Starting a cultural sector (digital) data revolution!

Convincing cultural institutions that their digital data really matters and how to improve it’s value dramatically.

Published in

A Curious Mind

11 min readMar 14, 2014

I’m a software engineer, and have been making interactive applications for museums and galleries for the last decade. I was recently asked to talk at TechNights specifically about an indie side project i’ve been working on called Art Map Project. Rather than discussing the project itself I ended up talking more about the apparent lack of care for digital data in Manchester’s cultural industry and my disappointment upon discovering this.

Simply put, Art Map Project maps the cultural institutions of cities…in other words, it maps where you can find culture. Whether it be it a temporary popup exhibition or long established institution, it’s mapped. In essence it’s designed to promote ‘Art for all’ allowing visitors to that city to stumble upon exhibitions in places they might not know about. At the moment, this is only released for public use in Manchester.

Further to this, AMP supplies all relevant contact details for each venue, alongside listings of what’s currently being exhibited. Guiding the visitor to use AMP as a portal to research the locations themselves. You can read more about the project here or read a recent article written about AMP on Tusk journal.

Writing this talk allowed me to explore the reasons why I made AMP, but more crucially in doing this, it brought to light wider more nightmarish problems. Problems I still come across while trying to collate this type of data.

The Journey (aka, my road to hell)

In trying to create a database of all venues (and their contact details) I discovered that this, the simplest task, was frankly ridiculous.

Here’s why…

Some venues don’t have a website. Which to a point is fair enough, ok you don’t have your own website, but come on, no online presence at all?!
Some cultural institutions only have a page embedded within a local authority website. Which usually leads to an awful UI and UX experience and also a complete lack of autonomy in what data they can publish.
Some don’t put their name, address, email or phone number on their site. You think i’m joking. I’m not.
Some do, but leave you with the unenviable task of trying to snuffle them out like truffles within pages and pages of irrelevant content.
Some don’t prioritise this basic information so that it appears in the header (or footer, whatever, i’m not precious) on every single page. Visitors need this information to be able to come and visit in real life. You know, outside of the internet.
Some venues don’t update their sites regularly, or at all. The content is out of date, and a lot of the time completely irrelevant.
Some simply don’t explain what the venue is for, what it does, or what you can expect to see when you get there. Surely the minimum?
Some don’t connect their website with their social media accounts, leaving you not knowing if the venue even has social media outlets. (Most did upon further research).
Some aren’t represented on Google Maps, Foursquare or any other similar mapping communities.
Some don’t give each exhibition it’s own url. It sounds like this doesn’t matter, but it really and truly does! How do we share this information if a link we publish ends up going to something completely different in a week’s time?
When you email them, they don’t ever reply. Or maybe that’s just me?

Now that’s over 10 major issues all conspiring to stop me from even adding these places to a database. Not to mention all the other ‘not obviously arty’ places that art is exhibited — venues like bars, graffiti project spaces, corporate buildings and so on…locations and data which are even harder to find.

You noticed above I say ‘some’ but in reality, it was ‘most’. Needless to say I battled through and managed to plot all of these using mapbox.

So, not only has AMP quickly become the only website for the city that plots pretty much every single exhibition location. It’s also the only place you can quickly and easily find out the address, phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, web link to each venue (and even whether they have a profile on the popular BBC Your Paintings project). This database literally does not exist already for Manchester anywhere, and it was created by someone who was doing it as a hobby. The reason I added all of these connections for each venue is because AMP is designed to open up further avenues for investigation by the user. By adding all of these outlets AMP becomes a hub.

AMP started to get used by the public with no PR, through word of mouth, and through Twitter and Facebook the following has grown. It was clear there was a need for this basic information. I mean the data is out there for the public to find already, but it takes a lot of effort to find it, using AMP as a hub to discover more is something, it seems, that the public wants.

As the site was being used so much, I decided to add more types of data. Surely I could quickly and easily also display ‘what’s on’ at these venues?

Nobody said this would be easy

I should have learned from the lack of basic information that I could not simply pull in the data I needed for the various what’s on feeds.

That’s because (I’m changing ‘some’ to ‘most’ from now on…)

Most don’t even have a what’s on page
99% don’t have a simple method of publishing a feed of this data. RSS, JSON tagged content, even a regular way of writing about each exhibition (heading, content, dates available).
Most, if they do have a what’s on page, don’t update it regularly, if at all.
Most get you to sign up to a newsletter that never sends anything out.
Some (a select few) advertise their exhibitions by making an image with embedded text. (A copy and paste nightmare).
Again, no matter how much I beg, these places don’t reply to my pleads for information. It’s like they don’t even want anyone to visit their shows!

I tried to link to RSS feeds when they did exist — they never got updated. I tried to scrape the data from the what’s on pages that did exist—they were so irregular in how they publish the information that it was impossible to automate.

In the end i’ve had to resort to MANUALLY UPDATING IT. Yes, in this age of world wide webbage I, a human (for the most part) has to do human research to populate AMP with human friendly information.

Yes, you heard right. I, twice weekly, take a morning to research every single one of the venues I have in my database to find out what their current exhibitions are. Not to mention possible new venues and other word of mouth exhibitions I could add. I do this to make sure the site is rich with current and relevant content, this is because I cant trust much of the data published by the venues themselves.

So, now AMP is the only site for the city that shows a completely current what’s on guide for any and all venues in Manchester. Each exhibition links through to further information on the venue’s website (if a specific page exists) or at minimum another route for further research.

The reason AMP does well is because it’s trustworthy. Visitors know that the data is current and correct. They know where they can locate a venue and they know that when they get there that the exhibition they want to see will be on. I’m sure they’ve come to realise that it really is hard work to research all this themselves, especially when they often come up against issues in finding the simple data they actually need.

So what can institutions do?

It begs the question. Why don’t these cultural venues supply this data themselves? Why don’t they appreciate that this is so important. Not just for updating the millions of city guides on the web, but for the public in general? Don’t they care? Or is it that they just don’t know?

It seems to me that…

There’s a major lack of basic digital knowledge by some staff.
The hardware or ‘computer system’ limitations that their IT department’s (if they have one) enforce make it impossible to install a lot of modern software and in turn leaving it impossible to use some modern websites. (IE6 being used in house being a major and regular example!).
They can’t afford image manipulation tools/software. Web development software, or any other software that helps them publish data online regularly.
They were convinced to pay for a website design and build that doesn’t allow them to update it using a content management system. Or they do, but don’t understand how to do it.
They are scared of ‘digital’.
They don’t see the importance. We’d like to think this isn’t the case but unfortunately in some cases it could be.
They don’t see the long term benefits of collating this data. How often an exhibition page is shared, how often they are doing one style of exhibition, how long their exhibitions are against how many visitors, how many times a particular exhibition web page was viewed. Analytics are a fantastic resource.
There are no software recommendations, and if there are they are too costly.
They have issues with trying to get the local authority website to allow them enough access to publish this data.
and the final and perhaps most important point of all: there are no current industry standards for cultural institutions to follow with regards to what data they need to release, or how best to release it.

There are no current industry standards for
cultural institutions to follow with regards to
what data they need to release,
or how best to release it.

A Checklist

I know i’ve nagged on a bit, but I simply want to get the point across that cultural institutions undervalue the importance of their data. This is only the tip of the iceberg, there are so many fantastic ways to use all kinds of cultural data. But lets start small.

Here’s a checklist for museum’s, galleries and any other art based venues to follow on how make their data more accessible without (too much) hassle.

Sharing data isn’t something to be scared of

No matter how bad your website is, making some changes will make it infinitely better, even if it’s only for us developers. Why help developers? Because then we can create things which inadvertently promote you. Sharing data isn’t something to be scared of…

Have your name, address, email address, phone number, Facebook link, Twitter link and opening times at the top of every page of your site. Not just that, it should be text, plain html, no embedding this crucial info inside an image. Not just for copy and paste junkies, but also for your site’s SEO!
Tell people if visiting your museum or gallery will cost them anything (including discounts, concessions etc).
Show a map of your location, or at least put your address including postcode as plain text on your page. Embedding a small map of your postcode is so easy to do, and so effective.
Update your website as regularly as you can.
Integrate your social media accounts.
If you publish images, make sure they have whatever text is within the image as additional plain text next to the image, and also written in the image’s alt tag. There’s decent free online image editing software available. Just dont forget the power of the plain text word.
Make a free Google calendar which details the dates of your exhibitions, then share it and your visitors can subscribe to it! Whenever you update your exhibitions, BAM! It’s straight into their calendar.
Keep your newsletter subscribers up to date with any and all your new information. They are the ones who’ve signed up to get your data early. Treat them to some lovely data nuggets!
Put the internet to work for you using the free, amazing, all powerful IFTTT (If This Then That). Using ‘recipes’ you can automate most of your digital! One recipe might be: if this: i’ve update my shiny new google calendar with a new exhibition then that: tweet about it! It’s that simple. Or maybe? If this: someone checks into our gallery and leaves a nice comment then that: post it to Facebook! There are SO many recipes to try.
Right, this is very important: Use a standard format for everything you publish, and once you’ve decided, make it the same every time. If you use a blog post for every new exhibition, then always do the same: title, a paragraph about exhibition, the opening date, the closing date, the cost, a photo etc. Always in the same order, always in the same format, always the same. Then you can….
…really easily turn this into a feed!
Use AMP and share it with your visitors…and reply to my emails!

The simplest and most generic way of creating a feed (if you’ve stuck to suggestion number 1o) would be to use a service that automatically parses your ‘what’s on’ page and spits it out as an xml RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.

In layman's terms, a feed is a stream of regularly published information. Visitors can subscribe to this feed to be told about new exhibitions. After this is setup once, whenever you add a new post it automatically publishes to this same ‘feed’. That simply means whenever you post about a new exhibition on your site, anyone who’s already subscribed will be notified automatically. Simple eh?!

There are so many options for creating an RSS feed, visitors can even use their own favourite apps to join your feed. But this will only work if you regularly update, and in the same format. If you can make this clear to whoever is creating your web content, or even developing your website — then that’s a massive step in the right direction!

If you’re thinking about developers too, then JSON tagged content would be super wonderful! You may need some technical help with this. Or if (after step 9) you’ve mastered IFTTT then you could hack your own JSON recipe!

Ideally you would make sure you would hire yourself a tech person. Maybe your web developer can help with suggestions. Either way, learning a little of this yourself would be wonderful.

Round it up

All in all, there are lots of little changes you can make to change how useful your data can be to others, and yourself. In doing these, we can start a shift in how the cultural sector values this data and can push forward in using it in such interesting ways! Not only can data be used to inform, but also to learn and also create!

Revolution!

What’s needed is a revolution!— a fundamental change in the way people handle data in the sector. This isn’t something that can happen overnight, granted. But if we start on the path now, we can instigate some real change. If this article only changes the mindset of one person dealing with digital content for their museum then i’m happy.

But really, we need to think bigger. We need to create some guidelines, together. An industry standard set of benchmarks, some recommendations and specifications that the cultural sector can use as a checklist. That way, we make everyone’s life easier!