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

On releasing the Whitney Museum’s first open access dataset…

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

Blog post about Sunrise/Sunset, and letting artists do what they want with whitney.org.

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

Blog post about updating the API that feeds the Whitney’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?

Blog post about the Whitney Museum’s use of QR codes as an entry point into interpretive materials.

Relaunching Softly: the Whitney’s Online Collection

Blog post about developing and quietly launching a new and improved version of the Whitney’s online collection.

The Whitney’s Mobile Guide

Blog post written by Sofie Andersen on a Progressive Web App we developed to replace our existing audio guides, and align the online experience with the in-person one.

Dimensions of Museum Data

Blog post on Whitney Digital covering some of the ways we look at our 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?”

Blog post on Whitney Digital that discusses 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

Blog post on Whitney Digital about 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?”

Blog post on Digital @ MoMA about my time with The Museum of Modern Art, working on a data analytics, data collection, and dashboard creation project.

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.