• BibSoup – New beta service to manage and share bibliographies. Bit early yet but good to keep an eye on this.
• How We Can Help | Anvil Academic Publishing – New scholarly publishing venture that seems to tick right boxes. Digital native, creative commons, etc.
• Architecture | TEXTUS – Project to build a text based system for curation, annotation, collecting and so on. Personal or public, shared or not.
• Introduction to Digital Humanities « Brian Croxall – Outline of an introductory digital humanities curriculum. Notice how text centric it is.
• DH in the Classroom « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers – Digital Humanities Questions and Answers. Ask a question, get an answer…

• Manifesto for the Digital Humanities | ThatCamp Paris 2010 –
• Voyant Tools: Reveal Your Texts – visualisation/mapping tool for text stuff from Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell (.ca).
• Voyant Tools: Reveal Your Texts – visualisation/mapping tool for text stuff from Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell (.ca).
• Space and Place Project 2012 Further Details –
• Folksonomy | Home – Their blurb: "An inspiring new website for digital culture and creative practices has been created by School of Art & Design academic Simon Perkins. The Folksonomy – www.folksonomy.co – is a knowledge commons and social bookmarking tool for digital culture and creative practice." Lots of references, and is interesting intervention into digital practice and method.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1.  Provide the ability for comments.  This will be particularly useful for finding out what data is wrong eg: ‘Paris’ written on a tape means ‘Paris Theatre Sydney’ not Paris, France.

2. Change the names of the videos.  Don’t use the names that were on the tapes as this can be misleading or inappropriate eg: ‘Sue Broadway’s Show’.

3. Remove the minor personnel from the list of people in the show, say ‘Trainers’.  Also remove people who worked offstage, say in the office.  Many people worked in the office and as performers so searching on their name will yield the whole period they worked, not just the shows they’re in.

4. If possible, provide ability to create a showreel.  This might be beyond us at this stage though!

5.  And something we need to do to for our purposes – create secure login.

Comments anyone?

So for us it is sort of on topic, but the working method is also relevant too… The conference was the Museum Computer Network conference, 2011, and the clips are at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/museumcn

Attending were Linda Mickleborough, Robyn McGregor, Clare McKenzie, Miranda O’Brien, Tim Coldwell and Mike Finch from Circus Oz, plus Bridget Jones from the Australia Council for the Arts.

Testing Prototype 1 (photo Adrian Miles)

The prototype now contains nearly 400 shows and growing, plus information on each show such as venue, date, people, and acts.

The workshop provided us with key feedback on how the prototype could develop over the next few months.  I’ll post some of this on the blog once we’ve collated and digested all the new information we have to work with.

Currently only available via our internal server, we aim to release the prototype to a wider group in order to collect more feedback via a password protected online facility early in 2012.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This method has come out of research that I’ve been doing around prototyping practices, user centered design, and user feedback mechanisms. The advantage of using an embedded prototype such as this is that it enables immediate community engagement with the design process (making the design more collaborative), and isn’t overly prescriptive in terms of design direction, which leaves us open to new ideas as the community starts to access and respond to the videos (important at this early stage of the project).

We already know (based on our Spiegeltent event) that Circus Oz ‘like’ to watch the videos. But how will they react when they can see the videos in their own time, on their own terms? What new ideas and uses of the archive might they think of once they have the collection in front of them? This prototyping process can help us answer these questions.