Before we all go demob happy for Christmas, here’s two things that have come out of the BM over the last few months.
This comes from Jo Sivell, who recently left the BM:
Here is the museum’s first viral game! Based on the Sparta challenge from the Ancient Greece website it is a special cut down version of the challenge consisting of just the ‘Egg Thief’ game which, I am sure you will find, is the most addictive bit. It is very easy to play but hard to master. It uses arrow keys and has sound effects if you have speakers. At the end we direct the user to find out more about Sparta or Ancient Greece in general, so directing traffic to the main site.
Do pass it on to as many people as you can (that’s how virals work) and encourage them to do the same.
And then from the Multimedia unit comes the Gazi Scroll online: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/bengal/gazi/gazi_scroll.html
The Gazi scroll is is one of the star objects in the current Myths of Bengal exhibition. It is 13m painted scroll which was used by itinerant storytellers in rural Bengal, as a visual aid to a spoken narration of the myths and exploits of the painted scenes.
The Educational Multimedia Unit (EMU) and the Department of Asia have just launched an interactive version of the Gazi Scroll on the Bengal Season Micro site. Following on from the success of the video scroll in the exhibition, this new web version has been created to allow users to watch the scroll unroll automatically, scene by scene, or to examine it at their own pace.
However the most innovative feature of this product is that for the first time we are actively eliciting comments from users and incorporating them back in to the webpage for other users to see. It should develop into a growing database of comments, anecdotes and stories surrounding the scroll. The Dept of Asia are particularly keen to hear form the Bengali community both in the UK and in South Asia, who it is hoped will be able to tell us a lot more about the narrative that the scroll holds and thereby contributing to our understanding of this fascinating object.
Individual scenes from the scroll are hosted on the photo sharing website Flickr which runs the comments feature. This will allow the museum to draw on the enormous user audience that use Flickr (which is now part of Yahoo) and feed it into the Bengal site.
It’s their first delve into the world of web 2.0 and social applications, something we’ve been doing for a few years now. However, small steps on the path to greatness. I suppose the only main drawback is the availability of flickr and whether there is any need for maintenance if their URI format changes. Kudos chaps.
OpenCalais helped to tag this with: Asia • Christmas • Department of Asia • Educational Multimedia Unit • Jo Sivell • social applications • United Kingdom • web version • Yahoo!
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