Transcript of this week’s podcast episode.

Part One

Hey everybody, welcome to week three of the course. In this week, we have two major tasks ahead of us. This is the first of two weeks where you can prep your materials for our asynchronous seminar discussions coming up. It’s also the first week where you have an opportunity to start polishing or developing your digital skills in particular. We’re going to use what are called Jupiter notebooks, these are well, they’re interesting. They are like little pieces of code that you can run in a piece of documentation.

Just kind of an awkward way of saying: it’s like a lab notebook where you have your observations and your actual code mixed together so that somebody else can read your work and actually see your observations or run your analysis at the same time. It might feel a bit intimidating and it’s okay to feel like that - I found these things intimidating when I started playing with them a few years ago.

I also have to admit any of the digital skills I have come from screwing around with the computer and talking about what hasn’t worked in public because I’m a one-man band for the most part. When things go wrong for me, I have to talk to people online and say, “uh, anybody? Can anybody help me out here? I don’t understand what I’ve done.’

And you know you learn more to when something breaks because when it breaks that’s when you realize, ‘okay, this is the assumption that’s been built in here, they’re assuming that I already know that I need to install X Y and Z before I can even do this, ah for God’s sakes’.

I want you to really understand that it’s okay for things to break in this class. It’s okay for you not to really quite get it at first. IT’S OKAY. I don’t grade according to ‘does this notebook work the first time’; no I don’t do that. I’m interested in your process, about how you deal with it, how you think about it, about what the experience has suggested for you; because contrary to what the tech industry will have you believe, nobody is a genius. The tech industry will advertise for a coding ninja, a wizard, a unicorn, and that’s… just bullshit.

They do this because they’re trying to enhance the prestige of the position and I’m all in favor of prestige - we want to feel good about the work that we do - but they make it sound as if there’s something inherent in you that prevents you from from doing code. Code is just a matter of exposure and practice and what I’m interested in, in this course is giving you that opportunity to practice, to play with things, to have them break, to think about why it breaks, and to do it within the broader context of the the GLAM sector and how it deals with digital stuff.

So this week go out and break things. That is the point. Okay? We’re far more interested in something that doesn’t work and trying to understand why it doesn’t work than in something that works that just goes the first time and you don’t understand why it did what it did, right? What’s the point in that?

So, please give yourself time to to work through those tutorials, but give yourself permission to be okay with it not really working at first. Give yourself permission to reach out to somebody else in the class, to a friend, to somebody in your family or, God forbid, even me; you can talk to me to say, ‘I don’t quite get why this isn’t coming together.’

Keep track of error messages. Take screenshots. Put this stuff into a repo that you can share the link to to say, hey can somebody help me out? Talk about it in discord. I want you to be resilient and resilience is built by experimenting by looking at what hasn’t worked, and by talking about it.

Nobody is going to attack you in this class for code stuff not working. Okay? We’re in this together and you will learn far more by talking about what hasn’t worked than by trying to do it in splendid isolation. In fact, if I find out that you’ve been working on it for hours without success and without talking to anybody about it, well, I’ll be really disappointed because that will have been time that you didn’t need to be stressed about, that you didn’t need to feel helpless about.

If it doesn’t come after 30 minutes it’s not gonna come after three hours and I am 100% serious about this. Close the computer go for a walk go do something else. Come back with fresh eyes, and then share the problem with somebody else. Talk to me. Okay. It’s gonna be great as long as we keep talking to each other.

Part Two

SG- Today we are joined by Dan Pet from the FitzWilliam Museum at Cambridge University. So I just wanted to ask you. Who are you in and what do you do at your institution?

DP- That’s a good question to start with, who am I; I’m not really sure sometimes. I’m Daniel Pett and I run the digital and IT for the FitzWilliam museum at Cambridge University. It’s the principal art museum at the university and it houses objects from antiquity to modern art to Rodin and Degas. I’ve got background from various different things. I started off straight after University where I studied archaeology working in investment banking on a trading floor doing digital IT. And that’s terrible boring and then I’ve moved into working with British Museum and I was there for 15 years and then that time I met the amazing Shawn Graham and I’ve now moved to the University of Cambridge to run IT and digital there. I’ve been there for about two years. So I’ve been working for nearly two decades and that makes me feel incredibly old.

SG- Nah, you’re still a spring chicken Dan, You’re still a spring chicken. So you’re the digital IT manager of the Fitzwilliam, what’s the greatest challenge you currently face in terms of the digital aspect of this work?

DP- The world’s changed substantially, we’re all stuck at home with COVID-19 and the challenges that brings. I think the biggest challenge we have well probably not just the museums but just generally is about the digital divide and people learning how to use new tools, skills, confidence, transitioning from being say, very face-to-face, analogue Facebook and paper -there is a lot of paper still be used in museums lot of notebooks being used - and transitioning to using these tools seamlessly and being able to be confident. So the challenge has been about getting people to work at home with their own equipment; a lot of people don’t have their own PC at home or own a Mac or whatever sort of computer. Just before we went into lockdown for the museum I did a survey of our staff to find out what sort of equipment they had and it turned out about 60% of people had access to equipment to use the internet. Now, that’s that’s quite staggering really 60% - what we are the 40% doing for their internet usage?

And that’s pretty interesting question for all of you, whether you can get in the library, whether they’re using it just at the museum and devices there or whether they’re going to friends’ houses or stealing broadband, which is what some people were doing, so they were using the neighbors Wi-Fi without people finding out about it, so that’s an interesting challenge that we’re having to face at the moment and I imagine that’s pretty the same in Canada, poor bandwidth and local rural areas as well.

If we’d’ve been home two years ago and I had to work at full-time here, I’d have had 1.2 megabytes per second bandwidth speed. And not being able to do any of the work I do now, so I couldn’t be talking to Shawn now for instance.

So the challenges are quite varied. So the next thing we’ve gone on to is - we have a very very old building. It’s from 1800s and it needs new cabling put into it to make it useable for 21st century. That’s quite hard to do because it’s listed so we’re trying to do that during lock down as well, of course, we can’t go to the building because we’re not allowed to be there.

And then other challenges I’ve got are about enabling people to do new things over the internet as well so we decided we’d like a new website during lockdown, we decided we’d like to do this we need digital programs, stuff Shawn’s class can probably do without even thinking about it. I think about the podcast or maybe learning how to use twine and all these things that you’re going to learn about probably doing the course, stories and narratives it’s a really interesting period right to think about how the internet can enable us to do new things how we can do about knowledge and I think that’s something that courses that you are doing with Shawn will enable you to go out into the workforce now to do these things that we can’t do now without lots of teaching and it’s quite inspiring to go to Shawn’s lessons and lectures and to learn new things and see that he struggles with stuff, sometimes, he’s about failure and that’s something that I also struggle with for work. I can’t talk about failure very often because they want everything to work whereas as I’d like to experiment and fail and learn new things let’s say this didn’t work but this did. And that’s probably another great challenge for me, about teaching people that failure is actually okay and we fail a little all the time our lives but why can’t we at work?

SG: So I can imagine the challenges of trying to teach people to fail in your context, so maybe we could talk a little bit about what does a day in the life of Dan Pett look like in your role in your work?

DP: Would you like pre-covid or right now?

SG: This is the world we live in now so.

DP: So at the moment I’ve got two children who are both a primary school agent. I don’t know what that’s called in Canada, that’s the primary school. So the first thing is to get them school in the morning, that’s the biggest challenge of the day. Tantrums start by nine o’clock and I’m ready to give up for the day. So we get the kids to school and then I get back upstairs to my office, I live in a countryside, I’ve got great view of my office over the village I can see the church actually the school my garden and then we probably start with multiple team calls in the morning. I probably don’t concentrate fully through all those calls and I might be doing coding and other things that come in over the night and I’ve been doing lots of development work recently based around a new website using some interesting technologies and trying to use Amazon web services. I think Shawn’s probably used Amazon web services for a few things and knows it can be quite frustrating trying and that goes back to what we said earlier about failure

So teach myself how to fail and break things. So I can prove and teach other people how to use information and resources. We have lots and lots of planning meetings at the moment about what we’re going to do about how we react to covid-19, how you bring ticketing people back into the building when we’re actually allowed to open. So in the UK I don’t know what it’s like in Canada we’re actually locked out from the museum, we’re in our second phase of lockdown now. So people cannot go into the building until December the third I think the date.

So that’s our second go of lockdown, so obviously museums have lost revenue over that time. But we’ve been quite fortunate, we’re funded through the university, we’re not completely reliant on ticket sales, we don’t charge. And we don’t sell a huge amount in our shop in terms of millions of pounds.

So that could mean carying on quite like normal and the plan is that we redeploy members of staff to do digitally focussed roles and help me with our digitalization programs with our public facing digital outputs. Now, what’s the instant challenges that you can imagine - you’ve got people who work in front of house, who might not even use a computer, the challenges teaching the skills to actually do these things in the first place.

I have a team of three people in digital IT. Three people doesn’t go very far to teach another 150 people when you have to teach them one to one. So lots of our time at the moment is about bringing people up to speed and how they can learn new things so we can learn how to use say the collection management system.

We could spend a couple hours a day just sorting out IT problems and you feel like you’re not achieving for yourself, but then you have to remember you’re achieving things for other people. And that’s the frustrating thing, you do get stuck with the idea ‘I didn’t achieve anything’ but actually you did achieve something. So it can be very frustrating for me as well because I think I’ve got this amount of time safe, then someone gives me a call and I’m not gonna get anything done because I’m spending a certain time doing all the work that they need to do.

And the other stuff that we’re really up to the moment is grant applications.

We’re trying to find money to do the new things. Things that we want to do, taking the museum outside the walls of the space and doing virtual tours, doing podcasts, doing it anything that can take the information out into new mediums and say you can’t come into our building but you can still experience it. Now I think museums and venues are a little bit fixated on that pyshical space and they haven’t thought about millions of people who don’t come to their building in a very holistic way yet. So challenges for us and what I’m thinking about lots at the moment about how we can change our physical analogue delivery to digital and work at how we can actually say ‘hey Shawn you should come to our museum, your students should come to our museum!’ What is our museum and that’s the idea, ‘what is the idea of a museum’ and that is changing quite rapidly now for a lot of people: is it digital? is it a hybrid? is it a broadcast or narrowcasting organization? and these are really interesting challenges to think about on the job. And then once that’s finished you don’t really get a home/work life balance anymore because you are working from home, so you just go back upstairs and do some more work and evening when you’re trying to avoid the kids or there’s nothing on TV you just end up working in bed and then get up again.

So it is quite an interesting time and I’m sure you’re going to the same sort of thing with your students you are doing a lot more work because you can, because you are home, you’re not commuting back into the museum. If I was working in Cambridge I’d be commuting five hours a day, how can you five hours a day five hours back, so I’m a bit more productive-

SG: I’m sorry you commute five hours to get to Cambridge?

DP: Yeah, it’s not that far, it’s seventy miles it’s about two and a half hours drive each way unless the traffic’s really bad. When I worked in London it was half an hour on the train, though the same distance roughly. So you could say I’m either crazy or dedicated

SG: Let’s go back to your your thoughts about where the museum is going um, and can I ask you where do you see cultural heritage informatics if we can use that label as a as a broader field beyond just museums? Where do you see that heading in the future?

DP: I thought you’re gonna stitch me up and what digital humanities is going to do but that’s a more interesting question. I think institutions have all got their own strengths and we were facing a little bit different challenges at the moment, there’s a lot of layoffs happening in the digital world across cultural organizations but there’s also this idea that we have to become digital but how do you do that without the staff to do that in the first place? so I think we are going to see a digital revolution based around this time where organizations are gonna changes themselves from this analogue fixated must be the workplace style to working from a house digitally and collaboratively and this is something I think archaeology is managed quite well in many cases. There’s projects that we’ve worked on, for instance thinking of the Ancient World Data Institute to MSU’s digital archaeology practice where you have learned to work with your peers, and I think these people have come together at these workshops have gone away with the idea that we can collaborate across the channel with multiple people even though they have low bandwidth, projects where not everyone’s got the same equity of access to resources but you try bring them into that project through either email IRC or any other way of talking to each other. But it’s gonna be quite a big challenge because there’s not enough people to go around with that digital knowledge who are prepared to share it and I think this is something that we need to be quite careful about is about how we make people transfer what they’re doing to other people.

So you’re excellent, you write things about what you’re doing, posting it to the internet. I try to do that but I find that my time gets delayed in sharing so I post a little things on Twitter saying this is what I’ve done, here’s a gist [gist.github.com], you can copy my work there. and I think organizations got to think more holistically about their peers and start doing more stuff with open source and documenting what they’re up to, and sharing what they’re doing. So American foundations and more American funding bodies seem quite good about funding universities and scholars to make software, but it’s available for other people to use.

So things like the Knight Foundation, the Getty, stuff that arches things like that are available for everyone to use so if you think about maybe the UK and perhaps European funding - that stuff doesn’t really make it into what people are using so I think this is where things will change. We’re all striving to do common things - learning how to make podcast is actually quite hard for people to do. But if people start sharing it, like on the Programming Historian, then we will all get better and then we’ll get a deluge of content and where do find your signal in the noise?

That that’s the thing we’re all doing the same stuff and how do you stand out? that’s where it becomes interesting. Your institution has got an interesting story to tell- how do you make that narrative stand out from the crowd? You could be the biggest museum in the world but be boring, I mean you listen to some of national museum podcast and didn’t really like that, look at the video and think didn’t really hit what I wanted to hear and then someone does that massive sheep tweet sort of thing and it goes viral around the world. How’d you know, if your content is going to be the next big thing? you don’t really do you. You’re very often quite lucky to get to that and I think that’s something that you can sort of instil in your students this serendipity as well, you don’t know how people use your resources so if you’re open with everything put it out there at least someone’s got chance to reuse so that brings me to the next part (in my head), about open licensing and resources as well. That hopefully will see more people being open about their stuff, they’re still making the money. And I think what people don’t really get at the moment is about creative common type licensing that you could put out assets under a certain license at some part of your work - that doesn’t cover everything that you’ve got you can always put out something under a different license at a higher resolution say, this is all rights restricted this stuff is creative commons, and I think people haven’t really got that in their mind at the moment.

And maybe we’ll see a change with that over time and I think collaborative stuff with Wikipedia might get more help well during this period learn more things infrastructure is not there for organizations to do their own website or do their own stuff, so go where the platform is. one thing that we’ve talked about regularly in various things we’ve been to is about that quote from Steve blank about ‘build it and they will come’ is not a strategy, it’s a prayer. I think lots of places are still building stuff, hoping people will come. so audience research is very much a key thing asking people what they want and that’s something I’m trying to do now with the FitzWilliam’s new beta website is I want to ask the audience what they want.

Now the problem I’m having at the moment is the audience aren’t talking to me and I’m not getting any feedback. I knew that was a risk and is that perhaps because the institution in the past has been very staid or standoffish? are we not asking questions in the right way yet? are we not promoting ourselves as well? have we got an audience that does not want to come to our website could be the question really so I think that’s one of the key things we’ve got to think about over time is about why we create something in the first place. And who it’s for, and what our goals are.

maybe we don’t have a fundamental question about why we did something in the first place so don’t do it really because you’ve got to have that hypothesis. it’s academic as well, isn’t it in how you structure it, it’s got to have the introduction and the body and then the conclusion about where you get to and is it an on-going project or is it one of those short things that is going to be done and then forgotten about and do we preserve it over time?

[transcription from this point is automatic]

Now that goes back to what I was talking about earlier with you and talking presentation you document your projects and your failures and your success what do you learn more from sure you learn from when it breaks, of course exactly when it breaks you exit and someone else might go to help you and I think that is something you and your students are not going to be afraid of the end of your course you can break stuff and actually if student gave me an essay explaining why they failed I’ll find that former interest in the one that says this is actually passed all the way through exhaust now what struggles they had and how they thought laterally and what they’ve actually.

Sprayed me to get to the point they preview something that works at the end of it but I really interested in where it went wrong on the way and we all make mistakes so recently our Instagram was hacked because someone made a mistake with a fishing attack and gave them the username and password and number because they said we were verified the account it looked plausible and if it’s hard it’s late at night and you’re working hard you can make mistakes but we’ve documented it so this is what happened hoping won’t make them stay mistake, so just be open about what you’re doing.

Nothing quite a lot there sorry well that was really good because the last question. I wanted to ask you was about advice you might. Be student interested in the intersection of the zones and cultural heritage informatics, so one part of that place clearly sounds like don’t be afraid to fail but document it and talk openly and honestly about it.

But is there anything else you might you might off. Um, well, I think just be that failure point is it’s got to be about teaching other people that failure is okay as well not coming in and just saying you can fail you have to convince your colleagues who are perhaps not of that culture that you can fail this project and funders as well because funders want you to succeed so you have to come up with this thing this might break at some point and this is what we’re trying to do when we think this will work that’s something you have to think about.

I’ve lost track of what’s gonna say this one so I just I wonder you know maybe we would have more attraction if we stopped using the word fail and failure could we come up with a euphemism that is more palatable or research and development will cover that doesn’t in many ways it’s like you’re you’re researching to get to a point developer product and on that you’re only you will have pitfalls in the road and things will not always go right because you can’t imagine the big firms like and any of the big picture haven’t had a failure on the way.

I mean, you think about projects that Google? Or bad so you remember as buzz and wave and all these things that we all went well, that’s God called. Where’s it now, it’s built there is it so so people do have problems along the way. I think there’s so much stuff that.

I’m for your students because they’re going to become physically immersed and taught new skills there are quite scarce at one point, they’re not going to be a scarcity in the cave in 19 as they were before because people didn’t have these skills having to learn them from. But you’re going to have a grounding in the theory that goes with it and why you should do this stuff don’t actually explain why this tool might not be the best thing for the job so someone might come up with you to say virtual reality is the key for our museum for the future but you might say well what sort of installation you’re going to do is gonna be a physical one big beard station well, should we do a web blew?

Augmented reality instead and are we gonna put headsets out for people to put on they you might instantly save all headsets can’t wear those at this time can we but they’re always around it with copy 19 so you could put a very extremely clean cleaning program instance but I think people still shy away from it, but you could could talk about new things that people might want to try instead and about what might be the best solution or who other people could be to talk to I think from your course and from your contacts your students will have a good grounding network, but people who they could talk to ask questions and I think it’s what Nothing you shouldn’t be scared of is asking people questions you’ve never met before as well and that’s where social media is actually become really useful for us so the things that I’ve been involved with over the last 10 years.