Museums in the Digital Age

Things are changing with the Semantic Web

People go to museums to find things out. Mostly. Some may just be keeping out of the rain or looking for a cup of coffee but in the main museum visitors are actively curious. Searching for something. Googling in 3D you could say. Well maybe not. If Google had been as slow and disorganised as most museums are, Larry and Sergey would still just be über geeks in Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park; we’d never have heard of Google. We’d still be using Netscape. We might still be looking for phone numbers in a thing called a telephone book.

From a Google perspective the ‘Time to Find’ is dreadful in museums. And find what? Just how are they organised? It’s definitely difficult to find things out if your organisational principles are maybe based on a) the museum having received a wonderful collection of thermionic valve radios in 1967 for that temporary exhibition (which became permanent) ‘The Triumph of the Transistor?’, b) the labyrinthine layout of the new wing (also hailing from the 1960s in Concrete Brutale style). If Larry and Sergey ran museums they’d have fired everyone long ago. But it’s a silly comparison isn’t it? Museums are in the knowledge business and Google is good for finding train times and checking out Bates Motel on Trip Advisor (zero stars). It’s an information portal, a world wide web of factoids. Nothing really to do with material culture, nothing to do with the stock in trade of museums, things.

Up to a point. One of the mantras inside the Googleplex these days is ‘things not strings’, what they are interested in is what Tim Berners Lee calls the Semantic Web, the Web of meanings and relationships. What they are building through one of their projects the Knowledge Graph, is a linked system of human knowledge which maps entities — relationships — using algorithms that learn how things occur in meaning clusters. Google and the Web are changing the way we make meaning or find things meaningful. And because the future of searching is mobile, on tablet, phone and ‘watch’, Google knows not just what you’re looking for but where you are when you’re looking. As connection grows the idea of ‘where’ starts to change; where we are when we are searching, looking, thinking and recording is as important as what we’re looking for. We start to get news, information and advertising tailored to our location and as well as our likes.

Recording this union of place, content, movement and interaction of course produces big data but we’re used to scaling up; we’ve done it before in old style manufacturing, transport systems and what used to be called telecommunications. And once we have the data at scale we can start to mine it for patterns and then make predictions. All those trillions of interactions build the basis for millions of money transactions. Which is Google’s real interest.

Personally, I love this — context sensitive, immediate information suited to my tastes? It doesn’t feel Big Brother-like to me, I just think ‘If only museums were like that…..’ Last time I was in the V&A (how is the V&A organised?) and I was standing by a frieze by Lord Leighton, I asked a question of the museum which it failed to answer. I searched in the gallery for information about the painter and found virtually none. Fortunately Google came to my rescue — a quick search on my handy iPad mini and I arrived at the Wikipedia piece on Fred Leighton. Job done. Thanks then to Jimmy Wales not to the V&A.

What does the Semantic Web mean for museums? Out there and in your hand is a connected human knowledge system which will soon offer an experience of discovery which is faster, richer and deeper than the interpretation system in any museum. Museums need to embrace this new world, populate the Web with their own digital ‘things’ and let Google and our urge to know do the rest. Oh and provide free wireless everywhere — thanks to the V&A for that.