Last week I visited Museums and the Web 2013, the annual conference about digital technology and museums. We were invited to give a talk about the results of our social media monitor, which was developed in the context of the project ‘Museumkompas’. But before I explain more about the presentation, I like to tell a little more about a number of other presentations that I attended.

Walking behind your parents while you should be quiet and hear the story of a tour guide. This is a memory of me during a summer when I was visiting a castle in Germany with my parents. And I can tell it’s hard to listen and behave when you’re 8 years old and can’t sit still for longer than a minute. My parents said that the castle has been the source of inspiration for many Disney movies. This is the only thing I can remember of that day…

This abstract I wrote, together with Harry van Vliet, about the usage of Flickr the Commons was accepted for the Heritage Impact 2012 in Brighton. I’m quite excited because this will be the first in a serie of papers focussing on social media data harvesting and analyses. Read the abstract here:

Together with Harry van Vliet I recently submitted an abstract to the International Conference on Knowledge Work and Innovations. In this paper we address the use of social tagging and storytelling in order to enrich digital collections of cultural heritage. The purpose of this conference is to deepen the co-operation between the members of the strategic partner network: HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and Polytechnic University of Valencia by discussing the new practices of knowledge work and innovation creation. We submitted our paper to the Applied Arts track. Let’s hope it gets accepted.

At the expert meeting of the CVN - Commission Cultural Treaty Vlaanderen – Nederland – (www.cvn.be) last week in Antwerpen I participated in a breakout session lead by Sylvie Dhaene of ‘Het Huis van Alijn’ (House of Alijn; www.huisvanalijn.be). This former museum of folklore has set out to tell a timeless story about the culture of everyday life. In the museum ordinary objects and curiosities offer an introduction to the common inheritance of the time periods of the fifties, sixties, seventies and so on, up till now. Digital media is used to let you zap through photo albums, listen to sound recordings and plunge into film excerpts.

The city of Utrecht has, as many Dutch cities and regions, a rich and well-documented history. There is a huge mountain of data of all sorts of events taking place in or around the city. And by mountain of data you can take that quite literal. If you would make a stack of all the documents it would form a pile higher then the Mont Blanc, with its 4811 meters the highest mountain of Europe. The preservation of these huge collections is a complex task, and making it easily accessible is even harder. Making it all something that a non-professional audience can experience in a fun way seems like an almost impossible task.

‘Museumkompas’ is a research proposal submitted for a RAAK grant (www.innovatie-alliantie.nl) that will start in the spring of 2011 and will run for two years. The project will be implemented by the Crossmedialab in collaboration with several museums, Erfgoed Nederland, DEN, and an expert agency in the field of information management in the public sector (BMC).

In collaboration with University Utrecht the Crossmedialab developed a proposal for a NWO subsidy, the proposal is titled ‘A Digital Infrastructure for the contextualization of Cultural Events (DICE)’. The immediate aim of the DICE proposal is to connect four major data collections, part of which were NWO-funded, in the domain of theatre and cinema culture collected by museums and archives. Each of these four collections holds different data on the production, circulation, presentation and reception of film screenings and theatre performances. Since this information has not as of yet been systematically collected and connected, our current knowledge of theatre and cinema culture is particularly fragmented, compartmentalized, incoherent and full of holes, and does not allow for a more systematic and comparative approach of Dutch stage and screen entertainments.