 Ngātiwara. OK. What I'd like to talk to you about today is our digital interpretation at Toyota Otago Settlers Museum. I know some of you have perhaps been there. Some of you I hope are about to come, if you haven't been already. At the moment I'm acting director, but my unusual day job is visitor experience manager and I was involved in the team that brought this all together. What I'd like to do is first of all do some thank yous to the team that brought the whole thing together, including Workshop E, our design team, and I know there's people out in the audience who are part of that team, so well done everybody. It was really, really good. Basically the museum's been on the go since 1908 in various incarnations and eventually it got to the stage where we decided we had to do a complete redo, redevelopment, got the money, et cetera, et cetera. And as part of a $39 million development, most of which went on the outside. The museum opened in December last year. But part of the way, along the way, we had to decide what to do and how to do the interpretation. And it was quite a process, which I'll talk about today. We looked at what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. But it started with the need to develop a text hierarchy, which would then inform our interpretation scheme. And I was very lucky to be asked to do that. So I organised and thought about and wrote and developed a text hierarchy, which then went back and forwards with Rich Hoppe, our design company, until we were all happy with how it was looking. But at the same time, I was also asked to consider what new technology I would want to see in the new museum, what I asked. Bit of a gadget girl, I owned the very first iPad sold in the entire South Island. I know that because I queued at the door for it. So I had spent a lot of time talking about technology and text and how to present it. And in the end, it ended up being done together more or less. And one of the research things that I looked at was what Tapapa had done in terms of writing effective interpretive text. I don't know how familiar you are with that. But basically, the interesting things are the longer the text on a label, the less likely it is to be read. The more text there is in an exhibition, the less of it is likely to be read. And visitors spent on average two seconds, scary. Two seconds reading any given text in an exhibition. The most read text are about things, object labels, or captions. The least read text are about ideas, labels not immediately associated with objects. And then the last thing that I really talked about was however reading behaviour is notoriously difficult to observe directly. Think about this finding. Given good legibility, visitors can take in 20 to 30 words during a two to three second movement towards or past a label within their field of vision with no apparent reading. And that's from Tapapa writing effective interpretive text. So what we ended up was a text hierarchy, which had very strict word limits and which placed most text at the lower end of the hierarchy and less at the top. And I can say that this was not universally popular when it was first mooted, but is working really well in practice. I think everyone would agree with that. But just very briefly, gallery name at the very top, one word, maximum three. Topic, which is up with gallery name 50 words. You could explain the whole gallery in 50 words. The traditional subtopic, we took it out altogether. So we have no subtopic panels anywhere in the museum, apart from one place. And then we've got object label, which is about 30 to 50 words. And then on top of that, we've got what we call a hero object, which is an object without which we can't tell the story. And that one was allowed 80 to 100 words. Which, as you can appreciate, was not a great number of words. So we got that organised, and then we started thinking again about what to do. I locked it radio frequency ID. But again, expensive, not a lot. It was fairly new, and you needed to have a big wand or something. And also, you had to be quite close to the object that you were looking at. It just seemed a bit limited. I also locked it near field technology. That was very, very new. Back in 2011, when we were considering that, too dependent on it being installed in the phone, or the device that you were using. So we kind of had to think about how we were going to do it and what we're going to do it with. I also considered GPS compatibility. Most users of smartphones, however, you'll find, they turn the GPS off because it sucks battery and it's not accurate enough. If you've got two objects close together, it's not going to differentiate about where you are. I then locked it QR technology, whichever I'll tell you a bit about later. It still needed a smartphone, but it didn't need any particular smartphone. And then what I had to do was battle, and I mean battle, to get free Wi-Fi throughout the whole museum. So it wasn't dependent on having access to a paid phone network, which was good. Okay, now, what we also looked at, and this is again Nina Simon, a big fan of Nina Simon, we wanted to do something meaningful with the technology and something meaningful in terms of the whole interpretive scheme. So I looked at this, which was the metawii design, which has a whole lot of different stages. Basically, stage one, we have provided access via a range of options. We've got printed text, QR code, access to YouTube videos and layers and layers of text on computer information screens, which I'll show you shortly. Stage two, we also thought very much about not spoon feeding the visitor, but making them hunt for the information that they needed. It's there, but you've got to do a bit of work to uncover it. And that's an ethos that goes right through the museum. You've really got to sometimes work to find that information. It's not writ large on the wall in front of you. Easy to find. We also have, for stage three, we've got various things, but a participation sculpture, which provides a platform for stage three interaction where people can write down directly what they think and put it up. We transcribe those and look at them. We've also got the usual social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. And stage four, I think we're still working on, but we do have a research centre where you can be face-to-face with staff who'll answer questions, and of course, we've got staff on the ground as well. Stage five is a tricky one. Partially solved via our people posts, but I'm not quite sure we've quite yet cracked the place for social interaction, although... And again, it was interesting because this has already been mentioned earlier. We have got... We've got craft collective, which is once a month people get together and do craft works together in the museum. We've got Book Club and other things, and we've got a Tuesday Club, which has a really highly social aspect to it, where people are really into the social aspect. In fact, I often joke that Tuesday Club doesn't matter who you get to talk to them because they'll come and listen because they really want to catch up with their mates and have a cup of tea. But they actually can take quite a lot of hard historical data as well. They're a very good group. But people are starting to become regulars at our social events, which we think is really, really good. So these are the concepts that we develop with Workshop E, and I'll run you through various ones of them. What we call a Digital Label Rail, or DLR. It's a touch screen for all the cases that we have, the big cases. We still do have written labels, printed labels for smaller cases. The DLR particularly is a concept that we weren't sure how that was going to go, but again, the Tuesday Club average age about 80. I tested it on them. I gave them the screen. I gave them no instruction. I just said, you've got to the case. Here's the screen in front of the case. And I didn't tell them any more than that, and they all got it. They touched it. They looked at it. They worked out how to use it really easy, which is really, really good. And the other concept that we had as well, which didn't work in one case, which I'll talk about people posts, is we didn't have any touch the screen to begin or there is information on the touch screen. We didn't. All the screens were touch screens. We didn't explain that they were touch screens. We didn't explain how to use them. We didn't explain that you had to touch them. And that, again, is about our not spoon-feeding visitors and making people find out for themselves. And again, the only place that didn't work was the people posts. There's our digital label rail in front of one of our cases. It is basically a computer screen. The housing contains all the gear, and I won't go into technical aspects here. I haven't really got time, but it's standalone, but networked, centrally controllable, and works really, really well. Now, the first screen, when you get to it, and I'll just give you an example in just a minute, has all the objects laid out with our design scheme of the case on it. And then we have a second screen, which takes you to the object and a third screen, in some cases, where there's more information. At the moment, we are working on providing a third screen for a lot more of the object, so we're adding another whole layer in there. So this is the Chinese case. It starts with the home screen, and then you click onto the object you want to learn more about, and it gives you a photograph, and you go back to the home screen. And again, each, this is an object label. It has a photograph associated with the object. It has a heading, a label, and then it has a photograph credit as well. Sometimes we have no photos, so there's no photo. And interestingly, where there's a photograph and no credit, we decided that to make it easier, because we had a lot of photographs, we digitised enormous numbers of photographs. We didn't put a credit where it was our photograph for two reasons, number one of which made it easier, number two of which we hadn't named ourselves yet, so it was much easier to go back and leave the name out, which we did. Okay, now also, while we did a lot of digital things, we also said we don't want to do only digital things. Let's keep it off the time. We wanted to have other things as well, so what we've got is we've got a reproduction newspaper of the period from the 1840s, 1850s. We do a daily guided tour if you want face-to-face interaction. You can have that. We have a lot of textile hands-on interactivity, which I haven't got time to talk about today, and dress ups are tremendously successful. If you put dress ups in a museum, it is obviously sanctioned, and the thing to do, and all sorts of people dress up that you would never think of would dress up, but they do. Okay, people post. This is another concept that we developed whereby we wanted to tell stories. It started off with all of our ethnic and other communities, and we said, how do we tell those stories? And we talked about objects and cases and all sorts of things. And in the end, we decided we would go with putting their voices into the gallery, and you can see here, this is a concept drawing of how it would be. It's a real life purse, a real life. It's a video, but it's life-size, and it's at the right height, and they talk to you. And I'll just show you two of them here, give you an example. They're very short. When you click on the people post, you get eight options on each post, and there are nine people posts. That's a lot of video. But you can then choose them, and they all set up YouTube style. You can go back. You can see how far through you are. Kura koutou. Sometimes the places and origins of areas around Otago get lost. My family has a strong connection with a place called Waitati and Blue Skin Bay. My ancestor, Kahuji, was heavily tattooed with the traditional blue colour, and he earned the name Blue Skin, which was given to him by sailors and whalers. Waitati is actually called Waitati, which means restricted waters. And if you travel there, you'll see the mouth of the estuary and the river. And I'll just talk briefly about the holding screen, what we did with the holding screen. We thought it was a really neat, cool idea. We got some people who were in the videos to just sit there and look around at the gallery as if they were looking at people. And what we found was, and again, we'd no instruction at all on the front. And what we found was people were walking past and not touching them and not interacting with them. So, hmm, okay. That's not working. So, and again, some of them were, I wouldn't say intimidating, but people didn't feel comfortable going up and poking them in the tummy to see what they did. So, what we had to do on the home screen, which looked much like one of these screens, was actually put a little hand symbol and a little bit of movement around it so that people would go up and touch it because they weren't interacting with them to that extent, or they had to have it explained. So that solved that problem. Chinese gold miner. Wong Gong came from Bamboo Village in China. He was a well-known gold miner and interpreter in the Schifters area, sent to Otago. One day, when he was working on his mine, was his mate Jimmy. Wong Gong was buried in a rock fort. Jimmy ran off and got the dredge master, Tom Hoskins, to help to dig him free. After he was dug out, they rubbed him down with Chinese liniments. Months later, the locals thought Wong Gong had gone mad when he was very busy building a rock wall garden. After that, Wong Gong presents it to the Hoskins family with a sack full of vegetables and he continued to gift the family with vegetables for many years to come. The truth was that Wong Gong had discovered that gardening was a much safer occupation than mining. And again, what we've got there is we've got people telling their own stories and their own words in the 20th Century Gallery, but people in other galleries telling the stories of their ancestors. It's a very personal experience. It works really, really well. Now, the other concept we've got is information stations. Again, this is what they look like on the ground in the gallery. There's nothing on them that sees information stations. There's no instructions, no nothing. But again, they work really, really well. One of the problem I have is if I want to show them to people, I've got a queue or wait for someone to finish looking at them. And in fact, I've also had to buy extra seating. The designer only organised for one seat under the small screen, the big screen you're supposed to stand at. But in fact, people were dragging the seat round to sit at the other screens. We put more seating there because people are spending more time at the screens. And I'll do a quick run-through of what they are. This is the big screen, which is place based on a map divided into three colour categories. So you can actually, it's a way of dividing up what's on the map. We've got change over time, which is new developments for the period made and needed in local businesses and companies, overground and underground. And as you can see, you can either touch it on the map and zoom into it and look at it. It gives you information and a photograph. And again, you just pinch and zoom. Very intuitive. Different colours, again, at the bottom are different types of things. And again, this one you can see has two screens and two images. And again, this one here, the information station is no word limit. Curated to be very happy about that one. So this is where you can put a lot of information because people have got to that layer. It's the last layer. Almost you have got time to sit down. So there's a lot more information in there and go to town. You've got two or three images. You stick them all in there. This is the place for them. There's an awful lot of information in them. And they all have the same format. We've got three of them and each one is in a different chronological period. But again, we haven't labelled them. You've got to work that one out. We've got another three in development. So eventually we'll have six information stations on the floor. And again, it was rather tricky trying to decide how to cover the whole area. But we said we have to cover the whole area because we needed to go right from Port Charmers Waikawiti right out to Outram, Mosgill for those that know Dunedin. It's one of the greatest land areas of a city council area. So we had to cover that area. It was very big. But again, people are used to zooming in out of the map, Google Maps is taught people how to do that, have a navigate round. So again, very intuitive way of navigating around. That's probably enough of that one. Then we go to the next one, which is People and Event. There's the small screen based on timeline. So you can just scoot along the timeline up and down in chronological order until you get to the one that interests you. And again, lots of words and photographs. These ones you can't zoom into the photographs like you can on the big screen. But they're still a decent size. And again, sources the whole thing. So it's quite a lot of information in there. But not only that, it's nicely presented. You know, it's not a linear fashion. It's not like a label on a screen. It's built as a computer interactive. Okay, and the other one I'll show you is about Monday. We have a series of 39 photographs. They are absolutely stunning photographs. They are really, really high quality and very big. They are a snapshot of Dunedin in 1864, about three city blocks. So it's a very, very small, concise area. As you can see from here, you can zoom into them and then you can move around. You can read the labels on the products in the shop windows. They are very, very detailed. There's an awful lot of information in each photograph and you can zoom around inside them quite a lot. Again, we've got on the side, we've got a map of each image. You can see precisely which angle it's taken from and where it is in the street. And we've also got information about Monday, the photographer as well. This one here just shows you the level of detail. You know this Dowling Street, that rock is now gone. And people do spend, this is a stand-up interactive, but people do spend quite a lot of time looking at it and going through the different photographs. People that know the area, people that don't, a whole variety of people that look at it. Okay, the other interactive we've got is one for the Smith Gallery. It's our portrait gallery. This is where the museum started. It's very, very historical. Very, very loved, a real iconic piece in the gallery. This is it from 1948. This is at a concept stage and this is it in reality. And you can see in the middle there we've got computer stations. Again, this is another one we had to modify a bit. Each computer station will show you each of the four walls in the gallery, but we found visitors were very politely curing up to go to the different station in front of the wall they wanted to go to. So we thought about that and re-jigged the interface at the front to make it more obvious what you were doing and what you were looking at. So that seems to go quite well. I'll show you this here. So you're looking at the wall in front of you. Again, what's really good about it is if the images are quite high up on the wall, you can look at them more closely. And again, some of them you've got multiple people, which means you can, and they're quite small, you can zoom in on and look at them more closely as well. So you need to click on the i for each photograph. You then get the information about that image, which can be quite long depending on what we've got. We've got 470-odd photographs on the wall, 80 of those have got a full biography of sort of like three, 400 words. This is information about the gallery itself. We also have a searchable index. It's not completely searchable in terms of typing something in, but it's arranged alphabetically. So you just have to scroll through until you can find the name that you're looking for, and then it will take you straight to that picture, and then it'll also tell you, when you click on the i, it'll tell you where it is on the wall. And again, we find people using this that don't even know the people, but they are really interested in knowing more about the pictures and the people that they're looking at on the screen. Okay, and now this is a fail. I'll tell you that right now. I've had, it's working and it's not quite working. This is QR codes. What we did is we decided, we had a lot of information about our hero objects. If you try to scan that, it won't work, sadly. The idea was you could scan it with your smartphone now and you could listen to the curator and see what I mean while I'm talking. But what I found out when I scanned it quickly at the end of last week, to make sure I could put it in the presentation and go, oh, it's not working. So I fired off a quick email, and the email string has got longer and longer and longer. And basically what it turned out is that when, in the process of changing our name, we of course changed the website. All of our QR codes point to our old website. So they have migrated everything over to the new website, that's fantastic. But the QR codes don't point to the right place. So we've had this big long discussion now of IT people and they're saying, oh, don't worry about it, develop new content. No, we don't want to develop new content. We want this content because there's 40 odd videos that have been produced with images and curatorial narration. We want people to access them. Oh, okay. Well, put new QR codes and fire them while over the place. There's 42 of them. They're all over the show. That's an expensive thing. We don't want to put a tacky sticker over it. Can you not just get the old website live again, pay the very small amount of money and then just redirect everybody. So we're still discussing that and trying to get them to see what the problem is. But I now have a word for it. It's called linkrot. I learnt that yesterday. I know about that one. But the scary thing about that is that I know they were working or even a month or so ago because I was testing one, but I don't know when they broke and nobody's told me that they're broken. So I'm not sure how well they're being used. There we go. If no one's told me, I know. So there we go. So how are we going? We're getting really, really good feedback. There's some things here that we've been doing. We have been gaining a lot of awards for various things for the whole project. But I think again, everything that we've done fits in really well to the whole project. We're getting many repeat visitors because there's so much content and there's so much to see. And what's really interesting when we're finding is people going, oh, we love the way you've added the labels onto that thing and we're going, oh, that's nice, yeah. And we don't tell them, but it's been there since opening. Oh, we love that new thing. You've got that new thing. We go, ha, yeah, been there since opening. So, you know, there's such a lot of content and there's so many layers of it that people are coming back and again and again and finding something new to visit, which is really, really good. And our visitor numbers, we haven't yet been open a full year, but we've just over 310,000, which is really, really good. And like I say, good repeat visitation. A lot of overseas visitors, a lot of cruise ship visitors as we're in the midst of cruise ship season just now. But I'll show you some of the feedback, including some from our visitors. We love TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is so good. And some of it, again, doesn't matter what sort of talk I'm doing, I go back to TripAdvisor and I can find somebody commenting on just exactly what I want to talk about. And again, what we're finding is that people are using what we thought of as an interpretive device as an interactive. Yes, they are interactive, but that's not primarily why we design them that way. They are an interpretation device, but they are really, really excited by the interactivity that we've built into everything and how much it engages the younger kids. That's what we're finding is that people are really liking it. That's awesome. Yeah, it was a lot cooler than when we were kids. I used to hate coming here on the Prime Minister, so it was pretty boring, apart from the juice apps, but no, it's a lot cooler now. It's a lot more exciting, more interactive. Yeah, more things to touch and get involved with, which is a lot cooler than just looking at things behind glass. The tide of us was really cool. Yeah. She really enjoyed the little makeshift shack house thing that you can go in and play in and see it was her house. It was great fun. And the dress ups and the boat was really fun as well. Yeah, it's cool. Obviously, for her age, they get a bit bored really easily, but we've been here for an hour, and she's only just getting fed up now, and we've been and had quite a lot through everything, so that's fine, and she's had a great time, so it's been good. I'll skip the next one back here. There we go. We two from here. There's lots of other things we're looking at and exploring. Like I said, we've got three information stations. We're looking at getting another three on the floor. We're collaborating with the Jewish Online Museum live today. I asked them very nicely if I could use a screenshot because it wasn't up and running yet, but it's live from today, which is fantastic. We're also looking at the montage there. We're looking at Cats and Dogs exhibition. At some point, we want to get everybody, the public, to load up their pictures of their cats and dogs via Flickr, and then we want to use it as a montage in the gallery and build it up as the exhibition goes along, so it grows as the exhibition goes along. We're redesigning our website because it's about three years old now, and we're also opening a new exhibition very shortly of a new exhibit called Ghosts of Wall Street, and I'd like to play you a video. It's Rebit Long, but I'll play you that because it's based on sound, solid research. It's based on digitising our photographs. It's based on real characters and real... It's fictional. They've made up a story, but we provided real hard data to make that from, and the exhibit is based on archaeology. So we said, right, okay, how do we bring archaeology to life? We've got all these things in this case. This story is based on a conch shell. It's a fairly unusual object to find in an inner-city archaeological site. We have evidence of a well-known, very early Chinese woman settler, and we gave all this information to a company and they came up with this, which is, I think, for us, it's a way forward. It's really, really good. It's about interactivity as well. It's about emotion. It's about lots of different things, and we're really looking forward to getting this one open very shortly. When I saw her for the first time, she was staring in a window at the conch shell I had to put there. Every time she passed by, I see her looking. I called her to come, but she's scared. Think I'm angry like others. They tell her, go. Shout at her to get out. Go home. So I learned words. Harry, my, and call her again. She comes into my store. Her name is Tahu Nui O'Raki. She knows English from missionary. Her tribe, Ma Mui, is very small. Our people have no woman here. So I dress like English lady, even though they will not speak to me. But Tahu comes again. And again, each time we're talking, she teach me her words. And I show her English letters. We give gifts and tell stories, speak of family, our ancestors, and their spirits. At home, we different. But here, in this city, we the same. This shell is stranger also from long away. Tahu calls it Tauka, a treasure. Yet no one buys. My husband say it unlucky. But I say shell has not finished his journey. So I give it to her to remind that. We do not know where travels will lead us or who shall be here when we arrive. And it goes back to a still picture and that's how it sits in the gallery. The still picture then comes to life in a sequence. There's some details if anyone's interested and I think we're on to question time now.