Milkbar.com.au

Milkbar.com.au: Meta-data Analysis Engine (Content is King!)

This is a ‘hypertextual history’ documentary about the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, in Melbourne, Australia (please note the work is no longer generally available).

Milkbar.com.au is an experiment using a ‘meta-data analysis engine’ to categorise and search (video-recorded) oral-history online (completed October 2002). You can search the 12 hours of interviews via the 4 categories that I have indexed within the video (there are about 200 index points). You can arrange and re-arrange the video according to an active, user-centred approach. This reveals the complex task of working with oral history and its multiple set of relationships and subjectivities. This work formed part of the ETD project (Electronic Thesis and Dissertation) Milkbar.com.au: Globalisation and the Everyday City. The project won the ‘Innovative Learning through ETD Award’ at the 2005 International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertation.

• Read about how this experiment fits within the context of new media and computing within the humanities.
• Read about ‘hypertextual video’ and its application to the historical study of Fitzroy Australia
• Read about gentrification in Fitzroy
• Read why you would want to make an Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) in the first place?
• Read why obsolescence isn’t such a bad thing (and is a component of innovation).
• And read why content is King (or why bad beer is still bad beer; regardless of what container it comes in).