Hello!
May’s here, the sun is out and we’re as busy as ever, finishing projects and starting new ones. Here’s some of what we’ve been up to, and some curious things found in tabs we haven’t closed yet…
Read on! And as always, if any of this piques your curiosity… drop us a line!
Feeling sensational
In Plain Sight exhibition, Steven Pocock, CC-BY 4.0
We’ve just wrapped up a chunk of work as a partner in the Sensational Museum research project. The Sensational Museum is a £1M AHRC-funded project that’s rethinking how museums make the sensory qualities of their collections accessible to their visitors, and experimenting with alternative ways into cultural heritage than looking at objects or images. The idea is ‘sensory gain’ for everyone involved, with or without visual impairments.
Our strand of the project looked at collections documentation. We built a proof-of-concept, extending our ‘enriched records’ model to include information about aspects of objects like content warnings and the emotional impact of objects that live alongside the core collections data..
It was a delightful group of people to work with and a great project. We’re keen to see what happens next, and hope that the idea of sensorially-enriched collections records starts to catch on.
In the works: Pattern matching
Screenshot: The Museum Platform
Ever experience that Fear of a Blank Page? The editor’s open, the blocks are there and you know what you want to say, but the page just sits there mocking you.
Enter the frame: Patterns. We’ve been experimenting with this, but we’re going all-out to implement it in version 5. It’s quite simple: you have preset shapes for common layouts, which you can quickly apply or copy and paste into a new page. It takes the pain out of reproducing common layouts, and helps keep things consistent across your site.
We’re just stepping into a user-testing phase. If you’re intrigued, we’ll let you take a sneaky peek at our prototype.
Telling tales: All mixed up at sea
Cocktail objects assemblage © P&O Heritage
P&O Heritage’s new site launched at the end of last year, and the team there continue to explore the history of Britain’s most-storied shipping company online.
With summer approaching it’s time to get the cocktail shakers and swizzle sticks out, and discover the history of cocktails at sea. From the glamour of the captain’s table to the ship that shook so hard it mixed its own drinks: a passenger’s guide to the relaxing side of life aboard a liner.
Thought for the day: Less drama please
Mike’s just back from a six-day silent retreat and he’s been thinking: “Why do modern documentaries try so hard to be dramas? Full of crashing orchestral music and contrived cliffhangers. It’s as if they’re afraid the content can’t stand on its own.
“Museums are (and should be) the opposite of this: giving objects the space they need, telling stories without UNNECESSARY CAPS, and providing a muted, nuanced space for well thought-out words, and objects that carry their own elegance and grace.”
A thing we liiike: Liiive
Screenshot: Liiive
Do you like IIIF? Maybe you’ll love Liiive. It’s a tool that you can use to collaboratively annotate your zoomable images: rather than discussing an image by emailing clunky screenshots back and forth, you can zoom, highlight, comment and discuss on the image itself. When you’re done, just download all your annotations as a standard IIIF manifest
It’s made by Rainer Simon, who’s been working on the super-slick Annotorious JavaScript library for years. Go have a play with it, and tell us what you think. If there’s a fan club, we might start thinking about TMP integrations.
From the collections: Trilobite trails
Screenshot: Manchester Museum
Cruziana is an ‘ichnofossil’, which means it’s not the fossil of a living creature’s body, but of a trace left by a living creature. It’s a classic of its kind: a fossil of the trails left by trilobites, in this case about 478-470 million years ago.
The ones on this specimen suggest a hectic sea-bed back in the time before multicellular life had caught sight of dry land. Today, it lives at Manchester Museum and you can admire those traces online. Enough to make you feel very small in the scale of things.
Bye!
Thanks for reading to the very end. We’ve loved having you around. June will be here before any of us knows it, but in the meantime if anything here has tickled your fancy, or you just want to chat about things TMP, then get in touch!
Until next time,
Mike, Jeremy and the TMP team.