Your Insides Out: The History of Visualization of Biological Macromolecules On-line Museum

Look at the title above.  Does it make any sense to you?  Probably not, unless you've got some college-level biology classes under your belt.  I had to read the opening page of this museum - and then re-read it to make sure I caught all the salient points, and then look at some of the images - before I understood what this museum is about.  This is kind of how the museum operates:  slightly confusing for the layman but full of pretty pictures.

Biological macromolecules are the larger molecules in our bodies, like proteins and the nucleic acids in our DNA.  Collected here are images and movies scientists in earlier generations produced in order to bring these macromolecules to a human scale.  The earliest images come from 1946 and were created in MIT laboratories.  There is also a 3D model of a protein, some pictures of crystals, and the cover of a 1966 molecule catalog (unfortunately, the link to flip through the catalog is no longer working).

The coolest section is the Early Molecular Graphics Movie Gallery, which shows films of protein and insulin molecules from 1966 and 1971.  They're on the primitive side, but it's interesting to see just what these structures look like.

Each section is accompanied by plenty of footnoted text, but it's not too user-friendly.  I suspect this was written with fellow scientists, not the general public, in mind.  That makes this museum frustrating, because with a more explanatory tone these images could provide a truly enlightening look inside our bodies.

So stop by and take a look, and try to glean what you can, but don't feel bad if it doesn't make sense to you.


History of Visualization of Biological Macromolecules On-line Museum
Mission:  This site is an on-line archive dedicated to the various tools and techniques that have been used by molecular scientists to visualize and study the structure of biological macromolecules.
Website:  www.umass.edu/molvis/francoeur/index.html

Wave of the Future: The Adobe Museum of Digital Media

So far a lot of the virtual museums I've seen can be classified as collections of super-informative web pages.  They're all great and tell some interesting stories, but none quite mimics the experience of a real museum visit.  None, that is, except the Adobe Museum of Digital Media.

Visiting Adobe's museum actually feels somewhat like walking through a museum building.  The museum and its exhibits are set up as a 3D structure that's highly interactive - for example, the exhibits are laid out in a floating, rotating formation that move toward your mouse as you scroll through.  There are even several exhibits whose content changes as you move among them.

Right now the museum has five exhibits plus a video by the museum's founder.  Each exhibit includes text and audio commentary from the curator and spaces where visitors can leave comments and share each piece in their social media networks.  The current exhibits are InForm, which displays colorful and random infographics; Journey to Seven Light Bay, a virtual tour of the artist Mariko Mori's work Primal Rhythm; Valley, a collection of digital art by the artist Tony Oursler; A + B = C, a video by Rhode Island School of Design's president on the intersection between real and virtual worlds; and Making the Impossible, which tells the story of how this museum came to be.  I really can't do these exhibits justice by describing them, so I'll let you explore them on your own.

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media is an ideal of what virtual museums can be, and what I imagine they will look like in the future.  I realize that this museum is made possible by Adobe's deep pockets, and that most of the virtual museums out there aren't nearly as well funded, but I think we can pick up some great cues here about how to bring museums online to the wider world.  Pay close attention and take notes, because this might just be the future of museums.


Adobe Museum of Digital Media
Mission:  The mission of the Adobe Museum of Digital Media is to showcase and preserve groundbreaking digital work and expert commentary to illustrate how digital media shapes and impacts today's society.
Website:  www.adobemuseum.com

A Thousand Words: The Canon Camera Museum

In real life, if you were to encounter a museum about a product, housed within the headquarters of that product's corporate parent, what would you think?  Would you find the information trustworthy, or would you be skeptical?  Would you expect a slick, expensive presentation or a nerd-tastic display of every minute specification?

These are all questions I asked myself while visiting the Canon Camera Museum, which is hosted on Canon's website.  I found that a company museum can be both interesting and selectively cheery, as well as shiny and new and a little too technologically detailed for the average camera user.

The museum is set up as a virtual space with five buildings, each hosting a different exhibit, surrounded by digital fields and pastures (which looked unfortunately similar to Farmville).  One building is simply a short introduction to the museum, and the other buildings house History Hall, Camera Hall, Technology Hall and Design Hall.

History Hall, like the historical narratives of a lot of virtual museums, features blocks of text arranged as a timeline.  You can read the digest form, which is long, or the full story, which is even longer and can't possibly appeal to anyone who isn't writing a research paper.  History Hall also contains a slick presentation on the history of the EOS cameras, and even though this exhibit reads like a sales pitch, its layout is quite interesting.  The main screen pans slowly back through images of the EOS line, showing what products looked like each year, which creates an interactive timeline that you can click on at various points for more information.  I wish this was how Canon has chosen to present the rest of their history.

Camera Hall is a pretty basic showcase of images and specifications of Canon's digital and analog cameras and camcorders.  There's not much to it, which is nice because it's easily accessible for those of us who don't know or care too much about mechanical specifics.

Technology Hall goes into great detail about how cameras are made and what the science is behind each product.  In the Technical Room you can see demos of how different camera parts work.  You can also view a Virtual Camcorder Plant and a Virtual Lens Plant, both of which feature videos showing the process of creating different products.  The Lens Plant video is especially good, like something you might find in a real museum exhibit, but they are both a little too upbeat and couched in an aura of marketing and promotion.

Design Hall was the most impenetrable exhibit in the museum.  I had no idea what most of the links meant, much less how to navigate through them, because they were full of technical jargon and product names that I was unfamiliar with.  I was all but ready to give up when I saw the Making of Camera Design section, which unfolds as an interactive video explaining the process of making and marketing cameras.  It was nice, in this sea of confusion, to sit back and have someone explain what camera design entails - someone who assumes you don't have a technical knowledge of cameras and lets you go at your own pace.

I suppose if you really like cameras, or if you desperately need a chunk of information on the Canon company, the Canon Camera Museum is for you.  The rest of us will have to settle for cherry-picking the sections that are understandable and not too dull.  And though I appreciate the Canon dollars that went in to making the unique design and the many interactive components of this museum, I can't help be a little turned off by the sunny corporate message on display.  All in all, the Canon Camera Museum is worth at least a glance, as long as you understand that not everything will appeal to you, and remember who's keeping the lights on.


The Canon Camera Museum
Mission:  The Canon Camera Museum is a virtual facility presenting a wealth of information on Canon cameras.  You'll learn things you can't learn elsewhere as we highlight the appealing features of Canon cameras.
Website:  www.canon.com/camera-museum

Past Sales: The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design

The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design isn't entirely virtual.  It has a physical space in Milwaukee that houses a collection, but it also has a series of digital exhibits featuring online-only content.  It's this component of the Eisner that I'll explore.

There are five virtual exhibits featured on the Eisner's website, all dealing with different methods and genres of advertisement.  Be sure to check them all out:

Hikifuda looks at how Japanese illustrated advertisements were developed and changed over time.  The content is engaging, especially since marketing historians often ignore non-Western influences, and the images are high quality.  The exhibit is a little static, however, and you have to navigate through some annoying music.

The exhibit on Boris Artzybasheff looks at how this Russian illustrator contributed to both advertising and magazine deisgn.  There's plenty of good interpretation to be found, and the images are superb, but the presentation is not very interactive.

The Art of the Album Cover is much different from the previous two exhibits.  It's set up as if you were playing a record - in order to view album covers from different decades, you have to move a turntable arm around.  While viewing these covers you can also listen to music from that era (or you can mute the sound).  My only complaint is that the quality of the album cover images isn't great.

The Power of Advertising:  Burma Shave tells the story of a clever marketing campaign from the 1920s. In order to understand just what the makers of Burma Shave were trying to accomplish, this exhibit lets you listen to audio clips, view images of roadside signs and see the product's old packaging.  And if you linger on the main screen long enough, you'll be able to cycle through the rhyming jingles that formed the backbone of these ads.

The final exhibit is A New Set of Wheels, which shows how car advertisements evolved and adapted to different media.  Using interactive timelines, you can see how cars changed through the years and how they were presented in prints ads.  You can also view a few TV spots for the Volkswagen Beetle, and you can play around with 3D images of a few classic cars.  There's such a wealth of information and images that you could easily loose track of time while marveling over old cars.

I would definitely recommend taking the time to view all these exhibits.  Their subject matter is incredibly diverse, yet taken together they provide an interesting narrative of the history of advertising.  Despite some limitations, you can learn a lot, and if you're in the Milwaukee area you should check out the Eisner's physical counterpart.

The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design
Mission:  The Eisner is an interactive educational center focusing on advertising and design, and their impact on our culture:  honor and lend recognition to past achievements within the scope of advertising and design; foster public awareness of the influential role of advertising and design on society; serve as an educational resource for advertising and design students and professionals and the community at large.  With its unique emphasis on the social, historical and aesthetic implications of advertising and design, the Eisner museum is an important center for research on and discussion of advertising and design.
Website:  www.eisnermuseum.org/exhibits/online.shtm

All Wrapped Up: The American Package Museum

Do you ever get a nostalgic feeling when you see a product logo that's been out of date for years?  It brings back memories from your childhood, maybe, or from some memorable time in your past, and you start to feel wistful for the era when that logo was new and fresh.  Well, get ready to take a long and winding trip down memory lane with the American Package Museum.

The opening page of the American Package Museum is pretty alluring.  You're greeted with short explanation about the museum, written by curator Ian House, alongside a group of three retro Wrigley's wrappers placed on a 60s-era tablecloth.  Click anywhere on this screen and you'll be taken to the museum's exhibits.

You have two options for viewing the exhibits:  You can either watch them in a slideshow (which is the default view after clicking through the opening screen) or you can choose what to view from an alphabetical index of products.  I would definitely check out the index instead of the slideshow because the index tells you which objects can be viewed in 3D.  You've got to have a pretty good connection to see the 3D objects, and they take a little while to load, but the wait is worth it.  How many other places can show you a full rotation of the original Oh Henry! packaging?

Despite these cool features, the American Package Museum isn't perfect.  The links for the Guestbook and Giftshop don't work, and the Contact section is similarly missing.  Also, none of the exhibits have any interpretation besides a caption with each product's name, which is disappointing if you want to know just how old each package is.

Nevertheless, the American Package Museum is pretty interesting in a visual sense.  If you just want to marvel at 20th century marketing, this is the place to go.  But if you want to learn the stories behind each product and packaging, you're going to have to do some research on your own.

The American Package Museum
Mission:  The primary objective of this website is to preserve and display specimens of American package design from the early decades of the 20th century.  The secondary objective is to establish a community for those interested in such an endeavor.
Website:  www.packagemuseum.com

History, eh: The Virtual Museum of Canada

Canada is a huge country - the second largest in the world - and many parts of it are sparsely inhabited.  How did museums in some of these far-flung regions manage to reach millions of visitors and share their resources around the world?  By setting up a virtual museum.

The Virtual Museum of Canada was created by the Canadian Heritage Information Network as a way to bring together more than 3,000 museums and historic sites across the country.  It currently hosts 790 virtual exhibits, comprising nearly a million images.  Many of these exhibits, like Prince Edward Island - Memories of WWII, relate to Canadian history and culture.  These exhibits tend to be a little dry, since they are presented as a series of photos and maps with catalog descriptions and minimal interpretation.

But don't be turned off by these history slide shows, because if you look hard there's more exciting exhibits to be seen.  The exhibits aren't Canada-specific - such as Anno Domini:  Jesus Through the Centuries - are much more interactive and engaging.  And if you visit the VMC Lab, you'll get to experience the latest virtual museum technology.  The Lab is a space to view some of the more digitally advanced exhibits that Canadian museums have put out.  At the Thule Whalebone House exhibit, for example, you can see a 3D rendering of the kind of house that First Nations people once lived in.

The Virtual Museum of Canada offers some other cool resources, like a podcast series on unusual topics in Canadian history and section called My VMC, where you can assemble your own personal exhibit space.  There's also Teachers' Centre (aww, Canadian spelling) that not only provides classroom resources, but also allows teachers to upload and share their lesson plans and projects.

So, if you're curious about Canada's history but don't want to spend the time and money traveling all over the Great Frozen North, check out the Virtual Museum of Canada.  You can see plenty historical photos and objects, and you can also use emerging technologies to explore places you might otherwise never visit.

The Virtual Museum of Canada
Mission:  As an endless source of discoveries, virtualmuseum.ca is a unique interactive space that brings together Canadian museum collections and riches in a variety of thought-provoking and instructive contents.  It's the window on current museum news and the reference guide to planning an outing.
Website:  www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/index-eng.jsp

Let's Get Meta: The Museum of Online Museums

So how do you begin blogging about virtual museums?  Perhaps by going to the source:  The Museum of Online Museums.  Created in 1999 by Coudal Partners, a design and advertising firm based in Chicago, the Museum of Online Museums contains both a permanent collection and a changing exhibits gallery that is updated quarterly. 

The permanent collection is more of an aggregation project, pulling together the online archives from physical museums around the world as well as quirky personal collections that have been uploaded to the web.  Here you can link to the National Portrait Gallery’s website.  You can also find the website of The Grocery List Collection, one man’s quest to display all the grocery lists he’s ever found.

The changing exhibits gallery features archives of all kinds of ephemera that someone, at some point, found meaningful or important.  Past exhibits have included Small Town Noir, a collection of mugshots and crime stories from New Castle, Pennsylvania; MAD Cover Site, which displays the cover, index and price of every MAD Magazine issue every printed; and An Archive of Radio Shack Catalogs (pretty much self-explanatory).  This is just a small sampling of past exhibits – you could easily lose an afternoon trying to view all of the previously featured collections.

The current featured exhibit is The Curators, a three-part video that tracks down some of the people behind the permanent and changing exhibits.  Here we meet Bill Keaggy, founder of the aforementioned Grocery List Collection, and others who have become part of The Museum of Online Museums.  It’s an interesting look at what form online collecting takes offline.

The Museum of Online Museums seems a little like a stunt at first - like the design nerd equivalent of a snake eating its tail - but don't let that keep you away.  There are a fascinating number of collections to browse that you never thought you'd care about, and you may even be inspired to throw whatever it is you collect up on the web.

The Museum of Online Museums

Mission:  Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of the mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector.
Website:  coudal.com/moom

What's going on here?

If you're stumbling across this blog and wondering just what this is all about, sit back and let me explain:

This blog is dedicated to exploring the world of digital museums - museums that exists only online, in digital format.  You may or not be aware of them, but there are many collections out there that don't have a physical form.  They live instead within the confines of URLs.

I got interested in digital museums from my work with Girl Museum, a digital museum that explores representations of girlhood through different eras and cultures.  The founder of Girl Museum lives in New Zealand, and those of us who contribute to the museum live in countries all across the world, yet we are all able to come together to create a collection that can be shared around the globe.  This would never be possible in a traditional museum!

So my aim here is to explore what can be found in the realm of digital museums - what kinds of collections are out there, what these museums are trying to say and how they are making an impact in the world.  Check back every week to learn about a new digital museum, and together we'll explore this new frontier.


PS. I can't take credit for this blog's title.  The phrase originated as the title of an article by Roger Silverstone.