Tag Archives: technology

Create[d] World

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A few thoughts from the recent Create World conference of clever, creative people.

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Panel on place and creativity – how does digital alter the way we think?

Architect Richard Kirk made the point that perspective drawing as a tool is only a few hundred years old, so we are yet to reap the full benefits of new additions to our creative lexicon, such as virtual worlds. Performance designer Anna Tregloan commented that some people can quite naturally translate a 2D image to imagine it in 3D space, but for others that will always be more difficult, so the theatre tradition of building a little model of the set may endure. Continuing the theme of how we translate human experiences into digital form, and whether we can learn to think in a hybrid way between digital and physical, creative innovator (?!) Hael Kobayashi described the process of making penguins dance for Happy Feet. Humans danced in a warehouse, each one wired for motion capture. A set of screens displayed the merger of their movements with the digital penguins, so the director and key creatives could see, in real-time, penguins dancing on an iceberg.

Keynotes on photography, animation and the active audience

Tom Ang‘s keynote was an entertaining blend of a romp through the history of photography, some behind-the-lens information about particular shots, and some philosophical observations about value and power in photography’s new world:

  • Photoshop has programmed us!
  • Boundaries of what is shareable have shifted.
  • The concept of the ‘still image’ is now a misnomer: they fade, zoom, slide – and fast. And the more abundant they become, the less we attend to each.
  • Because images are so abundant, there are no longer iconic images of world events. (I’m not convinced of this point. The process by which images become iconic has changed, but I reckon crowd wisdom will choose images over time. Note, for example, the twitter #ows discussion of iconic imagery, and the meme of the cop casually pepper-spraying seated protesters.)

Ian Taylor’s story of the success of Animation Research Ltd – and his team’s down-home methods – was awe-inspiring. But my strongest takeaway from his talk was the importance of taking your time to learn – ergo the immense value of free education. Which we no longer have.

As a longtime advocate for participatory approaches to cultural representations, I was very interested in Ernest Edmonds‘ talk on art and the active audience. My favourite parts:

  • Some early research found that babies less than one week old can learn – by controlling the turn of their head on the pillow – to switch a light on and off, and that once mastered, they become bored with it.
  • Our vocabulary for interaction is developing. For example, there are many different kinds of play: danger, competition, camaraderie, subversion, fantasy, sensation, captivation, difficulty, simulation. And so on!
  • Don’t assume that more is better. Performance and communication might be better with lower bandwidth. This is an intriguing point, and I wanted more from him on this. I wonder if he means, for example, that in some cases audio works better than video,   because it gets inside your head but doesn’t restrict your visual attention. Or that pixelated imagery like in Minecraft, works in part because it’s low-res, so the player can more actively/imaginatively inhabit the scene and the characters. In short, I suspect this point relates to the value of leaving space within a representation, for the audience to fill from their personal creative sources.

An audiovisual meditation on gold

Not your average academic conference, Create World includes a range of clever, creative performances. Of the four, this was my favourite – it’s an audiovisual meditation on the mineral gold, and it made my heart hum. (I recommend: go full-screen and use headphones or big speakers.)

The Solar Angel from abre ojos on Vimeo.

Other prezos

The quality of stream-session presentations was consistently good. I attended those on:

  • a multi-disciplinary creative technologies degree (Judit Klein, Auckland Uni of Technology)
  • iPads for music-making (Jamie Gabriel, Macquarie Uni)
  • an iPad app for assessing teachers of music, art and drama (Julia Wren & Alistair Campbell, Edith Cowan Uni)
  • EEG-mapping of artistic consumption and as artistic work (Jason Zagami, Griffith Uni)
  • a weather-data-generated sonic sculpture in Sydney (Kirsty Beilharz, Uni of Technology, Sydney)
  • kinaesthetic potential of educational gaming (Helen Farley & Adrian Stagg, Uni of Southern Queensland)
  • serious games (Tim Marsh, James Cook Uni)
  • digital research methods, including Wikipedia article-writing (Kerry Kilner, Uni of Queensland)
  • Playtime, an animated movie (Thomas Verbeek, Uni of Otago)
  • Ishq, an audiovisual work commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of its exhibition on Islamic art (Kim Cunio and Louise Harvey, Griffith Uni)

I presented – and have shared on the Museum’s Education blog – Gamifying relatedness: an iPad app-in-progress. Hearty thanks to Paris for his guest appearance.

A grand design for active digital learning

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This week I wangled a visit to the digital learning facility work-in-progress that is UC‘s InSPIRE centre, directed by Prof Rob Fitzgerald and site-managed by Jonno – thanks for the tour, people.

InSPIRE will be “a focus for research into innovative good practice pedagogy that utilises ICT to enhance student learning outcomes”. So it’s a technology-enhanced space for teaching and learning about technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Deliciously meta! And if, like me, you wonder about the little ‘n’ in amongst all those caps, ‘InSPIRE’ stands for Innovative Sustainable Practical Imaginative Research Education.

Below are images I snapped; see the InSPIRE site gallery for building plans.

It is exciting to preview this embodiment of technology-enhanced active learning; and I like the approach Rob is taking: set it up then see how it’s used; like building the footpaths once you can see how the space is used. That means you build in flexibility – roll-out lecterns, lots of AV points in the floor, digital switching to project one room’s proceedings into another.

InSPIRE has all you need to create and share media (down to kitchenettes :) , and it includes some great lo-tech: writeable walls, and a good-quality audio podcast room — with video capability, yes, but – isn’t podcast mobility great?

It has an industrial, resource-conscious aesthetic: projecting onto walls rather than screens, exposed ducts, recycled hardwood timbers, underground 25kl rainwater tank.

And it embodies a DIY ethic: BYO mobile or laptop and data: input plates for USB to project your data or to record proceedings; mobile interactive.

I can’t wait to see it in action. It’d be a wondrous venue for THATCamp Canberra, or any other smallish conference.

Maybe Rob will chime in if I have munged any details. (If he doesn’t comment, let’s just assume it’s all just so :)

Ubicomp, (museum) space and the social order

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What follows is a Master of Digital Design assignment – a ‘critical response’ to five papers on the topic of ‘Ubiquitous computing and urban informatics’. It includes (bonus!) references to a few other papers too.

Mark Weiser’s 1991 vision of technology blended invisibly into environments may not have quite materialised, but as Adam Greenfield points out, today’s phones, tablets and multitouch displays bear a close resemblance to his description of tabs, pads and boards. Ubicomp is spreading in many directions, from many sources. For example in Pachube, which serves out data streams about connected environments from people around the world, we can witness a growing wave of DIY ubicomp.

We can get a strong sense of technology’s wide and deep pervasion from Dan Hill’s account of the complex mesh of data flows in an imaginary-but-realistic city. Sensors, emittors and recorders are embedded in streets and buildings and carried by people doing business, passing by and hanging around. Data flows either with or without individual intent, and either functionally or dysfunctionally – in technical, personal and social terms.

Unlike the disembodied space of virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing works on, around and through human bodies; and in physical space, social relations are always at play. Ideally, we all have access (both read- and write-) to the data flows, as well as the ability to evade them. Ideally, we are also attentive to the affect of technology, and our interactions, on ourselves and the world around us. But real-world social space is messy. Anne Galloway warns that when technologies are invisible, so too are the power relations they replicate. The danger here is of our docile complicity in reproducing the dominant social order.

To mitigate against this risk, one of Greenfield’s ethical guidelines for UX in ubicomp settings is critical – ‘Be self-disclosing’. Seamlessness is rightly a feature, as Weiser imagined, but it must be optional, and reversible. And as with all new technologies, we must develop literacy about its use. We need to know that we have the right and the ability to ask the system to reveal itself – as well as its data.

Are there implications here for the digital design of museum space? For Foucault, museum space was heterotopia – ‘other space’ –  space that intervenes in ordinary space, and complicates our perceptions of it, illuminating and potentially contesting and inverting real-world social relations. To best serve visitors in their task of re-evaluating real-world social space, museum displays must not be seamless. They must ‘manifest their metatext’ (Lumley) precisely so that visitors can perceive the social relations implicit in both the product and process of their representation. Because of their particular role in representing ordinary space – because museum visitors are already immersed in a field of cultural technologies – the imperative for computational technology to be seamless might be greater here. If we can ignore the technology, do we gain a clearer view of social conditions? Or is it better to conceive of the technology as another layer of metatext, and therefore to render it visible?

Certainly, Weiser’s notion that ubicomp would be calm technology seems a better fit for museum spaces than the whizz-bang often associated with technology. It does not help museum visitors to be distracted by technology at the expense of their social engagement. So in museum building, exhibition and application design, that is something to note.

References:

Foucault, Michel. Of other spaces (PDF). Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 16(1), 1986: 22–7. (or here’s an HTML version)

Galloway, Anne. Resonances and everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city (PDF), 2003.

Greenfield, Adam. All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings. Boxes and Arrows, December 1, 2004.

Greenfield, Adam. Real life: Weiser FTW. Speedbird, April 16, 2010.

Haque, Usman. Pachube, patching the planet: Interview with Usman Haque. Interview by Tish Shute, January 28, 2009.

Hill, Dan. The street as platform, City of Sound, February 11, 2008.

Lumley, Robert. The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Routledge, 1988.

Weiser, Mark. The computer for the 21st century (PDF), Scientific American 256, no. 3, 1991: 66–75. Reprinted in IEEE Pervasive Computing, January 2002.

Not explicitly referred to (I only had 500 words!), but also informing my thinking here, were these two papers presented to the Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia on 16 April 2010:

  • Bell, Genevieve. ‘U are happy life: Making sense of new technologies’.
  • Manson, Rob. ‘Collections are leaking into the real world’.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

In planning this post, I had a strong urge to write about Ada Lovelace herself. Reading a chapter by Howard Rheingold, I marvelled at the clarity and potency of Ada’s vision for computer programming, in which ‘the mental and material [...] are brought into intimate connexion with each other’. Indeed, we unite this binary every time we use computers either to translate ideas into form, or to expand our consciousness of the world around us. Amazingly, Ada wrote that 100 years before computers existed.

Then I briefly thought to celebrate Evelyn Fox Keller – for figuring out that each cell of slime mould is an agent of its own aggregational destiny – ie, that there are no commanding cells directing all the others to form into a mass, moving entity; for unearthing the dispersed history of thinking about decentralised forms of authority, which has since coalesced into the field of emergence; and for her meta-work on feminist science, which is how I first encountered her.

But the achievements of both women have been well documented. I prefer to write about someone with a smaller digital footprint, even if it means traversing into more foreign technological terrain. So here is a brief tribute to an atmospheric scientist – a climatologist – whose contribution to science is mostly mysterious to me, but whose capacities for independent, steadfast investigation and analysis are unquestionably impressive.

My Mum reckons that my younger sister, Julie, was inspired to embark on a scientific career by our step-uncle, a paleontologist, when he gave her a piece of dinosaur egg from South Australia. She won the Australian National University Medal for her Honours degree in physics, and by age 30 she had a PhD in atmospheric gaseous exchange – you can read it here. I don’t grok its scientific significance, but I know that the research involved camping in a forest in Siberia, and building metal towers to climb in order to collect air samples. That’s quite an effort.

I also know that in her work for the federal Department of Parliamentary Services, she wrote a report, Climate change: The case for action, that dissolves any excuse the Australian government might have had for failing to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It says that the climate is changing; that most of the change is due to human influences; that the changes present serious risks; that those risks can be managed; and that the longer we delay, the more drastic our mitigation measures will need to be. It’s clear! (It’s just a pity that the problem here is not purely scientific – mostly, it’s cultural. People are apparently not yet ready to accept those mitigation measures.)

As well as being scientifically inclined (and successful), she is a rockclimber, adventurer, nature photographer, mother of two, animal lover (she has three Siberian huskies and two cats) and since last month, medical student. So, I celebrate Ada Lovelace Day by celebrating my multi-talented sister, Julie Styles.

Cultural lessons from the crowd in the cloud

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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 verifiability it cites and refers 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.

A photograph from the German National Archives via Wikimedia, June 1942 – Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-N0619-506

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.

Seeing the whole archive

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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:

Every series – big square means

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

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!)

A tool I want

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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.

How Web 2.0 will change history

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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

Mindmap of Web 2.0 and the life cycle of historiography

(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.

Folksonomic findability

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It is a pet peeve of mine that museums so rarely draw on the knowledge and understanding of visitors to help interpret their collections. Ever since I read Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture,1 I’ve sought out initiatives that facilitate community interaction. In global terms, there are plenty of examples, especially in terms of public programs. But in terms of the core business of museums – collection management, and exhibitions, it remains rare for a museum to involve audiences in the process of making collections meangingful. (Your examples are welcome!)

In the world of the web, though, the story is different. Social software enables visitors to the site to help make the site. And the cultural heritage sector is starting to explore the possibilities.

a tagged imageSteve is a project of a group of seven museums.2 It emerged out of the mismatch between the classification systems of museums and the way users tend to think about collection items. A museum might describe an artwork in terms of the artist’s proper family name. Whereas a visitor might search for an artwork according to how they remember it – its shape, or the fact that a painting had some nice clouds in it.

The Steve people are researching and developing a tool that will enable website visitors to add descriptive tags to any item they are viewing. The tags then join in with the official description of the item, so that the collection takes on a hybrid official and vernacular classification system. And henceforth each item becomes more findable for more people. And more collectively meaningful!

Have a look at, and join in, this wonderful experiment. (You need to register if you want to do some cataloguing.)

circular fabric designorange fabric designBut wait! Here’s another example, closer to home. Our very own Powerhouse Museum invites users to help describe swatches of fabric, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s. You can enter your thoughts on their colour, pattern, mood and/or ‘other facts’.

1. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
2. Steve stands for Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement.