this story starts with a princess an
Egyptian and Donald Trump
it’s a tale about how computers are
curating our cultural future and how our
Kiwi data company found itself in the
middle of that but it starts all the way
back in 547 B see when our princess
named in a gal D built the world’s very
first Museum but this museum wasn’t like
what you and I would know of as a museum
today because it was actually in her
home a palace and only there for the
enjoyment of her inner circle and with
it our princess started a trend that
would be followed by Roman warlords and
Danish aristocrats and British
scientists people who kept private
collections in their homes only
accessible for a privileged few and over
the years churches and states in the
very wealthy funded the construction of
the world’s great treasure trove and
along came the big names that we still
know today like the Vatican founded in
1506 and now boasting 54 museums within
the city’s walls and then a few hundred
years later a new museum age began when
a rich collector bequeathed his estate
to King George ii for seeing just how
important museums would be for sharing
the stories of history for future
generations and together they gave rise
to the British Museum now the most
visited Museum in the UK and this was a
big leap from private collections it
marked the first move for the memory of
humankind from antiquities elitism to
the public cultural institution and in
the French followed suit during the
revolution with the Louvre this
masterpiece was originally a fortress
can
to a museum and then open to the public
it is now one of the most popular in the
world seeing over 7 million people each
year through its doors and then finally
the u.s. had her turn when one of
Britain’s scientists who ironically had
never set foot on American soil left his
estate to its people and with it James
Smithson funded the Smithsonian’s
Institute which now numbers 19 museums
and the National Zoo it is the world’s
largest museum complex and so it
continued with arts and culture being a
sport of the rich and powerful right up
until the 1970s and then picture this
Watergate is happening and the Israeli
six-day war and Richard Nixon with
problems at home and abroad needs some
kind of diplomatic gesture he can share
with the Egyptians and with it broke her
peace in the Middle East and achieve a
win at home and so on one foul swoop
that kills two birds with one stone
he signed a deal together with his
country’s top museum directors and Egypt
and brought the contents of King Tut’s
tomb to the US this was the most popular
exhibition of all time it was seen by
over eight million people
eight million that’s more than the king
had ruled over in his life and at a time
when the halls of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art were previously quiet they
broke all attendance records and with
people camping outside the doors of the
Met just to get in they found themselves
flying their executives to Disneyland to
learn all about the world of
commercialising visitor experience and
wizard
they bought revenue and to the museum
and here we have it from royalty to the
church from the wealthy to the
government and finally our modern
commercial world over the last few
thousand years the history of museums
has followed power fast-forward to today
and in the myths
footsteps the average Museum operates
with a mix of government funding private
generosity and revenue but for the
billion people who visit the world’s
75,000 museums each year the average
museum can spend up to $50 for each foot
through the door and yet offset by less
than 10 in revenue and some people will
tell you even that as a problem
culture shouldn’t be commercialized and
we shouldn’t see visitors as customers
and now point to examples like the 9/11
Memorial Museum and they’ll ask you
whether you think it is right to sell a
toy fire truck at a mass grave site but
the reality is that museums need much
money to deliver on their social mission
and perhaps the hidden problem is that
our old model of grants and funding
doesn’t fit very well into the modern
world relying on private funding is a
pretty risky business in a global
financial crisis and in many countries
competing for government funds is
getting harder and harder there’s no
better example of this than with current
administration’s like Trump’s whose
budget right now before Congress will
wipe 500 million dollars from the US
government’s museum funding and then
there’s this traditionally museums don’t
like to think of themselves as
competitive businesses but sadly on a
Saturday morning when it’s time for the
family to decide what to do with their
weekend things like Netflix are getting
in the way of a visit to the museum this
has a social impact but it has a
financial one too and there’s a big
reason that we should all care about
this because it is only by truly
understanding our past that we can forge
a better future this is so pertinent and
today’s social climate for me the moment
when this really struck home was a few
years ago when I found out that a white
supremacist had walked into the u.s.
Holocaust Memorial Museum and shot did
one of its staff members it is a very
stark reminder some parts of history we
like to think of as behind us perhaps
not over just yet and that’s why our
cultural institutions be they history or
science or art are just so important so
captivated by this industry I wanted to
do something to change the world for
museums so starting at the Oakland Art
Gallery over the road I began by asking
will what makes a museum tick and what I
found out was it was this the answer was
clicks everywhere I went I saw clicker
counters take the Museum of American
history for example you’ll see one of
these humble clicker counters sitting
proudly on display in the numismatics
collection and you’ll also see them
using it at the front door so inspired
by a little middle device I founded a
company called Dix Abbott dedicated to
advancing big data analytics in the
cultural sector we use technology to
pull together all sorts of information
on the visitors experience to
anonymously help museums manage for
performance by better understanding
where you win – what you saw or did or
ate or bought or even what the weather
was doing outside and essentially we set
it on a mission to get rid of these
because the clicker counter doesn’t tell
you much in traditional ways of thinking
about customers don’t translate for a
curator like a few museum is about human
rights like this one in Canada you can’t
very well ask your visitors if they were
satisfied with their visits after
they’ve just emerged from a
heart-wrenching exhibition about
genocide we have defined proxies for
measuring engagement and data science
provides us with the means to use things
like mobile device signals to look at
trail routes and dwell times and work
out if the exhibitions are resonating
for people like you and me and then with
machine learning we can forecast how
many people will come to a museum as we
did with tip upper here down to the hour
and up to a year ahead and even
featuring the very subtle influence of
the local cruise ship schedule
knowing visitor numbers in advance helps
museums with everything from financial
planning to knowing how many muffins to
bake next Tuesday and then for museums
who have the wonderful challenge of
welcoming an overwhelming number of
visitors like the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of
african-american history and culture big
data can help us forecast attrition or
show rates and ultimately open the
museum up to those who would otherwise
miss out and now with museums who are
bringing in big blockbuster special
exhibitions such as the National Gallery
in London we’re working on using
artificial intelligence to simulate how
an exhibition will perform before it
even opens this helps museums make
especially important decisions as many
of them only ever show a few percent of
their collection at any given time and
then have to spin to bring and traveling
exhibits to but most important of all is
what this means for us as visitors while
we’ve moved on from the days when the
museums were invited only up until
recently it still been up to a pretty
select group to decide what to put in
front of us as the public and what big
data analytics does for us as it flips
that curatorial pyramid on its head it
allows us to vote with our feet big data
enables museums to listen rather than
just talk and that turns curation into a
conversation and that will create more
moments like this one where it plants a
seed in the minds of our future
scientists and artists but what I do
know is this in this new age of
democratizing the museum we will better
evidence the value of museums to society
data will help protect us against those
rescissions and federal budget cuts and
it will help empower the very delicate
balance of the museum’s pop culture with
its social mission so from princess in a
gallery to
Tutt to Donald Trump over the years the
place of museums and society has changed
and now I think it needs to change again
but we will only get there if we embrace
data to manage the future of our history thank you
Egyptian and Donald Trump
it’s a tale about how computers are
curating our cultural future and how our
Kiwi data company found itself in the
middle of that but it starts all the way
back in 547 B see when our princess
named in a gal D built the world’s very
first Museum but this museum wasn’t like
what you and I would know of as a museum
today because it was actually in her
home a palace and only there for the
enjoyment of her inner circle and with
it our princess started a trend that
would be followed by Roman warlords and
Danish aristocrats and British
scientists people who kept private
collections in their homes only
accessible for a privileged few and over
the years churches and states in the
very wealthy funded the construction of
the world’s great treasure trove and
along came the big names that we still
know today like the Vatican founded in
1506 and now boasting 54 museums within
the city’s walls and then a few hundred
years later a new museum age began when
a rich collector bequeathed his estate
to King George ii for seeing just how
important museums would be for sharing
the stories of history for future
generations and together they gave rise
to the British Museum now the most
visited Museum in the UK and this was a
big leap from private collections it
marked the first move for the memory of
humankind from antiquities elitism to
the public cultural institution and in
the French followed suit during the
revolution with the Louvre this
masterpiece was originally a fortress
can
to a museum and then open to the public
it is now one of the most popular in the
world seeing over 7 million people each
year through its doors and then finally
the u.s. had her turn when one of
Britain’s scientists who ironically had
never set foot on American soil left his
estate to its people and with it James
Smithson funded the Smithsonian’s
Institute which now numbers 19 museums
and the National Zoo it is the world’s
largest museum complex and so it
continued with arts and culture being a
sport of the rich and powerful right up
until the 1970s and then picture this
Watergate is happening and the Israeli
six-day war and Richard Nixon with
problems at home and abroad needs some
kind of diplomatic gesture he can share
with the Egyptians and with it broke her
peace in the Middle East and achieve a
win at home and so on one foul swoop
that kills two birds with one stone
he signed a deal together with his
country’s top museum directors and Egypt
and brought the contents of King Tut’s
tomb to the US this was the most popular
exhibition of all time it was seen by
over eight million people
eight million that’s more than the king
had ruled over in his life and at a time
when the halls of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art were previously quiet they
broke all attendance records and with
people camping outside the doors of the
Met just to get in they found themselves
flying their executives to Disneyland to
learn all about the world of
commercialising visitor experience and
wizard
they bought revenue and to the museum
and here we have it from royalty to the
church from the wealthy to the
government and finally our modern
commercial world over the last few
thousand years the history of museums
has followed power fast-forward to today
and in the myths
footsteps the average Museum operates
with a mix of government funding private
generosity and revenue but for the
billion people who visit the world’s
75,000 museums each year the average
museum can spend up to $50 for each foot
through the door and yet offset by less
than 10 in revenue and some people will
tell you even that as a problem
culture shouldn’t be commercialized and
we shouldn’t see visitors as customers
and now point to examples like the 9/11
Memorial Museum and they’ll ask you
whether you think it is right to sell a
toy fire truck at a mass grave site but
the reality is that museums need much
money to deliver on their social mission
and perhaps the hidden problem is that
our old model of grants and funding
doesn’t fit very well into the modern
world relying on private funding is a
pretty risky business in a global
financial crisis and in many countries
competing for government funds is
getting harder and harder there’s no
better example of this than with current
administration’s like Trump’s whose
budget right now before Congress will
wipe 500 million dollars from the US
government’s museum funding and then
there’s this traditionally museums don’t
like to think of themselves as
competitive businesses but sadly on a
Saturday morning when it’s time for the
family to decide what to do with their
weekend things like Netflix are getting
in the way of a visit to the museum this
has a social impact but it has a
financial one too and there’s a big
reason that we should all care about
this because it is only by truly
understanding our past that we can forge
a better future this is so pertinent and
today’s social climate for me the moment
when this really struck home was a few
years ago when I found out that a white
supremacist had walked into the u.s.
Holocaust Memorial Museum and shot did
one of its staff members it is a very
stark reminder some parts of history we
like to think of as behind us perhaps
not over just yet and that’s why our
cultural institutions be they history or
science or art are just so important so
captivated by this industry I wanted to
do something to change the world for
museums so starting at the Oakland Art
Gallery over the road I began by asking
will what makes a museum tick and what I
found out was it was this the answer was
clicks everywhere I went I saw clicker
counters take the Museum of American
history for example you’ll see one of
these humble clicker counters sitting
proudly on display in the numismatics
collection and you’ll also see them
using it at the front door so inspired
by a little middle device I founded a
company called Dix Abbott dedicated to
advancing big data analytics in the
cultural sector we use technology to
pull together all sorts of information
on the visitors experience to
anonymously help museums manage for
performance by better understanding
where you win – what you saw or did or
ate or bought or even what the weather
was doing outside and essentially we set
it on a mission to get rid of these
because the clicker counter doesn’t tell
you much in traditional ways of thinking
about customers don’t translate for a
curator like a few museum is about human
rights like this one in Canada you can’t
very well ask your visitors if they were
satisfied with their visits after
they’ve just emerged from a
heart-wrenching exhibition about
genocide we have defined proxies for
measuring engagement and data science
provides us with the means to use things
like mobile device signals to look at
trail routes and dwell times and work
out if the exhibitions are resonating
for people like you and me and then with
machine learning we can forecast how
many people will come to a museum as we
did with tip upper here down to the hour
and up to a year ahead and even
featuring the very subtle influence of
the local cruise ship schedule
knowing visitor numbers in advance helps
museums with everything from financial
planning to knowing how many muffins to
bake next Tuesday and then for museums
who have the wonderful challenge of
welcoming an overwhelming number of
visitors like the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of
african-american history and culture big
data can help us forecast attrition or
show rates and ultimately open the
museum up to those who would otherwise
miss out and now with museums who are
bringing in big blockbuster special
exhibitions such as the National Gallery
in London we’re working on using
artificial intelligence to simulate how
an exhibition will perform before it
even opens this helps museums make
especially important decisions as many
of them only ever show a few percent of
their collection at any given time and
then have to spin to bring and traveling
exhibits to but most important of all is
what this means for us as visitors while
we’ve moved on from the days when the
museums were invited only up until
recently it still been up to a pretty
select group to decide what to put in
front of us as the public and what big
data analytics does for us as it flips
that curatorial pyramid on its head it
allows us to vote with our feet big data
enables museums to listen rather than
just talk and that turns curation into a
conversation and that will create more
moments like this one where it plants a
seed in the minds of our future
scientists and artists but what I do
know is this in this new age of
democratizing the museum we will better
evidence the value of museums to society
data will help protect us against those
rescissions and federal budget cuts and
it will help empower the very delicate
balance of the museum’s pop culture with
its social mission so from princess in a
gallery to
Tutt to Donald Trump over the years the
place of museums and society has changed
and now I think it needs to change again
but we will only get there if we embrace
data to manage the future of our history thank you
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