Catching up with Europeana v1.0 [pt.1]

Last November, a prototype Europeana launched. Many (perhaps even both) of you will know that the results were mixed: the index itself was successful, at least given its proof-of-concept status, but personalisation features were not optimised and led rapidly a crash as the user sessions racked up. It seems that the solution to this was essentially configuration, but politics meant that more had to be seen to be done and so hardware was thrown at the problem. A couple of weeks later the site was back but under the radar and without the personalisation bit ("My Europeana"), and more recently this too has returned - go and have a play here.


Prototyping done, the bid was assembled to develop a full-blown service, "Europeana v1.0". This bid to the European Commission was successful and just before Easter a kick-off meeting was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague to initiate the project. This is actually but one of a suite a of projects under the EDLFoundation umbrella, all working in the same direction, but I guess you could say it's the one responsible for tying them together.


So how is Europeana shaping up now? Having spent three days finding out I can tell you now that I came back feeling good - and not just because I was heading straight off again on holiday. Day 1 was about travel and (obviously) a long and lovely trip to the Mauritshaus, but it ended with an hour in the company of Sjoerd Siebinga, lead developer on the project, and a session with Jill Cousins, Europeana's director. I went to see Sjoerd because I wanted to find out how Europeana's technical solution would fit with our plans at the Museum of London for a root-and-branch overhaul of our collections online delivery system. I knew that they'd be opening the source code up later this year, and I also knew that in essence what Europeana does is a superset of what we want to do, so I figured, find out if there'll be a good fit and whether there are things I could start to use or plan for now. Laughably, I thought that we might actually be able to help out by testing and developing the code further in a different environment - as if they needed me! I'll save this for another post, but in short Sjoerd took me on a tour of what they use as the core of the system (Solr) and blew me away. There are layers that they have built/will build above and below Solr that make Europeana what it is and may also prove helpful to us, but straight out of the box Solr is, quite simply, the bollocks. I've known of it for ages, but until given a tour of it didn't really grasp how it would work for us. Many, many thanks to Sjoerd for that.

Next I met with Jill for an interview for my research on digital sustainability in museums, where we dug into the roots of Europeana, its vision, key challenges, and of course sustainability (especially in terms of financial and political support). This was fascinating and revealing and added a lot to my understanding of the context of the project's birth and its fit in the historical landsacpe of EC-funded initiatives in digital/digitised cultural heritage. As a research exercise it was a test of my ability to work as an embedded researcher; one who is not just observing the processes of the project but contributing and arguing and necessarily developing opinions of his own. I really don't know how well I did in this regard - I'm not sure how often my attempts to be probing may in fact be leading, or whether my concerns with the project distort the approach I take in interviewing. Equally I don't know if this matters. A debate to expand upon another time, perhaps.

Days 2 and 3 were the kick-off meeting, and I'll put that in another post.

Museums and digital sustainability: the other meaning

Well, this is not an angle I'd considered before in my research (the sustainability of digital resources in museums, since you ask), but I guess it's interpretation of the problem:
Pirate Bay server becomes museum artefact
Whether the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology will be sustaining the file-sharing service is another matter.
I guess, joking aside, that really does highlight the key difference between (my definitions of) sustaining and preserving: the latter is about keeping stuff in existence, the former about fulfilling their purpose.

Evaluate this

Schmuck that I am, and despite the fact that I've been doing javascript for a decade now (though not all that much in recent years), I'd never really got how useful the eval() method is. Today, I found one of those points where I could not continue without it and thought I'd just post up where it helped me since there will be others after the same solution.
My problem: to create/declare javascript variable names dynamically. I have a loop in this little SVG experiment I'm doing with the Raphael javascript SVG library (another post to come on this) where I want to make a "set" of SVG elements out of each item in an array of unknown length. I also need to attach an onclick function to each set. For creating the set, putting items into it, and attaching the event handler I need a variable name to be made on the fly. This is how to declare it:

eval("var r" +i +" = dynamically named variable'");

If i is currently 2, this creates a string variable with the name r2 and the value "dynamically named variable". To get the variable value you have to use the eval() method again, thus:

alert(eval('r'+i));

Probably old hat, this stuff, but I'm not too proud to show my ignorance, at least when I've just reduced it slightly!

OT: Holy crap, it's the eefin' muppets

I'm new to eefin', or I thought I was till I read/watched/listened to this post from Woof-Moo's blog and the contents therein. I discovered that legendary Aussie roots troubadour Rolf Harris was following in a grand tradition of on-stage asthma attacks known as eefing (really). You gotta see it to believe it. And scroll down to see more eefin' Beakers than even I have worked with. That's a lot.

WFMU's Beware of the Blog: EEF BEAT MANIFESTO (MP3s)

Visualising SKOS

I got a crude navigator for the JSON coming out of Pipes here: http://www.ottevanger.plus.com/skos/skos_pipe.html. It doesn't work properly in Mozilla (which won't reload the script when you click a link) but hey, it's a start. There will be much cuter ways to navigate this info but that's not really the point of the test. I will, though, make a pipe that perhaps takes more parameters (e.g. choose to match part vs whole string, look for only broader/narrower/related terms).

Hmm, there are quite a few flaws with the SKOS too (but see above). I fixed some last night - I found that I needed to train Dapper differently for a couple of pages and there was no way of reconciling it without doing two separate dapps. I guess that's not too surprising considering the number and size of some pages, and the fact that there are over 2000 terms each with multiple relationships. It precludes Dapper from being part of a live service, but I already established that there wasn't much sense in that - better to use it as screen scraper and then move on.

Incidentally I, as a total JSON noob, had problems accessing what looked like arrays within the JSON array - for narrower and related terms. I couldn't treat them as arrays but finally, using a tip I found on the O'Reilly forums, took the element, did toString() and split it into a proper array at the commas (I'd tried split before, but it failed without toString()), then I could cycle through the terms. Perhaps repeating the problem here will help others with the same issue.

I'm a Dapper Dan man

Well, that's definitely overstating the case - I'm no whizz with Dapper, and not exactly the spit of Ulysses Everett McGill. However I am becoming rather a fan, somewhat belatedly (I think I first heard about it from Mike Ellis some time ago). Anyway, before my SKOS experiments I hade my first proper play with Dapper to give an API to the great geophys survey data that English Heritage have made available. One nice thing was that the results aren't paginated (I just twigged how lucky that was), so without much trouble (given I was learning the tool) I came up with a quick dapp for the search. You can search the DB via this dapp using any of the parameters on the original form, though I only built four into the dapp, which you see on the test box - the reason being I wanted to search geographically to integrate the XML that's returned with some MOLA site data. But that only gives the barest info, and I wanted the details too really, so I made another dapp for the details, which takes the ID, and hooked them together for seach results with details. Very gratifying!

Next step is KML for this lot, but I will talk to the content owners before doing anything like that, which might put a load on their servers were I to layer their content onto our maps. One helpful thing, though, is that their app takes a parameter for the size of square to return results for, which means you could write a map application that would only query for the area you're showing at the time.

Playing with SKOS

Well Mia's interest in what thesauri, word-lists etc. are out there, or could be out there, in machine-friendly form chimed nicely with mine, and it had been grating at me for ages that, for example, the NMR object type thesaurus is only available as HTML, not as a web service. There are a bunch of other thesauri in HTML form on the Collections Trust (well, MDA), English Heritage, and FISH sites, so following Mia's recent attempts to prod some of us museum tech types to action on the API front I figured I may as well have a go at turning one of them into a web service. The long and short is I haven't managed, but I have made useful steps, I think, and learnt a fair bit about Dapper, Pipes, and SKOS along the way.

I took the British Museum's material thesaurus, which is hosted by CT here. I went to Dapper and tried to get it to learn well enough to go straight to nice XML with all the different relationships having their own elements. There were too many exceptions for that and it stopped learning them after a while and I was going in circles I'd never escape, so I made a simpler Dapp (here) which just puts out the term, the linked terms, and comments. I later had to retrain it to cope with the H page but since running that page correctly once it's refused to again: it shows the results to A instead. Not to worry, add a querystring and it thinks it's a new page.

Anyway, then I had XML but still wanted to get this into nice nodes for different relationship types between terms (though wasn't really thinking about SKOS at this point. Doh!). I had high hopes for Pipes. Another doh! Because I would need to go through each item multiple times, renaming each sub-element according to its contents (e.g. broader terms all start "BT ") and trimming the string contents, I was scuppered: you can't loop operator modules, which are the ones that would allow renaming. And you can't rename by a rule, or I couldn't find how and it would probably rely on an operator module anyway. So after a lot of time wasted I thought, sod this, I know how to do this in a minute using XSLT and how important is it to have this as a web service? Fact is, it's not, or at least not in the form of a simple list - I may as well jus have a static file.

So that's what I did. It took more than a minute, though the core code scarcely did. What took longer was digging into SKOS, once it had struck me that it would be the obvious (only) format of choice. It works in a pretty straightforward way, or at least it's easy to do the basics and I didn't need to do more than that. Finding out how to represent it as RDF/XML was not so easy, coz the W3C pages don't show any - they just show TURTLE which isn't that much use to me, really. I needed a full RDF document. XML.com came up with the goods - old, but hopefully valid. So I went ahead and knocked up SKOS RDF for all the letters of the alphabet (bar X - there's nothing in the list starts with X) and merged them into one RDF file, which I hope is valid. I actually have my doubts, but I do know that with this file I can navigate around terms in a way that would be useful to me so that's good enough for me. It's here. I think it would be useful to put a web service on top of this now (perhaps Pipes can come in useful at last) so that it's really an API. Feel free! Oh, go on then, here's a first pass. Won't render as RSS and (consequently?) the "Run Pipe" screen shows nowt, but in debug mode you see results, and as e.g. JSON and PHP.

Next up there are a bunch of thesauri on those sites that I'd like to do a similar thing with, though some are going to be more fiddly. Others may be easier to dapp, but actually I reckon going to SKOS is a better bet and take it from there, as long as the content owners aren't too pissy about me playing with their stuff. Actually what would be most useful is probably to play with some of the word/term lists e.g. the RCHME Archaeological Periods List.

I could get into this.

The Guardian's API arrives

Here's the blurb: http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform
Here's the documentation: http://api.guardianapis.com/docs/
And don't forget the various sets of data they've compiled (from government and other sources) for the mashing thereof: http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store (pointing at Google spreadsheets)
Quite how we'd be able to use the Guardian API here will take a little consideration (and the answer may be "not at all"), but it's all good. It looks like newspapers will have to start tackling (or asking) their own version of the question that Richard Light recently posed and that Mia is chasing us museum tech types to answer: what can we standardise across the APIs that are starting to emerge from museums, and where do we start?

Shakespeare's first theatre

Here's the BBC story and video about a bit of news we'll probably see in a few other places soo, the discovery of what's thought to be the first theatre to show the work of William Shakespeare (and where he also worked as an actor). Though Museum of London Archaeology is going through a tough time at the moment they are, as ever, involved in some very exciting work. Maybe a little less romantic that Romeo and Juliet itself, but thrilling enough.

Multi-sense VR helmet? Want one o' them!

Courtesy of El Reg: Multi-sense VR helmet in development

Hmm, actually maybe I definitely do NOT want one o' them. Not only do I dislike the idea of not being able to tell reality from virtuality (and no, I didn't think The Matrix was a docu-drama), but you'd look a bit of a knob in this. But it's still a pretty cool bit of vapour-ware.

Uncontroversial title

Well it's all going off on Mike's blog, and previously on the MCG list, plus other (much more) considered opinions on Tom's blog and hopefully elsewhere. The subject matter: Creative Spaces, at last. "At last" because it's not been discussed properly by our community since its launch. Actually that's not quite fair: Tom's first post went up yesterday, and it's a thorough review supplemented today, so good on him. I'd planned to write something but haven't (still) checked it out properly.
Frankie kicked things off today, and after a bumpy start the discussion on those various venues has been fruitful I think. My thoughts are scattered around the place but, as I say, precede any real knowledge. Basically I think it's an idea with plenty going for it and which is a necessary experiment that we'll all learn from which, at the very least, will hopefully leave a legacy of some infrastructure (technical and organisational/political) for the 9 partners. It may be that there's a lot more than that, and it will make a very interesting case study. In the meantime, genuine congratulations to Carolyn Royston and her team for battling through all the challenges and getting this far. It's humbling, when you produce the sort of modest stuff I do, to see what's possible (if you have some resources).

Amazon Exposes 1 Terrabyte of Public Data

Hmm, never did anything with this when I saw it and amn't going to. It's a cool development, though: lots of new datasets through Amazon from (mainly) US sources, from DNA sequences to census and traffic data. It's more evidence that Amazon is shaping up as Google's real competition in the coming years, not Microsoft or Yahoo! (put that one in for those asleep at the back).

What can we offer from museums?

Anyway, here's the link to the RWW story: Amazon Exposes 1 Terrabyte of Public Data - ReadWriteWeb

Luke's Elegy and Ascent

Well I'm not the best placed to review Saturday evening's performance of Luke's new work, Elegy and Ascent, what with being a musical ignoramus and a very biased brother. I enjoyed it immensely, though, and his excellent talk beforehand (and our chats), and his reflections on how he reached this point in his artistic development, added a lot to the listening experience. It was fascinating to hear how he had, in the first half of the composition, taken part of a piano piece and redrawn it for orchestra. The original piece was composed using the chance (the drawing of cards) and Luke used a set of rules and his aesthetic sense to thread his way through this in a way that, as he pointed out, could only be his - another composer would have found another route through the chaos and made a different sort of beauty of it. To orchestrate this then, I suppose, added an extra layer of "human intervention" to the original randomness, as of course do the processes of conducting and performing the music. The second half of the Elegy and Ascent was very different but complementary: ordered but complex, and built around many interlocking, subtle and erudite ideas, as is usually the way with Luke's music. I won't say more for fear of sounding like I'm flattering my little brother, and we really can't have that. It would be even worse and kind of irrelevant to say we're proud of him, but...

I do hope that out there on't interweb somewhere somebody competent has done a proper job of reviewing the performance. One thing I have found, though, Karl Henning's blog where he previewed the concert and included Luke's notes. Also, if' you like to read scores, you can find lots of Luke's work on Scribd here (although not as yet Elegy and Ascent, I think). Hopefully in due course there will be a recording to listen to, too.

Digital preservation for da masses..? Archive Team, meet the DPC

Jeremy Keith (Adactio) has been fretting over the loss of his bookmarks with the dead-pooling of Magnolia, not to mention Pownce last year. Fortunately for Jeremy, he's a true alpha geek (not to mention trail-blazing, platform-pounding, left-clearing, good guy), so his response is to wonder how he can scrape, spider, and grab by hook or by crook all the stuff of his that he leaves scattered across the Web. Turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that he's not the only one with both the coding prowess and the strong sense of proprietorship over their stuff to try to do something like this. The spanking new Archive Team is up for it, guerilla-stylee, and hatching plans to help yer average Joe: as they put it, "We're gonna rescue your shit". Which is nice.

I like this. There's an active and sophisticated digital preservation community that has developed over many years. It has its roots, as far as I know, largely in the research and higher education communities, libraries, and the IT industry, all with their own priorities and preoccupations (museums are late-comers and minor players at best right now). And of course, lay people must have always played a part in some of this stuff, and some initiatives that could come under the DP banner - like the Internet Archive, I expect - rely heavily on informal communities to stash and curate stuff. Over the years ad hoc groups have sprung up to try to resuscitate corpsed forums, to salvage stuff from dying web-rings, to plan exit strategies for flaky virtual worlds and so on. But I don't think that there's really been a concerted approach to help individuals to keep a-hold of their stuff, spread as it often is across an array of sites from your many Google services, to Flickr and Delicious, to Twitter and your blog, Facebook, Slideshare and as many more as you care to mention. This is a huge variety, and what we might want to preserve in each will vary, as will the context required to make sense of it, so each service may need its own assessment for each individual (convergent evolution of the "significant properties" concept seems inevitable). It's a huge challenge but the Archive Team seem up for it.

I hope that these guys (and Jeremy K) and the "formal" DP community (DPC/DCC etc.) hook up and share knowledge. My guess is the latter have lots to offer in terms of technical expertise, connections, hardware and software, good theorisation, whilst the former group have wicked coding skills, motivation, inside-out knowledge of social software and its users, and a focus on the needs of individuals. They could offer each other a lot.

Something for the weekend

An(other) off-topic post intended for those small number of you who either (a) hang about in Leicester (hello!), or (b) are long-standing fans of the work of Luke Ottevanger (wow, how the hell did you find out about him?)
There's a concert this coming Saturday at the Fraser Noble Hall on London Road, Leicester, conducted by Michael Sackin and featuring Luke's Elegy and Ascent sandwiched between a Beethoven piano concerto and symphony. Luke is, let's say, not the greatest at publicising his work, and it's very rare that we in his family (or anyone else for that matter) get to hear what he has composed, so this is really exciting for us, and we have Michael to thank for asking Luke to write this piece, which I think he developed out of two previous works. Luke will be talking before the concert, hopefully explaining how the direction of his work has changed since its last public outing probably 10 years ago. Should be good, so come and hear the première!
Read more here.

There must be a name for this

That's it, I've had enough! Browsing the latest flurry of flim-flam from TechCrunch I found myself getting more and more cheesy at the current crop of crap names. OK so we're all used to mini-trends in the names that no-hoper start-ups go with - like the batch of second-ratrs (sic) that followed Flickr's success and ended their name with "[$consonant]r". Dopplr, Grazr, Etceterr. Funnily enough it's the fact that Twitter chose to name itself using the final vowel in the midst of that lame craze that makes me hate it less.

Nowadays it's all about the Ell: crap names ending with "...l" or "...le". OK so some names have been round for ever and make sense in their own way - to whit, Apple, Google - and others are more recent but might make sense still - Clickable, for example (no, "for example" is not a name, yet), even Pipl. I sort of forgive Amazon's Kindle (it's hardware anyway) but despite the fact it sort of relates to it's function I start to lose patience with Huddle, and having passed through Moodle, Oodle and Wonderfl we reach Trackle. Truly execrable. And slightly off the racing line, there's Twhirl.

Finally on the subject of appalling names from startups which will 90% certainly go to the wall, how about TwtQpon. Say it to yourself: TwtQpon.

WTF?

Hey ho, perhaps I should lighten up and rename this blog Doofkl.

The new NPG website: lots of stuff to see

Well I've got little to say about this, not having actually checked it out yet, but it's exciting to hear that London's National Portrait Gallery has a brand new website which now gives access to what sounds like most or all of their collection. Here's the 24HM story. Doubtless there'll be interesting things to learn technically and organisationally about the thing (for one, it was outsourced to CogApp - I'm interested now to know about the skills they maintain in-house). Basically though I'm just excited to be able to go and use it myself. Cool!

Museum of London API enhancements

I've been extending the MOLA publications database lately so that it now includes archaeological sites to which the publications relate. For pretty much all of these we have decent geographical point data (as we should, having dug most of them) and of course this is great for playing around with the data. So I've got a KML output going for that web API, which returns placemarks for sites corresponding to publications returned by your query. In the placemark are links to all the publications related to the site. You can also go the other way round: either query by the publication's ID to get its details and (in KML mode) related sites; or query by site, which returns simple XML for each related publication or, if you choose KML, returns all points related to books linked to that site (potentially lots of points, not just the one in your query). What it all means is that you can see your search results in Google Earth or on a map if you like by pasting in the URL for the KML e.g. http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museumoflondon/food/rest.aspx?source=pubs&mode=kml&period=roman
So far I've not put this into the public interface because I think to do so requires some consideration, but this will come. I'm pleased in part because I can start to use this API in my own behind-the-scenes integration. For example I've also just done a load of work on the site summaries that we publish for all the work that MOLA does. The KML for these is cleaned up and the old ASP/XSLT thing I did to search across these (and other reports) by borough has been refreshed. It now lets you search by site code, and now that I can get at publications via site code it's a pretty small step to get it also to return related publications, which should come very soon (perhaps before going-home time). Because they're in very different data sources (XML files and SQL Server) it wasn't so straight forward before, now it is. The publications API is mainly for internal consumption like this (it also runs the user-facing publications page itself, at a lower level). I'd be really pleased, though, if others find a use for this, and any thoughts about the rights and wrongs of how I've done it would be gratefully received.

Ideum's multi-touch table

Nice to see an alternative multi-touch table to the MS Surface one coming out of the ever-interesing Ideam: Multi-touch, Multi-user Table Prototype. This is a company working with museums very much at the centre of their concern. I don't know if that has any impact on how an interface like this might be designed, but in any case it looks like there's going to be choice in the market. Fingers crossed I might get to see it at MW2009, though the chances of wheedling the necessary cash from the accountants' talons look slim.

Being for the benefit of Mr Shite

...like me. This is just a post for the poor .Net coder out there in some remote corner of the world who, like me, will find themselves wondering why the hell their XSL transformations using disable-output-escaping are ending up with their output being escaped. For me this meant invalid KML, where hte CDATA sections I needed weren't being output correctly. I knew the transformation worked just by putting the XML and XSL together, but my cheapo web service did the transformation via C# and was screwing it up.

So if you're that coder of modest capacity like myself, here's where I got my clues:

• This thread told me that the XmlTextWriter which is part of my Transform class would be ignoring "disable-output-escaping", and that I should write to a stream instead.
• Never having actually done much with streams, I found these utility methods perfect for cut-n-paste MemoryStream-to-string conversion

Job done.

If you happen to be wondering how you can output a CDATA section in your XSLT, I wanted to put that in here too but unsurprisingly Blogger doesn't like that code. I'll see if I can find a way around that. Google "disable-output-escaping CDATA", that should get you somewhere!

Now that's what I call sustainable. Not.

Well, I didn't realise that my PhD might have such a tragi-comic example to illustrate the need for an examination of digital sustainability in museums, which is its subject matter, but the BBC's report (and a longer one on the telly) on the situation faced by The Public in West Bromwich even before it opens does throw up a lot of questions about who makes decisions and how, and who is best placed to decide when to pull the plug. Tens of £millions spent and yet facing the possibility that it will be scrapped before it fully opens - and at the heart of it, in the interactive gallery that's not yet open, lies digital media that may be out-dated before its launch. Will it be any good, will it look exciting and cutting edge, will it break, will it be worth the money already spent, and is that important when deciding about its future - or is it only the money yet to be spent that matters, that required to keep it working or useful? Who will decide what money will be spent and on what: the Arts Council, Sandwell Council, Advantage West Midlands, the European Union? The story's not over yet, and good luck to them since they've come this far. Hopefully it will be brilliant. But there must be questions to ask.

WorldCat/OCLC get the rough end of the Guardian's stick

Well I've always had huge admiration for OCLC and for their WorldCat service (and FindInALibrary, built upon it). My admiration has arisen in large part from the papers and reports that have come out of its distinguished personnel, and I've never known that much about its core business and how it works with libraries to make WorldCat what it is. The Guardian has a pretty critical piece (Why you can't find a library book in your search engine), which does allow OCLC's Karen Calhoun to come back but lays into a proposed rule changes that, says author Wendy Grossman, basically stops the reuse of any WorldCat data as of next month.
Now the article leaves me pretty confused about just what's to be protected. Is it the descriptive metadata about individual publications that OCLC people wrote, or data about which libraries those publications may be found in, or both? Can libraries themselves can use their own data? Does WorldCat exclude Google from its pages? Grossman would seem to imply so. I'm certainly in favour of WorldCat being truly open with a public API, and getting its stuff in all the search engines; and anything that makes it easier to know whether something is in your local library is good. AFAIK WorldCat doesn't have a really open and powerful API and this, frankly, is not sustainable. But I wonder whether Grossman is conflating metadata about books and that about copies of books in libraries in her article, in which case some of the contrasts she makes between what OCLC do and what OpenLibrary, Talis, LibraryThing etc offer may be false and unfair.

I guess I need to do some investigation myself, really. On the face of it the proposed rule change sounds unwelcome, but I'm too much of a fan of OCLC to take that criticism unquestioningly.

Davy Graham, goodbye

Davy Graham, goodbye. What a wonderful and inspiring musician, and what a legacy he leaves in his own music but, perhaps even more, in the music of others.

From his website:

It is with great sadness that we have to announce that Davy died yesterday [15th December 2008] amongst friends and family from a massive seizure at home after a short battle with lung cancer. There will be a private family funeral held in the next few days and a public memorial in January; details of which will be available at http://www.lescousins.co.uk/ shortly. Davy will be missed by those of us who loved him. The many fans who came to see his last concerts gave him much joy and satisfaction and was something he drew great strength from.

Zemanta: another channel for Europeana content?

OK there are several ways I could frame this post, but obviously one is that here is another opportunity for Europeana to channel its content.

So what is Zemanta? Well TechCrunch just wrote about the launch of its public API, and from what they say Zemanta is looks to be amongst a burgeoning sector of semantic enhancement tools - another with an API announcement this week was uClassify, and you can also look to OpenCalais, Hakia, AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer and others including Yahoo!. These are tools that take in (text) content, analyise it, and identify entities within or characteristics of that text. These might be embedded into the text, or returned as recommendations, classifications, or links to related material. Sometimes we're talking about a machine-facing service, sometimes an end-user one e.g. the BlueOrganizer plugin. With Hakia and Yahoo!, these are services built on the power of their search engines. Zemanta sounds like it's squarely in this area, digesting content and returning links, images, keywords etc. from a database including (of course) Wikipedia, Amazon and Flickr. Looks like it's a plugin too.
uClassify is a little different - it learns to classify your text as you train it. I'm characterising it as a semantic enhancement technology but that may not be right in a strict sense. In any case, it will "enrich" the content you submit by putting it into categories you've assigned. That said, when I used oFaust, one of the apps built on top of its API, it took my snippet of Moby Dick and told me it was like Edgar Allen Poe, but needed work! Hmm. Whether that was down to the classifier or the training, though, I don't know.
So to go back to how Zemanta might fit in with Europeana, it's basically that we could work with them to digest our content and create relevant links to Europeana's vast (hopefully) and authoritative collection of cultural heritage content: artefacts, media, documents, people, events, and places. This is where I expect it helps to be big and standardised, as it should be easier for companies like Zemanta to work with one provider of cultural heritage content than with thousands of museums, libraries and archives.
To read more about Europeana (formerly EDL) check out my earlier posts: Europeana and EDL

Building communities pt.2

In my previous post about "Building Communities in the Digital Arts and Humanities", the workshop I recently attended, I mentioned that one concrete suggestion had caught my imagination, and that of others, in the final discussion, but I forgot to actually write about it. Rather than heavily editing that post, I'll outline it here.

John Byron, Executive Director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, proposed a sort of helpdesk for the digital humanities. The situation at present for anyone with a problem can be tricky: non-specialists may have no clue where to turn to find advice on, say, digital preservation, whilst techies might wonder who to ask about, for example, reconciling two metadata schemas; and yet, if you knew who to ask, there's almost certainly someone out there who could answer that query, in a centre of expertise, a grass-roots network, a software house etc. But what if there was one website (or just an e-mail address!) you could go to with your problem, which would direct the query to the right place to get it answered? The model might be one of triage - a crack squad of dedicated elves with a deep knowledge of the sources of expertise decide who to send the question to - or of an expertise marketplace, akin to Experts Exchange and the like, where a problem would be posted to a suitable forum (perhaps by elves again) and the community there would propose answers. The beneficiary might be able to assign points for the help they're given.
The proposal is not at heart about how to build communities, of course, but it would face that problem in two areas - building the community of experts, and that of users. Perhaps it would also build on what we learned from the meeting, too, because the idea would be to build on existing communities, creating a community of communities in fact, although quite how would I guess depend upon each community. It would also, hopefully, adapt itself to the needs of the target (user) community too, providing services that it needs rather than what someone else thinks it needs.
I really liked the idea, which would need some funds to get off the ground and to keep going, but which I think is quite easy to explain and show the benefits of. The problem may be one of gaining resources for a project that benefits people worldwide. But there are examples of this working (OCLC, for one). I hope it goes somewhere.

New hope for Swanee Kazoo?

Those of us who adored I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue with the late Humphrey Lyttleton*, and wondering if it will ever return or could be the same without him do at least now have an opportunity to participate in a very exciting project you can address with either a swannee whistle or a kazoo, as is your wont. I'm not sure if there are any parts written specifically for either intrument, but feel free to co-opt any part that takes your fancy. Go on, make it happen, bring back Swanee Kazoo! (apologies to those of you unfamilar with the game, you probably live in the wrong country)


* Apparently Humph was once president of the Society for Italic Handwriting.

NEDCC conference

"Persistence of Memory:Sustaining Digital Collections" is a conference being run shortly in Chicago by the NEDCC (December 9-10), and I should have stuck up a note about it yonks ago but it's mainly strictly "digital preservation" stuff as opposed to sustainability in the way I treat it. However there are a couple of papers that look closer to my research interests, notably Simon Tanner's (of KCL), entitled "Making Digital Preservation Affordable: Values and Business Models": the emphasis on valuation is key. Katherine Skinner's "Collaborative Adventures in Digital Preservation: Creating and Sustaining External Partnerships" may be relevant too, although it looks as though it's in essence about developing networks of partners for preservation activity. Having spent the first part of this week hanging out with various very interesting people from KCL, it's clear the place is stuffed with people I should be pestering for insights in my research area. If I whisper, perhaps they won't hear me coming....

Building communities

<<<<<BIG WARNING>>>>>
Major pontification with no real conclusions follows. Look away now.

[UPDATE: I forgot to include the Big Idea I mention below, which I've now written about separately]

I got back late [last] Wednesday from a meeting/seminar/workshop/conference thing (papers now here) in at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh which I'm still digesting [a week after I started writing this...] but which gave me plenty to think about and introduced me to many interesting people from the digital arts & humanities world (DAH*). Weird though it seems when written down, this world intersects all too rarely with that of museums, libraries and archives(MLAs). That said, one aim of the organisers seemed to be to develop ideas for filling the void left by the Arts and Humanities Data Service, which was wound up this year and did have some relationships with MLAs, not least my own via the LAARC.

Anyway to the point. The object of the exercise was to explore community-building in DAH. What conditions favour this, what sorts of communities may fare best, what structures within the sector can or would help? I must confess that I frequently felt confused about whether we were speaking about the AHDS-related problem or a wider question, and whether the communities in question were partnerships and networks, or audiences for some product/service that the former might provide. Nevertheless there were several interesting presentations on day 1 (Tuesday), and I think fruitful discussion on day 2, when we worked in breakout groups to brainstorm a few questions around the topic., with at least one really stimulating idea emerging, courtesy of an antipodean mind (now why isn't that surprising?) I'll pick out a few of the things that grabbed me.

Themes

• demonstrating value. Value to funders, if you're going to get their support for your network/partnership/wha'evah. Value to those you want as partners. Value to the people you want to use whatever it is you're promoting. It wasn't the idea that was interesting but the increasing recognition of the need not just to have a good idea, but to sell it. There's an ever-widening discussion of what makes a good indicator of value in various contexts - I know this from the museum and cultural world, but of course the humanities/academic world is grappling with the same hydra. Perhaps for my circle it's a debate over the appropriate usage of web stats, whilst for many at the meeting it was about citations. Same problem.


• marketing. Plenty of cross-over with the above, in fact. As well as the obvious sales pitch aspect, if you're trying to build a community, there's the flipside of marketing: learning your market's needs in order to create the product that it wants.


• plumbing. There was a lot of talk about infrastructure, which means a great variety of things: in a way what is the facilitated at one level becomes the facilitator at another (i.e. infrastructure), much as data and metadata can seem to be the same thing seen from different angles. There was a kind of infrastructure that cropped up more than once, though I'm hard pushed to characterise it other than by negatives. It's not generally physical: no cabling, not necessarily servers. It's not the provision of some fundamental service. It's where an agent/network/partnership helps to hook up or facilitate services and, umm, servicees (sorry). A kind of metaservice, if you like. So we had Bamboo, CLARIN, DARIAH and tge-ADONIS, TextGrid all considering or planning to act as intermediaries of one sort or another between DAH services or data and consumers (machine or human). I was struck by the parallels with some of the work I already knew about in the cultural heritage area. Collections Trust has exciting plans about where it will position its Culture Online venture, and Lexara [read my disclaimer] have realigned their Magic Studio to make it the "plumbing" between content providers (including services like Flickr) and other services or end-users/creators. In the commercial world, Gnip is also putting itself in this space, between social apps and those built upon them.


• Roles and responsibilities. Really I suppose I just mean that a need for new roles is becoming apparent without us yet knowing who in our communities (or outside, perhaps) should be responsible for fulfilling them. We look at the rapid changes in the red-in-tooth-and-claw commercial sector, where networks of networks and a swirling and intermixing of content and services constantly throws up new ways of doing things, and we start to see the opportunities for new services to accomplish our parochial aims, recognise that we can't provide them, or that they're better provided collectively, or that our peers would benefit from them too; but we can be held back from turning this collective need/benefit into collective action in part because we haven't got conventions for assigning/allocating/assuming the new roles implied by these possibilities.
  
• Building on what we have. Starting a new community initiative from scratch, including the community, may be unwise for a number of reasons. Often it may be better to look at existing organisations and see how their role could be adapted or expanded, whether by the creation of a special interest group, a regional su-committee, a project or whatever. This way you start with a community and you have an established brand to build from, with both the name and the objectives/values pre-existing to an extent in the minds of (potential) stakeholders. I had in mind the likes of the MCG, MCN, CNI: organisations that could provide the foundations for specialist sub-groups or initiatives.

As you can tell, I guess, a week later I still haven't reached any conclusions. I was hoping that reading my notes and writing this would bring some revelations or clarity, but no. The Edinburgh meeting was more like the exercise stirred up a lot of mud that I'd always known was there and I still don't know how to deal with it, but I think at least I now have a slightly better idea of what it's made. I guess, with my scant experience of big collaborative projects, I am poorly equipped to interpret what I heard from the point of view of the question at hand: community building. All the same I did hear about lots of cool stuff and met fascinating people, and attending was well worthwhile for me - I hope I gave something back. So thank you, Seth Denbo (source of my invitation) and all of the organisers of the seminar. I hope it gave you some clues as to where to take DARIAH, and I hope we can find new ways to knit the digital heritage and digital arts and humanities closer together.

* Apologies. I tried to write this avoiding initials for this but it proved too much work. I doubt it will catch on.

Google kills Lively, advises on digital preservation

Google's well-reported putting-out-of-misery of Lively was announced here, where pragmatically and somewhat amusingly they advise on the digital preservation methods available to those poor suckers who took a chance on a Google Labs experiment. It's pretty simple, really:
"We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms"
Fair enough. I think plenty of DP types would accept that at the moment there aren't that many options for virtual worlds. It's certainly another argument for improving the transportability of material between VWs environments, but presumably this would mean compromising on innovation to some extent. Hey ho, there's plenty more VWs to go around (and I never go to any of them. Not exactly an early adopter, me)

UK press on Europeana's launch

Some UK press on the launch of Europeana:

BBC online: European online library launches
Guardian: Dante to dialects: EU's online renaissance
Associated Press: European history, culture and art goes digital (well not really UK but never mind)

I'll keep editing this stuff as I find more. Plenty of concentration on the awesome content as well as the fact the site was brought to its knees by huge traffic, which I'd see as a success of sorts - best see how the traffic holds up over the next few weeks, though.

Securing endowment

No, not endowments. Decision-making literature* addresses the "endowment effect". In a nutshell, I mean that phenomenon whereby people value what they have more than what they might have, although they be the same. This is tied to the observation that loss of utility is felt more keenly than a gain of the same utility. If I am given a mug (to follow Beach and Connolly's example) I may well require a larger payment to give it up that I would be prepared to pay for it.

This is probably a useful tool to wield when trying to get support for some resourcing decisions in an organisation, particularly those that can be expressed as relating to assets the organisation already possesses, rather than new ones it might acquire. In a scenario where I am seeking funds to support old digital resources, careful preparation of the ground to develop an endowment effect amongst the executive before taking the proposal to the board may be fruitful (this is obvious to the point of being banal, right?) If I just tell then what we have, what it could do in the future, and how we plan to maintain it, it's like saying "here's a mug that will hold your coffee and make you happy, it will cost you a fiver, gimme!" If instead I encourage a sense of pre-existing ownership - an emotional committment - a feeling that this thing is already part of the museum and its loss reduces us, then the costs I propose that we bear are more like the purchase offer for the mug that is turned down: in other words the board may be more likely to turn down the opportunity to avoid those costs. It's like saying "you've got a mug, you love it, if you want to keep the cash then I'm afraid you'll lose the mug. Bummer, but that's life. So cough up!"

How you actually cultivate within the executive that sense of ownership is another question. You could also argue that this is little different to just identifying and drawing out the value of an asset to the decision-makers, but it's a more emotional proposition than simply making them aware of an assets existence and potential future utility, and it may be worth exploring how one can play the psychological game and encourage emotional engagement and attachment to pre-existing digital resources when fighting for the funds to suppport them. It may actually be as important as the rational explication of value, however much we might like to believe decisions would be rational.

Nina Simon amongst others has talked extensively and profoundly on Museum 2.0 about developing engagement amongst our audiences, and I'm starting to realise how this could be equally important within the organisation: if we want to persuade people of the rightness of what we're arguing for, there can be more to it than pure reason, Kant there? (apologies for the shameless mis-referencing here of something I clearly don't understand. I only understand puns.) It's internal marketing, I suppose, and nothing new.





* OK, let's be honest, all I know about is the book I'm reading right now and blogged about previously

Europeana launch

Tomorrow is the official launch of the "final prototype" of Europeana, the super-duper service bringing together content from museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual archives around Europe. There's so much to be excited about, but I've not even looked at the latest version myself - all the same, the prospects for the project seem to be improving all the time. My own institution aside (still no content from us, I'm afraid, although there's enthusiasm among the ranks), there's momentum growing here in the UK with several institutions signing up in the last few months, most recently those forward-looking folks at the National Maritime Museum. The restructuring of digital heritage at the strategic level, care of the Collections Trust, also bodes well I think.

Here are a press release and some FAQs that are apparently no longer embargoed, so fill yer boots. And by the way I've blogged plenty about this project before both as Europeana and earlier as EDL


Europeana Press Release 20/11/2008

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Culture museum heritage

Europeana FAQs 20/11/2008

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Culture museum heritage

What makes a good CEO/director?

The National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australia, got a new CEO on Monday: Darryl McIntyre, formerly Group Director of Public Programmes at MoL. Rumour has it that he will make a splash by announcing a pay rise for its staff, which is certainly a good way to make friends, and if staff morale figures into what makes a successful museum/archive then actions like this may be more profound than simple ingratiation (which I'm all for, preferably at the start of the financial year).

But aside from having the chutzpah to buy the love of your staff, what makes a good CEO/director? I've never been one, and nor would I want to be, and I've never been a manager, but through my reading and my life at the bottom of the food-chain I've inevitably formed some opinions - biased though they must be by my specific experiences. Below are some things that I think a good director would and wouldn't do, and it turns out I put quite an emphasis on good communications and building trust, lord knows why.

• Remain in direct contact with staff.
  The layers of management provide essential filtering, sorting and translating functions in funnelling information about the museum to the director, for that person to use in planning and evaluation (together with their executive team). Yet it's also essential for that top person to make contact directly with people at all levels, in part to test the validity of what they're told by other executives. They need to take focussed and relevant questions to people on the ground, and receive questions and complaints directly; not so that they can fix them themselves, but so that they understand where the organisation's mentality is at. More structured consultation exercises are very useful too, if they are followed up with action, but if not then they are empty and counter-productive exercises that simply increase resentment.



• Provide vision at the highest level, as well as at the next level of strategic aims and objectives, with links from one to the other clearly explained. It's self-evident that this vision thing is perhaps the most vital part of the director's job, and it's a question of marketing this internally and externally, which means communication above all else (as well as iteration in response to feedback). A persuasive argument is needed to bring as many staff as possible along with you.



• Be seen as a champion of the museum's mission, not of its functional necessities (financial stability etc.) Essential though these are, it must always be clear that the director sees them as servants of the mission, not the other way around. It's part of selling your plan to the people that work for you, which is all the more vital in a context where the driving motivation of employees is professionalism and belief in the worth of the organisation rather than simply earning a wage.



• Avoid back-biting.
  It must be tough at the top, and there are surely plenty of nasty and unpopular jobs that just have to be done in order to get the organisation on the right track. Still, there is no point in picking fights that don't need to be fought, in leading where no-one will follow, in throwing your weight around for its own sake. Fear is not respect, it's often more related to contempt. In short, top dog needn't mean queen bitch*.
  

Obviously there's so much more to being a great director that these factors, I've learnt at least that much from Robert Janes. In any case, I wish NFSA good luck with their new CEO. I hope they get more than a pay rise from him.

* Sam is not actually a bitch but let's not be pedantic.

Museum rescues NASA (sort of)

Vindication for all those archivists of old tech: here's a story from the Register about plans to fix up an old IBM tape drive held by the Australian Computer Museum Society (not a museum, it would appear, but perhaps an organisation whose case for a museum is now stronger...). The drive is to be used for recovering data acquired during Apollo missions four decades ago, which NASA suddenly realised might be pretty handy. Isn't it lucky some geeks were keeping this old crap somewhere?

Presumably as long as computer museums can show themselves to be useful and cheaper than the space programme, they be be able to find funding.

Anyone want a SyQuest Sparq? It might save the Earth from asteroids.

America the beautiful

As the car swung through autumn drizzle and leaf-fall en route to the station this momentous morning, listening to Barack Obama's victory speech with its account of America's historical challenges and responses as seen by one 106-year-old first-time voter, I found myself holding back the tears. I'd thought myself too cynical to get carried along with rhetoric; happily I've found this not to be the case when the rhetoric captures something true and expansive and, in this case, full of hope. I'd like to think, on the other hand, that I'd still not be seduced by Blair-style insincerity and (mis)calculation, where the goal of careful speech-craft is manipulation and misrepresentation, instead of the clearest expression of a vision or argument.

If I'm honest, though, there's always the chance that I'm getting carried away by the moment. I can't forget that, despite my contempt for Blair and the fact that in 1997 I (a Labour-supporter since childhood) voted against him, when he swept into office and rid us of the Tories all my reservations melted away and I wrote him a letter of congratulations, expressing my hope for the future. This rapidly proved to be mistaken, though it must still be said he wasn't quite a Tory (all the time). But even considering that lapse, and the fact that other circumstances are making me especially emotional at the moment, I think this sense of joy, of a meaningful shift in America and of hope for the world, these are real and won't dissolve in disillusionment. Of course there will be disappointments in how Obama acts as president, or perhaps in the scale of his ambitions, and we mustn't forget that he's US President (elect) first and world leader second (what a relief if he can lift that latter burden from our own unimaginative premier). There will be surprises to interrupt any programme of change, although he's lucky that one such shock has come just before the election rather than after.

Why do we outside the US care so much? It's not simply that America's future influences ours, true though that is. For me, I simply identify strongly with the US. Nevermind that I've spent but two short spells there, or that there's much internally or about its disproportionate global influence that strikes one as wrong; and nevermind that the democratic process there is shot through with flaws that can on occasion permit gross injuries against the idea of representing the will of the people; still America's people can show their feelings at the ballot box like no other nation, in an expression of freedom that on a day like today can inspire us all. I dearly hope that the talk of bi-partisanship doesn't evaporate, as the biggest shortcoming of first-past-the-post democracy is obviously that it can result in excluding or denying the values of huge proportions of the population. Here in the UK we have a technocrat at the controls, one who's strengths are solely in economics and who preaches pragmatism. What we all need right now is not a (pure) pragmatist, but someone who can offer a vision the inspire us so that, as Obama says, we can look within ourselves and say "Yes we can!". I think he's that man.

Thank you America. I kiss you!

Yeah, of course I knew the Universe was a big place...

...but Mike L's post really brings it home. Follow his first link to get an idea of just how many galaxies there are out there; then follow his second link and zoom out bit by bit from our neighbourhood stars and see how small we are just within this little corner of our galaxy. Like I said, I'd heard the figures but it helps to see. Mind bending stuff.

Decision making psychology

My current reading is Beach and Connolly’s “The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations” (Sage, 2005), which I’ve found incredibly stimulating and which is providing a suite of tools that I’m certain will prove invaluable for interpreting the material I’m gathering through my case studies. I’m going to resist the temptation to put up all my notes on the book, but I’ll pull out a couple of the things that I’ve found in there that I think will be useful to me, even though when they’re put as baldly as this they may seem banal: the book is replete with further insights, experimental evidence, and models for particular situations, and if you’re interested in finding a theoretical basis or empirical support for interpreting decision making, I’d recommend you to have a look at it. I may also run through an example or two from my case studies, suitably anonymised. OK, so, some of the ideas I’ll be trying to weave into my work:

Framing. The way the outcomes of a decision (the action to be taken to solve the problem) are framed is vital. With outcomes framed as gains, people will take more risks; framed as losses they’ll be conservative. When considering whether to invest resources in maintaining a digital resource, we could think in terms of the potential loss of value from that resource, or additional value to be gained, or the opportunity cost of using the resources to this end.

The gambling analogy. Whilst the gambling analogy played a key part in early theory, and indeed has a role in current theories for particular kinds of decisions, there are many kinds of decisions where the analogy fails utterly and many analogies that can work better. Lots of decisions in digital resource management could probably be assessed quite well using normative gambling theory, at least in terms of evaluating probable outcomes and weighing them up against gains or losses. But figuring out the last part of that equation – the value of the gains or losses – can’t be achieved with gambling theory alone.

Scenario theory. One of these alternatives revolves around the construction and testing of scenarios (or stories, if interpreting past events). By creating a web of cause-and-effect relationships (some of them interdependent), weighting them for the likelihood of their outcomes, and again for the value of those outcomes, decision-makers can evaluate which has the best chance of success, and which the best pay-off.
Figuring out an application’s dependencies (and their own inter-dependencies), the likelihood of any of these being disrupted, mitigating strategies and their costs, running the scenarios and figuring out the value of the probable outcomes: this is a complex process, but it’s perhaps one worth pursuing (together with a “significant properties” approach) in evaluating sustainability strategies for museum digital resources.

The nature of the unknown. Even where gambling can seem appropriate, in dealing with uncertainty, it’s not all about the likelihood of a given action succeeding as intended: there is the question of how the scenario will unfold, and even uncertainty as to the value of the outcome in the event of success, since this value may change for the “player” over time. This is pretty pertinent for museum digital sustainability problems, since these will often involve planning well in advance when there is a high degree of uncertainty about not just future conditions and problems, but the value of the resource (or aspects of it) in the future. For example, a learning resource may prove to be much less valuable if there are curriculum changes; the likelihood of this happening may be hard to assess, but the risk might make it injudicious to invest significant effort in making the resource “future-proof”, whatever that is.

Decision making in groups. As well as offering the chance to share knowledge and, one would hope, use this to make better decisions, group decision making throws up hazards, not least the possibility that, instead of sharing new knowledge, groups will focus their discussions on common knowledge and reject anything outside this, thus narrowing the evidential base for their deliberations. Procedural, structural and social barriers can also bias decisions towards one faction or another.

The role of social pressure, morals and ethics. Although “normative” theory has no space for these factors, they are clearly inherent in many decisions. Etzioni has distinguished between three classes of factor influencing decisions:

• utilitarian influence – the economic assessment
• social influence - social pressure to conform, risk of approbation etc.
• deontological influence [deontology is effect of moral obligation and commitment upon behaviour]. May include internalised reflections of social factors e.g. guilt, but covers internal drivers of behaviour.

An institution acting as one of my case studies – let’s call it Framley Museum and hope they don’t sue – threw up an example wherein a number of middle managers were found to be unnecessary to the continued operation of the institution, although objectively one might view the obvious staff shortages in some affected areas as indicating that claims of “redundancy” were logically false. The deliberations that led to decision to dismiss staff may have included many factors, but one conceivable influence could have been the fact that a key member of the executive, with whom all the targets had been in conflict, was leaving the museum on the day that the redundancies were announced to Framley's staff. Exiting the social context (and the country) in which that director would have been held accountable may have liberated him, for better or worse, from any social influence upon his decision. Whether this also meant liberation from the responsibility to make sound and profitable decisions for the benefit of Framley Museum is an open question; and one has to ask how wise it can be for any organisation to take advice on such vital decisions from people on the point of departure, who then cannot then be held accountable for them in any way. It should also be said that it’s likely that incomplete information contributed to the staff-shedding decision, wherein the directorate was probably unable to obtain or comprehend the information necessary to assess the role of some managers, in part because they’d need to gather the information from the affected parties. Clearly the question of the influence of ethics is complex; likewise the role of information which I have barely touched on here, but which is a significant component Beach and Connolly's work.

These are poor caricatures of concepts from the book, and I haven’t even finished yet (two chapters to go) but I really wanted to write something about it. Perhaps in future I’ll work through some fuller, more detailed examples. If that’s of interest let me know with the usual sound of one hand clapping ;-)

Why I blog

Lorcan Dempsey cited an article in The Atlantic Why I Blog. Now, I don't really blog in the sense that Andrew Sullivan means, inasmuch as I don't have much of a relationship with those few readers I have (most of whom currently arrive through searches about the IE7 prompt bug-by-design, or web services for OSGB to lat/long conversion), and I recognise that this intercourse is a key part of what makes blogs a stimulating evolution of (self-)publishing. So there's lots that he says that doesn't apply to me, but I blog all the same, and I'd already been thinking about my motivations for it when that article appeared, so here's my bit.

As the blurb here explains, this is a research diary firstly, intended for me to jot down links and reactions to things I've come across when Delicious won't do, and to explore a few ideas as they develop in case they're useful for my doctoral research. There are reports on conferences and the like, all written with the knowledge and vain expectation (vain in both senses, usually) that other people with my interests will stumble across them and find something interesting or useful, as well as being for myself. Writing for other people like this came later, after I opened the blog from its private status, and it has changed the nature of the blog a bit. In fact opening the blog has been negative in one respect, because I can no longer write about things that need to remain private for the sake of the institutions I want to write about - I have to go back to keeping this stuff in Word, or saving it as draft blog posts that you lot can't see.

I have found myself tempted into using this place for other purposes, too. I've never kept a proper diary - the implied need to write daily is too much for a lazy arse like me - but have sometimes wanted to jot down particular thoughts, accounts or memories, which do occasionally end up on stray bits of paper or notebooks, or perhaps in e-mails or letters, albeit somewhere else in the world. I have, in fact, an almost pathological attachment to memories and my personal past, perhaps rooted in having a happy childhood that's often acted as the key to a happiness in the present. If you twin this with a collector's disposition you have someone who

1. collects Incredible String Band LPs (the ultimate band for those who yearn for childhood in the years of hippy fallout, and the collector geek's format of choice), and
2. spends probably too much time trying to capture moments, sometimes at the expense of experiencing them.

Perhaps it's also some foolish lunge for some kind of immortality, for freezing my acts, thoughts and experiences in something "permanent" that might outlast me (as if this were the least bit likely with a blog!). Since our children were born this has changed slightly. I now have the only kind of extended existence I want: I can't live forever but I've had a hand in making something better than me, in making three new universes that by natural law should outlast mine, and who could wish for more? At the same time, the memories are more valuable than ever, and the urge to hold on to every last moment stronger than ever. I keep an occasional journal about the kids' development, and I've also discovered that shedding this urge to leave some amazing, permanent legacy has given me a new freedom to actually do stuff. I'm one of the cursed billions that have the desire to create - music, prose, art, whatever - but lack talent. If you have some need to create for other people, this is a problem, but if you are doing it for yourself it's not, and you can get on and do stuff. Well, now that's how I feel, and I can get on and write songs or whatever with no concern that actually they're pretty rubbish by anyone else's measure: the act of creation and of capturing those memories in a different fashion is the reward in itself.

So I've occasionally used this blog to stray off topic, but I do sometimes wish to go further. This is why lately I've been mulling over why I blog: there have been big things happening at work or at the school where I'm a governor, for example, that I can't necessarily write about, although they may get their chance in future. More importantly there have been very important family things that I want to write about, but which aren't for here - health things, family history, stuff that's not just about me and not yet resolved. They're the sort of thing to share face-to-face with friends and family, but the authoring box on this web page is so tempting for just telling it all to, because writing is such a good way of straightening your thoughts and sharing worries or excitement. Fortunately I've said and written some of this stuff to several people now so it's out of my system, but it had me musing on the limits of what I should blog. It's out there for good once you let it go.

Concluding thoughts? Well as usual I don't have a nice wrap-up for this, but I've splurged my thoughts onto the page, and that'll do for me. Perhaps that says it all.

International projects in the international legal minefield

This is but a (delayed) note to remind myself about the challenges that projects like Europeana face in integrating assets from, and providing services to, several countries with only partially-harmonised legal systems. This was brought home to me by a recent German ruling on use of thumbnails by search engines. Amalyah Keshet (on the MCN mailing list) cited the following snippet from Arc Technica's post on the ruling:

"As much as people complain about the challenges of balancing copyrights and fair use in the US, overseas courts have been happy to provide examples that remind us that some aspects of US copyright law are actually fairly liberal. The latest such reminder comes courtesy of a case in Germany that revisits an issue that appears settled in the US: the right of image search services to create thumbnails from copyrighted works to display with the search results. The German courts have now determined that this is not OK in Germany, where Google has just lost two copyright suits over image thumbnails..."

MashLogic: worth hooking into?

This article on RWW about MashLogic suggests one more tempting possibility for Europeana to distribute itself more widely and get itself integrated web-wide, for those users in love with culture (in the widest sense). MashLogic is a Firefox extension that tries to create links between the page you're looking at and resources that you've chosen, built on web services and soon to become open to developers and partners. Some sort of semantic processing is presumably at the heart of it, and it sounds as though you can effectively help to teach it. Evidently it's in a similar space to Adaptive Blue, amongst others, but offering considerable scope for the user to tailor their experience and for content owners (like Europeana) to hook into it.
I guess people are much more likely to install a plugin that can do the same for a variety of providers in preference to one that's only good for one. So if Euroepana can piggyback on something like this, its appeal could made much broader.

Oh. And there was me thinking Thomson were cool, what with OpenCalais and all.

Thomson suing Zotero. Bummer. If the outcome goes the wrong way it's not great news for quite important stuff like interoperability and doing stuff with your own data. Thomson Reuters are definitely not being cool here.

Courtesy of Danny Weitzner's "Open Internet Policy" blog.

The End of the Road

Not some dire news, but a long-delayed write-up of the festival I went to on the 12th-14th September. Well, the long and short is that it was fantastic, the perfect reintroduction to (multi-day) festivals since it's been, um, a long time. I went with friend/brother-in-law John, who I went to Glasters with a few times (2-4, we can't really recall) in the '90s and we both felt it was pretty much the perfect festival and the perfect line-up. OK, if it was my actual fantasy line-up there would have been Micah Blue Smaldone and Kaki King, too, and one or two others, but quibbles aside there were so many acts there I'd been longing to see, and a number of wonderful surprises too.

Amongst the acts I was eagerly anticipating were the beautiful Shearwater. They struggled a bit with the sound and we didn't see the set through, mainly due to exhaustion. Micah P Hinson was super intense, looking like Woody Allen in wellies but blasting away any ambivalence I might have harboured about the album I have. Dirty Three! I cannot say enough about how exhilarating they were, another trio with an unfeasible amount of emotional energy in a small package. We were struck by the intimate dynamic you could see in quite a few trios, and the power it could generate, and none more so than D3. Kurt Wagner of Lambchop was an amazing one man show, entertaining and engaging but intense, and raw like a refracted version of the ancient country blues guys I'm listening to so much right now. Mercury Rev were deliriously cosmic. Calexico wrapped up the main stage joyously and mixed new material I'd never heard with favourites I'd yearned to see them do. We caught some of Bon Iver which was lovely. And the surprises? Bowerbirds (who also chimed in with Bon Iver for a couple of tunes), Liz Green, Devon Sproule, Sun Kil Moon (ex-Red House Painter Marc Kozalek), A Hawk and a Hacksaw (I knew them a little before, but they knocked me out). Any disappointments? Well, perhaps Conor Oberst was a little less enrapturing than I hoped, but then I had very high expectations and he gave it a lot. The band sometimes had a bit too much inclination to, um, please themselves, though. And Tindersticks were Tindersticks, but I preferred them in more intimate venues (Moles in Bath, I recall, was great. Way back when.) I had no great expectations of British Sea Power or Richard Hawley, which were borne out. There was a schedule clash which American Music Club lost, so I don't know how they were - I've loved that band so long it seems wrong to have missed them, but there was an embarassment of riches there and I've seen them several times (again, way back when...)

I'd love to write this up properly but perhaps instead I'll put in a Flickr slideshow and if I get around to annotating those photos that'll do for reviews. Oh, there are a couple of videos of Mercury Rev and Calexico too.

All I'd say to end is, lovely festival, great atmosphere and the right size (5,000 people, don't know how they afford to put it on but it works beautifully). Thanks Sofia and Simon!



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

OT: In't the interweb marvellous?

[Apologies in advance, this is a puerile post]

Oh, the wonder of the Web! Useless knowledge of the sort I most adore but which would previously have been simply unavailable, or impossibly hard to gather, is there in all its flawed glory, should you wish to look. Witness the answer to my casual question to colleague Prez, "surely there must be there people out there called Shirley Knott?". Yes, there are (or were). And I doubt they want us laughing about it, either, but hell, there are worse names.



Who wants to go in with me on a social networking site/self-help group? Perhaps http://www.blemishednam.es/ would do it. I'm seeing forums (OK, that's a bit old skool), widgets, dating, maybe a really pointless API. Well, if you beat me to the execution, at least give me a credit on the site.

A quick test of SemanticProxy: what, did you expect it to be perfect?

You can see Thomson-Reuters' newest semantic web leg-up here: SemanticProxy. The idea is great, it really seems to take OpenCalais' proposition further and offer a helping hand in building all sorts of RDF-centred applications. However a word of caution is advised: you'll probably get some pretty funny results so they need to be taken in the right spirit; they're a great first step but not perfect.
Take this page for example: Shakespeare’s first theatre uncovered. Paste the URL into the box on the demo page. If you look at the entities SemanticProxy identifies, some are impressively accurate. For example, it spots Jack Lohman, Jeff Kelly and Willian Shakespeare as people; identifies currency, facilities and companies reasonably well; finds phone numbers etc.
On the down side, quirks include that it considers the Museum of London a "facility" not a company or organisation; designates Chelsea Old Church (mentioned only in the navigation) both a person and organisation; thinks Taryn Nixon is the director of Tower Theater Company (though the text says "Taryn Nixon, Director of Museum of London Archaeology"); and calls Shakespeare a Hackney planning officer!
SematicProxy looks very impressive, still, but this quick test does at least illustrate what a fiendish problem these guys are trying to tackle. The team point out that it's a beta: "No guarantees, no promises", they say, and I hope they stick at it and that I get to play with it properly some time soon!

Boring notes on stuff cribbed from TechCrunch

OK there's lots of catching up to do but not now. Here are three things from TechCrunch that said to me "these might be useful at museums like MoL" or "research material!" Perhaps I can have some actual thoughts about them in due course.

• Google Launches Audio Indexing. The first mainstream search engine to do this, AFAIK (though not the first with the technology), and the implications for search and semantic integration are obvious
• Internet Movie Database adds video footage. This is here in part because (like YouTube etc, I guess) Europeana needs to keep destination sites like this in mind. Is the IMDB a suitable place for any material from museums, libraries and archives? Perhaps not, but on the other hand they may have material that can stretch the role of the IMDB
• Amazon Gets In On the Content Delivery Business. As Amazon's cloud-play grows, MoL and others may be getting a more attractive way of offering media that has previously been quite hard and expensive to host. We await details and prices!

Gathery and Giftag

So here, by the sound of it, is the hProduct equivalent of Gathery, the application I built to collect museum objects marked up with some POSH. No-one was going to support an object microformat, for strong reasons (though I still wish there was a more general object uF for objects than hProduct), but essentially this product is the same thing, but for making a wish-list. Read more on RWW: Giftag: Social Wishlists Using Open Standards . I'm wondering now, though, whether there might be mileage in using hProduct with extensions for museum collections - it's still better than the nothing we have at present.

Queen and Open Source

A post by Alan McGee on the Guardian's blog on Tuesday argued that Queen, and especially Freddie Mercury, were actually "punk". He hung his case on the assumption that punk meant "never being boring". The vigorous debate that followed in the comments in part attacked this assumption or definition of punk, and in part added new criteria by which we might identify what deserves that label. For me, I'd say that, given the limited nature of the straw man McGee erected, he's right: Queen were punk. But he's wrong, too, in that punk (to many people) is/was more than simply a good show; more indeed than rebellion or subversion, as some comments argued. To be a useful category that doesn't also include, say, Marcel Marceau, Joan of Arc, Jack Kerouac or a nice crucifixion, we need to bundle these characteristics with others. My bundle of essential punk features might be very different from yours - I'd call the Litter, Faust and, yes, the Creation supreme punks, perhaps only the Pistols and Crass were punk enough for you. The point is that it's helpful to distinguish between the phenomenon or category, and the aspects that define its essence. Otherwise we end up with fun but muddled rhetoric - fine on the blog, of course, but not so fine for serious debate.

This next bit is related, bear with me...

Last week, in a meeting about a new delivery system for collections content, Mia and I had a disagreement which echoed a recent debate on the MCG list (parts of the "CMS specifications" thread here). The issue was Open Source and whether it's something that we should require as part of the system we are planning for (and future systems). My argument was, and remains, that we are interested in certain significant properties embodied by the O.S. concept, but that these may be found elsewhere. To find the ones that are important to use - say, the ability to modify the codebase, or the existence of a supportive community of users and developers - we don't by definition have to look for an OS badge (which relates purely to the licence, after all - definition). Things such as a community of developers that are claimed as virtues of OS software may be there as a consequence (or cause) of the licence, but they are neither required for the label to apply, nor present only when the label applies. Nik Honeysett made a related point the other day, arguing on the Musenet blog that

"the communities that would be best served by Open Source, i.e. small/medium museums, are the ones that can least afford to contribute and participate, so they are no better off whether its open source or not - the crux of selecting software is that it meets your requirements"

Once again, it's not that Open Source is "right" or "wrong" but that we need to think analytically about the aspects of it that matter to us and whether they can be furnished by any given solution, not whether it wears the right badge. Access to source code is good, but it doesn't dictate OSS. Communities of developers are good, but not restricted to SourceForge and the like (GotDotNet has served me well). Freedom from reliance upon suppliers is good, but think about which parts of the technology stack you're most concerned about. In our case at MoL, large parts of our stack are "closed source" - the operating system and web server, the framework (.Net) and the CMS we use are all Microsoft and essentially closed. But I believe that we'd be more vulnerable if we implemented, say, Drupal, because our in-house development skills are with .Net, and it's the ability to develop what we have that gives us power over our destiny. It's limited, yes, because the CMS's core is closed, but (a) the data is accessible and (b) around that core is a cloud of .Net source code that I can and do develop, some sourced in the community, and which underlies the bulk of the functionality on our sites. I can't modify .Net (though there's Mono) but I wouldn't want to, nor can I recode Windows (ditto). But we have access to the code that matters most, and that's what matters most. You could in any case build a CMS in .Net and licence it by OS rules, but the next level of the stack wouldn't be OS - does that matter? Chances are that if you're installing some OSS then there's still a proprietary element in your stack, or at least a bit that you would be unable to fix yourself. And even if you're top-to-bottom LAMP and could dive into the source yourself to tweak Apache or Linux if necessary, you're probably still dependent on patented hardware. Live with it.

Both the Queen argument and the Open Source argument, then, come out of mixing up labels and characteristics that can attach to those labels. OSS is great, but for reasons that aren't always relevant or found only in OSS. Queen put on a great show, but that's not the same as being punk. Significant properties, in other words, aren't The Thing Itself.

New Photosynth release

Photosynth v.2: Brady Forest over on O'Reilly Radar has a thorough post on the new release of Photosynth from MS, which (most significantly) includes the ability to create your own "Synths", all of which are shared with/hosted by the community, and which are built with heavy use of your local machine. Clever, and very exciting as far as creating views of museum objects goes. Obviously I have yet to try it out, and who knows, it might turn out to be cheaper and easier to spend a few tens of thousands on a 3D scanner instead, but somehow I doubt it.... Coolcoolcool