Case Study – Your Paintings Transcript
Case Study – Adrian Cooper on Your Paintings - Transcript
Anthony Lilley, Chair:
There was an interesting and difficult question raised during the break, which I
propose we tackle now before we start. There is a requirement of the fund that
research is embedded and heavily involved in the proposition and in a successful
proposition. The question that was asked was “Given that the researchers and the
workshop for the successful propositions happen after the decision that the
proposition is going to get funded, isn’t there a catch-22 there?” I don’t think it’s
that, but the answer I think that I’m being given is that applicants don’t need to
know precisely how they’re going to do the research – you don’t need to know the
methodology of the research, you don’t know who it’s going to be because that’s
part of the match-making process but you need to know that it’s a researchable
topic. You need to be confident that you can argue it’s something you can actually
address with research in some shape or form. That’s a catch-22 of a slightly
different nature. I accept that, but it does mean you don’t have to come up like a
PhD proposal with your methodology and process written down. It’s not that, but it
does have to be addressable by some kind of research methodology. If you want
to know more about that, John’s still around and is more than happy to discuss. I
think it’s fair also – I’ll say this without being officially part of the fund – to some
degree this is experimental territory for everybody concerned, and trying to work
out how to make this work effectively for all these different kinds of partners
involves dialogue and a bit of give and take from everybody to just try and
understand how it’s going to work. Clearly, once you get into funding criteria it
won’t be dialogue and give and take, but part of the purpose of these events, to
some degree, is to surface some of those questions.
So, we’re going to run until maybe 1 o’clock, depending how excited we get, then
we’ll get back on schedule after lunch. I’m going to just give a brief grounding, then
we’re going to have my two colleagues here James and Adrian, who have got
experience of innovative arts and digital propositions, talk about what they’ve been
doing. Then bring them back onto a panel together for a discussion of the things
they learned, the things that were done successfully – I’m probably going to ask
them the things they learned from the things that weren’t successful. As someone
with ten or fifteen years experience in this area I learn much more from the things I
get wrong, and I’m sure you do too. As a brief overview, I’ve been a bit involved in
some of the thinking about the themes and the workshops and those sorts of
things.
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Case Study – Your Paintings Transcript
The six themes are in front of you, we have workshops happening on them this
afternoon. To give a bit of perspective on some of the discussions that have been
going on – and this is not meant to be a definitive answer to “Why these themes?”
– I think it was felt important that they were not art-form orientated. So we weren’t
saying “Let’s do dance digitally, let’s do theatre digitally” We didn’t get into that
trap. Partly because a lot of the work is going to be interdisciplinary,
multidisciplinary, loads of ideas. Partly because the boundaries between art forms
in general are pretty permeable in digital. Partly because there are other funds that
do that and things like NPO funding, I chair Lighthouse Brighton – it’s a digital
NPO. Part of the proposition of some of that funding is often to specific art form
development.
At the same time we didn’t want to get into the technology in too much detail. We
didn’t want to say “Then there will be apps, there will be things to do on Twitter and
there will be something you definitely do for the Nintendo DS” – it’s not that either;
it’s the social context of technological change an artistic response to technological
change that’s been coming up.
So there were lots of discussions and they came out in themes, around the impact;
as Andrew Nairne said, this explosion of choice and the falling down of walls and
boundaries, different media joining up together – Is it a film? Is it a DVD? Is it a live
performance? Is it a stream? The way these boundaries are falling down. So the
explosion of choice was a pretty big part of it. The changing nature of the contexts
in which digital behaviours happen alongside live, completely not alongside live,
whilst mobile, while sitting with another screen on your lap or watching another big
screen in a room, in the cinema – so the notion of contextual change and the way
that, for instance, mobile technology changes that, but equally the way that
learning is not rooted to a classroom etc. That was a big piece of it. The use of
tools and technologies for communication both expanded one way – bigger
distribution, new digital marketing techniques – that will come up in Resources or
in the Distribution area. But also crucially two-way communication from institutions
and arts organisations to the people formally known as the audience. And then,
really most interestingly of all, communication amongst everybody in that social
network communication. So this thing about communication was clearly a big part
of it. That obviously runs through most of what we’re talking about.
Then there was a strand that was running around control –increasingly the
capacity to control the experience, to tailor your experience, if you’re playing a
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game the whole point is control of the experience and what the dimensions of
change were, and what was interesting about the relationship between arts and
technology as people took more and more control – and as art forms and media
develop which are all about control. And the final piece was that community comes
out of all of the above, that increasingly it’s not a one-way audience relationship,
and to some degree it never was – certainly in my view it never really was – but
increasingly it’s about understanding that these communities are very complex.
They’re full of people who are having personalized media experiences and are
brought together into shifting communities of interest.
That was never written down. I’ve written down as five words beginning with C –
explosion of Choice, the change in the nature of Context in which media can be
consumed and created and art is consumed and created, the use of technology for
Communication, the increase in Control and the fact that Communities come out of
the back of it. That’s not the official line – that was just my reading of a lot of the
conversation. There were other things too, but forgive me a personal interpretation
of it.
I think the Google process and the workshops and the sixty interviews drew those
out into slightly less abstract notions. User-generated content, Social Media,
Distribution, Education & Learning, on which we spend billions as a nation anyway
– I accept that’s a big territory. Mobile Location & Games – that’s a slightly
uncomfortable joining-up into a theme because not all games are mobile and
obviously not all mobile locations are games. But they’re tricky territories. You can
of course cross themes. You don’t have to say “This is only about distribution”.
You could absolutely say “Distribution in a mobile context. By the way, they get
points to win more distribution capability” Whatever you like. Data & Archives and
then the category of using digital technology to enable your institution to be more
resilient which will feed back into your artistic program or make you money if
you’re a tech company. So that’s a story of how it came about.
I’ve got with me on the panel – Adrian Cooper and James Harriman-Smith. We’ve
spelled your name wrong, you’ve got an extra consonant – we probably ran out of
scrabble tiles or something. They’re each going to do a ten- or fifteen-minute
presentation about what they’ve been up to and we’re going to come back and talk
about it. I’m not going to introduce you any more than that because I think you’re
going to do it yourself, aren’t you? So Adrian is going to go first.
Adrian Cooper, Director of Intelligent Heritage:
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Case Study – Your Paintings Transcript
Morning everyone, I’ll just stand up and get my notes and slides. I’m Adrian
Cooper, Director of Intelligent Heritage; I’m going to be talking to you today about
this new, recently launched collaborative initiative called ‘Your Paintings’. The
main two partners in this are the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, and
as I hope to show there are many other people involved in this project. Since it
launched just over a week ago it’s great to have the opportunity to talk about it
today. This is me; I think there’s something about me in the pack.
Intelligent Heritage is a consulting organisation specializing in arts and culture. I’ve
been doing this since 2003. I work with lots of museums, galleries, archives, artbased organisations, theatres, festivals in this country and around Europe doing
some really interesting projects. Over the last few years I’ve been involved with the
Public Catalogue Foundation and became the project-manager. I was initially a
consultant on this project and then when it really started to go I was the overall
person managing Your Paintings and the Your Paintings Tagger, which is an
engagement project associated with the main project. My credentials for that were
that I have long experience in this space. I was originally Head of ITAS at the
Royal Opera House from 1988. I then went to the V&A during a rather interesting
time of change in their IT across the museum and looking at that. Then I went to
work for New York-based Gallery Systems who are a museum-management
software company. Their software is used by major museums and more across the
world. So all the big museums across the States use their software – the Tate,
National Gallery and others here. Then I left there to set up my own thing.
I’m talking about Data & Archives. I was asked to talk a bit about that theme. We’re
probably all very aware that there is a lot of content, there are a lot of collections
and archives across the country. Some of those are digitized; many of them aren’t.
Indeed, there’s been Higher Education funding and MLA-type funding over the last
ten or fifteen years where lots of material was digitized. People were applying for
funds and various things. There seems to be, of course, a shift in that and people
aren’t funding digitization any more, really, with some exceptions. Now the
movement is onto what you can do with that material. What I’m going to show is
that this project, Your Paintings, really highlights some of the challenges and
opportunities in terms of technology and audience-engagement with that. So very,
very quickly – I think we’re all very highly aware of the opportunities – there’s lots
of digitized material, there are lots of formats... but there’s also lots that isn’t
digitized.
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Case Study – Your Paintings Transcript
In the context here of course we have a higher availability and the take-up of
broadband services. We’re all consuming this technology on many different
devices; so context, as was said, is huge. We’re all using technology everywhere,
as is evidenced in this room right now.
There are also open-source technologies; the barriers to entry in some of this stuff
are so much lower. It’s very easy for smaller organisations to get involved by
taking third-party services that are often free, storage facilities, Cloud based
computing – all of those things allow us many opportunities to do something with
this material that exists. But of course the challenges are, well “What do I do with
it? Who is it for?” I think my perspective on all of this is – I think the big question
which has been raised a couple of times this morning – “Who is it? What is it for?
What’s the purpose of this?” is often not asked and not asked enough. Many,
many of these projects are led either from the technology perspective, and indeed
in some cases they’re about infrastructure and so if we want to think of what’s
been happening over the last years is a lot of... you’ve got to have the material in a
format to then exploit it. You need to have those enabling works. Some of the
challenges that are around- of course the price of digitizing, the material
themselves as you’ll see in this particular project, technology choices, the
copyright of lots of material – there are huge challenges with that. Different
material from different organisations has different structures, standards, formats so making those shareable, linkable is a huge challenge in itself. I’ve talked about
the audience. But even if you build something, the big issue is “Will people look at
it and engage with it?” – and that’s the biggest challenge of them all. If you build it
will they come? – so that promotion and awareness to actually drive traffic to your
thing is hugely important.
I’m actually going to try now to introduce the Your Paintings project with a short
video. This was made by the BBC and it says so much more than I can possibly
say in this short time. I will now hope that the technology is working.
(Various voiceovers on BBC’s Your Paintings):
-We have in this country probably one of the biggest collections of art in the world.
-Over the past five or six years we’ve been cataloguing paintings in national
ownership so anything from museums, schools, libraries, hospitals, fire stations,
councils right down to village halls.
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Case Study – Your Paintings Transcript
-At the east end of our offices we have the large Hogarth Triptych.
-It is beautifully painted. It’s staggeringly well done. It’s on a massive scale; it’s like
nothing else he did before. That is what is important.
-When the air raids began in 1940 there were not enough fire engines available
and of course one of the biggest fleets available, particularly in London, was that of
taxis.
-It’s almost live reporting, it was painted right at the start of the Blitz and someone
from the fire service had the idea to grab the canvas that they could from the roof
of the towing taxi.
-It’s very unusual to find something painted by a member of the fire service of
colleagues in action.
-A lot of these paintings- they might not be, shall we say, highly professional. But a
lot of these paintings meant a lot to people at the time. There’s a story behind that;
and it’s that story that should be remembered.
-During the Second World War there was a secret air base at Harrington. An
American airman painted the mural. At the end of the war they presented it to the
village of Clipston and the wall in the school is the only wall in the village that’s
large enough to house the painting.
-It was given to the village of Clipston as a gift of friendship so that people of the
village would not forget us.
-When the museum closed down in the mid-70s everything was taken down and
moved out into the nuclear bunker and that’s where they’ve been all this time. This
is a really exciting opportunity now for us because having catalogued all the
paintings it gives us the opportunity to share these paintings with everybody.
-It was a very strange octagonal painting above a doorway and we discovered that
actually there’s another half to the painting. But the fun bit is when we tried to stick
them together... there it goes! We’ve got a man.
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Case Study – Your Paintings Transcript
-The wonderful thing about them all going online is that there will be everything
from portraits to landscapes, pictures telling stories. It will be the most fantastic
resource for people coming to it from all angles.
Adrian Cooper, Director of Intelligent Heritage:
There we go. As they said at the end there, “Pictures telling stories” – I think that
says it all. Your Paintings, what is it? It’s a website which is the start of this
engagement. It’s hosted and led editorially by the BBC and for them this is the first
of what they’re calling a ‘public space partnership project’. They’re looking to do
things with public content and focus their own remit as a broadcaster in what they
can do around publicly available material.
Of course there are a lot of people involved in it. I’m going to show you a few
slides of the website in a moment but just to say very quickly, the website itself has
four key objectives which is about improving access to that material, enhancing
learning, engaging a wider audience and promoting the collections themselves.
Very much as well as looking at paintings online, one of the purposes of this is to
drive people to go and see these paintings themselves. So it’s not aimed at an art
historical type of audience; it’s aimed at trying to engage the public in art. It’s using
the nation’s collection of all paintings to do that.
Who is involved? I’ve mentioned the BBC – their role is to host and provide all of
the editorial-related stuff. They designed the site. The Public Catalogue
Foundation was really the start of this project because the Public Catalogue
Foundation was set up eight or nine years ago with the sole remit to catalogue all
the paintings in the national collection. Originally the brief was to put those out as
catalogues; a few years ago it was very clear that having this online would be a
better purpose. So the Public Catalogue Foundation and its team have been
working across the country and have been digitizing and cataloguing all this work
in partnership with 3,000 museums.
We’ve had other partners involved in that: University of Glasgow is involved in an
art historical context to make sure that certain aspects of this are there - as you will
see on the site there are various navigational routes which are important to get
right – they’ve been involved in those. We worked on the Tagger Project with the
University of Oxford, the Astrophysics Department which I’ll explain shortly. We
have 3,000 museums, galleries, police stations, fire stations, universities, the
National Trust – you name it, there are paintings in national ownership in many,
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many places across the country. Of course, the other partner in all this, we hope,
is the public at large and engaging these people with that.
A brief look at the website – there’s the home page. I hope those of you that
haven’t seen it already will look at it. The home page at the moment is trying to
point people to the various different things that you can do. Right there in the
middle is “Help us to tag the nation’s paintings” which is the tagging project which
I’ll come to. As you’ll see there are 63,000 of the target 200,000 paintings online
and you can do things like search for artists, paintings, galleries. All of this is up
there live and it went live last week.
This is very much the start of the process – getting that material digitized and
being able to put it online we very much now want feedback from the public.
“Okay, what should we be doing next?” Clearly we have ideas about what we
should be doing, but now is the time to engage people in that.
I’ll quickly go through these slides. You can see there’s a vast range of pictures
here and many different routes to find it. So I won’t dwell too much on this as I’m
conscious of the time. You can also find the paintings through the galleries
themselves.
So the Tagger – one of the issues around gathering all of this material is that we
had to get a certain amount of information from the museums themselves; but for
the site to properly engage you need keywords, tags, faceted browsing – all of
these ways in which you can provide routes to this information for people. We
thought long and hard about this in many different ways. We could, of course,
have paid for cataloguers to do that, or ask the museums to provide different
things, but of course that needed to be harmonized – each different museum does
things in different ways, they have different terminology etc. We needed something
that would work across this entire site. So we started to look at projects that
involved user-based tagging but we combined that with a notion of what’s called
crowd-sourcing which I’m sure most of you are aware of. We came across this
project called Galaxy Zoo which was done at the Astrophysics department at
Oxford University where they had this challenge to basically categorize millions of
records of galleries. They set up this Citizen Science Alliance Initiative. They
developed some very, very smart software which allowed the collective intelligence
of lots of people looking at these things to come up with an answer. They proved
to themselves through this work that the answers they got from the collective
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intelligence of lots of people was actually as good as any academic work on this.
But of course they could do the work in so much less time.
So we took that approach in terms of developing the Tagger, where we wanted to
be able to say “Let’s allow the public to look at paintings, tell us what they think
they can see in that”. There is some structure in that – there’s a flow you have to
go through, but it’s quite intuitive. So rather than a simple tagging process where
you put in a keyword and it has probably no context –because it’s connected to
open data like Wikipedia and the Oxford English Dictionary etc. this allows us to
have some knowledge behind what those tags actually do mean.
So we worked very collaboratively with a number of people, technology partners
and usability people to come up with a work flow. Paintings are delivered at
random to people – you can’t choose the painting you’re going to tag because we
thought that if we allowed that, some paintings would get lots of tags, the popular
ones, and others would never get touched at all. We needed all paintings to get
tagged. So you can skip a painting, but you’re presented with a flow to go through
– what things do you see, what people do you see, what places, what events and
then there are a couple of semi-structured things – types and subjects, and
developing on what level of user you are – if you’re a more expert user you are
allowed to have a go at saying what date you think this painting was painted, or
what style this particular painting is in. So if you haven’t tagged already I
encourage you to do so. There are a lot of people out there tagging and we’re all
told it’s becoming incredibly infectious. So this is a real engagement – letting
people see paintings, you don’t know what’s coming next. Of course there’s a
huge variety that you see – there you can see as you type the list of words from
Wikipedia via Google API appear to you and then in some cases you get to search
from a list so there’s some structure to that.
We’ve launched that and people are doing that right now. Of course, there’s a
complex and modern infrastructure that supports all of that. PCF themselves have
a very comprehensive web-based database from which we’re receiving all the
content, the three thousand odd collections. Then in terms of the tagger we’re
using Cloud based infrastructure, Amazon web services, in order to be able to
cope with potential large demand so this can grow and not fall over. So setting all
that up, providing a mechanism to record, capture, produce results and send those
back to the BBC – I’m not expecting you to read that but there’s quite a
comprehensive workflow and a range of APIs (Application Programming
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Interfaces) that connect all these things together and feed the data through to the
BBC as it goes along. There’s a quick slide of the application that the PCF use.
I think that’s really all that I wanted to say.
Anthony Lilley, Chair:
Okay, brilliant. Thank you. I’m guessing we’re going to make the presentations
available. So don’t feel you have to take all the notes and everything else. I’m
going to take questions when we’ve finished both case studies. Adrian, there’s a
kind of combination of curation, openness, expertise, passion in the middle of that
project. Do you think those are core requirements for a Data & Archive project, are
they core requirements for interactive digital projects full stop?
Adrian Cooper:
Yes, I think so. The issue of “Who are you doing it for? Why might people come to
it?” are part of that. There’s so much material there. Trying to find material that is
interesting and engaging to people, and more importantly allowing them the
opportunity to engage with it will only start that process. So the tagging is one of
the first initiatives of that engagement-like thing. People don’t realise they’re
learning and being entertained by doing that work. And telling other people about it
– “Yeah, you should do this, it’s fun.”
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