Online Archiving

November 22, 2004 at 8:31 pm · Filed under history

international internet preservation consortium - welcome” href=”http://netpreserve.org/about/index.php”> international internet preservation consortium - welcome
The IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium) is looking at
ways to archive complex electronic materials.

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Griffith University: School of Arts, Media and Culture

November 22, 2004 at 6:46 pm · Filed under media

School of Arts, Media and Culture

This school at Griffith University in Brisbane is an interesting combination of the Media and History fields. It is soon to be headed by the historian Professor Paul Turnbull of James Cook University (and the creator of the South Seas Project).

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Sherry Turkle

November 21, 2004 at 8:45 pm · Filed under media

Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is one of my favorites from the ‘first wave’ of internet research. This is her homepage.

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Online Archiving: The PANIC project

November 20, 2004 at 2:22 pm · Filed under history

PANIC

This is a project produced by Jane Hunter et.al at DSTC. It is called PANIC or Preservation webservices Architecture for Newmedia and Interactive Collections.

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Online Archiving

November 20, 2004 at 2:19 pm · Filed under history

Archiving Web Resources - International Conference

There was a conference on online archiving held recently at ANU.

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Significance and Archiving

November 17, 2004 at 2:56 pm · Filed under history

Often I participate in a list called Fibreculture with the occasional ‘gadfly’. The list’s participants are mostly from the fields of cultural studies and media studies as well as from the broader media arts and activist community.

Dear Fibreculture,

A point that I should make is that the first Humanities Computing archiving project was in 1949. The Humanities have been engaged in computing and archiving since the very first years of computing. Arguably humanities computing is the most important ‘new media’ field within the humanities.

But another point that I should make is that you first need to be able to recognise what is *significant* as well as being able to develop techniques to preserve significant cultural objects. What may be significant to you, may not be significant to broader communities. Historical significance is layered (and politicised) just like human society itself.

Innovation in applied computing techniques may be important to some communities ie. it is very important to the Universities of Technologies (where most of these innovations come from), but it may not be important to other Universities that are stronger in the Humanities or pure research (ie. Woollongong, Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne). We live in a diverse country and historical significance is not a neutral term. Significance always has external reference points beyond the somewhat parochial declarations that we all bound to make on occassions.

For instance, this is an online digital version of the founding document of the National Library of Australia (Captain Cook’s diaries). Arguably Cook’s diaries are the most significant documents in the history of white settlement in Australia. This project is not only significant for its technical techniques of preservation and interpretation-online but also for its historical significance to the broader Australian Commonwealth. The project, known as the South Seas Project, was produced by the historian Paul Turnbull http://southseas.nla.gov.au/

And here is Lisa Gye’s work at Swinburne University: It is extraordinary sophisticated in technique, but not as significant in content. It is significant in innovation of technique to broad communities, but the content has limited significance beyond (And this is OK I think). http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/

And take Adrian Miles’ work. It is informed and significant in technique to broad audiences but (and I am sure he would agree) it isn’t really that significant to others in terms of content (nor do video web logs have to be). http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/

And my own milkbar work. It is informed and significant in terms of technique to broad audience, but it is not that significant to those who live outside of Fitzroy or the inner cities www.milkbar.com.au

The point is that if you are attempting to argue that a work is significant in terms of technique alone then it has to be a pretty significant technological contribution. Technique accounts for a proportion of the *significance* of any cultural object, but it is usually only part of the overall significane. And not every cultural artefact is significant nor should it be.

Also see: “Significance:” A GUIDE TO ASSESSING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURAL HERITAGE OBJECTS AND COLLECTIONShttp://sector.amol.org.au/
publications_archive/museum_management/significance

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Peter Conrad Boyer Lectures

November 16, 2004 at 8:37 am · Filed under history

Radio National - Boyer Lectures

Peter Conrad is doing this year’s Boyer Lectures on Radio National. The 40 year old lecture series is a commentary by prominant Australians. Conrad is a Professor of Literature at Oxford at was born in Tasmania (he was a Rhodes Scholar like Richard Flanagan). His book ‘Down Home’is about returning to Tasmania.

In his six Boyer Lectures, Peter Conrad charts this transformation, impressively referencing literature, historical texts and artistic works from several fields. With his extraordinary grasp of the world?s cultural history and after years spent largely in Europe, Peter Conrad is uniquely placed to deliver this perspective in ?Tales of Two Hemispheres.

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Barry Wellman

November 15, 2004 at 2:25 pm · Filed under media

The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism

The prolific Sociologist Barry Wellman does some refreshing Internet research. His main contention is that there is a ’second wave’ of Internet research occuring that is centered in everyday life and empirical research (ie not Cyber-theory).

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Australian E-Humanities Gateway

November 15, 2004 at 9:29 am · Filed under media

Australian e-Humanities Gateway

The Australian e-Humanities Gateway is designed as a reference point for those involved in or seeking information about projects and events concerned with the use of digital resources in humanities disciplines in Australia.

It has a section called ‘going digital’ that may assist in terms of standards for online digital works.

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Distributed Networks

November 14, 2004 at 4:38 pm · Filed under politics

A “distributed network” is a term that is used to describe the construction of an art work or the construction of a narrative across a ‘distributed network’ such as the Internet (I have yet to discover what this might mean for an historian). There is an excellent paper online written by Dr Jill Walker of the University of Bergen (given at the Association of Internet Reserchers AOIRs in September) where she talks about distributed networks in terms of story telling and narrative.

Abstract
A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed
narrative. Distributed narratives don?t bring media together to make a
total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This paper begins an investigation into this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives.

http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/txt/AoIR-distributednarrative.pdf

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