Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

We have just joined The Commons on Flickr to share a selection of images with the Flickr community and to begin our partnership, it seemed appropriate that we start at the beginning! William Henry Goodyear was the Museum’s first Curator of Fine Arts. As an architectural historian (he is known for his book entitled The Grammar of the Lotus), he documented his travels. Goodyear collected lantern slides to illustrate his slide lectures which he presented here at the Museum and during his travels around the world. What you see in The Commons today are selections of images documenting Egypt as it appeared around Goodyear’s time as well as what he saw when he visited the Paris Exposition in 1900.

Left: Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. Abu Simbel [selected images]. View 05: Egypt. Abu Simbel., n.d., This slide colored by Joseph Hawkes Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 Abu Simbel, image 9491).

Right: Paris Exposition: Champ de Mars and Palace of Metallurgy, Paris, France, 1900. Exposition of 1900. General view of the Chateau de Mars taken from the Chateau d’Eau. [The Champs de Mars towards the Metallurgie Palace]. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_015 image 1945).

While the Brooklyn Museum staff is the primary user of our Libraries and Archives, we are open to the public and are always looking to reach out to a wide and varied audience. One of the challenges is ensuring everyone knows which resources we have available and listening to the needs of our visitors, so we know what to provide and how best to present these materials. One of the more interesting results of “growing” an encyclopedic collection is that we have research collections that serve as an intellectual link to the objects and perhaps act as storytellers revealing the cultural context of the objects. Think about the possible stories behind these photographs and then tag the images with the story you see. Take a look at these photographs and tell us how you would like to use them. What other materials would you like to see?

We believe that by sharing these images we will support a better understanding of the cultures that have created the great art that is held by this Museum. We hope you will agree.

We join The Commons on Flickr today and do so in a manner we hope will start an interesting discussion. Our Principal Librarian, Deirdre Lawrence, has posted about the collections we’ve uploaded and I’m going to write a little about the techie details.

Flickr is a fantastic community. For the last two years, we’ve been uploading photographs (mostly behind-the-scenes of various installations) on the Museum’s Flickr feed. Our experience on Flickr has been a great one where we’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot from this community who speak their minds without hesitation. When The Commons came along, we jumped at the chance to be part of it because The Commons allows us the ability to upload works from our Archival collections and we hope by doing so, it will create an additional dialogue.

To begin our partnership with The Commons, two sets of images have been uploaded—a selection of images from the Paris Exposition of 1900 (part of our Goodyear Archival Collection) and a selection of images of Egypt from our collection of lantern slides. The Paris images are uploaded at a standard 1200 pixel wide medium resolution, but for the Egyptian images we wanted to offer something more in the spirit of “The Commons”—the Egyptian set has been uploaded at the highest resolution we could provide based on the original scans. This means you can go to “all sizes” and see these images near 3000 pixels on the longest side. While we can’t offer images at this quality all the time—the small amount of revenue we generate from reproduction offsets the costs of caring for the collection—we did want to see what it teaches us about the needs of the people looking. This is “The Commons” after all, so let’s take this opportunity to talk about the issues. Is high resolution really more useful? Is the sampling of these materials of interest in this arena? How are you using our images? What images of yours relate to our collection images?

So, drop us a line (comment here or at Flickr or email) and let us know what you think. If you have a “now” image to our “then”, use the HTML code Flickr provides to post that image response into the comments area. What’s next into The Commons for us? No clue. We are curious to hear from you about the materials we’ve uploaded and will let that be our guide as we consider what to upload next.

Final note: Deb, Angie, Steeev thanks for making this upload and captioning process easy on me

Wowzer! If you were one of the 3344 visitors who cast 410,089 evaluations for Click!, you know what a commitment it really was. I can’t say this enough: Thank You!

This was a very dedicated group of people who gave a lot of time to the process. On average photographs were viewed 22 seconds prior to submitting an evaluation and that’s an eternity in web-time. If you calculate the average time on a photo with the 389 images, we are talking a gargantuan effort and this is especially true when you consider that our evaluation tool was almost universally disliked.

We didn’t set out to make life difficult, but we were concerned that the evaluation be as fair as we could possibly make it and that meant minimizing influence. There were some encouraging comments here and there about the tool, but for the most part, people seemed to dislike it and they were going to make sure I knew it. “Frustrating,” “tedious,” “tiring,” and “time-consuming” were just some of the words that came into my inbox. There was my personal favorite: “can you fix the website so i can VOTE !!!??! ! it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to navigate thru your website and see all the pictures quickly and easily. can you fix that ASAP! !?” …and you know it’s really bad when you get a call from you father at 10 p.m. and the conversation goes something like this:

Dad: Shell, you know you can’t skip around in there…?

Me: Yes, Dad, I know…it’s because of all these reasons (blah, blah, blah and frustration starts to mount)

Dad: I know, but there are close to 400 photographs in there!

So, let’s recap. The evaluation tool was designed to be fair. Images were randomized, attribution was withheld, comments (all 3098 that were left during the evaluation period) were withheld, linking was prevented and our algorithm ensured that all images would be seen an equal amount of times (approx 1054 times per image). Sure, we could have provided clickable thumbnails and ways to skip around, but that would have easily skewed results toward images that looked good in thumbnail format and there would have been no way to assure that each image would get equal time. In addition, an interface like that would have made it really easy for people to go vote for a particular work and skew the results — something we were specifically trying to avoid.

While most feedback indicated frustration, I will share one very interesting comment that I think really indicates some success with our methodology: “I have fresh empathy for curators who have to decide what’s in or out. It must be a grueling process“. When we first started working on Click! almost every curator who had been a part of an open call or a juried process had much the same story to tell, that it is often a tiring and tedious process. The feedback from the crowd was a decent indicator that the process really was reflecting some of the realities of a juried process.

Thank you for hanging in there. This really was an amazing effort and your dedication and support will shape this exhibition. In the coming weeks we will be discussing more issues and release more data as we go along, so stay tuned and let me know your thoughts in the comments area.

I’ll be posting a Click! update later today after we crunch some numbers. We won’t be posting any results until the exhibition opens on June 27, but we will be writing about different aspects of the open call and evaluation process and will include some basic numbers on the amount of participation. In the meantime, there are two projects worth mentioning here.

First, our friends at the Walker Art Center are having an call for submissions for artist-designed political yard signs. The call for the My Yard Our Message project is open to artist worldwide through June 30. Robin has a post up with details and be sure to catch this great radio interview with Justin about the project here.

Second, many of the photographers who submitted photos for Click! are part of the What’s the Hook community photo project. What’s the Hook will be at various venues in Red Hook this summer and each will host a separate set of photographs. Full schedule has been posted and the first show at the Kentler is up now.

Watch the blog for Click! updates throughout the next month and during the exhibition’s run.

What in the world am I talking about?? Brooklyn-based artist Steve Lambert has developed a plug-in for the Firefox browser that block ads and replaces them with art. There’s a lot more about Add-Art (and how great it is) over at C-Monster’s blog, so I won’t recap here.

We caught up with Steve about a year ago in the comments on the Walker’s post about the application and mentioned the Museum would be interested in contributing images to the project. Steve has been updating us with progress reports and then, a month ago, suggested we curate a show for the launch.

Add-Art shows are made up of 8 individual works at 15 different sizes. We needed to present a selection of collection works that would look good in all these different sizes knowing the plugin would randomly present the images depending on what ad space it was attempting to block. Hiroshige’s prints are detailed enough to create interesting crops and are already online, so they seemed a natural choice for this project. Joan Cummins, our Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art selected the 8 prints…

…and here’s what the Hiroshige mash-up looks like for the Add-Art application.

Add-Art publicly releases today (May 22) and there is a panel discussion at the New Museum this evening. Congrats to Steve and the team and thanks for letting us take part in this great app! Instructions for installing are on the Add-Art site.