Smarthistory: The Blog

Last week I had the pleasure of talking about Smarthistory.org’s conversational technique with 15 teachers from public schools across the country. They had come to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the week-long Clarice Smith National Teacher Institute, held from August 3-7, 2009. Their objective was to learn how to use art to teach across the curriculum, and our New Media team’s role was to give them some new technology skills for the classroom: blogging, podcasting, and incorporating multimedia into classroom powerpoint presentations.

[Link here to the slides]

But to underscore that the technology is but a vehicle for the content, I couldn’t resist talking a bit about interpretation and different approaches to audio content design as well. We looked at scripted content, which should be more like blog posts written for the ear than recorded versions of object labels; interviews with experts such as artists or curators – always a favorite with audiences; and ‘vox pops’ that incorporate visitors’ opinions, for example, as is common in SFMOMA’s Artcasts; and conversations about art, like SmartHistory.org’s.

To illustrate the conversational approach, I played Beth and Steven’s podcast about American artist Mary Cassatt’s 1894 Breakfast in Bed in the Huntington Library in California, and we talked about how the informal dialectic space models learning, inviting the listener to join the conversation and develop his or her own views of the artwork. Even the speakers’ early disagreement in the podcast about which town they were in serves to reinforce this useful information about the Huntington, while lightening the tone and lending the podcast an approachable atmosphere.

We also looked at the context in which listeners experience the audio content: are they moving through the museum, sitting in the classroom, or on a bus? Are they looking at an artwork or a high-quality image of it online, or is this mainly an audio experience? And is the best vehicle for the podcaster’s message a traditional audio tour ‘stop’ or ‘soundbite’, that focuses on a given artwork in-depth, or is it an overview of a gallery (like this one Beth & I experimented with at the IMA), exhibition or theme that immerses the listener in a ‘soundtrack’ to provide a higher level guide or general tools for understanding an artist, a collection, a period?

Whatever their tack, I recommended that the teachers start with the questions that come immediately to mind for their students when they confront the art under consideration. These will range from the empirical ‘what is this?’ to the philosophical ‘why is it important?’ questions, and will be inflected by the specific content and context of the art. Here are some we collected from visitors to the folk art section of our Luce Foundation Center, an open study/storage facility displaying about thirty-three hundred objects in a compact space over three floors of the Museum’s west wing, where we are in the final stages of creating a cross-platform audio tour:

1. What makes folk art, ‘art’? How is folk art different from fine art? Why is it in museums?
2. Who makes folk art? What were the people who made it like?
3. What do the symbols mean?
4. Where does all this stuff come from?
5. What is it made of?
6. Why are fishing lures considered art?
7. What is up with the penguins?
8. Where did all these fish come from? One person or lots of people?
9. I’d like more information about the “memory” idea about the ceramics that have the stones and other objects. Could you give an example from one of these pieces?

The ‘leading with questions’ methodology could come straight out of a market research or customer service manual. By responding to what your listeners have foremost in their minds, you engage them in a mental dialogue that then opens up a space where other ‘key messages’ can be more easily received as well. You validate their questions and interests, so they are more likely to want to listen to what else you have to offer.

Of course the best way to learn is to teach, so another interesting use of audio in the classroom is having students create their own podcasts. The Education Department of the American Art Museum has a very popular student podcast program, in which high school students record their reflections on selected artworks in the collection. Through the process of creating a script about an artwork and listening to their own words, the students’ writing skills improve immeasurably, in addition to their visual arts literacy.

I am now relishing the vision of podcasting and the SmartHistory.org conversational technique being refined throughout American classrooms and engaging future generations more deeply with art through the students that the Clarice Smith teachers will touch. I hope they’ll be as generous in sharing their tips and best practice with the community of art educators as Steven and Beth have been with me!

About Nancy Proctor
Formerly Head of New Product Development at Antenna Audio, Nancy Proctor is now Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She also manages MuseumMobile.info and its wiki and podcast series on mobile interpretation content and technology for cultural sites. Nancy was recently appointed Digital Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal.

Newspapers and wire services have been running stories about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students and even younger kids. The articles tend to cite California’s serious budget woes and the price and weight of the traditional textbook. Unfortunately, they are quite vague about what the digital texts will look like. At Smarthistory.org, we hope that California and others look beyond the familiar organizational structure of the textbook and its analogue finding aids. Open textbooks ought to take advantage of the web’s inherent strengths and allow users to organize material in numerous ways while pointing outward to high quality resources elsewhere on the web. Hopefully, these new resources will seamlessly incorporate multimedia allowing users to listen, read, watch and most importantly respond. Here is an opportunity to directly engage students, allowing them initiate or join conversations both in and outside the confines of the text. Hey, that sounds a bit like Smarthistory.org!

Gov. Schwarzenegger Launches First-in-Nation Initiative to Develop Free Digital Textbooks for High School Students

Schools may copy Arnold Schwarzenegger and junk their textbooks

This post was co-written by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

Mt. Rainier is currently on our right as we fly back to NYC from Portland by way of Seattle. We were privileged to spend the last few days at the Portland Art Museum with a group of dedicated educators, docents and curators. Our visit was the brainchild of Tina Olsen, the Director of Education and Programs, who thought there might be value in creating Smarthistory-style conversations for the museum—and wanted to test out her theory. We in turn, saw this as an opportunity to bridge the gap that exists between art historians in higher education and those in the museum world. Thanks to a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, we worked closely with Tina to design and execute an intensive two-day workshop to help educators, curators and docents develop the skills needed to create and produce interpretive content in the form of conversation that focused on their rich permanent collection.

Our goals included working across museum departments (with expert and non-expert voices) and opening up interpretation to emotion and opinion—in essence modeling thoughtful and exploratory conversations to invite museum visitors to discover collection objects on their own. While we have a clear sense that Smarthistory videos are engaging and helpful for art history students and informal learners, we had no real sense of how and if they would be successful in a museum context or how they might be transformed by other museum professionals. We were also excited to have two non-Western curators amongst the participants; we have been very curious to understand how our conversations would play out with art that was not part of the Western tradition.

So, this was an experiment—for both Smarthistory and for the Portland Art Museum—and no one was quite sure where it would leave us. We have already begun evaluating how successfully we achieved our goals and will continue in follow-up surveys and interviews. We’ll make sure to post all results here, and plan to develop a related “How-To” section on the Smarthistory site this summer for museums that might want to replicate what we did, though it became very clear to us that having experienced facilitators from the outside was extremely valuable.

Since this was new territory for all of us; we prepared carefully and even assigned preparatory “homework”—articles by Rika Burnham (Frick Collection) and Peter Samis (SFMoMA). The homework focused on museum interpretation and included audios and videos from the Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smarthistory and covered a wide range of styles. Some were long, some short, some were conversations while others were lectures and interviews. For our icebreaker we asked each workshop participant to bring in a reproduction of an object that had personal meaning to them—these also formed the basis of the first audio recording.

Over the course of the two days, each participant had four opportunities to create recordings in the galleries followed by time to listen, reflect and discuss. We experimented with different pairings—curator/curator, curator/educator, educator/educator, educator/docent, and docent/docent. In some pairings an object would be intimately familiar to one of the speakers, while in others, the object was less familiar to both. We also took turns in the mix.

What we didn’t anticipate was how much fun everyone would have. Taking time from busy schedules, going out into the galleries, talking to colleagues about beautiful and interesting objects that they feel a strong sense of attachment to, and creating and editing video that would live on the website—proved a surprisingly pleasurable experience. Several participants described the workshop as therapeutic and restorative.

In our discussions, we explored the following questions –

• Where should the media we created reside—on the website and/or in the galleries? How would it be accessed it the galleries?
• What formats (audio or video, long or short) would be best for those different settings?
• What style was best—an exploratory conversation or a relaxed interview? Is style tied to the purpose of the recording (a gallery overview, to model discovery, or an in-depth explication)?
• Does the conversation’s style depend on the speakers’ roles (docents, curators, educators—or a combination of those) and/or their familiarity and expertise with the object that was discussed?
• What visual material is most useful in the gallery versus on the website? Should visual material be offered in the gallery? If so, what kind of material would be best? Should we use a combination of photos of the image and video of the speakers?

We recognize that museum professionals in both education and curatorial departments don’t have the time and perhaps the confidence to learn new technologies unless they see first hand a substantial benefit. We were able to demonstrate strategies for creating engaging interpretive content as well as how to publish high quality video for in-gallery and web distribution. Video and audio production is still veiled in jargon and is viewed as an extremely expensive undertaking that is best left to IT departments and outside consultants.

We took a different approach. Our workshop sought to empower the curatorial and education departments with conversational strategies and inexpensive easy-to-use equipment and software. Very quickly, curators were planning future recordings while after the first brief lesson, two educators were confidently editing audio while zooming and panning across still images.

Please let us know if you have questions about the workshop, or if you are interested in running one at your institution.

Warm thanks to Christina Olsen, Bruce Guenther, Gerri Hayes, Kate Burns, Stephanie Parrish, Floyd Sklaver, Jillian Punska, Amy Gray, Maribeth Graybill, & Anna Strankman.

The following post was written by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

For some time now, we have been publicly questioning the division that exists between two professional groups tasked with educating the public about art: those in museums (curators and educators) and those in the academy (art historians). These two communities share expertise that is sought by the museum visitor and the student, yet they rarely meet, too often do not attend the same conferences, and almost never collaborate.

Teachers in the art history classroom regularly rely on museum resources (the fabulous Vermeer videos for example, created by the National Gallery, or the Eastman House videos to name two of our favorites). Exhibition subsites are also often very useful—but they are expensive to produce. The learning materials developed by professors for their students often reside behind the locked gates of learning management systems, so they are not available to the wider public (open courseware is, of course, the lovely exception). Interestingly, it is usually only via iTunesU that we are able to aggregate content created by these two different communities.

Our overarching point is that these two communities really ought to collaborate because the benefits to those we serve could be enormous. And we have two notions about how we might do that:

Notion 1
Inspired by Koven Smith’s recent paper (given just a couple of weeks ago at Museums and the Web) on the Future of Mobile Interpretation we thought of one way to bring the museum and the academy together. Koven draws attention to the disjunction between the more open and personalized online museum experience—which often allows visitors to browse most (if not all) of the museum’s collection, and even create personal collections of their own—and the experience of the on-site mobile device which contains only limited “stops” and focuses on special exhibitions and highlights from the permanent collection. Koven’s answer to mobile interpretation: make the entire collection available on mobile devices—with the textual accompaniment one finds on the website. And we would add more to that—make it available with interpretation that is conversational, open, personal, opinionated—AND offers expertise.

In a recent blog post Nina Simon noted the disjunction between the on-site experiences and the web experiences even of the same museum, “You may be able to engage a thriving community online, but if their experience with the institution is fundamentally different from the onsite one, they will remain online-only visitors.”

As we discussed with Nancy Proctor and Deb Howes, what if artists and art historians—those with significant expertise in looking at and thinking about art—could be called on to create multimedia (and even text-based) content for the works of art in a museum’s permanent collection? Museums could provide guidelines about what they are looking for, vet the content, and publish to the website and mobile devices only that content that aligned with the institution’s needs. In this way, the museum can begin to move toward becoming a platform and not just a provider.

Notion 2
The Smarthistory Lab
Susan Chun is one of those people for whom great ideas are a dime a dozen. There was one she tossed out over drinks recently that fit perfectly with two strands of thinking we have been grappling with at Smarthistory. On the one hand, we have sought ways to create a community of Smarthistory users and to include and highlight their voices (we are creating comments capability in the newest version) but we had also begun to discuss creating a sandbox, tentatively named the Smarthistory Lab, a neutral ground beyond the cloistered walls of the academy and the fortress-like facades of our museums where experts from across our disciplines can explore collaborative projects. So into this mire, Susan mentions that she had been working on an article that focused on the museum label. We were both instantly focused. There is likely no aspect of museum convention more fraught then the tiny real estate given over to the label. Here, on a small bit of cardboard beside the original object, is a set of abbreviated choices that likely express far more about the current state of museological and art historical thinking than it reveals about the object it is appended to.

The Label Project
An original impetus for Smarthistory was to enrich the museum visitors’ experience. At the museum we too often see visitors focused on the scant data offered by the label and not the object, hungry for keys to the work of art in front of them. And too often we offer them only the merest sustenance, the basic stats of an artist’s birth and death, material, perplexing acquisition and provenance notations, and perhaps a brief formal reading or quote. How stingy this seems compared to the riches potentially available. Can the tired modernist fiction that the direct experience of the object must remain unencumbered by the frame of context really still be operative? Do we actually believe that the experience of seeing the objects that we display is so tentative, and so easily overwhelmed?

Our first project for the Smarthistory Lab will be a wiki for writing museum labels, framed by the aforementioned article (by Susan Chun) and a discussion on the museum label. Our questions: How can we reinvent the museum label? What should it include? Can it be digital and multi-layered so that summary can lead to in-depth resources if the visitor wants more? Could the wiki label project be a forum where scholars from museums and from universities collaborate to provide a multiplicity of voices that inform and challenge and can this be the point where the online museum intersects with the experience of the physical visitor?

Please look for the Smarthistory Lab initiative by the end of June.

– Beth Harris & Steven Zucker