Data, Digital Futures
Staff Researcher
Digital Colonialism in the Global Sphere

Colonialism has consistently been a force in the global purview, including the technological space. In recent years, the expansion of artificial intelligence has vastly increased corporations’ global influence. As the world’s technologies continue to advance and innovate, individuals must keep a watchful eye on the ways in which digital colonialism might repeat harmful practices from the past.

Digital Colonialism in the Global Sphere
entertainment, Film
Staff Researcher
Part I: Playing the Game: The Convergence of ...

Due to the popularity and booming business of video games, Hollywood studios have capitalized on popular game titles by developing new content based off of their intellectual property (IP). This study sets out to better understand video game IP’s impact on film and television markets and what specific elements might impact an adaptation’s success. 

Part I: Playing the Game: The Convergence of Video
Artificial Intelligence, Conferences, museums
Brett Crawford
Future of Museums Summit 2024 Key Takeaways

Sustainability and AI were at the forefront this year at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Future of Museums Summit. What role will museums play in creating climate-friendly communities? And how can AI be used to maximize efficiency, increase accessibility, and deepen engagement? Read key conference takeaways from Xueer Ho and Dr. Brett Ashley Crawford.

Future of Museums Summit 2024 Key Takeaways
Analytics, Data, Management
Ian Hawthorne
Data Cultures Part II: Breaking Free from the ...

An overemphasis on data-driven work within the nonprofit sector has been shown to result in cycles of disempowerment, driven by third-party data demands of funding bodies.. This compounds due to the many market orientations nonprofits need to adopt, particularly prevalent among the arts. A key to navigating these markets and funder requirements lies in identifying a specific data culture best fit for your organization and investing in resources and training in order to achieve that framework sustainably.

Data Cultures Part II: Breaking Free from the Cycle of Disempowerment
Accessibility, Artificial Intelligence, museums
Staff Researcher
Envisioning the Future of Museum Accessibility ...

With AI’s ability to automatically produce content and process complicated datasets with high accuracy, museums worldwide are exploring ways in which this innovative technology can help them better achieve their missions and advance accessibility efforts. Through case studies, learn about three applications of this technology: content digitalization, language accessibility, and visual description.

Envisioning the Future of Museum Accessibility Through Artificial Intelligence

QRpedia

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The Best of Both Worlds: QRpedia.

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While scanning a quick response (QR) code on the back of a cereal box only to find it directs you to the cereal’s web site is, how can I put this politely, fun (that’s my attempt at sarcasm), it neither reflects the appropriate usage nor does it maximize the potential of those nifty little black and white squares. There's the cereal box QR code, and then there's QRpedia. QRpedia is a program announced by the Wikimedia Foundation in September 2011. It is currently competing in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress for the title of the United Kingdom’s “most innovative mobile company.” Today, on February 29th, the winner of the award will be announced. The reward? The United Kingdom Trade and Investment’s (UKTI) support to expand the company internationally.

But enough about the competition. What exactly is QRpedia and how does it work in the museum setting? It functions just as an ordinary QR code does, except for its whole language-detecting brilliance. A Polish speaking viewer walks up to, let’s say, Claude Lorrain’s Seaport at Sunset (1639) hanging in the Louvre in Paris. In front of the text panel, the visitor whips out his/her smartphone and snaps a photo of the QRpedia code. The QRpedia code instantly detects the phone’s language and the browser opens to a Wikipedia article on the painting or related topic in that written language. If an article on Claude Lorrain’s Seaport at Sunset isn’t available in Polish, the QRpedia code will direct the user to the next most closely related topic available in that language, perhaps an article on the French, 17th-century landscape painter, Nicolas Poussin.

QRpedia’s language-detecting technology makes it truly unique. For foreign visitors, this eliminates the expense of an audio guide from museum visits (if there is a guide even available in their preferred language) and replaces it with the ease of snapping a photo, the interactivity of a QR code and the straight-forward, mobile-formatted information of a Wikipedia article.

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aXCUOpBytxA [/embed]

Terence Eden, the lead developer of QRpedia, says

QRpedia is the perfect way to get access to massive amounts of cultural information. A typical museum display has less than a paragraph of text, often just in one language – QRpedia can give encyclopedic information in hundreds of languages. Recently, in Derby Museum, a painting by Joseph Wright was taken away for cleaning. The Museum staff have put a QRpedia code in its place so that visitors can still see a high quality image of the painting, and read information about the painting and its creator.

The program was created at the Derby Museum and Gallery in England. Today it is available online for any and every museum, gallery, library, public park, archive, historic landmark and so on. QRpedia has been implemented at numerous prestigious museums and galleries worldwide, including the United Kingdom’s National Archives and Spain’s Fundació Joan Miró. How about the United States, you ask? Why yes! It has been implemented at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. But why stop there? Its usage is not limited to arts and cultural institutions. Fun fact- the Occupy movement uses QRpedia codes on its posters and publications to disperse information to a wide and diverse audience.

What’s in it for the museum? A lot, actually.

1) You can create your own, online, as often and as many as you want.

2) For museums with multilingual audiences, a text panel can become cluttered and overwhelming with various translations. Additionally, the space allotted to provide relevant information becomes increasingly limited with numerous translations, causing you to cut-back even further on relevant information.

3) Because Wikipedia is editable, a curator, exhibition director, museum official or artist can translate articles to various languages and create articles if there is a void. That being said, so can anyone else. But be brave. Be bold. Be confident in the power of the public intellectual collective.

4) According to Roger Bamkin, the co-creator of QRpedia and the chair of Wikimedia UK, “We see e-volunteers giving thousands of hours to support museums... Hundreds of new articles have been created in dozens of different languages.” Beyond printing the codes, I’d say the work is done almost entirely for you.

5) QRpedia codes are not limited to paintings and items in your collection. Incorporate them in museum signage, directionals, cafe menus, etc.

6) QRpedia also records usage analytics. Museums, galleries, whoever, can track the number of QRpedia users, the paintings with the most QR code action, the most common languages, etc. In my humble opinion, it offers a rather innovative way to get to know your audience.

Accessible, innovative, interactive (for those inside the museum and those elsewhere translating Wikipedia articles without any intent to ever visit the museum…), and FREE. For museums and cultural institutions looking to expand into the QR code realm, this is the place to start. The Wikipedia articles are already written, online, and translated. Why not offer your visitors a more complete museum experience in their preferred language?