When Doors Close, Where Do Audiences Go? Analyzing Museum Web Traffic During Crisis
I spoke with journalist Alexander Panetta of CBC News for a story on museums’ use of technology during the pandemic:
Despite this historic opportunity for online learning, with hundreds of millions of people locked out of public spaces, [Spellerberg] says traffic to museum websites plummeted last year. Read more
From Physical to Digital: Creating ‘At Home’ Experiences and Virtual Programming
The pandemic of 2020 presented an unprecedented challenge for cultural institutions. We’ve been with with our clients every step of the way, creating projects that run the gamut of adaptations undertaken by the industry. We built “At Home” sections for the Andy Warhol Museum and the Akron Art Museum; we designed and developed virtual events for the Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles, and Pleasure Dome, Toronto; and we created a bring-your-own-device web app for the Hammer Museum. Read more
Museum Digital COVID-19 Research at MCN 2020 Virtual Conference
Since COVID-19 first hit, I have been conducting a cross-institutional research study about the effects of shelter-in-place on museum website visitation. Researcher Grace Poole and I have been working hard over the past several months to analyze the pandemic’s impact across the sector’s digital activity. Read more
Was Cloudflare’s Termination of the Daily Stormer Ethical?
On August 16, 2017, Cloudflare revoked its cyber-protection service from the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website (Newman, 2017). The ethical issue at stake concerns internet censorship and who gets to decide what speech stays online. Did Cloudflare ethically act when it made this exception to its position of neutrality?
Call for Participants: Museum Digital COVID-19 Research Study
We are living through history. Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping society. When Americans began practicing “social distancing” and following orders to shelter-in-place, museums and cultural organizations moved quickly to cease public visitation. But even as our institutions closed their physical doors, we have opened digital windows. Read more
Spellerberg Projects 2019 Year In Review
We showed a lot of great art this year. Exhibitions at the Main St Gallery focused on photography: I curated Elijah Barrett’s Rockport, an examination of the impact of our changing climate on communities along the Texas coast; and then Elijah curated Cristina Velásquez’s New World, a consideration of agricultural labor in her native Columbia...
MCN Field Trips Open up Dialog With Host-City Artists
This piece is cross-posted on the MCN Blog.
MCN is all about facilitating connections for museum professionals. For the 2018 conference in Denver, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to help introduce a new format, MCN Field Trips, that opened up opportunities for spatial and dialectic exploration. Read more
Presentation at WordCamp NYC 2018
Zack Rothauser and I will be heading to WordCamp NYC 2018 to give a presentation on the Clyfford Still Museum’s web-based touchscreen video platform.
Bringing Warhol to Life Online: Strategy, Design, and Accessibility for warhol.org
We worked The Andy Warhol Museum, conducting a comprehensive overhaul of warhol.org. Launched in May 2017, The redesign included migrating the backend to WordPress, redesigning the frontend, establishing a content strategy, implementing a new information architecture, and auditing and rewriting all text and images.
Presentations at MCN 2018
I'm involved in three presentations at this year's MCN conference: "Proud to be Flesh: Cultural Spaces After the Internet," which will be a conversation between museum technologists and local artists; "Understanding our audiences," about the Whitney’s Website Visitor Survey and its broader context; and "Emotion, Intimacy and Space," about designing and developing the Clyfford Still Museum’s In-Gallery Video Kiosk System.
Understanding Online Museum Audiences: Academic Research on Digital Visitor Motivations
Circa 2016, we co-led a study into the motivations of museum website visitors, with 23 institutions participating. We presented this work through several conference presentations and in an article in the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing.
For an overview of the project, see our post about the MW 2016 presentation. Read more
