It’s Dinovember, and his family’s plastic dinosaurs have been getting into mischief all month. Every year, Tuma and his wife devote the month of November to “convincing our children that, while they sleep, their plastic dinosaur figures come to life. 

“Why do we do this?,” says Tuma, “Because in the age of iPads and Netflix, we don’t want our kids to lose their sense of wonder and imagination. In a time when the answers to all the world’s questions are a web-search away, we want our kids to experience a little mystery.”

They had managed to breach the refrigerator and help themselves to a carton of eggs:

We live in a society where too much “creative expression” is varnished consumption. Express yourself wearing brand name clothes, and personalizing your hamburger. Real creativity is a whole different animal, or dinosaur. As educational organizations, we need to help inspire parents to dig into creativity while kids are young. From historical dress-up to science experiments to pure fantasy. Tuma’s project is a great example, and I hope it takes off.

The previous morning, the dinos had climbed onto the kitchen counter to raid the fruit bowl.

Even the dinosaurs are creative. Here they made him look like Barney:

“All it takes is some time and energy, creativity, and a few plastic dinosaurs,” says Tuma.

Check out his full article with lots more dino shenanigans.

Structuring a course

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) currently has six 8 or 10 week online courses. The cost is $200 for self-guided courses, or $350 for instructor-led. The latter enroll 30-45 students. MoMA offers both knowledge classes, e.g., “Modern and Contemporary Art: 1945–1989,” and knowledge/skill courses, e.g., “Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting,” in which students do hands-on work at home.

The instructor-led classes offer structure, socialization and personalization; whereas, the self-guided courses are about individual freedom, providing access to curated articles and video, with no live instructor facilitation nor social interaction with other students.

The studio-art offerings have weekly assignments. For example, students paint canvases using the  materials and techniques of iconic artists. They photograph their works in progress and finished, and upload them to discuss with other students and the instructor. Wendy Woon directs MoMA’s education department. She feels the 10-week timeframe has worked well for studio art, allowing enough time for a sense of trust and community to develop in the discussion forums so that students are willing to have “critical conversations” criticizing each other’s work.

At the completion of the course, MoMA students receive a certificate by email.

Each week’s lesson includes a Art History video lecture on a specific artist, 3-6 videos from the gallery with a ‘visual unwinding’ of the artists’ techniques, articles, slideshows, suggested readings, links to artwork on the MoMA site, and a detailed studio video demonstrating the techniques of an artist. The studio course totals about 20 hours of video footage. The art history survey course has 25% less video since there’s no studio component.

Texas artist Carol Wickenhiser-Schaudt says: “Unlike being in the museum, [we were] able to view the pieces up close, and things were pointed out to us that we may never see if we were there in person.”

The New York Times Knowledge Network offers a variety of online courses, generally taught by Times staff. The network is a good example of a traditional publisher exploring new revenue models and ways to inform the public. The courses are diverse, ranging from the arts to business to science. Some courses offer credit via partner schools.

Many NYT courses focus on personal skills, typically various kinds of writing (e.g., writing medical memoirs), last 4-10 weeks, and cost $200-1,000.

The 4-week “Writing A Medical Memoir” course ($225) was created and taught last year by Times reporter Denise Grady. The outcome of the course is that students produce a personal memoir of their experience with illness or injury. A good friend of this blogger took the course and found it very meaningful.

The course began by reviewing four essays that illustrate superb writing, and then the instructor coached students in writing their own essays. There were daily self-paced lessons, online discussion forums and web links, and scheduled online chats. The chat sessions and course contents were archived for students to review any time in the future.

Online learning is flourishing in the knitting and crocheting community (see my post about the Ravelry online knitting community).

Craftsy/Sympoz is an internet startup based in Denver, Colorado, offering 35 courses on various crafty topics, from knitting socks to quilting. Tens of thousands of students have taken their online courses, priced from $15 to $60 for unlimited access. They also offer occasional free courses to spike interest.

Craftsy courses consist of a series of video lectures, written documents, open Q&A-style discussion, plus video bookmarking, note-taking and private messaging. There is no fixed schedule, students come and go freely.

User interfaces

The best user interfaces are specifically designed to delight learners, make content easily accessible, and facilitate easy discussion. The Craftsy courses are the best of the three. Here are some screenshots:

In Craftsy, there’s a clear progression of steps through the course, easy access to course materials and notes, and an active, threaded discussion. The videos are designed to be displayed on screen, as part of the course.

The MoMA course interface is more cluttered and dense, but they have a lot more content to cover, with many videos, text, and images for students to review in each course. The course’s web software runs on the Haiku learning system. Screenshots follow:

The NYT Knowledge Network user interface is hard to use, ugly, and inefficient. They use the Epsilen course management system, which is designed for school administrators, so it includes lots of irrelevant features like grade books and quizzes, while key functions are buried or broken: It takes multiple clicks to read single messages from fellow students, and uploading documents breaks their formatting so they are hard to read. Following are two screenshots, personal details obscured. As a work-around, Grady says she used email to directly communicate with her students.

Course development

The NYT medical memoir course had the simplest development process because there was not extensive curricula to prepare before the course launched. Grady took the better part of a day to plan four short intro videos, and a few hours for a casual shoot. Unlike the knitting videos, which need high quality closeups, the purpose of Grady’s videos was to set the scene, and they kept it “very quick and casual. Not a huge big deal. My hair looks awful.” Grady says she “taught it the way I would have taught a regular classroom course, except they could see me and I couldn’t see them.” Once the course started, however, the workload became very substantial, consuming all her free time and more.

Shooting a video of El Lissitzky at MoMA for an upcoming course.

The MoMA courses are much more complex to prepare. The most time consuming part of creating courses is planning, video production and editing, says Woon. Shooting videos in a large museum like MoMA requires a lot of coordination between departments. It takes around 10 months from concept to launch. The development team is two full-time digital learning staff plus an adult & academic programs staff member, and an intern. The team collaborates with the instructors to build the course and manage an outside crew who shoots and edits the videos.

They start by running an instructor-led course, and then spin off a self-guided course the following semester, with some improvements based on first semester evaluations. The self-guided courses are edited to be flexible, since self-guided students may take a nonlinear sequence through the material.

Students have a range of experience levels, from complete novices to working artists with long exhibition histories. Students are predominantly female, aged 30 and older, and 55% of them are from the U.S. Woon says student’s primary motivation is “their belief in MoMA’s authority in modern art” and “they expect a high-quality experience.” Secondary motivations are “flexibility and accessibility”. Wickenhiser-Schaudt, the online student, said the classes are for serious students who do not live close enough to the MoMA to take in-person courses.

The knitting courses have a shorter production cycle. Courses are planned by the instructors, who typically work in the craft field as authors and teachers. Instructor Linda Permann said it took her a few months to outline and develop her course. Once the course is developed, there is a ~3-day video shoot (using HD video) with the Craftsy team and a film crew. Professional video editors produce finished videos. Above is the studio of Carol Ann Waugh during a Craftsy filming.

Craftsy loads the content into their proprietary course management system, developed by their parent company, Sympoz, which handles the technical details of course registration, displaying video and written materials, and online community. Sympoz is expanding their formula to other topics, such as cooking and personal finance. Nearly 400,000 people have created accounts with their site. At this time, the Sympoz backend is not available to use for your own projects.

Human touch

These courses may be online, but the human experience is vital for all of them.

At MoMA, charisma carries the day. Students praised instructor Corey D’Augustine’s charm and the fact he brought real-life knowledge as a practicing artist, art historian and conservator. Here’s a promo video, to get a feel for his style:

Student interaction is a vital too. The online discussion forums were buzzing with approximately a dozen active student participants. D’Augustine said that, “week to week, I’m amazed at the discussions that have taken place between students in, say, Moscow and Miami, Caracas in Colombia, or Croton-on-Hudson in New York.” Dallas artist Deborah Rhee said in a blog post that it was “a full-time job keeping up” with discussions in a section of the web site known as ‘The Cedar Bar.’ UK artist and art teacher Mania Row says she is still in touch with her fellow students.

The availability of the instructor has a big impact: in one D’Augustine course, he had other obligations at the same time, and students complained he was aloof. In another course, students said he was attentive and responsive.

Rhee said the course was “actually more intensive than being in class for a few hours a day,” and said her “personal art practice has most definitely matured” from the first MoMA online course she took. Rhee feels “it is the best investment I have made for myself and my Arts practice since beginning my journey in Art a decade ago.” Similarly, Wisconsin artist Myrna Leigh said in a blog post that the painting class she took in Fall 2011 was “informative and fun,” and she introduced the new techniques she learned into her work. Enthusiastic students continue the discussion on an official MoMA alumni Facebook page.

Craftsy’s instructors are charming and idiosyncratic. They directly address the viewer, and convey sincere enthusiasm. They’ve honed their stage presence with years of in-person classes at local stores, craft conferences and retreats. The good instructors are diligent about logging in daily to answer student questions.

Meanwhile, each Craftsy course builds an archive of questions and answers, and general chit-chat. There’s enough usage volume, and students will often reply to other students. In crafts, everyone is an expert on their personal experiences, and knitters love to talk about their favorite yarns and colors, and commiserate over small mistakes. The chat in the paywalled communities of Craftsy differs from that on the free community at Ravelry in that the discussions tend to have a much more on-topic “course” type of feel.

An instructive experience

Here are some views of the teaching experience:

Denise Grady is an experienced science and health reporter at The New York Times. She says she “dreamed up the course and got excited about the idea of helping people tell stories about life-changing events. Forgive me if this sounds trite but it is kind of a labor of love. It’s very intense, and rewarding. Quite fascinating. People show up with remarkable stories. It sells out every time.” The course doesn’t bring in much revenue (approximately $6,500), and Grady still had her full-time newsroom responsibilities while teaching. “The time commitment was huge,” Grady says. “Tens of hours, is the best way I can put it. Hours of preparation for each online session even though they were only an hour apiece. Many many hours reading drafts, commenting on them and returning.” Due to the workload and drain, she declined to teach this spring, and another Times journalist, David Corcoran, is teaching the course instead. Grady hopes to teach again in Fall 2012.

Donna Druchunas teaches three knitting courses (all priced at $60), and has over 5000 students enrolled. Craftsy is a significant income source for Druchunas (the $300k+ revenue is shared between her and Craftsy) and also a way to indirectly promote her books. She has authored several knitting books, and teaches in-person classes at local yarn shops and at knitting conferences and retreats on topics such as rug knitting, making yarn, and knitting socks and sweaters. She acknowledges that online courses make it harder to detect confused or frustrated students, but that’s mitigated by the clearer instructions in an online setting where students “can see things close up and replay the videos over and over again as often as they want.” While she can’t directly observe students working, she can comment on photos students upload. Druchunas spends ~15 minutes a day answering new questions in the courses.

Linda Permann teaches two crochet courses (priced at $30 & $60). She is a full-time crochet designer, writer and teacher. She has a few books, an ongoing column in Crochet Today magazine, and writes for other outlets. She finds teaching personally rewarding, and also useful to “stay in touch with crocheters and what is ‘hard’ for them.” She says that many communities lack convenient local crochet classes, “so I really wanted to jump in and provide a couple of intensive classes that would help people grow their skills.” Permann logs in once or twice a day to answer student questions, and her daily workload is ~20 minutes.

Stefanie Japel teaches three courses (priced $30-60) and a free mini-course, with a total of 16,000 paid and unpaid students. Japel is an author and teacher, as well as a staffer with Sympoz. A few years ago, she was a new mom, with a toddler and an infant, and she was unable to keep up with traveling to events for teaching. She started teaching online using Ning, where she started with shorter (4-8 week) courses, and amateur quality video. At Craftsy, the video production is a high level, courses never expire, and there’s a support team (designers, tech support, help desk, customer support). Japel invests an hour a week to maintain her three classes and the free workshop, answering questions and talking with students.

Japel has found the online and in-person courses complement each other. For example, in recent in-person courses she taught with Interweave Knitting Labs,  20% of the 25 enrolled students were already taking the online course and wanted to see the class live. Conversely, after the in-person course, several of the in-person students signed up for the online class.

Launching your own course…

Your organization could launch your own courses, adapting the models above as a starting point. The classes can have the side benefit of institutional branding; Woon says students report they feel connected to MoMA after taking the course.

Courses that require heavy involvement from an instructor don’t scale beyond a few dozen students, but they can be very meaningful learning experiences. The MoMA and NYT examples above involve large amounts of time and commitment from both students and the instructor. (Both MoMA and NYT also have self-guided courses that are more like online lecture series, and are more analogous to the Craftsy video series.) In the case of MoMA, there’s also a large up-front investment in video production. The Craftsy model is a slick and appealing presentation when most of the information can be taught by video. Economies of scale with the Craftsy approach allow for lower course fees, and substantially higher revenue.

Updates: 24-Jan: Corrections from Grady and Woon clarifying some details.

History

Reaching rural audiences for $10.71 per visitor, the “Van of Enchantment” brings cultural history to schools and public events in New Mexico — at no cost to visitors. New Mexico’s rich history traces back at least 11,000 years, and includes a flourishing Pueblo community in the 13th century, Spanish conquistadors and colonists in the 16th century, and railroads in the late 19th century.

The van’s current exhibition is “Riding the Rails,” which explores the Santa Fe Trail trade route between Mexico and the United States from 1821 to 1848, the start of railroads into New Mexico  in 1880, and the new Railrunner Express commuter train. This is the van:

They need a van because New Mexico is vast. Kimberly Mann runs the grant-supported program. She says, “We bring a museum experience to many different towns that do not have a local museum.” In fact, the nearest museum could be many hours away. New Mexico is the 5th largest U.S. state, and the 6th most sparsely inhabited. The van reaches students, rural, and underserved populations who don’t typically go to museums. And the van is inviting. Mann says, “having an exhibit in an RV makes the museum experience less intimidating, and since our exhibits are hands-on, people really interact and connect with the content.”

The van averages nine venues a month (see 2011 schedule), mostly targeting schools during the school year, and filling in the schedule with libraries in the summer. A quarter of venues are public events. The map at right shows how venues are distributed around the state.

Reaching the general public

To reach the general public, the van goes to public events and libraries, and visitors explore the exhibit self-guided. Most visitors stay for 15-20 minutes, plus another 10 minutes at a table outside. When visitors have kids, Mann says, “the visit usually lasts longer because the kids have to explore every corner of the Van.”

Mann says, “we try to go to as many events in as many different places as we can without completely exhausting our staff.” They need to choose events that will fit their large truck, have a large enough crowd to be worthwhile, but sufficiently rural that they reach their audience. Mann says, “we really try to balance big events with getting out to the rural and underserved areas. When possible, we like to participate in events with a similar theme as our exhibits. For example, this summer we will bring Road Trips to an event in Grants, NM sponsored by the New Mexico Route 66 Association.” Other venues include an Earth Day celebration, the Truth or Consequences Fiesta, the Clayton Lake Trout Derby, plus some huge events like the State Fair or the Balloon Fiesta where they keep the van open for 10-12 hours per day over several days. Normally, they operate with just the 2 staff on the van, but they occasionally recruit volunteers who meet them at very large events.

Public visitors are invited to do crafts activities that relate to the exhibit, such as using pump drills to put holes in seashells for necklaces (prehistoric trade routes), making God’s Eyes (trade routes between US and Mexico), or designing postcards.

Reaching students

To reach kids, the van travels to a few schools a week during the school year. Classes visit for 45 minutes, typically divided into two groups (one outside at an activity table, and one in the van), switching places after 20 minutes. A month before visiting a school, Mann mails the school a packet with an informational CD and curriculum. Teachers can pre-teach to prepare their students for the van’s visit, or use some lessons as a follow-up to reinforce the information after the visit. Mann says the continuity before and after the visit “has helped make Van visits to schools more meaningful and really stick with the students.”

At schools, van educators give students artifact exploration worksheets to work on individually or in groups. If time is available, they have students ‘teach’ the staff about the artifacts they just studied. Younger students do an artifact scavenger hunt, scouring the van for actual artifacts that match photographs. (See also technical details for schools, PDF).

Funding and operations

In fiscal year 2010, the van served 20,655 visitors (two-thirds being kids). The van is run by two educators/drivers. The current budget is $221k/year, which is a cost of $10.71 per visitor. Half of that cost includes designing & fabricating a new exhibition in the van each year, to keep it fresh. See budget breakdown at right.

The van started in 1996, and has been supported by various grants over the years. (In lean years, the van visits fewer sites). Artifacts are provided by the History Museum.

The van is run by the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). They operate one mobile museum, and are about to replace the original RV. There are two full time staff (Mann, a contractor, runs the program; and Jamie Brytowski, a full time state employee, is lead educator). Four part-time educators take turns joining Jamie on the van, each working 100-200 hours a year.

In a stroke of brilliance, current funding for this RV that travels the highways of New Mexico comes via the NM Department of Transportation. The collaboration between DCA and DoT started with a small 2004 exhibit at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, about highway Archeology (New Mexico started the first U.S. state highway archaeology program in 1954). A subset of that exhibit was installed in the van. Staff and visitors were so pleased with the small traveling exhibition that when a recent grant was given to DoT, they invested in the Van of Enchantment.

Mann says she’s been surprised at “how often people are deeply moved, even to tears, by our exhibits, and how many people want to share their stories even if the topic doesn’t relate to the exhibit.” On the administrative side, she jokes that the “biggest administrative surprise was having to explain why a statewide traveling museum program had to travel so much.”

Science

Reaching underserved urban audiences for around $20 per visitor, the “Moveable Museum” in New York City is a larger operation that teaches science. Run by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the program currently operates four RVs, each with permanent exhibitions on Anthropology, Paleontology, or Astronomy. Each targeting different student age groups, and delivering the exhibits at no cost to visitors. Here’s their Paleontology van:

Outside of Manhattan, New York City has surprisingly isolated communities. According to Rebecca Taylor, the program coordinator, if you ask a group of kids in the Bronx, “who’s been to a museum before?” almost all will say yes. But ask the same question in Far Rockaway (Brooklyn) or the corners of Staten Island, and many students will say no. Dependent on free buses or public transport, NYC schools far from downtown rarely go on field trips to museums because the timing does not work out. To reach the corners of NYC, Moveable Museum staff get started driving their trucks at 7am.

Origins

The mobile museum traces back to 1903, with the AMNH’s ‘school service’ which would deliver natural history objects (stuffed birds and other animals, insects, rocks, wood blocks, plus handbooks) to schools at no cost. For example, in 1927, the museum supplied specimens to 496 schools in greater New York, and 1.6 million students used museum materials in their school. The museums also distributed lantern slides (precursor to the slide projector), reaching a larger audience of 643 schools in greater New York, and over 9.9 million school children. (See AMNH 1927 annual report PDF, page 97)

Curator-in-chief George Sherwood wrote in 1927 that he was proud to be “helping to mould and prepare the most important building material in its structure — the interest of children — for the growth and development of the institution is absolutely dependent upon the support and confidence of public opinion. There are no more potent factors in shaping this public interest than the children’s influence in their homes. Often ‘Sonny’s’ enthusiastic description of the dinosaurs, birds at home, or big creatures of the sea is father’s first knowledge of the existence of the American Museum of Natural History, while at dinner the tales of travels to foreign lands, or glimpses of the wonders of nature through our lantern slides and films, serve to intensify father’s and mother’s interest in the work of the Museum. Finally, the children of today are the citizens, taxpayers and officials of tomorrow, and the impressions of school days carry over into private and public life.” They also had hands-on activities for blind students to touch specimens.

The current mobile museum program started in 1993. Initially a consortium program with local museums, in 1998 the AMNH created the Dinosaurs truck independently.

Reaching students

In fiscal year 2010, Moveable Museum had 22,144 visitors, spread over their four trucks. (The peak capacity is approx 25k visitors per truck per year if the truck goes out four days a week, including occasional big events.)

The photo at left is from inside the Dinosaur (Paleontology) van.

During most of the school year, the trucks go to schools. In June, schools tend to be chaotic, so instead they go to local libraries, and local classes walk a few blocks to the museum truck. In the summer, the Moveable Museum trucks go to summer camps at school buildings, community centers and churches.

At a school, they reach up to 120 students, and students have assignments related to their visit. Fifteen students visit the truck at a time. In the summers, a truck may see up to 300 students per day, though the visits are more fleeting, often as short as 5 minutes.

The program requires all participating teachers to attend professional development at the museum, which is scheduled between semesters. The Moveable Museum targets students of various age levels, and has activity packs for classes which are shaped to fit New York curricula.

Funding and operations

Funding is all corporate sponsorships. They aim for one funder per truck, but when money is tight, they accept partial sponsorships. Corporate sponsors (e.g., “Bloomberg”) get several benefits: Advertising via their logo on the truck that travels the city, bragging rights for their publicity documents, and typically the truck will attend a funder’s annual functions.

At it’s peak, the Moveable Museum program had 9 staff (one coordinator, and two educators each for four trucks). Currently, they have 5 staff, and they shuffle among the trucks. The four educators have grueling hours, and tend to be in their mid 20’s to early 30’s. Taylor says that one of the perks of the job is seeing so much of the city. Educators venture into nearly every neighborhood in the city.

The largest cost is staff. The four educators are each paid around $35-40k/year. AMNH’s exhibit team fabricated two of the exhibitions, and two were outsourced to a fabrication company. Each truck’s expenses (e.g., books and handouts, minor repairs, maintenance, fuel, materials, supplies) is around $50k per vehicle per year.

Other trucks

There are over a dozen mobile museums in the U.S., covering various disciplines, though there is no centralized association of mobile museums. Here are two additional examples, in the arts:

Go van Gogh (Dallas Museum of Art) — A school outreach program that brings art to 1st through 6th grade students in schools throughout North Texas.

VanGo! (Susquehanna Art Museum) — Started in 1992, follow the school year (September through July), bringing original works of art to schools, community festivals, business, and retirement centers.

Know about other programs? Leave a comment!

Update: 30 April 2011: Minor adjustments to clarify that the two programs are free to visitors, and other minor wording changes.

Yesterday, art critic Judith Dobrzynski wrote in her Real Clear Arts blog about how an upcoming nighttime event at the Hirshhorn is elitist, flaunted, and inexcusable. Dobrzynski says, “I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, if museum officials don’t believe that art is enough, no one else will either.” What do you think?

The “After hours” event is $18, next Friday night (29-April) in the outdoor plaza of the Hirshhorn. Dobrzynski’s concern is that a VIP event may make the general public think the museum is elitist. Dobrzynski laments, “For years, museum officials have been droning on about the need to dispel the notion that art museums are elitist. To me, it’s more of a museum image problem than anything real: some people think that they have to dress up, have a college diploma, or have other so-called elite attributes to feel welcome. Mostly, that’s pure fantasy — or an excuse.”

New revenue models are sorely needed, and late evening events at an otherwise closed museum do not disrupt free daytime operations. Mark Durney, who maintains the blog Art Theft Central, noted that “institutions that put on risque after hours events did not make huge cuts or layoffs during the past 2-3 years.”

The Hirshhorn has a lot of great events, targeting a variety of audiences from teens to nightclubbers. See events. They are also creative about outreach methods, including using Facebook to target teens. See my article on Hirshhorn, “Promoting art events to teens directly from FB.”

Especially as the internet, social media, and mobile devices are dissolving the walls of the museum, critics like Dobrzynski (who has been editor of the Sunday “Money & Business” section and deputy business editor of The New York Times) would better support the institutions they love by supporting new revenue models and use of museums as events spaces, rather than mischaracterize a fun, late night Springtime party in the courtyard of an art museum as making the museum inaccessible.

Meanwhile, there are many interesting events going on in the UK now during Museums at Night 2011. See list at Culture 24.

In Tokyo and Kyoto, Hasegawa Tohaku pulled in the crowds, as did Abe Lincoln in Washington, DC. According to The Art Newspaper:

Forecasting exhibition attendance is an unpredictable science. Who would have thought that the six-foot-high plaster model of a statue of Abraham Lincoln would attract 9,290 visitors a day to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC? “Designing the Lincoln Memorial” lacked the magic words “treasures”, “impressionism” or “gold” in the title and yet it attracted 2.9m visitors in total, putting it third overall in The Art Newspaper’s 17th ­annual survey of attendance figures.

See the article, or a PDF on the top 30 exhibitions, plus tons of other data on total art museum visitors, various “top ten” lists, .

The data only includes museums who reported attendance rates for exhibitions to The Art Newspaper.

Like any hook, such as sports or popular culture, military and national security themes broaden an audience for outreach. There are over 3.6M military personnel in the U.S., 1.9M spouses & kids of active duty members, and over 22M veterans, who also have families. (Stats on personnel & families, and veterans.)

There are several initiatives which are bridging the military world with the sciences and culture…

A winnable battle

Most Americans like science & art. A 2009 Pew study found that overwhelming majorities of Americans feel that science has had a positive effect on society and that research has made life easier for most people. Americans also like arts and culture. They are keen on music and visual arts, and many like culture and dance. (See our blog post about involvement in arts & culture.)

Despite this broad seed of interest, there are ideological differences, particularly when it comes to money. Among the general public, Democrats are more interested in funding the arts and sciences, and Republicans are more interested in military. (According to Jan 2011 Gallup poll; Pew stats on science funding from 2009 are similar.) Here’s the Gallup data:

Bridging the waters

Last year, amidst ongoing ideological debates about climate change and government funding of the arts, two unexpected voices testified before Congress.

In support of the sciences, Rear Admiral Titley testified on 27-July-2010 before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, explaining that the Navy is closely watching effects of changing climate on sea ice in the Arctic, saying that “the changing Arctic has national security implications for the Navy.” (See also PDF)

In support of the arts, retired Army Brigadier General Nolen Bivens testified on 13-April-2010 to the a House appropriations subcommittee, to raise the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Bivens testified that “support for the arts and culture can improve our [country’s] national security needs.”

These military voices command the respect and attention of the military-oriented public, and carry authority because the military is considered a neutral voice.

The opposition bluffs

There are ideological differences, but politicians can make the differences look larger than then are. For example, in the sciences, House Republicans cut Obama’s budget recommendations in science and art (see graph at Nature). And in the arts, in January 2011, a group of 165 House Republicans, proposed to cut federal funding for arts, eliminating funds for NEA and NEH, and public broadcasting, as well a other liberal policies like public transportation.

When looking at budget discussions, it’s important to maintain some perspective: In terms of the Federal budget, the funds assigned to defense are colossal. The Federal budget for defense ($691B in FY2010) is five-times the sciences’ ($137B in 2010) and dwarfs the National Endowments for the Arts’ (NEA) and and the National Endowments for Humanities’ (NEH) ($0.34B in 2010).

Moreover, politicians bring a lot of bluster into the budget debate. According to Stanley Katz, director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton, “despite the rhetoric of the cultural wars [of the 1990’s], not much actually happened to influence public opinion against the arts.” He continues that the current debates are “more ideological window dressing than anything else.”

When it comes to controversial science topics like climate change, ideology does play a larger role. Regarding climate change, one in five Americans are doubtful or actively dismissive about global warming — and nearly all of the people with extreme views on the validity of climate change science are conservative Republicans. (See “Six Americas” PDF). This is where Rear Admiral Titley’s testimony and outreach is so vital.

Science & art outreach

In the sciences, there is a popular blog (290 posts, 600k visitors in 2010), Armed with Science, run by DoD which often features blog posts by scientists and various military departments. For climate change in particular, Rear Admiral Titley directs the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, TFCC (see their charter, PDF). TFCC maintains a Facebook page liked by 605 people, and Titley gives a variety of public speeches which raise attention in the press and among bloggers.

In the arts, General Bivens feels there is a lot of untapped potential. He emphasizes that the vast majority of people in the military respect the arts and culture, and appreciate the importance of cultural diplomacy to America’s long term security. He suggests arts outreach projects focused on cultural diplomacy in foreign countries, trainings for military personnel, and services to veterans and military families. For families, one example is the Blue Star Museums project (joint between NEA and Blue Star Families, a support organization for military families), which gives free museum admission to military families in the summer. NEA chairman Rocco Landesman wrote in Feb 2011, that a quarter of a million military families visited one of the 920 Blue Star Museums over summer 2010.

Upcoming blog posts will look at these programs in more detail. If you know about more projects, please list them in the comments.

I can’t show you the sites I reviewed, but here are 3 winning examples from 2010: Electrifying America; Polio Pioneer; and Out of the Box, Into the Oven.

The context for the student web sites was National History Day. This is a yearlong educational program that guides students to learn about interesting issues, ideas, people, and events of their choosing — and to express it via a creative and original performance, documentary, paper, web site, or exhibit. Teams of 2-3 students followed guidelines to create “a collection of web pages, interconnected with hyperlinks, that presents primary and secondary sources, interactive multimedia, and historical analysis… an accumulation of research and argument that incorporates textual and non-textual (photographs, maps, music, etc.) description, interpretation, and multimedia sources to engage and inform viewers about your chosen historical topic.”

Meanwhile, in the museum world, virtual exhibits are created by curators and education/outreach staff, and loosely fall into two types:

• Story-driven exhibits — In the virtual analogue to a physical museum, visitors are drawn through a story, guided through sections and subsections, filled with text and multimedia. These can be costly to produce if they have a lot of pages or extensive multimedia, but are inexpensive on the simpler end (as the student exhibits show). A decade ago, there was a boom in richly multimedia virtual exhibits as museums and publishers rushed to make virtual exhibits. That boom quickly tapered off, as sky-high develop costs did not lead to revenue, and virtual exhibits are now produced less often. The virtual exhibits at WebExhibits are mostly story-driven.
• Object-driven exhibits — Another approach is to focus on objects. Collection management software can stitch together objects and captions, giving visitors a web pages to browse. The premise is that if software is fed enough data, browsing objects online can approximate the experience of wandering the archives of a museum. Previously limited to deep-pocketed museum who could afford in-house software developments or commercial licenses, open source software like Omeka and CollectiveAccess now allow museums and archives to put collections online less expensively. Even WordPress can be used to navigate a collection (each post is an object or topic.) On a smaller scale, museums can accomplish a similar, limited goal using photo sharing sites like Picasa or Flickr photos, or even sharing photos within Facebook. A great example of using a blog/Facebook format is “Letters of Note.”

Students have been making web sites for National History Day and other annual contests like ThinkQuest since 1996. Kids do this in their after school time. Student projects avoid adult intervention, and so they suffer from typos, misdirected emphasis, awkward layouts, and limited research. But these flaws could all be easily remedied in a non-contest setting, if students were supervised by a historian or curator, and perhaps a design mentor.

If cheap, imperfect exhibits can be made by kids, there has to be a lesson for the establishment. But what’s the lesson? Should museums have summer internships with teams of kids? Should they partner with existing youth outreach projects? Or should they make more short & sweet virtual exhibits, which will not get bogged down with complex contracts, tedious planning and budget creep?

If museums don’t increase their investment in virtual exhibits, there is evidence that others will step up to the plate. Software companies are moving into this space. For example, see our recent post about “The virtual vs. the real: Giga-resolution in Google Art Project” where Google collected deliciously high-resolution photos, metadata, and interesting captions, to create a new kind of online art exhibit. And in the sciences, our blog post “Making of science apps: Not the usual suspects” talks about how eBook publisher TouchPress has created two interactive eBooks, on the periodic table and about the solar system, which are effectively hand-held virtual exhibits.

The report gave NEA got a big wakeup call about what “meaningful arts participation” means in a digital age. For nearly 3 decades, the largest survey of American’s involvement in the arts defined involvement using old-school activities, such as live attendance at jazz or classical music concerts, opera, plays, ballet, or visits to art museums or galleries. Based on those criteria, the original 2008 report showed “that art is working for fewer Americans, a finding that is deeply disturbing to all of us who care about the arts in our country. It reports a 5 percentage point decline in arts participation by Americans,” said chairman of NEA, Rocco Landesman, in the preface of a new report.

The establishment was alarmed and flummoxed. Mr. Landesman continues:

But as I have been traveling across this country, those findings did not ring true with what I was seeing: young people signing on to Pandora and plugged into all manner of mp3 players; people of all ages watching Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance; the prevalence of etsy.com and the quarter of a million military families who visited one of our 920 Blue Star Museums over 4 months this summer; the Kindles and Nooks in front of every airport passenger; Netflix and YouTube allowing all manner of film and media, past and present, to be consumed anywhere. And how about Glee? I am witness to a voracious American appetite for the arts that does not seem to track with a decline in arts participation.

So was there a discrepancy? Yes. The authors of the original report overlooked the digital world, and last week’s report tries to remedy that.

Rise in digital consumption and creation of content

Survey questions like, “Did you go to the opera?” are straightforward and arty; but how do you characterize digital consumption? The 2008 study did not differentiate between listening to a single music track, and being a dedicated fan. Does taking a photo with a camera phone count as creating content? It’s a lot easier to take digital photos than toting around a film camera was.

Pew Internet recently reported that 33% of internet users have paid for digital music online.  16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows. 10% have paid for e-books. Looking at what people are doing with their phones, ComScore recently reported that 52% take photos, and 16% listen to music. As the proportion of smartphones increases, we can expect those number to rise.

At what point does taking photos cross over into being art? Does listening to pop music mean people are engaged in arts?

More interesting is how people can create their own content. New art made with new digital tools (for phones & tablets) that make it easy to create music and visual images. For example, photo and art-related apps for digital phones and tablets allow photos to be manipulated, and for fingertips to create digital brushstrokes.

More amazing are the new digital music tools, such as those announced by Apple yesterday for the iPad2, in Garage Band. This $5 app has more power than expensive synthesizers of old, includes many touch-controlled virtual instruments, and also “smart instruments” which allow the user to choose chords, without the learning curve for a real guitar. Strumming a finger on the screen makes beautiful guitar chords.  Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs enthused yesterday that teenagers will create tons of music with this.

The NEA survey, and re-calculation

Consumption and creation are art is moving to handheld devices, especially among the young. Although their 2008 survey was not designed to focus on digital, they had many questions to draw on. So NEA hired statisticians to re-mine the survey data from 18,444 adults, spread over 83 questions and subquestions. Although only 34.6% of respondents attended “benchmark” arts events such jazz or classical music concerts, opera, plays, ballet, or who visited art museums or galleries — Nearly 75% of adults attended arts activities, created art, or engaged with art via electronic media. The highest rates of participation via electronic media–including mobile devices and the Internet–were reported for classical music (18%), Latin music (15%), and programs about the visual and literary arts (15% each). The survey asked various questions, e.g., “During the last 12 months, did you use the Internet to view visual art online, such as paintings, sculpture, or photography? Is this something that you usually do?”

The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts is the nation’s largest and most representative periodic study of adult participation in arts events and activities. It is conducted by the NEA in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau (the SPPA questions are asked by census officials when interviewing a small subset of households). Five times since 1982, the survey has asked U.S. adults 18 and older about their patterns of arts participation over a 12-month period.

Report authors note major trends, such as, “The proliferation of artistic content via broadcast media (cable television, satellite radio, online media, etc.); The availability of low-cost, high-quality audio and visual recording devices (e.g., digital cameras) and portable sound systems; The widespread availability of computer software for downloading, organizing, and composing music; and, The availability of digital reading devices such as Amazon’s Kindle.”

Hopefully the next survey will look closer at the digital space; and perhaps this will also affect legislative and institutional priorities about how NEA works to improve American’s literacy in the arts.

Here’s a short press release about the report, and the report PDF.

Arts education matters too

The new data analysis also clearly showed that those who receive arts education as a child are more likely to create or perform art, engage with the arts via media, and take art classes as an adult. (See an article, “Arts Education Sees Decline, Especially for Minorities, Report Suggests” at Education Week for more about childhood education.)

Real life has a close competitor in the “Art Project,” released by Google last week. Their initial release is a clean, inviting site for browsing over one thousand artworks from 17 of the world’s most famous museums. At least one piece from each of the 17 museums is displayed in gigapixel resolution, so that online visitors can zoom in to the brushstrokes. Each piece also has information about the artists, text or video commentary, bios, and links to related pieces. Some museums have 3D walk-throughs, analogous to Google’s map street views (there are 6000 3D panoramas), and there’s a way to create personal art “collections” to revisit or share later.

The resolution on the gigapixel images is stunning. Consider “The Starry Night,” the famous paining by post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh. When you see the painting in real life, you can see the texture of the thick paint strokes which van Gogh created. But aside from a general impression of shimmering, textured paint, it’s hard to see the texture in detail in a busy gallery with normal illumination. Here’s a typical view:

Writing for the Boston Globe, Sebastian Smee said, “If you live far from some of the world’s great museums — and we all do — Google Art Project can give you tantalizing glimpses of their galleries and of individual works of art.” But most of Mr. Smee’s article criticizes the online access: “Call me a curmudgeon, but I remain underwhelmed. It’s not just that Google’s interface is frustrating, or that the choice of viewing possibilities is constrained and seemingly arbitrary… The human eye can grasp the thickness, weight, and texture of the yellow impasto Van Gogh used for the stars and moon in “The Starry Night’’ much more effectively than a camera.”

Is that true? below is a screenshot of the yellow impasto in Google Art Project — and you can zoom in even more:

The Starry Night image in the Google Art Project is super high resolution. The Google image is approximately 45 thousand pixels wide. It is 6 times higher resolution than the naked eye can see from a meter.

The painting is 74 cm × 92 cm. The maximum spatial resolution of  the human eye is measured in cycles per degree. If we consider the vision photoreceptors in the eye to be analogous to pixels, our vision in the most sensitive region, in the fovea of our eye, corresponds to the equivalent pixel spacing of 0.39 arc-minute (Clark, 1990).

One degree of vision is  1 / ( 0.39 * 1/60)  =  154 pixels. If you stand one meter from a painting, a 0.92 meter wide painting uses a width of 2 * arctan ( 0.92 / 2 ) degrees = 49° of your vision. The equivalent number of pixels which you can see is = 49 * 154 = 7546 pixel wide — the limit of resolution of our eye — any higher pixel density would look the same. You would need to look at the painting with your eye 7 cm (just under 3 inches) away to see the same level of detail. Brian Croxall notes that this is much higher resolution than the commercial image library ARTstor gives to schools and libraries.

Seeing details is important, but the relative importance of seeing detail vs. seeing real 3D is debatable. An article in the Washington Post, reported skeptical comments from museum directors, for example, Brian Kennedy, director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, said the gigapixel images can bring out details that might not be visible to ordinary museum-goers in a gallery. But scholars will still want a three-dimensional view of the art, which even a very high-resolution two-dimensional image can’t provide.

In any event, the degree of access in this visually appealing, easy to use, highly publicized and free web site is unparalleled. Without it, images of this iconic painting are hard for the general public to appreciate in detail, unless they buy a (two-dimensional) poster or book. That painting is located at MoMA in midtown Manhattan. Admission to the MoMA costs $20 for adults, $12 for students, and free on Friday nights. MoMA has approximately 2.1 million visitors per year, averaging 6.7 thousand visitors per day they are open — 16 visitors per minute — many of whom are interested in the same famous van Gogh painting. Despite being painted in 1889, and long since out of copyright, MoMA maintains strict control over photos which visitors might want to take home or share. According to their guidelines: “Still photography for personal use is permitted in collection galleries only… No photographs or videotapes may be reproduced, distributed, or sold without permission from the Museum.” — All the more reason that MoMA and the other 17 museums are to be commended for facilitating this project.

This is one of the reasons that Jonathan Jones writes at the Guardian says:

“Google’s Art Project is a profoundly enriching encounter, one that really starts to break down the difference between viewing a reproduction and seeing it in the flesh. It deserves to succeed.”

And Julian Raby, director of the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington said:

“The giga-pixel experience brings us very close to the essence of the artist through detail that simply can’t be seen in the gallery itself … Far from eliminating the necessity of seeing artworks in person, Art Project deepens our desire to go in search of the real thing.”

Dr. Raby’s comments echo those by made by Walter Benjamin makes in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Brian Croxall points out in the essay, Benjamin considers the effect that photography, phonography, lithography, and more have on the “aura” or authenticity of an art work. On the other hand, he noted, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Benjamin is clear that reproductions are better than originals in at least one concrete way:

…process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.

To examine this more closely with students, The New York Times Learning Network posted a lesson plan, “Real vs. Virtual: Examining Works of Art Online.”

This project did not start as an official Google strategy. Nelson Mattos, Google’s vice-president for engineering, said the Google Art Project started off as one of the company’s “20% projects.” (All Google employees to take a fifth of their time away from their regular day job, to work on innovations.) Google managed all theartwork photography, capture of the Street View imagery, and negotiations with museums. Negotiations could be a drag, and some museums resisted giving free access to their images. Absent are two of the most popular and important museums, the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay, both in Paris. Amit Sood, leader of the Google Art Project, said “We approached as many museums as we could…But you can only wait so long for people to come on board. We just decided to stop at 17.” Google outsourced some of the design to a media agency, Schematic. In an interview with CNET, Jason Brush, the executive vice president for user experience at Schematic said:

“One of the first issues we had to face was making sure that the site wasn’t itself a meta-museum. The museums themselves have the cultural and civic onus to present the artworks in their collections in whatever way that’s appropriate to their mission. We didn’t want to usurp that. So, the pressure stemmed from not just making sure that the site was enjoyable and easy-to-use because of it’s cultural value, but also because we needed to create a model that drew a clear distinction between the live, in-person museum-going experience…a whole new model for viewing art… We did make some design decisions vis-a-vis unique aggregation of content from many museums. For instance, on the home page, we chose to randomize which museum gets highlighted on load. We didn’t want it always to be the museum at the top of the list.”

Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums, called the walk-through technology an interesting experiment, and the kind of experiment that most museums can’t produce on their limited budgets. She liked the personalization, citing that “It certainly fits with the research we’ve been doing that people like to create their own experiences and their own mash-ups and share them with other people,” but she questioned the appeal of looking at art and galleries on a computer screen.

Marsha Semmel, deputy director for museums at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, said in the Post article that online collections should strive to create connections between material held by different institutions.

Check out the van Gogh painting at Google Art Project.

Their “poster” for “Teenagers Are TakingOver The Hirshhorn Feb. 4!” is below: