Watching the Walker
Posted by Steffen Böddeker
About a month ago the Walker Art Center announced the redesign of its Walker Channel. Initially launched in 2003 as a streaming venue for events related to the influential
How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in A Global Age exhibition/initiative, the Walker Channel continues to feed live event streams while also accumulating the related video archive. It was one the first such event reference archives on a museum website and by now hosts over 200 videos of the Walker’s diverse programming - not just lectures, conversations, and gallery talks, but dance, music, and other performing arts. Justin Heideman, who works on the Walker’s interactive and web-based projects, wrote a post announcing the improvements to the Walker Channel on his in-house blog “New Media Initiatives”. The visual design changes are subtle but are a big improvement in making this large and quickly growing archive more manageable - with a nice sense of hierarchy on the landing page, its own search, and a great browse page (by Featured, Popular, Recently added, and Schedule; Genre like film, music, deign, visual arts, etc; or Type like artist talk, lecture, performance, etc).
Justin outlines the various improvements most clearly in his post, and I don’t have to repeat his points here. His post is an admirable example of transparency in museum practice, discussing the strategy and process and sharing the details on resources and programming. The emphasis is on the technical improvements, highlighting the Walker’s new HD capabilities and conversion of its older videos to contemporary formats. It is a great reference for new media departments at other institutions, as is his blog in general.
Although not necessarily part of the most recent redesign, some small gestures are worth noting as they make this channel work so well: Immediately below each video are the location, date, time, and length of the event recorded, its genre and type, as well as the people featured. This simple information is crucial reference material and tells you a lot of what you need to know - especially when the content spans as many disciplines and formats as the Walker’s does. The genre and type fields are also handy entry points to the browse page.
Below this immediate reference material is a more detailed description with associated links, and tabs that display related media, allow sharing/embedding/downloading, user comments, and my favorite: a time-coded transcript that allows you to read the text and jump from there to any place in the video. The transcript goes hand-in-hand with the subtitles found in each new video, and is probably the greatest tool to make the Walker’s video material more available (by making the spoken word searchable) and more accessible.
Some other large art museums - like MoMA and SFMOMA - have similar online spaces for their video/media output, although rarely specifically dedicated to live event streams. With its recent updates, the Walker Channel stays a few steps ahead of its peers thanks its commitment to high-quality production, consistent use of subtitles, published transcripts, and the clarity of its interface.
Comments [0]