This posting was originally written in early March. Since then, the world has been witness to the incredible power of water. We are seeing serious repercussions from flood events in this country and around the world. My sense of wonder, joy and enthusiasm below is only possible because I am safe. I know that well, and I am grateful.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Minnesotan – I am drawn to water. Big water, little water, tiny creeks, large rivers, I need to be there. So it is difficult to stay away from the White River even when it is rising toward a flood. I feel like one of those crazy parents, the kind that drags her son along to see the water flowing where normally there is a path. “Let’s go to the danger zone.”

The U.S. Geological Survey installed a stream gauge several years ago to monitor the height of the river. I find can find this data by going to the IMA’s Dashboard, and find it under Topics, and then Nature. The data on the dashboard is in real time.

The artists  commissioned for 100 Acres are told there might be flooding. The inaugural pieces are evidence of this potential.  Here are some images of the works impacted by the flooding back in March:

Kendall Buster, "Stratum Pier," 2010.

The guard shack of Eden II is always a fun photo in rising water:

Tea Mäkipää, "Eden II," 2010.

Even Park of the Laments gets into the act:

Alfredo Jaar, "Park of Laments," 2010.

This tag and pink ribbon are from USGS of the high water markings from the hundred year flood we had in 2005.

One of my favorite things I remember from the 2005 flood is seeing where beaver had chewed on trees at my eye level.

North American Beaver, Castor canadensis, do not climb trees. They were swimming in the water when they ate that bark.

Now in this first week of May, the river and lake are high, there’s water in the wetlands, the bench near the Outflow is partially submerged again, Rue-anemone and Sassafras are blooming, there are broken Robin eggs on the ground (hatched, I hope) and I even saw Aphids on some Elderberry. Life continues.

If you’re just joining us, you can find links to the previous articles here (tag: transparency)

To leave you with a bit more to chew on before we head off, this last article provides some suggestions for how to implement your organization’s own dashboard.  Feel free to add your own suggestions / questions to the comment stream after the jump!

7 Guidelines for Implementing Dashboards

For museums that would like to take the plunge into revealing and tracking their performance metrics online, the software used in the creation of the IMA’s Dashboard tool has been made freely available to the community under an open source license. (http://code.google.com/p/museum-dashboard/) Regardless of the tools used to embrace practices of Transparency, the following are some pragmatic suggestions to consider during your planning processes.

1. Choose a Few Key Metrics

Identify tangible and measurable statistics which can serve as leading or trailing indicators of your institutions success at meeting its mission. Many elements in mission statements are intangible and difficult to measure.  Identifying a few metrics which can serve as key indicators of success to mission is of critical importance. (See Maxwell L. Anderson’s “Metrics of Success in Art Museums” for a discussion on this topic)

2. Identify and Share Areas for Improvement

Museums should include statistics to describe areas in which they would like to improve.  Being open about areas in which we are not excelling creates opportunities for discussion with our constituents and an extrinsic motivation for staff members trying to excel in these areas.  Also, it’s only possible to demonstrate progress if we first share our deficiencies.

3. Simplify the Presentation

Resist the temptation to squeeze all of your information onto one screen.  Executive dashboards often suffer from information overload. Dense displays of data can take time and significant effort to decode and understand even for the most invested museum employee.  If we hope to engage the less invested and ever-so driven-to-distraction web visitor with statistics about our museum, we must start with the assumption that this information will be experienced in a glance.  Our hope is to capture that attention in the moment and offer deeper and more meaningful content easily upon further investigation.

4. Involve Staff

As discussed previously, one of the primary benefits of publishing an organization’s performance in a dashboard is the impact doing so can have on internal communications with the museum’s own staff members.  The active involvement of staff from a variety of departments is critical to disseminating an understanding of mission-driven performance metrics and serves to infuse the organization with a culture of honesty, openness, and a desire and expectation of perpetual and incremental improvement.

5. Explain Your Reasoning

Describe to your audience why you think each particular statistic is worth measuring.  Transparency tools, such as dashboards, offer exciting opportunities to share and describe the ways your institution is attempting to achieve its mission.  Museums should use these opportunities to explain why the data looks the way it does.  Are you succeeding, facing challenges, radically improved in this area recently?  The deeper content behind each statistic gives your institution the chance to engage with interested constituents.

6. Describe the Way You Measure

We all know that it’s easy to deceive an audience with statistics; to make the numbers say whatever we want them to.  Be explicit in describing the ways you derived the information you are sharing.  If you make any assumptions, be sure to indicate them.  If you based your information on another source, be sure to reference it accurately. Information without this description is unverifiable and subject to manipulation.  This documentation will also serve institutions well during occasions of staff turn-over, preserving a continuity of reporting and responsibility.

7. Participate in the Creation of Open Standards

An extremely valuable result of many institutions adopting similar strategies for sharing performance metrics online would be the ability to benchmark and compare statistics across institutions.  Current resources for museum comparative statistics are inconsistent, poorly specified and opaque in their measurement specifics making them generally useless for cross-institutional benchmarking.  The community needs a more sophisticated way of thinking about common comparisons which might be made between institutions and how those measurements might be achieved and normalized to facilitate a better common-ground of understanding.  The impact on the efficient and professional management of museums would be profound.

* * * * *

It is undeniable that museums have witnessed their role in the world change due to the dramatic increase of information and access resulting from the influence of the internet on contemporary culture.  This change has provided museums previously unimaginable opportunities for reaching audiences who are quite literally “a world away”.  However, it is important to realize that we now live our lives in the open much more than we ever have in the past.  Concepts of privacy and previously accepted social norms are changing as well. We can see and experience that this is true personally, but museums have been slow to embrace this fact.  The adoption of open and transparent attitudes toward information sharing allows museums to take an information-savvy and culturally relevant approach to engage audiences regarding why museums are important to our communities, and to share the unique challenges faced by mission-driven organizations in today’s marketplace.  Institutions which can embrace these trends will realize significant tangible and strategic benefits.

Two things in particular which set our Dashboard effort apart from other business intelligence or executive dashboard tools are the way we engage our staff in the process, and the extended integration we’ve done with core museum systems.

In the past several weeks, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the theory and the underpinning logic of why any museum would consider moving forward with a strategy like this.  If you’re just joining the discussion you can find the previous articles here:

1. Walking The Talk
2. Reasons for Transparency
3. Impact on Institutional Culture

This week we’ll take a detailed look at how the Indianapolis Museum of Art implemented these ideas in the IMA Dashboard.  We’ll examine how we structured the experience, what our goals were and what some of the results and unintended consequences turned out to be.

We’ve had some really great questions and points raised in the comment sections of the previous articles, and I’d really like to hear questions / thoughts from the peanut gallery as it were.  Don’t be shy!  I’ll do my best to respond to every thoughtful comment in turn.

Transparency in Practice: IMA’s Online Dashboard

As discussed in previous posts, one of the most important aspects for museums wishing to take steps to be more transparent about their successes and failures is a decision about the best way to share this information.  There are many ways museums might accomplish this. Ideally an organization’s information should be freely available to all interested parties with a very low barrier to access. Many museums have adopted the practice of making their annual reports and even tax returns available online for public access. It would be difficult to make the argument that these mechanisms provide “easy access” to this information since these documents are often lengthy, technical, and difficult to interpret.  The investment required by a member of the public must be high enough to overcome these barriers in order to develop an understanding of the museum’s performance.  While well intended, this method of presentation obfuscates the information which, if shared in a simpler more user-friendly model, might otherwise lead to valuable interactions and discussions with media, donors and the general public.

In the summer of 2007, the Indianapolis Museum of Art began to take steps to capitalize on an institution-wide effort and commitment to organizational Transparency. A team of web developers and graphics designers led by the Chief Information Officer set out to design a presentation of information and statistics about the museum which would enable an at-a-glance interaction as well support of deep-diving investigations into specific topics of interest. The team desired a system which was easy to digest and easy to navigate, and could support the wide array of information important to the mission of a diverse institution.  The project took inspiration from contemporary web design and interaction trends to create a site which would feel fresh, fun and visually engaging.  Feeling that many corporate dashboards were both intimidating and hard to understand, the team strove for a simplicity of presentation that could hook interested visitors into a deeper investigation and tracking of the museum’s performance over time. Finally, the institution needed an easy to use tool which could be integrated into the pre-existing workflows and job demands of many of the different staff around the museum.  The result was a tool called the IMA Dashboard, which was launched by the museum in September, 2007 and later released as open-source software for the benefit of the larger museum community.  Many museums and institutions have downloaded this software and expressed an interest in using it to fuel similar endeavors within their own organizations.

Figure 1 - The IMA Dashboard

The selection of an initial set of statistics for the Dashboard was undertaken by the senior management team of the museum and focused on metrics which had direct impact and bearing on the mission of the museum.  Nine statistics were selected initially covering areas such as, the acquisition of art, educational tours, membership, financial performance, horticultural activities (the IMA is an accredited horticultural institution), and attendance.  Statistics are arranged by topic or by department and visitors are invited to explore related bits of information.

The automated reporting of statistics to the Dashboard was a topic of much discussion early in the development of this tool.  At first glance, the technical slickness and wizardry of an automatically updated dashboard seems to hold much promise.  In reality, several factors existed that complicated this fact and have led the IMA to a slightly different approach.  Remember first, that a key desire of pursuing a policy of institutional Transparency is not only to share that information with our external constituents, but with our internal constituencies as well.  The automation of statistics is convenient in that it saves effort and attention on the part of the museum staff, but can frequently and easily result in neglect.  This result can be attributed more to human nature than to any lack of effort.  Parents of young children can attest that we are conditioned at an early age to tune out automated processes, or expected interruptions.  This is, in fact, the opposite of what we want to encourage in our staff.  Since these are “mission critical” statistics, we want staff members to attend to and understand them each and every month.  If a small amount of data entry causes staff members to pause and internalize this data at the same time that it is deriving a benefit for the public, so much the better.  Secondly, computers are notoriously bad at predicting exceptions to the rule.  Take attendance counting for example.  Institutions can make rules about the hours the museum is open, and about when they expect certain numbers of staff to report, but museum staff cannot tell the computer how to anticipate a weather related closing, or a special event on a day the museum is normally closed.  These cases all require human intervention.  Likewise, there are many types of statistics which are important to the operation of the museum, for which no automated system currently exists.  The IMA tracks the number of hours conservators spend treating works of art in our collection.  We think it is important, that despite all their other responsibilities, conservators should continue to treat the works in our collection regularly.  While many different types of time-tracking software exist, our conservators already have a system of tracking this information that works well for them.  So instead of spending time and money purchasing, integrating and training staff so that we can automate this system, we simply ask them to cut and paste their hours into a web form once a month.

The involvement of museum staff in the selection, authoring, and maintenance of these statistics is a fundamental priority for the Dashboard tool.  As discussed earlier, utilizing members of the staff in the collection, reporting, and monitoring of key statistics is an important way to engage them with how and why certain numbers are the way they are and how the museum might improve its performance over time. Staff members from various departments were invited to submit statistics which they felt would be important to track.  The web team worked with these staff members to author, refine, and create the statistics they suggested.  Each statistic is assigned to the museum staff member most directly responsible for monitoring that information.  Ideally, updating the Dashboard will coincide with existing workflows and reporting tasks that staff members are already performing. The frequency at which each statistic is updated varies depending on how quickly that information changes, from five minute updates for automated attendance counting to twice annually for horticultural plantings on the museum’s campus.  Email reminders are sent to the assigned staff members and updates consist of a simple cut-and-paste operation taking less than one minute and very little technical knowledge. As of this writing, the IMA Dashboard maintains statistics in 6 different topic areas across 13 departments.  42 statistics are current tracked and maintained by 31 staff members. These statistics have been maintained by the staff usefully for over two years as of this writing.

Several of the statistics recorded become quite interesting and even compelling examples of improvements and challenges encountered by our museum during the past year. For example, the museum has a commitment to reducing our energy consumption.  As a result, we track the total kilowatt-hours per month we consume as stated on our gas and electric utility bills. (See Figure 2) We have been relatively successful in this endeavor and have in fact reduced our energy consumption year-over-year in 30 of the last 34 months.  In February 2009, we used 22% less energy as compared to just one year earlier, while in September 2009 we used just 2% less energy than September of 2008.

Figure 2 – The tracking of energy consumption on the IMA Dashboard

Not all statistics are so rosy however.  Financial statistics show that, as a result of the economic downturn, the value of our endowment holdings decreased by almost $100M in a six-month period between September 2008 and April 2009.  Statistics show a 46% shortfall in contributed income compared to the budgeted projections in December 2008, and an adjustment of those revenue estimates in the following month. Early in 2009 the museum went through a strategic restructuring of staff positions resulting in the elimination of several part-time and full-time staff positions – a fact which is reflected clearly on the Dashboard update of our Employee Count and distribution on March 10, 2009. While these statistics are not among the shining examples of museum performance, we are thankful for them. They have given us a chance to engage with donors, board members, funding agencies, and our local city government about the reality of the challenges the museum is facing and our plans for addressing them.  The way these “bad” statistics would be received weighed heavily on the minds of the senior management team as we discussed this series of tough decisions. The ability of the Dashboard to serve as a positive seed for discussion is explained by Anderson, “The point of the Dashboard is both to crow when we see positive trends, of course, but also to show where we have room to improve, either through our actions or as a result of the generosity and support of others.“

Overall, the Dashboard has been received very positively by the IMA staff and senior management in particular.

“The dashboard has been a persuasive tool to use with the news media. Certain journalists who we work with on a regular basis know to check the dashboard for facts and figures, though they’ll still often verify the information with our public relations staff. I believe that the transparency that the dashboard allows permits us to have additional credibility with members of the media. They know that we’re not hiding information from them.”

-Katie Zarich, Director of Public Affairs, IMA

“In my opinion, the IMA’s dashboard has served as a visible reminder of our accountability to our supporters and the communities that we serve.  It is remarkable to me that it is not the data that has gotten the most attention, but the mere act of posting the information for public view.  By openly sharing the information, it has helped to build a sense of trust with our constituencies.  Mechanically speaking, the Dashboard is so user friendly that it enables those who own the data to update it using minimal time and effort.  In order to be a sustainable tool, I think it is important to have this ability to disperse responsibility for its maintenance and to minimize the additional time burden on staff to keep it current.  The one thing I don’t think we have quite figured out is how to incorporate the Dashboard as an information source or motivational tool for staff.  It is a challenge to balance what is interesting and useful to outside users with the needs and interests from an internal management perspective.”

Anne Munsch – Chief Finance Officer, IMA

More recently, the Dashboard has been used to illustrate museum visitor demographics accomplished through the collection of zip codes from visitors to the museum’s campus. This admissions data is then correlated to demographic data about race, age, income and educational attainment in the museum’s local community.  The information is presented in a simple map interface which allows the public to explore these demographics at their leisure. (See Figure 3)  Attendance tracking software utilizes heat-sensitive cameras to detect and automatically count the visitors to the museum.  This data is automatically integrated with the Dashboard tool and drives graphs and charts allowing year-to-year comparisons and attendance projections. (See Figure 4)

Figure 3 – A demographic comparison of museum admissions by zip code

Figure 4 – A comparative graph of month to month museum attendance

Next week we’ll conclude this series of posts with a set of suggestions for museums to use when staging their own efforts online with transparency.  I’d love to hear about ways in which these articles are being discussed in your museums or particular struggles or flaws in these arguments. -Rob

I had originally authored this as a paper to be published in print form, but I think it will actually work better in a blog format like this one.  I’ve really appreciated the feedback and input readers have contributed to my last few posts, and would love your thoughts on this text as well.

Perhaps the most prevalent concern shared by peers about adopting similar approaches to transparency is a latent fear of the unknown, or a feeling that sharing the gritty details with the public will be too overwhelming and therefore misconstrued.  I’m happy to say that the wheels haven’t fallen off the IMA’s apple cart yet, hopefully this series will illuminate some of the benefits we’ve seen from taking these steps.

Walking the Talk – Part 1

The concept of Transparency has received significant attention in the media and online recently.  This attention comes at a time when public doubt in corporations, government and corporate executives is at an all-time high. High profile failures of some of the nation’s largest and most trusted institutions have shaken our assumptions about what had always seemed to be untouchable industries. Museums have always jealously guarded their trusted place in the public’s perception, but is there a risk that this trust will someday be lost?  As caretakers of this trust, what is the best way to foster open communication about the challenges and opportunities that face us as we try to achieve the mission of our museums?  As comprehensive and easy access to operational information becomes the norm, how can museums embrace this as an opportunity and confront internal fears about sharing their performance metrics with the public?

A Working Definition of Transparency

To begin, we must first come to a common understanding about Transparency. Institutional Transparency is a concept that is notoriously difficult to define precisely.  Principally, Transparency can be defined as the open sharing of information regarding a museum’s operations and performance.  But questions soon arise regarding what to share, when to share, and how to share it. These issues are much more significant for museums to consider when crafting an organizational stance about Transparency.

Museums and museum staff members are always striving for the best. We craft strategies that seek to make our program offerings vital and engaging to our community.  We seek to build our collections by acquiring important works of art.  We take extensive measures to protect and preserve the works in our care. We attempt to run more and more efficient operations by carefully crafting our budgets while, at the same time, seeking to increase our earned and contributed income so that we can continue to be effective in fulfilling our mission. If we’re honest, we would all agree that we succeed in some of these areas and fail in others.  We are not afraid to admit among ourselves that we are not yet the perfect museum which we strive to be, yet we seldom talk about these challenges to our constituents and donors.  We share a common fear that exposing these negative facts about our museums will result in condemnation from the press, a loss of respect in the community, and perhaps most significantly financial loss from decreasing membership or donor revenue.  As a result, our staff works hard to control the flow of information and shield the museum from negative consequences, crafting careful rationalizations which attempt to address and make up for our short comings.

Transparency in our institutions has a goal of counteracting these tendencies | realities with a type of radical authenticity.  Our culture values authenticity and looks for it in our public officials and the institutions we trust. For a museum, authenticity means sharing both the good and the bad in addition to the reasons, circumstances, context and challenges that face us everyday. Transparency then, is the ongoing discipline of practicing radical authenticity and demonstrating to the public whatever degree of integrity and operational excellence our museum possesses at the time.

This notion flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of our public relations and marketing departments who for years have sought to protect us from negative public sentiment and donor frustration. Some express concern that too much Transparency would be a bad thing.  Like any tool or technique, too much of a good thing can indeed be harmful.  When considering issues of Transparency we must do so thoughtfully and carefully, with a goal of maintaining an institutional integrity which is beyond reproach and at the same time, maintain a commitment to an open and authentic relationship with our constituents.

Several common challenges will help illustrate these issues. Museums must consider carefully, for example, their stance on sharing the purchase price of works of art in their collections.  Does doing so, enhance or harm the public’s understanding and relationship with these works of art?  Will sharing this information allow the museum to evaluate or improve its performance in some areas?  What impact, if any, would this action have upon the broader practice of art collecting? At the IMA, we have chosen NOT to share the purchase price or valuation of accessioned works of art in our collection. In addition, we have chosen that we WILL share the valuation of works slated for deaccessioning as well as the prices realized from their sale at auction and then listing the ways these proceeds are used towards the acquisition of new art for the collection.

Deaccessioned Artworks from the IMA's Website

Museums often depend on catering and space rental revenues to contribute to their operating budgets. To make a blanket statement saying that we will always share comprehensive financial information for all of our departments would mean that we would reveal financial information which would damage our competitive advantage against other catering and rental operations. Obviously, doing so is not in the best interests of the institution.

Rather than attempting to determine which information is eligible to be shared, perhaps the best approach is to instead discuss which sorts of information should not be shared. This would certainly cover sharing information which would break laws, breach contracts, violate trust or compromise privacy. Each of these situations would constitute a loss of integrity on the part of the museum.  This leaves a vast set of information that does not violate these caveats resulting in a freedom to share many different facets of museum operations.

Is it possible for a museum to share too much information? Do we risk placing an inordinate amount of emphasis on the sharing of information without a clear understanding of the expectations of our audience? Blogger Jeff Brooks examines this in his posting about the IMA’s Dashboard.

“It would be easy to say it’s too much, that it’s too arcane, too detailed, too boring for donors to care about.

But remember, one person’s boring factoid is another’s hobby. Or hobbyhorse. By putting it all out there, the Indianapolis Museum is telling its public that anyone who cares is an insider. Is it possible someone will go ballistic about their electricity use, or their ownership of possibly plundered art? Sure. But it’s not likely. And their openness defuses these things — much more effectively than trying to keep secrets.

If the information is too much, nobody will look at it. Even so, the very fact that they’re sharing it makes people respect the museum more. And who knows what info-sated donors might choose to do for an organization they feel trusts and respects them?” - Jeff Brooks, “Museum opens the books to anyone who cares”, Donor Power Blog, December 3, 2007,

Looking at the question from a different perspective raises an interesting rule of thumb. If an investment of staff time and effort will be made measuring certain statistics, then museums should choose to measure those things which will offer insight to change or improve our future performance, and shy away from those measurements that will not impact staff actions no matter what the results.  Perhaps this seems too obvious at first glance, but the careful selection of statistics that matter is part and parcel to operating as a transparent institution.  Creating a needle in the haystack model of information sharing does not result in better information for the public, or museum staff for that matter.

In the coming weeks we’ll continue to look at a variety of issues at play when seeking to implement transparency in practice at your museum.  Next week we’ll focus on the underlying reasons why transparency is a good idea, and one that all museums should seek to adopt.

Again, we’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions to these ideas.  The IMA has a few years of experience in this area, but we still find that we’re learning more and more each day.  I’m sure if you focus hard enough, you’ll find some discrepancies or deficiencies in our efforts… in fact, we hope you do!  At least then we’ll know about them and can take steps to fix them!  Thanks in advance!  -Rob

First, a quick overview of some technical bits. The user can select a range of dates from the map interface, and a new set of markers is rendered after an AJAX query to the backend PHP code, which requests the data from our database and aggregates it at the zip code and state level. The decision to do this two level aggregation was based on the performance hit that would be taken in trying to render on the order of 7000 icons for a year’s worth of data on a nationwide map. The MarkerManager class (which used to be part of the core Google Maps API) is used to display one set of icons when zoomed inside of what might be called “state level” and another set when zoomed out further. This adds a bit of extra complexity to our colormap choice.

There are a number of ways that this data could have been mapped into visual symbols. The size or shape of the glyphs could be related to the number of admissions, for example. The method that we are using maps the number of admissions to color (when this mapping is stored, it is called a colormap). The particular mapping that we use is important, because some mappings are better than others for certain tasks. For the markers on the map, we use a colormap that smoothly transitions from a blue at the low end to a red at the high end. The particular choice of blue to red leverages our cultural understanding of blue as “cold” and red as “hot” (note that sometimes colormap choice depends on cultural interpretation), a metaphor which works well as a representation of low vs. high admission rates. The combination of these two choices allows us to understand the general trends in the data without needing to refer back to the legend frequently. The drawback is that it is a bit more difficult to compare the value of two individual markers than it would be if we had picked a colormap of more distinct hues such as {red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple}. We tried to make it easier for the viewer to make comparisons by limiting the number of colors in our legend.

The next important choice is how exactly to map the number of admissions to a particular color. To do this well, an understanding of the distribution of the data is necessary. Intuitively, we would expect that there will be high admissions numbers for the zip codes closest to the museum, and the trend will be toward increasingly lower admissions from more distant zip codes, and likely there will be many zip codes with very low, but non-zero admissions numbers. The best way to look at this objectively is with a histogram. I will take a number of approaches with the data from the year 2008, for which the highest raw admission count for a zip code was 12,375 (during the aggregation, 9 digit zip codes are merged into 5 digit zip codes, resulting in slightly higher numbers in some instances), out of 6806 zip codes.

This first histogram segments the zip codes into buckets in a linear fashion, with each bucket representing 10% of 12,375. As you can see, the vast majority of the zip codes end up in the first bucket. If we used 10 colors with this linear mapping, almost all of the glyphs would be blue. It would be great for identifying and comparing the few zip codes that have very high admission, but a lot of subtlety in the big picture would be lost.

This histogram also uses a linear segmentation, but with an upper limit (or clamp). Any zip code with 10 admissions or more are put into the red bucket. This would be fine for comparing admissions from distant zip codes, but we wouldn’t be able to distinguish visually between admissions from zip codes around Indianapolis.

This is where the beauty of logarithms comes to the rescue. Let’s use our example to walk through the process. First we determine the logarithm of our maximum number, 12375, in base 2 (working in base 2 is very efficient for computers). The result is 13.59. The highest bucket represents 12375 in the real world, and 13.59 in exponent-land. Each bucket represents a tenth of 13.57 in exponent-land, just as in our first histogram each bucket represented a tenth of 12375. We then simply derive the numbers that each bucket represents in the real world; 2 to the 1.359th power equals 3 (when represented as a whole number), for example. These whole numbers in the real world are then used to put the zip codes in the proper bins.

The result is that we have teased out more meaning to bestow upon our colors. There are still thousands of zip codes in those blue buckets, but they are the ones that are scattered across the nation on our map, so here we are aided by spatial distribution. In the red zone, there are dozens of zip codes in each bucket, and this is just what we want to be able to analyze the subtleties around Indianapolis where the icons are more spatially dense. It also turns out that this trend is pretty much independent of the date range, and the colormap still works out well at the state level.

On the actual map we use eight icons rather than ten to reduce clutter in the legend, but the algorithm is the same.

You might notice that we use a different type of colormap in the demographic windows. We actually tried using a smooth colormap for this data for the more linear demographics (Income, Age, etc.). The problem was that it was then very difficult to visually relate a particular shade of blue or green to a particular age or income level, which would almost certainly lead to eye strain and headaches. So here we used a more rainbow-like colormap to make that analysis easier.

In summary, colormap selection is a complex process involving aspects of mathematics, design, and the nature of the dataset. It’s one of those areas where art and science come together and the best practices of each can lead to successful communication of concepts and beautiful representations of data.

If you visited the IMA’s permanent galleries more than once this year, it is likely you did not see the same works of art. Each month the IMA rotates different works of art in an effort to display the breadth of the Museum’s collection. The scheduled rotation is determined through a collaboration between curators and conservators. Curators decide which works are displayed and their display time frame, while the conservators regulate the exposure time of certain sensitive artworks. Below are just a handful of the hundreds of works newly displayed in the IMA’s galleries in 2008:

For a look at all the works that went on view in 2008, visit the IMA’s Dashboard.

In celebration of the IMA’s 125th anniversary, the Museum also sought to acquire 125 new gifts to add to its collection this year. Stay tuned for a complete recap of this project.