Have you been looking through The Center for the Future of Museums’ Trendswatch 2015?  If not, you can find it (and some related articles) right here.  (If you’re not familiar with Trendswatch, the basic idea is that the CFM looks at what’s happening in society on a large scale and predicts how certain trends in technology, attitude, and habits could influence/affect museums and museum-goers.  It has broader implications for education, design, marketing, and service organizations too.)

One of the trends identified is the rising importance/influence/availability of ‘open data’ and the projects that are created using it.  This can mean anything from GovTrack’s database of US Congressional voting records to the Cooper Hewitt’s 3D scans of their mansion, available free for makers and creatives of all sorts to download and tinker with.

In the spirit of Brain Popcorn’s Ideabox, here are some open resources that you can use, and some creative prompts for yourself, your museum, or your classroom:

Inspiring Images

What can you do with museum-quality images?

• Digital collages, cropping, recoloring, pop-culture parodies, screen wallpapers, custom header for your personal blog
• Print actual wallpaper, fabric, etc. using a service like Spoonflower or similar
• Print images for mixed media collage, mod-podge and resin-based crafts like jewelry or glass jar luminaria
• Costume, set, and character design inspiration for theater classes, writing prompts, and authors’ visual reference files
• History reports, bulletin boards, and VTS classroom discussions with an overhead projector or poster-sized prints

Where can you find them?  (Some of these links also include 3D models and audio and video files, for bonus remixing options)

• Library of Congress Digital Collections (all government records, images, etc. are public domain in the US.)
• NASA’s multimedia resources
• The Public Domain Project (a creative commons aggregator, very useful for searching multiple sites at once)
• Wikimedia Commons (quality of these images can be variable, but there are a lot of topics represented)
• Museum collections online – if you do a google search with this search string, you get dozens of possibilities, including local options (MFA Boston,  Peabody Museum at Harvard, MIT Museum) and more far-flung (Met Museum in NYC, Smithsonian Collections, The British Museum, The V&A).  Not all of these museums have all their records online, and they all have their own terms of use, so it’s important to pay attention to their individual rules, but there’s a lot of information out there for both the casual browser and the intense researcher.  The University of Colorado has pulled together a list that makes a great starting point, too.  [Need a refresher on fair use and public domain?  The Arlington Public Library has a great one here.]

So Many Numbers…

I mentioned GovTracks earlier, but there are reams of numerical sorts of information out there too.

What can you do with lots of numerical/geographical/etc. data sets?

• map customized information onto Google Earth or other visualization services (see Gapminder below) (great for conversations about population density, conservation efforts, etc.)
• track language use on social media (where are certain words or new phrases popular, and what kind of people are using them?)
• More maps: what do people in each state search most often on the internet?
• Plan a student advocacy campaign for something your class decides is important.  Who are your legislators and what do they think is important?  Who do you have a chance of convincing based on their records?

Where can you find data sets?  Please bear in mind that a lot of these sites aren’t going to have data that’s super interesting to a class of third graders, for instance.  For middle, high school, and college students, not to mention professionals, sure.  But if you have rec’s for kid-friendly data, I’d love to hear them!

• Data.gov – open data sources for cities, states, and the federal government
• 30 Places to find Open Data
• 20 Free Big Data Sources
• Data, Data, Data (these three have some overlap, but each include some unique links, so have them all!)

This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you have other great sources of open data, or suggestions for cool projects, please share them in the comments below!

What’s next?

Looking to make a set of data you or your organization has a part of the open data universe?  Check out Open Data Commons for a getting-started guide and important legal information.

As a logical extension of open data, some people are going all the way to ‘open objects,’ such as Jeremy Deller’s Do Touch project, in which objects from a historic collection are brought out to the public in malls, parks, etc, and made available for exploration.  This is a great idea, and it would be great if museums could do more of this! The Active Collections project is all about helping museums identify which objects are truly serving their missions: if they could also identify what could be used as ‘educational collection’ for this kind of purpose, think how inspiring that could be.

Open data is being used for community mapping, app building, advocacy, education, and more.  What are other possible mid- or end-points for this trend?