from headphones to microphones: co-creating the soundtracks to culture

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From Headphones to Microphones: Co-creating the soundtracks to culture - or - NancyProctor [email protected] useWeb.us MuseumsandtheWeb.com AVOIDING THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

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From Headphones to Microphones:Co-creating the soundtracks to culture- or -@[email protected] MuseumsandtheWeb.comAvoiding the Zombie Apocalypse

Wonderful to be back in this great city of open innovation that my 6-year old daughter calls Instagram seems an appropriate name for Amsterdam in the 21st century, no?1

Audio Tour 1.0: Stedelijk Museum, 1952

@NancyProctor [email protected]

In fact Amsterdams museums have been innovating with mobile technologies for decades as you may well know, this city is the birthplace of museum mobile or at least the documented history of it! How many of you have seen this video before?You are the first audience Ive ever played this for who will understand the voiceover! For those who may not be able to see my slides, I am going to try to interject a few verbal descriptions in English as well, and hope hearing a bilingual soundtrack doesnt make anyones head explode 2

Mobile through the Ages

@NancyProctor [email protected]

3Its easy to laugh at the sheep-like behavior of the users of this early audio tour, but technologies like radio broadcast and the cassette player like the walkman - first personal mobile media player actually enabled quite sophisticated content and experiences, with a full narrative arc including context, background, immersive sound effects, and even navigational help between stops.

But it was easy to get lost in the content in the broadcast or cassette tape tour, so the audiotour field moved to digital random access players. Here are a couple of the earliest models. They were supposed to liberate us from forced marches through the galleries, allowing us to listen to what we wanted, where and when we wanted. And the digital audiotour devices with its telephone-style keypad proliferated in a number of sizes and shapes.

This shift in technology also shifted the emphasis in content creation away from linear experiences to stops or soundbites of mobile information timed to correspond roughly with the ability of people to stand in one place for a period of time without becoming impatient or aware of their aching feet. This technology shift literally changed the story, and arguably museums lost the grand narrative we no longer know when a visitor listens to the stop about the Nightwatch if they have heard anything about Rembrandt before. Should the precious minute or so that we can hope the visitor will stand in front of the painting include a biography of the famous artist for those who may not have encountered western art before? Can we afford to include a few seconds of atmospheric sounds to help immerse the visitor in the feeling of the Dutch Golden Age? With the liberation from the herd, we lost access to a particular kind of museum mobile experience, that could consistently include the background and contextual information that helped transport us to another world, as well as ground us in the story.

Fraunhofer Institute, Kunstmuseum Bonn: Beat Zoderer exhibition (Listen project) 2003

Its NOT about the Technology

4So there has been a lot of new technology over the past 60 years of mobile in museums, but I would argue relatively little in the way of true innovation in the visitor experience for the past generation because our content creation has really been dominated by the model that emerged with the random access audio player at the dawn of the digital age: the stop.

Now, if youve ever heard me speak on mobile in museums before, youll know Im fond of saying, its not about the technology if we forget that, we turn our visitors into strange cyborgs like our dear friend, Norbert Kanter, pictured here in a 2003 location-aware installation in the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, wearing a large antenna on his head in order to experience the location-based soundtrack of the Beat Zoderer exhibition.

This is still my anthem - indeed, if you remember only one thing from my talk today, its that museums should be focusing their time and resources on creating content over technology. Too often museums have lost sight of the real problem they are solving, and have sunk literally millions of dollars into developing technologies like location-based content delivery and apps that dont actually move the needle on mission, audience engagement, growth, or the quality of the visitor experience, and moreover are obsolete in a matter of years and I am as guilty of this as anyone. Time and again, we have seen that what survives from these abortive attempts to be cutting edge and innovative is the content like, for example, that great video we saw of the Stadlijk museum at the outset of this talk.

Fraunhofer Institute, Kunstmuseum Bonn: Beat Zoderer exhibition (Listen project) 2003

http://halseyburgund.com/work/scapes/@NancyProctor [email protected]

Nonetheless, some true mobile innovation has emerged from two notable sources in my experience: the accessibility field, like the early Stadlijk museum tour, which used a radio technology that was originally developed to help people hear the soundtracks of news reels in cinemas; and the work of artists, like Halsey Burgund5

http://halseyburgund.com/work/scapes/

@NancyProctor [email protected]

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http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/62Roundware: http://roundware.org

Mobile InnovationsStops become soundtracksSoundtracks are no longer linearThe broadcast is a conversationThe conversation is asynchronousThe body is the interface

@NancyProctor [email protected]

In the Scapes app, the innovation is not the technology not the GPS, or even the opensource platform, Roundware, that the artist developed for crowdsourcing, though both of those things are interesting. The real innovation happened on the content level on the structure of the audio experience itself, which took us far beyond the traditional museum audio tour.

Again, Amsterdam and the Stadlijk museum have been sites of critical thinking about building experiences that take us beyond the audiotour as well in my book, Mobile Apps for Museums, MARGRIET SCHAVEMAKER wrote about her work at the Stadlijk museum using augmented reality to create para-tours. At Museums and the Web in 2010, Koven Smith introduced the term un-tour, and there is even now a company that calls itself Detour in the US - they are partnering with SFMOMA and do indeed deliver a very different, immersive quality of experience, more like the popular podcast series, RadioLab, than a traditional audio tour.

The appetite for and availability of immersive, participatory experiences like these has also grown in related fields, like theater, where weve seen the huge success of participatory plays like Then She Fell and Sleep No More. Mobile apps like Scapes tap into that zeitgeist. What all these experiences, be they theater or mobile apps, have in common is that they do not port inherited structures and content onto new platforms; they use the new affordances of the technology to enable new ways of telling and experiencing culture.7

Audio Tour 2.0 3.0?

8@NancyProctor [email protected]

What we havent yet seen in museums is this kind of mobile tour:8

MoMA: I See9

@NancyProctor [email protected]

I See is both immersive and personalizedWhy havent we yet experienced this kind of tour? Its not really a technology problem. As we know from shopping on Amazon or simply using Google, where there is an abundance of content to choose from millions of products and billions of web pages, for example - profiles emerge from our content use that enable highly customized and even predictive online experiences. The technology already exists; what is lacking in the museum field is the wealth of content that personalization requires. 9

Thinking Outside the AudioTour BoxFrom Headphones to MicrophonesFrom we do the talking to we help you do the talking. Chris Anderson, Wired, Smithsonian 2.0 Conference, 24 Jan 2009From interpretation to conversation. Max Anderson; Gather, Steward, and Converse, The Art Newspaper, 8 June 2010

So we have the technology to create immersive, context-aware, and highly personalized experiences. It is the content we are lacking. To create the content we need to use the full potential of modern mobile technologies, and stop using the supercomputers in our pockets as simply MP3 players. We must think outside the audiotour box, and move from headphones to microphones, from interpretation to conversations to inviting new voices to speak about our collections and museums, and create new kinds of mobile experiences that will have relevance and resonance for audiences both new and core. 10

Recruit the World!

When I headed up mobile strategy and initiatives at the Smithsonian, we described our vision for mobile as Recruit the world because this is the truly transformative opportunity of the latest generation of mobile devices. I often used this image of hands clasped in a circle on which the globe is painted to illustrate the concept and our need for many hands to do the work of that vast Institution. Modern smart phones arent just MP3 players: they allow people to participate in multi-way conversations, and museums to benefit from global knowledge by listening as much as they talk.

One of the few technologies that actually helps bridge the digital divide, the now nearly ubiquitous mobile phone allow us to tackle the kinds of tasks that museums will never have the money, staff or resources to do on their own.

http://www.elpuercoespin.com.ar/2010/07/06/inteligencia-artificial-en-busca-del-traductor-perfecto/9 11

Access American Stories

http://www.si.edu/apps/accessamericanstories@NancyProctor [email protected]

One example: the lack of verbal descriptions. 12

Stories from Main Street

http://storiesfrommainstreet.org/

@NancyProctor [email protected]

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Continues today, logging stories from across small towns in America and growing the Smithsonians audio archive with the voices of the people who live there and know it best.

The Rijksmuseum of course experimented with something similar, the Augmenting Masterpieces project with the Univ of Amsterdam, which was presented at MW in 2015. The prototype crowdsourced audio commentaries by visitors and used bluetooth beacons to make them discoverable in front of their corresponding artworks in the museum.

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@NancyProctor [email protected]

An even more content-rich experience is now available in the city of Amsterdam on the izi.TRAVEL platform.

Izi has realized that their platform is a like tree falling in the forest were not sure whether it makes a sound, or even exists if it doesnt have a preponderance of quality cultural content, so have been funding content creation in European cities and museums, and now in the US as well through the MuseWeb Foundation. And true to my motto that its not about the technology, we will be putting the content funded through this initiative not just on the izi Travel platform, but on other free and open platforms as well, including Wikimedia Commons, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

By putting cultural content on as many platforms as possible, the content serves as ambassadors for the collection, museum or city, increasing visibility and engagement and also helping to some extent with digital preservation after all, the way you preserve content on the internet is by putting copies in multiple places. We also use the TourML standard to help port content more easily from platform to platform, and avoid the trap of technology obsolescence. 15

Rijksmuseum@NancyProctor [email protected]

The Rijksmuseum has taken an important step in opening access to its digital collections with great results in stimulating both creativity and new products and business activity based on the collection.

So there is no better place or time to ask what more can be done with that open door for mobile experiences? And what about opportunities for smaller museums who have only a fraction of the collection and resources of the Rijksmuseum?

Once again, I will argue that the only practical solution to creating the volume and even quality of content necessary for impactful, relevant immersive, and personal mobile experiences for todays audiences is crowdsourcing is going from headphones to microphones. This is a move, like the Rijksmuseums opening of its digital collections, that ultimately repositions the museum as an open platform where people can create content and tell their own cultural stories, inspired by the museums collections, scholarship, and assets. It is a model in which meaningful conversations can open up among a whole new host of stakeholders and interlocutors, both with and without the direct involvement of the museum.

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@NancyProctor [email protected]

SFMOMA and the Met among others have similarly collaborated with outside makers to create new experiences and reach perhaps new audiencesSFMOMA with 826 Valencia student writing projectMet commissioned podcaster The Memory Palace to create an audio experience for theArtistic Furniture of the Gilded Age, exhibition open now through May 2016.

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ClosedOpenThe smart people in our field work for us.We need to work with smart people both inside and outside our organization.To profit from R&D, we must discover it, develop it, and ship it ourselves.External R&D can generate significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value.If we conduct most of the best research in the field, we will win.We dont have to originate the research to benefit from it.If we create the most or the best ideas in the field, we will win. If we make the best use of external ideas, we will win.We should control our innovation process, so that competitors dont profit from our ideas.We should profit from others use of our innovations, and we should buy others intellectual property (IP) whenever it advances our own interests.

Open Business models@NancyProctor [email protected]

This open approach to building a business is characteristic of one of the more innovative business models: Open

Recognizes that the smartest and best person to do any job doesnt work for you, and probably never will

Adapted from Chesbrough 2003 and Wikipedia 2009, BMC p. 111

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Birdwatching at the rijksmuseum@NancyProctor [email protected]

But you can attract them with your collection.For example, birdwatching at the Rijksmuseum

Jongma, Lizzy and Chris Dijkshoorn. "Accurator: Enriching collections with expert knowledge from the crowd." MW2016: Museums and the Web 2016. Published February 7, 2016. Consulted May 31, 2016.http://mw2016.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/accurator-enriching-collections-with-expert-knowledge-from-the-crowd/19

@NancyProctor [email protected]

Partnering with these niche experts helps us recognize anew that the most core concept in the museum, that of the collection, is more than just the stuff.

Define Collections = objects + content (IP)20

Metric@NancyProctor [email protected]

Also gives us new metrics of success, for our mobile apps, experiences, and other outputs of the museum: use of the collection as measured in part by the use of the content around it is a key metric, a KPI

With digital content we can begin to measure use of the collections more accurately and comprehensively than ever.

Image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3d/Tight_lacing.jpg21

Does this mean that we will value those objects that get used more over those that dont?

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/calsidyrose/4251915605

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Long Tail Markets@NancyProctor [email protected]

No quite the opposite: it will encourage us to partner with niche communities of expertise for nichesourcing as Lizzy Jongma and Chris Dijkshoorn termed it in their 2016 paper at Museums and the Web. Because as Chris Anderson demonstrated in his 2004 article and then his book on The Long Tail, those niche communities together make up fully half of the available market. The mass market, the head, is only half the market for whatever we produce, from exhibitions to mobile content.

In a digital economy, costs of warehousing and delivery of product approach zero making serving the niche not only affordable but profitableNiches are extremely powerful, and museums are very good at them. Attract passionate participants like the wikimedians and birdwatchers

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The Economics of Personal Curation

@NancyProctor [email protected]

This new focus on the long tail and open business models takes us from an economy of scarcity/exclusivity to one of abundance and curationCuration adds unique value to contentIf that curation can be crowdsourced, can be done at a scale that allows for content to be generated in quantities large enough to enable personalization. Personalization will ultimately grow towards curating for an audience of one: cp immersive theater, or the audio-tour-made-for-an-audience-of-one that Lesley Fosh, Katharina Lorenz, Steve Benford and Boriana Koleva reported on at MW last year. http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/personal-and-social-designing-personalised-experiences-for-groups-in-museums/

The economics of personal curation plays to unique strengths and resources of museums: human expertise for uniquely human experiences.

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Mobile Innovation Is About ContentCollections = stuff + content Museums are platforms for storytellingRecruit the World to help scalePersonalization is the next frontierContent is the business of museums@NancyProctor [email protected]

To summarize:True mobile innovation in museums happens thanks to great content, not technology. And museum collections are really the sum of the stuff the artefacts plus content: the scholarship, the scans, the data and the stories.The opportunity for museums in the digital age is to become platforms for storytelling.And to recruit the world to help increase both the scale and use of the collections through content.Were going to need all the help we can get, because personalization, the next frontier for museum mobile, requires lots and lots of content.And content is where the true business of museums lies.

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So many businesses fail simply because they have failed to correctly define themselves. John Hendricks@NancyProctor [email protected]

Now why do I have to introduce that scary word, business? Why is it important for museums to think about what business they are in, and even sully our important work with the notion of filthy lucre?

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Most often this failure stems from companies mistakenly identifying their core business with a currently popular delivery or distribution technology. E.g. railroad businesses, instead of transportation industry. Detroit now redefining itself not as the center of the automobile industry, but of the mobility business.In 1975, Americas Big Three networks considered themselves to be in the broadcasting business. In fact, they were in the television entertainment business. missed the opportunity to pivot and take advantage of cable, and now, the Internet.

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895_2.jpg/711px-Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895_2.jpg27

@NancyProctor [email protected]

Eric Reis, author of the Lean Startup, calls these perfectly executed failtures. This is the well-worn track to the zombie apocalypse: ironically, it is just when a business thinks its doing its core business well, and is even leading the field, that it usually misses the opportunity to identify the true source of the next generation of innovation and transformation in its field. We might look like were innovating and serving the public with the introduction of shiny new technologies but in fact were starving our true mission of resources when we dont invest in the things that last and make the museum more relevant and therefore sustainable like content and the inclusion of new voices in our cultural storytelling. If museums dont iterate and develop, they fall into the trap of the living dead unable to achieve their full potential because theyre experiencing slow death by a thousand budget cuts

Image:https://pixabay.com/en/apocalypse-zombie-death-undead-371947/28

@NancyProctor [email protected]

Now, I dont want to leave you with such a grim and pessimistic vision of the future of museums. Instead, let me offer a glimpse of a brave new revitalized future through an adjacent field that has similarly struggled to find new audiences and relevance in the digital age. The hit Broadway musical, Hamilton, is an incredible success story, precisely because it broke out of the box of historical narratives to tell the story of the United States first treasurer, Alexander Hamilton, in a new way with new voices. If you havent heard about it yet, listen to how these elders review it:

So, Hamilton. Cool, huh? When I try to imagine what the cultural soundtrack of the world created, for, by and with the people might sound like, this comes to mind as a pretty good sample.

Thanks for your attention. I look forward to hearing your voices now!29

Thank You!@NancyProctorNancy@MuseWeb.usMuseWeb.usMuseumsandtheWeb.comSlideShare.net/NancyProctor@[email protected]

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