My Top Takeaways from Museums and the Web 2018

4 min readApr 24, 2018

Last week was the 2018 Museums and the Web Conference, held this year in lovely Vancouver, Canada. Since this was my second year, I was a lot more prepared for what to expect and how to navigate it. I also got a lot more involved by volunteering, chairing a session, presenting a workshop, and participating as an expert on the Web Application Critique panel.

My week of conferencing started off with my a workshop led by myself and Jennifer Aho on how to create a video game from planning to development using Construct 3. If you’re interested in the slides, check out this post: No Cheat Codes Required- We Created a Video Game and You Can, Too!

Here, I want to share some of the major takeaways I had from the conference and some cool tools I discovered.

My Top Takeaways

1. Emotion is king: Instead of talking about marketing or promotion, museums are increasingly focusing on emotion as a way to connect with audiences and become more relevant. This was an underlying factor in a large number of the talks I attended.

Bente Jensen and Kajsa Hartig discussed how emotive hashtags led to increased user participation and a greater desire to have the museum collect and re-share their content.

Seema Rao and Robert Stein found that museum professionals were more likely to maintain deep conversations on Twitter if they felt an emotional connection to the topic.

Karin Ryding argued that being critical and examining history doesn’t have to be intellectual, it can be an emotional discussion.

Becky Menlove found that their serious game that taught about climate change often inspired children to become emotional attached- when they had to stop playing they would ask the next child to continue their stewardship of the fictional city.

2. Be open to new workflows and ways of approaching content: one of the things that I love about conferences is hearing new ideas and approaches, and this year in particular showed me the value of rethinking the way we do things. This means anything from finding inspiration in unexpected places, partnering with company in new ways, or allowing your work to be defined by the community.

Effie Kapsalis and Kellian Adams shared their museum-wide scavenger hunt that was half fictional as a way to get people to explore new areas and investigate the museum deeper.

Kate Huckle’s team used Netflix and YouTube as the inspiration for their new online collections system, which gave younger audiences a more familiar way to navigate the system and allowed for discovery of new and unexpected content.

Sarah Bailey Hogarty discussed how SFMOMA’s audio tour was meant to appeal to people who didn’t have a background in art and didn’t feel comfortable talking about it by developing an immersive audio tour led by a range of different hosts from comedians to sports professionals as a way to make the art relevant to them.

3. Being open access within our discipline is critical: For the good of all museums and related institutions, we need to be more open about what we’re doing, how we are doing it, and what our results were. The methods and tools I’ve discovered at this conference have been invaluable and there re many things I plan to try at my institution.

Karin Ryding introduced me to ArtCodes, a cool tool that allows you to make art-based codes that function in a similar manner to QR codes (but look better).

Maria Paula Arias examined geo-tagged Instagram posts to analyze the ways that the MUSEUM is represented online, revealing some intriguing trends that show the position of the museum within the community.

Jennifer Snyder introduced us to JourneyMaker, an amazing open-access platform that helps museum-goers develop their own tours across the museum in a way that is playful and fun.

Multiple speakers talked about the utility of using Apple to help create better maps for their museums that could be used for location-based services rather than using beacons, which are potentially problematic.

Final Thoughts

I’m coming away from MW18 this year with a lot of practical tips and tricks, as well as some larger goals that will stick with me throughout the year. I want to prioritize making social media more social- increase the dialogue and decrease the outright promotions. I want to share more of what I’m doing- the successes and failures- to help our discipline move forward. And I want to try something totally new- whether it is using QR codes in a gallery, trying my hand at JourneyMaker, or developing a unique community partnership- I want to push myself beyond my comfort zone.