Blog – Page 2 – Colin Brooks

March 2020

Relaunching the Whitney’s Online Collection…again

*Author’s note: I’ve been sitting on a half-finished draft of this for too long, and while I know this is a bit of an odd time to share, I have very little else to do. I hope that these kinds of online museum resources can be a positive outlet for boredom and inspiration in the weeks and months ahead.*

A screenshot of the Whitney's online collection front page as of March 2020.

June 2019

QR Codes: Alive and Well in the Museum?

I can’t tell you if QR codes are dead, undead, or if they never died in the first place, but I can tell you we’ve been trialing them at the Whitney Museum of American Art over the last year. Anecdotally, everybody familiar with what QR codes are seems to have an anecdote about them, but we wanted to determine more systematically whether or not they might be a useful tool for driving visitors into digital content while at the Museum, with any meaningful levels of utilization. And as it turns out, for us, QR codes are alive and well.

iPhone open to camera scanning a QR code on a paper visitor's guide

February 2019

Relaunching Softly: the Whitney’s Online Collection

The Whitney’s collection defines and drives much of our mission and our work. It is a unique resource, offering a lens into the historical and contemporary landscape of American art through more than 3,400 artists and 23,000 works of art. With the opening of the Whitney’s new building in 2015, nearly every work in the Museum’s collection was made available online for the first time.

January 2019

The Whitney’s Mobile Guide

November 2018

Dimensions of Museum Data

Google analytics was not built for the arts. Most of the time that’s fine: as a museum we still care about all kinds of standard metrics. Pageviews still matter, session behavior matters, referrals matter, ecommerce matters, and when we need something specific to our platform or its extensions we can usually cover it with custom event tracking or find another tool that can give us what we need. But as we’ve tried to more cohesively analyze data around our exhibitions, it’s become more and more labor intensive to identify the throughlines between content spread across different aspects of our online presence. There are a number of ways we’re working to answer this challenge, and one is through better utilizing custom dimensions.

November 2018

Understanding our audiences: The Whitney’s Website Visitor Survey and its broader context

I was part of a presentation at MCN 2018 on a visitor motivation survey (VMS) we ran on whitney.org. As a group we covered the context of motivation-based surveys at museums and some key learnings for the Whitney, both in results and in strategy.

June 2018

Answering the question “what’s on today?”

A few months ago we launched a new visit planning feature on whitney.org. Varyingly referred to internally as “Today at the Whitney” or “What’s on Today”, this feature came about after a conversation with a number of our colleagues in Visitor Services around our Plan Your Visit and Events calendar pages. They brought up how difficult it can be for visitors to get a good view “at a glance” of what all is happening at the Whitney on a given day, and wondered if there was a way we could better serve this need on whitney.org. To anyone who’s visited museums and their websites, this is likely a familiar problem.

Diptych of front and back of a handout from a museum with the header "Today" and a schedule of events beneath.

March 2018

Experimenting with what works

A lot has changed about whitney.org over the last year. This includes the entire platform underpinning the site, and a number of major usability and user interface improvements, from reworked navigation, to new mobile experiences for audio and video, to the incorporation of outside voices in our exhibition content. And with growing distance from the complexities of launching a new website, our data-related work has been picking up steam as we’ve been able to devote more time and mindshare to it, which in turn has begun to more deeply impact our design thinking and decision making processes. A major aspect of that impact is in an increasing ability to reevaluate our assumptions, and to better understand how visitors are actually interacting with us…rather than just how we might think they are.

July 2017

How Many Hoppers?

An up to date count of the number of works by Edward Hopper currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

August 2016

1/1/2015 — 10/5/2016

An animated mapping exploration of the Washington Post’s fatal police shooting dataset. Locations are geocoded through the Google Maps API, and build up a familiar image of the United States.

July 2016

“Hey could you give me the numbers on that again?”

Interning with MoMA’s Digital Media department is great. Building a dashboard to track metrics across the museum is really complicated. Both of these statements are true, which is the kind of authoritative certainty I strive for in data analytics. This summer my job has been to create a dynamic dashboard that pulls in data from sources all over MoMA, that ideally updates automatically.

July 2016

Neuron

Mixed media enlargement of an imagined neuron, incorporating generative audio and video, projection mapping with Kinect and OpenCV, chicken wire, stainless steel, and acrylic.

Close up of a giant neuron made of metal wire with light being projected over the surface.

June 2016

Recursion lesson & survey

An experiment in teaching about the concept of recursion to new audiences using an animated Sierpinski triangle. Learners read a brief sequence of paragraphs describing recursion while the animation played alongside, then answered a brief survey on the topic.

Screenshot of a webpage with a green triangle on the left and text on the right.

May 2016

Spheres II

Continued exploration of deconstructing spheres, limited color, galaxy-inspired movements and shapes, and generative growth.

Geometric shapes in pinks purples and whites rotating around a central point over a black background.

May 2016

Whitney Teens Open Studio sign in

A smarter sign in form for Whitney Museum teen events. Parses acronyms and commonly mis-entered information, aggregates data, and pushes it to a central Google Sheet.