Inside the Met’s construction of a museum without walls
BY RACHEL KRAUS
The baby Jesus in Italian sculptor Luca della Robbia’s "Madonna and Child with Scroll" is surprisingly…sassy. Wrapped in his placid mother’s arms, he even seems to be serving a “girl, please” side-eye. His whole figure is full of personality and detail; his baby hands and ears, though porcelain, look chubby enough to bite. Up close — very up close — he even has baby teeth.
On October 4, Joe Coscia, Jr., the Metropolitan Museum of Art's quiet but devoted chief photographer, undertook the task of capturing the Madonna, and her child with their scroll, digitally.
“How often do you get to photograph a della Robbia?” Coscia said while he worked. “Maybe once in a lifetime — twice if you’re lucky.”
This is what Coscia and the imaging team do day in and day out: carefully stage, light, photograph, edit, and render the digital files of the Met’s 1.5 million artifacts, and send them off to curators, publishers, and, frequently, the digital department, for publishing online.
Since the creation of the digital division in 2009, the Met — like most cultural institutions — has been proactively wrestling with the question of what it means to be a museum in the digital age. How should the reach of a museum extend beyond its walls?
Some museums choose to guard and curate their collections online just as they would in their buildings. Others fling open their digital doors, and let go of control over their collections in the name of reaching more people, and enabling further study and creation.
“Now that many people can access representations of museums and objects online, it’s forced museums to really think about what aspect of artwork they think is really special,” Dr. Miriam Posner, an assistant professor of Information Studies at UCLA, said. “Every museum has to decide what its priorities are.”
IMAGE: KEVIN URGILES/MASHABLE
For the most part, the Met has staked its flag on the side of open access; in 2017, it released 375,000 images of its public domain art objects on its website under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. That means any person can download, use, and change these images however they see fit.
On Thursday, it went further. The Met has now released a public API connecting to over 200,000 open access pieces in its collection.
An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a tool that allow computers to read and analyze a changing set of information. With the Met’s API, researchers, students, social media platforms, or anyone who can run code that interfaces with a digital database, will have access to information about — as the Met’s head of digital, Loic Tallon, is fond of saying— “5,000 years of human history.”
“In many ways we’ve been working towards this for a while, building on the launch of Open Access,” the Met's director, Max Hollein, told Mashable. “We hope people will be creative and hands-on with our collection, emboldened to engage with it in new ways, and—through the data that is now available for every object, painting, sculpture in the public domain—we hope there will be a deep exploration of and fresh appreciation for the historical context, beauty, and resources that exist within this unparalleled collection.”
"We hope people will be creative and hands-on with our collection, emboldened to engage with it in new ways."
The museum is launching the API in partnership with Google, which is using the API to pull these objects into the Google Arts & Culture app and web archive.
“Every month and every week with technologies advancing, I’m more convinced that technology can make art make a bigger impact in people’s lives,” Simon Delacroix, program manager for Google Arts & Culture in North America, said.
Although the Met’s collection has had an online presence for the last six years, Tallon and his department hope that the API will help the Met’s archive reach a farther and more diverse audience, whether through exposure on Google, Wikipedia, or even through social media platforms. They envision that it will enable the creation of creative research projects about the collection. Somewhat symbiotically, it could even serve as a resource that programmers can use to train A.I. in the development of image recognition programs.
“The museum is really trying to figure out what it means to open its doors in the digital age to make sure it can reach audiences around the world, to make sure it's putting as few barriers as possible between people around the world and the objects that can inspire them,” Tallon said. “That really is the global aim here.”
Many cultural institutions are establishing their digital presences, whether through all-access APIs or highly curated digital exhibitions, and everything in between. A museum of the Met’s stature devoting its resources to digitization could provide a path forward for other institutions as they walk the tightrope between access and curation. And, together, define what it means to be a museum, online.
Above the Great Hall
Joe Coscia works in a matte black studio in the imaging department, a space directly above the Great Hall that has housed the department since its founding in 1906. Walking through requires navigating around 10-foot high white halves of spheres — the backside of the museum’s famed domed ceiling. Photographers used to shoot using the natural light from the skylights of the domes, and develop the film on the rooftops of the Met above Fifth Avenue.
Today, this is where imaging, working hand in hand with digital, help digitize the collection.
The process begins with curators who often request photographs of the objects. Every piece of physical art comes with its own metadata — the artist, the date, or any other descriptors. These are initially written by curators and put into the museum’s content management system, created and managed by Tallon’s digital team.
Then specialized art movers in the Met’s riggers department bring the piece into the studio, if it’s able to be moved. A photographer is assigned, based on their expertise (Joe Coscia loves shooting ceramics and bronze, and does a lot of porcelain).
Photographers then stage the piece, making sure that the object stands out without getting lost in the shadows. Each surface, whether paint or bronze or marble, has its unique staging and lighting needs. Photographers then capture all the details requested by the curators, as well as whatever they notice on their own.
“Everything's a challenge, because every single shot is different,” Coscia said.
Coscia works in his dark studio using a Hasselblad camera, shooting in 100 million megapixels that converts raw files into a 600 MB .TIF file. Coscia says the department has always had top of the line cameras, lights, and software, because “this collection absolutely needs the best equipment. The better the equipment, we can make more beautiful pictures of this incredible collection.” Only when zoomed in hundreds of percents on screen do people notice the baby Jesus’ teeth in the della Robbia.
“When you blow it up huge, sometimes you can see fingerprints, you can see all sorts of great things that the artists might have left,” Coscia said. “The curators love it.”
IMAGE: KEVIN URGILES/MASHABLE
Once a photographer has secured the perfect shot, they send it to advanced post-production to get it ready for distribution.
Heather Johnson is an imaging production assistant. She originally applied to be a museum security guard, but now she has a much different role: editing photographs of objects to make sure, as she says, that objects look in print or on screen just as they do in real life. In service to that mission, shadows are Heather’s nemesis.
“I think the thing that people would be surprised by is how hard it is to make something look like you would see it in real life,” Johnson said. “The first thing I learned here was how to make a shadow look real. Mostly because we're so used to seeing shadows, that even if you have no sort of technical skills, you can look at an object and be like, something's off there.”
Heather cleans up the enormous photo files pixel by pixel, which can be both meditative, or a pain. She also makes edits that photographers can’t in real life. The della Robbia came on what Coscia called an “unfortunate” wood pedestal that can’t be removed physically. But Heather can remove it digitally, so the creamy porcelain of Madonna and Child shines against the dramatic gray background, sans ugly wood.
IMAGE: KEVIN URGILES/MASHABLE
Once employees like Heather and Joe finish their work, the head of imaging, Barbara Bridgers, hands the baton over to Loic Tallon’s digital team. Under Tallon, the division has 60 employees working on the website and building new digital tools and content. The team running point for the Met’s API is the collections squad, helmed by lead developer Spencer Kaiser.
“We're responsible for the collection online, the full stack all the way from the databases that the curators use to catalogue the objects,” Kaiser said. “What you see on the website is what we've produced.”
With work on building the API coming to a close, Kaiser’s team is now deep in a multitude of projects, including making the website “sexier,” and building an art timeline, to show what was happening in history during the production of various artworks. His team names their sprints based on constellations; at the time we spoke, they were currently finishing up Tucana.
"This collection absolutely needs the best equipment. The better the equipment, we can make more beautiful pictures of this incredible collection."
With the API and the ongoing digitization process, Kaiser’s team receives digital files from the imaging team, as well as the metadata from curators. A big challenge for his team (and for digitization as a whole) has been making the format of the metadata consistent, since it comprises pieces that have been catalogued continuously over a century and a half.
“Having talked to a lot of museum people about their data projects, we’re all super aware of how hard it is to get presentable data from this, and how much effort it takes to make this happen,” UCLA’s Dr. Posner said.
Organizing databases and programming the API, Kaiser acknowledges that a lot of the technical work is not so different from what any developer making a content management system and API does. The difference is that his team does it at The Met — incidentally, in the same fifth floor space of the museum’s old slide library, where sepia-toned slides of greek statues or European oil paintings are still scattered around the office.
“This type of work, building APIs, can be a similar experience no matter where you are,” Kaiser said. “The real difference is that we get to work with such incredible artworks. The responsibility of getting that out into the world is what really makes a difference for us.”
The old slide library
Loic Tallon works from a standing desk in his office and when he speaks about his work, his words stream out while he simultaneously retrieves supporting documents, or looks up another burgeoning thought online. He recites the full mission statement of The Met at the drop of a hat, so quickly that it seems a talisman rather than a mere collection of words, because he says he is always thinking about the statement and how to best serve it.
Tallon also works closely with institutions outside of the Met to make the collection easy to access wherever people already are online. The department has a “Wikipedian-in-residence,” who helps integrate the collection into Wikipedia articles. It also works closely with Google’s Arts & Culture platform, which serves as a digital portal to museum collections all over the world. And connecting with these platforms, in the case of the API, is really the next step in the process of digitization.
“It might not be sexy, but from a technical point of view, it’s a big step forward.”
“The Met is more than just a physical space—we share our content with the millions of people who follow us on social media and use our website, and digital platforms give us the ability to reach out even beyond these audiences,” museum director Max Hollein said. “This circles right back to the heart of the Museum’s mission—to connect people with art.”
Google’s own goal of organizing the world’s information works curiously well in tandem with the Met’s mission. That synchronicity is part of what’s made the Met partnership and the API a priority for Google Arts & Culture. “It ties back to the general mission statement of Google,” Delacroix said. “And that’s exactly what we’re doing, and doing it at a new scale, with the help of an API.”
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Prior to the API launch, Google engineers manually uploaded the Met’s work onto its platform. But Delacroix says that that process is slow and painstaking. The API will enable the Google platform to ingest a huge amount of dynamic data at once. And while there were previously 2,000 Met works on Google Arts & Culture, the API swells that number to over 200,000.
“An API allows you to do that at scale in a painless way, because you have these two interfaces communicating, and doing the job for themselves,” Delacroix said. “It might not be sexy, but from a technical point of view, it’s a big step forward.”
“With the API coming out, we’re really assertively going down that route of trying to connect everyone in the world to the Met's collection,” Tallon said. “Reducing the distance between people and the object that's relevant to them — that's the global goal.”
https://mashable.com/article/the-met-museum-api/?utm_cid=hp-h-3#2YjBxK_vdsqY
posted by Satish Sharma at
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