The project “Wise Stones (Pedras Sabidas) Interactive Interface Accessible Circuit” is a roadmap consisting of four accessible digital interfaces, exposed permanently in the various floors of the Mines and Metal Museum (MM Gerdau) in the City of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. During the visit, which does not have to be previously scheduled, patrons can touch and handle multiple samples of original museum pieces interactively enhanced by audio information, texts, zoomed images of the samples and sign language, intended to provide access to all visitors, anytime. Noteworthy is the fact that the audio information was developed in collaboration with blind and visually impaired participants, who, during a focus group session, pointed out what they can sense while touching the geological samples. The project originated from the master’s work of one of the authors, Roberto Vaz (Portugal), in partnership with the laboratory LavMUSEU/UFMG, coordinated by Professor Ana Cecília Rocha Veiga (Brazil). The prototype, developed in the initial stage, had good acceptance from both normal-sighted and visually impaired visitors, furthering the development of an international joint effort for research between UFMG, the museum and the Bragança Polytechnic Institute (IPB), in Portugal, through Professor Paula Odete Fernandes.

Wise Stones Website (Portuguese): https://webmuseu.org/mmgerdau-pedras-sabidas/
Wise Stones Website (English): https://webmuseu.org/mmgerdau-wise-stones/

Tainacan is a platform consisting of free WordPress tools (theme and plugin) allowing the management and development of digital collections to be done as easily as blog posting, and meeting all requirements of a professional platform for museum collections. Tainacan has a GitHub open code, managed by MediaLab at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG), having the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and the Brazilian Museums Institute (IBRAM) as partners. This is, in our opinion, one of today’s most promising specific initiatives for cultural collections, especially for having WordPress as a starting point. Tainacan benefits from each WordPress improvement or additional functionality. Along with Omeka, Collective Access and Collection Space, Tainacan is being tested and evaluated, by means of a survey-action and usability tests, in the “Virtual Museums Cultural Blogs” project, maintained by LavMUSEU/UFMG.

Online collections developed under Tainacan: Indians Museum, National Historical Museum.

WhatsApp Monitor is a social media monitoring tool developed by Locus/UFMG (Social Communication Laboratory – Fake News-Free Election Project), allowing message ranking, links, videos and images forwarded in politically-oriented public Whatsapp groups. That tool was used by LavMUSEU/UFMG to monitor museum-related fake news during Brazil’s 2018 election period.

How it works? This system shows the most shared image, video, audio, messaging, and URLs content across over 300 WhatsApp public groups daily. Such groups are open groups, accessible through invitation links that are published on websites well as on various social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In this way, this system view of which images, memes and news were more frequent in the chats of the Brazilians. We hope that this system will make all information shared by Brazilians in public WhatsApp groups more transparent. To identify images with inappropriate content, we use the Yahoo Open NSFW Model, considering as improper all images with a score higher than 0.8, as suggested by the authors.  (Source: WhatsApp Monitor Demo)

BuzzSumo is a tool that allows the analysis of the best-performing content for a given topic. This content analyzer provides a list that ranks the content mentioning a specific term to be queried. It presents how many shares and/or how much engagement a given content obtained on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. It also provides the number of articles analyzed, total engagement, average engagement, among other detailed statistics. The search can be refined by date, country, language, filter domains, content type, word count and publisher size. In addition to the content analyzer, BuzzSumo includes other features, such as influencer analyzer, trend identifier in news and monitoring tools (brand mentions, competitor mentions, content from a website, backlinks etc). The search for the term “museums” on BuzzSumo pointed to an article in BBC about the fire in Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum as the first topic with most engagement past year.

CrowdTangle is a platform that allows internet content tracking, taking social performance measures and identifying digital influencers. The free resource currently available to the general public consists of a Chrome Extension showing the number of Facebook interactions and top referrals (number of times posted, total interactions and total followers, with a segmented list of followers). The data can be downloaded in Excel worksheet format. This is one of the research tools used by LavMUSEU/UFMG in benchmarking and content results analysis.

Google Ngram Viewer is an online search engine allowing users to view the comparative frequency of words in books stored on Google Books. It presents the results in graphs and reports. In the process of text writing for museums and their websites, this tool helps in the selection of terms according to their frequency over time, as well as in evaluating the need for further clarification of rarely used expressions.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps the content producer to prepare texts that meet the SEO (search engine optimization) requirements. Yoast SEO’s features include, among others: text analysis reports within the SEO standards, XML sitemaps functionality, canonical URLs and title/meta description templating. Yoast SEO was used in the optimization of the Wise Stones website, especially the content’s superficial layers (Post it, Fast Text), in accordance with our proposal of a Web Writing for Museums (Exhiwriting) model.

TextExpander is a tool allowing the expansion of texts by means of snippets. A snippet is a user-customized content through which abbreviations can be typed and automatically expanded into a text. Therefore, short abbreviations expand into words, emails or any other texts according to the user’s needs. Museums can use TextExpander to optimize communication with the public, especially through e-mails and social media. Since this tool allows the creation of templates, it can also be used in the production of standard content for museum blogs, such as texts announcing frequently repeated events, undergoing a few alterations such as date and event promoter.

Collabtive is a web-based project management software, an open-source option to other tools such as Basecamp. Some of Collabtive’s features include, among others: projects, milestones, task lists, members with user profiles, role-based permission management, messaging, time tracking, reports, notifications and calendars. Collabtive, available in 39 languages, was the project management software used for the research work “IT in High-Complexity Museums”, the international agreement that gave life to the Wise Stones Accessible Circuit.

Todoist app works as a personal task manager, allowing teamwork as well. Todoist’s features include, in addition to those traditionally observed in the most important to-do apps, the addition of tags to the tasks, providing them with context (e-mail, cell, specific locations, teams etc.). That functionality becomes especially useful in the adoption of the GTD methodology (Get Things Done, by David Allen). Additional resources, such as georeferenced reminders, facilitate management routine. For example, when the user enters the museum, notices will be given on the tasks to be performed there. Todoist presents various features integrated with other software programs, such as the excellent time tracker Toggl. This is an efficient and complete personal organization tool, used by the coordination of LavMUSEU/UFMG.

Trello is a web-based collaboration software that allows the creation of boards, lists and cards, organizing projects by stage, team or task type (for example: to do, in progress, concluded). Some of Trello’s features include, among others: projects, task lists, members with user profiles, messaging and notifications. This is a simple and visual way to organize a text, website or exhibit. Trello has been used by LavMUSEU/UFMG and by the Minas Gerais State Culture Secretariat to manage the development of the MG Museums Web Portal (MG – Minas Gerais State, Brazil).

OneNote is a digital notebook, similar to Evernote, divided into sections and pages, with a structure very similar to that of a website, facilitating its use in the production and storing of web content. This application software allows the team members’ collaboration, pointing to new alterations in the pages’ content, identified by author. OneNote’s features include, in addition to those already mentioned: recording audio notes, inserting online videos, adding files, saving web content with a single click, drawing and text recognition in images, among others. OneNote has been used in the Wise Stones Website as a database for the project’s references and as content backup of the online guidebook. OneNote is also being used in the collaboration and text production for the MG Museums Web Portal.

Izi.travel – a storytelling platform, is a go-to platform where content providers can create multimedia guides for museums, places or cities. Users can access those tours by means of a smartphone app or on the platform’s website.  Georeferenced tours can be created containing images, audio recordings, texts, maps, sequential guides, sharing buttons, a customized profile for the content provider, among others. Izi.travel has been used by LavMUSEU/UFMG in the organization of guides for Brazilian museums, including the Wise Stones Acessible Circuit, located at the Mines and Metal Museum (under construction).

Metaverse is a free augmented reality platform allowing museums to create various types of interactive content, or “experiences”, ranging from visit guides to games. The content is developed on Metaverse’s website and viewed with the help of a smartphone app. Experiences consist of “scenes”, which may present characters, images, texts, webviews, videos, polls, 360^o views, among others. For each experience published, Metaverse provides a unique QR Code and a share link. Metaverse has been used by LavMUSEU/UFMG in the organization of guides for Brazilian museums, including the Wise Stones Acessible Circuit, located at the Mines and Metal Museum (under construction).