Week 8: Response to Agnes Stauber

When I think about a museum and their presence online, I don’t want to just see posts of the art you can see in the museum – that’s why I visit a museum. Rather, it should give viewers context, both with the “behind the scenes”, as well as the history of the art itself. I think that’s the strength of LACMA’s videos, as it doesn’t necessarily focus on just one aspect, but rather, incorporates many different aspects of what the museum is about. They do not necessarily need to have a strong social media presence, although that helps a lot with increasing foot traffic, but having a digital presence can enhance a user’s experience, either after the museum visit, or before.

I am not a huge advocate of online courses — in high school, Khan Academy used to make me fall asleep (Salman Khan’s voice is extremely soothing for me), and I find other ones difficult to sit through as it’s not as engaging as traditional courses can be. However, I think online coding classes are very worth it. I currently use Lynda.com to learn JavaScript and SQL. If I had to pitch an online course, I would probably have one about running an e-commerce site. This would combine coding skills with graphic design and economics/management, and it’s pretty relevant to today’s consumers.

One thing that is interesting to note — MoMA just announced a few days ago that it would be launching a free photography course online, so it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.

Stephanie actually posted the storytelling piece that I wanted to post (the Dreams of Dali VR is so well done), but Wired actually posed about something else I had seen, so I’m going to use that one instead. They are reporting about Google’s collaborations with large museums via the Cultural Institute project, which is digitizing tens of thousands of pieces onto a digital archive. This time, Google partnered with the Guggenheim Museum in New York  so that you can visit it through your computer. This combines Google’s street view option on maps with an extensive set of cameras/drones to capture the building, built by Frank Lloyd Wright.

One thought on “Week 8: Response to Agnes Stauber”

  1. I agree with you that a museum website shouldn’t simply act as an attempt at a replication of the museum exhibits. I think a site should offer enhanced information about exhibits so that the site experience is altered from the physical museum experience, thus making visiting the site a potentially worthwhile activity for museum goers. Offering a site as a digital substitution towards the physical space of the museum will never fully succeed until we can use virtual reality, so there needs to be an additional information offered by a museum website

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