Edison labs, Henry Ford Museum, Detroit.  Via gruntzooki on Flickr.

Creating a labs area of the collection online, gives us a chance to play around with some ideas and look at trends we are starting to see, but allows us to present projects in an informal way for discussion and visitor testing.  Some labs projects will only take us a few days to put together, while others might take a bit longer.  Depending on what we find out and how we see things used, we may integrate some of these projects into the collection’s main layout.

To start labs, we thought we’d explore love—hey, it is February after all!  We’ve been sitting on a bunch of data that shows how people are reacting to certain objects online and in the galleries.  This first project, What is Love?, displays top-ranked objects broken down by the ways in which people are showing their adoration. There’s active love:  online Posse members selecting objects as favorites in our collection during their web session or visitors coming to the museum and using our interactive gallery guide, BklynMuse, to favorite objects they like on view in the gallery. There’s also passive love: stats generated from the Google Analytics API to show additional metrics such as objects that are most viewed, when folks spend the most time on page with an object, or objects that are getting the most link love on the internet. All of these things shown together, can start to put together a picture of loving going on with regard to objects in our collection.

What is Love? Our first labs project—go explore the data and tell us your thoughts!

I guess I shouldn’t find it all that surprising that our nudes and the erotic sculpture in the Egyptian collection are all quite popular via the web, but I was surprised at how much variance there is between the categories and how few objects are loved across metrics. We released a sneak preview of What is Love? to our Facebook page last week, one person noted that there seemed to be high percentage of women depicted.  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments—notice any correlations between the data here?  Want to see more of this kind of thing in labs?

Today, we are launching BklynMuse, a gallery guide that is designed to complement the more structured museum experience.  In its most basic form, it’s a community-powered recommendation system for the objects that are on display here.  As visitors move through the galleries, they can recommend objects to other visitors.  Based on the  recommendations you give it, this muse will crunch the collective data and present other suggestions for you as you move from room to room.  The guide does other stuff too—it gives access to our cell-phone audio stops, our YouTube videos—but the real power in the device comes from visitors sharing their own takes in our galleries.

This is one of a series of things we are implementing to bridge both the online experience with the in-person visit.  In the case of BklynMuse, Posse members get their recommendations saved to their profiles for future reference—think of it as bookmarking your favs on the go in the gallery and then being able to access them later.  Even more than that, Posse members can create sets of objects on our website and annotate them and, if you choose to sign into your Posse account on BklynMuse, your sets will be right there waiting for you to follow in the gallery.  Those same sets can be shared and featured for other visitors to see, so your voice…your notes…your selections…may be highlighted, in all their Posse glory, for all to see.

For those of you reading the blog, you know I’ve been on a bit of a failure kick lately—cautious observations of visitors glued to screens and kiosks that drive me slightly bonkers—you may be wondering how this could possibly be different.   We designed this interface as more like a scavenger hunt than a multimedia guide.  It’s something that can guide you to objects and something you can use to help guide others, but it’s not meant to replicate the actual experience of really looking at the work, so I’m hoping this reduces the screen glue. As with everything, only time will really tell the outcome, but it’s worth a try.

In areas like The Dinner Party and Luce Visible Storage, suddenly you have a whole kiosk’s worth of information at your fingertips…right there in the space when you need, it in an unobtrusive way.

There’s even more after the jump if you are curious.

Logistics:

Why a web app?  We wanted to develop something that could be utilized on as many devices as possible.  Now, that means we can’t do some fancy bells and whistles…like integration with iPhone cams, etc., but we believe accessibility is paramount.

Why room codes?  We went with short codes instead of something like QR codes because I pine for the day that QR codes become truly easy to use.  Different cell phone cameras trying to capture QR codes in low light = one heck of a mess.  We are going for the most universal method, the simplest way to get visitors the information.

What’s to prevent a cascade? We’ve got lots of Wisdom of Crowds randomization built into the output to avoid it.

Why can’t I comment on objects and create sets on the fly during my visit?  That may be coming in version 2, but for now we wanted to be conscious that typing on these little device keyboards can be a frustrating and painful experience.  As it stands, the interface is almost all touch-and-go with as little typing needed as possible and the expectation is this will lowers the barrier to entry and allows the app to be more easily used.

Considerations:

At the moment, we are relying on visitors to bring their own hardware and we don’t how many of our visitors have these devices or want an experience like this. We will be watching usage closely, but also will be monitoring how many visitors come to the front desk to ask if we have units available.   For now, this is a starting point and as we learn more we will be considering if checkout at the front desk is necessary option that we need to provide.

What’s Next:

Eventually, the data gathered will power a recommendation system on our website.  This is something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but hesitated because objects present themselves so differently via the web.  We are hoping that data gathered in the gallery will be more true to the objects, so when we port this back to the website, the recommendations will be based on what visitors physically saw in the gallery rather than how objects are (mis)interpreted via the web.

As many readers know, we have an existing iPhone app that was developed using our API, so you might be wondering how these two things will co-exist.  Well, we think BklynMuse is something that works well in the building—everything is location specific, recommendations are something you give in the gallery while looking at objects.  The iPhone app works well outside of the building as a browser for our collection. Because the iPhone app is now open source, our internal team will be working to contribute code to combine the two things in the Fall. Ideally, when you download the iPhone app in the future, the home screen will present you with two choices “I’m in the building and want to explore.” or “I want to browse the collection away from the museum.” Based on the adventure you choose, the app will either bounce you to BklynMuse or you will be directed to the existing iPhone app.

Thank You:

For the first time since Click!, we did some extensive beta testing with some pretty amazing people willing to give their time to this project and this testing was essential.  We not only learned a lot from it, but it sparked some great ideas along the way and we wouldn’t be at this juncture without the help and dedication of: Mike, Rik, Lisa, Erin, MuseumNerd, Wesley, Mike, Matt & Kendall, Amy, Stephen, Ronnye & Fred, Farrah, Amy, Dave and Courtney.  Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to make this app even better.

If you got this far, you must want to give it a go?

We did extensive testing with mobile device browsers, but didn’t bother with desktop browsers, so you’ll have to humor us and use Firefox if you are testing via desktop instead of a mobile device.  Point your browser to m.brooklynmuseum.org and scale it down so the window is small.  If you need room codes you can find them on my Flickr (the codes are on labels in each gallery, I’m just giving you maps to be friendly).  If you are on the iPhone or iPod Touch, you can add the app to the homescreen after you hit it in mobile Safari.  Don’t forget to set your mood and have some fun!

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!

So, today, we are introducing “Change My Settings.” From within Tag! You’re It!, you can now change your game preferences by selecting the areas of our collection that you’d like to see:

As Mike mentioned earlier, joining the Posse is now easier than ever with our Google account integration and we are excited enough about these enhancements, that Bob (along with a few willing participants) made us a really awesome video to celebrate.  Have fun tagging and many thanks for all your enthusiasm (50,000+ tags!!) thus far!

But wait! Before you start kicking yourself for signing up with us before we released this super-awesome feature, let me tell you this: we have carefully engineered a solution to your problem. If you login with your existing username and password, then navigate to your account page, you will see a link to transition your account to use Google ID.

Also, if for some reason you come to an impasse with Google and would like to start using another emails address and password to log into our site, you can easily transition to using any other account you choose.