It's time to say goodbye

On a recent Slate Culture Gabfest, the hosts bemoaned cutesy 404 pages - the responses you get when your device is able to make contact with a server, but that server is not able to deliver the page you've requested. Perhaps the most famous 404 page was Twitter's "fail whale" (discontinued in 2013), and for a period there web people got very excited about making playful, pun-filled and beautiful 404 pages. It was seen as part and parcel of caring deeply for the user's experience ("We can't give you what you want but we'll make it beautiful!"). Pages and pages of results can be generated for a search for a phrase like "best 404 pages".

So it was a little disconcerting to hear people on this podcast who I really like seeing all this effort as going to waste. Perhaps no-one really wants to be delighted when they're told they can't have what they're asking for: maybe they just want things to be fixed.

To my mind, the artisanal 404 page is one of the great artefacts of Web 2.0, and I really hope academic study, plushy print publications, and considerable archival effort are being devoted to its documentation and retention for future generations to enjoy and learn from.*

Right up there with the 404 page is the shutting-down announcement. Nothing reminds you that the web is an ephemeral space with a metabolism akin to a hummingbird's like trying to remember all the web services you've used at some point and then had to transition on from when they close (here's me three years ago being overly upset about Google Reader shutting down: reader, life has gone on).**

I've been mulling this since clicking through a couple of links to the news of Hi.co - a location-based micro-blogging-ish site I'd never heard of before - setting to close at the end of this month.

I read about this in a post by Russell Davies, where he talks about the pleasure of writing on corners of the internet that are public, but not highly frequented. Starting on Gowalla Davies had written little fictional histories about places he was spending time; when Gowalla closed down he moved on to Hi.co, which is now, too, shutting down.

But they're shutting down in the most elegant way. As site founder Craig Mod writes in a Medium post, they are taking all due care of their users that they can, but also trying to record the existence of Hi.co for posterity. As he writes:

Web projects often lack hard edges. They begin with clarity but end without. We want to close Hi.co with clarity. To properly bookend the website. Sometimes web projects exhaust themselves. Outlive themselves. Are allowed to stagnate, be forgotten. Resources dry up and then one day — poof — they’re gone. This has happened countless times, Geocities being one of the foremost examples. We don’t want this to happen with Hi.co.

So, Hi.co is enabling users to download their archives, and to promising to keep an online archive alive for at least a decade. And they're also producing a small number of physical storage artefacts, inscribed with the content of the site, that will be deposited with institutions like the Library of Congress:

We’ve partnered with Norsam Technologies and Los Alamos Laboratories to utilize a special ion-etching process, capable of printing tens of thousands of pages onto a 2" × 2" plate. 

The process does not produce “data.” It is not like a CD. It is not a composition of 0's and 1's representing the information. It is the information itself. The nickel plate is a medium, not media. And everything printed on the plate will be readable with an optical microscope. 

The nickel plates have an estimated life span of 10,000 years. They’re fire resistant. They deal well with salt water. And because they’re printed with our pictures and words — assuming contemporary language is decipherable in the future — anyone who finds this and has access to fairly elementary technology (an optical microscope) will be able to read our thoughts and experiences as mapped to city and place.

It's such an interesting question. As with video games (see MOMA on acquiring their first batch) so many questions exist. What are you collecting when you try to memorialise a website or service? The code? The visual appearance? The user interaction? The history of the making and marketing of the site? Or the described experiences of those people who made and used it?

Businesses shut down all the time, and have for as long as they've been around. Traditionally they've been captured for the record - often incidentally, lurking in the background of the main focus) in photographs, newspapers, gazettes, phone books, correspondence, government records. Sometimes - when they're old enough, big enough, flash enough or loved enough - their closing is a cause for reminiscence and celebration. But often they just slip out of sight.

But websites and services seem to take their closures with the same seriousness that they take their launch. (Three thoughts on this: (1) people who work in web design are pretty much the most self-analytical and self-descriptive that I know - what other industry devotes so much time to examining and publishing in real time upon itself? and (2) People who are shutting down things on the internet are doing so in a medium beautifully designed for people to tell them exactly what they think of their decision; and (3) like 404 pages, the attraction of the graceful failure is as potent in this part of web operations as in any other.) Here for example is John Gruber announcing the shutting down of Vesper, a notes app, last week. Although the app is shutting down due to low usage (and, from my deduction, accompanying low interest) and a notes app is hardly a crucial life tool, Gruber's post is a detailed and thoughtful retrospective on what they could have done better, and why they made the decisions they did. No simple CLOSED sign here.

Here, for example, is a long and admiring article on the grace with which Glitch, a massive multi-player online game, was shut down. The game was built out of this almost obsessive love for the end user that powered early Web 2.0 properties like first-iteration Flickr (not coincidentally, the lead designer was the co-founder of Flickr and founder of Slack, both of which place/d a tremendous emphasis on surprise and delight of users). From the Glitch post announcing their shut-down, the list of FAQ titles:

1. Why why why why?
2. What will happen to the team building Glitch?
3. What will happen to Tiny Speck?
4. How long will the game remain open?
5. Can people still sign up to play?
6. But I spent money! What about that?
7. I'm really angry about this!
8. Why can't you sell the game so someone else can take it over?
9. Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?
10. Why can't you just _______________? 

Or for another example, look at how Matt Webb announced the closure of design company Berg through a poem on the company's blog (week 483, RIP). And here's his post on the Little Printer blog that shares that announcement, and explains that Little Printer, Berg's experiment in the Internet of Things and a more human interface with the web, will also be shutting down. And here's his post - redolent of a late night and too many cups of coffee*** - explaining that he's "trying something:

Hi everyone. Hello from where I’m sitting at home in London. It’s Sunday night, I’m Matt, my personal homepage is over here. Till recently I was CEO at Berg, now I’m the last employee and trying to wrap things up nicely. To do that I’ve got about a day a week cos I also now have other commitments. 

I’d like to try something…

I really hope someone out there - an obsessive individual, an academic, or an institution - is collecting these artefacts. By their very nature they're usually written in places that will soon disappear from the internet, and then all we'll have are the GigaOm and FastCompany rehashes (until they too degrade away.) and gravestones in the Internet Archive. But they're such a visceral and telling part of this period of design, communication, and business.  They deserve to be held on to. Maybe there's more nickel-plate books to be made.


*Seriously, there don't seem to be any print publications on the history of the 404 page, and I think that's a real oversight. And of course, all my bookmarks on this topic are long-lost in the endless shuffle of bookmarking sites I've been through over the past decade or so.

**Also, of interest to me but probably not for you, looking at what sites I opened first when I got up in the morning, I've gone from Email > Twitter > Reader > Work email to Feedly > [work] Facebook > Twitter > Email > Instagram .... work email when I get to work.

*** I have no idea how late it was or whether Webb even drinks coffee - I suspect not - but you get what I mean.

Final report: visitor experience in American art museums

The day has finally come - I've submitted my report on my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust-supported trip late last year around art museums in seven different American states.

I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.

Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages) 

Preface 

If the museum is to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot afford to be solely a place of retreat from society. It must stimulate, provoke and engage, as well as offering a place for contemplation or consolation. It must be a place in which we can share in a commonwealth of ideas. (Serota, 2015)

Since the 1970s the stereotype of the museum being a starchily exclusive place for the quiet contemplation of rarities by those with the educational and social advantages to appreciate the experience has been steadily challenged, not least by people working within the sector.

In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:

People contributed [to a fundraising drive] because they knew the gallery would not be another city monument to an elitist arts society. Luit Bieringa has deliberately tried to make the gallery as accessible as possible to all the people of the Manawatu, whether their interest be in functional pottery or conceptual art. (Spill, 1977) 

Over the course of the 20th century, museums reoriented from a focus on collecting and categorisation to a focus on public service by way of education. This shift saw the visitor grow in prominence in the museum's view of its own operation. Over the past two decades, the visitor has shifted again, now to the centre of the museum's operation. Museums are increasingly seen as social spaces, and today's greatest innovations in museum operations are inspired by the social and economic changes intricately entwined with the rise of the internet.

The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.

Areas of focus

My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:

• Connecting with visitors through digital technology 
• Visible storage displays 
• New models of membership programmes 
• Outreach programmes serving people on the autism spectrum and people with dementia, their families and caregivers 

Due to several staff not being available at the time I was visiting, or staff turnover at institutions, I was not able to conduct a great deal of research into the outreach programmes I had identified in my original plan. I met with several educators during my visit, but learned little beyond what I already knew from reading online resources.

However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.

As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.

Quickfire conclusions

Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:

Digital innovation 

• Leading museums are focusing on developing 'eyes-up' experiences that encourage closer looking, questioning, and further discovery after the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt and Brooklyn Museum)
• Museums are using digital projects as part of their overall branding efforts (Cooper Hewitt, DMA, Brooklyn Museum, media stories on opening of Los Angeles' The Broad and SFMOMA in San Francisco) 
• External funding focused on digitally-enhanced visitor experience at individual institutions may be discouraging collaborative development, and projects focused on online users of museums (Bloomberg Philanthropy) 
• There is a danger that digital brands may become disassociated from the physical visiting experience (Walker Art Center) 

Open storage 

• Open storage initiatives continue to offer an more 'free range' and exploratory experience for visitors, compared to modernist exhibition design, and also assure visitors that not all the collection is ‘locked away’ 
• Some open storage displays are becoming tired, and feel static (Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum) 
• There may be lessons for digital innovation projects fuelled by external funding in the model that seems to have been established by the Henry Luce Foundation grants for visible storage (significant initial investment and then dwindling ongoing attention/funding) 
• Digital projects are offering alternative ways to blend digitised collections with the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt's Immersion Room) 
• New 'orientation' galleries with mixed density displays may offer a more engaging option for contemporary audiences (Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art)  

Membership programmes 

• Free entry-level membership options are being offered in tiered membership programmes to encourage traditionally non-visiting audiences to attend museums, and to increase repeat visitation (DMA and MIA Minneapolis) 
• 'Free' membership is often an exchange of the visitor's data for this access; this data can be used in many ways, from better understanding audience demographics to targeting retail promotions 
• The introduction of free membership programmes accompanies a revolution in the understanding of the visitor host role (DMA) 
• Collection of significant amounts of data from our visitors creates new ethical obligations for museums over how this data is collected, stored and used 

Visitor experience 

• Major art museums around the United States have astounding collections, but can feel repetitive when visited in quick succession. 
• Even small displays that buck this trend for can convey a strong and individual sense of place (BMA)
• Museum stores can play a significant role in communicating the vision and personality of a museum (American Visionary Art Museum, Mia) 
• Large museums can induct new visitors and help them to engage with large collections through thematically-curated, cross-collection introductory galleries (Brooklyn Museum, BMA) 
• Smaller museums can distinguish themselves by cultivating distinctive personalities and ways of relating to people (American Visionary Art Museum, ASI)

Download the full report (49 pages) 

Final report: visitor experience in American art museums

The day has finally come - I've submitted my report on my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust-supported trip late last year around art museums in seven different American states.

I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.

Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages) 

Preface 

If the museum is to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot afford to be solely a place of retreat from society. It must stimulate, provoke and engage, as well as offering a place for contemplation or consolation. It must be a place in which we can share in a commonwealth of ideas. (Serota, 2015)

Since the 1970s the stereotype of the museum being a starchily exclusive place for the quiet contemplation of rarities by those with the educational and social advantages to appreciate the experience has been steadily challenged, not least by people working within the sector.

In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:

People contributed [to a fundraising drive] because they knew the gallery would not be another city monument to an elitist arts society. Luit Bieringa has deliberately tried to make the gallery as accessible as possible to all the people of the Manawatu, whether their interest be in functional pottery or conceptual art. (Spill, 1977) 

Over the course of the 20th century, museums reoriented from a focus on collecting and categorisation to a focus on public service by way of education. This shift saw the visitor grow in prominence in the museum's view of its own operation. Over the past two decades, the visitor has shifted again, now to the centre of the museum's operation. Museums are increasingly seen as social spaces, and today's greatest innovations in museum operations are inspired by the social and economic changes intricately entwined with the rise of the internet.

The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.

Areas of focus

My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:

• Connecting with visitors through digital technology 
• Visible storage displays 
• New models of membership programmes 
• Outreach programmes serving people on the autism spectrum and people with dementia, their families and caregivers 

Due to several staff not being available at the time I was visiting, or staff turnover at institutions, I was not able to conduct a great deal of research into the outreach programmes I had identified in my original plan. I met with several educators during my visit, but learned little beyond what I already knew from reading online resources.

However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.

As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.

Quickfire conclusions

Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:

Digital innovation 

• Leading museums are focusing on developing 'eyes-up' experiences that encourage closer looking, questioning, and further discovery after the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt and Brooklyn Museum)
• Museums are using digital projects as part of their overall branding efforts (Cooper Hewitt, DMA, Brooklyn Museum, media stories on opening of Los Angeles' The Broad and SFMOMA in San Francisco) 
• External funding focused on digitally-enhanced visitor experience at individual institutions may be discouraging collaborative development, and projects focused on online users of museums (Bloomberg Philanthropy) 
• There is a danger that digital brands may become disassociated from the physical visiting experience (Walker Art Center) 

Open storage 

• Open storage initiatives continue to offer an more 'free range' and exploratory experience for visitors, compared to modernist exhibition design, and also assure visitors that not all the collection is ‘locked away’ 
• Some open storage displays are becoming tired, and feel static (Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum) 
• There may be lessons for digital innovation projects fuelled by external funding in the model that seems to have been established by the Henry Luce Foundation grants for visible storage (significant initial investment and then dwindling ongoing attention/funding) 
• Digital projects are offering alternative ways to blend digitised collections with the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt's Immersion Room) 
• New 'orientation' galleries with mixed density displays may offer a more engaging option for contemporary audiences (Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art)  

Membership programmes 

• Free entry-level membership options are being offered in tiered membership programmes to encourage traditionally non-visiting audiences to attend museums, and to increase repeat visitation (DMA and MIA Minneapolis) 
• 'Free' membership is often an exchange of the visitor's data for this access; this data can be used in many ways, from better understanding audience demographics to targeting retail promotions 
• The introduction of free membership programmes accompanies a revolution in the understanding of the visitor host role (DMA) 
• Collection of significant amounts of data from our visitors creates new ethical obligations for museums over how this data is collected, stored and used 

Visitor experience 

• Major art museums around the United States have astounding collections, but can feel repetitive when visited in quick succession. 
• Even small displays that buck this trend for can convey a strong and individual sense of place (BMA)
• Museum stores can play a significant role in communicating the vision and personality of a museum (American Visionary Art Museum, Mia) 
• Large museums can induct new visitors and help them to engage with large collections through thematically-curated, cross-collection introductory galleries (Brooklyn Museum, BMA) 
• Smaller museums can distinguish themselves by cultivating distinctive personalities and ways of relating to people (American Visionary Art Museum, ASI)

Download the full report (49 pages) 

Digital humanists love network visualisations, but ordinary people say, ‘so what’?

The title of this post is taken from a recent talk by Mia Ridge, Network visualisations and the ‘so what?’ problem. In the talk Mia (who is a digital curator in the British Library working mostly with pre-1900 archives but also a long time proponent of better uses of the web to get people using and understanding the holdings of cultural organisations) addresses some of the things that really concern me about the use of visualisations and interactives in the cultural sector: specifically, the question ‘What does this tell me that I couldn’t learn as quickly from a sentence, list or table?’.

That is my question with so many of the visualisations I see, especially the network ones, which seek to show you links between people, objects, places, dates, all of these things, some of these things, and/or other things.

A recent example that floated across my feeds is this visualisation of Miles Davis's legacy, as represented through mentions of him in various contexts on Wikipedia pages (from artistic collaborators to 'drug users').

It's a truly beautiful thing, and it certainly has the "spronginess" that Mia mentions as one of the appeals of visualisations like this.

But I still don't feel like I get a lot more from it than I do from the sub-1000 word write-up, and while pop-up boxes and swirling colours indicate connections and sites of information to me, I don't feel better informed than I do by a similar paragraph.

One of Mia's most salient points, to my mind, is this:

Sometimes a network visualisation isn’t the answer … even if it was part of the question. 

As an outcome of an exploratory process, network visualisations are not necessarily the best way to present the final product. Be disciplined – make yourself justify the choice to use network visualisations.

I've been pondering visualisations as a small part of a much bigger question (well, bigger for me, currently): how do you give a visitor to an art exhibition the context and detailed info that will open up the work to them? I think about this all the time - it's my job - but I've also been thinking about it a lot since visiting Space to Dream at Auckland Art Gallery, which exposed how superficial my knowledge of South America is. How could I have gleaned the information I needed about relationships between countries, about political movements and protest, about art and culture, that I needed to get the most out of the opportunity to see all those works brought together?

In light of this, I was intrigued by Jarrett Fuller's A Rough Sketch for a Video Essay as Design Criticism, recently sent to me by a friend. Fuller - using the Eames' films, and Orson Welles' last film, F for Fake - asks whether video, rather than writing or graphic design, is the best medium for describing and critiquing design for an audience.

A Rough Sketch for a Video Essay as Design Criticism from jarrett on Vimeo.

I'm not exactly sure what separates the video essay, as Fuller details it here, from a short documentary., except the intent: which is much the same, I suppose as saying that what separates the curator's wall panel from the reviewer's column is intent.

We all tend to use the tools we're most skilled at and excited by to express our ideas - writers with words rather than pixels, for example, a data visualiser with graphics rather than sentences. This points to an exciting future however where more curators may come from a design background (or schooling where basic design and coding is built in) and we can more easily find ways of inducting audiences into art than the current mis-match of text panels to artworks allows ....

Cultural institutions and the social compact

An essay included in the first issue of the New Zealand Emerging Museums Professionals publication, Tauhere | Connections, May 2016

>>>>>>>>>>

In August 2015, with the assistance of a Winston Churchill Fellowship, I made a research trip around art museums in seven states in America exploring, amongst other things, trends in digital development and engagement in art museum. In November I was invited to take part in to a panel discussion at the National and State Libraries of Australasia event ‘Linked Up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship’.(1)

I used this as an opportunity to investigate a strand of digital practice that had  really struck me during my conversations with colleagues in American museums: the increasing collection and analysis of visitor data gathered using digital methods, rather than surveys or visitor-trailing. The key development in this field is the introduction of a new breed of museum membership where, unlike traditional memberships (where you pay an annual fee for free access to a paid-entry museum) you trade your data for access and benefits.

The leading exponent of this new membership model is the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Under (recently departed) director Maxwell Anderson, over the past three years the DMA has removed entry charges from general admission shows at the museum, and introduced a new entry-level ‘Friends’ offer to its membership programme.(2)

When you sign up for the programme, using a kiosk at the Museum, you provide your contact details and your postcode information. In return, you are admitted to a programme where, through various activities, you can gain 'points' that can be traded in for benefits.(3)  For example, if you collect sufficient points, you can having your parking charges redeemed. In a city where the car is king, free parking as part of your gallery is a compelling inducement to taking part in the programme. More points get you better access, more special and desirable rewards.

From a dataset of more than 100,000 signed-up Friends, the DMA is able to collect information about which galleries are visited, which programmes are attended, and which rewards are most desirable. Using the postcode information allows them to see where visitors are coming from and, by comparing this information to census data, draw conclusions about which demographics their visitors represent - at scale.

The DMA is currently using this information to understand which communities they are reaching and not reaching, under-serving and over-serving. The more time they invest in gathering and interrogating this data, the more of a data-driven organisation they can become: carrying out targeted programming, marketing and community outreach activities, and measuring whether these activities have discernible impacts on visitor behaviour.

On the one hand, I am in favour of, and admiring of, this approach. It is all too easy to rely on anecdotal information and your own perceptions of your audience and the success of your initiatives. However, I also have reservations about these activities that boli down to the risk of them becoming – in a colloquial but accurate wording in terms of the felt affect – creepy.

We have become accustomed to trading our data for convenience and for access. We hand over contact details and dates of birth for loyalty cards at companies that then bombard us with marketing offers. We buy from sites like Amazon, which store our browing and shopping behaviour and use this to tailor the information that is presented to us, and to others. We hand over our data merrily, and maybe without thought for how this data is being stored, analysed, and shared.

If we look at the DMA's privacy policy, it states

We sometimes provide personal information to other providers of goods and services so that they may assist us in connection with ticket sales, event promotion, fundraising, or otherwise in connection with providing services or merchandise to you. However, we require that those providers use personal information only for that purpose, and we require our providers to provide assurances that they will appropriately protect personal information entrusted to them.(4)  

A growing number of American museums are ramping up their collection of data in order to increase engagement for the purposes of visitor acquisition, retention and conversion. One museum I met with was planning on implementing the DMA's software with a new free entry-level membership offer, with the same intent of understanding visitor demographics. They also had however a clear plan for using this information – this personalisation – for targeted marketing campaigns, and to convert visitors to shoppers, shoppers to donors: effectively, using visitor data to maximise revenue. At the Museums and the Web Asia conference in Melbourne in October 2015, Diana Pan from the Museum of Modern Art showed statistics derived from members’ shopping behaviour, and explained how MOMA had tweaked its retail offer in response to patterns they saw.(5)

As well as giving us information to improve the relevance of our programmes, tackle inequality of access, and increase revenue, data can sometimes tell us things we'd rather not hear.

Colleen Dilenschneider is a consultant with an American company that specialises, among other things, in the application of data analysis in the non-profit sector. She writes and presents regularly on data as it relates to cultural and visitor organisations. In a November 2015 blog post she crunched the data on free admission days, the monthly free days many paid-entry museums in the US run in the hopes of reducing the barriers to access for non-traditional visitors (read: those who are lower-earning, more geographically distanced, less educated and from a different racial or ethnic background to your average white middle-class middle-aged museum member).(6)

The data as Dilenschneider analysed it shows that free admission days do not attract underserved audiences. Dilenschneider's research shows that:

• Admission price is not identified as the chief barrier to access
• Free access days attract higher earning and higher educated attendees than paid access days
• Free access days do not tempt non-visitors, but rather accelerate the speed at which an existing visitor revisits
• Cultural organisations generally don't know how to, or don't effectively, market free access days to underserved audiences but instead use their email databases, social media platforms and regular marketing outlets to tap the people they are already reaching. 

These are unsettling things for the very well-meaning people who run museums to hear.

Dilenschneider's company generates these insights by buying data from many sources: the data of people just like us. They then analyse this data and sell that analysis and consultancy services back to cultural organisations: just like ours. I should note that Dilenschneider is not at all covert about this, and in fact that her company has been very generous in allowing her to share this data and information as freely as she does.(7)

There's no escaping the fact though that companies are being built and money being made on the bounty of the ocean of data we are all drip feeding into.

Concern about the collection, security  and use of data – from the outing of philanders on dating sites to a former CIA director's statement "we kill people based on metadata” – are hardly new.(8)  But with my heightened awareness due to what I’d seen and heard in America primed me to pay particular attention as I was preparing for this talk to a series of references that floated across my radar that shared a common theme: the comparison of data technology to nuclear technology.

In the Guardian in 2008, Cory Doctorow wrote:

We should treat personal electronic data with the same care and respect as weapons-grade plutonium – it is dangerous, long-lasting and once it has leaked there's no getting it back.(9)

Doctorow at that time proposed that data should be embargoed for 200 years, that anyone who touches or cares for that data over that period must be properly trained, and that businesses and government must be made to bear the costs associated with this.

At the start of October Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski spoke at O'Reilly Media's Big Data conference. Aiming to puncture the bubble of data enthusiasts, he painted a purposefully grim picture of data as, in his words,

not as a pristine resource, but as a waste product, a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.(10) 

Ceglowski drew an explicit link between data technology and nuclear technology, as two powerful innovations whose ‘beneficial uses we could never quite untangle from the harmful ones.’

Like Doctorow, Ceglowski describes the similarity between data and nuclear waste; a material that has the potential to last far longer than the institutions we build to manage it. He stated

information about people retains its power as long as those people are alive, and sometimes as long as their children are alive. No one knows what will become of sites like Twitter in five years or ten. But the data those sites own will retain the power to hurt for decades.

He also noted that data technology is creating a situation where people are reacting to the manipulations of big data, purposefully gaming systems, forcing an ever-evolving arms race between data collectors and data creators that creates more distance between us as humans, not more understanding.

Finally, British artist and technologist James Bridle recently wrote an essay, based on a talk he gave at the 'Through Post-Atomic Eyes' event in Toronto, that name-checked the two above pieces.(11) Bridle has written and made work extensively about mass surveillance, and in this piece he drew a parallel between the Cold War that nuclear technology locked the world into for 45 years and the potential of big data today. As he notes, even though the information we collect about human behaviour grows and grows and grows, our sympathy and empathy and connection across politics, races, religions and nations do not leap forward at the same pace.

We in cultural organisations think of ourselves as the white hats and the good guys. Libraries in particular have a strong ethos of free and protected access to information. The siren call of data is strong however, and we will all soon, if we're not already, have to ask ourselves: who benefits from the data we collect, and how we keep each other safe?

A coda

When I gave this talk, I purposefully took a cautious attitude towards the activity of data collection by cultural organisations, and painted a dark picture of a field that can be intelligently managed. My concern, as a museum director but also as a technologist at heart, lies with the tendency of people who are not versed in the conversations around data management to fall for vendors’ pitches without applying a sufficiently sceptical lens to their claims. This concern was proved valid when earlier this year I heard a museum director talking about hardware they were about to insert into their gallery doorways, which would collect the IMEI (unique identifier) of every switched-on mobile phone that entered the building. This is vastly appealing to me as a director, for the ability to cheaply and accurately measure how many repeat visitors you have to your museum and how frequently they visit. It is also terrifying to me as a technologist, in terms of the way it invades an individual’s privacy and surveils their physical passage through the world.

At the end of the talk, a member of the audience asked how we could collect and manage data responsibly. I offer up Ceglowki’s advice as a starting point for you:

Don't collect it! 
If you can get away with it, just don't collect it! Just like you don't worry about getting mugged if you don't have any money, your problems with data disappear if you stop collecting it....  

If you have to collect it, don't store it! 
... You can get a lot of mileage out of ephemeral data. There's an added benefit that people will be willing to share things with you they wouldn't otherwise share, as long as they can believe you won't store it. ... 

If you have to store it, don't keep it! 
Certainly don't keep it forever. Don't sell it to Acxiom! Don't put it in Amazon glacier and forget it.  

I believe there should be a law that limits behavioral data collection to 90 days, not because I want to ruin Christmas for your children, but because I think it will give us all better data while clawing back some semblance of privacy.

(1) Linked Up, Loud and Literate: Enabling Digital Citizenship http://www.nsla.org.au/events/linked-loud-and-literate-libraries-enabling-digital-citizenship-wellington-nz

(2) The Dallas Museum of Art Friends programme https://www.dma.org/visit/dma-friends More information about my research into American museum membership programmes is available here http://best-of-3.blogspot.co.nz/2016/01/wcmt-acquittal-draft-membership.html, including links to many more articles and sources.

(3)  Points can be gained in a multitude of ways: by bringing people to the museum and recruiting them into the programme, by collecting codes posted at the entries to different galleries, by taking part in public programme events, through scavenger hunts, and so on.

(4) DMA Friends privacy statement https://www.dma.org/privacy

(5) Diana Pan and Manish Engineer, ‘The 360-Degree View: Why An Integrated CRM Platform is Important in Growing a Museum’s Membership Program’, Museums and the Web Asia, Melbourne, October 2015  http://mwa2015.museumsandtheweb.com/proposal/the-360-degree-view-why-an-integrated-crm-platform-is-important-in-growing-a-museums-membership-program/

(6) Colleen Dilenschneider, ‘Free  admission days do not actually attract udnerserved Visitors’, Know Your Own Bone, 4 November 2015  http://colleendilen.com/2015/11/04/free-admission-days-do-not-actually-attract-underserved-visitors-to-cultural-organizations-data/

 (7) See the information page on Dilenschneider’s website http://colleendilen.com/welcome/ and her frequent public presentations

(8) David Cole, ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’, New York Review of Books, 10 May 2014
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/

(9) Cory Doctorow, ‘Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste’, The Guardian, 15 January 2008 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/15/data.security

(10) Maciej Ceglowski, ‘Haunted by Data’, talk given on 1 October 2015, http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm All quotes from Ceglowski are drawn from this talk.

(11) James Bridle, ‘Big Data, No Thanks’, BookTwo.org, 2 November 2015 http://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/

Art snark and web page annotations

I've been interested in Genius (the annotation website that started out as Rap Genius but has expanded its model outwards in the last couple of years) for a few years now. I've only just caught up with the fact though that there's a Chrome plug-in that can be used to add annotations to any web page. Accompanying that is News Genius, which describes itself as " a community of prize-winning writers, passionate readers, artists, designers, engineers, students ... pushing the limits of how people have traditionally read and related to the news by annotating new stories every day". In this Google spreadsheet you can see a list of news and magazine stories that have been annotated.

I first came upon all this in the wild over the weekend, when Carolina Miranda, an LA Times visual arts columnist and blogger, linked to an annotation of a NY Times by Conrad De Aenlle, 'Los Angeles Art Scene Comes Into Its Own'.

Before I downloaded the plug-in, the annotated article looked like this:

(You can see this version of the page here.) After downloading, it looked like this:

Now, most of Miranda's annotations are West Coast - East Coast snark (for example, First quote goes to guy who doesn’t live in L.A. and works for a European art fair company that operates in Miami.) But I'm quite fascinated by the tool nonetheless.

On one level, it allows for semi-private unpicking, criticism or ridiculing of the content of a web page (I *think* you can annotate and share any page by creating an account and then appending 'genius.it' to any page.) You could imagine, for example, a group of people sharing around an annotated exhibition listing from any public gallery website, any CNZ media release, and EyeContact review.

On the other, it could be a simple and powerful tool for crowd-use of any piece of digital or digitised content, regardless of whether the site the content is hosted on has enabled that themselves. Take the amazing resource that is the digitised copies of Te Ao Hou and imagine all those article and images available for annotation, cross-referencing, and linking into the rest of the web.

I am currently thinking about ways I want to extend the beginnings I made by starting the timeline of feminist art movement in New Zealand on Wikipedia. Annotation and cross-referencing is very much on my mind. I'm looking for a tool (probably Evernote, but I'm open to suggestions) to help me gather and annotate texts and while Genius isn't it (the problem being that most of the text I want to work with isn't already online) it's given me a few inklings ...

The engagement era - and the artist's place within it

As I continue pecking my way through my WCMT research report (see the drafts on open collections and museum memberships) I find myself repeatedly wrestling with the ideas of 'engagement' and 'experience', two words that are constantly in use in contemporary museum speak but which I still find very floppy in their definition.

One framework that I've found really useful as I try to organise my thoughts about what characterises the urgent issues and highest priority activities in art museums today is that advanced by Seph Rodney. In a recent piece on Hyperallergic, Rodney traces a progression from the final decades of the 19th century and first two decades of the 20th century, when museums focused on 'centralization, specialization, and classification of a collection' and any benefits gained by visitors were largely a by-product of that concentration , to a post WWI era where visitor education becomes the main cause of the museum, meaning that by the end of the 20th century 'one could have expected to enter a museum to have an explicitly educational experience, that is, the success of the visit would have been defined largely by how effectively information was transferred to the visitor, largely through didactic texts.'

Over the past 25 years, Rodney argues, political and economic changes have created a new era of the visitor as 'consumer', and a environment in museums where 'personalisation' has succeeded 'education':

Now, in the 21st century, with the inauguration of a new museology, and the engulfing of the civic culture by capitalism with its handmaidens, consumerism and heightened competition, museums have begun to recognize that in order to survive they must cultivate new and repeat visitors. Three key means of accomplishing this is first, recognizing visitors’ capacity to make meaning for themselves; two, partnering with them to discover what they personally want from the museum; and lastly, mobilizing the museum’s resources to meet these needs. These tasks can be met by, among other things, new curatorial strategies through which museums partner with visitors to develop activities and events: co-curation projects, and crowdsourcing exhibition content.

The hallmark of this new museum is the interactive and participatory activities that have emerged over the past quarter-century in exhibition design, but underlying these is 'an institutional recognition of the visitor as an independent maker of meaning who uses the museum in a variety of ways to fulfill particular, individual needs and desires.' You can read a longer version of Rodney's argument - which is the basis of his recent Ph.D thesis - on the CultureCom website.

I don't think we can deny that there *has* been a change in thinking. Here's a pretty specious piece of evidence based on Google's ngram viewer:

Instances of the phrase 'visitor engagement' in the Google Books corpus, 1950-2008

Rodney's way of looking at 'engagement' and 'experience' is informed by the study of changes in museum philosophy, as well as governmental cultural policy and shifts in marketing trends. Another trend emerging in museums' internal understanding of themselves and their relationship to visitors is that advanced by Jon Alexander of the New Citizenship Project, who has worked with a number of media companies and art museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art. Alexander is promulgating a shift from thinking of the visitor (or individual, beyond their visiting potential) as consumer to the visitor as citizen: less about targeting individuals through a better understanding of their personal needs and wants, more about appealing to them as people who wish to be better participants in their society.

The #CitizenShift, as the New Citizenship Project terms the 'emerging era of the citizen' maps reasonably well to Rodney's 'collections > education > engagement' model, as this 'quick concepts' diagram from their publication shows:

One of the reasons why I find the words 'engagement' and 'experience' so hard to grapple with is that I instinctively conflate them with the theories and practices of the contemporary internet and web worlds that I professionally came of age in. The practice of user experience design underpins the way I approach working in a museum: as Wikipedia defines it, 'the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product'. Previously applied to the relationship between user and hardware/software, those practices can be expanded out over any interaction between the individual and the physical world. The strong emphasis upon accessibility and usability - which were 'inclusive' before that word became on-trend in wider discourse - in particular maps well to today's museum.

I find it natural, therefore, to see the changes over the past 25 years in museums as being at the very least influenced by the rise of the internet; not just the way that the web has amplified the voice and abilities of the individual, but also the theorising of the internet. And the most outwardly-visible changes in museum in this period - the introduction of digital interactives, the uptake of social media, the free wifi networks, the adoption of all things 'crowd' - have indeed looked very internetty. Let's zip back almost exactly five years, for example, to an interview with Thomas Campbell, who had by this time been running the Metropolitan Museum for three years. Much is made of the difference in style between Campbell and his predecessor, Philippe de Montebello:

The difference was certainly evident in a recent interview in the director’s office, where Mr. de Montebello used to preside with baronial aplomb behind his desk. Mr. Campbell instead pulled up a chair around a conference table and talked with boyish enthusiasm not just about art but also about the kinds of things that increasingly accompany it in 21st-century museums. The Met has created its first app, to accompany the guitar show. It is embarking on the daunting task of wiring its huge building for Wi-Fi, he said, so that patrons will eventually be able to read and watch videos about art museumwide on their phones and tablet computers. And it is venturing as never before into the rapidly evolving field of what museum administrators call “visitor engagement”: a social science aimed at trying to reach every patron, from the first-timer to the seasoned scholar.

Such ambitions for the Met might not sound revolutionary, especially after the kinds of grand expansions and acquisitions that more than doubled the museum’s size during the de Montebello years, leaving little room for his successor to start putting his stamp on the place. 

But in two wide-ranging interviews over the last month Mr. Campbell said that he did not see it that way and that he viewed the museum’s next frontier to be less physical than philosophical and virtual: a change in the Met’s tone and public face, making it a more open and understandable museum, largely by thoroughly rethinking the way it uses technology.

“It’s not sexy and glamorous, like building a new wing,” he said, “but I think it’s a fundamental part of our responsibility to our audience.” 

If you'd like to see an apoplectic hot-take on this interview, check out Charlie Finch's reaction from the time on Artnet, and his screech that Campbell is about to 'trap, fold and mutilate every poor soul who arrives with something called "Visitor Engagement".' Today, the Met has come from behind to be doing some of the most innovative online work in the world.

Most leaders in museums today (I hope) have figured out that touchscreens and Snapchat ≠ 'engagement', but rather that it's the shift in thinking that characterises the new museum. This is a point that people like Seb Chan are particularly good at articulating. In his end of year post for 2015, Chan wrote:

Digital transformation is really about something else that often isn’t openly talked about – transforming audiences. Sure, we might change work practices along the way, but really digital transformation efforts are really in the service of visitors wherever they might be. In that sense, ‘digital transformation’ follows in the footsteps of the education-led museology of the 1990s.

Here we see again that shift from 'education' to 'engagement'. (It struck me just now that we can throw in another 'e': 'empowerment'. Such a fortuitous vowel.) Recently Suse Cairns took this point by Chan (and Rodney's piece above) for a walk in a post titled 'Transforming audiences, transforming museums'. Cairns picks up on a distinctive theme of Chan's piece: what 'audience transformation' means in the American museum sector, where the funding and oversight of museums comes largely from private individuals and philanthropic or corporate supporters. Thinking about contemporary audience development, she also cites Rob Stein:

Now that museums are beginning to have the tools and expertise at their disposal to monitor, track, record, and analyze all the various ways that the public benefits from their work, the real task begins to redesign the process and program of museums and to embed impact-driven data collection into every aspect of our efforts.

Cairns identifies this as the "crux of this digital transformation/audience transformation question. As we can measure our audiences in new ways, we expect to be able to measure how we impact and affect them, in order to respond to them differently."

One way I have been trying to re-phrase 'engagement' inside my head (and 'experience' to, because all museums are and have always been designed as experiences) is as 'visitor-led': as in, we have moved from being educationally-driven (you will learn about this and that and come out better for it) to being 'visitor-led' (how can we better understand you and meet your expectations so you enjoy your time here?). Another way is to think of museums as switching from an impersonal omniscient narrator to a first person point of view, where the visitor is constantly asked to bring their own history and context to their museum encounter. Museums still tell a story through their arrangement of spaces and objects and accompanying interpretative devices: however our assumptions of, and responses to, our visitors' desires have changed.

All the drivers above either come out forces surrounding the museum - new technology, new cultural policies, new marketing tactics - or from museology itself. What I think much of this discussion about the new museum experience and visitor engagement often leaves out is the influence of changes in artistic practice.

Let's look again at Seb Chan paragraph cited above, this time with the final sentence appended:

Digital transformation is really about something else that often isn’t openly talked about – transforming audiences. Sure, we might change work practices along the way, but really digital transformation efforts are really in the service of visitors wherever they might be. In that sense, ‘digital transformation’ follows in the footsteps of the education-led museology of the 1990s. You can sense this in Nicholas Serota’s recently published “commonwealth of ideas” speech about a new Tate.

Serota's speech (printed in The Art Newspaper) identifies a 'profound shift in the expectations and behaviour of audiences in museums' initiated yes, by digital transformation, but also by shifts in artistic practice. He opens by reflecting on unexpected visitor behaviour in installations in the Tate's Turbine Hall:

For me, this first became evident in the response to Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003. People took over the space and used it as an arena for their own experience, so that the work gained an unanticipated performative aspect. Similar unprogrammed responses were prompted by Carsten Höller’s Test Site in 2006 and by Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth in 2007. 

In his essay from last year 'After the white cube' Hal Foster tracks some of the issues I'm grappling with here: the adaptive cycle (or arms race) between museum architecture and artistic practice, the 'activation' of the viewer, the society of spectacle. When we survey visitors on what they'd like to see more of at The Dowse, one of the things they cite are experiential or participatory exhibitions we have staged in the past, such as those by Peter Robinson in 2013/14 and Scott Eady in 2011/12. The appeal of these exhibitions is strong and - in those one of those phrases you never want to be documented using - they tick so many boxes. Families love them, funders love them, the media love them, and they photograph so damn well. In fact, you can sit at your desk and draw up just the perfect exhibition for your gallery, that will have all the necessary elements of hands-on interaction and Instagram appeal, and then lament the fact there's no artist you know making exactly that thing so you can just programme it in.

Which is not to demean those artists who are working in a manner that invites, or needs, participation from the viewer. But we're working in an era where it's increasingly hard to differentiate experience design from artwork. (And maybe we don't need to - and maybe I'm retrograde for thinking we do - but I still think it matters.) The Rain Room sits squarely in the middle of this conundrum - exhibited at leading art museums around the world, described as an 'immersive environment', but somehow not quite art to my mind. Glade's 'Museum of Feelings' - which coopts the experiential museum visit to sell scented candles - squats malevolently at the fringes. And then there's the 20 works developed by the 400-member Japanese technology-art collective teamLab for Pace's new Art+Technology program at Menlo Park. As Pace president Marc Glimcher said himself of first seeing teamLab's work:

I was like, ‘This is not art,’ and realized I was having an authentic art experience,” he says. “It’s something that we have to open up what our definition of art is, so I had my own conversion experience.”

Unusually for a dealer gallery presentation, you have to buy tickets to see what this actually is.

Serota says in that piece above that the future of museums is being driven by 'a combination of curatorial vision, artistic innovation and the demands of audiences'. At this point, are we dealing with artist-led experience, or visitor-led design? I can't answer that question - and I'm not even sure I'm asking the right one. So I'd love to see some pieces of writing that track the hand-in-hand development of participatory art practices and the museological interest in visitor experience: the co-creation, so to speak. I'm sure they're already out there, so please, send them my way.

References

Seph Rodney, 'The evolution of the museum visit, from privilege to personalized experience ', Hyperallergic , 22 January 2016 http://hyperallergic.com/267096/the-evolution-of-the-museum-visit-from-privilege-to-personalized-experience/

Seph Rodney, 'How museum visitors became consumers', CultureCom, 28 August 2015 http://culture-communication.fr/en/how-museum-visitors-became-consumers/

'This is the #CitizenShift', The New Citizenship Project, (undated) http://issuu.com/newcitizenshipproject/docs/ncp_report/1

Seb Chan, 'Since we last spoke: Rounding up 2015', Fresh + New(er,) 10 January 2016 http://www.freshandnew.org/2016/01/roundup2015/

Robin Kennedy, 'The Met's plans for virtual expansion', New York Times, 12 February 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/arts/design/12campbell.html

Suse Cairns, 'Transforming audiences, transforming museums', Museum Geek, 27 January 2016, http://museumgeek.xyz/2016/01/27/transforming-audiences-transforming-museums/

Nicholas Serota, 'The 21st museum is a commonwealth of ideas', The Art Newspaper, 5 January 2016 http://theartnewspaper.com/comment/comment/the-21st-century-tate-is-a-commonwealth-of-ideas/

Hal Foster, 'Beyond the white cube', London Review of Books, 15 March 2015, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/hal-foster/after-the-white-cube

Julie Baumgardner, 'A Very Different Kind of Immersive Art Installation', The New York Times Style Magazine', 4 February 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/t-magazine/art/teamlab-living-digital-space-future-parks-pace-gallery-california.html

'Sup, Colin?

Sometimes a little idea brings a lot of pleasure. An example of this, which has been around since 2014 but only just passed my transom today, is Sup Bowie, a site that answers the vital question: What did David Bowie do at your age?

It does what it says on the box: you enter your name, and it shows you an event from Bowie's life.

My first thought was, of course, that this would be fun to apply to a New Zealand artist who worked steadily and productively across their lifetime - Colin McCahon, with the added advantage of the McCahon database, is the obvious option. In his 36th (approximately) year, for example, McCahon was living in Titirangi, experimenting with a new visual landscape in a Cubist-influenced style, doing some stage designs for the art gallery ballet, and producing a few rather theatrical early word paintings, like  Sacred to the memory of Death.

I thought this idea could be extrapolated out: for example, a collection search could let you call up works by various artists, based on their age (Show me all the things made by artists when they were 36). Mulling this over though, I realised this was kind of dry (and totally the kind of thing people like me come up with and get all excited about).

A creative director or UX lead might explain that the appeal of Sup Bowie is getting to use a very basic shared attribute (we were all born in some year, we were all born in some place, we are all a certain age) to draw a connection yourself and the content being delivered/marketed to you. The appeal with the Bowie site, of course, is being able to compare your life progress with a mythical unicorn beast. The reason I *like* Sup Bowie though is that instead of being programmatically driven off, say, his Wikipedia discography, each year has been specifically scripted. While some years are marked by showstoppers (his marriage to Iman, the release of Let's Dance) his childhood years are marked with imaginatively captioned photos and some years (possibly the less active, to be fair) are given to basically random shit

The what-did-Bowie-do-at-an-age-he-hasn't-reached is also dealt with ...

This brings the site closer to story telling than data visualisation. It's also more human. Mixing in a bit of humour and a bit of ordinary life make you want to keep prodding it with new numbers, precisely because it doesn't just spit out the usual biodata. And that's a useful thing to keep in mind.

On stars, and thinking things through

In which I started out talking about something I like on the internet and ended up thinking quite a bit harder than I intended to.

This has been a summer break of small and quiet joys, mostly involving sunshine, reading, and sweaty physical exertion with people who I care a lot about.*

One of these small and quiet joys is Matt Webb's new-ish internet play thing, 5point9billion. It's a little Twitter bot that, after you provide it with your date of birth, tweets you regular updates on the progression of your personal light cone: the movement of the light that left the Earth on the day of your birth reaching the surrounding stars. You can read more about light cones and see how I got that description wrong on Wikipedia. And you can read all about the background and the technical details on Matt's blog.

After you've given 5point9billion your date of birth, it starts tweeting you as your light cone races towards the bright stars in the sky - first long-range forecasts (months in advance), then weekly, then day by day and then ...

A few of my friends have signed up to the bot, and there's something lovely about seeing the days pass in all of our lives through this very gentle and abstract medium.

Here's one conversation that we had about that online. Usually, I balk at passing over details like date of birth, and especially when signing up for something that publishes evidence of your birthdate for all to see. But - I trust Matt Webb, and so I did it.

When you are signed in to the service you can also see a chronology of your star-past:

Matt's also made a little 'personal star map' app, which when you're signed in shows your relative position to the surrounding stars in three dimensions.

After a very busy couple of weeks, I've entered a slow patch again, and 5point9billion will fade from my consciousness until May. But I like knowing it's there, and I like knowing that it's there in my friends' lives. It's one of those very light ties-that-bind that are facilitated by the internet.

* * *

There are three things I like about what Matt Webb does. One: he makes thoughtful things. Two: he makes them in public, and publicises them just enough, so you can follow his thinking and learning and see his mind at work. And three: I get the sense that although his activities seem quite broad (tramping, hardware coffee clubs, twitterbots) they all feed into and off of one another, and that appeals to me at this time when I'm trying to figure out what my thing is.

Matt (to my eyes, anyway) doesn't have a singular 'thing': he has this kind of spangly web of interests and skills that coalesces around a line of enquiry and results in the making or doing of a thing, and these things in turn become part of that web and generate further experiments and thinking. (I also, as I mangle away at this metaphor, am thinking of contrails, those vapour trails left by planes in the sky - directional traces of activity - as a descriptor for the various things I've seen Matt make and do online, but that image lacks the generative power I'm trying to convey).

What I'm trying to express is that I am drawn to Matt's experimenting and thinking because it doesn't seem directed towards a monolithic output (an app, a research paper, a book, a podcast series) but instead strikes me as a lived intellectual endeavour that is generously shared and not taken too heavily: thinking out loud on the internet. It appeals to me because, I guess, in my small sense, that's what I'm trying to do too.

And writing this just now has made something I've been feeling uncomfortable about fit better into my head. See, I met Matt once, about five and a half years ago, at Foo Camp in the States - went to a session he and Matt Jones ran and then played cricket in the parking lot with a bunch of other English and New Zealand people. But I don't know him. When I write about him like this - speculatively, making assumptions - I'm effectively using him as a thinking or teaching aid for myself. I read into what he does what I need to get out of it: my perception of his activity helps me assess and critique my own, suggests to me where I might direct more effort, gives me a model I can use. The Matt Webb that is useful to me might be unrecognisable to Matt Webb himself.

Colin McCahon, Teaching aids 2 (June), 1975. Collection of Auckland Art Gallery.

For a while now I've been struggling with the experience of being a role model for people. It's not a new phenomena or concern for me - as far back as when I worked at National Library I had the odd person come up to me and say that they looked up to me for the work I do. It's become a bit more common as I've gotten into leadership roles, and while I do appreciate it, it also worries me.

For one thing, at 36, I don't want to be old enough to be 'looked up to' by people in their 20s - I want to be thought of as a peer, someone with just as much likelihood of getting it right or fucking it up as they have. Being a role model also feels a little bit like being put on the shelf. At the same time, one of the things I've really relished over the past three years has been being in a position where I can create opportunities for people - but hopefully for people of all ages, not just my younger/newer colleagues.

The other thing, of course, is feeling like a fake. I try to be grateful, and gracious, when someone comes up to me and says something like 'You don't know me but you're my hero' (actual quote) but I tend to oscillate between two poles. One is irritation - if I don't know you, how do you know me well enough to putting me on some kind of pedastal without any input from me? And the other, of course, is fear: If you really knew me, you wouldn't feel like that at all. If you saw me in everyday work life, hunkering down in my office, getting things wrong, missing opportunities, being snappy with people, taking the easy course of action rather than pushing harder, being pretty uninspiring 95% of the times, you'd be disappointed in how far I am from the mental model you've constructed of me.

[As a side note, I also struggle with the empty hyperbole of the internet, the awesome-isation of everything, the kick-ass and babe! of tweets and Instagram comments. I wrote a somewhat satirical piece on the devaluation of competence once, but it wasn't really all that satirical, now or at the time. The way we craft our online personalities and presences doesn't help, of course. The internet gives us much greater access to people we don't know in real life, but without the checks and balances of real life. I am discomforted (but also a little thrilled, and then discomforted at that thrill) when some of that online adulation is attached to something I've done or said.]

But writing this just now has made me realise, in a way, that this doesn't matter. (As long as I'm not a big fat con artist, anyway.) I've finally figured out that to use someone as a role model you don't need to know every in-and-out of their character or their practice. Instead, you find something in a person that helps move you ahead in whatever it is you're trying to the achieve. Something that they've done, or the way they've done it, becomes the special ingredient in your recipe. It's not about the hero, it's about the person whose story this is. The role model/hero an unwitting teaching aid. And that's kind of cool.

[An update, on Saturday morning: Jolisa Gracewood suggested in this series of tweets the model of the gravitational assist, whereby a spacecraft uses the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to get a leg up on its own journey by increasing or decreasing speed. This is the perfect metaphor for me because inside my head I see a planet just serenely carrying on, doing its planetary business, while the plucky little spaceship benefits from the energy of that business, without siphoning any of it off.]

So Matt - if by any chance you're reading this, I do think 5point9billion is kick-ass, and that you're awesome. But more importantly: thanks for the work you do, and the way you do it, because it is helpful to me, in ways that you probably wouldn't ever expect.

*One day I am going to write a long piece on just what it is that jiu jitsu means to me, but not today. This abnormal Wellington sunshine has made me too mentally lazy. Serious writing is a cold weather activity.