Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

As most of our readers know, we encourage tagging on our online collection and we created Tag! You’re It to make that contribution more fun and more relevant.  We’ve been surprised at the tagging that has taken place, how much of it is really excellent work and how committed some people have been to making our collection even more searchable.  In the ten months since our collection has gone online, we’ve seen 69,579 tags—3,815 system tags automatically extracted from our internal collection system, 58,107 contributed by members of our Posse and 7,657 created by anonymous users. By far, the best results have come from our Posse of logged in users—both in terms of quantity and quality (fewer than 1% of Posse-generated tags have been removed).  The auto-generated system tags are mostly OK, but they could use some human vetting. The tags generated by anonymous taggers can sometimes be a different story.

We designed our system to accept tags from users who might not want an account and that’s been both valuable and a bit of trouble.  On one hand, the 7,657 tags by anonymous contribution are nothing to sneeze at, but we’ve had to keep a close eye on those submissions and have deleted roughly 6% of them due to complete inaccuracy.  We could eliminate the capability to add tags anonymously, but 94% of those contributions are of great value and, more importantly we want our online collection to be welcoming to anyone with or without an account.  That said, there are plenty of people testing us just for fun and when the tags “how long will it take you to delete this tag” and “are you going to block me” showed up on the scene, there was only so long it was going to take an overworked Technology department to do something about it.  We knew the Brooklyn Museum Posse would have a lot to do with the solution.

The hunt for the Governor gang of bushrangers. A posse of mounted police, aboriginal trackers and district volunteers. Jimmy & Joe Governor were sighted at Stewarts Brook on 12 September 1900 - Stewarts Brook, NSW / by A C Jackson (via State Library of New South Wales on the Flickr Commons).

Today we are introducing a new game called Freeze Tag! which puts control of the tags back into the hands of our most valued community members.  If you are a member of our Posse, you can delete tags from object pages−this is new, previously we were not allowing tag deletion except by system admins. For any tag that is deleted, it takes another two pairs of Posse eyes to “agree” within Freeze Tag! before that tag’s fate is sealed.  On the other hand, if three Posse members within the game think the tag should be saved, it will be restored.  After a short stint on the live site, all tags created anonymously will automatically be “challenged” and moved into the game for vetting by Posse.  Freeze Tag! is designed with all that great Wisdom of Crowds mentality−influence is minimized by each Posse member coming to their own decision independently, then we aggregate into a collective decision to determine if a tag should stay or go.  After all, why should one person decide the worth of a tag, when a collective decision may be more accurate?  It will be interesting to see the results of this and we’ll report back as we see what happens.

To start Freeze Tag! off with a bang, we’ve populated it with all the anonymous tags to date and, in addition, thrown in all those auto-generated tags that need a bit of human review.  This may sound complicated, but I think when you play Freeze Tag!, you’ll agree that all the complicated goings on behind-the-scenes is bundled up in a pretty simple package that, we hope, is fun to play.  No spoilers or anything, but be on the lookout for cameos from our own on-site security posse.

Rock on, Posse—thank you for all your incredible work to date and we hope you continue to have fun with us as we move forward with our collection online!

We all know this feeling, right? When you walk into an exhibition and there’s one work that really stops you in your tracks? On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, it happened to me at the Mattress Factory’s Inner and Outer Space exhibition. I was fascinated with a work by Mary Temple, a Brooklyn-based artist, that was installed on the MF’s 5th floor.

Installation view, courtesy Mattress Factory.

Every day, as Mary was reading the day’s news via various news sites on the internet, she would select a political figure to draw on a tabloid sized sheet of paper. Each day, she would scan the drawing, send to the MF where they would print and hang it in the gallery in a calendar style format on the walls. I spent a long time pouring over the walls of the exhibition space and left wanting to follow this project day-by-day, but knew that I wouldn’t be able to.

When Will and I first conceptualized the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed, this project of Mary’s was one of the first works that came to my mind. Could we figure out a way to bring this project into the feed and tweet each day with a link to the drawing? I knew that the MF show was closing in mid-January and wondered if a continuation could take place online for the 1stfans, so a quick call to Jeffrey at MF was in order and the next day I was e-mailing Mary (thanks, Jeff).

Mary Temple has been working on this series since 2007 and drawings are archived in stacks by month in flat files that reside in her Brooklyn studio.

This has been an incredibly fun collaboration for us on many levels. In reaching out to the artist, it was our chance to work with the MF and they’ve also given us some video footage of the process that will be up soon. For Mary, we developed a way to display the drawings in calendar-format, so the virtual presentation will mirror the layout in the gallery with an added Twitter twist. 1stfans will be able to follow day-by-day, then everyone will be able to see the work in our own galleries because we will be installing the work for one night only at the March 7th Target First Saturday. You can follow along by joining 1stfans and we hope to see you there!

I’ll leave you reading Mary’s own narrative about the work:

Mary Temple
Currency
2007-present

On September 24, 2007 the president of Iran spoke at Columbia University amid protests and much controversy. I found the event, coverage and images of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad compelling and made some drawings of him from various Web–based news sources. The drawings piqued my interest in him as a character—I wanted to know more about his history as well as Iran’s past. Drawing him expanded my thinking about world events. I’ve continued to make a drawing of a world leader every day since then. My goal in the beginning was simply to concentrate on one event each day—to try to grasp a minuscule portion of the barrage of information that surrounds each of us in a 24-hour news cycle. As the research and drawings accumulated, I found that the news events marked my own personal history as well as delineating a (biased) global event time line. In order to underscore that relationship, and the diaristic nature of the undertaking, I hung the drawings in a calendar format—7 day (columns) across, and 5 to 6 week (rows) down. I placed the drawings on the page according to my own feelings of optimism or pessimism regarding the day’s event, the higher on the page the greater my hope for world harmony.

Each evening I select a story and the character (a world leader), draw a portrait in pen and ink on a tabloid size sheet of paper, and record the event with an image caption at the bottom of the page. The drawing is then scanned and emailed to a museum. Every morning the museum staff receives my email scan, prints the portrait on a similar tabloid size sheet of handmade paper and hangs it in a gallery next to the previous day’s drawings in the calendar grid. Entire calendar years accumulate in this way.

The title, of the piece, Currency, most obviously references my desire and attempt to keep current of world events, to try to understand some of what is happening in the world. It also refers to something that fascinates me about an industry that trades in a product that is only valuable until the moment it is heard, at which time it instantly loses its value. Yesterday’s news is an artifact which no longer has currency or power as a trade worthy item. The title Currency also refers to the scale of the portraits themselves, which might evoke a bank note or dollar bill portrait, the image of power and money entwined.

Update 1/29/09:  Video posted to YouTube.

In addition to our original partners (Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, V&A) we’ve now been joined by Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Houston Museum of Natural Science, The Hunter Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New-York Historical Society, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Taft Museum of Art—in all, 17 16 institutions willing to help engage their community of photographers to help get the wiki folks what they need.

My own personal props have to go out to Victor over at MoMA, who wins the gold star for bending over backwards to figure out the best way they could participate and still ensure everything falls into the public domain. Victor, that’s dedication! CJN212, thanks for the legwork over there. I have to say from an organizer standpoint, I couldn’t be more thrilled about how many institutions took the leap work with us on what will hopefully become a massive cross-institution community collaboration!

Not so super-secret meetup for the Wikipedia NYC Chapter. Topic of discussion? You guessed it: Wikipedia Loves Art. Wiki peeps and guests including Denise and Hazel from the MET, Victor from MoMA and moi. Check out that awesome ceiling w/ globe lights at Columbia University.

In the next week, we’ve got a lot of work to do to get scavenger hunt lists published and many of us are making final preparations for meetups. All details, including the lists will be published to the Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr group, so keep an eye on things over there (and congrats to us for creating what might be the longest Flickr group description…ever). There’s even a discussion getting started about the best way to shoot in museums to avoid glare off cases while working with no flash, no tripod restrictions.

Now that we have institutions, we need photographers! Please help us spread the word. Remember, because of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s offer, there’s a way you can participate from almost anywhere in the United States even if your local museum is not on the participant list. Good luck everyone, we are looking forward to seeing your shots!

In the same spirit that we asked Swoon to launch 1stfans in person (that is to say, with the Museum’s existing community in mind), we are delighted to announce that An Xiao is going to be the first artist on the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed. We’ve known An for a while and were ecstatic when she decided to submit a proposal for the 1stfans Twitter. Many of our community may already know An because her work was in the top 25% of Click! and perhaps you’ve seen her blog or her Twitter feed (both of which Shelley and I follow). I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her work is part of the Micro-Macro exhibition in NYC running through the end of this year, so hurry, go quick. But none of these reasons are why she was selected (lest you think that we are granting anyone favors). An’s proposal for using the Twitter Art Feed simply blew us away and when we forwarded it to curators Eugenie Tsai, Patrick Amsellem, and Lauren Ross, they were equally enamored. Since I’m not a curator, I’ll spare you my analysis and simply share with you how An will be using the Twitter Art Feed in her own words:

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In January 2006, Western Union put to rest the telegram, the groundbreaking new technology that allowed nearly-instant intercontinental communication and enjoyed almost two centuries of communications usage. Two months later, a new medium emerged, similar in many ways: Twitter. In a world of email, AIM and cell phones, it made barely a blip, but its importance is quickly becoming clear.

I propose using the 1stfans feed to tweet in Morse code. As writer Nicholas Carr noted, the parallels are apparent–speed, brevity, and a need for acronyms–, but the purposes are almost entirely separate. Whereas telegrams were used for business and important personal communication, tweets generally act as wide broadcasts and rarely contain substantive information per se, which emails and blogs are better suited for. In other words, telegrams conveyed news of deaths, deals and diplomacy; tweets convey breakfast habits.

Through tweeting Morse code, I aim to explore instant communication’s new direction by recalling its history. Rather than important issues, I will communicate daily minutiae, such as “Brushing my teeth” and “Tired. Need coffee.” Such usage of telegraph technology would have been inconceivable in its heyday. In so doing, I want to encourage 1stfans viewers to examine the evolution of instant communication and what purpose, exactly, is served by sharing such minor details of one’s life.

Samuel Morse, in his first telegraph, asked, “What hath God wrought?” His invention changed the world, especially with its influence on politics and business. What have Twitter, and other microblogging media, wrought upon the way we connect with others? What doors have they opened in the realm of personal and business relationships, and how have they expanded our sense of identity?

You may have read about the departure of George Oates in the media, but if not check out Seb’s blog post on the subject for starters. The thing that I worried about most with George’s absence was the idea that our cheerleader—the person who had a very personal connection to each Commons Institution, the one who spread her enthusiasm for our collections to the Flickr crowd—was suddenly gone and how does a gaping hole like that get filled? Well, I learned something very valuable. When community is strong, shifts can take place that fill the gap and in this instance, that’s exactly what happened.

To my relief, a few days after we found out about George, I came in to work one morning to a message in the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr inbox. I won’t quote the whole thing here, but BigBean sent a lovely note asking us to join a group - “I was very surprised to find that there was not one single flickr group devoted to the Commons! In true flickr tradition, I decided to start one. On flickr, groups is where it’s at!”

Boom! In the simplest way, using Flickr’s existing structure, suddenly we have a fantastic group run by some really committed admins and the participation that is going on there is as rich as it gets and it’s only been two days. This new group provides a direct link to the people within the Flickr community who really love The Commons and this was something we had been missing. Previously, we could make one-on-one connections, but the group allows for much greater interaction among all participants.

As most of you know, we’ve got a set of challenges we have to think about as we move forward in The Commons and, now, the feedback from this group will help us greatly. To say we are looking forward to following and participating in this group is, well, a bit of an understatement.

Looking for something fun? How about this thread where Brenda Anderson is curating mail delivery across Commons collections? Awesome.