Amanda Lawson

Voices from the regions, challenges and strategies

Amanda Lawson — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:14:21 PDT

This paper explores some of the issues for galleries in responding to and shaping national agendas and policies on the arts. How do regional galleries negotiate national and state arts funding and cultural development frameworks at the local level? What does it mean to be a local government funded organisation and pursue a big vision at the same time? What are the new opportunities for cross-artform programs? How are artists with regional practices positioned in the future arts environment? What are the future roles for regional galleries and what kind of partnerships can they forge to find that future role? How will generational change impact on the galleries - for artists and arts professionals? Many questions,no simple answers, but the history of regional gallery developments and their current strengths should form the basis for inventive and creative solutions.

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific

Vinod Daniel et al. — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:50:37 PST

The Australian Museum’s ethnographic collection consists of 110,000 objects from Indigenous Australia (33%); Pacific (50%) and Asia, Africa and the Americas (17%). The Pacific islands collection comprises approximately 60,000 objects and is the largest collection in an Australian public museum. This Collection is of international importance to several communities with complementary interests:•Indigenous communities have a specific interest in preserving and strengthening their cultural heritage both in the host countries and wherever the communities have migrated to. •For anthropologists access to collections, regardless of location, is key to the understanding and preservation of artefacts of many geographically dispersed collections. •The general public can learn from and contribute to the body of knowledge which will develop from having an active online community

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific (web site)

Brogan S. Bunt et al. — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:41:47 PST

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a collaborative project between the University of Wollongong and the Australian Museum that intends to leverage the meta-data of 400 objects into a rich application. It features the ability for users to browse objects based on their attributes and semantic meaning, and group like or similar objects together that are of interest.

Designing the Digital Ecosystem of the Virtual Museum of the Pacific

Peter Eklund et al. — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:21:02 PST

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a digital ecosystem implemented as Web 2.0 application that experiments with information and knowledge acquisition for a digital collection of museum artifacts from the Australian Museum. The Virtual Museum of the Pacific allows several search methods: attribute search based on a control vocabulary, query refinement and query-by-example but importantly it facilitates a number of social media interfaces that enable content to be added and tagged, the control vocabulary to be extended, user perspectives to be defined and narratives added via wiki. We characterize the design of the Virtual Museum of the Pacific as: a semantic Web application with a Web services back-end, and as a digital ecosystem by identifying its purpose, function and stakeholders. In doing so, the paper illustrates the issues encountered in its design and deployment, the technical platform, the historical context of the growth of the collection and the challenges to the organization and management of a digital ecosystem metadata model.

CollectionWeb Digital Ecosystems: A Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Framework for generating Museum Web sites

Peter Eklund et al. — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:58:50 PST

CollectionWeb is a development platform for Web-based social media sites that distribute, display, annotate and management digital collection content. CollectionWeb is based on an approach that generates semantic navigation interfaces that induces pages from collection metadata using Formal Concept Analysis.

The Art Collection Ecosystem: Discovering Art using Formal Concept Analysis

Tim Wray et al. — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:48:10 PST

We describe an application and case study in the design and evaluation of the Art Collection Ecosystem (ACE) | a Rich Internet Application that supports the ability of users to browse and explore art collections using Formal Concept Analysis. With a view of a system that allows browsing of tagged content, 25 participants conducted a usability study within the context of a popular social media website - Flickr. We describe key design elements within its user interface and incorporate re- visions of its design based on user feedback. We incorporate these results into a framework called CollectionWeb - a set of software, services and processes that allows associative and explorative browsing of any kind of collection content over the Web.

Alan Peascod - influences and dialogue

A. Lawson et al. — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:26:01 PST

Alan Peascod was an influential teacher, mentor and friend to many in the ceramics community of Australia, especially in the places where he lived and worked, the Illawarra, Canberra and later Gulgong. Timed to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Wollongong City Gallery - an apt moment for reflection on the culture of the region - this exhibition is an investigation of traditions and techniques, creative interaction and influence over three decades, centering on Peascod’s practice. Interestingly, the research we undertook for this exhibition revealed a wealth of ceramics held in private collections throughout the Illawarra and beyond - a source of cultural richness in the region that has been largely overlooked.