ideas

In 1999, David Anderson launched Seti@home and with it a method of enlisting the underused cycles of PC's worldwide. While Seti still hasn't found any extra-terrestrial life, it did give birth to BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) which Anderson established in 2002. The Economist, December 6 edition, reports that BOINC based computing supports several hundred CPU intensive scientific investigations and has recently been augmented to use PC graphic cards and Playstations for some graphically demanding processing.

The article also identifies some social applications of BOINC of interest to museums. Galaxy Zoo has employed more than 100,000 volunteers to examine the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to classify galaxies and Stardust@home is using volunteers to spot stellar tracks. The Manchester Museum has had volunteers cataloguing 12,000 herbaria specimens from the 19th century. Africa@home from the University of Geneva is enlisting volunteers to extract cartographic data on the location of roads, villages, fields etc. from satellite images.

Projects like these have led Anderson to launch a new platform he calls BOSSA (Berkeley Open System for Skills Aggregation) which he hopes will be lower the barrier to entry for such web-based knowledge sharing and collaboration projects. Check it out at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BossaIntro

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How can a web object have a defined meaning in the context of the objects discovered at the same site, a group of different objects with which it was sold at auction, and yet other objects displayed in the same museum exhibition years later, when each of the individual objects will have one or many URI’s and representations on the Web?

How, in other words, can the meanings of different aggregations of digital objects be retained over time?

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.