Updated Thesis Brief 5/1/6

There is a substantial need for a personally maintained, open-source, media management system for artists.  This thesis will explore the zeitgeist of the online gallery as explained by both traditional museums, galleries and academics, and the digital gallery, as explained by interactive designers, bloggers and scholars.  My initial concept was to attempt to recreate the phsycial gallery experience online, by learning how gallery owners and curators structure their exhibitions, and tapping into the decision making process that goes on, and adapting it to the digital realm.  This recreation relies on a sophisticated understanding of relational models of data, and a custom software application that takes into consideration the needs of this project: chiefly that it be free, fully customizable, and extentable to unseen applications.  The operation of this management system will be targeted towards the working or student artist.  This is a perpendicular change to my original concept, where I was mimicking the process of the curator and their needs, whereas this iteration focuses more on the art and the artists, and the framework of the project serves as an intelligent curator.

The commercial gallery’s main focus is to bring bodies into their location and sell them artwork based upon their exhibition’s organization and their marketing and promotion of their artists.  Traditional museums raision d’etre is the attraction of visitors to its halls and relative exclusivity of their collection.  Neither of these scenarios lend themselves to the support of a recreation of the gallery experience.  But the lack of interest from these two groups clearly illuminates the latent threat of a comprehensive online gallery experience, and the disintermediating power of the internet in the hands of an individual artist or movement of artists.  Rather than try and force a system on an unwilling client, I will create a comprehensive system for a needing (to succumb to the ‘broke artist’ stereotype) and deserving (in that the desire for the artist is to share their vision with the world) patron.

From Jakob Nielsen, the god of usability.

In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

LINK - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

LINK - http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/

I presented this in class, it’s a circular way of looking at Flickr.

OK. I have an updated Thesis Outline Here

The major changes are the condensing of the surveys, and rework of the development.

Evoca.com – Audio recording and management

Design – Very nice, simple and themed.

Degradation – Not optimized for XHTML, CSS. Poor degradation.

Paradigms – Uses familiar symbols and terminology, except for ‘shoebox’.

Extensibility – Built in RSS of mp3s.

Digg.com – Community Tech News and related

Design – Very simple, well organized.

Degradation – Optimized for XHTML & CSS. Great degradation.

Paradigms – Uses familiar symbols and terminology, except for ‘digg’ and ‘spy’.

Extensibility – Built in RSS of searches, users, feeds, and pages. API support.

Newsvine.com – Community News Site

Design – Hierarchical in nature. Thematic. Well branded.

Degradation – Optimized for XHTML & CSS. Great degradation.

Paradigms – Simple interface, symbols and images. Industry (news) terms. ‘seed’

Extensibility – RSS your own feed, or others, or even tags.  Seed via JS.

Odeo.com – Audio recording and management

Design – Garish, simple, colorful.  Appeals to both genders(? Pink/blue ?)

Degradation – Optimized for XHTML & CSS. Good degradation.

Paradigms – Simple play/record control.  Does not use all common net symbols (rss)

Extensibility – Can record via phone. Personal files as RSS. Save as mp3 option.

Eyespot.com – Video mixing and management (beta)

Design – Very clean, and contemporary. Simple branding, used repeatedly.

Degradation – Since its video, you’d expect little degradation, but it is quite nice.

Paradigms – Simple mixing and editing controls. Drag-n-drop used extensively.

Extensibility – Poor. No ability to generate video podcasts, or share externally.

Stylehive.com – Social bookmarking of product/design (alpha)

Design – Poor ratios of content. Top heavy on inner pages.  Not designed for browsers.

Degradation – It actually looks better to me without any CSS. The hierarchy is obvious.

Paradigms – Does not take advantage of existing visual systems, and it is intl in nature.

Extensibility – Not obvious with the RSS integration.  Unknown ability to use Apis.

Megite.com – Tech news site

Design – Good color/font concept, very poor execution. Way more content than needed.

Degradation – OK, again, too much content displayed to scan quickly.

Paradigms – Too text based, could use more symbols.  Generally black on white.

Extensibility - Good. Ability to consume RSS of popular content. Credit to sources.

Last.fm – Audio browsing and management.

Design – Good theme and branding.  Layout of elements is clear. Lots of info, yet simple.

Degradation – Excellent. CSS gen’d graphs degrade perfectly. Very easy to understand.

Paradigms – Great, use of common audio symbols and hierarchy of text sizes.

Extensibility – External plugins to run outside of the browser.  Legal restrictions on RSS.

Wufoo.com – Online form builder (beta)

Design – Nice theme, obvious separation of areas due to colors and fonts.

Degradation – Not applicable

Paradigms – Awesome. Drag/drop. Instant feedback.  Active highlighting.

Extensibility – I’d assume that would be key. But its still in beta.

Riffs.com – Social recommender

Design – Nice theme, clean and clear. A little big, but that seems to be the ‘in’ thing.

Degradation – Great. Totally usable with no CSS.

Paradigms­ – Good. Attention paid to clearly identifiable symbols, there are a lot though.

Extensibility – RSS based on user, cat or tag.  Good API support and dev. Phone use.

Flickr.com is an online photo sharing site.  Its content is generated by its users, and it grows in any of the directions that they feel necessary.  Flickr takes advantage of all of the latest paradigms of visual navigation, content syndication and applied programming interfaces (apis).  And most importantly, it has an advanced content tagging system, which allows metagalleries to be instantly generated by shared keywords.  This also allows you to create personal metagalleries if you have a large amount of photos shared, so that you don’t need to manage multiple galleries, rather you can just manage the tags that you use to define pictures, and let these tags define the layout of the galleries.  There is also built in rating and commenting systems that promotes community interaction, and the sharing of information and talents.  And Flickr also does an amazingly fantastic job at allowing users to upload their content from phones, wirelessly, or via the web their photos. In addition to these methods, you can download plugins for popular home photo management software, so that Flickr can be aware of changes you make to your local files, and update your personal galleries simultaneously.

I’m a big fan of Flickr (if you couldn’t tell) and so rather than rehash what I feel are their strengths, I will look at any of the areas that they might improve:
Multiple suggestions of similar or interesting related photos - When you are browsing, you do see thumbnails of both the next and previous image in the thread you are browsing, but it would be nice if you could also see these thumbs (and a few more) that relate to the pattern you are investigating by ratio of that thumbnail (closer match, larger thumb).
Additional level of affinity - Rather than ‘blog’ an image, or add it to my ‘favs’, it would be nice if the system could tell how I feel about the image by the amount of time I spend on the page, if I read any comments (by rollover) or if I look at the hotspots of an image. This would help the AI predict patterns more quickly.
Hierarchical history tree view - I’m often lost deep in some thread or users gallery after noticing an image I like and following that path, this is great, but unfortunately I lose some of the threads I was on.  It would be nice if Flickr kept track of this session, my afinity towards images on each page, and showed me a nice way to trace my steps.

Overall, Flickr is the current end-all, be-all of web 2.0 media management. It is phenomenally successful, due to the fact that beautiful photos are a prime medium to showcase on the web.  Any system that attempts to mimic it, or even wishes to work within its framework have plenty of support and options from the Flickr team and community, something that speaks volumes for the future of a product/service.

This online gallery is quite nice, and quite not. They allow the user to ‘create’ their own exhibition by searching for existing works, and then designing the virtual layout of those pieces, complete with text ‘cards’ for more information. I’m going to dissect the strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths:
Customization, user control - Users have the ability to create their own exhibit with their own thoughts.
Drag-n-drop interface - Very easy to use, as we all understand how this works
Dynamic resizing of images - So that you can position them more easily on your ‘wall’

Weaknesses:
Still a slideshow - This is more like a powerpoint slideshow, as you can have multiple images. But you still progress in a linear mode, with no ability to skip walls.
Art is still seen as representations - With the dynamic sizing, it would be nice if the artworks defaulted to a certain ratio, so that a small work would be obviously small on the blank wall, unless you wished to resize it.
Too many popups/rigid system - The environment for creating your exhibit is very rigid, and vertical in nature. The naming and saving functions don’t need to be obvious while we are working, we can ask for them when needed. And all of the details or additional information is done using web 1.0 techniques, rather than asynchronously.

Overall, this is a great leap forward, but is not the correct answer as far as I am concerned. There is no ‘intelligence’ of the system, so that it identifies your patterns and suggests content for you. And once you are in the exhibition creation mode, you can’t explore any more than you can enter a search term, and glean information from a very small thumbnail. Also, there is no ‘metagallery’ experience where you can browse or sift through multiple users exhibitions, or just multiple exhibitions in general.

http://www.princeton.edu/~ina/index.html - International Networks Archive \\ Remapping Our World
Work done by Jonathan Harris

http://www.number27.org/

Amazing stuff, amazing

So I dug a bit deeper around the participants page, and notices that aside from the museums, there was an interactive developer listed by the name of Ray Shah, from think design inc.  After googline ‘think design, inc.’ I came across his site, and found that he too is working with web apps, education and museums, and retail clients.  I was interested in his application ‘Nexhibition’ but was dissappointed to see that it was a Joomla component that he is charging people $300/month to host (though he distributes the source free for you to do yourselves).  I also felt that the implementation was lacking and very ‘Web 1.0′ to me, in that it does not take advantage of the built in relations between individual works, and does not suggest any alternative exploratory pattern beyond the typical slideshow.  I hope to find out more soon.

LINK - thinkdesign.com

Thanks to Glenn Willumson, the director of the graduate program in Museum Studies at UF, I have stumbled upon the ’steve’ project. It appears to be related to the Guggenheim museum (just by the fact that the email I got back was form support@cca.guggenheim.org ) and has interest or partners in quite a few other museums. It too is a compendium/archive of art and artists in an online form. My initial reactions are that it is overly complex (as I look at their data model) and does not take advantage of some of the relational aspects of network based database design and delivery systems. I do however really like the beginnings of the ‘contribute’ or ‘prototype’ section. It shows you an image, and then prompts you to tell the system what words best describe that image. My personal opinion is that this is lacking the ability to refine information, and should also give the viewer suggestions based on how the system interprets it. This will give a positive feedback loop to the developers and the system, allowing for greater, quicker improvement.

I contacted the someone in ‘Archives & Museum Informatics’ and hope to hear from them soon.

About steve: steve is a collaborative research project developed by members of the museum community to collect keyword terms about works of art in museum collections. The research project will explore the potential of social tagging to improve access to museum collections and to encourage user engagement with cultural content. To learn more about the project, visit the project Web site at www.steve.museum

(ed)

LINK - steve.museum