This is very cool! Thank you for sharing.
Here is the link to Artscope:
http://www.sfmoma.org/projects/artscope/
and to Hardrock Memorabilia:
http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
Artscope is reminiscent of my favorite browser plugin for viewing
images, Cooliris (http://www.cooliris.com/), and the online bookstore
zoomi (http://zoomii.com/), but without the interactivity with the
mousewheel and trackpad as Doug points out...
On 12-May-09, at 7:28 AM, John Norman wrote:
I don't normally appreciate people sending things to lists without
checking them out, but I really don't have time right now and if I
don't capture it I might lose it. So feel free to ignore if it is
not useful:
John
SFMOMA's ArtScope Offers New Way To Browse Museum Collections
by Doug McLean <[email protected]>
At a functional level, visiting an art museum is not so different
from going to a Blockbuster video store (considering the rise of
Netflix and Internet video, the two probably have similar attendance
levels these days). For the most part, the objects in both are
collected and categorized. In a movie store you have aisles for
Action, Horror, Comedy, and so on. Art museums use similar schemes -
wings for Flemish Paintings from the 1600s, Etruscan Sculpture, and
Japanese Works on Paper. Even in sections that appear jumbled,
there's usually some rhyme or reason - New Releases or Staff
Recommendations in the movie store, and Recent Acquisitions or Works
from the Rubell Collection in the art museum. The goal of the
organizational clarity is similar in both cases - it makes it easy
to find what you're looking for, and once you've found whatever that
is, to find more of the same.
Most art museums have taken a traditional approach to the
development of their online presence, transplanting their real-world
organization to the Web. Take, for example, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York, whose Web site, while offering a searchable
database, focuses on giving each curatorial department its own page.
The Web site for the Louvre in Paris has a feature that furthers the
effort to preserve the real-world feeling of the museum by enabling
users to navigate 3D virtual spaces that replicate its rooms and
exhibitions. While there's nothing wrong with maintaining these
sorts of groupings, the digitizing of a collection opens the door to
many other possibilities. (For some now-historical musings on
museums in the digital world, see Brad DeLong's "Ontological
Breakdown, or, Pretending to be a Help System," 1995-08-21.)
Peering into the ArtScope -- The San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art's ArtScope is a great example of an innovative approach to
bringing a museum's collection to the Web. ArtScope is a visual
browsing tool comprised of a thumbnail grid displaying 3,500 works
from the SFMOMA's permanent collection. The grid is zoomable,
displaying a lens which can be moved over it to magnify certain
areas, enabling users to view hundreds of artworks simultaneously,
or just one at a time in close detail.
[View image]
When you launch ArtScope, a set of controls and a search box are
visible to the right hand side of the window. The controls help you
zoom in and out, or zoom all the way out, though it's easier to
double-click inside the lens to zoom in, and to double-click outside
the lens to zoom out. You can also grab the grid and drag to move it
around, exactly as you can with a map in Google Maps. Unfortunately,
ArtScope doesn't support trackpad gestures or the scroll wheel for
zooming, and the incremental zooming via double-clicking is tedious.
[View image]
More interestingly, ArtScope also provides a search tool, and below
it a pane displaying information about the artwork at the center of
the lens (the artwork information is displayed even if you are fully
zoomed out). You can type anything into the search field: artist
name, title, date, medium, keywords, etc. If any results match your
search phrase, ArtScope moves the lens (maintaining the same level
of zoom) to the first match. If more than one result exists for your
term, a navigation bar displays the number of the result you are
currently viewing, the total number of results, and arrow buttons
that enable you to jump to the other matches within the grid. It's
fun typing in a term like "1970" or "Acrylic on canvas", and then
flying around the grid via the arrow keys to view all the results in
their scattered locations.
Browsing the Hard Rock Memorabilia Collection -- ArtScope finds a
kindred spirit in the Hard Rock Cafe's Memorabilia site, which has a
similar visual interface, and, in some ways, a better one for
browsing through the company's collection of popular music
artifacts. The controls and navigation are more along the lines of
what I'd like to see brought to ArtScope. The Hard Rock Memorabilia
tool has grab-and-drag navigation like SFMOMA's, but with an Apple-
like design touch. The drag has a little inertia to it, which gives
the navigation a natural and physical feel. That sense of inertia
also carries over to the zoom, which supports trackpad and scroll
wheel zooming - a much faster and more efficient way to zoom in and
out. Zooming in ArtScope magnifies the circumscribed area of the
lens, but also magnifies the background to a slightly lesser degree.
Visually it's a bit cluttered, and upon using the unified-page-zoom
on the Hard Rock site, the lens feels unnecessary.
[View image]
However, ArtScope is resizable and can take advantage of larger
screens, while the Hard Rock Memorabilia tool maintains a fixed
window size on all monitors. This becomes an issue with the latter's
information pane, which, while slick in how it pops up at a certain
degree of magnification, takes up prime real estate in the limited
window area, occasionally blocking the object you're trying to view.
Another strike against Hard Rock's more attractive information pane
is that there are instances when you'd want to be able to view the
item's information while zoomed out, as you can with ArtScope. Yet
the largest problem with the Hard Rock Memorabilia tool is its slow
load times. Zooming in almost always results in a blurry pixelated
image that takes far too long to resolve into crisp detail. While
you can zoom in quite close, the delay ensures you won't bother. In
comparison, ArtScope zooms crisply and quickly.
Lastly, unlike ArtScope, the Hard Rock Memorabilia tool lacks any
search tool and instead provides categories for breaking the
collection into chunks. ArtScope's approach here is far more
effective and engaging, since it eliminates the traditional top-down
establishment of categories, instead enabling users to create their
own collections via the search tool.
Rethinking the Online Museum -- Despite my gripes about ArtScope's
zooming, I still think it's a brilliant step toward answering the
question of how museums can offer an online experience that goes
beyond what's possible in the physical world. Nothing can replace
the experience of seeing art in person, but since many people will
never have the opportunity to stand face to face with even the most
significant works of art, it's essential that we explore different
ways of viewing these things on a computer screen. ArtScope
encourages wandering, free associations, odd connections, and a
playful engagement with a group of objects often perceived to be
weighty and untouchable. The virtual Prado Museum in Google Earth
offers another approach, though one that lends itself more to deep
exploration of a very few works rather than any sort of synthesis of
an entire museum's collection (see "Google Earth's Virtual Prado
Museum," 2009-01-28).
In sum, ArtScope produces an experience you simply cannot achieve in
a physical setting, and proposes a new model for looking at art. It
seizes upon the scalability of digital reproduction to enable new
juxtapositions - a large sarcophagus and a tiny drawing can be
viewed as identically sized images side by side, and we can sift
through a collection almost as though we're thumbing through a deck
of cards. I applaud the SFMOMA for approaching their Web site with a
sense of inventiveness, and hope to see more museums consider their
relationship to the Internet with an appreciation for what the
digital dimension can offer, and for what possibilities remain
unexplored.
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