Museums build some pretty cool websites. To help people find them, use them, and give them props, the Museums and the Web conference has held an annual Best of the Web contest since 1997.
This year's nominees are here. Just a sample:
the MOMA on Bauhaus, the Center for New Media's
Bracero History Archive, the Textile Museum of Canada's
In Touch:Connecting Cloth, Culture, and Art, Perception Deception from The National Science and Technology Center of Australia,
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh from the Van Gogh Museum, the Smithsonian's
Prehistoric Climate Change and Why it Matters Today, and more . If that doesn't wash out the remainder of your Friday, you can always dig into the
past nominees.
posted by Miko
on Mar 26, 2010 -
8 comments
Circuits are flipping on in the
nation's attic. A couple of weeks ago,
31 "digerati" -- like
Clay Shirky,
Chris Anderson, and
George Oates --
dropped in to the Smithsonian Institution for the invitation-only conference
"Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age".
Dan Cohen of the
Center for History and New Media provides
a great summary (and continues to pose provocative questions) on his own blog. Those whose invitations were somehow lost in the mail can play fly-on-the-wall by
watching the keynotes, paging through the
Flickr pool of envymaking glimpses of their behind-the-scenes lab and collections tours, reading the
blog (where Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum lays out
a succinct road map for museums using social media), and poking around in the SI's
website gallery. Want to cheer on the USA's favorite 163-year-old
"Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge" without taking the trip to DC? Thanks to their recent efforts, you can now follow the SI on
Twitter, listen to its
podcasts, watch its
YouTube channel, visit the
Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life, or use the
FaceBook gifts page to send your best friends their very own pair of Dorothy's
ruby slippers,
Hope diamond,
Negro Leagues baseball, or
coelocanth.
posted by Miko
on Feb 27, 2009 -
13 comments
The
recent passing of Studs Terkel sparked a renewed interest in his interview projects, like
Working,
Race, and
Hard Times. But Studs was not just a broadcaster who liked people; he was a practitioner of
oral history, a method of gathering information about the past through preserving individual recollections. It's a
subfield of history, with its own
ethics,
techniques,
professional literature,
uses, and
limitations.
Learn how to
collect and share oral histories yourself, from
interviewing to
recording and getting
clearances to
preserving and disseminating. Oral histories have been preserved as
text transcripts for decades; now digital media is
reinvigorating the form, bringing new ease to recording and
wider opportunities for the public to
see and hear the content. Explore oral history projects on the web with stories of
veterans,
suffragists,
Tibetans,
jazz cats,
Nevada nuclear test site witnesses,
Basque Americans,
rodeo cowboys and cowgirls,
musicians,
Katrina survivors,
ACT UP activists,
Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge,
Native Americans,
women whose lives were affected by the Pill,
survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire,
women in World War II,
Hawai'ians,
workers in Paterson, NJ....
posted by Miko
on Dec 11, 2008 -
20 comments
Voice Thread Now the online world can lend support in your family argument about what
really happened on your fifth birthday.
posted by Miko
on Nov 5, 2007 -
6 comments
