Hello and welcome to the Digital Snapshot, bringing you all the latest digital news, inspiration, tips and guidance for the arts, culture, museums and heritage world.
Towards the end of April I was back at the Museum of London for the Museum Association's yearly Digital event. It's a well-established one day conference focusing on the creative and innovative ways that museums are using digital. I took part in the closing panel with colleagues from the Museums Computer Group (I'm on the network's committee, a story for another day). One of my co-committee members, Livi Adu, wrote a great little synopsis of what we discussed. In this month's issue, I've included some links from the conference as there was some really interesting covered.
Finally, I'll be at the Museums + Heritage show on Wednesday 14 and Thursday 15 May. Come say hi at the networking event or at our stand.
📰 Latest news
- It feels like I've been talking about the TikTok ban in the US for years now. But they are slowly edging closer to it maybe, potentially kind of actually happening... now that the senate has passed a bill giving TikTok's owners 9 months to divest the U.S. assets or face a nationwide ban.
- The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem has, apparently, the world's first TikTok creator in residence.
- The National Archives (in America) has blocked access to ChatGPT for staff due to concerns over security threats. A number of other federal agencies in the U.S. have done the same.
- This is an interesting look at the impact of internet connectivity. According to a study by Oxford Internet Institute, internet use is linked to higher levels of wellbeing.
- Apple has faced backlash after their most recent ad showed a hydraulic press crushing a pile of 'creative' objects including musical instruments and books. It was supposed to represent how creativity is compressed into its latest iPad, but many have argued that it suggests the opposite.
🤓 Useful / shareable
- Microsoft has a programme called AI for Cultural Heritage, which is supporting individuals and organisations through investment and tech to help preserve and share cultural heritage. May be some opportunities there, so definitely one to watch.
- There's a concern that AI could lead to the death of creative jobs, but researchers have highlighted that human creativity is still needed to fuel AI. Currently if you feed AI on just machine-generated content, the model will ultimately collapse.
- RivalIQ has published a TikTok benchmark report for 2024 with a number of interesting takeaways. Worth a peruse.
- Substrakt has published a benchmarking report on cultural website performance, after undertaking a comparative analysis of 76 cultural sector websites. One top-level interesting finding is that between 2022-23 traffic rose by 99.8%.
- This is a useful intro to content audits.
💥 Distracting / entertaining / inspiring
- An always-on video portal is letting people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time. Probably a recipe for disaster but I like the sentiment.
- Making a Scene is an interesting collaborative project between the University of Bristol, the Bristol Old Vic and AR studio Zubr. Together they developed an app mixing physical collections with Augmented Reality. You can find out more through their blog series.
- At the MA event we heard from Jassim Happa, a lecturer in Information Security at Royal Holloway, who spoke about cyber security. One of the threats he mentioned was around deep-fake videos and it raised thought provoking questions about the sector's role in debunking fake "historical" videos. Here's an example he shared created through the OpenAI Sora platform of Gold Rush America.
- The National Trust recently opened a new immersive experience at Outernet London called 'Nature's Confetti'.
- The Museum of London is currently using AI within their collections management to improve tagging, metadata and connections between collections. No proper links as of yet but I did make some notes as their Head of Digital Innovation spoke about it at the MA day.
👍 Something good
- Here is a truly awful joke from Orkney Library (as I'm sure many of you have come to expect over the years).
- I really enjoyed this overview of the history behind 8 of the best known (English language) tongue twisters.
And that’s all for this edition.
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You can find all past editions of the Digital Snapshot here.
