One of the things we hope to do with the technology posts on the blog is to take a look at our projects and carefully assess them—to look at our successes and failures and to examine complexities that can occur with any project. Wikipedia Loves Art is no exception and this will begin a series of posts on the lessons learned. For as much room as I have here, there just won’t be room for everything, so if you are an institution considering a similar project—I’d encourage you to e-mail me directly. That said, it’s important to note that these are my thoughts as the organizer of the project. Other institutions and participants may feel differently and I encourage them to express thoughts in the comments for further discussion. In addition to my own posts, Erin Sweeney, the fellow Brooklyn Museum staffer who’s been working on this project, will be blogging later in the week. This was a massive project.
Hey! We are doing a lot of tech posting this week, so if this is not your thing, we will be back to more varied material in the blog next week. If this kind of thing interests you, let’s go after the jump… (more…)
Let’s take a look at the basic statistics. During the show’s four month run, visitors recorded 482 videos, 236 of which made it to our Black List Project YouTube channel. Of the 236 that were published on the channel, 96 made it to the Brooklyn Museum favorites playlist. We had 43,386 video views overall, but keep in mind one video (recorded by one of our security guards) was seen over 23,000 times when it was featured on YouTube during MLK day. Also, the channel was given non-profit status at YouTube which means auto-play is activated for videos featured on our channel and this will raise the view count.
Moderation
The project required a sizable amount of moderation. Videos went live throughout the day and were post-moderated in the evenings. Depending on how many videos were recorded, moderation took between 5-15 minutes per day. When we had higher volume at Target First Saturday, we’d see anywhere between 40-80 videos recorded and this moderation required an hour or two. Interestingly, we received some of our best comments during Target First Saturday and the ratio on those days was much more signal than noise, so even in the volume, it felt worth it. Moderated videos fell into three areas and I’ve left a few of these live so you can get a chuckle: 1) kids goofing off 2) adults goofing off 3) people who would press record and walk away. There were also more than a few instances of will our hardware make it out of this experiment alive!!??! Only one video was removed because it violated our comment guidelines. Typically, we don’t moderate this heavily, but on this particular project we decided to do so because wading through video content to get to decent recordings is a lot more difficult than scanning text comments for gold. As someone who did almost all of the moderation on the project, I can tell you it’s a time-consuming process and not one that I’d want to put our web visitors through. We toyed with the idea of letting the community moderate itself at YouTube (ratings were left on), but we ran into issues there. For starters, we didn’t have enough traffic to the channel to generate enough ratings on all the videos. You can see what happens when you look at most viewed. Some videos were seen a lot (due in part to our featuring the videos in different ways) and others were not seen much at all—had we left all the content, I have a feeling the view numbers would have plummeted out of sheer viewer frustration.
We ran into one significant issue along the way and this is something I was prepared for in my head, but perhaps not in reality. I was surprised by how many members of the community were sharing racist statements at YouTube (we have never had this problem on other platforms). *wow* can only describe some of the comments that were deleted because they were in such clear violation our comment guidelines. Only one video was deleted due to a violation in guidelines, but the opposite was true on YouTube, where in my entire career, I have never deleted more comments or blocked so many users. We have a very high threshold, so just know this problem was significant. There was something about the subject matter of the show, what we were asking and how people were responding, combined with this particular on-line community that generated a lot of issues in this arena. Now that the show has closed, we will go in and turn off comments on every video and that’s a first for us.
Technical Issues
We had a some technical trouble (crashing, sound mismatches, pixelated capture) in the early videos. We solved it by prioritizing traffic on that part of the LAN and enabling flow control at the switch side. So you need a strong LAN infrastructure where you can tweak a bit if you are seeing problems. I would not try this over a wifi connection. We also found lights were needed and we grabbed those at Ikea for very little money.
Archiving
I don’t have a great answer for this. Because the videos are uploaded directly to YouTube, archiving them becomes a manual process where we use free tools to download the files back to our systems. This is a time-consuming process, so we will probably only do this for the ones that made our favorites list. In addition, the channel and some of the videos with comments and ratings will be screenshot. The channel itself will stay up for as long as it can be there—we have no plans to remove it.
Success?
Yes, but there’s more we can do next time. This was a very simple system which cost us very little in actual dollars. As low-fi as it was, it worked well to provide something that we couldn’t have afforded otherwise. Staff time was needed for moderation, but other than the volume at Target First Saturday, the time needed to be accounted for, but was not overwhelming. I will never forget seeing more than one visitor in tears when expressing themselves at these kiosks. Browse through these videos to get an idea of why this was so great.
Given the amount of moderation, I don’t think we’d use these often, but when we have a really important question we want to ask, it will be worth considering. If I had to do it all over again, I’d make sure we had our favorites playing in the gallery alongside the recording area, so people could get inspired by what others had to say—closing the loop and bringing the voices back into the gallery. For the record, our Education Department was advocating this from the start, but given the time constraints we were under, we couldn’t make this part of the first round. Nina Simon also has some good reasons for it here that you may want to read. In a future instance, we’d ideally leverage the YouTube API to allow people in the gallery to comment on and rate the existing videos, but that’s a pretty large project for another day. For now, we were happy with and learned a lot from this first try.
When we announced Mary Temple for the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed in February, one of the things that Shelley mentioned was our collaboration with the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. If we can find a way to feature artists whose work has been or will be seen elsewhere in different forms, then we’re providing a way for more people to access this work. That’s part of the reason we are happy to collaborate with THE THING and Brooklyn-based writer Jonathan Lethem. THE THING is an object based quarterly publication that was created and is edited by two visual artists. For each issue, a different writer, artist or filmmaker is invited conceive of an everyday object that somehow incorporates text. This object is then reproduced and sent to the subscribers. All issues are a kept secret until they arrive.
When Jonn and Will at THE THING mentioned that Jonathan Lethem was going to do Issue 7 in in May, we knew it would be great to try to get Jonathan to do the Twitter Art Feed for April as a way for fans of his work so see him in two different formats back-to-back, all in anticipation of his new novel, Chronic City, which comes out in the Fall. Jonn and Will said something striking that inadvertently convinced me that we should try to get him on the Twitter Art Feed: “We both felt like much of Jonathan’s work dealt with objects…or in some case the language felt like an object itself.” Since we’re using the Twitter Art Feed as a way for artists to explore ideas about language, artistic production, and other new concepts, Shelley and I saw no reason that a writer couldn’t be on the feed, and Eugenie Tsai, our John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, agreed.
Jonathan Lethem lives in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn is the setting for two of his novels: Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn. Shelley caught up on his work recently during a layover in the Sydney airport.
After that, it was just a matter of seeing what Jonathan wanted to do on the feed. When we spoke on the phone, it became clear to me why he agreed to collaborate with us. Here’s Jonathan, in his own words:
“For the last few years (and in another sense, for my entire life), I’ve been concerned with fictions that among other things present human encounters with “impossible objects”, a description that encompasses instances as diverse as Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra. I’ve finished a novel, to be published in October, called Chronic City, in which the object in question is called a “chaldron.” During the years of this book’s writing I found myself by chance repeatedly drawn into collaborations with a series of other artists or art-presenters (see: Jennifer Palladino, Matthew Ritchie, and THE THING) and in each case I used it to further the foolish postulate that “chaldrons” were a part of the world outside the novel, an error shared by my book’s characters. On the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed you’ll overhear tweets from a group of deluded aspirants to chaldron-ownership, as they debate strategies for winning a chaldron in an on-line auction.”
You can look for Jonathan’s tweets on the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed for the entire month of April, and then if you’re interested you can subscribe to THE THING at www.thethingquarterly.com to see Jonathan’s issue in late May.
Having the opportunity to write labels for objects in the collection is one of my favorite things about being an intern at the Brooklyn Museum. One of my labels is for a work entitled “Man with a Sword,” part of a group of drawings currently on display in the Arts of the Islamic World gallery. This installation of objects explores drawing as a medium of expression in the eastern Islamic world.
I chose to do research on this piece for purely aesthetic reasons as well as to satisfy my own curiosity. The drawing seemed different from other Islamic drawings I had seen, and I wanted to find out why. When you can devote your time to researching one particular object in depth, you come across an incredible amount of interesting information. Unfortunately, limitations on text length mean it’s not possible to share every bit of available research with the museum’s visitors, so the goal in writing a label like this is to convey a large amount of information in a clear and concise yet simultaneously interesting way. The most difficult thing is deciding what you want to focus on.
Compared to the other drawings in this installation, “Man with a Sword” seems oddly rigid and geometric, which is unusual when so many Islamic drawings are driven by the smooth, graceful brushwork style inspired by Islamic calligraphy. As I discovered in my research, this work was created in the tradition of Islamic astrological drawings. The Book of Fixed Stars, written by the Iranian astronomer cAbd al-Rahman al-Sufi in 964 CE, would have provided ample source material for the artist who created “Man with a Sword”: it is filled with anthropomorphic representations of different constellations. For me, the most interesting thing about Al-Sufi was that he was one of the first to translate Greek astrological works into Arabic and compare the two cultures’ constellations; Boötes, the likely inspiration for this piece, was referenced as early as Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 700 BCE) and appears in numerous ancient mythologies as a hunter or herdsman. This became the focus for my label-writing, since I thought that other people would find it interesting as well.
Works on paper are light sensitive, and can only be displayed for a few months at a time. Drawings of the Islamic World will be on display until April, however, so there is still time to see “Man with a Sword” in person!
The season is over. We finished digging on Tuesday and spent the rest of this week cleaning up, checking notes and taking final photographs. Our major achievements this season were the restoration of the Taharqa Gate and Chapel D and the excavation of part of the area to its west. You are looking at the west face of the gate across the front area of the precinct to Temple A in the background.
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