The next generation of digital publishing: Integrated strategies for online scholarly content at SFMOMA

Sarah Bailey Hogarty, New Museum, USA, Jennifer Knox White, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA, James Provenza, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA

Abstract

Keywords: digital publishing, content strategy, OSCI, collection, exhibition, Web

Introduction

In July of 2017, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) launched Soundtracks, a digital publication accompanying an exhibition of sound-based art presented in the museum’s galleries. The first fully-online exhibition catalog produced by SFMOMA, it was also the museum’s first digital publication since the collection-focused Rauschenberg Research Project (RRP), published four years earlier as part of the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI). Soundtracks proved the perfect launch pad for the museum’s next phase of our digital publishing program, as it provided an opportunity to assess the findings from the OSCI project, extend these learnings to exhibition-based publications, and reflect on the opportunities and challenges around documenting and representing time-based art for online audiences.

Crucial to our approach to the Soundtracks publication were lessons learned from three distinct phases of the RRP: production, evaluation, and the publication’s post-launch life. While the first provided an established model for organizational questions related to staffing, process, and workflow, the latter two helped guide decisions around structure, functionality, integrated user experience, and design.

Evaluations of the RRP and the wider OSCI project in particular provided key guideposts. As Laura Mann reported to the Museums and the Web conference in 2016 (Mann, 2016), the 2014–15 assessment of the RRP by Frankly, Green + Webb (FG+W) highlighted the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and metadata to the discoverability of online publications, pointing to the tight integration of the RRP with the museum’s existing website pages as particularly successful in this regard. The study also turned up a corresponding challenge, namely the need to clearly convey the boundaries of a publication if it is integrated into the larger website in this way—to distinguish between what belongs to the publication and what lies outside it. Mann notes “Confusion about the boundaries . . . has the potential to undermine audience trust in the publication as a specialist, scholarly source.” Similar concerns were reported by other OSCI participants as well (Albers, 2017; Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age, 2017). Further, among the key findings of the OSCI project, as summarized in the Getty Foundation’s Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age: A Final Report on the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (2017), was the efficacy of repurposing technological tools and content, given the considerable institutional resources invested in establishing a new platform.

With these findings in mind, we approached the Soundtracks digital publication as an opportunity to develop a sustainable template that would be integrated into the museum’s site as a whole, would draw on tools developed for the RRP, and would be flexible enough to apply to a range of publication types and scales: collection- or exhibition-based; small, focused studies; or larger, longer-term undertakings.

Building a sustainable digital publication template

Designed to deeply integrate with the online collection, the RRP is a highly focused, customized digital publication. Its primary building block is the collection artwork record. Each piece of content included in the publication—essays, alternate views of the artwork, museum files, commentary, interviews, or related publications—was uploaded to the museum’s CMS with an explicit relationship to an artwork record.

The RRP was published prior to the launch of the museum’s redesigned and rebranded website in 2015. As this previous iteration of sfmoma.org was not conceived to support the deep content included in the RRP, new page templates and content relationships had to be created specifically for the publication. The user experience, however, was designed to integrate with the site as a whole. Because of this, migrating the RRP to our new website platform in 2015 proved extraordinarily difficult, resulting in the RRP relaunching on the new sfmoma.org two months after the overall site launch. Within the site’s new framework and design ethos, however, the RRP landing page remains an outlier.

In addition to the design constraints, we also learned that because RRP content was so closely coupled with the online collection, the publication’s infrastructure was ultimately too constrained to support the goals of a scalable and sustainable digital publications program—goals that included aspirations to create non-collection-based digital publications such as exhibition catalogs.

Drawing on these learnings, we developed an approach to the next iteration of digital publications that focused on a templated structure that would work for both collection- and non-collection-based content, and would be built off the new site’s existing user experience design. Using the new site’s founding principles—immersive imagery, in-page navigation paired with scrolling, and clearly contextualized related content blocks—we created the framework for a new digital publication content type.

Although this iteration of digital publication would use a templated approach derived from the site’s extant user experience design, it was important for the visual design to clearly distinguish the boundaries of the publication, as noted above. Using a standard sfmoma.org landing page as the starting point, we designed a customizable digital publication landing page with a specifically tailored full-screen hero image with text overlay, designed to drop users into an immersive, cover-like experience. In-page navigation appears immediately below the hero image, or “cover,” and in this way serves as the publication’s table of contents.

Figure 1

Users can either click on an in-page navigation item to drop down to their selected content, or scroll for a more holistic view of the page and its contents. The in-page navigation sticks to the top of the page as users scroll down, a feature that appears throughout sfmoma.org. Here, however, and throughout each publication, the in-page navigation is assigned a color palette specific to that publication. This serves as a visual cue that alerts readers they are within the space of the digital publication.

Figure 2

Below the in-page navigation on the landing page are links to the publication’s individual content pieces. These take the form of “promos”—related content blocks similar to those used elsewhere on sfmoma.org. Designed to aggregate related content links, promos can be attached to landing pages, event or exhibition pages, article pages, or artist and artwork pages, and can present single or multiple related content items. Promos display a thumbnail image with a page title, and have the capacity for introductory text to provide further context to the related content. For the digital publication template, our Web developer created a new type of promo, called an “article promo.” When attached to the digital publication landing page, the article promo applies the publication’s specifically branded in-page navigation to the attached articles. The “article promo” plugin allows a content creator to attach multiple articles to the digital publication landing page, and in doing so, to apply the publication’s branding across all the subsidiary pages, thereby providing the visual demarcation necessary to instill user confidence in the boundaries of the digital publication.

It should be noted that “article” is an umbrella term the SFMOMA CMS uses to describe several key content types and their related page templates:

• “Essay” pages (designed for essay-length scholarly content);
• “Read” pages (a more flexible template, designed for texts of various types, ranging from press or news-related content to institutional story-telling to scholarly material);
•  “Watch” pages (for embedded video content);
• “Listen” pages (for embedded audio content).

The “essay” template was first developed for the RRP but now serves, since the 2015 site redesign, as a valuable stand-alone content type utilized across sfmoma.org, not only in digital publications. The previous iteration of sfmoma.org did not include any long-form written content, so essays were exclusive to the RRP and thus strictly coupled with an artwork record. This relationship meant that an essay could only be expressed as subsidiary content on an artwork page. This tightly coupled format significantly limited the scope and subject matter that an online essay could have—for instance, thematic essays or essays that linked multiple artworks or artists were not possible.

As part of our new approach to online scholarly content, we knew that we wanted to provide a decoupled essay content type that would allow curators and external contributors to write essays addressing a broad spectrum of subject matter, not just a single artwork. So as part of the 2015 site redesign, we modified the essay format so that content producers can now manually select the relevant relationships, thus allowing an essay to exist on its own or to be closely coupled with an artwork or artist (or multiple artworks or artists). In the first instance, a decoupled essay can be displayed on its own in a single-item promo;

Figure 3

as part of a suite of content;

Figure 4

or as a subsidiary of a digital publication included in an “article promo.”

Figure 5

In the second instance, an essay that is expressly coupled with an artist or an artwork object is automatically displayed on the artist or artwork page. Importantly, it can also be expressed in all of the ways listed above.

Other key features developed for the RRP essay were integrated into the new, stand-alone essay content type as well. Essays represent the deepest level of scholarly content on the site, so maintaining the footnote feature was paramount. Developed to be interactive, the footnote feature allows users to click on a supertext number in the text and be immediately dropped down to the note at the bottom of the page. When clicked on, a small caret at the end of the footnote then pops users back to the footnote number so that they can continue reading where they left off.

The citation creation feature introduced in the RRP has also been ported to the generic essay content type. When readers highlight a selection of text included in an essay, a “create citation” button appears in the right margin of the page. This button activates a dialogue box that displays the highlighted text with the concomitant citation, which users can then simply copy and paste into their own document. Finally, the paragraph numbering feature that was first introduced to the RRP essays was also migrated over to the new, generic essay content type.

Figure 6

In the case of the Soundtracks publication, the “read” page template serves as the container for all content. This template, developed as part of the 2015 site redesign, was selected because it allowed greater flexibility for the layout of text, image, and multimedia, thereby better accommodating the range of material in the publication, which includes an artist project, a conversation, new pages devoted to each of the artists in the exhibition (most of which include embedded multimedia), as well as a more straightforward introductory essay. For example, images in the “read” page template are centered and can span the full width of the text column, lending them more prominence; in the “essay” page template they are inline, and so typically smaller, and more similar to the standard treatment of comparative illustrations in a print publication. “Read” articles can also contain embedded video and audio. As originally designed, however, the “read” template did not include footnote functionality, so additional development was required to incorporate this tool from the “essay” template.

As we prepared to launch the Soundtracks online exhibition catalog in conjunction with the show’s opening, discussions began to crystallize around the creation of a collection-based digital publication highlighting SFMOMA’s extensive collection of Japanese photography. Focus on Japanese Photography would center on the work of key practitioners of the last six decades, all of whom were already represented in the online collection. Five artists were selected for the initial launch of the publication, with additional artists and related materials to be added in subsequent publication phases.

With our new digital publication template in hand, we began to look at the implications of integrating extant artist and artwork pages into the digital publication framework. Whereas the non-collection artist plate pages featured in Soundtracks were built as “read” articles, collection artist pages comprise a framework that scrapes data from EmbARK, SFMOMA’s collection management system. For this reason, these pages are far less fungible, and any changes to their underlying structure requires development work. Luckily, the RRP’s essay relationship feature had also been deployed to artist pages. When content producers associate an essay with an artist or an artwork, this results in the published essay displaying automatically on the relevant artist or artwork page. In the new iteration of sfmoma.org, this expression takes form as an in-page navigation item called “Essay,” which anchors to a promoted content card featuring a representative image, the title and author of the essay, a brief description, and a call-to-action button to “read” the essay.

Figure 7

A collection-based digital publication, then, could easily incorporate artist-related essays that would automatically display on the collection artist page. Those essays could also be attached in aggregate to a digital publication landing page using the aforementioned article promo, which would then apply the publication’s branding to them.

However, the inclusion of collection artist pages into a digital publication presented a new and interesting conundrum. Our main concern was how to express that an artist page is part of a digital publication without limiting the inclusion of that same artist page in future digital publications. Additionally, if a collection artist page were to reflect the topline branding of a digital publication, what would that communicate to a user who landed on the page from an SFMOMA or Google search? We quickly came to the consensus that applying the topline digital publication branding to a collection artist page was not sustainable, because it would prohibit that collection artist page from featuring in any future digital publications and deliver a confusing experience to users landing on the artist page from external referrers. Instead, we worked with our developers to build writable in-page navigation functionality into the collection artist pages, which would allow us to visually organize the collection artist page content and explicitly call out the publications (or in this instance, the digital publications) with which the page is associated. Writable in-page navigation also allows us to manually upload text to the collection artist page using the text block content type, allowing greater flexibility for artist-specific content development. Previously, biographical information included on an artist page could only be served via the daily systems integration from EmbARK and had to first be entered as HTML into that platform’s biography field. Implementing writable text fields onto the artist page now allows us to include more flexible content that can be added or edited by content producers as needed.

In addition to collection artist pages, Focus on Japanese Photography includes newly created “essay” articles and extant “watch” articles with embedded video interviews with featured artists (produced and published in conjunction with the 2016-17 exhibition Japanese Photography from Postwar to Now). Using the article promo, the “essay” and “watch” articles were attached to the Focus on Japanese Photography digital publication landing page, affording them the topline branding. These pages serve as a good example of how access to a digital publication can be deployed across the website for greater discoverability. Available via the Focus on Japanese Photography digital publication landing page, they are also found on the Japanese Photography from Postwar to Now exhibition page, collection artist pages, artist interview “watch” pages, or via SFMOMA search.

Figure 8

Similarly, digital publications as a whole are promoted via single-item promo cards across the relevant areas of the site, including related exhibition pages, Projects + Perspectives (the museum’s online publishing platform, or blog), and collecting area landing pages. Digital publications also feature prominently on the Publications landing page.

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The digital publication of time-based artworks

Pursuing a digital publication model for Soundtracks had clear advantages over print, given the nature of the works included in the exhibition. Movement is frozen in print—video stills, film stills, and production stills can capture the look of a kinetic sculpture, a film or video, or a performance at a moment in time, but not its duration—and depicting works incorporating sound, or based purely on sound, is more challenging still. Yet this approach opened up a new set of questions related to how best to represent the works included in the exhibition—questions that art institutions are still grappling with as durational artwork increasingly takes enters our collections and galleries. But how to reproduce the experience of these works in the museum’s galleries in an online context?

The works included in Soundtracks take myriad forms and use sound in a variety of ways; early in the planning stages, it became clear that no single form of documentation would serve every work. It also became clear that replicating the in-person experience was an impossible goal; rather, audio and video documentation had to be seen as another means to convey a sense of the work, working in combination with text and still photography to convey the artist’s intent.

The following questions came to the fore: Does the work have a visual component, whether sculptural or media-based? How important is the visual component to the experience of the work? Is the audio programmed or pre-recorded, or is it created on-site as the viewer experiences the work? Is it single-channel or multi-channel? Is the experience primarily a private one (with headphones) or public? How does the artist intend the work to be experienced?

The means of representing the works in the publication varied accordingly.

Audio only

The primary visual component of Christina Kubisch’s Cloud (2011/2017) is a sculptural tangle of red electrical wire suspended in the gallery. The artist programs recordings of magnetic fields into the loops of cable, and visitors wear specially-designed headphones that convert the magnetic fields into sound as they move around the sculpture. The random compositions that result from the mixing of sounds as the viewer interacts with the sculpture are a key aspect of the work. The publication contains two audio recordings of different types—an excerpt of one of the recordings programmed by the artist into the cable “cloud,” and a recording of a walk around the cloud, documenting the random mixing of channels.

Bill Fontana’s Sonic Shadows (2010) also produces a live composition, but in this case the sound is transmitted through loudspeakers rather than headphones. The site-specific piece, located on a bridge with the museum’s large ocular skylight above and the entrance atrium five floors below, uses vibration sensors attached to elements of the building to produce what exhibition curator Rudolf Frieling terms “an acoustic drawing in real time.” Sounds played by speakers on pan-tilt heads bounce off the curved walls surrounding them, and spread throughout the building. In the Soundtracks publication, a binaural recording made in 2011, when the piece was first installed at SFMOMA, approximates the experience of the work from a stationary point above the bridge. Though it does not reflect the experience of a visitor traveling through the building while hearing the piece, it captures the presence of ambient sound—part of every viewer’s experience of the work—and the movement of the sound as it bounces around the building. A second recording will be added to the publication in early 2018; made while the work was installed as part of Soundtracks, it will document changes to the work due to the expansion of the museum’s building in 2013–16.

Video/audio

Video recordings were used in the publication for works incorporating movement in various ways. Anri Sala’s Moth in B-Flat (2015) is a drum set suspended upside down, with floating drumsticks that tap out an unsteady rhythm. The work was installed on a landing at the entrance to the exhibition, where it invited visitors to pause before being drawn into the galleries by the sounds emanating from within. The video reflects this interaction, recording the sounds of visitors and other works as background to the drum’s beats.

By contrast, the video documentation of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s clinamen v.3 (2012–ongoing) is free of ambient sounds. This reflects the artist’s intent that the work—a large pool of water filled with floating porcelain bowls that circulate on a gentle current, producing melodic chimes as they tap together—provide a site for quiet contemplation.

360 video/audio

When we began this project, we knew that Soundtracks would provide an ideal opportunity to experiment with 360 video documentation. Building on our collaboration on Self Composed, a digital selfie station launched in 2016 in the museum’s photography interpretive gallery, we reached out to the Adobe Design Studio, because they had been experimenting with 360 video and audio capture. This innovative technology pairs spatial audio with 360 video, allowing different sounds to resonate more clearly at different “places” in the 360 video capture.

Two works in particular were especially well suited to this form of documentation: Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012) and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon’s Inside You Is Me (2016). The Visitors is a multi-channel video installation that immerses visitors both aurally and visually. Two back-to-back screens are positioned in the center of a darkened room, surrounded by seven screens mounted on the surrounding walls. Each screen has its own audio output, which encourages visitors to focus their eyes and ears on a single performer while still hearing the resonant sounds of the rest of the captured performances. The effect is enveloping. Similarly, Inside You Is Me is a room-size installation with multi-channel audio. In both instances, the format of the work closely follows the key functionality of the 360 audio/video technology.

The SFMOMA website uses Brightcove to host all of our video content, including the Soundtracks documentation. Our initial hope was that we could implement Brightcove’s 360 video plugin to embed the 360 video documentation in the publication. Upon further testing, however, we learned that Brightcove’s plugin was not mature enough to serve our purposes. Instead, we uploaded the 360 video capture to SFMOMA Shorts, the museum’s YouTube channel. YouTube’s 360 plugin, although not perfect, as it does not perform on all browsers, is far more functional than Brightcove’s, and proved a viable solution for the purposes of the publication. To capitalize on YouTube’s enormous viewership, a link back to the publication was included in the video’s description.

In addition to the advantages of a digital publication model for representing works with a durational aspect, producing an online exhibition catalogue for Soundtracks allowed us to incorporate documentation of works that were created for the exhibition; were substantially altered for their presentation at SFMOMA; or that incorporated live performance in the galleries—which the long lead times for print publishing often render impossible. With no lag time for printing and delivery of a physical book, documentation could be made and incorporated relatively quickly after the installation of works but prior to the launch of the publication for the exhibition opening.

Still, documentation of works can be time consuming and complex, especially during an active installation. For this reason, we developed a two-phased approach: before the exhibition opening, we focused on capturing still photography of newly created works and new iterations of existing works, and then incorporated these installation views into the publication for its initial launch. We then turned to completing new audio and video documentation once the exhibition opened, and then launched a second edition with this multimedia documentation in place a few months into the run of the show.

Organizational support for digital publications at SFMOMA

This rapid turnaround could only be accomplished with an agile internal workflow and a high degree of collaboration between departments across the museum, including installation, exhibitions, photography, marketing and communications, Web and digital, design, curatorial, and publications. It was also made easier by existing organizational structures within the museum, particularly the grouping of Web and digital, design, and publications within the same division.

The close alignment of Web and digital, publications, and design was key not only to the production of the Soundtracks catalogue, but—simultaneously—to the development of the digital publication template. Working with an internal Web development and design team that was intimately familiar with content production, as well as the overall user experience of sfmoma.org, allowed us to quickly and efficiently brainstorm, iterate, socialize, revise, and implement design and feature sets for the digital publication template. Sarah Bailey Hogarty project managed the sfmoma.org site redesign, and currently helms Web content production, bringing project and product management best practices to the project. Jennifer Knox White’s extensive experience with developmental editing for exhibition catalogs informed her understanding of how a template would best serve its readers, helping the team adapt the structures of print books to a digital environment; she also worked closely with curators and contributors to develop the publication’s concept and content. James Provenza was responsible for both the design of the new sfmoma.org and the Soundtracks exhibition design, so he was perfectly positioned to seamlessly translate the in-building experience to the sfmoma.org design language in ways that an external contractor never could.

During production, this organizational structure fostered a nimble process. Text and image changes could be quickly incorporated and approved. Adhering to agile Web development best practices, tweaks to the template were placed into the Web development queue along the way, and with testing, allowed us to improve the interplay between the template, the content, and the user experience. Due to the deep skill sets of all departments involved, much of the artwork documentation and audio/video editing for assets included in the publication was handled by the Web and digital department (in consultation with the publications, design, and curatorial departments), rather than an external production team. Additional documentation support was provided by the marketing and communications team, with whom Web and digital works closely; this collaborative relationship made it easy to leverage additional assets produced by the marketing and communications group for use in the digital publication. Close cooperation and continuous communication between departments also contributed to fewer editorial rounds and a smaller margin of error.

The entire project was managed using Asana, the museum’s project management tool of record. This platform will be utilized moving forward to maintain the upkeep of the digital publications, with any edits, new content, or updated credit lines entered as tasks into Asana, and assigned accordingly.

Analytics

At the time of this writing, only the first edition of the Soundtracks digital publication has been evaluated. Data for the second edition will be available in early 2018, and will be supplied at the conference. When reviewing the analytics for the first edition, it is important to note that the publication did not yet include any multimedia content. We are excited to see the difference in engagement between the first and second editions.

When the Soundtracks digital publication launched on July 12, 2017, it was promoted across the site on the following pages:

• Soundtracks exhibition webpage
• Projects + Perspectives
• Publications landing page

During the first edition evaluation period (July 12 to October 25, 2017), the digital publication received 28,092 total page views.

Figure 10

The top referral page to any Soundtracks content was the digital publication landing page, an indication that when users entered through the landing page, they continued to peruse the publication’s subsidiary pages. There were also more than 1,600 clicks from the Soundtracks exhibition page to the digital publication.

The most visited page off the Soundtracks digital publication landing page was the Ragnar Kjartansson artist page.

Figure 11

We intentionally attached the full artist page article promo to each individual artist page (excluding the base artist page) in the hope that these pages would serve as a key navigational path through the digital publication.

Figure 12

As such, one of the key questions we were interested in answering was if users navigated through the publication via these artist pages. By and large, the top most visited page off an individual artist page is the digital publication landing page—an indication that users frequently returned to the landing page to facilitate further navigation through the digital publication. That said, however, the next most visited pages are other artist pages, demonstrating that the artist pages do serve as a primary navigational path through the publication.

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The average time spent on-page within the digital publication was 1:50 minutes, with the Kjartansson dwell time significantly higher, at 3:17 minutes. Interestingly, the highest dwell times were on the artist pages as opposed to the longer-form articles.

Based on the first edition, movement through the site pivoted on the landing page with significant subsidiary navigation taking place through the artist pages.

Conclusion

While a full evaluation of the two publications created using the new digital publication template has yet to be completed, the template promises to be an effective and flexible tool for scholarly online publishing on sfmoma.org. The evaluation of the RRP (Mann, 2016) provided crucial guidance for SFMOMA’s subsequent approach to online scholarly content, including its digital publications program. Easily implemented, scalable, and readily adapted to a range of content, the new digital publication template offers particular promise for the publication of ongoing research related to the museum’s collection and of studies and catalogs focusing on time-based art.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Emily Robbins for her assistance in gathering the analytics data presented here.

A research visit by Amy Brost, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Media Conservation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, helped shape the approach to documenting the sound-based works included in Soundtracks. In addition to the papers and report cited below, the papers by Liz Neely and Sam Quigley presented at the Museums and the Web conferences in 2011 and 2012 have contributed to our thinking.

References

Albers, G. (2017). “Bringing books online.” MW17: Museums and the Web 2017. Published March 29, 2017. Consulted January 14, 2018. Available https://mw17.mwconf.org/paper/the-next-generation-of-online-publishing-building-on-what-weve-learned-together/

Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age: A Final Report on the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative. (2017). Los Angeles: The Getty Foundation. Available https://www.getty.edu/publications/osci-report/

Mann, L. (2016). “Online scholarly catalogues: Data and insights from OSCI.” MW2016: Museums and the Web 2016. Published March 21, 2016. Consulted January 14, 2018. Available https://mw2016.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/online-scholarly-catalogues-data-and-insights-from-osci/