To kick things off, there are two reports that I’ve flicked through and decided need some proper attention. First up is Getting In On the Act: How Arts Groups are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation (PDF) from The James Irvine Foundation. Frankly, they had me at this diagram:
I was also fascinated by The Arts Ripple Report that Nina Simon blogged about:
Here’s how the project worked: researchers worked with small focus groups to understand their associations with arts and culture organizations and developed several framing arguments for public support of the arts. Then, they interviewed 400 people by phone and online, presenting them with a short framing argument (80-120 words), followed by a series of open-ended questions intended to determine how memorable the argument was, how it influenced their perception of the public value of the arts, and how likely it was to inspire action
Leaning back towards the tech side of things, Wieden + Kennedy’s post on Why We’re Not Hiring Creative Technologists started a fair few conversations. As did Steve Yegge’s unintentional thinking/ranting out loud. I’m still not quite sure to make of the Photos of Sarah article in The Awl and the post that I’ve brought up in conversation with others more than any other has been Bobbie Johnson’s one about failure.
Arts/digital links
- The Doofer Call: On [that] day, 4th October 2011… pt 1 – “All in all we launched a new brand, the beta of the all-new IWM website, a re-skinned image licensing site, overhauled e-shop, redesigned print sales website, and phase 1 of a new system for delivering collections information to our public digital interfaces”.
- Lots of resources on free and open source art, compiled by Furtherfield for the Arts Council
- Createquity does good link round-ups and the blogroll is worth raiding too
- A sketched concept for a collaboration matchmaking service bringing artists and geeks together with other sectors.
- Digitalization in the arts: Is there a do-over if we get it wrong? | Jumper – “I’ve recently come across four articles/papers that have me grappling with the promise and the potential threats of digitalization in the arts and culture sector.”
- New Models for Arts Journalism Receive Funding – Knight Foundation – “five projects that offer innovative models for local arts journalism will receive funding to help make their projects a reality”. With a further six honourable mentions
- Vision scientist helps to rescue John Martin’s vision of destruction – Psychologist Tim Smith describes how a painting was saved by a combination of eye-tracking technology, Photoshop and conservation expertise. User-testing art the way we might user-test a website
Other links
- An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, mashups and tools being influenced by Google Maps.
- Mary Meekers’s presentation from the Web 2.0 Summit has lots of stats but it was slide 15 (about iPad shipments) that surprised me
- Avinash Kaushik’s taken a look at social media measurement
- I like the kind of post where someone creates something unexpectedly popular and then blogs about why they think it was good. In this case, simple rules for designing slides
- Loads of online giving/crowdfunding platforms
- Matthew Somerville’s knocked together a page of Birmingham to London train times. Timely, what with all the back and forth I do
Some apps and services
- Web – Speaker Deck, SearchHash, Chartbeat, Repudo, PunchTab, ArtSpotter
- iPhone – the ESPN Goals app proves 101 Great Goals point. Codify looks interesting