How Open Data Can Be A Museum Exhibit In Its Own Right

When reading the articles for this week which focused on the use of museum’s open data for developers in creating visualizations, I had to ask myself how this can enhance the museum experience. Helen Wall’s work with the Moma collection’s data is a historical backlog that would be most relevant to scholars rather than a casual viewer. But as Mia Ridge says, “Like many participatory projects, open cultural data projects seem to work better when they set aside resources for community interaction.” Since we’re interested in presenting art in a way that expands the mind of an everyman museum visiter, we have to ask how this viewer can take advantage of a network of links between sources, which is essentially what open data is.

Mia Ridge, in “Where Next For Open Cultural Data In Museums” states “the internal and external benefits of linked data are in linking to other sources as well as providing linkable sources.” One example of this is an interactive Collection Browser I saw at NYC’s Cooper Hewitt museum earlier this month. At the museum, there was a table whose top was like a giant tablet. Using a stylus, the user would scribble on the table. A famous work of art which contained a similar line or shape would pop up, as well as the work’s metadata. If this doesn’t make sense, you can view a description of the Cooper Hewitt Collection Browser table here: http://www.cooperhewitt.org/new-experience/

This is much more relevant that a bunch of graphs and charts giving biological data about artists and their art. Open data will also be useful for those who wish to access museum archives remotely. The problem with remote access is that it is even more decontextualizing than the typical museum format which we discussed last week with the Exhibitionary Complex: thousands of images and their metadata on one page with absolutely no caption or story as to why they are relevant.

2 thoughts on “How Open Data Can Be A Museum Exhibit In Its Own Right”

  1. Very cool! I wonder how giant data projects like this affect people’s feelings of connection with the objects themselves.

  2. If you look at work by Charles Gaines, his artwork is actually a numerical analysis of objects. He takes data from trees, people, and even texts and uses formulas to discern deeper meaning that he can show through in his art.

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