Sean
H. Gao
Digital Technologies & Tools
Contemporary technologies and tools shape tremendously how people live in reality. For cultural institutions, following the trends, manipulating the collected data with related actions, and utilizing the technologies to help institutional growth can be beneficial. This section presents project and descriptions of how selecting and efficiently applying digital technologies can help enhance museum and cultural heritage services, leading them to inform and engage diverse communities.
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[ Referred Courses ]
Digital Analytics - Elena Villaespesa
Information Technologies - Nicholas E. Dease
Digital Analytics: Web, Mobile, and Social Media class helps build an entire process from how to collect data from different platforms to detailed knowledge of analyzing and visualizing the data. It is a trend nowadays for cultural institutions to embrace digital media and use it as a means to communicate and promote their activities, and also to interact and engage with their audiences. The practical component includes the extraction and interpretation of data, in order to enhance the engagement and user experience on the website, app, or social media activity. The framework of the course also includes real-life examples and guest speakers to illustrate how to use the different analytics reports in order to provide insights, inform strategy and provide evidence to help the decision-making process.
Thematic topics of this class include web analytics, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization(SEO) audits, MOZ guide, video analytics, mobile and social media analytics, Internet research and benchmarking, Google Data Studio, and other high-edge analyzing tools.
Information Technologies class builds up a foundation of computing and networking systems for the program, with instructions on how these technologies engage with creating, manipulating, storing, and accessing information. Essentials include web technologies, database concepts, markup languages, data management, and design and accessibility. This class offers various hands-on activities to acquire skills that are broadly adapted to work with fields related to information technologies. It also explores recent trends in technology within information organizations and cultural institutions by individual needs in order to fir the entire needs of different backgrounds of the School of Information.
Even though these two courses were not taken in the same semester, they corresponded with each other to help build a concrete base for informational structure and analysis, providing smooth transitions to the applicable field of using information. Information Technology class is a lecture-based class because there are so many contents to be covered as entry-level knowledge for the information world. It covers main themes like hardware/software, Internet networking systems, Data & Database, Web Design HTML and CSS practice, Graphics, multimedia, basic programming & API, User Experience & Accessibility, XML and Interoperability, information security and privacy as well as intellectual future trends. This class develops an overview of understanding the information technologies used for creating, managing, storing, and accessing information in the contemporary world. The figure above shows the final group project of this class, focusing on how Digital Information Access in Cultural Institutions is presenting information and facing challenges in the current social environment.
Digital Analytics class, in supplement and in more specific aspects, explained details of how real institutions adopt modern technologies in terms of current digital analytics tools. The web analytics report focused on the Pratt MDC Blog and practiced with hands-on Google Analytics skills to analyze a set of information, providing a summary with a list of findings and recommendations, and creating a Google Analytics dashboard that includes key website metrics. Social Media Analytics is a group project based on analyzing data from one social media platform, Instagram in this case, with a group presentation including main findings and recommendations to improve the performance of the selected account. For me particularly, I was focusing on what are the most successful/unsuccessful posts of Pratt SI's Instagram account, what visuals receive the most interactions, and are long captions effective when broadcasting the information. The benchmarking project focused on five world-famous museums' official websites and how they performed with their SEO analysis. Both the final group project and individual case study were based on data and research in cooperation with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg. This brings out huge attention to real-life data, picking and solving realistic problems from current scenarios and coming up with solutions or suggestions.
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[ Learning outcomes ]​
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Final Digital Analytic Project[Download File]: Andy Warhol Museum
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Case Study[Download File]: Target Audience Shifts of Andy Warhol Museum
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IT Exploration Group Project[Download File]: Individual site on Language and translation issues among digital information access in Cultural Institutions.
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