Links for May 2013

Have a play with the Google Street View Hyperlapse if you’ve not already, or at least watch the video. It’s great.

Arts, digital, etc

The Digital Public Library of America is ‘a platform’.

Nymbol connects digital content like text, photos and videos with physical objects and places. Could be used to create apps that help people discover and explore a collection.

Donate is a mobile-donations-to-the-arts thing that’s launched with a few partners. I don’t really get how it’s an improvement on anything though – see Article19’s take for more.

Culture Hive is a repository of documents about cultural marketing. Guessing it’s early stages for this, because I’d understood there was going to be rather more to it.

Some stats about digital engagement with museums:

The survey showed that 30% of adults reported visiting a museum or gallery website, up from 16% when data collection began in 2005/06. This reflects a steady upward trend in digital engagement during that period.

Of those who had visited, 60% had done so to order tickets or find out about exhibitions and events and 45% to learn more about a particular subject.

Which is funny, because the ticket-buying experience on museum websites is often terrible. Speaking of museums:

  • Ideas for museums is collecting interviews with people working on implementing digital technologies in everyday museum practice.
  • Design Thinking for Museums is a blog sharing resources and lessons learned all about, well… design thinking and museums.

The RSC are revisiting digital storytelling with Midsummer Night’s Dreaming over 21-23 June. Such Tweet Sorry received a mixed reception but should at the very least be chalked up as a good effort, so good on the RSC for taking a second swing.

Playground Sessions is a software platform that teaches you how to play the piano using popular songs. Quincy Jones is one of the backers.

The job ad for the next V&A Head of Digital Media (£70-75k per annum) says:

The successful applicant will have… Familiarity with using web marketing analytics

At this point I shall leave a casual link to the Arts Analytics series I’m doing (worth knowing that stuff if you want to get ahead).

Other links

Want to get some perspective? Then Here Is Today.

Mailchimp explain how they do email marketing. If you’re going to learn lessons from anyone, it may as well be them.

Kaggle is a community of data scientists. They compete with each other to solve complex data science problems, and the top competitors get invited to consult on projects from some of the world’s biggest companies. This is pretty fascinating, with this profile in Wired explaining more.

I’ve been looking at a few of the companies trying to help businesses make sense of all their data, including ClearStory DataStatwing and Platfora. Not used any of them, but it’s a really interesting area.

The quickfire round:

Apps/services/etc

Finally…

Do Not Touch: this is the music video for Kilo by Light Light

After 50 years of pointing and clicking, we are celebrating the nearing end of the computer cursor with an ever-changing music video where all our cursors can be seen together for one last time.

Do Not Touch music video

I’d also recommend Beardyman presents The Beardytron 5000 mkII, although I’m not sure whether I was most interested in the performance or the interviews about the kit’s development.

Published by Chris Unitt

I work at One Further, doing digital projects with cultural organisations. Follow @ChrisUnitt or find me on LinkedIn.