Museum stats and analytics

This year there have been a few websites and projects aimed at presenting online (and offline) statistics relating to museums. These are the ones I’ve seen, in chronological order. There may well be more, so if I’ve missed any good ones then let me know.

When Should I Visit? was made at Culture Hack London in January 2011 by Dan Williams. It uses check-in data from Foursquare to find the least busy time to visit the museums, galleries and theatres of London.

There have been other interesting things made at Culture Hacks over the year but this one stuck in the mind.

In April, Jim Richardson tweeted about having a spreadsheet of 1500+ museums on Twitter. This sparked a collaborative project with lots of others chipping in to extend and improve his data. The spreadsheet doesn’t seem to be accessible at the moment but no matter, it got a good amount of attention while it was around.

Sean Redmond, a web developer at the Guggenheim, took that spreadsheet and created Museums in Social Media. He added Facebook data and presented the information in a nice table.  He’s also blogged about the process.

Skip on a few months to August when the Let’s Get Real report was published. I’ve mentioned that one on this blog plenty enough by now so won’t go on about it here. I should give Museum Stats a mention at this point. It was referenced in that report but, what with it being in closed Alpha at the moment and me not being a museum, I have no idea what’s going on there.

Which brings us to Museum Analytics, recently unveiled by INTK in the Netherlands. It’s:

an online platform for sharing and discussing information about museums and their audiences. For each museum there is a daily updated report with information about online and offline audiences.

I’m not quite sure how they’re getting all the information (although there is an about page which explains a little) but it’s nicely put together and they’re talking about it extending it further. You can look at stats for each venue, country and online platform. You can even order a regular report to be emailed to you.

The pattern for these things goes:

• Someone makes data available (Foursquare, Jim Richardson & co, Let’s Get Real partners, etc)
• Someone does something with that data (Dan Williams, Culture 24, Sean Redmond, INTK)

The variety of things that can be built will only increase as the raw materials (lots of good sources of data) become more widely available. Whether the things that are made are insightful, arty, actionable, profitable, funny or otherwise will depend on the person building it and what their motivations are. The more the merrier, I say.

Tweet

Links for 6 October 2009

• Derek Powazek – How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half – “But, really, I can’t believe how easy it was. Making print media used to be so difficult. I remember cutting and gluing long columns of text together, shooting flats, and generally sweating for days to create my college newspaper. Now the the most time-consuming part is simply asking for permission from the content creators”
• Welcome | MagCloud – “Welcome to MagCloud, where you can publish your own printed magazine”
• Trust Art – Home – “Trust Art is a social platform that is commissioning ten public artworks over the next year. People are invited to become shareholders with $1, share with interested friends, and renew culture”
• 24hrBook Project : CompletelyNovel – “a groundbreaking project to challenge a group of writers to write a new story about London in just 24 hours. The book will be written by a group of experienced writers working together using all kinds of online collaborative tools around the clock”
• HBO Imagine – “This isn’t sitting back to watch a show… we’ve created this entirely new way of experiencing a story. Each piece of content provides unique information, and offers a unique perspective on the characters, plots and motives at play, allowing viewers to discover for themselves what is really going on”
• November In Manchester – November in Manchester is a social media tale of fiction. Taking place over the month of November, this project will share the story of two very different characters – via the medium of social media – as their lives intertwine and eventually collide
• Flink Labs | Data Visualisation Beyond the Bar Chart | Concept Lens – Concept Lens is an innovative application that enables you to visually track the conversations occurring on Twitter and photos being posted on Flickr, for an event or topic of interest

Tweet

Links for 11 September 2009

• Blogging for Artists – An informal talk given to Shropshire Arts Network on September 8th 2009 by Pete Ashton
• Culture Wars | About Culture Wars – Culture Wars is the online review of the Institute of Ideas in London. We cover books, films, theatre, art and talk events, with a view to understanding how political and other ideas filter through the culture, and how the arts in turn influence politics and society more generally
• Welcome to verifiable.com – “Our goal is to develop a tool to help you communicate data more clearly, efficiently, and honestly. We want to make it easy and fun to produce gorgeous, verifiable visualizations and allow viewers to dig into your data and even build on your work to bring out richer, clearer, or just plain different conclusions”
• Monopoly City Streets – Live worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence” Launching 9 Sept
• RSS in the Clouds « Blog « WordPress.com – “Today we turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud, which is basically a way for people to get push notification that your feed has updated”. Oh, now that is interesting
• Embeddable Google Document Viewer – A little known Google Docs feature will let you embed a PDF or .ppt on a website. One day we won’t have to faff around with arcane things like this
• Ning Apps – “Today you can choose from more than 90 Ning Apps, and that’s just the beginning. This number will continue to grow as developers here at Ning and around the world build additional Ning Apps tailored around your interests and passions”

Tweet

Links for 12 July 2009

• Social Media Releases for the music industry – MonkeyWatcher – Advice for bands – “send a quick press release by email, and provide a link to a social media release (SMR), or, in other words, a page aggregating the various items you want to share (music, pictures, videos, blog posts, tour dates, etc.)” I get a lot of adjective stuffed press releases from bands’ PR companies too – the essentials with links to further stuff would be so much more useful
• Putt’s Law – “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand”
• Population : One – One Person is One Pixel – “Every pixel in the illustration represents one person alive on Earth. The first one is you. The rest are everyone else”. Reminiscent of Stans Cafe’s ‘Of All The People…’. It never hurts to get a sense of perspective once in a while
• Birmingham schools named in gang report – Google Maps – Someone’s plotted all the schools named in a report as being “at risk of becoming ‘feeder schools’ for city gangs into a Google Map. No idea which report and the colour-coding is a mystery. Still. As a side note, if anyone knows how to search Google Maps for user-generated maps then please let me know
• kala phool – Mother India – 21st Century Remix – The edit and live soundtracking of Mother India which Kala Phool produced last year was one of the best things I’ve seen in the past 12 months. I’ve just heard they’re taking the show on a UK tour between August and October. No dates yet but you heard it here first
• nycgo / this is new york city – New York’s official website for visitors was relaunched in Jan 09, partnering with Google, Travelocity, Time Out New York and others
• Spotted by Locals – Experience cities like a local – A collection of city blogs, all under the ‘Spotted by Locals’ roof. An interesting idea, not quite realised but still pretty good

Tweet