Objects in the Wild

I am traveling in Italy at the moment, and earlier this week I had an opportunity to visit the new Museum of the History of Bologna, which opened in January of this year. It's housed in the former palace of the Pepoli family, and it's part of a larger project, Genus Bononiae, initiated by the Carisbo Foundation to restore and link together eight cultural sites in Bologna. The Museum of the History of Bologna is a particularly interesting city museum for several reasons, one of which is that it's a distinct departure from the "museo civico" model found in so many Italian cities. At some point I need to write a proper blog post about my experience there. But as is often the case when I visit for the first time a museum I really like, the seed of a new idea is planted in my head and I feel compelled to spend my post sharing that instead.The idea I had in Bologna was sparked by a gallery at the city museum called "Your Museum" (pictured above). Its goal is to involve Bologna residents by inviting them to bring their own objects to be exhibited in the museum. Massimo Negri, the museum's scientific director (i.e. chief content developer), told me he had originally hoped this gallery would be much bigger, with a system where people could bring in their objects and on the spot have them added to the display. Unfortunately, due to space and logistical constraints, he had to settle for the iteration I saw.Many museums are now interested in public participation, and they have been experimenting with the best ways to do it; Your Museum in Bologna is one example. At the same time, we also acknowledge that the museum collections we have inherited, formed in previous centuries, were assembled haphazardly, with major gaps in the stories they can tell. They leave out large groups of people and do not adequately represent the breadth of our history and culture. In short, the objects that have made their way into our museum collections represent only a tiny fraction of our entire material heritage. I've been thinking about these challenges a lot recently, as have many of you, I'm sure. I've also been thinking a lot about my recent visit to the Museu da Maré, a community museum in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Museu da Maré has a much more flexible collections policy than museums are normally used to: a member of the community can donate an object to the museum and then, if later he or she wants it back, the museum gives it back. Community members might also technically give the museum an object but still keep it in their home. I have heard that the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa has a similar policy. Mix all of these concepts together and you end up with my Idea du Jour:Can a city museum catalog the material life of its city without actually acquiring and owning it? Imagine a zoo that collects animals from the wild and puts them together in cages. Currently, our museums are like zoos. Now imagine a biologist who tracks and studies animals, but never takes them out of the wild. We have sophisticated RFID tags and we have extensive object database software. Why not conduct a material culture census, or inventory, of a city, but not actually collect anything?This may seem like a lot of work for nothing. I would have said that too five years ago, but the museum landscape has changed enough that I think we could start to see the potential. There are so many opportunities here for public participation. Residents can catalog their own objects, with or without the help of a curator. People can "like" the objects they are particularly drawn to, or contribute additional information about objects posted by other people. Curators can put out a call for certain gaps in the "collection" that need to be filled. But perhaps also a resident can recommend that her neighbor's object be added to the collection because it has a great story. And perhaps if an object gets many, many likes, it is then recommended for physical acquisition by the museum (subject to the owner's approval, of course), a kind of crowdsourced method of determining which artifacts are most important to preserve, combined with some gentle community pressure for public ownership of them. Individuals could also recommend a neighbor's object for exhibition at the museum, and so on. The role of the museum curator, then, is to highlight really interesting objects, monitor and improve accuracy, draw connections, and start conversations.Because, as you know, I am obsessed with geotagging objects, I think it would be great to have a mapping component where you can see all these objects existing out in real space, out in "the wild," across the city. Although that may present a security risk that could serve as a deterrent to community members. If people know you have special things in your home then maybe they want to steal them. (And who knows what other practical considerations this idea raises since I'm really just thinking it off the top of my head.) On the other hand, many objects no longer live in the place where they had the most geographic meaning, so the tags on the map don't necessarily have to represent current location, just location of meaning. Also, it would be easy enough to hide the identity of object owners so that only the museum has personal contact information.But wouldn't it be interesting to see what happens when the material culture of a place is collectively exposed in this way, regardless of whether it is owned privately or publicly? Would it make us rethink what cultural heritage means, and perhaps assume a different kind of shared responsibility? I wonder if anyone out there has already experimented with this concept--if so chime in and let me know. Otherwise, let's make it happen somewhere as a pilot project.

Disruptive Objects, on the Streets

You know how I'm obsessed with geotagging objects, right? We lost a lot of meaning when we separated artifacts from their places of origin in order to assemble our museum collections—especially in the case of our local history collections—and geotagging gives us a chance to get some of that meaning back. I preach about this concept to anyone who will listen, and I've even played around with pinning some objects from New-York Historical Society's collection to the Google Map in historypin (until historypin told me to stop because they want people to stick to photographs).This evening I had a conversation with Chris Chelberg, a library science grad student I met back in May at THATCamp Museums NYC. We were following up on a session Chris led at THATCamp about disruption theory, Clayton Christensen's argument from the business world that the real threat to established companies comes not from their conventional competitors—the companies selling the same product they are—but from products brand new to the market that offer a "good enough" solution to fill the consumer need at a much cheaper price. At first these new products are so shoddy that the established companies don't pay any attention to them, but eventually they improve to the point where they take off, and by then it's too late to do anything about it. Christensen cites a number of real world examples, the most interesting of which (to me at least) is that online degree programs like University of Phoenix have the potential to disrupt universities like Harvard and Yale: online learning might seem like no match for such prestigious schools now, but it's getting more and more sophisticated with time, and it fills the need for a credential at a fraction of the cost. If disruption theory is new to you and you want to get caught up, you can read Christensen's books, or I recommend this short and sweet New Yorker article by Larissa MacFarquhar.Chris and I were talking about potential disruptions to museums; can we anticipate them and how they will affect our work? One of the big challenges museums face is the burden of caring for their collections. This is an essential function of museums, mind you, but it is so expensive that it leaves us particularly vulnerable to disruptions from cheaper, more flexible sources. We talked about the things that museums think are poor quality but that the general public often thinks are good enough, and cheaper: popular historical fiction, video games, anything labeled edutainment. Community-curated exhibitions. Pop-up projects. Reproductions.This last one elicited the most interesting conversation. Right now, reproductions are no match for the real thing, and museums hold tight to the notion that authenticity is their trump card. I firmly believe this myself; In fact I wrote about authentic objects in History News last year. But maybe it's just that reproductions are no match for the real thing yet. Is it possible that in 5-10 years they will be good enough? Are you following what's happening with 3-D printers these days?What Chris and I came up with is that maybe 3-D printing, as it evolves, can finally address some of the major access challenges museums have been grappling with for years. So we put everything in glass cases because we don't want visitors handling and stealing our precious artifacts. But who cares what happens to the 3-D reproductions? Let them get breathed on and licked and caressed to death, Velveteen Rabbit-style. Put them in a room without climate control; heck, put them outside.Which leads me back to geotagging. I would love to see a city museum take 100 of its most significant objects, partner with a 3-D printer manufacturer (or better yet, as Chris suggested, crowd-source it to the local maker community), and then install these 3-D reproductions out on the streets, where the original [authentic] objects came from. What would we learn from such an experiment? Could we own the disruption? Let me know if you want to find out.

Urban History Exhibited in Aarhus, Denmark

 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h2d3gNBCf0]In October I flew to Aarhus, Denmark, to give a paper at an urban history conference hosted by the open air museum Den Gamle By. The Aarhus City Museum just merged with Den Gamle By, and the conference was organized in part to guide strategic planning efforts under the new management structure. This is a video of my talk; it's a half-hour in length. Hardcore city museum folks will also want to check out the other conference presentations, not only from Aarhus but also Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and Ghent—each one has a different take on urban history.

Rectify This

Like old maps? Have a little time on your hands? Maybe you want to participate in the New York Public Library's Map Rectifier project. NYPL put its collection of historic maps online, and is asking the public to help align all the old maps against a more precise contemporary map. The rectification process not only allows everyone to compare then and now, but it also helps resolve inaccuracies in the old maps. The contemporary map NYPL is using for this project is Open Street Map, which is sort of Wikipedia for cartography. By tagging "control points," specific coordinates that are constant for both maps, the historic one is brought into alignment with Open Street Map. At the NYPL site, in addition to actually doing the rectifying, members of the public can browse all the historic maps and also view the rectified ones in Google Earth. A video tutorial on the NYPL website, using an 1860 map of Central Park as an example, makes the process seem easy enough for anyone with basic computer skills. This project is an interesting example of crowdsourcing, and a great way to get to know a city better.

Walking Through Time

In my continuing effort to keep abreast of urban history-themed apps for mobile devices, today I’m featuring a new IPhone app developed by a team from the Edinburgh College of Art and University of Edinburgh, Walking Through Time. It syncs historical maps of Edinburgh with the current, GPS-enabled map on your IPhone so you can navigate both geographically and chronologically as you stroll around Edinburgh. You can set the application to follow maps from a range of different time periods, 19th and 20th century. You can also toggle back and forth between old and new, or customize the transparency level to view both maps at the same time. A set of walking tours gives the application some structure if you don’t want to wander aimlessly.Chris Speed, one of the developers, was quoted in the Edinburgh Journal: "The great fun is giving it to someone and then taking them to where a street doesn’t exist and say ‘walk’, but they can’t because there’s a new building in the way.” Here’s a brief video explaining the Walking Through Time concept:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwYv-6wgf8]When the project launched, Walking Through Time featured historical maps of London as well, but only for a brief promotional period. The team is negotiating a long-term rights contract to include the London maps permanently, and hopes eventually to branch out to other parts of the UK.Comments from users, posted on ITunes, have been mixed. Sounds like there were some glitches out of the gate (which may now be fixed), and Londoners want their maps back. But it’s clear that we are going to see more and more of these GPS historical apps in the next few years, and with experimentation and practice they will get better and better.Which reminds me of this great little animation that Plate of Peas Productions developed in 2007 for the Old State House, the museum I used to run in Boston. It shows nearly 300 years of change, both to the Old State House itself and to the neighborhood around it, sped up at a rate of roughly 15 years per second. You can see it here, as part of a longer History Channel piece about Old State House preservation, 1:10 into the video:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DalYthWk6FU]I’m wondering if all this technology is heading to a place where the historical timeline is visible, the way it is in the Old State House animation, not just for a few landmark buildings but on every street corner throughout the city. That means many layers of history, all open to us simultaneously, so that we toggle back and forth between the present and many different pasts seamlessly. And then what does that do to our everyday experience of the city? And what does it do to the city museum?

We Are What We Remember

I finally had a chance to try out Historypin, the website that lets you link old photos to Google Street View. Historypin was developed, in partnership with Google, by We Are What We Do, an organization in the UK that takes big goals like a cleaner environment or better schools and breaks them into small, manageable steps they call "actions." Historypin represents action #132, Share a Piece of Your History, as part of a goal of strengthening intergenerational relationships.I was home in North Carolina this week for my 20th high school reunion, so I rooted through my childhood photo album and found an image that seemed perfect for Historypin:It's the house I grew up in, just after an ice storm in 1979. The house was torn down in 1984 to make way for a baseball stadium, so the site looks radically different today. I was able to successfully pin the photo to Street View and upload a brief story about the house. You can view the results here.Historypin debuted in June 2010 and it's still in beta form. In theory, linking historical images to Google Street View creates compelling before-and-after comparisons, and I like the idea that anyone, anywhere can upload to the same global map. But in practice, Historypin is still a clunky experience.First, the user interface is complicated and not intuitive for a general audience. The layout of the page is confusing and it's not always clear which button to click to navigate between Google map, Google Street View, and the specific information about each image--you can easily end up somewhere you didn't intend to be. Plus, the Street View function, by far the most interesting part of the site, doesn't always work properly. When people pin their old photos to Street View, the scale or angle is often skewed. It's hard to get a crisp comparison, to toggle back and forth between old and new, or to zoom out far enough from the image to get the overall effect.Second, the map still needs to be saturated with a lot more images. So far, mine is the only one pinned to Greensboro, North Carolina, a sizable city. I can imagine that many of the photos that would be most interesting for Street View--the ones that are at least 20 years old and therefore show significant change--have not yet been scanned into digital format; they are in closets and attics and basements all over the place. Historypin will be much more meaningful if everyone uses it. Seeding the content is a challenge for many online projects, not just Historypin.And third, copyright restrictions present a barrier. You're only allowed to upload photos for which you own the rights, which is how I ended up rooting through the photo album at my mom's house. Again, the most interesting photographs are the older ones, most of which are owned by historical societies and libraries. Historypin is encouraging these organizations to add their fabulous photograph collections to the map, and a few are doing so. Meanwhile, I imagine there are some local history enthusiasts out there who would spend countless hours researching, uploading, and pinning images if access and permission could be brokered.I hope after some retooling that Historypin succeeds, and eventually launches a mobile app version. In the meantime, did my test case strengthen any intergenerational relationships? I spent an hour talking to my mom about the old house--she remembered details that I had forgotten, and we debated the height of the magnolia trees and what kind of story I should write. Later my sister came over and added her two cents. We are all walking around today with vivid memories of a place we shared that no longer exists. Action #132: check.

Cincinnati at a Gazillion DPI

Wired Magazine recently ran a feature on Charles Fontayne and William Porter’s 1848 photographic panorama of Cincinnati’s waterfront, owned by the Cincinnati Public Library. Conservators at the George Eastman House have been working on the eight daguerreotypes that comprise the panorama, and in the process they have done a couple of interesting things. First, using a stereo microscope, they figured out just how far they could zoom without loosing resolution—according to Wired, “the panorama could be blown up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity.” They also created high-resolution digital scans of each 6.5” x 8.5” plate and trained a computer to “clean” them of spots left by dust and other deterioration, pixel by pixel. Looking very carefully, the conservation team has been able to discover all sorts of new information embedded in these views: faces in windows, shop signs, the time on the clock tower, clues to a imminent cholera epidemic. The panorama even provides early documentation of Cincinnati’s free black community. On the Wired site you can see all eight images, and zoom in on one of them at 10x.The Cincinnati project reminded me of a small exhibition I saw this summer in Brussels at the BELvue Museum. It was an in-depth exploration of a panorama painting by Jean-Baptiste Bonnecroy of Brussels ca. 1664-1665. Here's a photo I took of one section of the exhibition:You could study the huge painting itself in all its glory, but you could also use interpretive features to learn more about the details Bonnecroy depicted. There was a key to all the major landmarks, for example, and an interactive touchscreen for zooming in on specific parts of the city. There was also a contemporary photographic panorama for comparison. If I hadn’t been scheduled to meet my husband, I could’ve spent a good hour in there staring at this image.The Cincinnati daguerreotypes also reminded me of my niece Franny’s recent fascination with Richard Scarry books. Franny is starting to make connections between different scenes—the photograph on the desk on one page is of a character who appears a few pages later, for example. Busytown, USA is a very different kind of city than Cincinnati or Brussels, but it’s no less real to millions of kids who have zoned out to Scarry’s illustrations (and in fact in 1990s the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry did indeed create a real Busytown as a traveling exhibition). I’d like to think that Franny is learning the kind of close-observation skills that some day will help her mark the subtle patterns and changes in her own neighborhood.Sometimes you need to see a city in broad strokes of history, but other times it’s just as important to stop the clock and get lost in the details. So here’s to panoramas and birds-eye-views, and Busytown USA. And here’s to looking really, really hard.

Mapping Locals and Tourists

I just heard about the work of Eric Fischer, a programmer in the San Francisco area who has created a series of maps of major cities showing where people take photographs. Because the public photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa enable geo-tagging of the images people upload, Fischer was able to create maps that show the hot-spots—the places that are photographed by many people every day. This is interesting for my research because it could help city museums visualize the urban spaces that are most important to the public—the places that possess a high amount of social capital, the ones we want to remember.As if that weren’t enough, Fischer took it one step further and used the timestamps on photos to divide them into those taken by tourists and those taken by locals.  He defines tourists as people who took photos in a given locale for less than a month, and locals as those who log timestamps over many months in the same city. Above is Fischer’s Locals and Tourists map of Boston. Blue represents locals; red represents tourists; yellow represents photos that couldn’t be categorized. Since city museums must be mindful of the different needs of locals and tourists, it’s really interesting to be able to confirm in such graphic terms that the places residents care about are often not the places tourists care about.Here’s the Locals and Tourists map of Helsinki:The first thing I noticed is the prominence of the ferry ride to the island fortress of Suomenlinna. It shows up as a sharp blue line extending from the southeastern edge of Helsinki centre to a blue and red island that looks like a bunch of grapes. The blue line is so defined that you’d think it followed a road, but it’s actually traversing the harbor. And then, of course, you can also see Senate Square and the Esplanade in bright and shining red at the centre, in contrast with the oval blue outline of Toölönlahti, Helsinki's version of Central Park, just to the north. I look at this map and I am proud to say that I have visited just as many blue spots as red. While I am by no means a local yet, I do know something about the Helsinki of Helsinkians.You should all go explore the cities you love through Fischer’s maps—there are hundreds of them. Fischer has made them available in multiple sizes, everything from thumbnail to the original 6137 x 6137 files—just click on the “all sizes” button in the top left corner of each map to access a version with more detail. Isn’t it amazing when information becomes a work of art?

Geo-tagging Is the New Black

The Museum of London just launched an IPhone app that allows users to pull up geo-tagged photos and paintings all over the city, similar to the Sydney Powerhouse Museum project I described a few weeks ago.There are a few more images of StreetMuseum available at Londonist to give you a sense of how it might work. The launch of StreetMuseum is part of the fanfare for the Museum of London’s new Galleries of Modern London, a £20 million undertaking that opens May 28. Museum of London is considered to be one of the leaders in the city museum field, so I am very interested to check out this new project when I travel to London in July. In the meantime, here’s an early review from the Times.

LAYARing History

Earlier this week I blogged about my interest in combining GPS and city history.  A colleague recently sent me a link to a project launched by the Powerhouse, Sydney’s  museum of science and design. Today I had a chance to sit down and explore. It uses Layar, an augmented reality tool. If you’re saying to yourself, “Hunh?” then here’s what it means. If you have an IPhone or an Android phone, Layar registers your location and will pull up GPS-encoded information—for example, the closest café, any public events currently taking place, nearby “Tweeters”—as you walk around. In other words it augments your experience of a real place. The Powerhouse has loaded historic photographs of Sydney into Layar. The photos are geo-tagged with coordinates as close as possible to the photographer’s original viewpoint. That means you can pull out your phone in the central business district and pull up what Sydney would have looked like from that same spot in, say, 1926. Layar is still a relatively new tool for museums. The Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s contemporary art museum, offers a Layar opportunity for users to design their own public art and install it virtually on the streets of the city. And two developers in Germany have created a virtual version of the Berlin Wall, where the real wall used to stand, raising all sorts of implications for city museums (imagine using Layar to remake all our bulldozed landmarks). Other museums are using different augmented reality tools besides Layar within the bricks-and-mortar exhibition space (examples include the “Mobile Augmented Reality Quest,” the Allard Pierson Museum, and the Louvre). This is interesting stuff. I caution that technology for technology’s sake is never a good idea. And it’s going to take years for the small museums to get around to such projects—they’re still struggling to pay the electricity bill. But let’s at least spend a little time dreaming about the possibilities. For example, historic sites face significant physical challenges because proper preservation requires so many restrictions. Why not use augmented reality to recreate for visitors what a particular historic space looked like, without having to make any real changes to walls, floors, and furnishings? Or why not have residents create their own mental maps in Layar of their most important urban places? And speaking of layered history, with an e this time, why not use augmented reality to show a street corner in Sydney not just in 1926, but from prehistory up through present day? The past is present, indeed.