About Me

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Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger

Friday, January 26, 2007

Real-world Control Panel for Second Life - nice reality conundrum/conjunction

wwward.expressions: Real-world Control Panel for Second Life
Haven't quite mentally integrated this into the research question but hey, it's a pretty cool proof-of-concept and a further blurring of the boundaries. I really need to look more at the thinking around There, SL etc with regard to value.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Training at Leicester

Just so I don't forget, I'm (hopefully) signed up for two training days
in Leicester:
"Interviewing skills for Social Scientists" Tuesday, 24 April 2007
(9.30am-12.30pm)
and
Conference Day 3 - Friday 4th May 2007 (Year One) - including "Getting
it Right From the Start - Formatting the Thesis"/"Project Managing Your
PhD"/"Passing from APG to full PhD Status"

Friday, January 19, 2007

Perian Sully on the "New Media and Social Memory" symposium

Musematic: New Media and Social Memory - Artists vs. Users? Perian Sully offers a typically insightful response to George Lucas' proposition that it is the artist's vision that should be the one preserved:
"It’s always the artist’s prerogative to be able to go back and remake their artwork. However, I remember the cries of anguish from my Star Wars fan friends when the Special Editions came out. They felt that the integrity of the story was compromised by the new shiny flashy digital additions. The story didn’t change, but the look and feel, the experience of the film had changed..... If museums are preservers of cultural memory, and new media art is dependent upon the user experience to survive, whose vision wins? Should the original user experience be the main goal of preservation efforts, or should the artist’s intent be first and foremost? "

Monday, January 15, 2007

Archiving the Avant-Garde

Archiving the Avant-Garde This project looks like it has a lot of overlap with mine, technically and in the sense of theorising the assets and evaluating their worth. It's not only about digital art but that is one significant strand. A notation system (A System of Formal Notation for Scoring Works of Digital and Variable Media Art (PDF)) and a related book (Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach) look interesting, as does this article by one of the contributors: The Straw that Broke the Museum's Back: Documenting and Preserving Digital Art for the Next Century (Richard Rinehart, 2000)

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Ariadne on Google

'Search Engines: Is Google Building on Shaky Foundations?', Ariadne Issue 49
Phil Bradley looks at the variety of stuff coming from Google and how it's likely that lots of it ain't gonna last, and lots that may not develop over time. Also looks at weaknesses of the search engine itself vs the alternatives.

Monday, January 08, 2007

IBM Sears Second Life

http://www.3pointd.com/20070108/ibm-brings-sears-to-second-life-at-ces/

Also http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/designing-a-better-semantic-search-engine/ This is in part it's about improving "semantics" search-side i.e. understanding the query better, and in part it's about feeding better info to crawlers, with Wikipedia v 3 in mind

AI beats SW? http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/the_wikipedian_1.php

Friday, January 05, 2007

Various recent things

Musematic on developing the cycle of on- and off-line visits: Museum
Websites and Museum Visitors: Before and After the Museum Visit
http://musematic.net/?p=118

British Library get London maps onto Google Earth:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/londoninmaps/2006/12/google_earth_la
html
O'Reilly approves of Wikipedia entry on Web 2.0:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/01/web_20_most_cit.html