Colin Brooks – Senior Developer @ Whitney Museum

Rayyane Tabet: Becoming American

Becoming American is a project for the 2022 Whitney Biennial that includes a technical intervention across all of whitney.org, where visitors are prompted with questions from the US citizenship test.

Stepping into open access

Open access is good. We’re just starting and we should do more of it.

Images of artworks on the online collection replaced with wooden boards, over a black background and greyed-out text

Sunrise/Sunset and letting artists take over the museum

Some thoughts on why the Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset project is such a good one.

michaelbot.website

Q: what is michaelbot?
A: square adjust placement and save each one alone or something Holy cow I love it

(michaelbot is a TensorFlow ML model served by Flask, trained on texts parsed from iMessage, that crashes a lot on an undersized server)

A screenshot of the Whitney's online collection front page as of March 2020.

Relaunching the Whitney’s Online Collection…again

Launched a bunch of new features on the museum’s online collection.

iPhone open to camera scanning a QR code on a paper visitor's guide

QR Codes: Alive and Well in the Museum?

Some experimenting with QR codes as an entry point into interpretive materials.

Relaunching Softly: the Whitney’s Online Collection

A bit about developing and quietly launching a new version of the Whitney’s online collection.

The Whitney’s Mobile Guide

Some writing by Sofie Andersen on a Progressive Web App we developed to replace the old museum audio guide.

Dimensions of Museum Data

Some thoughts on online exhibition data, and single question surveys.

Understanding our audiences: The Whitney’s Website Visitor Survey and its broader context

I was part of a presentation at MCN 2018 on a visitor motivation survey (VMS) we ran on whitney.org. As a group we covered the context of motivation-based surveys at museums and some key learnings for the Whitney, both in results and in strategy.

Answering the question “what’s on today?”

Some thoughts on the design and development process for a feature aimed at giving users an at-a-glance view of what’s going on at the museum.

Experimenting with what works

A/B testing and experimentation around whitney.org.

How Many Hoppers?

An up to date count of the number of works by Edward Hopper currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1/1/2015 — 10/5/2016

An animated mapping exploration of the Washington Post’s fatal police shooting dataset. Locations are geocoded through the Google Maps API, and build up a familiar image of the United States.

“Hey could you give me the numbers on that again?”

MoMA, data analytics, data collection, and dashboard creation.

Neuron

Mixed media enlargement of an imagined neuron, incorporating generative audio and video, projection mapping with Kinect and OpenCV, chicken wire, stainless steel, and acrylic.

Recursion lesson & survey

An experiment in teaching about the concept of recursion to new audiences using an animated Sierpinski triangle. Learners read a brief sequence of paragraphs describing recursion while the animation played alongside, then answered a brief survey on the topic.