Category: Uncategorised

Call for participants: 1st Annual Antiquist Workshop

This might be of interest if you are interested in computer applications in archaeology (and can be in the UK in late April):

1st Annual Antiquist Workshop

21-23 April 2008

Department of Archaeology

Southampton University

www.antiquist.org

SECOND CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

The 1st Annual Antiquist Workshop will be hosted at Southampton University Archaeology Department in April 2008. The purpose of the Workshop is to provide postgraduate students in Archaeological Informatics and associated disciplines with the opportunity to:

  • Broaden their skill base with a short series of practical seminars focusing on real-world applications of IT in archaeology

  • Get career guidance from professionals working in the field

  • Network with peers from other institutions

  • Become involved with the Antiquist online community for IT & Cultural Heritage

Seminars will be based on topics requested by participants but are likely to include GIS, web-based mapping, 3D visualisation & reconstruction, data structuring and scripting. Workshop attendance is free but participants will need to pay for food and accommodation where required. The organisers will be happy to reserve accommodation at a local hostel or hotel on request. Places on the workshop are limited and will be assigned on a first-come-first-served basis. Topics requested by early registrants may also be given priority. The final deadline for registration is 10 February 2008.

In order to register please send an email to l.isaksen@soton.ac.uk stating your name, institution and course, two specific topics which would be of interest to you, and whether accommodation arrangements should be made.

Please feel free to forward this to any person or list likely to be interested.

Best wishes

The AAW team

BBC: "Aboriginal archive offers new DRM"

A new method of digital rights management (DRM) which relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive has been developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM

It's a fascinating example of how real world community practice can be translated into online viewing. As the article says, "[f]or example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families." This has been an issue for Australian museums in the past and it'll be interesting to see if this 'DRM' solution is adopted more widely.

BBC: Aboriginal archive offers new DRM

Time to get rid of some old accessibility habits

The always interesting webcredible newsletter listed an article on '10 common errors when implementing accessibility' – as screen readers have improved, some old accessibility tips aren't required, and can even impede performance.

There's also a piece from December on 'Designing online social networks: The theories of social groups' with some relevance to cultural heritage organisations.

Google as encyclopedia?

On the BBC this morning: Google debuts knowledge project:

Google has kicked off a project to create an authoritative store of information about any and every topic.

The search giant has already started inviting people to write about the subject on which they are known to be an expert.
…
The system will centre around authored articles created with a tool Google has dubbed "knol" – the word denotes a unit of knowledge – that will make webpages with a distinctive livery to identify them as authoritative.
…
The knol pages will get search rankings to reflect their usefulness. Knols will also come with tools that readers can use to rate the information, add comments, suggest edits or additional content.
…
Nicholas Carr said the knol project was … an attempt by Google to knock ad-free Wikipedia entries on similar subjects down the rankings.

So much could be said about this. Is it a peer review system for the web? How are 'experts' discovered and chosen? What factors would influence whether an 'expert' agrees to participate? Would practices of academic inclusion and exclusion apply? Will it use semantic web technologies or methodologies? Will commercial factors affect the users' trust in search results? How will it affect traditional content providers like encyclopaedias, and new content sources like Wikipedia? Are they duplicating existing knowledge systems just to provide a new revenue stream?

Browse with maps on Flickr

Flickr have introduce a new 'places' feature, which makes geo-tagged photos easier to find by navigating through a map, browsing or searching. There's an end-user focussed screencast explaining how it works. There are more technical links under the 'Are you nerdy?' heading.

Features like this and Google maps seem to be creating a much more 'map savvy' generation of online users – I think this could be really beneficial because they're educating our users about mapping technologies and interfaces as well as making it possible for ordinary people to create geo-referenced content.

Flickr have also introduced stats for Pro accounts, which will make evaluating the use of our content a lot easier.

Could Facebook bring new audiences to your sites?

Dan Pett has written an interesting overview of Facebook and the Heritage sector on the PAS blog, and says:

We’re now starting to see Facebook appearing more regularly in our Google Analytics referrer pages, and people seem to be sticking around for around 7 pages per visit. It’s a new door to people entering our site, and maybe one that could be fruitful;

Brooklyn Museum announce ArtShare on Facebook

From the post announcing it, ArtShare on Facebook!:

What can you do with ArtShare? Well, you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display on your profile. But then, because social networking is about connecting and seeing what others contribute to the social fabric, anyone can also use ArtShare to upload their own work and share it with others. You can use ArtShare to select a wide variety of work, then each time your profile is loaded a different work will be displayed at random from your selections.

They contacted contemporary artists who still held copyright over their works and asked if they would give their permission for this use. They've even offered their application functionality to other museums:

If you work at another institution and want to share your museum’s collection this way, we can set you up with your own tab in ArtShare. When we set this up for you, your institution’s logo will be displayed alongside the works that you upload, so they are easily identifiable as being a part of your collection.

So congratulations to Mike Dillon and Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum, and thank you for letting us know so that we all get to learn from your experience.

(Actually I've just noticed one problem – given the recent fuss about Facebook, advertising, applications and privacy, I wanted to read the application Terms of Service, but you have to add the application to read them, so you have to agree to them before you've read them. It's not a criticism of their application as I'm sure this isn't specific to ArtShare but I guess it does show that concerns over Facebook's privacy model are going to affect how cultural institutions engage with it.)

A golden age before copyright was king?

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the pop art exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery:

Does this show – paid for with public money, with some works that are themselves owned by public institutions – seek to inspire us to become 21st century pop artists, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is it supposed to inform us that our chance has passed and we'd best settle for a life as information serfs who can't even make free use of what our eyes see and our ears hear?

Perhaps, just perhaps, this is actually a Dadaist show masquerading as a pop art show. Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the delicious irony of celebrating copyright infringement while simultaneously taking the view that even the "No Photography" sign is a form of property not to be reproduced without the permission that can never be had.

Warhol is turning in his grave