Uncategorised – Page 10

The location-aware future is here (and why cities suck but are good)

Thought-provoking article in Wired on the implications of location-aware devices for our social relationships, privacy concerns, and how we consume and publish geo-located content:

I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle

The location-aware future—good, bad, and sleazy—is here. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google's Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what—and who—is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you'll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.

Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.

The article neatly finishes with a sense of 'the more things change, the more things stay the same', which seems to be one of the markers of the moments when technologies are integrated into our lives:

I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place. Sure, with the proper social filters, location awareness needn't be invasive or creepy. But it can be isolating. Even as we gradually digitize our environment, we should remember to look around the old-fashioned way.

Found via Exporting the past into the future, or, "The Possibility Jelly lives on the hypersurface of the present" which in turn came via a tweet.

I also recently enjoyed 'How the city hurts your brain… and what you can do about it'. It's worth learning how you can alleviate the worst symptoms, because it seems cities are worth putting up with:

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.

Cultural heritage – particularly important in a recession?

Articles on the value of the arts and cultural heritage are useful at the best of times, let alone when funding to the sector is being squeezed. From the New Statesman, Looking back to go forward:

In looking at, visiting and absorbing culture and heritage, we are doing more than simply finding things out and enjoying them. Certainly, these are vital and thoroughly justifiable parts of the equation, but we also need to think about how heritage is presented and what role it plays. Culture and heritage are spaces in which we encounter different values: the objects in museums, the results of our creativity and the fabric of our buildings are the material signs of our beliefs and values. Our cultural and heritage institutions can help us interpret and make sense
of these.

…

Certainly, if culture and heritage can distract from graver issues, then that in itself is a reason to support them. However, they also provide spaces in which we can confront, approach, discuss and renegotiate the many values that make up our society, and this is what we need as our worldview has been shaken to the core.

Hat tip: I only spotted this article because the link was tweeted by Bridget McKenzie.

Looking for inspiration for Ada Lovelace Day?

The GetSETWomen Blog is a great source of inspiring women in technology to blog about for Ada Lovelace Day.

The UKRC's GetSETWomen network for women in science, engineering or technology (SET) site also includes an astronomy blog where a variety of women will post 'a one-off entry about the role of astronomy and outer space in their lives' for the International Year of Astronomy, and the 2008 Outstanding Women in SET: Photographic Exhibition is another good source. It's a shame they haven't listed the 'outstanding women in SET' for 2009 ahead of the launch of the exhibition but check back in mid-March.

[Updated to add:] The Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network(GWIIN) website might also throw up some leads, and the related British Female Inventor of the Year award site has some great stories about women inventors.

I've also been listing inspiring women at modernbluestocking.freebase.com, though as it's a much broader project, not everyone listed works with technology.

If you're not sure why female role models matter, these articles explain it well.

BBC to put 200,000 paintings from the Public Catalogue Foundation online

This could be fantastic – I hope the BBC will work with the museum sector to complement the work they're already doing or planning to get their collections online. From the Guardian, BBC to put nation's oil paintings online:

A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK's publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.

The BBC said it wanted to establish a new section of its bbc.co.uk website, called Your Paintings, where users could view and find information on the UK's national collection.

The Public Catalogue Foundation, launched in 2003, is 30% of the way through cataloguing the UK's collection of oil paintings.

In addition the BBC said it was talking to the Arts Council about giving the public free online access to its archive for the first time, including its wide-ranging film collection dating back to the 1950s.

…

[Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, said:] "Today we are not only reaffirming our commitment to arts, but we're announcing a series of measures that will put this relationship on an even stronger footing. Through innovative new partnerships, I believe the BBC can deliver big, bold arts programming that is accessible, distinctive and enjoyable."

I do wonder what Time Out's Tony Elliott would make of it.

'The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web'

Below is a quote from Wired's Chris Anderson on museum, curatorial authority and the long tail, from a Washington Post report, 'Smithsonian Click-n-Drags Itself Forward' on Smithsonian 2.0 ('A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age').

The quote really covers two issues – making failures and mistakes in public and leaving them there, and training external volunteers and experts to curate parts of collections, because no one curator can be authoritative on everything in their remit: "in exchange for a slight diminution of the credentialed voice for a small number of things, you would get far more for a lot of things".

I suspect this is a false dichotomy – there's a place for both internal and external expertise. The Science Museum object wiki doesn't mean the rest of the collection catalogue and interpretation has no value or relevance. The challenge lies in presenting organisation and user-contributed content in the same interface – can those boundaries be removed? Is it wise to try? And what about taking external content back into the catalogue?

This isn't a new conversation for museum technologists, but it's a conversation I'd love to have with curators. I've never been sure how the technologists who get really excited by the possibilities of sharing content online in various ways can go about working with curators to find the best way of managing it so that the public, the collections and the curators benefit.

Anyway, onto Chris Anderson:

The discovery of the "long tail" principle has implications for museums because it means there is vast room at the bottom for everything. Which means, Anderson said, that curators need to get over themselves. Their influence will never be the same.

"The Web is messy, and in that messiness comes something new and interesting and really rich," he said. "The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web. It says, 'We blew it, but we are leaving that mistake out there. We're not perfect, but we get better over time.' "

If you think that notion gives indigestion to an organization like the Smithsonian — full of people who have devoted much of their lifetimes to bringing near-perfect luster to some tiny pearl of truth — you would be correct.

The problem is, "the best curators of any given artifact do not work here, and you do not know them," Anderson told the Smithsonian thought leaders. "Not only that, but you can't find them. They can find you, but you can't find them. The only way to find them is to put stuff out there and let them reveal themselves as being an expert."

Take something like, oh, everything the Smithsonian's got on 1950s Cold War aircraft. Put it out there, Anderson suggested, and say, "If you know something about this, tell us." Focus on the those who sound like they have phenomenal expertise, and invest your time and effort into training these volunteers how to curate. "I'll bet that they would be thrilled, and that they would pay their own money to be given the privilege of seeing this stuff up close. It would be their responsibility to do a good job" in authenticating it and explaining it. "It would be the best free labor that you can imagine."

It didn't go down easily among the thought leaders, who have staked their lives' work on authoritativeness, on avoiding strikethroughs. What about the quality and strength of the knowledge we offer? asked one Smithsonian attendee.

You don't get it, Anderson suggested. "There aren't enough of you. Your skills cannot be invested in enough areas to give that quality."

It's like Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, Anderson said. Some Wikipedia entries certainly are not as perfectly polished as the Britannica. But "most of the things I'm interested in are not in the Britannica. In exchange for a slight diminution of the credentialed voice for a small number of things, you would get far more for a lot of things. Something is better than nothing." And right now at the Smithsonian, what you get, he said, is "great" or "nothing."

"Is it our job to be smart and be the best? Or is it our job to share knowledge?" Anderson asked.

What makes a good API? JISC want to know

Tony Hirst blogged about a JISC survey on good APIs, so if you're an API producer or consumer with a few minutes to spare then have your say on good APIs:

The aim of this survey is to identify best practice which should be adopted when making use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The feedback will inform a report for JISC on best practices related to the development of and use of APIs in JISC's development activities and will be made freely available.

You might not be directly affected by JISC's funding decisions, but I think the entire cultural heritage sector could benefit from better information on the best practices for API creation and use. Early last year I heard a speaker say 'APIs are UIs for programmers' and the nicer the UI we get to work with, the easier our jobs are. Apart from anything else, the more good examples out there, the more creating an API for any digitisation project will become the norm.

Finding Ada – creating new female role models

I should be studying for exams but I wanted to quickly post about Ada Lovelace Day. The organiser asks for pledges to "publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire". You can find out more about why at the link above, but the point about why role models are important is worth repeating:

Undoubtedly it’s a complex issue, but recent research may shed some light: Psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones.

Well, that’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Thus was born Ada Lovelace Day, and this pledge:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

Who would you blog about? I've signed the pledge so I'd better start thinking.

[Edited to add: if you're interested in researching and making information about inspiring female role models accessible, you might be interested in 'modern bluestocking'. Contributions and suggestions are very welcome, especially from a technical perspective. And I will be shamelessly checking out suggestions for Ada Lovelace Day to add to the nascent modernbluestocking topic on Freebase.]

Innovation crunch?

Slightly old (mid-December) news, but I've had deadlines/been on holidays: Google Shutters Its Science Data Service:

Google will shutter its highly-anticipated scientific data service in January without even officially launching the product, the company said in an e-mail to its beta testers.

Once nicknamed Palimpsests, but more recently going by the staid name, Google Research Datasets, the service was going to offer scientists a way to store the massive amounts of data generated in an increasing number of fields. About 30 datasets — mostly tests — had already been uploaded to the site.

The dream appears to have fallen prey to belt-tightening at Silicon Valley's most innovative company.

What do stories like this mean for innovation in 2009, as we lurch on in a state of financial panic/crisis? And as with layoffs at Flickr, there's possibly a salutary lesson for cultural heritage organisations investing resources with even the biggest companies – always make sure you've got backups and an exit strategy.

QR tags edging towards mainstream?

A London-based 'tech PR' blog post said this week:

When Kelly Brooks starts appearing in ads featuring QR codes you know that the 2D dot matrix bar code technology is close to a tipping point. Brooks features in a Pepsi campaign that has gone live this week and images of her clutching a QR code have featured in most of the tabloids.

Source: QR codes and the Kelly Brooks Pepsi campaign, hat tip for link: Heleana Quartey.

See also p8tch.com who says 'think of it as a TinyURL you can wear' and emmacott.com who say 'wear your profile'. There's even a Facebook 'add to friends' QR app and a Google Charts QR Code API.

It's interesting timing, as QR codes were discussed in a MCG thread on 'Putting web addresses on interpretation' that was in essence about linking from the offline physical world and online content.

While they're not mainstream enough to be a viable solution yet, we could be getting close to the tipping point where QR tags might become a viable way of bookmarking real world objects and locations. QR tags also provide a way of linking locations to online content without the requirements for a location-aware device.