Data Riches and Visualization

Last week, I was in Washington, D.C. to present our work at the annual conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Here is a link to our abstract. The session we were in was organized by Catelijne Koopmans, National University of Singapore, under the title “Data Riches: The Practices and Politics of Exploiting [...]

Museums and measuring performance, part I

Last week, Trilce Navarrete and I attended a debate at the Reinwardt Academy of cultural heritage in Amsterdam on performance indicators and changing roles of museums in the present “information society.” The debate was part of a monthly series called Erfgoedarena (Heritage Arena), co-organised by the Reinwardt Academy and the Netherlands Institute for Heritage (NIH). [...]

Museums and measuring performance, part II

This brings us back to  last week’s debate. There were 3 discussants: Gitta Luiten, director of the Mondriaan Foundation (supports projects in the visual arts, design, and cultural heritage); Arnoud Odding, head of the National Glass Museum; and Marc Jacobs, senior advisor Culture and Cultural History for one of the Dutch provinces. Their job was to set [...]

Crossmedia @ the museum

Yesterday and today, I joined in on a Crossmedia workshop for employees of the Tropenmuseum, Tropentheater, and Tropenmuseum Junior, led by Jim Stolze and Rob Prass.  Among other things, participants were introduced into the world of Twitter, RSS, blogging, Igoogle, learned why the sender-receiver model of communication is no longer applicable, how to the museum [...]

23 ways to engage new audiences

The Tropenmuseum is one of a host of cultural heritage institutes currently hopping on the Web 2.0 train.  The museum wants to engage new audiences, and increase the number of visitors. The task to increase visibility on multiple platforms is taken pretty seriously. The museum has a multimedia producer, and has  recently hired a new [...]

Wiki loves art/NL part 2

The first two weeks of fieldwork at the Tropenmuseum have generated so much stimulating new information, that it is hard to choose out of many possible topics. For now, I’ll stick to the event described in Anne’s earlier post: the photo competion WikiLovesArt/NL.  The basic idea, as Anne already mentioned, is that people make photographs of objects, art works, [...]

Databasing the arts

On Thursday 12 and Friday 13 November ‘09, a conference will be held in London that seems very interesting for our project. It is organised by CHArt (Computers and the History of Art; Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London). This year’s topic is Object and Identity in a Digital Age. We hope [...]

Museums and web 2.0

The past couple of weeks, I have been using the web to get a sense of what is going on in the museum world as to web 2.0 developments. It’s part of the fieldwork for the Tropenmuseum case. My general impression is that there is a large, active community of professionals in the museum world [...]

Presentation at Tropenmuseum

Yesterday, we presented an outline of our research to some of the employees of the Tropenmuseum and the Royal Tropical Institute. The weather was lovely, which made our wait for tram 14 a lot more pleasant.

It was very nice to be able to share our plans for the fieldwork at the museum, and to meet [...]