This is how I want to be, and what I need from those around me, in order to want to be around them. That includes family and friends, but also colleagues and other associates.
Lately it seems that simple.
This week I’ve invested some time in thinking about time and how to spend it well. I was prompted by someone dear to me, who is currently challenged by a peculiar combination of:
His disruptive schedule (1) creates a general condition of restlessness, which amplifies the effect of his natural aversion (2), causing certain kinds of work to pile up even more than they otherwise might. Both of those factors then work to increase his hankering (3) because the general restlessness and the agitation – of knowing there is a pile of work looming ever larger – join forces to thwart the creative impulse. Which in turn exacerbates the restlessness and agitation. It’s a vicious circle of joyless dissatisfaction.
To solve the angry jellyfish dilemma, we have devised a simple, twofold plan:
Below is the first-draft timetable, made in InDesign. I couldn’t find a template to start from, so for anyone else who might use it, here is the timetable template – 450kb zip file of an InDesign template. (And if someone out there can tell me how to get a full choice of colours in the fill for the table cell style, rather than be limited to a range of about 5 CMYK colours, I’d be grateful! Flip, maybe I should have made it in Graffle.)
The timetable seems to be helping already, to reveal the time that is there for the things that need doing; so he can see how to get them done. So, hooray. Maybe I should have called this post ‘How a timetable can soothe an angry jellyfish’.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve encountered some great insight into and evidence of the potential effect of large public networks on the work of making cultural assets accessible. It has come from two separate sources – Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but also the first ever public conversation between Wikimedia and the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).
I haven’t finished the book yet, so my focus here is on what the GLAM sector might take away from the conference (although no doubt the book is infiltrating my thinking.) The following points are not neatly sewn-up instructional lessons, and of course, people will disagree, but I believe the following are important considerations for those of us working to make cultural assets accessible online.
1. A completely different process of authorisation
I heard a lot of talk about how Wikipedia lacks authority and I heard a lot of what seemed like fear that its perceived dodginess would infect cultural institutions and jeopardise their authority. Well, for me, an almost opposite view is far more compelling.
Cultural institutions hold in their collections assets that have authority because they are original sources. No question; nothing will jeopardise that. And academic research accrues authority through the process of peer review, or by being written by someone who has accrued authority in the course of their professional career.
Wikipedia has an entirely different relationship with authority. Its articles are by definition, necessarily and absolutely not original research. And yes, Wikipedia editing is amateur. But the amazing thing is that Wikipedia articles can achieve a form of authority by virtue of the fact that the community of editors (which includes anyone who wants to be in it) finds a neutral, consensus position, and the article settles into relatively stable content. That stability is a genuine, honourable form of authority. It is not invested through credentials but emerges – and continues to emerge – out of open dialogue. And because Wikipedia gives voice to the community rather than to an individual or institution, in my view, Wikipedian authority is of great value.
I’m not suggesting that Wikipedia is the only source we need. On the contrary, it is vital to check the original sources, to seek out other sources (including primary sources!), to read critically and to adopt your own position. But Wikipedia is an excellent starting point. How many of us would deny that we regularly use it?! And the fact that Wikipedia content must be verifiable – cite and refer readers to reliable sources – positions it very well as a potential partner for cultural institutions.
2. A horde of willing and able enthusiasts
The arresting image below resides in the German Federal Archive but now – along with almost 100,000 others – it also resides in the Wikimedia Commons.
Jewish women with yellow star, Paris, June 1942 – from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia – Deutsches Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F000136-0009
It’s there because Mathias Schindler negotiated a deal with the Bundesarchiv, by which the archive would release 100,000 images into the public domain, and in return, Wikipedians would help by describing the photographs and matching person data (authority files – the A-word again!) in three places – German Wikipedia, National Archive and National Library.
As an employee of a federal archive, I am acutely conscious of the scale of the work involved in description and digitisation – core tasks usually prerequisite to making cultural assets accessible. Anything with the potential to distribute this load must be worth exploring. That way, more culture can be shared more widely which is, of course, the point.
The experience of the National Library of Australia in soliciting bulk text enhancement – via its wonderful Australian Newspapers project – provides further evidence that the public can be relied upon to do a mammoth amount of good work in enhancing OCR’d microfilm.
3. More accessible doesn’t seem to mean less profitable
And importantly, evidence is amassing at the Powerhouse Museum that increasing the accessible reach of your photographs, through the Flickr Commons, has a massive impact on how many people see and tag your images, but very little effect on image sales.
So…
In short, unlike Angelina, I came away from GLAM-wiki feeling fairly enthusiastic – like Gerard – about the possibilities for partnership.
Senator Kate Lundy’s Public Sphere forum this week was exciting, not least because amongst all the compelling presentations, the Government 2.0 Taskforce was announced. Its role is not only to help the government navigate into the future of greater transparency and collaboration, but also to fund projects to the same end. So what might the taskforce fund? Well, here’s an idea, and a fairly fundamental, simple one at that.
Last night I watched Us Now, a film that makes a great case for how a distributed, collaborative approach can trump a top-down approach in ventures ranging from commercial money-lending to selecting players for a football team to allocating government funds. (An aside: I was struck by how accepting the model railway guys were of the crowd-sourced decision, even though it denied them any council funding. As one of them said – I’m paraphrasing – he had had his eyes opened up to all the other worthy projects, and he was satisfied that the process had been fair. Key point: transparent, collaborative decision-making is satisfying, even when you don’t get what you want.)
Because there seem to be so many areas of government policy and service that might be improved by some citizen collaboration, I started to wonder where those possibilities end. What are the limits to Government 2.0? Of course, the best way to answer that question would be to ask the people. What do you want a say in? And how?
For me, there are many potential points of intervention. My first thoughts are rather trivial – we could ban sticky labels on fruit! And rid the country of those horrid robo-loos that have taken over where public toilets used to be. But I’d also appreciate a say in more serious and complex things like immigration policy, climate change targets, and so on. No doubt there would be many other issues that I’d like to vote on, if I was offered the choice. The tricky part is knowing all the options – being aware of all the ways in which governments shape our environments, cultures and experiences.
The thing is, in order for people to answer the question ‘What do you want a say in?’ – in order for us to collectively determine the scope and limits of citizen governance – we need to be able to peruse the full set of government functions – at federal, state and local levels.
What we need is a visualisation – a view that shows us government functions as a whole and enables us to explore the component parts. Then, we could add an architecture of participation – put it to users as to what issues should be put to the people.
Actually, such a tool could be multi-purpose. Imagine if, having found a function of interest, you could see which level of government performs that function, and which agency, and how to get in touch with that agency. For me, a browsable visualisation of Australian governments has greater potential value as a directory than any ‘enhanced’ australia.gov.au search service.
How the architecture of this model of citizen governance might work is of course open, but the way forward for the visualisation part of this project seems obvious. A starting point, at least in relation to the federal government, would certainly be information from the National Archives, which has a key role in keeping governments accountable – by keeping their records – and which therefore takes a lead role in keeping government information organised. For example, it:
So, how about it? Do you share my sense that making the functions visible is a critical first step toward Government 2.0?
Yesterday I went to Dr Mitchell Whitelaw’s impressive presentation at the National Archives, about his Visible Archive project.
First, he gave a great introduction to why visualisations are important and how they can help you get a handle on a collection. In brief, search excels when you know which small piece you’re looking for. But if you want to explore the whole, you need another way in. Visualisations are great because by looking, we can find patterns and therefore intrinsic structures, which help us to make sense of and thereby navigate within large data sets.
Look at this beautiful visualisation of all the series in the Archives:
65k archival series – a big border => physically large; a big interior square => a lot of registered items
In the interactive version, you can click on any series and see the agencies that created or controlled it, and the other series to which it relates – eg an index to the series, or a successive series:
Series A432, which agencies created and controlled it, and its related series
When you highlight one of the agencies, in this case CA5, the orange squares also indicate all the other series that that agency created.
Ah, the beauty of the series system! As Ross Gibbs, Director-General of the National Archives, said at the end of the presentation, Peter Scott would be elated.
But wait, there was more. Mitchell then showed us a deceptively simple visualisation of a single series, A1. It started with a tag cloud of the 150 most common words in the titles if items. ‘Naturalisation’ and ‘certificate’ were huge, and there were a lot of names, of places like Norfolk and Papua but also of people.
On hover you could see the spread of each term in items over time, and on click you could see a list of items. Then, if the item was digitised you could also have a look at each folio. Nice!
But the zing was yet to come. You can also combine two terms, or exclude one (eg, what is there in that series apart from all those naturalisation files? And in this way you could start to make discoveries, just by playing around with the tag cloud – for example, that there was a major cyclone in Darwin in 1937.
In so many ways, visualisation works as a way in to the records. We can’t predict all the ways that it works until we see them working. But sure as eggs there will be ways, not least because the national archives data has an in-built structure.
Thanks Mitchell ! for doing this great work and for making it look effortless. (I know it’s not!)
In the spirit of yesterday’s post, I’m sharing some diagrams.
Last year I gave a conference paper about how user-generated description can improve archival findability. I began with the idea that every use of an archival record can generate a description, which (if it is captured) can make the record more findable in future.
A visual elaboration of this concept is below. It begins in the middle. (And ‘RecordSearch’ is the collection database of the National Archives.)
Ultimately, my point was also that archives should value users as much as users value archives. Their relationship is interdependent – archives engage users, users enrich archives.
And really, if they are not used and interpreted and shared, archives are irrelevant.
The paper was well received, and I was especially pleased because Eric Ketelaar asked me if he could use the main diagram with his students.
At work, people sometimes laugh at me for doing a drawing of a concept we’re discussing. But lately (very lately – yes, I’m slow) I am becoming aware that not only is there an exciting, flourishing field of data visualisation out there – but there is also a field of visual thinking. I have always considered it is a useful practice, to think visually, especially for the sake of communicating complex ideas or processes or systems. Mostly I have kept this opinion a bit quiet. But flip, maybe I can call it a talent! Henceforth I will be more inclined to share the diagrams I make for one reason or another…
For some time now an idea has been simmering in the back of my mind. It comes from a gap I’ve noticed in the flourishing world of online tools. What I’d like is to be able to assemble data – images, text passages, PDFs, audio, video, whatever, and whether I’ve found them on the internet or uploaded them from my own machine – into a visual array, describe each item and identify how they relate to one another.
I know there is a plethora of ‘mindmapping’ tools out there, which vaguely resemble what I want. But such tools tend to be for the purpose of managing projects, or organising thoughts. They arrange ideas but they don’t actually compile *stuff*. And they tend to make a flat, static image, whose structure is often superficial.
I want to be able to make a dynamic presentation, which embeds the resources it depicts, and which allows you to see the whole and explore its parts. I see this tool as enabling you to do something in between Zotero – for compiling and tracking resources – and ManyEyes – for auto-building visualisations of pre-existing data sets. It would enable the manual assembly of resources into a non-linear, structured, dynamic visual array.
Once created, you could hover and/or click to see details of each item and the relationships between them. What type of relationship is it? And what is its character?
So. Does such a tool exist? If not, how can I make it so? Please advise!
Funnily enough… I was about to publish this post when I thought I’d have one last mozy around the web and lo, I discovered VUE – Visual Understanding Environment. It looks pretty good! I will endeavour to explore it… and return to report.
A few comments on Friday’s Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia…
A bit of faith in humanity goes a long way
From my POV, the most interesting aspect of the forum was that one key theme was so not-new – trust in and respect for the public / consumers / audiences / users – whatever we want to call them. Four of the presenters suggested in some way that trust as an essential element of contemporary cultural work – Marcus Gillezeau, Mark Scott, Rose Holley and Darren Sharp. This is an absolutely critical point. But it has been said many a time before, especially in relation to the library sector. It was the issue that was most discussed in 2006 when I posted a paper about Web 2.0. And it’s all over the web now – just try googling ‘radical trust’.
As government-funded cultural workers – as people in positions of cultural authority – we need to lay aside our fears, withhold our judgement, and actively resist our will-to-control – and trust and respect our audiences, radically and fundamentally. If we assume the best of people, and build systems based on radical trust (which can include transparency features and safeguards such as version tracking and rollback functions), then it’s possible to get the brilliant results that the Library is getting through its Newspapers Digitisation Program – thousands of people correcting millions of words, because they want to help. As Rose Holley reported, people are motivated by the trust and respect the Library is showing them.
The opposite is also true, and I bet we all have this experience: lack of trust is a powerful demotivator.
But clearly, hearing the words and seeing the success stories is not sufficient to engender the cultural shift we need in order to build trust-based systems. Every single time I hear (or talk) about a project involving user-generated content, someone invariably asks the question about the vandals.
Well, yes it happens that some people do dodgy things, by accident and by design. But it’s better to build a system that enables public participation for public benefit than to preclude that participation and benefit on the assumption of ill-will. Only then can we allow and benefit from user-led innovation – thanks to Darren Sharp for bringing this notion to the forum (and hear, hear to the recently-released Venturous Australia report, which pointed out that governments have been pretty good at fostering top-down innovation but fare badly when it comes to innovating from the bottom up).
Talking the talk but baulking at the walk
Despite lugging my huuuuge Mac laptop with the idea of swimming along in the tweetstream while I listened… I was one of the who-knows-how-many who couldn’t connect, even after more IP addresses were made available. Well – I did manage it at 4.45pm from the foyer, after everyone had gone home 
So as someone willing but unable to participate in that way, I was disappointed that the social media channels that had been set up for the event were not integrated in any way into the forum itself – rather, there was an unfortunate (and ironic, given the subject) disconnect between the presenters and the audience.
Perhaps the next forum could be a more radical experiment in the form of the forum – perhaps we could collaborate to create some innovative ideas.
A phenomenon that passed me by…
I admit I had never once heard a jot about Scorched, the ambitious and fascinating all-media creation of Marcus Gillezeau and co. I’m not a watcher of commercial tv, so no surprise there. But I’m a user of social media, and did not hear about it that way either. Would have been interesting to see a show of hands as to how many people at the forum had heard of the project, watched the telemovie, participated in the community. Lots about it is interesting and worthy of further discussion – in particular, the relationships between fact / fiction, and commercial / non-commercial culture. And what happens to the community now that there’s no more funding?
This post is an excerpt from a paper I wrote about findability of National Archives of Australia collection items for the 2008 Australian Society of Archivists conference. The idea is that anyone’s description of a record could be put to work in the service of findability. So the following is an example of a description, of a single page from a single file (of 220 pages) from a single series (of 13,749 files) from the National Archives collection (of around 45,000 series). (You can see why findability is an issue for us!)
The whole paper is available from the National Archives of Australia website.
In February 1934, Victor Fitzgibbon wrote a note to the Secretary of the Department of the Interior. The Department had provided him with four weeks’ work so that he could leave Canberra with his family. Having saved enough in that time to buy and recondition a truck, Mr Fitzgibbon sought a grant to register the vehicle for three months.
Victor Fitzgibbon’s request to the Department of the Interior for a grant to register his truck for three months so he could leave Canberra with his family.
National Archives of Australia: A659, 1939/1/16561
This note – the raw record – was used the same day it was written. CS Daley, the Assistant Secretary of the Civic Branch of the Department of the Interior, inserted Mr Fitzgibbon’s handwritten page into a typewriter to make his recommendation, which was to approve the grant ‘as a debit to the Alleviation of Distress, on the grounds that his continued residence in Canberra would be a greater burden to the Alleviation of Distress than the amount requested’. The Secretary of the Department must have been away, because he then added a further annotation: ‘In view of urgency, take action as proposed and resubmit for covering approval on Secretary’s return. CSD, 16.2.34′.
Another annotation suggests that the grant was issued four days later, and HC Brown, Secretary of the Department, noted his approval about a week after that.
In this first phase of the record’s life, it has served its purpose as attestation – to the need for the grant; and as documentation – of the Assistant Secretary’s recommendation for approval, and on what grounds; of the funds’ disbursal; and of the belated approval for such.
By reading the other documents in the file that relate to Mr Fitzgibbon, a fuller picture of the situation is revealed. It was the tail end of the Depression. Victor Fitzgibbon had arrived in Canberra after 1929, so he was ineligible for the rations available to other residents in similarly difficult circumstances. He was living at Ainslie married camp, with his pregnant wife and infant child. Several months prior to writing the letter described here, he had agreed to leave the Territory by mid-January if he was unable to find work. From the Department of the Interior’s point of view, the Fitzgibbon family had received special treatment up to that time, on account of the young child and Mrs Fitzgibbon’s pregnancy. In fact, one document notes that several years prior to this time, Victor Fitzgibbon’s father had been granted transport to go to Melbourne in 1929, and that he had returned ‘unannounced’ with Victor and his family.
Probably, the Department was keen to see the back of the Fitzgibbons, its sympathy having expired. The final instalment in the archival story is a small note pinned to the letter. ‘CD’ (presumably the Assistant Secretary, CS Daley) states ‘Has Fitzgerald [sic] actually left on the vehicle.’ Another hand has written ‘Please verify from police.’ A final note states ‘Fitzgibbon left Canberra Thursday last 22.2.34 – destination unknown’.
You can also see this record in Vrroom – virtual reading room.
