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A Day in Training

I know that everyone on the team agrees—spending time learning about the collection is a privilege, an honor, and a lot of fun. Training started…

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Amassing Encyclopedic Knowledge

ASK is a tool that allows any museum visitor using the Museum’s app to have the opportunity to be in direct and immediate contact with…

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Meet the Audience Engagement Team

I am happy to announce that we’ve identified and hired six individuals who are knowledgeable, experienced at connecting people with art, and excited to take…

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Inside Out

The most passionate debates in our office have centered around how we are using geofencing in our upcoming app to present different information to users dependent upon…

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Iterating on the ASK Mobile Experience

The ASK mobile app has gone through many design iterations and has continually evolved in a quest to to offer an exceptional user experience. In…

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Lessons Learned Running User Testing

We have an incredible opportunity in front of us; the folks who will be using our ASK app are coming through the door every day, so we…

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Working out the Wiki

The most basic goal of the ASK app is to connect visitors to works of art in the museum. Although the conduit for this connection…

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Who are we looking for in an Audience Engagement Team?

I’ve just joined the Bloomberg Connects project as the Audience Engagement Lead. I will be heading the team that will be answering inquiries from visitors…

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Finding the Right People to ASK

On the surface, it might seem that our Bloomberg Connects project is all about tech. After all, this particular Bloomberg Philanthropies initiative is specifically for…

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Aspiring To Code Nirvana Through Tests

1 + 1 = 2? Obvious right? How about (2 + 2 x 4)^2? That’s a little more complicated but not so bad either. Over…

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13

The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale

Location aware technology as part of Bloomberg Connects is pretty vital.  We use it to tell the staff answering questions which gallery a visitor is standing…

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Benefitting from Code Prototypes

The dashboard—the web application our audience engagement team will use to answer incoming questions—is a complex application with many parts and before we hit the…

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SITU Studio (re)Envisions our Lobby as Part of Bloomberg Connects

We are excited to announce that the Brooklyn based design firm, SITU Studio, will be working with us to create a new, more friendly and…

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Pikachu, I choose you!

Preparing for a Post-Password Future with Pokemon Cards

Every year a gathering of hackers and information security professionals convene in Washington, DC to discuss how awful and broken the state of computer security…

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1

Challenges using the iPod Touch for a Mobile Testing Environment

In previous blog posts we’ve discussed the results of our initial user testing. In this blog post we’ll talk about the process and challenges of getting…

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Fighting Code Chaos with the Right Framework

From the outset we knew that the dashboard—the web application our audience engagement team will use to answer incoming questions—was going to be a huge…

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One API to Rule Them All

In the web development world, RESTish APIs (Application Programming Interface) have slowly become the de facto standard by which different computing systems are used to…

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1
Sticky Notes

Agile Baby Steps

By and large, most software in the world is made to a spec enshrined into immutability, then interpreted differently by various parts of the teams…

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User Testing ASK with our Members

Earlier this week I covered how we have been testing the ASK app internally. Today I am going to talk about how we user tested…

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Preparing for User Testing

I was very excited by the prospect of user testing in the field when I started working on the Bloomberg Connects project. As a web…

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6

Configuring the All-in-One Windows 8 PC into a Gallery Kiosk

In getting our ASK iPad pilot into full swing for Bloomberg Connects we needed to nail down how we were going to present the answers…

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2

Metrics Tell (Part of) the Story

As Shelley mentioned in her previous post, we’ve tweaked our comment kiosks over the past year or so, shifting them to an ask functionality only…

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Piloting the Complexities of Migrating iPad Kiosks into ASK

Brian and Jennie have been talking about our forthcoming mobile application, which is one of the public facing components of our Bloomberg Connects project, but…

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The Design Spin Cycle

When I started as Web Designer for the museum in January, I assumed I had been hired for a website redesign. Rookie mistake. As you’ve…

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3

Positioning Visitors with iBeacons

When Apple released iOS7 in 2013 one of the new features introduced was iBeacon. This technology would now enable Apple devices to pick up broadcasting…

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Simply ASK

In previous Bloomberg Connects blog posts we’ve described the iterative process of determining how we can engage the visitor, enhancing their museum experience. The ASK app (our…

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2

Going Responsive with Agile Planning

“Three Simple Truths” from The Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmussen: 1. It is impossible to gather all the requirements at the beginning of a project….

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1

Local Matters

If you’ve been reading the blog lately you know we’ve been taking stock of our digital efforts and making considerable changes. I’ve been discussing what’s not…

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Leveraging Technology for Connection

As Sara mentioned in her previous posts, we’ve been careful in this project to let visitor need pave the way toward an idea. It was…

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Piloting a Future Visitor Experience

A series of internal meetings got us set on the path for this project, but we wanted to test it with our visitors. To do…

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Taking Assumptions with a Grain of Salt

As Shelley introduced in her last post, we have the very ambitious goal of overhauling our visitor experience through an initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies…

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Visitor Powered Technology to Create a Responsive Museum

We are incredibly excited that Bloomberg Philanthropies has funded a three-year initiative as part of Bloomberg Connects and it gives us the opportunity to significantly improve…

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Teaching next-gen art making for the next generation of artists

Since we first made use of our 3D printer, we’ve grown the number of things we’ve used it for, ranging from creating a participatory experience…

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Clear Choices in Tagging

Remember my post on Social Change? We’ve been evaluating our digital projects with a careful eye toward what’s working and what isn’t.  At this juncture,…

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The nicest error page we hope you never see.

Cloud Watching

A few years ago we moved away from hosting our website infrastructure from its dusty basement to the Cloud. This brought a certain peace of…

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29

Social Change

There comes a moment in every trajectory where one has to change course.  As part of a social media strategic plan, we are changing gears…

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Robert Nardi photographing Senwosret III

How about a nice game of 3D printed chess?

Earlier this year, we started exploring how 3D printing could enhance the visitor experience and began by introducing it on that month’s sensory tour. In…

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The Dinner Party (Heritage Floor; detail)

Writing Women Back Into History

As I embarked on The Dinner Party Wikipedia project, my first step was to conduct a thorough assessment of the presence of these 1,038 women…

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Saul Bolton in front of the Brooklyn Museum.

Welcome Saul at the Brooklyn Museum

I am just delighted to announce the wonderful news that this fall, Brooklyn’s acclaimed Michelin star restaurant, Saul, will move from its current location in…

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The Dinner Party

Ending the ongoing cycle of omission

The conversation about sexism on Wikipedia is longstanding. In 2011, The New York Times Room for Debate took up the question of why there are…

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Figure of a Hornblower

“Africanizing” Wikipedia

As I’ve been leading the current Wikipedia initiative at the Brooklyn Museum, I have recently started working with our curator of African Art, Kevin Dumouchelle,…

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Latoya Ruby Frazier Interview PDF

A Conversation With Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier

One of the best parts of working in contemporary art is that we often work closely with artists, and are able to build relationships over…

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WikiAfrica logo

Collaborating with WikiAfrica

In September 2012, a representative from WikiAfrica approached us about working with them to provide Africa-related content to the Wikimedia Foundation’s websites. As the WikiAfrica profile…

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Wikipedia logo

Adding Our Voice to the Wikipedia Chorus

Our online collections have a relatively small number of visitors compared to the whopping 470 million unique visitors to Wikipedia each month. Every day, hundreds…

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In Conversation iPad Kiosk

Moving Toward a Conversation

If you’ve ever heard me speak at conferences you know that one of our most successful technology projects is also one of our simplest—the comment…

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Arts of the Islamic World gallery

The Reinstallation of the Asian and Arts of the Islamic World Galleries

If you’ve visited the second floor of the Museum recently, you may have noticed that it looks considerably more bare than normal. Big changes are…

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George Grosz, Otto Dix and World War I

In my last post, I highlighted several of the many prints in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection that, like those now on view in the Käthe…

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German Expressionist Prints at the Brooklyn Museum

The current exhibition in the Herstory Gallery of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art features the politically engaged work of early twentieth-century artist…

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Looking for love?

I’ve been at the Brooklyn Museum for about a year-and-a-half now, which is also as long as I’ve been a resident of our fair borough….

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Fine Lines Sensory Tour

Teaching with a 3D Simulacrum

When Shelley and David brought up the idea of 3D printing, my not-so-inner tech geek and my really-blatantly-outer education geek got pretty excited.  As Shelley…

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Join us at #table17

The Brooklyn Artists Ball is coming up next week and it’s an event that we are super excited about; this year’s ball celebrates Brooklyn and…

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Replicating a 19th Century Statue with 21st Century Tech

My first exposure to the world of 3D printing took place in 2009 approximately 500 feet under the Earth’s surface in a former missile silo…

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Double Pegasus

3D Printing for Accessibility

In the last year, we’ve seen a lot happening in the museum space with 3D printing.  The Smithsonian is working on what looks like a enormous project,…

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The End of the Season

Working together with the ARCE project team we got a great deal accomplished this season in preparing the site to open to visitors. Most of…

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Our last week of excavation

Our last day of excavation was February 28, but we still have work to do. Since we are leaving Luxor next week, this will be…

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Old projects, new projects

Jaap’s wife, Egyptologist Julia Harvey, arrived on February 15, completing this season’s small team. Julia has agreed to take on the pottery, with which she…

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Our first week

According to the late French scholar, Agnes Cabrol, these 3 badly damaged sphinxes sitting east of Chapel D date stylistically to the reign of Ramesses…

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Back at Mut – How things have changed!

Our first day at the site this year was February 6, so most of this first posting will be about how the site has changed…

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Connecting Cultures

Armed with Input

As you may recall, we kicked-off a visitor study about Connecting Cultures back in May with an updated approach based on a bit of trial-and-error…

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Yoko Ono's Wish Tree

Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree

Since the 1990s, Yoko Ono has created her work Wish Tree in locations all over world.   In honor of Ono’s acceptance of the Brooklyn Museum’s…

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Mosque Lamp 21.484

Othoniel’s Sculptures and Glass from the Islamic World

Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way just closed here in Brooklyn a few days ago, but The Secret Happy End (2008) is still on view in the…

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Yeon Ji Yoo

Join us in Celebrating GO

It’s hard to believe we are here after dozens of artist and voter meetups throughout the summer; an exhilarating open studio weekend that resulted in…

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Making Choices to Create an Exhibition

Once we had our group of the ten most nominated artists, Eugenie and I set out on our part of the collaboration. We visited the…

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GO installation

Creating a Framework to Collaborate with the Public

You have been following us from the 1708 studios to 9,457 nominations to 10 nominees to the 5 featured artists. Let’s take a look at…

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Going Gangnam Style in Support of Ai Weiwei

In late October, acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei and friends performed a parody of the “Gangnam Style” video by the South Korean rapper PSY. The video,…

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Henri Bendel Window Display

Candy Garments at Bendel’s Holiday Windows

If you want to see a fun window display go over to the Henri Bendel at 721 Fifth Avenue at 56th Street. Their designers used…

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Our GO Featured Artists

Since our announcement of our top ten nominated artists in late September, Eugenie Tsai (John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art) and I have visited their…

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William Hogarth’s Election series

After more than a year of partisanship, pundits, and polls, as well as a seemingly never-ending stream of gaffes, accusations, and distortions, Election Day has…

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Respite from Hurricane Sandy

As we all pulled ourselves together after the storm, those of us who managed to make it to the Museum yesterday were delighted to discover…

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Double Cosmetic Tube

Looking at Glass

Jean-Michel Othoniel has noted that he is fascinated and inspired by fragile glass objects that have survived for centuries, imbued with the unknown histories and…

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GO Nominated Artists

Your Ten Nominated Artists

After approximately 147,000 studio visits to 1,708 artists, and then 9,457 nominations, we have our top ten nominated artists. In alphabetical order: Aleksander Betko, Cobble…

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Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971). A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007

What is hands-on art history?

This fall, for the first time since the program began, Gallery/Studio is going to offer a class in art history… sort of. We refer to…

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Heat Map

Moving Toward an Exhibition with 9,457 Nominations

As you saw in Shelley’s previous post, we were thrilled about the level of participation over the open studio weekend. At the same time, we…

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Open Studio Weekend Visitation Statistics

As the nomination phase of GO continues this week, now is a good time to review the weekend and share some statistics about weekend visitation…

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GO See Art in Brooklyn This Weekend!

Our borough-wide open studio weekend is finally just days away! On September 8th and 9th, more than 1800 artists across 46 neighborhoods in Brooklyn will…

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