More often than not, visitors were browsing the iPads in groups.

I’ll mention there is a lot of possible error with those numbers. For starters, we were seeing that the iPads were overwhelmingly social devices with often more than one person using them at a time, so while we can get a rough idea of sessions, it’s not indicative of how many visitors actually used them or how many of the same visitors may have used more than one device throughout their visit.  In addition, there were some anomalies in the stats that had us questioning how we were capturing some of the metrics.  That said, it seems better to release what we know and ask you to take these metrics with a grain of salt as we dive deeper into this post.

Map of the gallery showing iPad placement.

In the exhibition layout, we had three iPads installed throughout the gallery near the works of art to be used while standing in the space.  There were also two iPads installed in a seating area at the end of the exhibition.  We were curious about possible differences in seating vs. standing metrics, so we were tracking stats accordingly.  Units that were placed in the galleries to be utilized standing were overall more popular than the units placed in a seating area at the end of the exhibition.  On average, wall units were used for ten minutes with visitors viewing 11.18 wiki articles, while units near seating were used for eight minutes with visitors taking a look at 9.55 wiki articles—again, that’s for the average session with the possibility of multiple visitors per session.  We had expected more use at the seated units, so these figures surprised us a bit.  I don’t want to jump to too many conclusions remembering that the very end of an exhibition is less trafficked than beginning/middle and it’s possible these numbers wash out in the end, but it may point to visitors wanting the resource near the works of art.

The coverflow app that Beau developed worked very well.  Stats indicated that visitors were traversing the entire length of the 26 artists.  The artist names were presented alphabetically in the coverflow, but visitors didn’t just click on names earlier in the alphabet, they swiped and clicked on names all over the menu.  Interestingly, visitors looked at almost the same artists no matter if they were seated or standing.  When you look at the top ten in each category, the lists are almost the identical with the order changing slightly:

top 10 at end of exhibition with access to seating—

Dorothy_Grebenak, Dorothy_Iannone, Chryssa, Jann_Haworth, Vija_Celmins, Marjorie_Strider, Pauline_Boty, Idelle_Weber, Letty_Eisenhauer, Kay_Kurt

top 10 in gallery standing—

Dorothy_Grebenak*, Marjorie_Strider, Jann_Haworth, Dorothy_Iannone, Idelle_Weber*, Pauline_Boty, Chryssa*, Vija_Celmins, Rosalyn_Drexler*, Marisol_Escobar*

In the standing top 10, I’ve included asterisks that indicate artists with work in the show physically near an iPad, possibly changing the stats.  Devices were also near objects by Lee Lozano and Kay Kurt, but those two artists did not make it into the standing top 10 list.  I’ll note at this point that choice of thumbnail easily skewed stats and, it seems, sex and money still sell in the end—take a look at some of the images used in the coverflow and then revisit the top 10 lists:

On average visitors were looking at 10.66 wiki articles, but given we allowed access to the entire English Wikipedia what were visitors looking at? Across the board, the top 26 articles were exclusively our featured artists; people stayed within our exhibition framework for most of the time. Beyond that, articles on pop art, psychedelic art and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were universally popular no matter if visitors were seated or standing. (Jann Haworth, one of the artists featured in the exhibition, designed the album cover along with Peter Blake and the link to Sgt. Pepper is in the first sentence of her wiki article, so this makes sense especially given she was in the top 10 on both lists.) What’s more fascinating is to keep looking….visitors who were standing seemed intrigued by articles about other museums. More often that not, a standing visitor would click on articles about Met, Whitney, MoMA, Gugg, New Museum and the list goes on and on to institutions far and wide. (Seriously, other museums should have paid us for in-gallery advertising—it was just that noticeable.) At the seated units, visitors were more likely to browse deeper in subject matter: sexual revolution, pop artist, painting, happenings, WWII, sculptor, surrealism, artist names, etc. Even though our 26 artists were universally popular, we saw lots and lots of statistics pointing to visitors going down the wiki rabbit hole given the opportunity to do so.

Psst...It's okay to pick up the iPad.

After opening, it became clear that visitors were apprehensive about picking up the device.  Even though we copied the Apple store’s display which allows people to pick them up, we found most visitors were using it on the stand instead of cradling the device. After adding some signage guards reported more visitors picking them up, but it’s interesting to remember that in a museum setting old habits die hard and even with iPads people were cautious to touch too much.  At this point, I’ll also note that we were using the same alarm system Apple uses in their stores and we never had a visitor attempt to walk away with an iPad.  We did have the alarm go off once and we all got a good laugh when we discovered it happened during the press preview as one of the reporters got a little over curious about the setup.

Overall, this project worked well on many levels.  A high percentage of visitors utilized the devices for long periods of time going pretty deep into the wiki catalog, but also staying focused on exhibition content. Given most people come to museums with other people, the iPads turned out to be a social device which engaged people in a way that seemed natural to their visit.   The information in the wiki articles on these 26 artists is now out in the world via Wikipedia and will contribute to information sharing beyond our exhibition.  This leaves us likely to do it again at the next opportunity.

We wanted to provide a way of reading Wikipedia that could be passed from person to person without anybody getting really lost. A big problem with mouse- and keyboard-based interactive kiosks is that sitting down at a computer can create a situation where one person is in charge of what happens and everybody else is just along for the ride. This is a serious problem when it comes to engaging groups of users; one can’t just pass a mouse and keyboard around from person to person. Hand-held touch devices like the iPad do a lot to get around this problem. They can move from person to person, and they make being a backseat driver a lot more fun. We settled on the idea of a sliding frame with buttons for each artist which, when tapped, would load the Wikipedia article for that artist in a content frame above.

To minimize distraction and maximize fun, we also decided we needed preserve the feeling of using a native iPad application. To this end, we built our first open source software release: BklynFlow. BklynFlow is a MooTools class for creating Coverflow-like user interfaces for the web. It’s easy to use (check out BklynFlow on GitHub for an example), and has has several features that we hope make it particularly appealing: thumbnails can have captions, it supports both touch and mouse interaction, and click/tap behavior isn’t prescribed ahead of time — a click or tap can call any JavaScript function.

BklynFlow makes use of hardware accelerated 3D transforms, so right now it only works in Safari and Mobile Safari. It was in large part inspired by Zflow. Please let us know what you think!

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This post is part of a three-part series on Wikipop.

An initial search on Wikipedia revealed that only 14 of the 25 artists featured in Seductive Subversion had existing Wikipedia pages. Of those pages, at least three qualified as “stubs” (short article in need of expansion).  The remaining 11 artists had no Wikipedia presence at all, except Barbro Östlihn, about whom there is a small paragraph featured on Swedish Wikipedia.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to find Wikipedia entries for all the artists in Seductive Subversion. After all, a good number of them, such as Mara McAfee, Dorothy Grebenak, and Kay Kurt, have been virtually forgotten over the years.  But I simply couldn’t believe that many celebrated artists, including May Stevens, Dorothy Iannone, and Lee Lozano, had no Wikipedia presence whatsoever, while Pauline Boty, Britain’s reigning “Queen of Pop,” had one paltry paragraph dedicated to her brief but stellar life.

So I knew I had my work cut out for me. Over the summer and early fall I created and expanded pages for the artists who needed them most.  In so doing, I learned a great deal about their lives. Who would have guessed, looking at Evelyne Axell’s psychedelic nudes, that she had learned to paint by taking private lessons with René Magritte?  Or that Rosalyn Drexler, in addition to being a Pop artist, was also an award-winning playwright and one-time Mexican wrestler? The more I learned—of Letty Eisenhauer’s rousing performances at early Happenings, Boty’s friendship with Bob Dylan, McAfee’s hilarious illustrations for National Lampoon—the happier I was to know that the biographies of these remarkable women would soon be widely available.

Of course, getting all these great anecdotes to appear on Wikipedia presented somewhat of a challenge.  After a few meetings with Shelley, and with the patient help of several Wikipedians over live chat and page discussions, I mastered the basics of WikiMedia editing.  I learned how to create sections within articles, make bulleted lists, insert block quotes, and, most fun of all, hyperlink to other Wikipedia articles.

Creating hyperlinks led to a fair amount of insight into the Pop Art landscape on Wikipedia.  It was interesting to see which personalities of the 1960s art world were well represented, and which were not.  I was hard pressed to find a male Pop artist who didn’t have a Wikipedia page.  Even the gallerists who represented them, men like Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis, and Arne Glimcher, merited their own articles. Meanwhile Jill Kornblee, a New York City art dealer who represented women artists like Drexler and Kurt in the early 1960s when male gallerists simply would not, remains without a page. Even the Wikipedia entry for Pop Art, which traces the style’s evolution in five different countries and tells of myriad male artists’ accomplishments, makes only passing reference to two women artists—Niki de Saint Phalle and Marisol.  On this page, I added several more women to the list of “Notable artists” included towards the end, a small and admittedly insufficient remedy for the glaring omissions in the text above.

The artists featured in Seductive Subversion deserve to be better integrated into the narrative of Pop Art, in text books, on museum walls, and, yes, even on Wikipedia.  What I’ve done is simply lay the groundwork for their presence on this popular site, in the hopes of generating deeper interest in their lives in work amongst visitors to our exhibition and the general public alike. The pages featured on the iPads in our galleries, like all Wikipedia pages, are continually being updated.  Already Wikipedians have begun contributing to the pages I created just a few weeks ago.

I encourage you all visit these articles, but more than that, I hope you will join us in the project of revising Wikipedia to be ever-more inclusive and mindful of its lacunae.

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This post is part of a three-part series on Wikipop.

Where’s the technology in this gallery?  Nicely hidden on the column (at right) with the iPad installed on a shelf so visitors are not drowned in mounted screens upon entry.

Let’s start with Wikipedia.  To get the research into the hands of the biggest audience possible, updating Wikipedia made the most sense.  After all, more people go there for information than any other source, so why not take the information we have and make a contribution where it will count? Over the past several months, Rebecca Shaykin, has been working to update the Wikipedia articles on the 25 artists featured in the exhibition.  Rebecca is going to talk a little bit more about this process in the next post.

iPads are installed on shelves in several locations throughout the exhibition and two units are provided in a seating area as well.

Once we updated the Wiki, the question became how to get that back into the gallery in an unobtrusive way.  For the first time, we’ve installed iPads in the gallery and we are using the Wiki API to grab the appropriate data and bring it into the in-gallery interactive.   iPads are installed on shelves (much like what you see at the Apple store), so visitors are not surrounded by potentially distracting mounted screens.  Hardware is installed in various locations throughout the exhibition, so people can stand near the works and browse the Wiki.  In addition, we’ve got a couple of iPads in a lounge-like seating area for a more comfy browsing experience.

For some technical nitty-gritty, we are using the wKiosk app on the iPads to kiosk-ify the browsing experience.  We custom designed and manufactured pieces to sit over the home button and power buttons, so visitors can’t accidentally break out of the kiosk environment.  We are using the same alarm system (SK-T6X-W from Se-Kure) used in the Apple store to prevent theft, but still allow the devices to be picked up and played with.  Beau Sievers worked to create an iPad-like browsing experience using HTML and is going to post about the technical ins and outs and release some code we think may be helpful to others.

Wikipedia on the iPad using Beau’s BklynFlow to retain iPad-like navigation.

So, what are we looking to learn from this?  First, we’d like to see if visitors want this much information in an exhibition setting.  The interactive uses the 25 artist articles as a starting point, but visitors have access to the entire wiki from there.  Most educators and interpretation staff will say less is more and tend to favor a more guided learning experience, but that’s counter to the web.  When providing a web resource in the gallery, do visitors want more control over the information they browse? Second, we’d like to see how visitors react to this type of hardware and how we’ve installed it.  Does this provide a better user experience both for the people who want to use it and those who’d rather not be distracted by tech in the gallery setting?  Should we be using this type of low-impact equipment in more places throughout the museum?  Third, we are going to be looking at browse statistics and how they differ when people are standing near objects versus when they are sitting.  Does a seating area mean visitors spend more time with the devices or do people really want to have the information near the works of art?

We’ll report back on our findings after the show closes.  In the meantime, come see this fantastic show, play with this new system and tell us what your own experience is when using it.  Of course, you can also browse Wikipop online and if you hit that link on your own iPad, you’ll see what visitors are seeing in the gallery.

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This post is part of a three-part series on Wikipop.