A Remarkable Year in the M+ Digital Programme
Hello everyone, I’m Mary — I was the digital-team intern at M+ from 2019 to 2020. During this amazing one-year programme, I worked with talented people across various disciplines, including curation, collections management, editorial, and marketing colleagues. I learnt a lot, grew, and gained different insights while working at M+, and would like to share some of my unforgettable memories with you.
My dream came true!
It was quite magical that I was able to join M+ since I do not have an art background. Art to me is a means to escape from reality and find calmness. In my leisure time, I love visiting museums and connecting with the objects in those spaces. I have often been impressed by the design of digital elements — they create virtual spatial environments that I can dive into naturally. I found out by chance that M+ organises an Internship Programme that includes a digital track every year. I applied, thinking it would be a great chance to understand how digital elements are used in a museum. I’m so glad I was selected for the programme. Working in a museum was a dream for me, and the dream came true.
What did I do as a digital intern? A lot of data work!
I studied data-related subjects at university and did not have much knowledge about modern art museums when I started the internship. To understand this industry, I started doing landscape research by visiting the websites of other museums. I read their content, studied their digital platforms, and tried to understand their storytelling strategies, such as how they present collection objects on their sites.
Shortly after starting my internship, I joined the open access programme, a project that aims to make information about the museum’s collections as accessible as possible to the public. Open access at M+ is a collaborative effort between teams from different disciplines and departments, including archives, collections, digital, editorial, collection database, and rights and reproduction. We work to make the M+ Collections data available through an API as well as the ever-evolving M+ Collections Beta website. There are two open access updates annually. To meet the half-year deadline, we had regular meetings to discuss various data-related topics, including data imports, clean-ups, and reviews.
While working on open access, I got the chance to manage its alt text project, which aims to use English and Chinese alternative text — written copy in the source code that appears as a replacement for images — to enhance the accessibility of the Collections Beta site, especially for those who are visually impaired.
A vast number of object images had to be processed for this project, and I developed a tracking structure to handle the writing, translation, and review of the alt text in organised batches. On top of this tracking structure, I worked with the collections database team to update the import spreadsheet and clean the data.
To provide a better user experience across M+’s online platforms, I also worked on a project to link the Collections Beta pages with M+ Stories. With help from the collections database team, I did a deep dive into The Museum System (TMS) — the database M+ uses to store all its information — to understand how the museum manages its data and then collected the corresponding data by reviewing posts on M+ Stories posts. I spent four months adding and saving new records to TMS, enriching the content on Collections Beta as a result.
Museums not only produce content but also relationships…
Throughout this internship, I kept thinking about the role of storytelling. At one event, assistant curator Vera Lam introduced us to the Five Artists: Sites Encountered exhibition at M+ Pavilion. She shared the artists’ stories and why the show’s curators selected and presented these artworks. Vera said that the museum collects a lot of artworks, which are used to produce content. I was impressed by her sharing, which made me think more about storytelling.
I read all the articles on M+ Stories while I was preparing the data needed to link them with the Collections Beta site. I also watched videos on the M+ Channel. I found that, apart from producing content, M+ also creates relationships between artworks. I believed there were messages hidden in these relationships, which was why I thought of doing a mini project on the relationship data.
I used the M+ Stories post 5 Women Artists You Should Know — an article that creates a relationship between five objects — as an example. Before coding, I plotted a trial graph of all related objects from M+ Stories posts from July 2017 to October 2019.
To reduce the project’s complexity and perform the debugging process, I analysed M+ Stories blog posts from 2019 and made the below observations(as of 2 April 2020):
- There are 46 Blog articles from 2019:
- 15 blog posts mention no related objects (32.6%)
- 18 blog posts mention at least one public accessed object* (39.1%)
- 13 blog posts mention at least one related object, but the object(s) is or are not public accessed (28.3%)
2. Among the 18 blog posts that have at least one public accessed object:
- 9 blog posts mention related objects that are all public accessed*
3. Within these blog posts, 149 objects were mentioned:
- 87 objects are public accessed* (58.4%)
- 62 objects are not public accessed (41.6%)
* As available on Collections Beta in April 2020.
With the above findings, I plotted a graph and used different coloured nodes to represent an object’s public-access status.
I didn’t have a particular outcome in mind when I started this mini project. I just wanted to dive into the data and explore the information that could be extracted from the different object relationships. Maybe in the future, I will have an idea of how this data can be further used.
My dearest mentor — Diane Wang
Each intern is assigned one mentor or two, depending on the team he/she works in. My mentor, Diane Wang, is the manager of digital products. I am so grateful to be working with Diane. She is amazing and kind, and always gives me love and endless support. Sometimes, when I feel frustrated with my work, she shares her thoughts with me and gives suggestions on how I can overcome obstacles and better handle both my tasks and my emotions. Diane also encourages me to think outside the box, and she welcomes any creative ideas.
Diane and I have weekly work catch-ups and often have lunch together. Over the course of my internship, we have really gotten to know more about each other and have built up a sense of mutual trust. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, we’ve mostly been working from home, but we still keep our strong connection by communicating online. She has really helped me a lot in the past year, and I consider her my teacher, work buddy, listener, and also advisor!
Gaining more than work experience
Apart from gaining valuable work experience, I also met my lovely intern buddies, digital teammates, and awesome colleagues. I have learnt a lot from all of them over the past year.
There are a total of 10 interns in the 2019–2020 programme. We sit together but work in different teams. One intern works for the collection and exhibition department. The other nine work in various teams in the curatorial department: the design and architecture team, digital team, Hong Kong visual culture team, ink art team, learning and interpretation team, moving image team, Sigg team, and visual art team.
Over this past year, we have worked together, had fun together, and grew together. One highlight for me was when we attended the Museum Summit 2019 together and learnt about the works of others and visited exhibitions. We also have regular sharing sessions, where colleagues from different teams or departments share their backgrounds and daily work with us.
The digital team is a big family and we all have different skills, such as project management, writing and translation, video production, and programming. Aside from their talents, my teammates are all kind and considerate and always help me when I’m in need.
I’ve been really lucky in that I’ve had a chance to work with almost all my teammates because of the M+ Online Hackathon. Kate, a producer on the Digital Programme, and I spent nearly one year organising this event, and we received a lot of support from the rest of the team to make it happen. (By the way, if you are interested in getting a behind-the-scenes look of the M+ Online Hackathon, I will share another article on this soon. Stay tuned!)
Valuable year at M+
I wasn’t sure what I would gain from joining M+ at first. But as time passes, I have realised how much I’ve learnt and achieved, from hands-on database experience to getting used to the English working environment and training up my communication skills. I am now confident in performing tasks individually and also working with others as a team. Being an intern — an insider — has given me a deep understanding of the structure of the museum and how different teams collaborate together. I also had the chance to work on some big projects and got the flexibility to develop a mini project. All of this has helped me hone my skills and has also prompted me to think about my future — of what I could do and what I want to do. I cannot believe how far I’ve come. It’s something I’m really proud of.
I would like to express my gratitude to Lara Day, the former head of the Digital Programme, and Diane Wang, who gave me this opportunity at M+. This is just the beginning of my journey with art, data, and digital elements. I’m excited to see where this journey will take me.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Feel free to leave me a comment to tell me what you think!
