Read the Label: How Much is Too Much?

I read a review today about a new exhibit called "Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth" at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The reviewer for the college paper thought the exhibit was fascinating, but what caught my attention was what he didn't like: he commented that the labels in the exhibit explained way too much. In the review he said, "Frequently, labels fully explain what a piece is 'supposed' to mean, such as in the case of Caché, a reclining wood female figure by Alison Saar swathed in ceiling tin and attached to an immense ball of wire. The Hood explains to us that the ball represents the oppressive racial and cultural burdens of being an African woman. Once again, what happened to my own interpretation? Why should Caché mean only one thing?"

Presenting information about specific works can be a real dilemma for museums --how much information should they provide their visitor about an object, and where should that information go? Is a label with the artist's name, the date, and the medium enough? Or is there other information that is vital to present so the visitor enjoys the piece more? It's a balancing act, and there's a fine line between too little, just enough, and so much information about a piece that there's little room for a viewer's own interpretation of it. So the question I've been thinking about today is, "how much information is too much?"

We've been working on ways to use mobile devices to supplement museum visitors' in-museum experience by linking to online content. The beauty of it is that it allows visitors to access more information about an object they are viewing--IF and when they want it. If you walk into a museum and you simply want to enjoy a beautiful or fascinating work, then you may not want to know anything more about it than what is in front of you. But if you do want to learn more about a work, a period, or an artist, being able to access it via your cell phone is a pretty handy option for you, and a more flexible way to present information for the museum. It leaves a little more room for interpretation.

Ask Me Something I Can Answer

I was reading the latest issue of Museum Magazine this weekend, and came across Nina Simon's column, "You Talking to Me?"

In her column, Nina talks about how lots of museums these days include questions for visitors on their exhibit labels, but don't seem to expect answers. She wondered why they bother. She asks, "Is it just an exercise in giving visitors an empty megaphone to say their piece?"

Nina's take on those labels is that museums are asking the wrong questions, and they need to think harder about asking the right ones so they can engage visitors in dialogue about the topic at hand. In Nina's view, the wrong questions make it difficult for visitors to answer; the right questions make the visitor experience more rich and dynamic.

Those rhetorical questions posted on museum labels are my personal museum pet peeve. If a museum is asking me a question, why doesn't it ever give me a venue for answering it? Am I just supposed to read the question and think about it, or does the museum really want to have a conversation about it? Drives me nuts. But unlike Nina, I don't think the problem is that museums are asking the wrong questions; I think the problem is that museums aren't thinking enough about how to let visitors answer those questions.

I was at a museum recently that asked the question, "How risky is your life?" I guess the premise was that I'd find answers in the exhibit, which was about risk taking and our perceptions of risk. I don't know how risky my life is, and I didn't know any more after the exhibit, either. I did learn a lot about probability, had a blast lying down on a bed of nails, and even learned a fascinating fact about how many people in Paris are hospitalized each year due to slipping in dog poop, but I left the exhibit still pondering the question without any means of answering it.

In "You Talking to Me?" Nina gives some really great examples of museums that she says have asked the right questions to fully engage visitors, including the Ontario Science Centre's "Facing Mars" exhibit, Denver Art Museum's "Side Trip", and Powerhouse Museum's "Odditoreum". The exhibits sound terrific, but I'd argue that it's not so much the great questions the museums have asked that makes those exhibits a success, but rather it's because they have provided the means for visitors to answer the question, allowing the visitor to be a part of the exhibit, too. The Odditoreum exhibit, for example, allows people to make up their own stories to go with the strange objects on display; the Mars exhibit allows people to respond to the question, "Would you go to Mars?" by having them choose between a door marked 'Yes' and a door marked 'No'. It's the venue for response that makes these appealing to visitors--you get asked a question and have a way to answer it.

If you ask me, museums are already asking interesting questions of their visitors--what they need to spend a little more time on is thinking of ways that visitors can respond to the questions they ask. In my case, I would have really liked the chance to talk with someone else about my life and how risky it might be, or learn more about someone else's ideas of what is risky, or even if they liked lying down on the bed of nails. But there wasn't any venue for me to respond. And so I left that museum somehow dissatisfied with my experience, and with a real need to talk about it. Which is risky business.

Co-Creation, Towards a Better Quality of Information and Life

Critics of crowd-sourcing assert that the process of co-creating digital knowledge necessarily entails the dumbing down of content, the stripping away of its historical context and the obliteration of authorial (or curatorial) perspective. I say, bah humbug! The outcomes of co-creation (as for any product) depend as much on the production process as the quality of any individual contributor. And this process can and should be designed into the product.

Wikipedia, arguably the most successful experiment in co-creation to date, has very clear and transparent principles and protocols for contribution. If you wonder what is behind any particular assertion, you can see the sources and visit the behinds the scenes discussions. Contrary to appearances, Click! -- a powerful and successful exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum -- was made possible by the careful and thorough structure created by its curatorial team. To say it emerged like a Dada creation would be to misunderstand the vision and prowess of these museum professionals.

Like Click! and Wikipedia, Open Museum was designed with an eye toward creating the optimal conditions for collaboration. One of those conditions is clarity of ownership. No one performs at their best if there is even the slightest possibility that someone else could mar or claim credit for their work. In Open Museum, curators own their museums through a variety of ways that are programmed into the site, including the layout and features. For instance, everyone's text -- the curators' and the visitors' -- appears near the object or discussion it refers to. Everyone's text, however, is not treated equally. The curator's text appears in larger font at the top of the screen and visitor comments appear in separate boxes, each one credited to its author.

We believe that exhibits are stories that curators tell, and like all stories, they have an implicit point of view. In Open Museum, we permit curators to share their point of view, unfettered by others (within limits set by our terms of service). In turn, visitors are free -- in fact encouraged -- to express alternative and additional points of view which stand below the curated text and cannot be edited by the curator. Yet again in turn, the curator retains the power to promote or delete visitor comments. In this way, varying points of view can be accommodated and the various participants can maintain control over their contributions.

Since we believe fences, especially virtual ones, make good neighbors, at Open Museum we program in rules that make co-creation not only possible but satisfying. We hope collaboration between museum curators and visitors will lead to greater knowledge, creativity, and mutual appreciation. And that the world will become a better place because of this co-creation, by pooling our knowledge, exposing us to various points of view, and allowing us to talk to more and different people.

Many thanks to the AAM's Center on the Future of Museums, whose excellent post inspired this post.

Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary,Thinking about Outreach

We have been talking a lot about how to position Open Museum to various audiences. Our current tagline reads, "Open Museum is a participatory, non-commercial exhibit space open to all." Which is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story about what Open Museum is to different audiences. For visitors, we certainly are a participatory exhibit space that offers anyone access to some pretty amazing art and invites them to talk about it, rate it, tag it, and get up close and personal on a virtual level.

But for museums, we offer something both different, and quite frankly, better, than just another venue for displaying what's on their walls. Most museums seem to think that their websites do this already, although it's unclear why they think they are doing it well. Most museums' websites offer small, low-res digital reproductions of the works on their walls. It's a virtual showcase of the schizophrenic struggle many museums go through these days: they want to show people that they have great art, but don't want to show it too well online lest someone nefariously downloads the digital image and makes millions of dollars printing greeting cards, fruit cake tins, and bookmarks bearing the museums' images. The result of this struggle is that most museums' websites don't offer anything new or interesting to their visitors, and what they do offer is a tepid tip of the hat to their collections.

On the other hand, it's interesting that a few museums seem to have the opposite problem: they have become far more participatory and engaging online than they are in their real-world institutions. Nina Simon points out in the July-August issue of Museum that two leading-edge online museums, the Indiana Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, deliver remarkable innovation and engagement online that isn't matched by the experience visitors have in the actual museum. In fact, says Simon, "you show up in person and feel jilted. Where are the friendly, open, participatory experiences you came for? Where's the museum you know and love?" Simon says she is worried that "the Web is becoming a participatory ghetto, a dumping ground for experimentation rather than an integrated driver of innovation in museums."

So the challenge--and opportunity--for museums is to create an online presence that complements and accurately reflects what the museum offers in person. Many museums will say that while a plan like that sounds great, they don't have the money, time, technology, or personnel to devote to developing a web presence that coordinates with their real-life experience. But to those of us at Open Museum, it just doesn't seem that complicated, because that's exactly what we offer: a way for museums to engage their visitors in ways that mirror the ways they engage visitors in the real world.

Is the museum giving a gallery talk about a particular work? On Open Museum, they can add the audio file online and link it to the work so that anyone can hear the talk, anytime. Better yet, they can make it always available to anyone who comes to the gallery and stands in front of the work by adding a small QR code that can be read by a mobile phone. Voila--a gallery talk on your phone any time you're in the museum. A gallery talk any time you're online and click on the work. It's integrative outreach that reflects what is in the museum, and continues to engage visitors whether they are walking through the galleries or sitting in front of their computers.

Creating a participatory experience inside a museum doesn't require major bells and whistles. What it does require is an ability on the part of museums to envision how to provide the same kind of interactivity their visitors experience inside the museum, and make that experience possible outside. It's not revolutionary thinking; it's evolutionary thinking. What works in a museum will also work online, and we think we have a pretty good method for helping museums do it.

Does Open Museum Make you Want to Sing?

Group of four young schoolgirls, singing as they dance around the maypole, 1935 by Sam Hood

State Library of New South Wales, Australia

Flickr Commons

Last time, I wrote about ways people could interact with Open Museum, noting that the site supports image, text, audio and video content. Since then, thanks to the generous and insightful comments of a visitor, I've realized there is a text bias in the site. Not only do you need to be able to type and type in English to participate in posting comments as a visitor, but you need to generate text to undertake even the first step to participation, registering and creating a profile.

We are not able, nor willing, to support multiple languages at Open Museum. It's not a question of chauvinism. All of us are at least bilingual and 2/3 hold duel citizenship. It is a question of practicality. Setting aside the question of cost, a site that supported merely some languages would send a negative message and a site accommodating every language would become a Tower of Babel. English, the language that seems to be the lingua franca in the arts and culture as well as tech world, strikes me as a defensible compromise.

On the other hand, Open Museum's implicit bias for text strikes me as indefensible. Although visitors can post images as comments and participate in other ways, such as rating, starring and friending, Open Museum is too text oriented. Starting with the registration process, it seems that Open Museum privileges the creation of text. Just to register and create a bio, the newcomer has to churn out a fair amount of text. This bias is a reflection of more than the personal predisposition of the founders (who happen to be two English majors and a French lit major, one of them in the book business for years).

Society, up until the tech revolution, seems to have been on a path towards producing more text and elevating it in the hierarchy of creation. One of the wonderful -- albeit threatening to some -- developments of the online world is that the primacy of text is being challenged by other media, namely image, audio, video. If Open Museum is going to achieve its goal of providing an open venue where people can interact with objects and each other, we ought to erode our bias for text.

A couple of concrete steps occur to me, starting with the registration and profile creation process. Why not provide the newcomer with a template with pull down options for each field so that s/he can have a profile up and running in minutes. It would be easy to make the fields optional, permitting the graphophile to override this ready-made option and any one who got started with the template to replace parts or all of it over time.

Likewise, it seems that we ought to expand the visitor contribution options to include video and audio. This change is more problematic than the latter because although we know how to implement these media (we support them for curators), their addition may have other implications. For instance, audio raises the bandwidth requirements and therefore may slow down the performance and raise our costs of service. Furthermore, it creates an additional challenge to enforcing the site's respect of copyrights. Curators are responsible for monitoring the material on their sites, so adding audio and video to the mix of user-generated content potentially means more stuff to do. In my mind, a good problem for a curator to confront but perhaps a barrier to entry as we get started. So we'll have to look at the audio and video options carefully before acting.

The higher order take away for me from this epiphanette on Open Museum's text bias is a the importance of seeing the site through the eyes (ears, touch...) of others. Wouldn't it be great if a visitor could play or sing a comment?