

Over at Science Buzz we are interested in exploring controversial issues in contemporary science with our museum visitors in new ways. In the past week we rolled out a kiosk and website that asks visitors to read through some medical scenarios, asking them questions about the situation along the way. Specifically the stories are about embryonic testing, a guardian's right to deny treatment, and assisted suicide.

We present the visitors with these scenarios via a web interface and collect their answers to the questions using the Drupal webform module. The webform module is a great tool for soliciting multiple types of feedback in a structured fashion. While webform has some reporting tools they are really designed for the administrator and don't visualize the data in an easily readable fashion.

Google Charts API

I was thinking about all sorts of complex ways to dynamically generate graphs with special image libraries, but that would likely take weeks to complete. In stepped the Google Charts API which lets you create charts, graphs, and even maps on the fly with a simple URL. The charts are served up as PNGs that are dynamically generated live from Google's servers each time the report page is loaded based on data you pass in the URL string. Very simple.

How we tied it all together

1. Visitor completes our scenario survey using the Drupal webform module, which stores their answers in the database
2. The visitor is sent to a results page with a call to a function in our custom drupal module called answers_report
3. The answers_report module pulls the answers out of the database and formats them into a PHP array.
4. Then we use this great go-between for the Google Charts API and PHP called, GoogChart.
5. GoogChart turns our PHP array of data into a big long URL which we can use to tell google to generate our pie chart.
6. We drop that URL into a HTML img tag and viola, there's our graph of user opinion.

Will it work?

I'm a big graphs and charts nerd. They help me visualize lots of information, but I am curious to see how visitors respond. Will these charts help generate some interesting conversations on the forums around each of these topics? Right now we don't have enough data to really tell, so go and tell us what YOU think.

Michael Geist, the keynote speaker from Museums and the Web 2008, has a great feature in the BBC today. Highlights from the article:

• In 2006 the V&A museum in London made all digitized images from its collection free for reproduction in academic journals and books
• The National Gallery of Canada actually charges more for public domain images than copyright ones, an average of $379 (canadian).
• Many museums around the world use restrictive and expensive licensing fees for images in the public domain.

Geist was a great speaker on these issues and I'm excited to see some of his ideas make it into the mainstream media with regards to museums.

The backchannel at this year's Museums and the Web (#mw2008) was especially active and important to my experience at the event. Check out some of the ephemeral cast out as a result of the discussion.

Twitter, Flickr, and the Blog feed

More and more folks got addicted to the backchannel feed this year. Thanks to Mike Ellis' OneTag system everyone's tweets got aggregated into one thread via the #mw2008 tag for all to follow at conference.archimuse.com....and elsewhere

• HashTags' look at #mw2008
• Tweet Scan on #mw2008
• Flickr on #mw2008
• Technorati's aggregate of blog posts tagged #mw2008

One of the most exciting aspects of the #mw2008 tag for me was social in nature. By following the people posting on #mw2008 I was able to make TONS of new twitter and flickr friends who are specifically posting on issues and ideas that I care about already (museum folk). In this way the backchannel serves as a new high bandwidth networking tool.

As these tools become a more important method for fully experiencing a conference both live and remotely we will need new ways to visualize the large amount of data and content that is created. Stamen design's visualization of the backchannel at the 2006 ETech conference looks like an interesting first start.

Did any of you fellow mw2008 attendees have any cool backchannel experiences?

One last twitter link...check out your own tweet cloud. Here's mine.

Museums have done an enormous amount of work making their spaces and exhibit interfaces accessible to those with physical differences, limitations, and disabilities. However, we have lots more work before we can claim such progress with digital and media interfaces.

One easy thing we can do right is design websites and media interactives for for the colorblind. An estimated 8% of the male population (roughly 12 million folks in the US) have some form of color blindness that can make it hard to use interfaces that rely on color to convey information.

I use two simple tools that help me test my designs for color blind users. They let me see what my work looks like through the eyes of some one who can't see the various differences between the shades of green, blue, or red.

Color Oracle

Color Oracle is great because it turns your entire screen color blind for a moment. Any movement of the mouse or clicks turn the display back to "normal."

Sim Daltonism

Sim Daltonism gives you a color blindness portal or window that lets you see little parts of your screen color blind live. This can be real nice for flash and moving images. But this can also be more memory and processor intensive if you are on a slow computer.

Both of these apps are for the Mac and I don't have any first hand experience with any PC tools. But Daltonize lets you test your interfaces over the web. You can upload an image and filter it for various types of color blindness.

I'd love to hear your tips about how you work to make your visual interfaces more accessible to all viewers.

courtesy William SpaetzelFifth grader, Kenton Stufflebeam, has pointed out an error in a museum exhibit about geology at the Smithsonian that's been out for the public to see for 27 years. By building mechanisms for visitors to share their knowledge and ideas we can avoid this sort of issue in the future. Many museum folk immediately worry about accuracy when we talk about new experiences that let visitors contribute and share authority with our institutions. In this case the expertise flowed from visitor to museum instead of the other way around.

courtesey Piero SierraThe Science Museum of Minnesota is hiring a Drupal developer to work as part of the team that operates the award wining Science Buzz website and exhibit.
Application deadline: April 9, 2008.

Science Buzz is expanding in many ways. Your expert Drupal, PHP, and web coding skills will help us:

• develop Mentor Buzz, an online community focusing on the needs of mentors and their students talking about science
• create unique web features focusing on contemporary issues like the 35W bridge collapse, Hurricane Katrina, or even male pregnancy!
• build web enabled exhibits that allow other museums around the country that allow their visitors to hook into the Science Buzz community
• create new tools that help our visitors create content along with us...we like to share authority
• and more...

Learn more about the job...

courtesey Ard Hesselink
This Friday I thought I would post on some of the tools that our web/media group has been using lately.

Assembla

Writing code is hard. Writing code in a group that might not even be on the same floor, building, or state is much harder. Assembla is a set of the key collaboration tools that programming teams need, all rolled into one off-site package. SVN, Trac, a wiki, and even Scrum reporting tools. We initially used it as a stop-gap measure while we got our own SVN server up. Now we're finding it hard to tear ourselves away.

IRC

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around for a long, long while, but we hadn't really thought of it as a work tool until real recently. After two of our finest web/media developers returned from the 2008 DrupalCon, they informed us about a whole 'nother world of Drupal support and discussion living on the IRC channels. I tried it out for a couple of hours one Sunday I was amazed at how much live help was out there for some complex stuff I was trying to figure out. I'm on a mac so I use Colloquy to get on Drupal's IRC channels. Obviously this isn't Drupal specific. There are many channels for the topic you are currently banging your head over right now.

ScreenKeys

What's cooler than a button? A button with a little display built in. Screenkeys are little programmable LCD screens in buttons and switches. These could be quite fun for customized and changing content. The options for control in a game could change every time a visitor plays. We aren't using these yet but I just threw them in for fun.

Any of all those crazy acronyms throw you for a loop? Post a question about how we are using these tools and I'll try and fill you in.

I recently had the pleasure to speak the IMLS WebWise conference about some of the work that we have been doing with Science Buzz. This was an interesting meeting because it mixes the world of traditional museum with a wise group of people from the library field as well. For those of you who don't already know, those librarians are about 5 years ahead of museums when it comes to sharing authority with their visitors. Many of us thinking about new ways to use technology in our museums are looking to the library world for leadership.

Here are few of the coolest projects that I learned about in Miami Beach (oh yeah did I mention that the conference was in Miami Beach...poor me).

George Mason University's Center for History and New Media is an exciting group of talented software developers and that blend a unique approach to education and learning around history. They talked about two projects:

• Zotero - A firefox plugin that gives you an iTunes style tool to track, tag, and archive to various nerdy academic resources you need to follow as you research weavers shuttles of the Appalachian Mountains, Tractors of the Upper Midwest, or the personal stories told around Hurricane Katrina. As more and more academic research moves online I am sure that Zotero will become more and more of a standard for researchers of all ilks to manage their many academic resources.
• Omeka - Think of Omeka as the WordPress of "Collections Online." After some initial configuration Omeka will be a simple content management system to build collections based websites. I am particularly encourages to see the Omeka team focusing on smaller museums and building some community tools right into the software.

My other favorite discovery hits close to home. As a matter of fact I walk past this museum on my way to work every day. The Minnesota Historical Society is experimenting with GIS resources in conjunction with their collection of historical maps and aerial photographs. On their True North website you can overlay interesting data sets like current agricultural land use and historical Indian land use before European settlement. I really like this project because it exposes a set of map based tools to the general public.

Flick launches statistics for your photo sharing accounts. I know of several folks who are using Flickr as their image engine and then pulling their images into their website via the API. I suspect this will make it easier for more projects to use that model now that they can better track use.

Make sure you look for the funny old skool "under construction" animated GIFs when you sign up for these stats.