Planeta Forum

[planeta]

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is one of the world's most beloved museums. Te Papa's key tasks are to preserve and present the taonga (treasures) of New Zealand's peoples and to interpret the country's heritage for national and international visitors. In 2008 Te Papa opens a dynamic display called Our Space that connects physical and virtual spaces. Our Space Exhibition Manager Adán Tijerina has agreed to participate in this online Q&A.

REFERENCES

Te Papa
http://www.tepapa.govt.nz

Our Space
http://www.ourspace.tepapa.com

Flickr

Our Space
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ourspace

World Museums
http://www.flickr.com/groups/worldmuseumsgallery

[planeta]

Adan, thank you for participating in this conversation. Can you introduce yourself and the OurSpace exhibit?

[adan.t]

Thanks, Ron, for the interest in Our Space.

As you noted, I am the Our Space Manager, and I am responsible for maintaining a relevant and fresh database of media submitted by the public that represents the plurality of interpretations and identities of this unique nation, New Zealand/Aoteroa.

This user-generated media makes its way to the database through digital means as contributors join one of two online communities accessed via the Our Space website -- http://ourspace.tepapa.com -- or a web-based photo management and sharing application -- http://www.flickr.com/groups/ourspace

It is then in place for negotiation in the physical space within the Museum, which completes the experience through aural, tactile, and visual stimulation and interaction.

[planeta]

Can you walk us through the administrative process of the creation of OurSpace? Was this an easy sell or did it take some work to convince those in charge of the museum that user-generated media has a place in Te Papa?

[adan.t]

I attach the following response by Terry Urbahn, Project Manager for Our Space:

Adán



Hello everyone, I’m Te Papa’s contract project manager for Our Space. I started this role in late 2006.

Four years ago Te Papa had recognised the need to eventually upgrade the opening exhibit “The Time Warp”. The Time Warp was primarily a combination of mechanical & video experiences e.g. Virtual Bungy Jump, Whale Rider and was wearing out.

“When Te Papa opened in 1998 The Time Warp was one of the signifiers that Te Papa was to deliver a ‘new museum experience’. The Time Warp also formed a key element of Te Papa’s brand image, and has been strongly positioned with media and through marketing strategies, becoming an icon of the new museum. The Time Warp is an important part of the Te Papa experience and what makes Te Papa different from traditional museums, and as a brand identifier, remains a vital element of the Museum’s offer.”

By the end of 2006 Te Papa had developed a series of conceptual briefs for The Time Warp Replacement (retaining the above philosophical approach and continuing a “broad-brush” New Zealand identity theme).

Proposals were then requested from a number of companies and assessed.

Gibson International Limited’s response to the brief introduced the concept of user-generated content supported by the web 2 model for community building and moderation.

At the time, some senior staff at Te Papa were interested in (and grappling with) the idea of providing the facility for visitors to contribute content within exhibitions and GIL’s initial proposal was perfectly timed to open up dialogue at management level.

The concept was reasonably straight-forward to negotiate. It was more difficult to convince everyone that the technology was viable and sustainable for a long-term exhibit.

Good on GIL for producing the goods!

[adan.t]

We have been through our first few weeks of operations and it has certainly been a rich experience.

I must say that we were not quite prepared for the role of ephemeral media on The Wall. The still and video camera functions in the space have been very popular, and on some days we had well over 3000 photos and videos taken from the loading stations. Because the opening coincided with the inception of school holidays here in NZ, Our Space was flooded with families and holiday programmes of school children - it made for a very dynamic, and sometimes frenetic, space.

Now that we are beginning to get a significant number of return visitors, the creative possibilities are certainly becoming realised. People are interacting with The Map and The Wall in quite diverse ways, and they are leaving their unique digital legacies behind with each and every visit.

We are also noticing some great interest spurred in local educational, artistic, management, and commercial communities who are keen to use The Wall to have very directed and facilitated visual conversations and interactions around particular topics.

Technically, the emphasis now will be to ensure that all the interactive possibilities are entirely functional, the media database is updated, and everything is backed-up. Conceptually, we need to continue attracting media that portrays a wide range of idiosyncratic behaviours and characteristics of New Zealanders.

We'll keep you posted.

[planeta]

Adan, I must confess to lurking on the Our Space website and finding through mutual friends some relevant photosets -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomwalter/sets/72157609659937381/ -- and videos -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7YD6YXlopE -- about the exhibition. This looks wonderful!

My question -- how is the exhibit being received?

Also, do you see ways that other countries could learn some lessons about showing the plurality of a nation's identity? I live in Mexico and have been talking up the social and technical advances of the exhibit to colleagues who work for museums, many at the community level. I'm not a museum professional, so my question is ... what might I suggest they consider from your experience?

Ron

[adan.t]

So we have now been through a couple of months of operations, and for the most part, we have been fielding great feedback. Even within the professional museum community, the feedback has been resoundingly favourable, which means we are being watched carefully to see how handle the possibilities...

Of course, I would be lying if I said it was all positive. Some more traditional museum visitors have difficulty with Our Space for a few reasons:

1. Museums, and particularly national Museums, have been traditionally seen as authorities on cultural and historical knowledge. Inviting user-generated content, warts and all, challenges this notion of a musuem as a wellspring of expert knowledge to be transferred to the empty receptacle that is the visitor.
2. The space has very little instructional signage or conceptual description informing the visitor of what they are supposed to be getting out of the exhibition. More conventional museum visitors seem to like the little bits of paper and signage to guide them through their experience. Our Space encourages the user to explore, play, and orient themselves how they wish and get whatever they would like out of the experience, whether shallow or profound. The role of the Hosts in Our Space is very different to their more reactive role elsewhere in the Museum, as there is still a recognised need to offer some measured guidance to certain visitors.
3. Museums are also seen to ideally have unrestrained mass appeal. While Our Space certainly does have this appeal, it has been unabashedly targetted at a specific psychodynamic of 15-25 year olds - content creators that have been traditionally underrepresented in the museum world.

These are challenges for the more traditional museum visitor, but for the most part, these visitors have been few and far between.

[adan.t]

And, in regards to your second question, I think the fact that you are not a museum professional is very valuable. I too am not a museum professional, but a community organiser with experience in the arts, cultural, and educational sectors.

Museums are recognising a need, and a responsibility, to listen to their citizenry. I am of Mexican blood and Chicano culture, but my perspective and my story as an immigrant to New Zealand is validated by mere inclusion, and as a user rather than administrator, I am co-creating knowledge through my contribution and my interaction with other contributors and their media.

Particularly in Oaxaca, where there is such a rich and extraordinarily diverse indigenous population, museums, in my mind, need to be offering opportunities for these communities to represent themselves by offering them the chance to create and generate content for inclusion in the museum space, whether physical or virtual.

Of course there is also the need to do so delicately in today's Web 2.0 world to ensure the protection of intangible heritage and national treasure, but musuems can, and should, be welcoming self-determining portrayals of self.

[planeta]

Just to bring us up to speed ... do you have any developments or additions to the exhibit?

[planeta]

Great to see the use of Twitter from OurSpace!
http://twitter.com/ourspacenz

And congratulations on having 5,400 photos in the OurSpace Pool -- http://www.flickr.com/groups/ourspace

I see that you're making a special request for images that tell a story about Matariki. As I understand, this is the Maori New Year celebrated on the upcoming solstice. What can you share about this particular celebration at Te Papa?

[adan.t]

The Capture Matariki event served two main purposes, one of which was to bring attention to user-generated images submitted to the OurSpace database related to Matariki, while the other was to launch the new technology developed in partnership with TelstraClear as an extension of the OurSpace experience.

Te Papa made a national call for submission of images related to the overarching theme of this year’s Matariki Festival, whakawhanaungatanga – bringing people together. We specifically asked to see what this meant to New Zealanders during this special time of year.

Over 350 images were submitted, and these were then narrowed down into nine final pools of 16 images each for review by selectors. Each selector chose the six images that they felt were most impressive. This final pool of 54 images was then sent to the 103-inch OurSpace TelstraClear Screen installed on the front exterior of the building, for dynamic interaction.

The images submitted were fantastic.

Matariki is the Maori name for the group of stars also known as the Pleiades star cluster, or The Seven Sisters; and, as you noted, Matariki is the traditional Maori New Year celebration. It has two translations, both referring to a tiny constellation of stars:Mata Riki (Tiny Eyes) and Mata Ariki (Eyes of God).

It is a time for family and friends to come together in remembrance of the past and celebrate new beginnings looking forward. Many iwi (tribes) still use Matariki to determine the crops of the upcoming season - it is a time for new harvest and ceremonial offerings to the land-based gods, Rongo, Uenuku, and Whiro to ensure good crops for the coming year.

Many of the images submitted to the Capture Matariki pool reflected these practices and featured family and community gatherings taking part in traditional ceremonies and eating traditionally prepared meals cooked in the ground (hangi).

From the end of this month, the imagery displayed on the Screen will be nominated by visitors to the website and will act more as an extension of the OurSpace experience that celebrates the plurality of perspectives represented in the database. It is another social media element of OurSpace linking the online with the onsite as part of the Museum's strategy to engage new audiences and explore the capabilities of user-generated content.

[planeta]

Via Twitter -- http://twitter.com/ourspacenz -- you wrote, "I'm realising that my web interests revolve more around content than engagement..." - http://twitter.com/ourspacenz/status/3390720343 - and this may be a simple question, but just how you do define 'content' and 'engagement'?

For example, is content what you yourself create or what you create with others? And is 'engagement' something that you try to measure online and/or in the museum?

On a sidenote and what makes me pester you with such questions is that I'm finding it difficult to organize web workshops with people who are not Web 2.0-savvy. I can go them and write a 'guide' to their local mangrove conservation work, but I'd rather get them up to speed on the more commonly used Web 2.0 tools such as Flickr, Twitter, Wiki and YouTube. I see the stronger the links are between content and engagement the more satisfied locals and visitors will be when connecting web-based research with on the ground conservation and tourism. When the links are weak, then there are fewer opportunities for synergies and a loss of motivation.

Also, this week I convinced Maori colleagues to begin editing an online guide to Hokianga -- http://planeta.wikispaces.com/hokianga

Another 100 edits and this will look pretty sweet!

[adan.t]

This was more of a personal statement than one of any great conceptual depth.

If we are talking specifically about web content, then it is the information that we share, link to, and (co)create through our interaction. Of course, this content is available in several mediums, and could be as simple as a message sent through a statement, but it is the message that interests me most, rather than the way it is expressed or dispersed.

The engagement refers to the interaction, and this is where much of the emphasis is with many social media platforms. This is great for some, but not all uses, and I often see institutions struggle with this by not bringing the focus back to the content, the message, the story.

For Museums, this is what it is all about, content. Even with UGC initiatives, it is about the narratives that are told through the interaction and engagement with our audiences and our collections. And we do this in several ways: through exhibitions, obviously, through events programming, through education programme delivery, and now, through our web and new media development.

I find these same things a struggle, Ron, but hopefully with endeavours like Planeta and OurSpace we will see a shift.

[adan.t]

I've yet to visit the Hokianga, but it is certainly on my list.

There is some great content here on Planeta to explore... I'll keep doing so and will hopefully have the opporunity to visit and engage with the local communities and experience the heritage first-hand.