What Surprised Me…

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Laetitia

Here are a few of the answers to ‘What Surprised Me…’ at our Nov 18 Progress Meeting.  The full list of comments can be found in the discussion papers section of our wiki (access restricted to project team only – sorry).

Amount of content
That it works
Obscure footage, indigenous communities, gave me a sense of being there
Scope ie instant access back to a moment
Speed
That you couldn’t search by date
Quanity of information
That all staff were credited not just creatives and performers
The volume of video content – number and length of clips
How much data already with videos eg: performer names
That music styles came up in the searches
Most of the videos are good quality – thought they might be a bit scratchy
Project has developed much further than realised – great work!
Ease of use
Surprised by amount of footage available
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Key messages from Circus Oz for the prototype

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Laetitia

A few of the key messages from Circus Oz on how to develop the prototype prior to the community launch in February:

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?

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Digital Humanities in Museums

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Adrian

Bear with me here with this one. This is interesting as it is a YouTube playlist that was crowdsourced from people in archive/digital humanities/cultural heritage sectors that responded to “Philosophical Leadership Needed for the Future: Digital Humanities Scholars in Museums”.

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

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Revealing the first Living Archive prototype

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Laetitia

Last Friday we drew back the curtain to reveal and test the first working prototype of the Living Archive with some of our key project partners.

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.

 

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HTML 5 Video Resources

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Adrian

Starting to collect links about HTML 5, and all the rest over on my usual research blog in the “Resources” section. Need somewhere to park this stuff.

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Video Thick Description

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Adrian

Just a test for now as we work out tech requirements. However, a lot of really interesting research in this project happens around the table in our weekly meetings. This is where the thick practice of interdisicplinary research is made visible, but aside from meeting notes not really captured. So wouldn’t it be good to video this, just in case? Here’s the first goes. Two Sanyo Xacti’s on little tripods just left on… (270 and 280MB of QuickTime goodness…., really do need to start using poster frames.)

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Embedded prototypes

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Reuben

For the initial exploratory development of the living archive, we will be experimenting with the use of an iterative prototyping technique that involves using an ‘embedded prototype’. What this means is that we will be building a basic working system, giving the inner Circus Oz community access, and then further developing our design directions and prototypes based on quantitative and qualitative feedback as the community uses the system over time:

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.

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Video, Metadata, Archives

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Adrian

This is a summary of what I have collated so far around digital video, cultural heritage dash archives, and metadata. The mileage varies, but I think the simplest outcome is that there are no standards around performance. However, an informed decision needs to be made in the context of the project in relation to what metadata matters so the project is situated appropriately in the context of digital humanities, archival practice and social media. Personally I think we are developing a lightweight, agile model which is not an archive (that is a separate thing to the living archive project) but more like an ecology, so what metadata does that need?

  • JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Digital Media have drafted the excellent “Metadata and Digital Video“.
  • The International Council of Museums has Technical Papers and References, this includes a series of slides for presentations on the performing arts, a schema for material and immaterial culture, and a slide presentation on Performing Arts as a Field for Conceptual Modelling.
  • Then there’s the EN 15907 metadata standard for Cinematographic works, though I don’t think the project is about cinematographic works so much as records of performance (the ‘thing’ to be archived is an audiovisual record of a performance, not a videographic work or artefact).
  • From Øyvind Eide (Uni of Oslo): If you see circus performances as intangible cultural heritage, as I think you should, a connection to the museum community may be in place. An ontology for museum and cultural heritage information is developed by ICOM-CIDOC into an ISO standard, namely the Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM, ISO 21127:2006).

    An OWL implementation of CIDOC-CRM is developed at the Friedrich- Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in cooperation with several other institutions: http://erlangen-crm.org/

  • Deena Engel (New York University): With respect to capturing metadata on time-based media, you might find both information and community through the Electronic Media Group wiki of the American Institute for conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (http://www.conservation-wiki.com/index.php?title=Electronic_Media) as well as the U.S. Library of Congress project, PREMIS (http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/)
  • There is the PBCore schema for describing objects http://pbcore.org/schema/ (with thanks to Christopher C Alhambra)
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First prototype (P1)

Posted on October 6, 2011 by David

We are now embarked on development of our first ‘living archive’ prototype. We are aiming to have this up and running by mid November if possible. We have been having a lot of discussions about what the nature of this prototype should be, related to questions of what precisely it is for and what we are aiming to test and discover through it. Our current thinking is that P1 is about, as Reuben said last week,’giving everyone at Circus Oz the (digital) key to the [archive room] video cupboard’- making accessible through a simple online interface as many of the show videos as possible, from earliest to recent, with a simple search capacity using the basic (and incomplete) metadata we/Circus Oz currently can attach to those videos. Lukman is building a video serving system using the open source Kaltura software and we plan to serve P1 from RMIT (leaving open the option for later prototypes to be served from elsewhere (the cloud, most likely) as the projected usage scales up. The principle underlying P1 is that it is simple and sketchy and everything about it can be revised/migrated/exported as required as it morphs into P2 and beyond.

We have established that the user groups who will be able to use and interact with P1 will be those who have the greatest stake in them: the two inner circles on the diagram below: Circus Oz present and past members, those who are in the videos and/or just offscreen, as it were (backstage or in the office). (The diagram itself, by the way, is a quick and dirty ‘thinking picture’ that needs to be further refined and theorised.)

P1 won’t be open to the public as there are still issues that need to be worked through within Circus Oz and its community before such a step can be defined: (e.g. should all videos be available publicly? If so, under what conditions? If not, what should be? etc)

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Dig Humanities Australasia – cfp

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Adrian

Proposals close November 11 – http://aa-dh.org/conference

From the announcement:

Proposals may focus on, but need not be limited to:

- Institutionalisation, interdisciplinarity and collaboration
- Measuring and valuing digital research
- Publication and dissemination
- Research applications and interfaces for digital collections
- Designing and curating online resources
- Digital textuality and literacy
- Curriculum and pedagogy
- Culture, creativity, arts, music, performance
- Electronic critical editions
- Digitisation, text encoding and analysis
- Communities and crowdsourcing
- Infrastructure, virtual research environments, workflows
- Information mining, modelling, GIS and visualisation
- Critical reflections on digital humanities futures

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