Author: mia

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 Discovering and displaying historical content marked-up with the right context (see below) gives us a chance to 'move' through the fourth dimension while we move through the other three; the content of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.

If Web 3.0 = Semantic Web is this the 'first major' Semantic Web application?

Via Rough Type post 'Freebase: the Web 3.0 machine':

"Artificial intelligence guru Danny Hillis has launched an early version of the first major Web 3.0 application. It's called Freebase, and its grandiose epistemological mission is right up there with those of Google and Wikipedia.

…

The product of Hillis's latest company, Metaweb Technologies, Freebase is a user-generated brain. Like Wikipedia, it allows people to freely add information to it, in the form of text or images or, one assumes, anything else that can be rendered digitally. But it also allows users to add "metadata" about the information – tags that describe what a word or picture is and how it relates to other information.

…

The addition of rich meta tags in a standardized form is what makes Freebase a next-generation Web application – a manifestation of what Tim Berners-Lee long ago dubbed the Semantic Web and what has recently been rebranded Web 3.0 for popular consumption.

…Freebase is really more about the creation of a community of machines than a community of people. The essence of the Semantic Web is the development of a language through which computers can share meaning and hence operate at a higher, more human level of intelligence. The meta tags are crucial to that machine language. Freebase hopes to harness the (free) labor of a big pool of vounteers to add those tags, which is a labor-intensive chore (and a big hurdle on the path to Web 3.0)."

It's worth checking out the IHT article linked above, A 'more revolutionary' Web. I liked this bit:

"A consequence of an open and diffuse Internet, he noted, is that unexpected outcomes can emerge from unanticipated places.

For instance, some early experiments in highlighting new relationships from existing Web data have come out of Flickr, a photo-sharing site that members categorize themselves, and FOAF, which stands for "friend of a friend," a research project to describe the various links between people.

Both add "meaning" where such context did not exist before, just by changing the underlying programming to reflect links between databases, Shadbolt said."

I've put a draft of my CAA paper online because I said I'd get copies to a few people. I'll be re-organising it a little to get away from the Powerpoint slide-ishness of some of it, and re-writing into the 3rd person next week but I'd be interested to hear any comments in the meantime.

Buzzword or benefit: The possibilities of Web 2.0 for the cultural heritage sector, CAA UK 2007

Update: I've put the final version online at the same address (Buzzword or benefit) and moved the draft.

Thanks to everyone who read and commented!

Interesting BBC article on the philosophy behind Craig's List:

"Initially it was mostly coming in via email which we would reply to, but we've grown so much that now the more common thing is you set up a series of discussion forums in which users bring up various things that they think are important to change or modify in some way.

Users talk amongst themselves about things we're doing poorly or could be doing better, and then we're able to observe that interaction. It proves to be a very kind of efficient and interesting and useful way, nowadays, of digesting that feedback.

The other important aspect that you might not imagine initially is that all of the feedback is coming in as 'voting with their feet'. We just watch how people are using particular categories.

If we see that, 'oh users want to do this and we're not currently enabling this', then we try to code up some changes to better enable them to do whatever that is."

Blogger just made me switch to the Google version – ugh. On the other hand, I discovered that I had unapproved comments, so my apologies for the delay, I've approved them now. And my thanks for leaving the comments in the first place!

The BBC on Push for open access to research: "Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication."

I like the idea of a Friday post looking at how people are interacting with and inhabiting museums. Here's a lovely photo of Melbourne Museum on Flickr. I have a personal interest in this photo because it reminds me of leaving the office late at night when I was working all hours to get the website finished before the launch of the museum.

I love the way this overhead photo has been marked up with notes to link to other historical photos and add layers of personal meaning: Whitechapel – a local history in pictures.

Yahoo Pipes – a new challenge? opportunity? for museums

I'm cheating and posting something I sent to the Museums Computer Group list.

Bill Thompson has written about Yahoo Pipes in 'The mash-up future of the web'.

If you haven't heard of Yahoo Pipes before, this is a reasonable summary from the article:

"Their new offering, Pipes, lets you take a data feed such as the result of a web search, or an RSS feed from a blog or news site, or a set of tagged photos on Flickr, and transform it to produce the outcome you want. You can then make it available for other people to see.

It's web-based, no more complicated than creating programs for Lego MindStorms, and already stirring up a lot of interest.

Yahoo!'s Pipes do the same with a simple graphical tool that lets you define and connect data feeds, filters and user prompts, so that you can quickly build the service you want. You still need some technical ability, but you don't need to be a programmer."

My first thought was 'cool, let's make sure our feeds are in a compatible format so people can use our data' and my second thought was 'how on earth will we measure usage?'.

It would be cool to know who's using our data and how, but overall, do we need to measure how it's used and how often it's accessed? Given that we probably can't anyway, are there other potentially useful indicators of use? Would use of our data in a mash-up affect our museums' Key Performance Indicators by driving traffic away from our sites? I'd like to say that's the wrong question, but website visitors count under some funding models.

From the AHDS blog:

The AHDS has done some investigation of the user statistics of the Stormont Papers resource. Two main points are uncovered

1. User searches show the 'long tail' effect. The bulk of searches are not on the most popular terms (which account for 21% of searches) , but on terms, phrases and words that are used very rarely (which account for 54% of searches)

2. Of the ten most popular search terms, all are available as pre-arranged links on the home page. A quick click on a link, rather than typing something into a keyboard, provides a more user-friendly way for a user to get to know what is within a resource.

Source: Users do not want what you expect, AHDS.