Monthly Archives: April 2015

Publishing is as publishing does – revealing ‘books’ in the collection

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Note: This book is actually 144 pages long and the count is a by-product of the way we’ve stitched things together. By the time you read this that problem may be fixed. So it goes, right?

We’ve added a new section to the Collections website: publications. You know, books.

This is the simplest dumbest thing we could think of to create a bridge between analog publications and the web. It’s only a handful of recent publications at the moment and whether or not older publications will be supported remains an open question, for now.

To be clear – there are already historical publications available for viewing on the main Cooper Hewitt website. As I was writing this blog post Micah reminded me that we’ve even uploaded them in to the Internet Archive so you can use their handy book reader to view the books online. All of which means that we’ll likely be importing those publications to the collections website soon enough.

All of this (newer) work is predicated on the fact that we have the luxury, with these specific publications, of operating outside the “work” versus “edition” dilemma that many other kinds of books have to negotiate. All we’ve done is created stable permanent URLs for each book and each page in that book. That’s it.

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The goal is not to reproduce the book online, for all the usual reasons, but to give meaningful atomic units of a book – pages – a presence on the Interwebs and a scaffolding for future stuff (object lists, additional photographs, notes and other ancillary materials and so on) as time and circumstance permit.

Related, Emily Fildes’ and Allison Foster’s Museums and the Web (2015) paper
What the Fonds?! The ups and downs of digitising Tate’s Archive is a good discussion around the issues, both technical and user-facing, that are raised as various sources of disparate data (artworks, library and archive data, curatorial files) all start to share the same conceptual space on the web.

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We’re not there yet and it may take us a while to get there so in the meantime every page URL has a small half-toned reproduction of the book page in question. That’s meant to give people a visual cue and confidence in the URL itself — specifically they look the same — such that you might bookmark it, share it with a friend, or whatever awesome use you dream up without having to wonder whether the ground will shift out from underneath it.

Kind of like books, right?

Finally, all the links indicating how many pages a particular book has are “magic” – click on them and you’ll be redirected to a random page inside that book.

Enjoy!

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Understanding how the Pen interacts with the API

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Detail of instructional postcard now available to museum visitors at entry to accompany The Pen.

Detail of instructional postcard now available to museum visitors at entry to accompany The Pen.

The Pen has been up and running now for five weeks and the museum as a whole has been coming to terms with exactly what that means. Some things can be planned for, others can be hedged against, but inevitably there will be surprises – pleasant and unpleasant. We can report that our expectations of usage have been far exceeded with extremely high take up rates, over 400,000 ‘acts of collection’ (saving museum objects with the Pen), and a great post-visit log in rate.

The Pen touches almost every operation of the museum – even though the museum was able to operate completely without it from our opening in December until March. At its most simple, object labels need NFC tags which in turn needs up-to-the-minute location information entered into our collection management system (TMS); the ticketing system needs a constant connection not only to its own servers but also to our API functions that create unique shortcodes for each visitor’s visit; and the Pens need regular cleaning and their monthly battery change. So everyone in the museum has been continuously improving and altering backend systems, improving workflows, and even the front-end UI on tablets that the ticket staff use to pair Pens with tickets.

Its complex.

Katie drew up (another) useful diagram of the journey of a Pen through a visit and how it interacts with our API.

Single visit 'lifecycle' of The Pen. Illustration by Katie Shelly, 2015. [click to enlarge]

Single visit ‘lifecycle’ of The Pen. Illustration by Katie Shelly, 2015. [click to enlarge]

Even more details of the overall system design and development saga can be found in the (long) Museums and the Web 2015 paper by Chan & Cope.

The digital experience at Cooper Hewitt is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The Pen is the result of a collaboration between Cooper Hewitt, SistelNetworks, GE, MakeSimply, Undercurrent, and an original concept by Local Projects with Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Sorting, Synonyms and a Pretty Pony

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We’ve been undergoing a massive rapid-capture digitization project here at the Cooper Hewitt, which means every day brings us pictures of things that probably haven’t been seen for a very, very long time.

As an initial way to view all these new images of objects, I added “date last photographed” to our search index and allowed it to be sorted by on the search results page.

That’s when I found this.

[collection_object id=18692335]

I hope we can all agree that this pony is adorable and that if there is anything else like it in our collection, it needs to be seen right now. I started browsing around the other recently photographed objects and began to notice more animal figurines:

[collection_object id=18460201]

[collection_object id=18615463]

As serendipitous as it was that I came across this wonderful collection-within-a-collection by browsing through recently-photographed objects, what if someone is specifically looking for this group? The whole process shows off some of the work we did last summer switching our search backend over to Elasticsearch (which I recently presented at Museums and the Web). We wanted to make it easier to add new things so we could provide users (and ourselves) with as many “ways in” to the collection as possible, as it’s those entry points that allow for more emergent groupings to be uncovered. This is great for somebody who is casually spending time scrolling through pictures, but a user who wants to browse is different from a user who wants to search. Once we uncover a connected group of objects, what can we do to make it easier to find in the future?

Enter synonyms. Synonyms, as you might have guessed, are a text analysis technique we can use in our search engine to relate words together. In our case, I wanted to relate a bunch of animal names to the word “animal,” so that anyone searching for terms like “animals” or “animal figurines” would see all these great little friends. Like this bear.

[collection_object id=18633719]

The actual rule (generated with the help of Wikipedia’s list of animal names) is this:

 "animal => aardvark, albatross, alligator, alpaca, ant, anteater, antelope, ape, armadillo, baboon, badger, barracuda, bat, bear, beaver, bee, bird, bison, boar, butterfly, camel, capybara, caribou, cassowary, cat, kitten, caterpillar, calf, bull, cheetah, chicken, rooster, chimpanzee, chinchilla, chough, clam, cobra, cockroach, cod, cormorant, coyote, puppy, crab, crocodile, crow, curlew, deer, dinosaur, dog, puppy, salmon, dolphin, donkey, dotterel, dove, dragonfly, duck, poultry, dugong, dunlin, eagle, echidna, eel, elephant, seal, elk, emu, falcon, ferret, finch, fish, flamingo, fly, fox, frog, gaur, gazelle, gerbil, panda, giraffe, gnat, goat, sheep, goose, poultry, goldfish, gorilla, blackback, goshawk, grasshopper, grouse, guanaco, fowl, poultry, guinea, pig, gull, hamster, hare, hawk, goshawk, sparrowhawk, hedgehog, heron, herring, hippopotamus, hornet, swarm, horse, foal, filly, mare, pig, human, hummingbird, hyena, ibex, ibis, jackal, jaguar, jellyfish, planula, polyp, scyphozoa, kangaroo, kingfisher, koala, dragon, kookabura, kouprey, kudu, lapwing, lark, lemur, leopard, lion, llama, lobster, locust, loris, louse, lyrebird, magpie, mallard, manatee, mandrill, mantis, marten, meerkat, mink, mongoose, monkey, moose, venison, mouse, mosquito, mule, narwhal, newt, nightingale, octopus, okapi, opossum, oryx, ostrich, otter, owl, oyster, parrot, panda, partridge, peafowl, poultry, pelican, penguin, pheasant, pigeon, bear, pony, porcupine, porpoise, quail, quelea, quetzal, rabbit, raccoon, rat, raven, deer, panda, reindeer, rhinoceros, salamander, salmon, sandpiper, sardine, scorpion, lion, sea urchin, seahorse, shark, sheep, hoggett, shrew, skunk, snail, escargot, snake, sparrow, spider, spoonbill, squid, calamari, squirrel, starling, stingray, stinkbug, stork, swallow, swan, tapir, tarsier, termite, tiger, toad, trout, poultry, turtle, vulture, wallaby, walrus, wasp, buffalo, carabeef, weasel, whale, wildcat, wolf, wolverine, wombat, woodcock, woodpecker, worm, wren, yak, zebra"

Where every word to the right of the => automatically gets added to a search for a word to the left.

Not only does our new search stack provide us with a useful way to discover emergent relationships, but it makes it easy for us to “seal them in,” allowing multiple types of user to get the most from our collections site.