Blogs

[PUBLIC] curating is an ongoing research-project by the Vienna-based organisation CONT3XT.NET, collecting methods, resources and theories concerning the changing conditions of the curation of (New) Media Art. The organisation CONT3XT.NET investigates the (perception of) communication in our society by means of experimental formation, starting from the concept of the context and its transfer into digitally networked interrelation.

Last week while we were giving a technology workshop at the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) annual conference, the power of the observation that culture is additive, that cultural artifacts gain meaning as well as significance by being seen in the context of other, similar, artifacts from within and outside the culture, and that the digital world offers us the opportunity to bring dispersed cultural objects together, was self-evident. Here were hundreds of generally small museums, in diasporic communities throughout North America, that each held a tiny portion of the story of American Jewry. If only they could aggregate it – each telling their local story, yet each contributing to the larger picture of what Jewish culture means in America; and of course, they could.

David and I gave a workshop yesterday on 'Museums and Technology' for the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM). It was a last minute favour for a friend, that provided a chance to think about strategies for approaching technology choices.

WWW2007 Workshop:

Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization

Tuesday May 8, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada

Call For Papers and Participation

http://www2007.redlog.net/

i've recently taken a look at a year's worth

Sometimes it seem we are fixated on copyright act reform as the only way to achieve broader access to digital culture and are overlooking the attitudinal changes that are taking place within institutions and opening the way to wider access without the need for legislative remedies. Over the past year the Metropolitan Museum of Art quietly made its images available for academic use and was followed last month by the Victoria & Albert Museum. When two major international art museums recognize that they have more to gain by making their collections open to non-commercial publication and broad discussion than they do from licensing rights to non-remunerative uses, it reflects a massive attitudinal change that should be noted, celebrated and copied. Yet in discussions of barriers to access and public policy initiatives these changes have largely gone unnoticed.

I've just been playing with another experimental image indexing tool, that's using image analysis to suggest keywords for images, called ALIPR: Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures. You feed it an image file, or a URL to a web accessible image, and it suggests keywords that might apply to that image. You're then prompted to correct the suggestions, and add alteratives, so the program "learns" through user feedback and prompting.

In November I undertook a project with the Canadian Heritage Information Network to explore potential future information technologies and their implications for museums. First I identified 25 technological scenarios based on technologies that already exist, at least in the laboratory. Then we asked a number of experts who would help to predict when, if ever, these technologies would be widespread within North America. Subsequently, we held a session with museum professionals, consultants, students and educators to explore how these technolgies might be used in museums and imagine their transformative potential. The process is continuing this month with the writing of a number of 'vignettes' that depict new realities in which the museum might find itself in the coming years and the response to these vignettes by second year Museum Studies students who are looking at their current plans for an exhibit in 2007 and how these might change in light of tgechnological opportunities envisioned for 2013.

The experts predicted that within six years, most North American museums clients (though of course the statements say "Canadian" since the study was funded by CHIN) will consider it commonplace to:

These last days we have been very busy trying to find information about museums in Libya. At the end, and thanks to web2.0 tools such as Flickr, we have ellaborate a map of museums in that country.

Unfortunately, the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) is not including information about Libyan Museums in its website. However, they are wonderful institutions which specifically need of more visibility to be recongnized as they should be in the international landscape. That is the reason why we have elaborated this map which gathers and places all museums we are aware of.

Thanks to Web2.0 tools it is our pleasure to share this map of Libyan Museums with all of you. You can find more information in our blog e-artcasting and in e-artcasting Photoproject, where you can also add your comments as well as tags to the image.

Panel 4: Conceptual Frameworks for Social Classification

An examination of authority in social classification systems [PDF]
Melanie Feinberg (University of Washington, USA)
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/sigcr/sigcr-06feinberg.pdf

My paper led this session

Social Classification and Folksonomy in Art Museums: early data from the steve.museum tagger prototype.

J. Trant (Archives & Museum informatics / University of Toronto)
see http://www.archimuse.com/papers/asist-CR-steve-0611.pdf

Exploring characteristics of social classification
Xia Lin, Joan E. Beaudoin, Yen Bui, and Kaushal Desai (Drexel University, USA)
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/sigcr/sigcr-06lin.pdf

- reference to his sig-cr paper in 1997 that talked about distributed indexing
- paper reports on work in doctoral seminar @ Drexel
- IMLS-funded project: interdisciplinary perspectives on information organization in the digital environment
- Is there a paradigm shift from traditional information organization to digital information organization?
- contrasts traditional/thesaurus (concept-based, static, domain-specific, constructed, independent of documents) with digital/dynamic (connection-based, dynamic, social-network based [ jt-same words ≠ social network] , large-scale, integrated document and concept space)

Experiments done in class
1. compare terms w controlled vocabulary

it almost worked ... poster presenters took 30 seconds each to say why we should come talk to them...

poster descriptions

1. organizations need rules to keep them from imploding.

Three answers from ask@nownow.com to Joseph's question....

I'm at the SIG-CR workshop on before the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Austin TX, listening to information scientists discuss Social Classification. Papers on-line at http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/sigcr/events.html