 So how many of you took part in SplitSecond online? Just a few. OK. Well, so the good thing is, there are kiosks over here, so you can actually still do it in a dower. It's not available online, but it is here, if you want to get a sense of what happens online. But we're going to walk through it a little bit. So one of the things I want to talk about is the museum itself. And how we think about engagement and mission around here. A big part of our mission is centered on visitor experience and this idea of community. And so I work on the web, and one of the things that I'm charged with is figuring out how to be inclusive of an audience on the web. And also, when you're coming into the galleries to be inclusive there, too, use technology in new ways so that our visitors are more engaged. And with this mission, we've got a large audience coming in. We're thinking about things like engagement and some things that you may have seen. Have you guys seen the little electronic comment books that we have in the galleries? If you go to our shows, usually you'll find a comment book in the gallery. And that kind of comic book, it's the simplest kind of technology that could possibly put in a museum. All it does is ask you what you thought. And the great thing about that is, because it's electronic, our curators get email, all of those comments so they can see what you're responding to. And those comments go on our website so that other visitors can see how people are reacting in our galleries. If you remember the graffiti show back in 2006, this is one of the earliest things we ever did. You have this interactive in the middle of the gallery. There's nothing technically interesting about this, except that we were asking visitors to tag this wall. And then we were posting these photographs on Flickr. And it was creating this dialogue that was happening both in the gallery and online. We were seeing people come in from online to tag the wall to get their picture out on Flickr. And then having discussions around that material, both online and in the gallery. And then the Blacklist project was another interesting use of technology here. During this show, what we wanted to do is sort of open up this idea of how race impacted your life by allowing visitors to respond in the gallery using video kiosks that recorded the visitor reaction, but that write up to YouTube. So instead of just being about the material on the show, it was also very much about our community and our community's response to this very important question that the show is addressing. And this is the kind of response we were getting. We were seeing lots and lots of people record videos that were very personal. People were crying in the gallery, trying to tell their story. Very interesting to sort of see our audience open up in the same. And in our Vishnu show, this will be one of, I'm sure, a couple of plugs to go see Vishnu, which is now upstairs. When you come out of the elevators, you can use iPad kiosks to take a quiz. And the quiz tells you which of Vishnu's app cards you should be accompanied by throughout the exhibition. And then in the exhibition, you can use kiosks. You get a little tap, and you can use these kiosks to sort of explore some of the works on view and tell us which handings you like. So the question for me is sort of like, how do you go even deeper than this? A lot of museums do interactings in galleries, and one of the things that we wanna do is sort of bridge this online and in-gallery idea. And one of the ways that we did that was this project called CLIC, the Crowd Curated Exhibition, which was in 2008. Are any of you familiar with CLIC, or to part and click? It was a long time ago. Okay, oh, one, okay. Two. Yay. So CLIC was based on a book by James Sirwethy, called The Wisdom of Crowds. And in Sirwethy's book, what he says is that crowds, regardless of what we think of them, crowds are actually very, very wise. They can sometimes be as wise as the wisest person in the room when you aggregate all that data. So what we did is we put on a show where we asked, we did an open call for photography, and we asked the photographers to depict the changing faces of Brooklyn. And we set up a voting tool that very much reflected the sort of thesis in Sirwethy's book and sort of how we would get to that answer. So Sirwethy has rules, and we reflected those rules in the voting tool. And in the end, we put up a show, which was just over here, actually, on the second floor. And the great thing about that show was it sort of bridged this gap between sort of what happens online and what people are willing to do online, and sort of bringing people inside the gallery and letting them be a part of what happens in the building. So one of the things that we're really trying to do here is not do projects in silence. If it happens online, it happens in the building. If it happens in the building, it happens online. This project came about because I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blank. And I was reading that book as Cliff was up in the gallery. And I was thinking about sort of the visitor experience, because it's a big part of what we do here. And I wonder sort of what happens when you come here to visit, you know, the book is all about split second decisions and are those decisions how they affect what you see and how you feel? And I think when you step into our galleries, this is sort of what happens. You're faced with a lot of choices that you have to make very quickly. There's gallery design, the objects are positioned in a certain way, there's lighting, there's didactics, there's labels, but there's frames. The images have frames. So when you walk in, regardless of whether you realize it or not, you're probably making a lot of decisions on the fly about what you're gonna spend time on in the gallery. It's pretty competitive, it's a big place. You walk in, you've got a lot of things competing for your attention. So I started to think about our labels, and I started to wonder, you know, if you give people more information about an object, does that change the way they think about it? Because, you know, in Gladwell's book, and he doesn't really come out and say one way or another that's split second thinking it's good or bad, I sort of wondered how our interpret materials on the walls change a person's visit. And the result of this is split second and innings. So I went to Jen, who I had worked with quite a bit on the blog, she's like one of our best bloggers, and I took this idea, and I said, Jen, I've got this idea around this book Blink, and we need material for it. And I'd really like to work with you and do you have any ideas? And she said, well, I'll actually kind of do. And she's gonna talk about that in a second. So that, we started to design a tool, knowing that we were gonna use our new paintings. And the tool, basically online, this is an online activity. The tool did just a few things. It asked you, when you were born, that's when you were born and your experience level around art. And then it put you in a time trial where you saw two works side by side and you had four seconds to pick between them. And interestingly enough, almost everyone who wrote to me about this talked to me about how stressful this decision was. Like, regardless of the fact that they're making this decision when they go into a gallery, putting it online seemed very forced. And they reacted, everybody was just very stressed out about this idea of having to pick something so quickly. And we pushed you through it. Like, if you didn't make the four second time out, it would say, you gotta hurry up, you gotta hurry up. Don't think so much, just pick something you like. And then in the second part, we were asking you to engage with it. So we would give you works in the second part of this tool where you were split into six separate groups and each group was assigned a question at random. So some people got, how many figures are in this painting? Some people got, what are the dominant colors? Some people were asked to describe the scene in the Senate. Some people were asked to describe the scene in a few words. And what we were looking at here, and once you've answered the question, you were asked to rate the painting. And what we were looking at here is to see if your engagement in this way changed your ratings at all from that quick split second trial that had happened earlier. And in the last section, what we were looking at is testing our interpret materials. So some people, we were split people into three groups. Some people got just the painting with the caption information, which just gives the artist the title of the dates, the very minimal information. Some people got that and in addition got descriptive words, tags that was in. And then some people got labels, full on labels that you see in a lot of galleries. To see if, and what we were looking at here is to see if any of this information changed the way you thought about the works that you were seeing. So the response on mine was kind of interesting. A lot of people really had a great time doing this. We got the word out mostly on Twitter and Facebook. And this is the kind of things that we were seeing. They sort of saw this and kind of went, oh wow, this is like hot or not, or oh, this is so much fun. And they were helping us spread the word. And we were also seeing that people were learning things. We were seeing tweets out there about how they didn't know Yo-Yo's existed in 19th century India. The little things and paintings that people were putting out and sort of going, wow, this is very cool. And we were seeing a little bit of criticism. That first one is kind of hilarious. This is really how we created shows by picking works in rapid fire. And the second one is a little concerning because I think we care a lot about how we present art here and we think about community. So it's a little concerning, but not too bad. That was the only one I saw that was like that. In the end, we had 4,617 participants and they were creating a heck of a lot of ratings. They were a very dedicated audience to this idea. And the interesting thing is, they were spending seven minutes and 32 seconds online with us. It's a huge figure of us. Most website averages are about two minutes, three minutes. And they were spending a large portion of time. And the next thing that I'm about to show is the thing that floored me in my office when I saw it and I called Bo over. Bo, you have to look at this, you have to look at this. Whenever we do a project like this, we're always worried that because it's digital, that we're not reaching a local audience. Digital's great, it means it's everywhere, but we care about our local audience here in Brooklyn and we want to engage with that audience. And when I looked at our Google Analytics, what it was saying was that the majority of the people who were doing this were in the United States and the majority within that were in the New York City area. And we did nothing other than get the word out on Twitter. We didn't put it, during click years ago, we went and put cards in the local cafes so that everybody would know that this was going on. But this, we just did online and we wanted to see what happened. What we saw happen was that this local audience really found it and took it really seriously and to demonstrate that, if you remember that, average was about seven minutes. If you were in New York City or Brooklyn, you were spending 15 minutes online with us, which is pretty amazing. It indicates that people really spent a lot of time and took this impact really seriously. And on a show like this, I think one of the key issues is this idea that we're doing this around the permanent collection. And the permanent collection has tons of logistics that we have to think about. In this case, when Joan said she wanted to use Indian paintings, we took this list of conservation and asked them, which paintings do you think we can include, which ones have been out on loan that possibly present problems because they had too much light exposure? So they sort of had to vet the list and then there was a long period of time between the close of voting and the actual opening of the show because the works had to be framed and mounted and actually worked on by our conservation teams. That's something that was uniquely different and kind of difficult about doing a digital project like this that happens so quickly that the rest of the building sort of has to work with this idea that is not very common in a museum. Most shows are planned three years out and this was planned in about six months even though we didn't think we got it for a very long time. So Joan is gonna talk for a little bit. I am really not the brains behind this show. I'm sort of like the grocer that provided food to the chef but I, and I didn't even grow it, that's why I'm the grocer, but I was pleased to you know anything I can do to get people to look at more Indian art is cool with me. So I was happy that Shelley thought of me as the curator who might be up for this. We have a good collection of Indian paintings here. I forgot to look up the number but it's something like 400 Indian paintings and they range in date from about 14, 20 or so to well no that's not true, we have a few that are earlier than that, to pretty recently, I don't know maybe 18 to 50 or even later and as Shelley mentioned, we had to pull some of them out of the project because they weren't really candidates for being exhibited so we pulled out anything that was already in the Vishnu show upstairs. We pulled out anything that had been shown too recently because they are somewhat light sensitive but Indian paintings turned out to be a really good group of things to use as the kind of fodder for this show in part because we wanted to use something that was not going to be incredibly familiar to our users. We didn't want them to run across a painting that they recognized as being by Monet and say, oh Monet, Monet's famous click. We didn't want anybody to recognize something as being more celebrated than something else and we knew that our audience for the most part would not instantly know expensive Indian painting from not so expensive Indian painting. The Indian paintings also from a pure nuts and bolts point of view were a very good group of objects to use for this because all of them had recently been photographed in color. There are big streptes of the collection that the curators have photographed them in storage but the photographs are really pathetic and these had actually been professionally photographed digitally in publication quality and so we were able to use that, the whole systematic way all of them had been photographed so we were able to draw in that photography and I also thought it was a good group of objects for this kind of thing because they're flat and that means that the photography is much more straightforward. When you photograph a sculpture or a picture or something there always has to be a colored backdrop and often it's up to the photographer to decide what colored backdrop you ought to use and how dramatic the light ought to be, what the difference between the shadows and the light and so taking photographs of three dimensional objects is a very kind of artistic process and if you had 100 pictures they might have been photographed by different people or on different days and the quality of the photography might help people decide or sway them in one direction or another whereas we knew the same photographer had photographed all of our paintings all at the same time and they're flat so there isn't that whole issue of well there's a little bit of an issue with raking light but not that much. So between the sort of lack of familiarity we knew that people would mostly be on common ground with this material and the flatness and the convenience we thought they made a pretty good candidate. Another thing is that they're a relatively good thing to look at on screen because they're kind of small in the first place so there is that little bit of one to one, they were quite a bit smaller on the screen than they are and especially I think one of the things we learned is that people often have no idea of the scale of things when they're looking even if you are given the dimensions people often don't bother to read them I know I don't and I'm in this business. So I think it came as a surprise it's like Tisheli when we pulled this out she's like wow that's really big. But meanwhile other things are kind of small. One of the problems with the Indian paintings as a subject is that they often have these borders that are an integral part of the painting but for something like this or that one over there the borders are quite large and so when all the paintings are reproduced the same size the ones with the big borders the images are actually kind of tiny and hard to see. So things with big borders often didn't rate very well because people just couldn't quite see them well enough. But in any case I thought it's been a really fun and interesting experiment we totally could have done it with any number of other parts of the collection we could have done Japanese prints we could have done African textiles we could have done European woodcuts and we might in the future. But for the time being I was perfectly happy also no small coincidence that we have in Indian one of our major exhibition upstairs is an Indian show and I thought a lot of my colleagues will be in town to see my show why not give them just a few more Indian paintings to look at too. So I did also email all my colleagues we have a listserv for people who do Indian art and many of them participated in the experiment and Shelly got on the phone with me she's like we only have 54 people who describe themselves as experts and I said well actually that's pretty good that's about as many of us as there are in the US. Anyway they all had a grand time they had a really good time. So I'm gonna let Bo talk about the results and then we can kind of talk about my feelings about the results after but we'll let Bo take it away with the results and he's gonna walk around so we're gonna get out of the way. Yeah I thought about having slides but Shelly pointed out that everything that we wanted to talk about was right here on the wall. So Shelly mentioned that the experiment came in three phases and I'll just recap them because that's important for what I'm about to discuss. The first phase was the split second time trial where two paintings were displayed on screen at once and participants had four seconds to pick which one they liked best. Then during the second section there was an engagement task so participants would look at a single painting they were asked to answer a question about the painting and then they would rate it. Then finally in the third section we were testing different levels of information so participants would see a single painting it would have either a caption, some tags or a full label and they would rate that painting. In addition to that we had another group which was the control group and they just saw a painting and they didn't do anything they just rated it. So this is sort of a neutral task that we could use to compare the results of the other tasks to it. So here we have the five sort of biggest findings or the five findings that work best on a wall and I'm just gonna go through each of them. So here's the high low finding which is that certain paintings do better than others really consistently. That when we ask people whether or not they like something we're measuring something that's real and it's something that's consistent. So this painting did really well consistently. This painting did consistently poorly and this painting did really well and this painting also didn't do so well. Sort of unsurprising in a certain way but important to see I think. Then and this is the finding that really sort of engages with Malcolm Gladwell's book the most directly is that people respond very differently when time is limited than when it's unlimited. So there's a lot of volatility in the rankings that we got from these two tasks. However, and I'm gonna expand a little bit beyond what it says on the wall here. However, there was a direct relationship between people's decisions about things in a split second and their decisions when they had unlimited time. So the split second decisions were very predictive of the unlimited time decisions. However, the rankings were still very different. We're gonna go into more detail about that on the blog. We found that there are certain features of paintings that cause them to do well in a split second versus unlimited time. Then, so this finding, the finding about context pertains to the third task where we added text and I had people read the text before they rated the painting. We found that the more text we added, the higher people's ratings were in absolute terms. That adding a lot of text really made people rate the painting higher. And we found that this boost that we get in ratings was biggest for the paintings that didn't do very well without the context. So the paintings that did the best with context also did very sort of poorly without the context. And so that means that context is very, very important for the presentation of artwork. So this is, this next finding, finding four is one of the more interesting ones to me is the question of complexity in a painting. So we had computers measure the complexity of every painting we used and we tried to see how that measurement of complexity was related to people's judgments about the paintings and how it changed in one context versus another. So I'm gonna, I just posted about this on the blog today. I'm gonna go into this a little bit. So in the first task, complex paintings did better than simple paintings. There was a sort of moderate correlation between complexity and rank. But for the control group, so if you only had four seconds, you liked complex paintings a little bit. But if you were in the control group and you had unlimited time, then you liked complex paintings a lot. And we found that very interesting. That sort of, it shows what's left out of a split second or what's left out of sort of a thinly sliced decision. And another interesting thing we found about that is that as we added information, as we added context, this boost that you get from complexity disappears. So there's something about the context that sort of overrides this effect. And finally, we have this question of engagement. So when, this is pretty relevant for museums because we're sort of trying to get people to engage with the work. We have, you know, in Vishnu, there are iPads and people complete activities. They look at the painting and try to identify some of the figures in it. And we wanna know how this affects people's relationship to the work exactly, right? And so this is, we found something that's unlike context. So the more context you have, the higher you rate a painting. But for engagement, that wasn't the case. Engagement didn't cause people to rate paintings higher, but it did cause people to agree with each other more. The variance of the ratings decreased for the engagement tasks. So when you ask people to rate something after engaging with it, they sort of tend to hone in on what they really think the painting was about. So I'm over the next, you know, as long as the exhibition is running, I'm gonna be blogging about this. We have a lot of findings that didn't make it to the wall because there didn't fit in a sound bite or just didn't quite feel right for being in a room. And one of them, I'll just sort of give a preview of that. This is my sort of favorite finding. So there's this question of, you know, when we rate something, when we make a judgment, is that judgment really our own? You know, what are we measuring exactly? Are we measuring some kind of some kind of personal decision or are we measuring something that's more like a reaction, that's more sort of mechanical and immediate? Or is it somewhere in between, right? And we found that depending on how people's attention was focused, they would rate paintings differently. So some of these paintings have, you know, big frames around them. And some frames are more complicated than other frames. And what we found was that the more context we added to a painting, that is the more stuff you had to read instead of looking at the painting, the more the complexity of the frame would affect your rating. So that's a little tricky to understand. And what it means is that the less you paid attention to the frame, the more it affected you. That there were things that sort of snuck in through our unconscious mind and affected our decisions. And we have some pretty solid quantitative proof of that. And it's very interesting, I think. So I think that's about it. Come read the blog also. Where's the blog? Oh. So the blog, this is the split second website, and there's a story to have at the top. And we're gonna be, the blogs all show up there. And then you can also access them from the front of the museum blog as well. We should sit down and talk a little bit. Yeah. Do you want to talk about data? Or haven't analyzed the data, the way that these guys have. But there was probably my single favorite chunk of data that I, well, obviously I like to know that people liked paintings better after they had read my labels. But you know, and that's, I always knew that. I'm not being particular, but with my field, people are unfamiliar and they feel like they're on shaky ground. And having a little information along with the art is really helpful. I've always known that. You have to give people something to, you know, background information so that they know how to read the painting because people feel unsure of themselves when they're looking at Indian art often. So, I mean, the fact that having extra information what we're calling context made people like the art better. That didn't come as any great surprise to me. What did come as a surprise to me is that people were consistently rating the complex paintings high when they only had a second to look at it. Well, you know, a couple of seconds. And I kind of assumed that people would go for the big, bold, simple paintings. You know, all of us, I think in commercial advertising, I mean, commercial art, like you wanna go for big and bold and eye-catching or at least that's what they tell you. You want big and flashy. And yeah, these very complex paintings rated high even when people didn't have time to fully read them. And I have to wonder what that means. And what I'm kind of coming to as I think about it is that people just have very different criteria for fine art than they do for perhaps commercial art or, I don't know, graphic design that people expect maybe or hope that an artist will have expended lots of time and effort on a work of art. And the more the art gives you in terms of detailing, perhaps, that makes people feel like it's a better or more worthwhile work of art. And this is based on nothing. This is just based on me thinking about it in the shower. But I was surprised because there were a number of very bold, very appealing, simple paintings that frankly didn't rate all that well that I thought were gonna do really well. There's one of a horse against a yellow background. I was like, everyone's gonna love that and it's so boring. But they didn't. I was sort of pleasantly surprised to see that people didn't over and over again rate the horses their favorite thing. In fact, it didn't rank. So, I mean, yes, that's the chunk of data that I find the most interesting of the timing aspect of it. And also I would point out that the lower painting, the high-low section, the second grouping, the lower one, is actually considered by scholars a very important painting. But it's because of its sort of role in history rather than its aesthetic appeal. And I agree, it's a very kind of folky-looking painting. So I'm not totally surprised that it didn't rank high. But it's interesting that on the sort of base gut level that didn't communicate anything to people. Yeah. Can you comment a little bit about the historical context of these paintings? Sure. Why are they significant? Why did you select them? Is there a period where there's a warring state going on between Rockets Down and Quebec or, you know, there could be... Yeah, sure. I can tell you about these were all made, with the exception of this one, they're all on paper and they were all made to be pages in manuscripts that were either bound or collected into piles and then kind of treated as series of paintings. Some of them were just sort of albums, like we would have photo albums and they're unrelated paintings. But most of them were made to be viewed in sequence like the pages of a kind of coffee table book. And they were private possessions, almost always of Maharajas or Nizams or emperors. And they were kept in libraries and they were brought out at entertainment functions as an evening's entertainment. There might be musicians playing in the background, you bring out the paintings, you've got a couple of close friends, you pass the paintings around, you look at them carefully, holding them in your hands. And so you want, because it's your evening's entertainment, often you want there to be all kinds of fun little details that you don't notice until you've been looking at the painting for a while. So in a lot of ways, these paintings are the opposite of split second entertainment. They are supposed to give you a long viewing experience. And they're supposed to be an intimate viewing experience. They don't hang on walls originally. This is all wrong, but. Nor were they mad or framed. But so, and they were mostly made in Northern India. There are several exceptions to that rule that remain in Southern India here. They were made for various kings and princes and emperors, some of whom got along and some of whom didn't. And they were generally made by artists who worked anonymously and often in groups, in workshops. So they're very few of these where we name an artist. And that's usually just because he happens to have signed the painting, which is quite unusual. And we're perfectly content not to know the names of these artists that we're just never going to. So that gives you a little background on what these are. And as I said, most of the paintings in this group were made between about 16. Well, no, the earliest one is probably this one. This one's about 15, 70 or so. And the latest one is probably about 18, 20 or so. The more common images did not do as well in the old context, because it seems a little bit inconsistent. Generally, you said that paintings did better around the time when there was context except for the complex. No, I think they did even better. Well, to clarify, when context was added the effect of complexity was muted, if that makes sense. So it's not that complex paintings did poorly when there was context, but that complexity was no longer predictive of their rating. She had your question over there. Dealers in particular to sort of tell the story as if they're one about the sort of predictability and also findings and all of these in terms of the way the Indian painting does cover some of the jobs and it seems as if sort of landscapes probably were individuals seemed to in general do well. I was going to keep a comment on that. These are the, let's say, the Western tradition and also how something that's so markedly different in particular looking at one behind you, the work of the Islamic script, as well as something that looks like it's from the cultural tradition, again, sort of like more of an Islamic quote as opposed to either a Hindu or more Indian or Western one, like all this there and there were answers. We haven't analyzed it from that point of view yet. I can tell you, I think portraits generally did quite poorly. I don't know why, maybe people thought they were born. Most of those had big frames. Some of them, but yeah, this guy didn't do all that well and that's a beautiful portrait. Yeah. We measured some things that we suspect track with the genre, right? So frame complexity, certain kinds of frames are more complicated than others. So that sort of confounds that finding, right? And we're not entirely sure how to sort that out yet. I guess check the blog. But no, to confirm what you just said, we didn't do any sort of semantic expert sort of classification of the paintings and then look at the ratings with respect to those classifications. Most of our analyses were strictly formal. And we did try out the ones that for which we, we didn't, I mean we should be kind of transparent about this, not all of the paintings had full write-ups so that when people were given the context write-up there were only 40 of the paintings that showed up in that section. So it's hard for us to do a full analysis because we didn't give write-ups for all 200 plus paintings that were in the split-secondly part of the exercise. And I don't know that we had enough Google paintings in the mix for the sort of Persianate versus more Indian looking comparison to be made. But yeah, I mean I have to say there are a few paintings that I think are absolutely gorgeous that didn't rate all that well and I'm interested to go back and look at trying to figure out maybe why. Do you have to exclude the expert user from the set when you talk about they exclude or will they include it and will their answers different than somebody who rated themselves? I haven't seen how the expert answers are different. Have you? Yeah, the problem with this was we didn't have enough experts. So we had over 4,000 people, right? And so our confidence about our findings in terms of people in general is like very strong. But in terms of experts, we just didn't have enough to be sure about how their responses differed from the sort of whole population. We have some ideas. One of the people were asked to divide themselves into five groups, expert being the most expert but there was also the above average. What we're gonna do on the blog is combine the experts with above average and look at that as a group and see if they differ from people below average to see those differences with the caveat that it's not quite experts because of the data issues. That's why I called Joan and was like, we only have like 50. I'm sorry, that's all you got. I, from anecdotal evidence though, my expert friends said that they were sort of horrified at their own reactions. As one friend of mine who is an expert in painting said, well, apparently I really like orange because I can see things that are orange even though I knew they weren't the better painting. And they, I think they really rose to the occasion of the spirit of it and were just going with their guts rather than saying, oh yes, that's the famous 1671 men who spread their faith for so and so. So yeah, I, because it really was about liking. It wasn't about importance. It wasn't about, you know, cost or significance or anything like that. It was just about, yeah, purely subjective. And I think from all of the reaction that I've heard to people who took part in this online took it seriously enough to read those questions carefully and yet a lot of people, I wouldn't say stressed out. They got stressed out. They got very serious about what they were being at. And they would come to me and say, well, you said this, so that led me to do this kind of behavior. So I think it's sort of interesting that even the experts could sort of remove themselves and say, you know, what are they really asking and answer it. Yay. Awesome. Yes. I can't wait to talk about that. Yep. So the little pink graphs are there. These have been great. We asked if you're, we asked about gender, and we asked about age. And this was another thing that I was super fortified. We had more women than men to do this. Quite a big percentage, 66 and 33 percent. Interestingly, that is almost the exact number of women considered in the bracket. When I called downstairs, there was one person to get the stats. And I found this out. I was kind of floored in the middle of the week about that. And saying this is true also for age, we have an extraordinary amount of audience here between 20 and late 30s. And that is clearly reflected in the people who are doing this. We also have this kind of large group of people in her 70s doing it. And I heard that's true. It's my mom's brand. I had to add one thing to that, which is gonna go up on the blog later, just another teaser. We found that men and women did react differently to different sort of kinds of paintings in different contexts. In particular, women responded more positively to the addition of information than men did. So men and women both... We're asking for directions. Well, men and women both rated things more highly when they had more information, but women rated things even higher than men. Yes. Yes. And I'm sitting here. And I quickly figured out that I thought one of the paintings was more intriguing and the other one was probably interesting. And I'm wondering if you doubt it, yes. I'm saying, I'm really in a good mood thinking in my head. I think one is more intriguing, but the other one is more interesting. I'm wondering if people, what about that, and how people might sort of misinterpret it? Absolutely. A word, a question. It's incredibly subjective. It's incredibly subjective. And yes. We wanted to leave it vague, right? We wanted to leave it vague. We didn't want people to... So like is sort of like this very charged word already, right? And you maybe want to like things that are better looking, right? And so we wanted to pull back from that and we wanted to go somewhere where people would have to make sort of a gut decision, right? And so our findings overall were consistent, right? So whatever people decided, they decided it consistently. We spent hours at tables discussing stuff like this. Among many parties, editors, interpretive material staff are looking at this and it was pretty intense. I mean, we were just talking about even the wording that's on the walls, making it scientifically correct and yet understandable was a process here that was very difficult because of how many people it goes through inside the museum before it gets on the wall. And so I decided, okay. You know, these findings are all really interesting but what I like here is what is your takeaway? How does that influence what you do in terms of how you engage online and how you engage in the museum itself? Is it going to cause, you know, you look at a complex picture and say, that's great, maybe you can get a little less copy or you take away and say, you know what? I need to do more storytelling in general. I'd like to hear from both of you what your takeaway is. Granted, you don't have all the data. Well, for me it's a slightly tricky situation because we were asking people to rate things and whether they liked things. And I'm not really in the business of making people like things. I'm more of a teacher. So I'm interested in having people learn things and I don't know that I really care if you like the art at the end of the gallery tour. I'm just more interested in having you know something more about the world than you knew at the end. So it's interesting because I'm not in the business of selling paintings. I am in the business, I hope, of getting people to come to museums. So it's hard for me to know exactly how to use this data. There's interesting stuff in here and it's definitely food for thought. But that's one of the things I've been kind of grappling with is sure, I like people to like Indian painting more because it's my field and I want the director who want to do more Indian art exhibitions. But yeah, what is that sort of subjective reaction? How does that play in with what I do? So yeah, something I'm still grappling with and I don't know exactly how to answer, but I'll let Shelly. I think, you know, findings aside, the interesting thing for me when I did it because I was trying as a sort when we were designing it to not do it so that I could do it as a participant. And I think one of our biggest challenges at the museum and it's a challenge at any museum is getting people more immersed in our permanent collections. Everybody comes to see the shows that are gonna close in. And the question is how can we be using our permanent collections in ways to get people looking at them more? And the thing that struck me and a couple of people said this to me was that after doing this, they had a pretty good sense of our collection of Indian paintings. And they maybe didn't know exactly what because they hadn't read every single label or they were only asked to read 20 labels or 10 labels. But they had a really good sense of that imagery and what that was and could come into a museum and see one on a wall and go I know what that is now. I have a familiarity with it that I've known before. So that was sort of something that was really, I think important in the process is sort of exposing the collection in new ways, getting people engaged around the collection. We can put our collection online all we want, but unless we're gonna do something interesting around it that gets people really looking at it. And then I think also bringing it into the museum so that you're actually looking at it physically. One of the things that I know Beau and I talked about countless times is when we were looking at the data to try and figure out what was gonna go on the walls, we were so bummed that there were only gonna be 11 paintings after having seen 170 of them. We wanted to see more. And I think that's a really great thing if two people working on the project wanted to see more and kind of felt like this wasn't enough. There's a lot more upstairs. That's plug number four. Before we move on, I'd like to jump in a little bit. So for me, I'm sort of entirely on board with the idea that we're not trying to optimize people liking things, right? That's not the goal. Like streamlining the liking process is like not what we're here for. However, I think that there are some really interesting lessons that can come out of this about attention management and how time information and sort of form work to focus people on different things and different scenarios. Now I'd hesitate to say anything more concrete than that. I think we'd need to do like more research, but this sort of points in a direction. I'd say. If you have to learn something, you have to engage them so that they'll spend your seven minutes or five. So how do you sequence it to draw them in? How do you use context? Exactly, yeah. This is really great stuff. I think there are some incredible learnings in there. How do you use the perfect collections? How do you engage people creating things that people want to engage in? Because what you're using is offline and online. So if you think about it in terms of a stream, there may be lessons there that I enjoy this and I want to know that as a long time as a museum, I actually grew up around here and I've been coming for years. I've been my son, I've been his friends, but I love what you've done with the website and the way you look at blogs. It really does engage when you work with kids. It engages them in a different way. We're going to show them things on the computer and sort of plug them in. So when I saw this experiment, I just sent this email to people. I said, oh, let me try this out. And I remember getting started doing it and at first I was like, wow, this worked really fast. And then I was like, I can't even go away because I read the book. I was like, let's see, let's see what comes out. And I was like, this is taking a long time, but it was so interesting. You were winning in 15 minutes. Yeah. But it was like, okay, I want to see what comes out of this. I like the idea of how you use the media and getting involved and working with young kids. I was thinking about how you can get them more engaged. And I like what you said about the Kermit collection because the one thing that you hear as a visitor is come for a long time. So I have heard so much about this. What I do about art is there's things that are like myths that have been out that don't come out very much and they just didn't play as Indian collection. Brought out stuff that doesn't come out at all in this. It's like the website, you have everything on here. We can go and look and look around and stuff. But I just was interested in this as an experiment and that's why I came to that ability to hear sort of the information technology and the curators that are talking about. A little bit about the takeaways, but I didn't really expect this. This is probably pretty new. Has anybody else done anything like this, first of all? Has anyone done anything quite? I didn't think so. Not now. Just I like the open experimental nature of it. So I'm looking forward to just seeing where you're. Yeah, I personally am looking forward to sitting down at the data a little more and seeing what I can make of it. And you know, I have a rather large show upstairs that I've been working on, so I haven't really had time to think about it. But yeah. Yeah, and I'm not surprised that there's such a young audience because I find sort of this idea that this would never have worked if we had just done this online and didn't read it in the building. That you have to raise the stakes online to make it important for people to spend 15 minutes to do it. And I think it's this sort of the difference between just putting the question online and actually doing something with it that matters both online and in the building and then taking that research and putting it back out online to form that sort of complete circle. And that's the kind of thing that we're really interested in doing. We don't, you know, we did click in 2008, we did this in 2011, it's not like we do it every day. But we try very hard. I certainly am privileged to work in a place that when I walk into a curator's office or I walk into my director's office and say, I have this kind of crazy idea. They don't keep me out of their office. I should also say that I'm personally very happy to see the museum as a space in which basic empirical research can take place. And I think that's very valuable. Yeah, it would be perfect to name ourselves. What? I know, I have no idea. The engagement of the participant caused the participant to say, how do I, what do I think is artistic? Why did I like that? Why did, irregardless of the notion of what is meant of art, it's what do I pray for? What does it mean to think something is? So you know, this is the experience. So, more than a little, with a lot. Exactly. More than a little. People base it on time. 36% said they were average. It's okay, I see what we're doing. With 23%, that's pretty high. So you're above 59, 60, and then exactly. And then how much, what percent says expert? Expert, 1.9%. Okay, so you're over 50, way over 50%. Yeah, okay, yeah. Okay, so most of them brought enough artistic experience to care about what they were bringing and what this experience said to them about their artistic sense. Yes, artistic sense, maybe define, I should pull up that slide so you can see how we define that, how people were asked to, people were asked to put themselves in specific groups, and how we define that I think is pretty key. They were asked, I don't think so, they're not so much. I might visit these years every once in a while, but for the most part, I'm a fresh perspective. Some, I don't have formal training, but I do assess general knowledge of art or I visit museums. So it's more about museum representation in this case and less about artistic sensibility, that makes sense. More than a little, I think in courses in art and history, visit museums and galleries. Above that range is pretty extensive knowledge in art history, where experts are to define as a sense of knowledge of Indian art, which is why there's so many. So that's why I think we can keep those two groups in the area and show the expert. Really, not the Indian expert, but maybe the expert. One other point today is about the Saturday night at the NPR, there was an interview with a neuroscientist who completed the CLA on a new book on brain modes, which is what he called the NPHM. One of his experiments was to do split second versus long time reaction to something. And it wasn't to our statistic that it would, what to house, right? And people would be able to say, no. But on reflection, the answer was that it was water. Okay, if you flipped up four points, how much the percentage that you'll get heads over tails or something. And immediately, people would respond 50% and then on reflection, they'd say, wait a minute, that can't be right. And maybe after a year down, of course, the answer isn't 50%. But so it's interesting to apply. In those cases, you've got a right or wrong answer. Yes. You bring an association to answering this split second. Yes. Which is what gets me back to, each of us brings something on an artistic, something of a sense of what we like to, when you split second to something, and then on reflection, perhaps with more context, you may come to a different point. I'm just trying to point this out, because I think it's so cool. Just, this is a little long topic, but it's kind of related. We're not talking about the split second in this. In terms of engagement, remember what Bobo was saying, people got closer to getting to read a little bit more of each other when we're asked questions. If they were asked a question that was subjective, were they to give many of her kinds of answers, it just looked like they were further apart. But when they were asked how many figures were the people who were standing, which has a right or wrong degree, what kind of qualities did that have? It just, you can see it in the data, how the difference in those types of questions changes. I would spend that time standing here. Yeah. I should say before we move on, though, that our situation, oh no, no, no, no, that our situation is not quite like these seemingly intuitive questions with counterintuitive answers, because this is much more a gut thing in both cases, really. I mean, figuring out whether you like a painting, even if you have infinite time, is not like doing a math problem. There's a difference in kind there. And another thing that we found is that, for the most part, the split second ratings were predictive of the longer term ratings. That, you know, what's interesting is these sort of reliable exceptions, right? But for the most part, the split second judgements were pretty good. So. I was just trying to walk around, sit up, you know, it's untidy with this, that would make it great in gallery interactive. Yeah. But, yeah, it was so much fun, I never got. And I'm so engaged, and so is my friend, he's laughed the whole time. Is the author of A Link Inspiring, just aware of this study, and what is he waiting for? He has been great. He was extremely excited that he basically wrote and said that this is exactly what he sort of could hope could happen from his book, that this kind of thing would come up. He is in Europe, and when we released everything, he was like, I'm in Europe, I'm gonna come see when I come back, and we'll see what he says. I'm hopeful that maybe he can get and maybe record a conversation with us and put it online, but we'll see. But he's been very supportive of the top bottom, and that's a great thing to have access to. The web editor of the New Yorker lives across the street, and he's who I contacted to get a hold of him. So it's kind of nice to have a neighbor that you can pick up her phone and say hi, and he can get a hold of her, and everybody can do that. Yeah, I'm gonna talk about this more on the blog too, I think that what we did has a lot to say to the book directly, in particular, about the things that aren't quite within the scope of the book. So the book talks about what are split seconds, split second decisions, what is the thin slicing, right? But the book sort of stops short of saying when does it make sense to do a thinly sliced decision, and when does it make sense to do maybe, to take maybe a thicker slice, right? And that's something that I think this experiment can go away toward answering. For which on the spot, you have to sell a pan of tomato soup until you go on time editing. What would be the optimal sort of scenario, I mean, based on your collective crowd sourcing? You get one shot, like what would you, how would you play the background on a 10,000 pan? You know, I don't know that our results are as directly relevant to that as they might seem. I think there are probably some lessons to take out of it, but one of the things we found is that context can override a lot, and that the context of evaluating art is something that sort of dominates the whole experiment, and that would limit its general applicability in a certain way. So maybe you don't want to just have an image of a soup can, you want to have somebody, a voiceover, tell you about the many qualities of the soup, so. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. In George's sort of company, you would just website in the arts and that, and the experience is people intellectuals in the arts, et cetera, et cetera, and probably grab it to be in George's, and then you just want to have it, and you want to read, but I'm still wondering if the bigger realm of society is like, oh, it's really something. Right. You know, anything kind of like that, so. On that note, which is, it's not quite related, but one of the reasons why we're running the experiment in the gallery is we want to see if the metrics around people visiting are different from how they were online. So the data that's being taken here is separate. And we will be talking about that at the very end. That's one of the things that Gladwell wanted us to look at is the label link. So one of the things that Bo's going to look at in depth, I hope, is does the length of the label change that rating? Right, they had me write labels of various lengths. We have small samples, so we're going to have to give a caveat there, but it's a small, small sampling of data, but I think it's worth looking at. And the other thing we should mention is, what's our statistics here? Is it 50% in the gallery's labels? Oh god, it depends on the gallery. So the interpretive material's down here, I think, I think it's, I thought it was 50%. It's like 100%, but yeah, it depends. The permanent galleries, there are a lot of rooms with almost no explanation of anything, and that's just because they date back to another period. But in the Brooklyn Museum's modern interpretation, which is the last 10 years of this director, the interpretation level in the gallery has gone up to the point where I thought that I had heard a figure that they aimed for was like 50% to have labels on works, as to be the most accessible, what we call chats. Chats, not just the caption, but the discussion as opposed to just the caption. So when you walk around, it's sort of interesting, when you walk around the Brooklyn Museum, in any modern, more recent thing in the gallery, you might look at Islamic as a good example of that. You'll see more texts running around than you might in another institution. That's what I mean, actually. So when you think about, if you go straight, you'll see a more modern gallery, if you turn right into the Indian Gallery, you'll see a gallery that really has barely changed at all since the 70s. Also about the sort of question of whether or not these results are sort of like with the context, whether it's about the length or whether it's about what the length signifies. That sort of hits the limits of what empiricism is capable of, right? Or at least you need like a really clever experiment, more clever than what we did to sort of get at that difference, if that makes sense. And the data, I mean, didn't we see that the words did almost as well as the chats? Well, I'll have to look at it again, but... It's definitely something we're gonna be looking at. Yeah, the tags, which is what we were calling them, they definitely did something. I'll have to look to figure out what, yeah. Thanks very much.