Welcome back to Digital Works, the newsletter from Substrakt that's part of our programme of free talks, podcasts and other content, bringing arts, culture, museums and heritage professionals together to talk all things digital. I'm Katie Moffat, Director of Sector Strategy at Substrakt. Please get in touch if you have anything you'd like to share, or if you need any support with your digital projects. And if you find this newsletter useful, do forward to a friend or colleague.

Latest Things

In case you missed it tickets for our very first Digital Works Conference are now live! The conference will be a two day event, held in Leeds, UK, on 24-25 April 2024. Day one will be focused on leadership, strategy, and new ideas and day two will be all about successful execution. We have announced some of our excellent speakers with many more to come. We also have a call out for session proposals, if you have something interesting to talk about please complete this short form. 

There is also still time to sign up for our free webinar on conducting user research with limited resources. 

In other news from the tech world... xAI (owned by Elon Musk, who also, as you all know, owns X) has announced Grok, their chatbot that is similar to ChatGPT but with a typical Elon Musk vibe, "Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor! A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems." What could possibly go wrong with an AI system trained on the content of X... 

Apparently X is also selling off old Twitter handles for upwards of $50,000. (Related to X news, there is quite an interesting discussion in the comments of a LinkedIn post I shared last week, about whether or not now is the time to shut down your X account).

Google has launched 'About this image' a tool to check the credibility and context of an image. You'll be able to see information like the image's history, which other sites are using it and, where available, any metadata. 

Tis the season for digital trends slide decks, first up this year we have Hootsuite's Social Trends 2024 webinars. Worth registering to get the follow up info even if you can't attend.

In what is potentially a significant development OpenAI showcased GPTs, an easy way for anyone to build their own conversational AI tool. You'll then be able to list it on OpenAI's GPT Store which will eventually be monetized. Perhaps there's mileage in building a GPT to help write arts funding bids 😉

Useful Things

For those of you based near Birmingham (UK), this event by the ESRC Digital Good Network and Birmingham Museums Trust looks good. 

A good blog post from BBC's Research & Development department about the launch of Braid, a new research programme that is looking at innovating responsibly with AI. 

More AI stuff but this time a list of AI tools you might find useful in your work, from chatbots and content generators to audio editing and personal productivity.

And finally for this section, we were reminded this week of this great post from the team at One Further about SEO for theatres and arts venues.

Thought-provoking, Inspiring & Entertaining Things

Internet Artifacts is a lovely nostalgic stroll down the history of the internet and includes some of the most important moments, from the first smiley, to Million Dollar Homepage and Me at the Zoo.

WeTransfer continues to impress with its content series under the WePresent title, for example this recent piece about creating user interfaces for films and TV.

Black Games Archive is "a public facing database of games, digital resources, accessible scholarship, and designer interviews that are relevant to the intersections between Black culture, games, and play."

A thoughful review of Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations” recently acquired by MoMA, in which the artist, "...is using AI to mediate the building in which it is displayed — the Museum of Modern Art". There is a particularly interesting reflection in this peice about the tendancy with these type of artworks for there to be a screen that shows the inner workings of the AI model (which in reality is just a computer screen showing data calculations and code), the author says, "The information screen is really designed to emphasize the complexity of the AI system we are looking at...It feels to me like Anadol wants us to be in awe of this thing, to be overwhelmed by the calculations the machines can make, and by contrast, that humans cannot."

Digital Works Podcast

A reminder that, in addition to our regular interview podcast, we now have a new short 'Bytes' episode, which will be released after every newsletter to discuss three of the most interesting stories in the newsletter. Have a listen and let us know what you think!

Crowdfunding, owning your niche, dealing with censorship and ignoring the trolls - with Zoe Williams - Vagina Museum.

Getting to 1 million digital subscribers, creating meaningful metrics, and working with NT at Home - with George Montagu, FT Strategies.

What effective funding looks like and thinking differently about value and risk - with Fran Sanderson, Nesta.

The power of cultural leaders developing a 'digital imagination' - with Seb Chan, CEO and Director of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)

Running a successful digital project - with Fiona Morris, CEO and Creative Director of The Space.

Strategy & team culture - with Hilary Knight, formerly Director of Digital at Tate, now a consultant at AEA Consulting.

Innovation and experimentation - with Nick Sherrard, a partner at Label Ventures.

Listen to all the episodes.

Good Reads

A very long read about "The people who ruined the internet" by which the author means SEO specialists (spoiler alert: they didn't really). This is actually more about Google's practices, "For the past 25 years, the internet as we know it has been almost entirely defined and controlled by Google. What the SEOs do matters for all of us on a daily basis, distorting how we perceive the world in ways we can hardly begin to imagine or understand. Yet any money that any SEO has made is a fraction of a crumb compared to Google’s 10-layer cake."

Social Internet is Dead. Get Over It. A somewhat hyperbolic title belies an excellent article about how social media isn't social anymore, and it's not really media. Sidenote: these types of articles remind us of the importance of having owned digital channels.

See you soon

That's all for this issue, if you see anything interesting, surprising, fun, or useful, please do share it with us so we can include it in a future newsletter.

And if you're looking for help with a digital project or any kind of digital consultancy support, please do get in touch. Consultancy projects we are currently working on include a digital strategy for a global not-for-profit and a digital capacity review for an arts and culture organisation.

Until next time, stay safe.

Bye!