This interview was conducted on October 14, 2021, via Zoom between Andy Cummins, Director of Product Development, Cogapp, and Meredith Steinfels, Assistant Director, Digital Platforms, Media and Archives, Hood Museum of Art. We thank Public Relations Assistant Anna Kaye Schulte for participating as the scribe.
Meredith Steinfels (MS): OK, so could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and Cogapp? Who are they? What do they do? What do you do?
Andy Cummins (AC): I’m Andy Cummins. I’ve worked at Cogapp for about 15 years. I started there as an intern and now I’m one of the directors. Cogapp has lots of experience, we’re over 30 years old. We are a digital agency in Brighton in the UK. We also do business in America. We work with museums, galleries, archives, libraries, mainly –– so mainly within cultural heritage and the arts. We help clients put collections online and fulfill their missions digitally. We have built things in the past like physical installations, but now and as time progresses, we’ve moved more online, so more web projects. We went through the whole app thing. We built lots of apps when everyone wanted apps –– too many to think of, but I haven’t had to do that for a while.
MS: So, you didn’t steer clients away by saying, “You know that once you release this, you’re going have to treat this app like it’s a pet?”
AC: Oh, we did. We very much did. For example, one project that I really remember doing that for was the Baltimore Museum of Art. They wanted a gallery tour app and we built it in a web application. That was the first web app we did way back when. Then people could bring their own device, and it’s easier for them. I think it’s still online. I don’t know how long ago –– a long time ago. Ten years ago, or something?
MS: Yeah, I mean at least it was a web app and not a mobile app.
AC: Yeah, that’s it. I built [mobile] apps for the Tate and other big institutions who could support those kinds of things, but time has passed and none of them exist anymore, except on the Cogapp website (or in my brain).
MS: Yeah, so it goes. Right, question 2. Before we dive into Storiiies, what I wanted to talk a little bit about was Triple IF (IIIF) because it’s the technology that drives this. It’s a technology that’s near and dear to my heart, and something I want to bring to the Hood Museum in a more widespread way. But I’m awful at describing it, so could you do your best, in lay terms, to talk a little bit about what it is?
AC: So that’s mean, that’s mean! [laughs] It’s dry, and it’s difficult. And that’s why Storiiies exists. I’m just going to cheat because I wrote a blog post once that was meant to do this. My colleague Gavin [Mallory] has also written one. It’s a way of presenting images and meta data associated with them online in a consistent format. If everyone speaks the same language (so uses the same format), then they can use the same tools. It’s a bit like having a common way of talking about images and describing them online. And even that’s a bit dry. What I just said is boring, but what that kind of simple idea does is let you do some really cool stuff. It kind of acts as a foundation for creative interfaces. And that’s where Storiiies comes from. Storiiies presents images online and when you create a “Storiiie,” you are typing your interesting information in, but the in the background Cogapp’s interface is recording it in this special format (IIIF) that others can use. Meaning, the Storiiies that you’ve created, can be uploaded in a different interface and they would look different, but they should work. So, if anyone else made a tool that annotated images, it would work, and it could be presented in a completely different way. It can be reinterpreted and reused. Yeah, but that’s long and confusing, so I would point you to my blog article.
MS: For me, coming from a library science background, one of the reasons that I got into this line of work was because I learned about the process of book stripping. Book stripping is when you take a manuscript, cut the book, and you sell the pages for way more than the sum of them. The pages would get sold to people and, in my mind, I’m asking, “Where’s the context? You’ve lost all the information with no way of putting it back. What if you sell it to somebody who doesn’t know ecclesiastical Latin? What the heck are they gonna do with this thing?” I first learned about IIIF in 2014 at an MCN. I feel like [the technology] was fairly young then . . .
AC: Yeah, that’s a while ago. I think I did my first talk about it then, but other people had done them before me. When I met you in Los Angeles, that was the first time I spoke about it, but we’d already been using it, so I was kind of saying, “Hey, this thing is really cool.”
But your example about the book stripping, there are loads of examples of people recombining pages from various, particularly religious, texts I’ve seen over here in Europe. The Qur’an for example, where people have found the pages in disparate national libraries –– and you know –– some of our national libraries are pretty old. They’ve got all these, disparate pages from various books, and there might be one in the British Library, and then there’s one at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. But they can’t be joined together, except digitally. So, there are good examples of that, and I can see why that piqued your interest.
MS: Yes, that was the aspect that got me: I can do this, I can contextualize this. And like you said, I can now share this in a common language, or using common tools that people can help restore or even digitally restore depending on the context. For me, figuring out that you could restore information was the driving force behind wanting to ask you if you were willing to discuss it at the museum I previously worked at, and now here. Now I feel like I have some traction.
AC: We’ve done similar work with a couple of our clients. One of your neighbors, I suppose, the Yale Center for British Art, and another client of ours the National Portrait Gallery in London. They are using IIIF to share information for research, things like that.
MS: Question 3. Let’s talk about Storiiies. Could you discuss it and tell us about it? When was it developed? Why did you develop it? I know it’s on the website, but I’d like to also hear from you.
AC: That’s good because I’ll probably say something completely different then you can choose the best one. Storiiies . . . it’s the same thing we were talking about a second ago. IIIF is quite dense to get your head around if you’re not in the world of metadata and technologies and things. I mean, it’s an acronym for start, so you have to figure out what that is and then try and say that acronym out loud. It’s difficult. It’s long and confusing.
MS: [IIIF] International image interoperability framework.
AC: There you go. See? It takes ages. What we were trying to do was –– what most of Cogapp’s work is about –– give access to material, so we tend to work with public collections. You know, putting things out into the public sphere. By presenting things in IIIF we could do that, but it was only the IIIF community who understood what we were talking about, so we were trying to demonstrate what you can achieve with IIIF.
We wrote some Storiiies, ostensibly, some annotations for images, then on the original Storiiies website you could see the same content but presented in different ways. It was loading the same files, but one would be presented in the nice new Storiiies default view. You know, the close-looking one that you guys are using . There’s also a long form kind of article, among others. We were just experimenting, and I believe we were doing it all with the expectation of presenting it at the conference in the Vatican. We wanted to go to the IIIF conference in the Vatican to say, “Look here’s all this cool stuff you can do with this [technology]. Let’s start showing people what you can do!” Then you’ll get more people using it and eventually a bit of a critical mass. I think the general idea of sharing and presenting more compelling use cases has piqued people, like your, interest, Meredith, but other people and more and more institutions are using it. Including Wiki Foundations which has started to dabble, and archive.org either had or have a kind of beta version of IIIF content. So, Storiiies came out of us trying to sell that to the wider community.
Then the COVID came around and we were stuck with this thing that we had already put out there for people to use, but we hadn’t really told that many people about it. You know, Cogapp’s blog readership is not in the millions or anything and so we thought, “Nobody is going to museums right now. Nobody is going into libraries. Nobody is doing this stuff. So why don’t we tell the story a bit more widely and let our colleagues and network know this exists and that people should use it?” We kind of just did that in the way that you usually do. We blogged about it. We also talked to people about it and let people know that it is happening and there might be people who are using it. It’s actually pretty cool. There are loads of people using it, more than we know because we don’t go in checking all the time or anything like that. Obviously, you guys are using it, and the Folger in Washington is using it, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is using it. Lots of universities in Europe are using it and then individuals, interesting individuals, got a hold of it.
MS: You might say my next question is mean, but I think it’s important to talk about because I think it’s one of the reasons that I keep coming to back to Cogapp even though we haven’t been able to have a formal working arrangement with you yet. It’s the reason I recommend your work to other people, so I wanted to talk a little bit about why Storiiies is free for other people to use. I believe in free tools. I’m very much that open-source person, but I think that there are maybe a few people in our audience that wouldn’t necessarily understand why you wouldn’t try to monetize a tool like Storiiies because it’s so good. For example, when I did a little test run and showed our educators they were blown away. Now they think I’m a wizard. I told them, “I don’t think you realize how easy it is. It’s really plug and play! You load a file . . . “
AC: Don’t tell them! What are you doing?! [laughs] You could be that wizard.
MS: I know! In the most elegant way possible, it’s so simple. I wanted to talk a little bit about the why. Why a tool like that would and should be free? What made you want to release it openly? How does this touch on Cogapp’s mission?
AC: Cogapp’s mission –– if I knew it off by heart, I would say it –– but there’s a very short strap line that I do remember, and it’s “building a better online world.” There’s 18 of us, we don’t imagine we’re going to change the world, you know, in the bad ways that the big companies do, but we like to think that the work we do improves things a little bit. With that in mind, we’ve traditionally worked with quite large organizations, like the Met or MoMA, over your way. Or you know, institutions in the UK like the National Portrait Gallery. The larger institutions have budgets that are relative to the size of their institution, a lot of our work is unaffordable [to smaller institutions]. Whereas this work (Storiiies) wasn’t for a client, we did it for ourselves. The IIIF community is about presenting work or presenting material for everyone to use. It’s not for putting things behind paywalls or anything like that. When COVID came around, we knew this tool existed and we were already paying for it. We pay for it because we host it. So, it doesn’t make much difference if 1,000 people use it or if 1 person uses it, we’re paying for it.
My job title is Director of Product Development. We do think about products, but quite often we build products so that we can use them for projects. We have Storiiies, for example, and that’s being used on client projects. For example, we just launched a website for the University of Edinburgh, and they are using Storiiies in their exhibition platform. Artists that we know (and who are friends) use Storiiies on their websites to sell their work. We’re able to see the benefits that Storiiies can give to people. That’s why we have added a few features that allows, as you said Meredith, people who aren’t “techie” to use it. It should be really easy to use.
One other feature that we added, after the initial run, was allowing people to upload images. Now you don’t need IIIF images to be able to make a Storiiies. We convert your images to IIIF, but it means that somebody like my little boy could make a Storiiies if he wanted to. He could upload the picture of his drawings and annotate them. There’s so many uses for it, and we are seeing that. Quite often, after releases, you see what people do and how they react to it. Then you can say, “OK. Look, a lot of schools are using this. That’s something we didn’t think of. How could we make it better for them? How could we maybe do something with that?” To be honest, when we released it more publicly, we knew all the museums were closed and we knew that lots of them didn’t have digital teams to keep spreading their stories. We made it available so that people, our local museums, art students, or whoever could use it. So, I guess, I don’t know what the driving force behind that is. It’s probably because we’re a bit nice, I don’t know. [laughs]
MS: We have a tech person and then, Anna Kaye [Schulte], who you’ve met, and Alison [Palizzolo], who you haven’t met, cover communications, digital content, and marketing. So, we have people at the museum who are literate and savvy but not entirely or even primarily dedicated to this, you know?
AC: Right, or primarily don’t have the time. You know, I’m sure if you really wanted to, you guys could learn how to do this stuff. It would just take you longer than people who’ve been doing it for a while.
MS: Yes, there’s those of us who can, but don’t have the time or the capacity. A lot of us in a small museum wear 5,000,000 hats. Storiiies is already very beloved by our educators because one of the things we do in a teaching museum is teach people how to look at art, and Storiiies is so successful in teaching people this.
AC: Yeah, the one you sent through is great. It’s a really good example. The tool itself is so flexible that people can make their own –– it’s not exclusive. You can make your own easily and then, like I said, you can use it in different ways. You can present some information about an artwork like the one you and your team created. Or it could be about diagrams. It could be about anything that you want to give a bit of guidance on. We’ve seen a lot of universities using it. Particularly in the humanities. Also, for things like archival photographs. Maybe it highlights things that you wouldn’t really notice, or that were from a different time. Storiiies can provide the missing context, because without the context –– for example where the photo was taken –– the image has less of an impact.
MS: Storiiies lends itself really well to Thornton Dial’s work, who is the artist in our Storiiies (also see below). We have future plans. Storiiies is making its way onto our menu of digital interpretation tools. It’s the perfect tool for a work like Dial’s Heaven and Hell on Earth (1995) because it’s so dense.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
MS: Last question! Do you have any future plans for Storiiies or any other platforms like it? Because our educators would really love to have the ability to use non-Latin characters, bold, italics, etc. Are there any other sort of development cycles planned for Storiiies?
AC: Like I said, we love Storiiies and we can see it being put to good use. However, we’re also beholden to our clients. We have to do our client work, so that’s our balancing act. Storiiies is definitely something we believe in, and it’s now being used on some of our client projects. Which further proves that it’s useful. Some of the things that we know we’d like to do are small. Many are things that you probably said because pretty much everyone says the same thing. For example, having links in the annotation, bolding text, etc. Which means we have to build an interface to allow people the access to those things. We want to make sure that anything we do is accessible to everyone, so everyone can use it.
There are things that exist already in prototype form that we haven’t told anyone about. One of them is audio annotations. There are things in the pipeline. Unfortunately, Cogapp is really busy right now. We’re booked up, almost to March (2022) or something like that.
MS: Yeah, I mean we work for a non-profit museum and our admission is free. We don’t want to charge people entry. We want people to have access to as much as possible and being able to access Storiiies is very much in our ethos and wheelhouse.
AC: The other thing about Storiiies is that because it’s like an app, but it’s web-based, you can use it on a laptop or a smart phone, but you can also use it with a projector, and project on the side of the museum –– you can do whatever you want with it. I’m keen for people to make it big and put it somewhere.
I presented a slow looking at a conference in Denver, and I just sat in a room in the hotel where the conference was being held and said, “Hey, everyone who needs a break from the conference come down here!” We had all these artworks playing on their walls, and lots of people came down and I got to chat with them. As a projection on the wall, it is an entirely different experience than looking on your phone or on your laptop. I was talking to another museum recently about projecting Storiiies as a kind of installation and about how you could make it happen.
MS: Yes! Thank you for first for taking time to speak with us. I am positive we’ll be in touch again. But this has been very, very helpful.
AC: Cool, perfect. Thank you.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The Hood Museum of Art would like to thank Andy and the Cogapp team for creating and sharing Storiiies. For more information about Cogapp visit their website cogapp.com.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ANDY CUMMINS leads Cogapp’s work on a day-to-day basis. Andy’s balance of technical and production skills have been honed over more than a decade at Cogapp. He has helped deliver an incredibly wide range of projects under various roles from technical lead to producer, as well as developer for clients including The British Library, The UK National Archives, MoMA New York, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Andy has a degree in Software Engineering from The University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is a certified Scrum Master. He has experience in a range of both back-end and front-end web technologies as well as years of experience in Objective-C and Java in relation to both mobile applications and on-site, digital interactive experiences. Andy is a member of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and a member of the board of directors at MCN.
MEREDITH STEINFELS is Assistant Director, Digital Platforms, Media and Archives at the Hood Museum. She joined the Hood Museum of Art in January 2018. Her numerous roles at the museum include: digital strategist, archivist, and subject matter expert in the use of museum digital platforms and digital infrastructure. Meredith was first trained as an archivist and then a registrar, before stepping into the world of museum technology. Her practice is rooted in empathy and user empowerment, acknowledging the imperfect and sometimes harmful nature of databases and data management. She received a B.A. in art history from Goucher College, and she earned her MLIS with a focus in archives, preservation, and records management from the University of Pittsburgh.
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