In his TED talk on education innovation, Charles Leadbeater introduces a map of the territory based on two axes: sustaining/disruptive and formal/informal. He argues that most of our resources are concentrated in the first quadrant, but that globally, we need to invest energy in the fourth.
I liked the organising principles – it might be a very useful way to think about future projects. So I redrew it:
If you want, download a nice, scalable, printable PDF version (100kb).
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.
As an editor of archival websites, I’m interested in the tools available for historical publishing, research and interpretation. And the advent of Web 2.0 means that such tools are proliferating and becoming easier and more fun to use. Social software is making search interfaces more intuitive and clever; it is making publishing dialogic – readers can also be writers; and it is enabling many new kinds of collaborations to occur in interpreting collections.
Last month I addressed a small group at the Australian Historical Association conference in Canberra on this topic of How Web 2.0 will change history – possible futures for websites of the National Archives of Australia (PDF 312kb). The paper was framed by this mindmap I made
(inspired by other mindmaps on Web 2.0, like the one on Wikipedia).
There are plenty of exciting things the National Archives of Australia could do with these technologies, and it is starting to happen, but the path is long, resources are limited, and in some ways a cultural shift is necessary – it does not come naturally for a cultural institution to radically trust its audience.* So the paper is a bit imagin-ary. But didn’t Einstein say that imagination is more important than knowledge?
* Deep bow here to the Powerhouse Museum and its new collection interface, which you can read more about on the fresh + new blog.
