Blogs

Niels Finneman is next, speaking about the archiving of Danish election sites which led on to the question of developing a national Danish Internet archive. They didn't find either the Australian or Swedish models appropriate for their purposes, and so tried to find a middle way.

Alex Halavais is next; he also presented at AoIR last year. He points out that a few years back hyperlinks rarely crossed national borders (other than into the US, I suppose), but this has been reducing over time. Language borders persist, of course, and continue to mean there is little linking across language borders.

Paul Koerbin from the National Library of Australia now speaks on issues of how to select content for an archive of Internet content (and whether selection is even necessary given that there are wholesale archivists like Internet Archive). The NLA has a specific statute which leads its PANDORA project towards archiving selected content, however.

My first day in Britain is spent at the meeting of the researchers' working group for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). This is within a couple of hours of stepping off the plane from Brisbane - and I can now also claim the privilege of having showered next door to the boardroom of the British Library, which is where we have now convened (the boardroom, not the shower).

I attended a talk by Phil Graham from UQ Ipswich on Friday - mainly because of the intriguing title "Monopoly, Monopsony, and the Value of Culture in a Digital Age".

Well. So that was Helsinki then - a good if exhausting experience, and a wonderful conference space to boot. I'm still coming to terms with the city itself, though - it reminds me a lot of my home town Hannover somehow, especially in the style of buildings. Helsinki Train Station Portal with legless lightbulb gods(Not the train station, though, whose portal is positively weird.) There seems to be no real city centre (especially compared to Tallinn with its well-preserved 1400s old town), and I understand this is partly because a fire destroyed most of the original old town some time ago.

The last keynote here at ISEA2004 has now begun. I'm actually watching this on the big video screen in an adjoining room because otherwise I'd run out of power on the laptop. The positive aspect of this is that I have far more space around me - but in exchange I'm breathing second-hand cigarette smoke. Makes you appreciate Queensland's anti-smoking laws all the more!

Finally met Jill Walker during the break! Now on to the next panel - but it's very dark in here so I'll apologise in advance for any typing errors. Mary Flanagan and Ken Perlin are presenting on their RAPUNSEL project. The motivation is that very few of the programmers and other IT professionals in the US are women (7%), so the project is to develop a game to attract girls to the area. The main drop-off point for interest amongst girls is around middle school, but they are and remain very interested in online gaming (over 60% of the gamers in Sims Online are women). The project builds on this by using 'computer clubhouses' in poor and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in New York (which are sponsored by Intel). The combination of everyday desires and technology enables the expression of a possible world (building on Deleuze). So how can hacker and middle-schooler cultures be connected in this way?

The second keynote is by Nina Wakeford of INCITE at the University of Surrey. Her topic is "The Identity Politics of Mobility and Design Culture". She builds on queer theory and suggests that we might take from it the break with an understanding of identity as fixed - this then is directly relevant to studies of mobility, of course.

We're on to the next keynote (which we've delayed through our question time in the previous panel). Wendy Hui Kyong Chun from Brown Univerity makes a start here. She talks of the tendency to take work at interface value - to fetishise new technology as cool rather than look beyond the interface itself. What conditions, what makes possible an experience of use?