I’m delighted to share a couple of new publications written with my esteemed colleagues in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre – and as if we weren’t working on enough research projects already, this year is about to get an awful lot busier soon, too. First, though, to the latest articles:
The final presenter in this morning session at "Compromised Data" is Yuk Hui, who will present a social media self-archiving project. He has worked for years on audiovisual archives, but much of the work on this field has focussed on institutional rather than personal archives, with the latter often concerned mainly with privacy issues.
But another set of problems relates to data management instead: we are working with multiple cloud-based systems, but rarely archive our digital objects effectively - archiving is not just about storing, but about preserving the context of digital objects as well: the digital milieu. …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 panel is Niels Brügger, who steps back from online social networks to present some more general observations about network analysis. His specific interest is in Web historiography – how can network analysis be applied to archival Web material, then?
Software-supported network analysis builds on hyperlinks on the Web – not on the wider context of Web content production. But hyperlinks always have a meaning; they are made for a reason, and constitute a performative entity which enables movement from one document to another. Web archives complicate such meaning as they cannot normally constitute …
Canberra. The final speakers in this DHA 2012 session are Monica Omodei and Gordon Mohr. Monica, from the National Library of Australia, begins by pointing out the importance of Internet content as raw data for humanities research – and even when the live Web is the object of study, its ephemeral nature means that archives of Web content are absolutely crucial for verifiability and reproducibility.
Relevant examples of such research include social network research, lexicography, linguistics, network science, and political science, amongst many others. Common collection strategies to develop archives of online content include thematical and topical archiving, resource-specific archiving …
Rio de Janeiro. The next keynote speaker at SBPJor is Marcos Palacios (whose speech I hear in live translation, so we’ll see how this liveblog goes…). Marcos suggests that there are hurrahs as well as uh-ohs in the transformation of journalism for the digital media environment: in the first place, as we venture into a digital environment, we learn that media have memory – that there are more uses for yesterday’s newspaper than to wrap today’s fish.
News has been called the first draft of history, of course – journalism has an input into both historiography, and into the formation …
Briefly back in Australia, yesterday I went down to Sydney to speak at the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2011 Symposium (staged at the fabulous Luna Park venue). My paper was meant as an urgent call to action on the question of archiving public activities in social media spaces – so much material which will be of immense value to future researchers is being lost every day if we don’t get our act together very soon; we can’t wait for the lumbering beast that is the U.S. Library of Congress to do the job for us, however fulsomely they’ve promised to …
The next session at COST298 begins with a paper by Eva van Passel, whose focus is on open and dynamic archives. Digitisation and digital preservation are increasingly seen as important strategies to safeguard audiovisual heritage - but the digital versions of such audiovisual materials are often almost as fragile as the original materials, due to changing standards. In Belgium, the BOM-Vlaanderen project drives some of the thinking on these issues - and it is especially interested also in incorporating user wants and needs into its process.
The first keynote speaker this morning is Kathryn Greenhill from Murdoch University, presenting on the possibilities of Second Life as a platform. She begins by taking us on a flight around Info Island - the central library island in Second Life - and follows this with a quick explanation of what Second Life is and how it works. The aim here, she notes, is immersion, not just information.
Boston. We're starting the post-lunch session here at MiT5 with a paper by Marlene Manoff, titled Volatility, Instability, Ambiguity: The Evolving Digital Record. She has been working in collage art for a long time, and notes that recently viewers of her work are increasingly asking whether the artworks were created through digital means (they weren't). This is a sign of a wider trend towards a growing ambiguity of digital objects, also forcing us to see traditional objects in new ways and challenge the nature of cultural objects. This is also a form of interpretation and re-interpretation of existing objects, and the emergence of digital media has led to a concern about the dehistoricisation of media; a failure of archives to connect new to existing work. The digital record, in fact, is particularly susceptible to distortion and manipulation, and this is increasingly a focus of research.
