In light of the new emphasis on interactive pedagogy, museum administrators are interested in a metaLAB project called “Teaching with Things,” which aims to develop a virtual representation of an artifact’s shape and size in order to facilitate annotation, says metaLAB creative technologist Cristoforo Magliozzi.

“[The technology] is becoming a lot cheaper, a lot leaner, and a lot more mobile,” Magliozzi says. “More and more museums and institutions of that sort are having these capabilities in-house.”

Magliozzi also highlighted the potential value of digitizing content that is in storage, since the Harvard Art Museums will only be able to exhibit “the tip of the iceberg” of its full collections when it opens.

“Index,” Harvard Art Museums’ magazine, is looking forward to a digital transition as well. Originally a print magazine, the publication will eventually become entirely digital.

“We’re tinkering and experimenting and rolling it out in all these different venues,” Steward says. “We’re making connections between what you can do in the gallery and what you can do at home.”

ENGAGEMENT ANEW

What the Harvard Art Museums hopes to do is already underway in Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Curators have equipped the 250-acre garden with technology aimed at bringing the plants to life digitally. As a result, the Arboretum has served as a laboratory for the kind of technology the metaLAB is looking to introduce in Harvard’s artistic collections, and a blueprint for what a digitally-equipped art museum could look like in the future.

Working with Nuvu Cambridge—an innovation center attended by high school students who take a semester off to collaborate on projects with experts from MIT and Harvard—the metaLAB designed a series of digital modules for the Arboretum.

In one module, for example, students built a robotic flower that simulated conditions at the Arboretum by opening, closing, or changing color. Another module tasked them with building a birdhouse with several hidden sensors. Using a single-pixel camera, the birdhouse was able to measure the light hitting the tree, which in turn fed into a visualization of how a tree perceives light.

The purpose of the new modules is to gather and display “metadata”—the cloud of information surrounding each artifact. It is data about data, according to Yanni A. Loukissas, metaLAB senior researcher, and it could represent an exciting new path for museums.

“Our sense throughout this whole project has been that, if you do it right, you can create this interesting ecology of experience... from encounters with the raw physicality of the collection to encounters with the metadata of the collection,” says Parry, the metaLAB researcher experimenting with digital videography at the Arboretum.

For museums, the potential to unlock supplementary digital information about an object could help visitors understand artifacts in new ways. “People are used to having navigation and search at their fingertips,” Loukissas says. “I think the museum... kind of begs for that.”

For example, the ability to digitally view three-dimensional objects from all possible angles could help museum-goers overcome the physical constraints of galleries. Even seeing a video of someone handling an object, according to Loukissas, psychologically enhances understanding of three-dimensionality.

Annotating objects digitally is another method of producing metadata. For example, Houghton Library houses artifacts called “ostraca,” pottery fragments that were used in ancient Athens to vote in banishment trials. Loukissas and other innovators think that a researcher examining the shards should be able to reference informational material about the object through digital annotations.

“We’re in a new means of engagement,” he says.