The Latest from the Blog

Museums and the New Web: The Promise of Social Technologies

Museums and the New Web: The Promise of Social Technologies, an article that I wrote for the Association of Science – Technology Center’s Dimensions Magazine is now available online. It is part of an issue that is focused on Web 2.0 technologies (although the term “social technologies” was used instead.) The article is similar in scope to two others that I worked on earlier this year: Museums and Web 2.0 for the Exhibitionist’s 25th anniversary issue and Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies,…

Where to Recycle, A Google Maps Mashup

Over the last two months, we’ve been working on our first Google Map Mashup using the Google Maps API. Our client has given us permission to release the site to solicit feedback. The application is (of course) in “Beta.” Where to Recycle in Torrance, California allows city residents to easily find recycling centers based on the items they wish to recycle. The concept is simple: the easier it is to recycle, the more recycling will happen. We conducted a card sort…

Rainbows over Pueblo Bonito

We just back from a quick weekend trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. For those of you who are familiar with Ideum, you probably know that we’ve been involved with the park over the last few years, and have developed the website and a book for NASA’s Traditions of the Sun project focusing on archaeoastronomy in Chaco Canyon. This weekend we were in the park to help photograph a possible lunar alignment, but due to cloud cover, that didn’t quite turn…

ExhibitFiles: Development Blog

For the last six months we’ve been working on an NSF-sponsored project called ExhibitFiles. It’s a three-year project and our mission is to “create the infrastructure for an active online community of informal science exhibit practitioners, including shared records of exhibition descriptions as a core feature.” Wendy Pollock from Association of Science-Technology Centers is the principal investigator and Kathy McLean from Independent Exhibitions is a co-PI. Ideum’s role is help design, and build the site which will launch this winter. We’re building it…

RailsConf 2006 or: How I Learned to Stop Wasting Time and Love Web Programming.

Last month I had the good fortune of attending RailsConf 2006 in Chicago, the first official international conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails. For those of you who are out of the web development loop, Ruby on Rails (or simpy Rails) is an open source web application framework written in the Ruby programming language. In short, the Rails framework gives developers the power to create powerful web applications quickly and sustainably using much less…

We’re a Climate Neutral Company

Last month we announced that we reduced our carbon emissions by switching our electricity over to 90% wind power. Today, Ideum has taken the final steps and have become completely carbon neutral. The process was relatively simple and inexpensive. As I mentioned in the last post, switching over to wind power for our electricity costs us an additional $10 a month, and it required a phone call to our electricity provider. To figure out our complete carbon footprint we needed to look at…

More Summer Solstice Photographs

Here’s some more photographs from our trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park on the Summer Solstice. As I mentioned in the previous post the dancers are Hopi and are from Second Mesa, Arizona. Deer dancer makes a call. Three girls with feathers. The youngest dancer. A hunter dancer. The entire group in the Plaza of the great house, Pueblo Bonito.

Chaco Culture on the Solstice

It was an amazing afternoon at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. We saw two performances of Hopi dancers and took quite a few photographs. We talked with the two leaders of the group, Bertram Tsavadawa and Ruben Saufkie. They are from Second Mesa, one of a number Hopi Villages in eastern Arizona. Ruben told us about the importance and symbolism of the dances and their impression of Chaco Canyon, a place that they (and other Puebloan people) consider an ancestral homeland. He also…

Off to Chaco for Summer Solstice

We are heading out tomorrow to Chaco Culture National Historical Park to photograph Hopi dancers performing in celebration of the summer solstice. The park which was a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture, is located in the northwest corner of the state. Back in 2004, I took a number of photographs of another group of dancers on the solstice, the Tewa Dancers from the North for the Traditions of the Sun project. Here’s a few of the shots from that trip.