Pictured above is a screen capture of the dashboard for the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), an interesting web project that came my way via the always reliable delicious account of Dan Hill some weeks back. Having just visited the Newseum in Washington (which I'll post about soon), and given the scope of the Curediting issue of Vague Terrain, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the relationship between exhibit space and media.
Perhaps in a bid for increased institutional transparency, the IMA has opted to port a wide variety of operational data onto a dedicated microsite. As evidenced by the capture above this includes new additions to museum holdings, work on loan, membership information, student visits, volunteer hours, power consumption as well as web related data such as the length of the average website visit and Facebook fans. An excerpt from the mission statement for the dashboard:
The goal of the Dashboard is to seek to quantify and report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum observers and to particular interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues, and patrons.
These various streams of data provide a curious, if somewhat fragmented view into various curatorial, institutional, infrastructural and web realms that the IMA occupies.
The top half of the above image displays the thumbnail gallery a IMA web user receives when clicking on "Works of Art - New Works on View". This gallery allows a user to drill down and get information about a recent acquisition. This isn't really anything to write home about considering the web presence of other similar institutions but piping all this additional information online is quite novel.
While I applaud the effort of this interactive venture, I do think it is strange that the IMA has dropped their holdings into an array alongside the somewhat banal metric tracking the average length of a web visit - a rather curious juxtaposition. Stranger still is the fact that the "front page" of the dashboard contains links to social media stats but a user has to root around to find the (really interesting) financial analytics for the museum. Since when does anybody in the art world care about meter readings? We clearly want to get the skinny on the endowment keeping our favourite art institutions afloat.
What does interest me about this web project is the manner in which it sits both alongside and outside the scope of the main IMA site. If a user starts examining work through the dashboard there is a possibility that they may be rerouted into one of the more obscure IMA collections, perhaps one they may not have selected to examine otherwise. My earlier navigation and layout grumbling aside, it is refreshing to see an institution willing to take some chances on their web presence and deviate from the generic museum and gallery "high culture institution" flavoured templates.
[Google Analytics - display & interface]
Poking around the IMA dashboard got me thinking about other possibilities for the conflation of institutional and web analytics. Since it is not an "online gallery", why is the IMA so concerned with displaying their web stats? Let's be clear, the work is catalogued online, it is not net.art. In my opinion, what could be much more interesting would be to track the "performance" of pieces of art in the display space and put this information online. Why not employ proximity and motion sensors to track crowd density and "average linger lengths" at each piece? It could make for some interesting analysis of holdings and help study how visitors engage the work on display. Perhaps the IMA should give George Legrady a call if they are bent on connecting the gallery floor with the screen space of the web.
Chema Cobo
Marc Chagall
Chema Madoz
