Since video is something that we see people posting frequently to Twitter, we thought it would be cool to get an artist that works with video to take over the feed for a month to post some clips. Tracey agreed, and rather than posting deep, brooding avant garde art films (that people on Twitter probably wouldn’t have time to watch), Tracey has decided to post her favorite YouTube clips with a bit of commentary about each. Some clips will be funny and familiar while others more obscure, but all will say a lot about Tracey, so we hope our 1stfans will have a fun time watching and getting to know her through them.
In keeping with the interactive vein, I’ll re-tweet some of the 1stfans @replies with their own related video clips on the feed (look for the “WC” at the end of the tweet so you know it’s me posting and not Tracey). We’ve seen a preview and this is going to be pretty wacky and fun!
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.
The Black List Project just opened last week and our education staff really wanted to include visitor response as part of the exhibition. Typically, we do this with our electronic comment books which have been working well for us, but the educators felt that a more personal storytelling was what they were looking for with this show and incorporating video would help fulfill those needs.
The original idea was to set up recording times and take quick video responses in the gallery, but knowing how much editing work would come our way…my response was a very fast and very frustrated “we can’t possibly take this on.” We started thinking about self-service video kiosks, but quickly found engineering a custom solution was going to drain too much staff time and products for purchase were insanely expensive, so no go. Argh!
…well, we found a way and it’s simple enough that anyone can do it. We are taking advantage of YouTube’s Quick Capture feature, which allows anyone to use a webcam to directly record a video to their YouTube channel. We grabbed the two Macbooks we had used for Click!…setup a YouTube channel for the exhibition…fired up the webcams…and locked everything down with wKiosk. Presto, a working video kiosk with no overhead! I couldn’t be more excited that we were able to find a Scrappy-Doo solution that got us over the technical and budgetary hurdles.
Now that we’ve got these working, we are all a little curious to see what in the world happens. There’s plenty of monkey-business going on with our e-comment books—I always joke that you always know when there’s a school group in the building That’s to be expected, though. There’s no established community around those books and they can be completely anonymous, so it’s easy to see why someone will goof off. For the most part, the e-comment books work well, we get meaningful comments and discussion from them. Our visitors have come to expect them and we recommend this system as something that has had great benefit (if you are interested in implementing, you might take a look at Nina Simon’s recent post for some ideas).
I have to wonder, though, what happens when you turn a camera on? Are there fewer goof-offs because comments are tied directly to an identity (at first glance, that’s probably too optimistic)? Are there fewer responses because visitors are less comfortable with this format? Are responses more personal because the act of commenting is more confessional (despite the tech glitches we are still working through, maybe yes)? These video kiosks are out in the open in a large space…are people attracted to that or would they rather have a more private setting like a booth? Do visitors shy away from it by the very nature that the resulting video is hosted on YouTube?
Clearly, we have more questions than answers right now and I’m betting we may make adjustments as we go through the run, but it’s kind of fun to try something new and you just know I’ll report back on what we learn
For the past several months, we’ve been working with filmmaker Matt Wolf on an upcoming video project. The video is in the final stages of editing, but I wanted to take a moment to write about the process. When we first met with Matt, he had the idea to do a rapid-fire combine of visitor portraits and objects in the collection. Because his vision was so closely tied to our mission (which considers the visitor experience paramount), we thought it might be an interesting twist if the collection photography used in piece was actually taken by our visitors.
We had been running a Brooklyn Museum Flickr group and had always been thrilled by the diversity and the quality of the shots that had been submitted to the group over the years. For the video, we selected 10 photographers who had been part of our Flickr community to participate by photographing areas of the permanent collection. Similar to our earlier Visitor Video Competition, one of the most interesting elements became how each photographer captured objects in a distinctly different way. As shots started to come in for review, I kept finding myself really looking at objects again and noticing how different the photography differed from our own. Objects that I see every day, took on new life and we hope these different takes will help show off the museum in a new way in the final video. (more…)
FAQ
That’s to be expected, though. There’s no established community around those books and they can be completely anonymous, so it’s easy to see why someone will goof off. For the most part, the e-comment books work well, we get meaningful comments and discussion from them. Our visitors have come to expect them and we recommend this system as something that has had great benefit (if you are interested in implementing, you might take a look at Nina Simon’s 
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum 