Tag: physical hyperlinks

Spotting QR tags in the real world

One of the prototypes made for dev8D has been adapted so it can 'splash a big QR code onto the screen' so people can conferences can take a shot of it and click straight through to the URL – no typing.  Super cool!

I'm excited by Semapedia, a project "which uses QR Code nodes to connect Wikipedia articles with their relevant place in physical space". You can browse locations that have been tagged on a map or on Flickr. I get excited by things like this because it makes 'outside the walls of the museum' projects seem much more feasible.

The ZKM (Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) are exploring mobile tagging for their 20th anniversay: "[w]ith this new tag solution, you can communicate with the museum and use it as a platform also outside of opening hours, i.e., not bound to a certain time, and without being physically present in the museum, i.e., not bound to a certain place." The site is in German so it's difficult to work out exactly what you get online. Thanks to Jennifer Trant for the tip-off.

Two notes on QR tags out in the wild – Seb's recent post linked to 'a guerilla art installation at [Melbourne's] Federation Square' which is ace on so many levels.  I love their ethos.

The image is a photo I took today – a band have put up a QR tag outside a London tube station.  It takes you to a page that links to a downloadable track and their iTunes and MySpace pages.

Tragically, I've even started using QR codes in the office – I often use my phone to test sites outside our network, and I've printed out a sheet of QR codes for sites I check often, to save typing in URLs on my phone keyboard.

QR tags edging towards mainstream?

A London-based 'tech PR' blog post said this week:

When Kelly Brooks starts appearing in ads featuring QR codes you know that the 2D dot matrix bar code technology is close to a tipping point. Brooks features in a Pepsi campaign that has gone live this week and images of her clutching a QR code have featured in most of the tabloids.

Source: QR codes and the Kelly Brooks Pepsi campaign, hat tip for link: Heleana Quartey.

See also p8tch.com who says 'think of it as a TinyURL you can wear' and emmacott.com who say 'wear your profile'. There's even a Facebook 'add to friends' QR app and a Google Charts QR Code API.

It's interesting timing, as QR codes were discussed in a MCG thread on 'Putting web addresses on interpretation' that was in essence about linking from the offline physical world and online content.

While they're not mainstream enough to be a viable solution yet, we could be getting close to the tipping point where QR tags might become a viable way of bookmarking real world objects and locations. QR tags also provide a way of linking locations to online content without the requirements for a location-aware device.

Finding problems for QR tags to solve

QR tags (square or 2D barcodes that can hold up to 4,296 characters) are famously 'big in Japan'. Outside of Japan they've often seemed a solution in search of a problem, but we're getting closer to recognising the situations where they could be useful.

There's a great idea in this blog post, Video Print:

By placing something like a QR code in the margin text at the point you want the reader to watch the video, you can provide an easy way of grabbing the video URL, and let the reader use a device that's likely to be at hand to view the video with…

I would use this a lot myself – my laptop usually lives on my desk, but that's not where I tend to read print media, so in the past I've ripped URLs out of articles or taken a photo on my phone to remind myself to look at them later, but I never get around to it. But since I always have my phone with me I'd happily snap a QR code (the Nokia barcode software is usually hidden a few menus down, but it's worth digging out because it works incredibly well and makes a cool noise when it snaps onto a tag) and use the home wifi connection to view a video or an extended text online.

As a 'call to action' a QR tag may work better than a printed URL because it saves typing in a URL on a mobile keyboard.

QR tags would also work well as physical world hyperlinks, providing a visible sign that information about a particular location is available online or as a short piece of text encoded in the QR tag. They could work as well for a guerrilla campaign to make contested or forgotten histories visible again – stickers are easy to produce and can be replaced if they weather – as for official projects to take cultural heritage content outside the walls of the museum.

The Powerhouse Museum have also experimented with QR tags, creating special offer vouchers.

Here's the obligatory sample QR – if your phone has a barcode reader you should get the URL of this blog*:

qrcode

* which is totally not optimised for mobile reading as the main pages tend to be quite long but it works ok over wifi broadband.

[Update – I just came across this post about Barcode wikipedia that suggests: "People would be able to access the info by entering/scanning the barcode number. The kind of information that would be stored against the product would be things like reviews, manufacturing conditions, news stories about the product/manufacturer, farm subsidies paid to the manufacturer etc." I'm a bit (ok, a lot) of a hippie and check product labels before I buy – I love this idea because it's like a version of the ethical shopping guide small enough to fit inside my wap phone.]

[Update 2 – more discussion of a 'what are QR codes good for' ilk over at http://blog.paulwalk.net/2008/10/24/quite-resourceful/]

Introducing modern bluestocking

[Update, May 2012: I've tweaked this entry so it makes a little more sense.  These other posts from around the same time help put it in context: Some ideas for location-linked cultural heritage projects, Exposing the layers of history in cityscapes, and a more recent approach  '…and they all turn on their computers and say 'yay!" (aka, 'mapping for humanists'). I'm also including below some content rescued from the ning site, written by Joanna:

What do historian Catharine Macauley, scientist Ada Lovelace, and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron have in common? All excelled in fields where women’s contributions were thought to be irrelevant. And they did so in ways that pushed the boundaries of those disciplines and created space for other women to succeed. And, sadly, much of their intellectual contribution and artistic intervention has been forgotten.

Inspired by the achievements and exploits of the original bluestockings, Modern Bluestockings aims to celebrate and record the accomplishments not just of women like Macauley, Lovelace and Cameron, but also of women today whose actions within their intellectual or professional fields are inspiring other women. We want to build up an interactive online resource that records these women’s stories. We want to create a feminist space where we can share, discuss, commemorate, and learn.

So if there is a woman whose writing has inspired your own, whose art has challenged the way you think about the world, or whose intellectual contribution you feel has gone unacknowledged for too long, do join us at http://modernbluestocking.ning.com/, and make sure that her story is recorded. You'll find lots of suggestions and ideas there for sharing content, and plenty of willing participants ready to join the discussion about your favourite bluestocking.

And more explanation from modernbluestocking on freebase:

Celebrating the lives of intellectual women from history…

Wikipedia lists bluestocking as 'an obsolete and disparaging term for an educated, intellectual woman'.  We'd prefer to celebrate intellectual women, often feminist in intent or action, who have pushed the boundaries in their discipline or field in a way that has created space for other women to succeed within those fields.

The original impetus was a discussion at the National Portrait Gallery in London held during the exhibition 'Brilliant Women, 18th Century Bluestockings' (http://www.npg.org.uk/live/wobrilliantwomen1.asp) where it was embarrassingly obvious that people couldn't name young(ish) intellectual women they admired.  We need to find and celebrate the modern bluestockings.  Recording and celebrating the lives of women who've gone before us is another way of doing this.

However, at least one of the morals of this story is 'don't get excited about a project, then change jobs and start a part-time Masters degree.  On the other hand, my PhD proposal was shaped by the ideas expressed here, particularly the idea of mapping as a tool for public history by e.g using geo-located stories to place links to content in the physical location.

While my PhD has drifted away from early scientific women, I still read around the subject and occasionally adding names to modernbluestocking.freebase.com.  If someone's not listed in Wikipedia it's a lot harder to add them, but I've realised that if you want to make a difference to the representation of intellectual women, you need to put content where people look for information – i.e. Wikipedia.

And with the launch of Google's Knowledge Graph, getting history articles into Wikipedia then into Freebase is even more important for the visibility of women's history: "The Knowledge Graph is built using facts and schema from Freebase so everyone who has contributed to Freebase had a part in making this possible. …The Knowledge Graph is built using facts and schema from Freebase soeveryone who has contributed to Freebase had a part in making this possible. (Source: this post to the Freebase list).  I'd go so far as to say that if it's worth writing a scholarly article on an intellectual woman, it's worth re-using  your references to create or improve their Wikipedia entry.]

Anyway. On with the original post…]

I keep meaning to find the time to write a proper post explaining one of the projects I'm working on, but in the absence of time a copy and paste job and a link will have to do…

I've started a project called 'modern bluestocking' that's about celebrating and commemorating intellectual women activists from the past and present while reclaiming and redefining the term 'bluestocking'.  It was inspired by the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, 'Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings'.  (See also the review, Not just a pretty face).

It will be a website of some sort, with a community of contributors and it'll also incorporate links to other resources.

We've started talking about what it might contain and how it might work at modernbluestocking.ning.com (ning died, so it's at modernbluestocking.freebase.com…)

Museum application (something to make for mashed museum day?): collect feminist histories, stories, artefacts, images, locations, etc; support the creation of new or synthesised content with content embedded and referenced from a variety of sources. Grab something, tag it, display them, share them; comment, integrate, annotate others. Create a collection to inspire, record, commemorate, and build on.
What, who, how should this website look? Join and help us figure it out.

Why modernbluestocking? Because knowing where you've come from helps you know where you're going.

Sources could include online exhibition materials from the NPG (tricky interface to pull records from).  How can this be a geek/socially friendly project and still get stuff done?  Run a Modernbluestocking, community and museum hack day app to get stuff built and data collated?  Have list of names, portraits, objects for query. Build a collection of links to existing content on other sites? Role models and heroes from current life or history. Where is relatedness stored? 'Significance' -thorny issue? Personal stories cf other more mainstream content?  Is it like a museum made up of loan objects with new interpretation? How much is attribution of the person who added the link required? Login v not? Vandalism? How do deal with changing location or format of resources? Local copies or links? Eg images. Local don't impact bandwidth, but don't count as visits on originating site. Remote resources might disappear – moved, permissions changed, format change, taken offline, etc, or be replaced with different content. Examine the sources, look at their format, how they could be linked to, how stable they appear to be, whether it's possible to contact the publisher…

Could also be interesting to make explicit, transparent, the processes of validation and canonisation.

Some ideas for location-linked cultural heritage projects

I loved the Fire Eagle presentation I saw at the WSG Findability event [my write-up] because it got me all excited again about ideas for projects that take cultural heritage outside the walls of the museum, and more importantly, it made some of those projects seem feasible.

There's also been a lot of talk about APIs into museum data recently and hopefully the time has come for this idea. It'd be ace if it was possible to bring museum data into the everyday experience of people who would be interested in the things we know about but would never think to have 'a museum experience'.

For example, you could be on your way to the pub in Stoke Newington, and your phone could let you know that you were passing one of Daniel Defoe's hang outs, or the school where Mary Wollstonecraft taught, or that you were passing a 'Neolithic working area for axe-making' and that you could see examples of the Neolithic axes in the Museum of London or Defoe's headstone in Hackney Museum.

That's a personal example, and those are some of my interests – Defoe wrote one of my favourite books (A Journal of the Plague Year), and I've been thinking about a project about 'modern bluestockings' that will collate information about early feminists like Wollstonecroft (contact me for more information) – but ideally you could tailor the information you receive to your interests, whether it's football, music, fashion, history, literature or soap stars in Melbourne, Mumbai or Malmo. If I can get some content sources with good geo-data I might play with this at the museum hack day.

I'm still thinking about functionality, but a notification might look something like "did you know that [person/event blah] [lived/did blah/happened] around here? Find out more now/later [email me a link]; add this to your map for sharing/viewing later".

I've always been fascinated with the idea of making the invisible and intangible layers of history linked to any one location visible again. Millions of lives, ordinary or notable, have been lived in London (and in your city); imagine waiting at your local bus stop and having access to the countless stories and events that happened around you over the centuries. Wikinear is a great example, but it's currently limited to content on Wikipedia, and this content has to pass a 'notability' test that doesn't reflect local concepts of notability or 'interestingness'. Wikipedia isn't interested in the finds associated with an archaeological dig that happened at the end of your road in the 1970s, but with a bit of tinkering (or a nudge to me to find the time to make a better programmatic interface) you could get that information from the LAARC catalogue.

The nice thing about local data is that there are lots of people making content; the not nice thing about local data is that it's scattered all over the web, in all kinds of formats with all kinds of 'trustability', from museums/libraries/archives, to local councils to local enthusiasts and the occasional raving lunatic. If an application developer or content editor can't find information from trusted sources that fits the format required for their application, they'll use whatever they can find on other encyclopaedic repositories, hack federated searches, or they'll screen-scrape our data and generate their own set of entities (authority records) and object records. But what happens if a museum updates and republishes an incorrect record – will that change be reflected in various ad hoc data solutions? Surely it's better to acknowledge and play with this new information environment – better for our data and better for our audiences.

Preparing the data and/or the interface is not necessarily a project that should be specific to any one museum – it's the kind of project that would work well if it drew on resources from across the cultural heritage sector (assuming we all made our geo-located object data and authority records available and easily queryable; whether with a commonly agreed core schema or our own schemas that others could map between).

Location-linked data isn't only about official cultural heritage data; it could be used to display, preserve and commemorate histories that aren't 'notable' or 'historic' enough for recording officially, whether that's grime pirate radio stations in East London high-rise roofs or the sites of Turkish social clubs that are now new apartment buildings. Museums might not generate that data, but we could look at how it fits with user-generated content and with our collecting policies.

Or getting away from traditional cultural heritage, I'd love to know when I'm passing over the site of one of London's lost rivers, or a location that's mentioned in a film, novel or song.

[Updated December 2008 to add – as QR tags get more mainstream, they could provide a versatile and cheap way to provide links to online content, or 250 characters of information. That's more information than the average Blue Plaque.]

Exposing the layers of history in cityscapes

I really liked this talk on "Time, History and the Internet" because it touches on lots of things I'm interested in.

I have a on-going fascination with the idea of exposing the layers of history present in any cityscape.

I'd like to see content linked to and through particular places, creating a sense of four dimensional space/time anchored specifically in a given location. Discovering and displaying historical content marked-up with the right context (see below) gives us a chance to 'move' through the fourth dimension while we move through the other three; the content of each layer of time changing as the landscape changes (and as information is available).

Context for content: when was it written? Was it written/created at the time we're viewing, or afterwards, or possibly even before it about the future time? Who wrote/created it, and who were they writing/drawing/creating it for? If this context is machine-readable and content is linked to a geo-reference, can we generate a representation of these layers on-the-fly?

Imagine standing at the base of Centrepoint at London's Tottenham Court Road and being able to ask, what would I have seen here ten years ago? fifty? two hundred? two thousand? Or imagine sitting at home, navigating through layers of historic mapping and tilting down from a birds eye view to a view of a street-level reconstructed scene. It's a long way off, but as more resources are born or made discoverable and interoperable, it becomes more possible.