RESCITE

B L A C K - O U T

2012-01-18T10:09:00.000Z

I can't black-out my Blogger page, but consider it blacked-out anyway.

PLEASE DON'T READ THIS PAGE. IT IS SUPPORTING THE BLACKOUT IN OPPOSITION TO SOPA AND PIPA.

Do not let your government destroy your human rights for corporate greed.

Robin Boast

Digging into Technology's Past - Archaeology Magazine

2011-07-24T09:07:00.000+01:00

It is nice to know that after years of working as a media archaeologist, and an archaeologist that is an historian of technology, that the archaeology community is finally waking up to the existence of the discipline. I don't want to gloat, but there is a quiet satisfaction of "I have been telling you so."

Digging into Technology's Past - Archaeology Magazine

Paternalistic neo-colonialism in 21st century anthropology

2011-01-29T09:13:00.002Z

I am always surprised to see how little has changed in Anthropology since Clifford and Marcus' book Writing Culture (1986). As far as I can see, anthropologists still practice an implicit territoriality over their subject, their collections, their region and their "natives". They stubbornly adhere to the now completely discredited belief that they are not only the connoisseurs of Culture, but the mediators between the Modern and the Indigenous.

Access to the now institutionalised patrimony and inscriptions of the indigenous, appropriated over centuries largely without the consent, or even knowledge, of the originating cultures, are now strictly guarded by these marshals of cultures not their own. Is this just the last desperate grasping of a dying epistemology, or the resurgence of a new colonialism? Let's hope the former.

Objects and Learning from 1995

2011-01-21T15:48:00.000Z

The following is another in the series of publications that came out of the innovative project, the Virtual Teaching Collection, in the 1990s. I am republishing the internal papers here so they can be of use. However, it must be realised that this paper was written in 1995, a little under 2 years after the Web was launched, and should be read in that context.
R. Boast 21 January 2011.

Objects and Learning

Cabinet and the Context of Enquiry

Edited by

Dr. Robin B. Boast

1995

With contributions from:

Dr. S. Lucy, Dr. L. Thomas, Dr. M. Wintroub

University of Cambridge

Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology

Preface

Funded by the Higher Education Funding Council (England) (HEFCE), the Virtual Teaching Collection is a three year project based in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Whipple Museum of History of Science. Also involved, as consortium partners, are Glasgow University, the University of London, Middlesex University and Oxford University.

The aims of the project are to establish a database of digital images relating to curricula in the fields of archaeology and history of science, and to provide the tools necessary for research and the construction of teaching materials. In doing this, the Virtual Teaching Collection will give access to a range of objects which is unavailable even in the largest teaching collections. The completion date for the project is December 1996, by which time a fully operational image database system, consisting of over 4,000 images relating to the two disciplines, will have been evaluated, and will be available for use in undergraduate teaching at the consortium sites. A working prototype of the system with a sample set of images will be ready for preliminary assessment by January 1995.

The Development Team consists of four people: Dr. Lester Thomas is responsible for system/software engineering, Charlie Gere is in charge of interaction and graphic design, Michael Wintroub is the research assistant for History of Science, and his counterpart in Archaeology is Sam Lucy. The directors of the project are Dr. Robin Boast from Archaeology, along with Dr. Liba Taub and Craig Rodine, both from History of Science.

The Executive Committee consists of representatives from the consortium sites. It comprises Dr. Jim Bennett, Curator of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University; Stephen Boyd Davis from the Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University; Dr. Jeremy Huggett of the Department of Archaeology, Glasgow University; and Dr. Derek Keane of the Centre for Metropolitan History, University of London.

Introduction:

To the Museum

We go from room to room, down long corridors, and through a maze of exhibits. We pass crowded display cases. We walk at eye-level with the masterpieces hanging on the walls. We stoop and strain to read cards covered with fine print, and we stop and stare in amazement at an item that for some ineffable reason particularly touches us. Then we think about how much our feet hurt, about how much more there is to see, and we shuffle on to the next room, in search of culture, knowledge, and perhaps even entertainment.

We go to museums to be, and to become, Cultured, to learn about our past, our present, about other cultures, and even other worlds. Whether it be the school field-trip, the Sunday visit, or the tourist excursion, the spectacle offered up by the museum is considered an essential component of the larger process of “cultural enlightenment”. Yet, curiously, we are not invited to participate in this presentation of culture, of “enlightenment”, as anything other than passive subjects. Indeed, we are encouraged neither to think critically, nor to interact with the exhibits or the stories they tell. We are, in a word, tourists.

Matters of Dissent

The traditional role of the museum is being challenged. Questions are being raised. Dissenting voices are being heard. One has only to look at the furore over the “Art of Death” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1994), or the angry exchanges incited by the Smithsonian Institute’s exhibition of the Enola Gay (1995) to see that museums and their collections have become arenas for social and political debate.

Clearly, museum collections have become so controversial because they are closely related to the ways we define and understand our own and other cultures. The problems begin when more than one culture, nation or group claims an object or collection as its own; when the facts as recounted about a particular collection or exhibit represent one point of view, neglecting all others. Accordingly, much of the sound and fury associated with museums has to do with where collections come from and to whom they legitimately belong. The question thus becomes: who determines how best to collect, present, understand and appreciate these objects? Whose interpretation is right? Whose is wrong? Who should have access? Whose views should be represented? And who should be vested with the authority to judge between the often volatile differences that might arise?

At the very time when the intellectual and moral status of large multicultural collections has become increasingly problematic, it has become apparent that such collections are crucial not only to understanding our own history and culture, but also other peoples, places and times. This is because the objects within a collection have been, and continue to be, invested with so much meaning. The irony is clear: collections have become most important precisely when they have become most problematic, when their ownership, interpretation, and use have become highly politicised and contested issues.

The teaching of archaeology has always depended upon the “material culture” found in museums, and this is also increasingly becoming the case with the teaching of history of science. Clearly, to demonstrate the richness of a particular culture, a particular time, or place, one object will not suffice. Rather, a whole series is needed if one is to examine the ways in which objects are used and understood. The problem, of course, is that such collections are increasingly difficult to assemble, and that once assembled, access to them tends to be severely limited.

The Virtual Teaching Collection is a project designed by archaeologists and historians of science to redress some of the problems and controversies associated with access, control, and interpretation of collections. To this end, a set of software tools have been developed called Cabinet. The goal of Cabinet is to ensure that students, lecturers and researchers are not only able to have access to the wide range of objects associated with our curricula, but also that they be able to explore some of the many different contexts in which these objects are used and understood. In this sense, the goal of Cabinet is not to dictate how or what should be taught in using the remarkable resources found in the museums of Cambridge, Oxford, London and Glasgow, but rather to provide an environment within which instruction and research can take place virtually anywhere and with any collection of digital representations.

Rethinking the Museum

Commenting upon a recent exhibition at the Smithsonian, a former curator of its Air and Space Museum asserted that “...didactic arguments have no place in a museum of history. Such discussions should not infiltrate their way into what should be, after all, a pure (factual) recollection of precise moments of the past.” We could not disagree more. The stories which museums recount are not simply factual; they reflect the opinions, points of view and interpretations of those who tell them.

The growing awareness of the “political” nature of museums, and the part they play in maintaining the cultural values of elite or privileged groups has encouraged a new openness and self-awareness on the part of some museum organisers. The questions of “Who does the culture belong to?”, “How is it being portrayed?” and “Who is portraying it for whom?” have brought about new conceptions of what museums should and should not be doing. These questions have led to attempts to redefine the relationship between museums and visitors by encouraging the visitor to interact with the collection.

Such trends can be identified in some recent innovative museums which have attempted to demystify the traditional authority of museums and their exhibits. For example, in the Archaeological Resource Centre in York visitors participate in the archaeological process, classifying and recording real artefacts, thus gaining an insight into some aspects of what archaeologists actually do. The Prehistoric Gallery at the Museum of London offers a number of different interpretations for the same phenomena, thereby making the point that there is not a “true” record of the past, but many different versions of it. The history of science exhibits at the Whipple Museum in Cambridge (1993-1994) have aimed to make plain the fact that social and political conditions were (and still are) an integral part of scientific research and explanation.

Enabling Technologies:

Hardware

New approaches to virtual images and their associated data have been made possible by developments in hardware and software. Increasingly sophisticated circuit design and ever subtler microchip manufacture have lifted microprocessors to new pinnacles of performance. Packed into a couple of square centimetres of silicon there are up to three million transistors arranged using the latest innovations in processor design (RISC architecture, pipelining and superscalar operation, for example). The chips now being used have speeds of 50 to 200 MHz and perform 100 million to 400 million instructions per second. The whole aim of this hardware is not just to make spreadsheet or word processing applications that operate faster, but to be a catalyst for whole new realms of functionality and interactivity: event driven WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) software with speech, images, movies and hypertext, for example.

Software

Computer software has come a long way since the terminal command line interfaces of a decade ago. Led by research at Xerox PARC and popularised by the Apple Macintosh, WIMP interfaces have become the norm for human-computer interaction. Because these interfaces are event driven, they allow the user to be in control of the interaction. The events (for example, opening a window or running an application) are usually generated by selecting menus or icons, typically with a mouse pointer. This is very different from the old command line interface where the user typically chose from a small selection of commands and the control of the interaction rested with the computer.

Decreasing prices of ever more powerful hardware have also lead to the development of interactive multimedia: the integration of images, video and sound into interactive software. A major problem with this integration is the high “bandwidth” and large storage space required to handle multimedia data in digital form. The use of data compression is one of the key factors needed to enable the use of digital multimedia. The last ten years have seen a large research effort in this area and there now exists a range of widely accepted standards for digital multimedia compression. For the Virtual Teaching Collection project, the following standards were chosen: For images the Joint Photographic Experts Group international standard (JPEG) and for video, Apple Computer Inc.’s QuickTime™ standard (see Research Report No. 2).

The main problems with generating software are managing its complexity and reducing the length of the software development time needed to produce these complex programs. Central to the solution of these problems is the use of object-oriented tools and techniques which have been developed over the last decade. Object-oriented software development tools allow the modular design and reuse of software components. Commercial “libraries” are available for user interface components (windows, buttons, menus etc.) and database components (object persistence mechanisms, searching and sorting). These features allow for increased speed and efficiency of programming and improved maintenance and reliability of the system.

Advances in hardware and software technology thus allow the development of new and innovative applications, and the use of computer technology in new areas. The aim of the Virtual Teaching Collection is to develop the technology to meet the challenges of object-based teaching and learning in an effective way.

The Role of Objects

To demonstrate what can be done with Cabinet, the Virtual Teaching Collection project has developed two collections: a collection of materials covering British Archaeology from the Neolithic through the Medieval periods with objects from the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the University of Glasgow Hunterian Museum and the Andover Museum; a collection of history of science instruments from the Oxford University Museum of the History of Science and the University of Cambridge Whipple Museum.

Objects in Archaeology

The use of objects is an integral part of archaeological teaching and research. With no documentary sources to provide an historical framework, archaeological knowledge is constructed by contrasting and comparing excavated artefacts. Often fine typologies and chronologies, around which frameworks of interpretation are based, are reliant on minute differences between similar objects. Thus, an intimate understanding of object materials and categories, and the development of knowledge about how they fit into structures of meaning, are two of the primary means by which ideas about the past are formed.

Virtually all archaeological teaching makes use of images of objects, in the form of slide shows to accompany a lecture, or uses the objects themselves, in the context of practical sessions. This usage presents considerable problems of access, however. With regard to images of objects, an extensive slide collection is only built up by a lecturer over a considerable amount of time, and remains in the possession and control of that person, who therefore also controls the information associated with those objects. Students are not free to use these images for their own purposes, and have no access to contextual information except through the lecturer or readings. Illustrations of artefacts are found in widely diffuse sources, such as text-books, site-reports and artefact catalogues, and in such sources they are usually divorced from the detailed description of context which is the mainstay of archaeological interpretation.

With regard to the objects themselves, many university and college departments do not have access to adequate teaching collections which their students can work with. Even in those departments with extensive teaching collections, such as Cambridge, the complete range of artefacts necessary for detailed explanation of a topic is often not held by the museum. In addition, many artefacts are too delicate to be handled by large (or even small) numbers of students. Students are also rarely permitted to use the collections without supervision.

The Virtual Teaching Collection aims to side-step these problems by making use of representations of objects in museum collections with a high level of documentation and giving the user free access to as much contextual and descriptive information as possible. In this respect, the uses to which the collection will be put, whether by the student, the researcher or the lecturer, will be determined by the aims and needs of the user, rather than by the limitations of the information itself.

Objects in History of Science

In contrast to archaeology, the role which objects play in teaching the history of science is very different. The history of science has been, until recently, dominated with telling a narrative of progressive enlightenment. The standard bearers of this “enlightenment” were represented by certain canonical figures such as Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. These “Great Men” have been depicted as single-handedly freeing “Man” from the tyranny of ignorance and superstition. Although their ideas have been explored in some depth, they have been treated as curiously ahistorical.

This picture, of late, has been drastically revised. The ahistorical genius has been firmly placed within specific historical circumstances which conditioned both the production and reception of his ideas. As a result, increasing attention has come to be placed on the specific practices and tools that he employed in producing his theories.

Traditionally, there has been a wide gulf between the work that goes into making a scientific theory, and the presentation of the theory as a scientific fact. Increasingly, historians of science are concentrating their attention on specific experiments, the ways they are structured, carried out, observed, written about and understood. This emphasis on the “work” of science directly contradicts the picture of the scientist as some kind of disembodied being who never gets his (let alone her) hands dirty with the often messy work which precedes the eventual written presentation of the elegantly performed experiment. Indeed, much of the work of science is carried out, not by the “great genius”, but rather by everyday craftsmen and technicians.

The Virtual Teaching Collection’s curriculum in the history of science grows directly out of this changed emphasis, and it has several interrelated goals. Firstly, we aim to give the lecturer, student or researcher the access which they would not normally have to the rare and precious devices used by natural philosophers, astronomers, sailors, merchants and surveyors of the past. Secondly, we wish to communicate through these instruments the sense that science is heavily influenced by specific historical, social and cultural contexts. Thirdly, we want to allow our users to explore the work of some of the canonical figures in the history of science through the instruments they developed and used. And finally, we would like to permit our users to explore the history of science according to their own particular interests, by giving them the freedom to create their own sub-collections for purposes of teaching and research. We hope that this will both promote a critical reexamination of traditional ideas and encourage original research.

Virtual Collections

It is evident that the true potential of information technology has yet to be realised, for although museums and institutions concerned with material culture have embraced computing technology, the uses to which this technology has been put, and the results that have been obtained, are relatively disappointing.

Indeed, the end result of their forays into information technology often differs little from the publication of a well-indexed book. As such, they reproduce many of the shortcomings of “actual” collections in the sense that they are closed linear systems which offer the user no chance of real interaction. The contents and links are decided and fixed by the writers or designers, and the user remains a passive recipient of knowledge. Even more limiting, attempts have been made to reproduce the physical space of the museum. Using virtual reality techniques which enable the user to “walk through” the museum in essence transfers the inadequacies of the museum experience directly onto the computer.

Computers have revolutionised our ability to store and manipulate complex information. Their potential now permits us to reexamine the various ways in which collections are made, used and understood. Associations and connections which were once hard and fast, and seemingly fixed by the very order of things, can now be challenged. Information and objects can be assembled and manipulated, and narratives can be explored, or even rewritten, according to new and diverse criteria.

Applying these ideas to museums and their collections allows us to open out systems of classification and organisation which were previously rigid. And, though for many purposes there is no substitute for the experience of the actual artefact, the ability to virtually place objects in different contexts has the potential to transform our understanding of these objects when we do actually see them in museums. Cabinet is the first software tool, that we know of, that is designed for this form of user driven recontextualisation of collections.

Cabinet and The Virtual Teaching Collection

Outlined above is a brief review of past, present and future roles of museums and their collections. The critique of such roles has enabled the development of new ideas about collections, and thus has given rise to new uses for them. The Virtual Teaching Collection, with the use of Cabinet, aims to build on this critique. We realise that it would be impossible to entirely avoid the pitfalls associated with these ideological dilemmas, and that in any case it would not be desirable to do so. Indeed, the recognition that we are not working in an objective, non-ideological, medium, is the starting point for the development of this work. The diversity of our users, and the richness of our chosen curricula in archaeology and history of science, demand that interaction take place on a number of different levels.

This points to the unique capacity of Cabinet to do what a museum cannot. Objects in museums can only occupy one place and one context at a time, and thus they can only be situated in the particular linear narrative which is imposed by the physical order of the museum’s rooms. The ‘space’ in a virtual collection, on the other hand, operates in a very different way, for it enables objects to exist simultaneously in very different contexts, and be manipulated within them. This would be altogether impossible to duplicate in a conventional museum.

Freed from the constraints and restrictions of the linear display, objects can thus be viewed in new and different ways and understood with reference to a number of different narratives. What Cabinet offers users is the possibility of determining their own paths through the collection, and viewing the objects in a multiplicity of contexts and narratives. In this, Cabinet arguably offers not just more functionality than other software concerned with material culture, but an entirely different approach, which is far more appropriate to the needs of users now and in the future.

Cabinet derives much of its inspiration from applications developed from within computer culture. Spreadsheets, graphics programs and word processors are not only appropriate uses of the computer’s power, but offer truer interaction and, arguably, a greater sense of pleasure than multimedia, virtual reality and other more heralded developments. What Cabinet offers, then, is a set of tools with which to construct, examine and contextualise collections, rather than a fixed medium. The user can search for a specific item, browse the collections using visual and iconographic representations of their contents; examine the distribution of objects by place or date through visual cues; make sub-collections according to a variety of parameters, and construct arrangements of objects at will. Such collections can be annotated and made into paper documents, slide shows, hyper-documents and other teaching materials.

Epilogue

In conclusion, Cabinet, and the Virtual Teaching Collection, can perhaps best be seen to function as an extremely portable collections of representations, accompanied by a versatile set of tools with which to construct, examine and organise them. This catalogue can be personalised according to individual needs and specific requirements. At the same time, for those with little or no knowledge of our chosen curricula, objects in Cabinet will provide distinct advantages over authentic objects in a museum, for it will allow for the possibility of integrating objects into larger explanatory contexts of primary and secondary texts and images. These contexts can be construed narrowly, e.g. in terms of short narratives, anecdotes, and bibliographies, or more broadly by merging the possibilities of a textual archive with our collection of virtual objects. In either case, the point will be to anchor these narratives firmly to the image-objects in our collection, for without such an anchor there is the very real danger that the freedom and the versatility of our medium will collapse into incoherence. Accordingly, we will both offer the user a wide degree of latitude, while at the same time allowing the less sophisticated user the possibility of choosing defaults which are designed to offer more structured narratives and traditional interpretations.

Interview on Archives, Digital and the furture of stuff

2011-01-15T09:37:00.000Z

I was recently interviewed by Jussi Parikka about my developing ideas about the archive, the digital and the the nonsense of centralised digital archives. We ranged over the 20th century history of archive theory and the mismatch between current archive thinking and the digital. Might be of interest to some people.

You can find the interview here.

Toys for boys: an alternative view of the internet

2010-11-14T10:22:00.003Z

It has been a while since I wrote here, but with a new son, I have been busy. However, not I have to get back to thinking about the archive, digital repositories and the "virtual" museum. In the course of getting back to thinking of this, I revisited a number of in-house publications that emerged out of a project we did back in the mid-1990s, in the callow age of the web. The Virtual Teaching Collection was a groundbreaking project that developed new many approaches to museum collections access. The fact that the project itself didn't go anywhere, is a long story, but like many origin technologies, they are more about ideas than actual apps.

Anyway, reading through some of these publications, I thought it would be a good idea to present them here for the first time on-line. They are historical works, now, and their references are interesting reading more than 12-15 years later, but they are also fascinating in how forward thinking they were. I present them here for historical interest. Here is the first one, a paper presented at the Museum Studies Department at the University of Leicester in 1995.

~ ~ ---------- o O o ---------- ~ ~

Toys for boys: an alternative view of the internet

Dr. Robin Boast

Cambridge University

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Original presented to the Christmas Conference of the

Museum Studies Department, Leicester University

December, 1995

We have all heard of the Web. Many of us have actually used it — surfed it — and explored its many resources. We have already heard a great deal about the Web today, and some of you may have explored at this mornings demonstration. However, the majority of us, like almost every other person in the world, know the Web mostly through what is written about it. Our conception of the Web is molded far more by the constant bombardment of hype and ideology than any reflexive exploration of the Web itself. Even those of us who are "veteran" Webphiles find it very hard to understand the Web removed from its mythology.

But exactly what is the Web and what use is it to Museums? To answer the first question we can look to its most popular sites, including Museums, to see what it is that the "best" sites offer the average Web surfer. If we assume that the Web's strength is its ability to offer the individual choice — in its ability to construct an electronic Piagetan paradise — then by virtue of choice, these sites should best define what the Web is and what's so good about it.

In my endeavor, in writing this paper, to be as objective as possible, I did not simply wander the Web looking for those sites that seemed to have the most visitor numbers. I did, in fact, consult the professionals. Pinpoint Ltd. is an American Web company that, on the basis of several criteria, evaluate Web sites for their content, presentation and experience value. Using Pinpoint as my guide, I was able to discover what the most successful Web site in the world was. It is called Peeping Tom's Home Page.

And, no, it's not what you think. I know that everyone assumes that Porn is the most popular service available on the net, and you would not be far wrong, but Pinpoint's top ten includes not a single Porn site. Granted, this is largely because they refuse to review porn, but that's not the point. Peeping Tom's Home Page is, in fact, a series of links to live video cameras around the world. You can log in and see what it is like in Stockholm, and then revive yourself with a view of the current sunset over Maui. You can see what's happening in Manhattan at this moment, or have a look at Hollywood (it was 3:30 in the morning when I had a look). Most importantly, of course you can have a look at the famous Cambridge University coffee pot.

Peeping Tom's is what we call a links page. It is not a series of linked information, but a list of links to other places. There are also pages that are hypertext guides with a variety of linked information, usually produced by one person or institution, and served-up for you to wander around. Most of these pages also allow you to search on some criteria to get a list of information. This is true of the Movie Database, one of the top ten Web sites, where you can search for a variety of information about almost every film that has ever been made ... except for the film itself ... or any pictures of it. There are also sites that offer services, sort of a virtual mall, and just about as appealing. However, these sites are also very popular on the Web.

The problem with these popular sites, as with almost all sites on the Web, is that they are often far less about information than they are about advertising. This is not really a new phenomenon, although the Web has been rapidly commercialised over the last six months. On the Peeping Tom sites you always have to go through a page telling you all about the wonderful company or university department that is kindly, and through its technical expertise, bringing you the live image. Granted, the many on-line databases, like the Movie Database, are services provided by enthusiasts, but these too are increasingly becoming commercialised. And the digi-malls, well need I say more.

The World Wide Web is fast becoming a commercial media where goods, services, academic reputations, university admissions are marketed to the cyber public.

Of course museums are not involved in this petty form of marketing. We work to much higher ideals, we seek new and innovative media to improve access to our vast collections and expand our audiences.

A quick tour through the top 5 Museum sites defines the unusual picture:

In first place is the National Zoological Park in Washington DC. Not a page that I would particularly recommend with far too much emphasis on virtual marble, but plenty of cute and cuddlies.

Next is the Museum of American Art. This is the place to go if you are keen on cowboys and western sculpture — Wild West I mean. Again, the visitor here goes for an affinity with the content rather than due to an educational zeal.

Third is the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, a pedestrian site with good images.

Fourth is the Michael C. Carlos Museum, by far the most interesting site of the lot. This site is as close as you can get to a virtual museum with the interface completely through a gallery guide. However, the Carlos Museum gives you access not only to the galleries, but to all the Museum's various offices and officers. You can visit the Director or stop off and see who works in Security, or even visit marketing or education. This museum has a truly open door policy — well, virtually.

Finally, and the most bizarre, is the International Museum of the Horse. This is a very boring page that seems to extol the virtues of the horse in America as though this was representative of the universe. Why this page should be so popular can only be explained by the vast number of horse owners in the US.

What is most striking about these sites is the shear dominance of the American Museums. Why are these museum's Web sites so popular? The Science Museum's pages have had over 600,000 users over the last three months. Are they better presented than ours? Certainly we cannot argue that the presentation of the International Horse Museum is better than Jim Bennett's Oxford University History of Science Page. Is there something more to this that we haven't been told? You have to wait until 11th place before a non-US museum appears — in this case our own Natural History Museum.

The top 5 museum sites, and the top 20 for that matter, represent a ragtag collection of American museum Web sites. Granted, the visitor numbers for museum sites is far lower than many corporate sites, but there is really nothing to unite these sites in quality, content or experience. They are all largely dull, badly designed and offer only the most superficial information. They are, I am afraid, merely on-line prospectus for the museum. On-line adverts to tell the Web populace what a wonderful place these Museums are. But where are the vast number of Europeans? Where are those of Asian and African decent? Where is their interest expressed in these sites? If they are the most popular, why are these people visiting the National Zoological Park in Washington. or the International Museum of the Horse?

Perhaps we have been missing the point? We have been told that the Web is a place for all people. That you cannot tell the gender of a person on the Web, or their race, or their income. That there is no barrier to access. Except a small monthly charge. And the cost of a computer of course. Oh, yes, and at least a bit of computing knowledge. Oh, and then, of course, a belief in the unquestionable worth of uncontextualised and unreflexive information is quite useful as well. But everyone believes that — don't they?

If everyone does believe that, and if even the vast majority of the people of the developed world, at least, have reasonable access to computing, then we should see quite a diverse cultural and socio-economic audience on the Web. So, if that is the case, why are all these people, from diverse and varied backgrounds visiting digi-malls, or looking at a coffee pot in Cambridge, or educating themselves at the International Museum of the Horse?

There is another very useful site on the Web. It is at Georgia Tech. It is a site that, every six months or so, releases summary statistics about Web use. Most important for us is the statistics that they collect on who is using the Web. Here are some of their statistics:

The different ages of people who use the Web is quite interesting. The age of those who use the Web is both universal and fairly young.

In respect to income, please notice that in the United States there is a clear peak among the middle income groups, while here in Europe there is also a large peak in the lower income groups. This is not because our lower income groups are more Web savvy, but because in Europe our universities give all their students free Web access and students tend to be on quite low incomes.

The general level of education of Web users is quite interesting. In the United States, the level of education is quite low, while in Europe it is quite high — peaking around the Masters Degree level. This is probably due to our high student Web population. But we still don't see many at the lower end of the socio-economic scale here.

More telling are the more personal statistics. The ones that mark us more clearly than do the ambiguous and varying factors of income, age or education.

What about gender? Computers started out, and largely remain, a male preserve and the Web doesn't seem to be doing much to reverse that trend. Women buy more mobile phones than men, there is an almost 50-50 split on Fax ownership, so why are women staying off the Web in droves?

Race is another important indicator, not the least because it is so strongly linked to socio-economic trends in the West. But also because it is these people that need a greater voice, and, after all, as I stated before, you can't tell a person's colour on the Web. Or can you. Perhaps we cannot see their colour, but what is being said, what is being offered, does not seem to be of much use unless you are white.

Most telling of all is where the Web audience is located. What countries do our Web population call home. We all know that the largest Web population is in the United States, but did you know that it was this large? 85% of all Web users are American! No wonder they are all so fascinated by the American Museums, they are all Americans.

Now the Georgia Tech statistics are obviously biased towards the United States. Even though they work quite hard to get a world wide picture, there is inevitably going to be a bias towards the US. But even if we accept that these statistics are only generally correct, there is a phenomenal dominance of white, middle-class, American, males on the Web. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the primary audience of any Web site are the white, middle-class, American, males.

Why is this so? We have been told that the Internet grew out of a US military computing system that was distributed so that it could not be knocked out in the case of a nuclear war. That this computing system was increasingly used by the defense research community and then slowly appropriated by the universities. And that now this network is being distributed throughout the world as a universal communications system.

This is a lovely, evolutionary history of progress and transformation — real swords into ploughshares stuff. Though in some respects technically true, it is, substantively, incorrect. The real history of the internet, especially as we see it today, is far more interesting and far more political.

In 1991, the US Congress, backed by the then President Bush, with bipartisan support in both Houses, passed the National High-performance Computer Technology Act. This Act had a direct impact on what was to become the Internet revolution, but the most immediate effect was to boost federal support of the Internet by about £625 million per year.

Why should the US government do this, and why do it in 1991. The Cold War was beginning to wind down. The Regan years of excessive military spending were over — the US government could no longer afford such luxuries. Congress, especially the Republicans, have always been very wary of computers and computer access. Even today, among many of the Congressional big-wigs there is a Techno-fear that borders on paranoia. So why spend such a large sum on what amounted to an educational computer network.

The 1991 bill was largely the work of two Congressmen — one Democrat, the other Republican. Both are science, and science fiction, nuts, and both are self confessed 'futurists'. Both of these men embraced computers and computing as the future of telecommunications and saw the Internet as the basis of America's educational and commercial future.

It was largely, and some argue almost exclusively, through the work of these two Congressmen that the 1991 bill was passed and the Internet as we know it was born. Both are well versed in the technicalities of the Internet and computing — a knowledge that industry experts recognise as being unique on Capital Hill. And this knowledge, as well as their involvement with the developing network infrastructure of the US has certainly helped their careers, at least in part. For both have, over the past 4 years, been given quite significant promotions.

So who are these two Politicians, Capital Hill's own cyber-nerds? They are none other that Vice President Al Gore and Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

Al Gore, as I am sure you all know, is the person who coined the phrase, "The Information Superhighway". He says that it was at a meeting with some computer heavy-weights in 1978. Many of his aides are less sure, and some attribute this evocative association to the mid 1980s.

Gore's idea, as he put it, was to create a national infrastructure that would fulfill his vision of "a little girl in Carthage, Tennessee" — Gore's childhood home — "going home after school, settling down in front of a machine not much different from today's Nintendo, and having at her fingertips all the information in the Library of Congress." (A. Gore). This was Al Gore's vision, and it quickly became America's vision, and then the worlds. The vision of a vast information network connecting all the parts of America which, supported directly by the federal government, would grease the wheels of education and commerce as the interstate highway system of the 1950s did.

This analogy, between the information superhighway and the interstates, is not fortuitous. Albert Gore Sr., the Vice President's father who was also a Senator, was one of the architects of the US interstate highway system in the 1950s. A network of motorways, supported by government, with access to all, enabling contact, movement and interaction was a powerful image for the young Al Gore Jr.

Far more important, for the Americans, was Al Gore's role in the passing of the National High-performance Computer Technology Act in 1991. He was central to its passage even though ultimately it became a Republican initiative. It certainly helped swing a large number of leading-edge constituencies in the Presidential Primaries of that year, thus catapulting Al Gore from Senatorial cyber-nerd to Vice Presidential Candidate and, ultimately, to Vice President.

Newt Gingrich has had a slightly different path into political cyberspace. As an Associate Professor of History at West Georgia College in the 1970s, he went to hear Alan Toffler, a leading American futurist, speak in Chicago. Newt was already well versed in the writings of Toffler and was already tailoring himself as what he now calls a conservative futurist. After being elected to the House in the 1980s, Gingrich met Gore and both worked together on many committees on Capital Hill during that decade to further what both saw, and still see, as the way forward for universal communications in the 21st century — the internet.

However, though Gingrich was seen as an intelligent and extremely well informed politician on internet matters, he was seen as a definite outsider. With a Democratic President in the White House and what must have seemed as a permanent Republican minority in the House, Newt Gingrich was not much of a player, except from the sidelines.

All this changed with the 1994 elections. As we all know there was a Democratic route on Capital Hill and the Republicans took both Houses. The Vice President presides over the Senate, but as of the 1994 elections, Newt Gingrich presides over the House of Representatives. Gingrich had his chance, not just politically, but also to mould the future of computer networks to his plan — to his vision.

On his first full day as Speaker of the House, with all the nation's media in attendance, the one day where he was assured of the complete dominance of the nations media, Gingrich chose to speak of practically nothing else but computers. As he spoke to the House Ways and Means Committee, the Committee that sets spending policy, the only definitive proposal that he put forward that day was a tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop. He has since retracted this proposal in that it was really a sound-bite rather than a meaningful policy, and it was pointed out that the poor don't pay taxes anyway. However, that day he also vowed to put Congress on-line.

This was no small proposal. Congress has resisted going on-line for years, and no party more than the Republicans. For a Republican Speaker to be proposing such access was nothing short of radical. But Gingrich was actually suggesting something even more radical — something far beyond what even the Democrats were suggesting — he said that the citizens should have access to everything — bills, speeches, committee reports, everything — and that access should be free. And, by-the-by, he has done.

So why should we care that the two most powerful politicians in America are cyber-keen? Isn't this a very good thing? Won't this herald in the golden electronic age that much quicker? Well, first of all, I'm yet to be convinced that an electronic golden age is approaching. Mostly, though, what worries me, and many others in the computing industry, is the battle that is developing between Gore and Gingrich on the future of American Telecommunications. As we have seen with the internet, what America does, the rest of us more or less do by default. The shear scale of the market, the shear scale of the ideology, largely determines what is available for the rest of us. As Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, has said, "On competition, access, privacy and rights, they're fighting over the future of America's communications and information infrastructure."

The battle has already started for what the information superhighways of the future will look like. At the heart of the battle is a belief, a belief that is shared completely by both Gore and Gingrich. The belief in a network that is "digital, connected, decentralised, ubiquitous: a network of networks, controlled by no one, buzzing with competition among firms of all sizes and among innovative individuals, but with plenty of room for those who want just to talk." (Wired, 1995) The battle is, rather, between two fundamentally different visions of the proper relationship between the federal government and the emerging cyber world.

Gingrich believes completely in the effectiveness and efficacy of the private sector, and holds complete contempt for Washington. A self-styled "conservative futurist", Gingrich is an American Thatcherite.

Gingrich's philosophy is summed up in a 110 page white paper which received full support of Gingrich, "The Telecom Revolution — An American Opportunity". It is a conservative policy document on the how to make his central vision for the internet work. At its heart is a doctrine of rapid, radical deregulation. Cable-rate regulations? Gone. Cross-ownership restrictions between cable and broadcasting and between broadcasting and newspapers? Gone. As Gingrich recently said, "I think it's pretty clear we're at a point where we ought to just liberate the market and let the technologies sort themselves out over the next 10 or 15 years." (Gingrich)

Al Gore takes a different tack. He does not advocate government control and supports privatisation of the internet. He believes that private enterprise should build it and pay for it. However, he also believes that such a foundational universal service requires regulation and control. Not the least to avoid large corporate interests building a monopoly and controlling the media (much as Labour has recently done with its proposed agreement with BT).

The latest round has been over the Republican bills to reform the Communications Act of 1934. An Act that both sides agree is completely inadequate to cope with even late 20th Century communications. The battle was on the usual partisan lines: Gingrich thought that the bills didn't go far enough in removing regulation and pushed for the abolishing of the Federal Communications Commission. Gore arguing that the whole package went far too far, leaving the door open for a late 1890s style Robber Baron development of the internet. In the end, the latest House Telecom Bill was the usual compromise.

This was not the main battle, though. With US annual direct and associated internet revenues of around £160 billion, this is a fight that is not going to die down soon. The battle for the internet is not a battle between the peoples of the world. It is a battle between corporate and governmental interests almost exclusively in the US. Mostly, though, it is a battle between two men. Two men who epitomise the constituency they are fighting for. White, middle-class, American and male, they epitomise the vast majority of cyber-folk and the ideology that this "revolution" is about access and free exchange of information. It is, however, ultimately, about making money and control, and whatever is the outcome of the next two to three years of legislative battles in the States, this outcome will fundamentally determine what the internet may become.

We all need to be aware of what the internet is and who it represents. Not the hype, but the reality. We also need to recognise, and effect through our works, the need to influence the development of all forms of telecommunications towards real access. As museums, we cannot do this by simply accepting the hype of the internet and offering up more of the same restrictive icons electronically. We do not need virtual museums, we need means of access and communication which speaks to new audiences and more directly to our local communities.

We may be able to effect this development, but only in a small way. We can only achieve and effect by concerning ourselves with what we produce, rather than on what we produce. The internet is not the answer, it is but a medium. The question is whether it does become a medium within which various groups and interests may find a voice, or whether it will remain, as it largely is today, a passive and restrictive toy for boys.

Prolog:

Better known as Black Thursday, on the 8th of February, 1996, the US Telecom Bill passed both houses of Congress and is about to become law.

The book shop and the sunday drive: yet again why the UK Digital Economy Bill is wrong-headed

2010-03-07T11:57:00.007Z

I have been having an email conversation with Lord Clement-Jones for the past few days (see blog 1 and blog 2) about the UK Digital Economy Bill. We have been trading complaints and counter-complaints, arguments and counter arguments, but I have had the strong feeling that we are mostly speaking past each other. Not because, as many may think, that one of us, or both of us, don't really understand the Bill. In different ways, Lord Clement-Jones and I are well versed in the implications of the bill, but the ways that we are versed seem to be based in different cultures.

I have had this problem before, that of trying to explain something that from my own experience seems so clear and familiar, but must seem totally alien to the person I am speaking to. I characterise this to my students as something like the 16th century European traveller coming home from what then were far away lands and trying to explain what they saw. Without a common language and a common experience, what is familiar and sensible to one is alien and distant, even impossible, to another. This is what I feel like when talking with well meaning people who think that the UK Digital Economy Bill is a good thing.

After exchanging arguments with Lord Clement-Jones, I felt that one of the problems is with the belief about what the web is. If I may speak for Lord Clement-Jones and the other proponents of the Bill -- an unfair position to take, I know -- I think that they all see the web as a large library or book store. The web for them is a means of disseminating published, or quasi-published, material and the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are there to accommodate the accumulation and dissemination of this content. Therefore, from their point of view, if some 'publisher' of content, a web page owner, is accumulating or disseminating illegal content or violating someones copyright, the web library or bookstore -- the ISP -- has a duty to remove it from the shelf. More than this, like all good libraries and bookstore, they have a duty to keep a record of all they hold. Very simple, very sensible.

Unfortunately for Lord Clement Jones and the other proponents, the web isn't anything like a library or a bookshop, and ISPs certainly aren't like libraries or bookshops. Not only is publishing on the web far more complex, hybrid and multi-authored, in fact since Web 2.0 it isn't much like publishing at all in the vast majority of cases, but the services that provide for content to move around and be used on the web are nothing at all like a library of bookshop.

The confusion that the Government and the proponents of this Bill have got themselves into is that they don't realise that they are dealing with something that is much more like a distributed, grassroots transport system than an archive. The web is much more like a vast open road system, where all people can not only choose where to drive, and when, but can put up stalls more or less when and were they wish. They can stop where they want for a chat, or a bit of politicking or even to build a community. What the Bill really doesn't understand is the degree that anyone can build and extend their own road system within the existing network, and how anyone can enter the transport system from any one of dozens of points (I regularly use at least 5 ISPs and probably dozens more infrequently). Rather than being something scary and dangerous, this is what gives the great power to the Digital Economy. Shut down or disable this system, and you destroy the economy.

The problem with this legislation is that it thinks it is blocking books on shelves, when what it is really going to be doing is to close down whole streets because someone may have done something illegal on them. We would not expect the occupants of a street, nor the businesses on that street, and especially not the people who maintain the street, to be liable if someone does something illegal on their street. However, this is exactly what this Bill does for digital networks.

There remains no need for these restrictions and unjust obligations as current copyright law more than adequately protects the copyright holder. That the web needs regulation and its use requires responsibility, I fully agree, but let's create fair regulations that punish the perpetrators while ensuring the rights of law-abiding users and service providers.

More of Lord Clement-Jones' arguements -- and back

2010-03-06T13:27:00.005Z

Lord Clement-Jones was kind enough to reply to my criticisms directly.

As Lord Clement-Jones wrote directly to me, rather than a stock reply, I do not feel I can reproduce what he said here without his permission. However, he did make several points which I can paraphrase here.

Lord Clement-Jones misunderstood my allusion to mobile networks and phone companies thinking that I believed that the new legislation included such provisions. I did not, and I was using the example hypothetically. He went on to say that UK domestic websites fall within UK copyright law, which we knew, and that many sites already have procedures for removing infringing material -- so why do we need the legislation? Also, that most other services are more regulated than the internet and that the new provisions are "very carefully circumscribed."

Well, I naturally disagree with Lord Clement-Jones, and here is my reply:

-------------------------
Dear Lord Clement-Jones,

I think I did mean "extended reply", but perhaps the irony was misplaced. I did see that the amendment does not force mobile phone or landline operators to police the use of all phones, as that was my point. If there was, hypothetically, some legislation requiring them to do so, this would be seen as intolerable. However, we are expecting ISPs to police content in a way that we would not demand of any other service provider. We do demand such policing of content for broadcasters, but then that leads us to a much larger debate about the difference between broadcasting and the internet -- a debate that needs a great deal more attention before we start legislating it.

Your fourth point is apt as many other services are more regulated, but they are more regulated to ensure freedom of content, freedom of expression and to stop government policing the service without due legal process. If that was the case, then we would be far less concerned with the legislation. Your points, as put, are sensible, but the point remains that we are asking ISPs to police content of a service which is not really a broadcast service, and to do this with a liability that is ill-considered and clearly unjust. ISPs are not broadcasters and do not have an editorial role over the content their service enables, any more than the phone companies or mobile networks have editorial, or any, responsibility over what their users say. It is the lack of understanding of these key differences and key characteristics of the digital networks that has lead to this ill-suited and certainly damaging bill.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Robin Boast

Lord Tim Clement-Jones replies to criticism about the Digital Economy Bill

2010-03-05T21:35:00.003Z

After writing to Lord Clement-Jones asking him to reconsider his backing of the deeply damaging UK Digital Economy Bill, here is the response I got. As it is a "standard reply", I do not think I am breaking any copyright laws in reprinting it. However, I may in the future.

-------------------------

Dear Dr Boast

Forgive the standard reply but I have had a few emails to reply to on this subject as you can imagine. If you have further queries having read this, don't hesitate to contact me again.

Thank you very much for your email concerning an amendment passed in the House of Lords to the Digital Economy Bill on the issue of site blocking on the internet. I hope I can explain the background, why some of the concerns that have been expressed are unfounded but also the steps that are being taken to resolve any outstanding issues.

The amendment was tabled to replace Clause 17 which gave the Secretary of State excessive powers to amend copyright law at will in the future with limited scrutiny from Parliament. The Lords’ efforts ensured that Clause 17 was successfully deleted from the Bill on Wednesday 3 March.

Conscious, however, that around 35% of all online copyright infringement takes place on non peer-to-peer sites and services it was felt important to also sought to address this issue. To some extent there is existing legislation regarding site blocking; for example, numerous ticket touting websites were closed by police action in recent months. While further improvements no doubt can be made, the intention was to improve such existing legislation.

Amendment 120A enables the High Court to grant an injunction requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that persist in publishing a substantial amount of copyrighted material despite repeated requests to remove it.

The Liberal Democrats believe passionately in the neutrality of the web; neutrality as far as free speech is concerned and neutrality as far as independence from government is concerned. Indeed, dating back to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act the Liberal Democrats have been committed to ensuring the maximum possible freedom on the internet. That remains our position. And we are instinctively loath to give the government any increased power in this area. But we can’t be neutral about illegality. Just as we would all want to prevent shops from selling stolen or counterfeit goods, so too we should want to prevent it happening on the internet.

As it stands, the amendment ensures that an injunction would only be permissible in the following circumstances:

1. Where a site is hosting a substantial amount of copyright material
Sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Google have such an enormous volume of material it would be impossible for a “substantial proportion” of their content to infringe copyright at any one time.

AND
2. Where the site operator has been contacted a number of times and asked to remove the copyright content but has failed to do so

Amendment 120A includes the condition that if reasonable steps have been taken to prevent access to copyright content an injunction would not be permissible. YouTube, for example, has a very good record of checking and removing content that infringes copyright.

AND
3. Where the copyright holder has made a reasonable effort to ensure that there are legal ways of accessing the content online

The amendment is designed to encourage copyright owners to develop innovative new ways for their material to be accessed legally online, such as Spotify. The intention is to discourage legal action from being the first port of call.

AND
4. Where human rights implications, such as the right to freedom of expression, have been taken into consideration by the Court

No injunction would be permitted unless all these conditions were met.

In other words, the amendment is designed to pick up sites that persistently host substantial amounts of copyright content despite being asked repeatedly to take the material down. The business of many of these sites is based on the publication of copyright material but, as they are not based in the UK, existing British law does not apply to them.

Some concerns which have been raised about the amendment include:

1. YouTube or Google (or similar sites) would be blocked -
This clearly couldn’t happen (see points 1 & 2 above)

2. Site operators won’t be notified of an injunction application -
An injunction is not permissible unless the site operator has already been contacted and asked to remove illegal material, and refused to do so (see point 2). So concerns that site operators would not know of the threat are unjustified.

3. Sites like blogs that host other people’s comments might publish illegal material inadvertently and therefore be targeted by ISPs -

For a website to be threatened with an injunction, the illegal content would have to form a “substantial” part of all the material on the website (see point 1) AND the site operators would need to have refused repeatedly to remove the content.

4. Cyberlocking sites which are used to publish copyright content could be blocked -
The same conditions about “substantial” amount of copyright material and repeated refusals to remove or block copyright content would apply to cyberlocking sites as to any others (see points 1 & 2 above).

Given the speed with which this amendment was drafted, it is quite possible that the wording can be improved and I would welcome any suggestions you have on this point. You can be assured that the Liberal Democrats will continue to seek to do all we can to ensure that the rights and freedoms of internet users are protected to the maximum possible extent. The DCMS team has invited some leading bloggers and the Open Rights Group as well as representatives from key members of the industry to a round table to work out how we can best make this happen.

Many thanks again for taking the time to contact me on this important issue.

Best Wishes

Tim Clement-Jones

-------------------------

This was my reply to Lord Clement-Jones:

Dear Lord Clement-Jones,

Thank you for the extended reply, and I do know most of these points already. The point you fail to deal with, however, is that contrary to any other service sector, this legislation places liability onto the service provider. I don't think that a piece of legislation would get very far if it included an amendment forcing mobile phone or landline operators to police the use of all phones. If someone is violating the law, copyright or not, by using a landline or mobile phone, the service provider is not liable the perpetrator is. If someone is using a leased property for illegal activity, the landlord is not liable the perpetrator is. Yet this legislation requires the ISPs to both police the service, the job of the police, and be liable for illegal activity that they are not complicit in. This is draconian by any standard and will force the internet into a downward spiral. Just at a time when this country should be investing in increased capacity and greater inclusion, this legislation will force many grassroots ISPs off-line. I ask you again to rethink you support for this legislation as a whole. We can do much better than this -- we must do much better than this.

Your sincerely,

-------------------------

Let us all hope that this transparent mockery of justice will fail.

Whose Legacy? Whose Ownership? Problems with CC Attribution and Non-Commercial

2010-02-28T14:01:00.011Z

Creative Commons interviewed Shelley Bernstein, the Brooklyn Museum’s Chief of Technology, earlier this month. In keeping with the Brooklyn Museum's innovative approach to on-line access, they are creating an API for people to access all of their digital content via the CC Attribution/Non-Commercial license. Last year, Sydney's Powerhouse Museum did something similar when it put most of its digital images up on Flickr using the CC Attribution/Non-Commercial license. Our museum (the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge) has had all of its collections on-line since 1996, and these searchable records have been accessible under the CC Attribution/Non-Commercial license since 2009.

What we see here is the slow, but increasing, willingness of museums to recognize that not only are they but stewards of the collections they hold, but also that how their collections are used, and what is said about them, is not limited to their galleries and documentation systems. More radically, at least for a few museums, is the acceptance that their digital resources, like their collections, have lives and uses beyond their walls. We are constantly being told these days, at least in Europe, that each of our objects tell a story. However, what these museums have accepted is that each of their objects, digital or not, tell many stories, for many different communities and in settings far from the museum.

A few weeks ago I posted an audacious blog where I questioned the continuing existence of closed, regimented and policed Collection Management Systems in Museums. I got some constructive feedback, and some support. However, the outrage I felt at the continued existence of these dinosaurs did not seem to be shared by many of my colleagues in museums. The point of that blog was that these CMSs are not just an afront to contemporary use, but they are antithetical to the kind of sharing we see at the Brooklyn, Powerhouse and MAA.

However, though I clearly support this program of sharing, and have done vocally for decades, I do have a few problems with sharing resources with the CC licenses. In particular, I have problems with both the terms of Attribution and Non-Commercial.

My problems are not what you might think, at least not if you assume the usual response of a museum professional. That is that they might be concerned about how to police Attribution and Non-Commercial use, or that they are not happy about allowing derivative works. In fact, I have no problems with any of this and I am more than happy to allow derivative works, as I think this is the whole point of our resources anyway. What does worry me is that there are assumptions about Attribution and Non-commercial that do not fit well with the sharing of our resources in all contexts.

Of course the good people at CC have given all this a great deal of thought and these conditions are designed to ensure the rights of the copyright holder. They are also designed to be kept as simple as possible and to allow for shared use. But what happens when the ownership of a resource, or what it refers to, is more complicated? What happens when, occasionally, there is a very good reason for commercial use, but not others? What do we do then? Now in the area I work in, archaeology collections and their use by expert communities, these situations arise almost all the time.

Let's take two simple examples.

First, I have recently been imaging a collection of artefacts from a site in New Mexico. The images are reference images of my museum and we hold the copyright. These collections also have catalogue entries that are also written by the museum and, therefore, under its copyright. However, these records and images are being shared with the Native American community whose site these objects are from. More importantly, the objects were collected at the beginning of the 20th century under conditions that would not be acceptable today. Further, these collections are from an historic site that was occupied during the Pueblo Uprising (also known as the Pueblo Revolt) of 1680 which gives these objects a very complicated, and contested, colonial heritage. So, although the museum technically "owns" the copyright of these resources, the ownership of the collections, and the histories and descriptions around them, are much more complicated. Why should these people, whose patrimony is represented, "attribute"ownership of some images and descriptions of their cultural heritage to this or that museum?

You could say, in this instance, that we could just leave Attribution off our license, but that wouldn't do either. The problem is that Attribution within derivative works for this community would not be wanted, but it would for most others. Neither we, nor the community, want other people using this information without due recognition. The community too want to protect their cultural heritage from misuse and abuse.

The second setting also involves such source communities, or those whose patrimony constitutes the resources being shared. In this case, we have a conflict with the Non-Commercial license. Let's say that some contemporary artists from the community mentioned above use some images of the collection to develop forms of jewelry, pottery or basketry that is not now made in the community. They then go on to sell these objects because that is how artists make a living. Let's take another example. Some company takes the images we are offering on-line and develops a range of jewelry or pottery, made somewhere in southeast Asia, that is marketed in Europe as "native". Now both of these instances would be contrary to the license. In fact, the second would be illegal in the United States even without the license, but not in Europe. However, clearly these two commercial uses are completely different. In the first, artists are reusing their own cultural patrimony, designs or techniques that were developed by their own forefathers, or foremothers. We wish, in fact need, to guard against the latter, but would want to enable and endorse the former.

This is my problem with the CC licenses. For most "typical" uses, they are fine, but they do not recognize the problems when ownership is distributed, in many complex ways, across multiple stakeholders. These forms of ownership and use are common to shared resources within museums, especially archaeology and anthropology museums, but all existing licenses fail to recognize these forms of ownership and use. As well as speaking with the good people at the Brooklyn Museum, I would like to ask CC to also begin talking to those of use who work with diverse and complicated patrimony. Much needs to be done here before museums, and communities, can guard their patrimony from misuse and appropriation.

When insanity reigns, someone makes a packet.

2010-02-09T18:59:00.002Z

I know that I haven't blogged for a while, but I have been spending all my time tweeting for the past few months. I find that tweeting allows me to say what I want, in the very short time I have, without having to compose too much. However, I have been pushed into writing by a deep sense of frustration and even anger. I have been frustrated and angered by how we have all allowed ourselves to be bamboozled by a bunch of sharks peddling out-of-date wares for astronomical prices. More than that, how these bamboozlers have almost brought the whole system to its knees.
No, I am not talking about the bankers, though I certainly could be, nor am I talking about international corporations (don't even get me started!). I am talking about a small group of specialist software companies who wrote some intractable software for museums back in the 1990s and have been fleecing the museum community ever since.
I am not going to name any names here, that would be unfair and even foolish. Nor am I going to point the finger at my friends and colleagues who have bought, and continue to pay through the nose, for these "systems" (you know who you are). However, I want to say a few things about the roughly 8 to 10 major Collection Management Systems (CMS) which have come to dominate most mid-sized to very large museums for their documentation over the past 15 or so years.
First of all, a bit of background. Since the 1960s museums, or organizations supporting museums, have been trying to write the all-singing all-dancing CMS. Different groups started at slightly different times and in different places, but you can look up the work of the Museum Documentation Association (now the Collections Trust) in the UK, CHIN in Canada, or CIDOC at ICOM internationally. However, the Museum Documentation Association and CHIN were the earliest, as I recall. After numerous local, national and international attempts, all of which failed, there was created enough of a consensus, or at least enough of a consensus that could be imposed, to build some more or less stable CMSs. With these "standards", a number of software companies build some rather clunky CMSs using out-of-date or aging database methods and interfaces and began to sell. Oh, how they sold!
You see, museums then, and to a large extent now, are not very technologically sophisticated. I know that there are a number of exceptions, but the exceptions prove the rule. Museums, like so many large public institutions (health services, governmental agencies, security services, etc.) like big, expensive and largely unworkable systems to run their organizations. Museums are no different, so they bought these CMSs like they were hot cakes. Now, everywhere you go, at least practically every museum you go to, has one of these absurdly complex, expensive and clunky systems "managing" their data. The problem is that these systems manage very little. In fact, they provide very little service at all, often for thousands of dollars every year.

Here are a few deficiencies that I have found with these products.
1) When you buy one of these systems, you buy the structure of the data, "as is." This is regardless of the kind of museum you are, the size, the mandate, the audience and the collections. Of course these companies provide you with a service where you can customize your structure, to a degree, but only if you are willing, and able, to spend a vast amount of money. How much money? Often tens of thousands of dollars just to get a few fields to be added or changed.
2) The whole point of a CMS is to help the institution organize its information. That means that you will need not only some sophisticated means finding and organizing the vast records that these systems create, but also reporting the results in an impressive array of reports. Most of these systems, however, provide you with anywhere from two to a dozen fixed reports, mostly just lists, that you can't change either. Again, if you need another one, you pay, and you pay a lot.
3) We live in an age of the Web and sharing of our information. We all use, daily, systems that help us organize and share our information on-line with a whole host of different communities. One would think that our CMSs should do the same, but no. These leading CMSs provide only the most basic web modules and output systems. None can effectively link to on-line services, few have APIs and all cost thousands of dollars to add.
4) Finally, though I could go on and on, is the user interface. We have had over 40 years of HCI expertise built up in the software industry. We are all use to using quite sophisticated user interfaces on line and in our applications. So why are we, as museums, asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars, or its currency equivalents, and almost that much again each year, for a user interface that, frankly, I could have pulled out of my arm-pit in the 1980s?
Tens of thousands of dollars for what? An embarrassing user interface to an out-of-date application that hasn't even realized that the rest of the world is well into Web 2.0 and moving towards the Cloud? No thank you. I have been building CMSs for small to medium museums for over 30 years. They are easy, they are simple, and they can do a huge amount more than you imagined. More than that, they are very cheap and easy to implement and manage. You can go out tomorrow, buy yourself a copy of FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced, give it to your 11 year old son or daughter and let them build you a powerful, sophisticated, user friendly and web-savey CMS over the weekend. If that is too easy for you, join one of the two open-source CMS projects that are now approaching completion (CollectionSpace or CollectiveAccess).
I am calling on the museum workers of the world, "Cast off the shackles of exploitation." "Unite around the simple, the usable, the effective, and the cost-effective." "Free our documentation so that it can serve our audiences." It is not a dream, it can be done.

The logic of the Mall

2009-08-12T09:58:00.004+01:00

Robin Good announced today on Twitter the "Real possibility that FriendFeed.com will be shut down for good - Streamy replacing it?" Now I have never been a fan of feeds nor feed aggregators. They always struck me as a kind of extended TV Guide - lots of choice, but little useful information. I am happy to admit, however, that this is a personal foible, and should not be considered, in particular by me, as a fundamental flaw of feeds, feed use or aggregation. However, it is clear that feeds in general have been falling in popularity for some time now, and that new forms of access, sharing and use are arising.

I remember some years ago that there was a flurry of excitement over RSS and ATOM and the possibilities that it offered. I do think that a good history of the direct influence of RSS and ATOM on the rise of social computing has yet to be written, not least in changing the way that information is now accessed on the web (via Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Ning, Bebo, not to mention the rise of blogs). I too was briefly captivated by the possibilities of feeds. I remember a few on-line conversations with Robin Good over the possibilities, all of which were very enlightening as all discussions with Robin are. I quickly realized, though, that what I was working with was a web version of an inventory, and with all of its limitations.

An inventory is useful if you are regularly accessing the same items over and over again, but it is not very useful if you are constantly looking around at different items or your useful items list is constantly changing. What you get with an inventory is a constantly growing list. Like the Library, you get more and more items, but the inventory, so necessary for management, doesn't help much with access. Christine Borgman has made this point many times over the years, as have I on this blog. Inventories are useful for managing resources, but people find things through different means. For books this has always meant finding what you need through bibliographies, indexes, word of mouth, etc., and then going to the inventory to find out where the book actually is kept.

But the limitations of feeds on their own was realized fairly quickly and we saw the rise of aggregators. There was a realization that if it was too difficult to run around the web, from feed to feed, searching for what you were interested in, what you wanted to access, and what you had accessed before, was just too complicated. What was needed was a place where all of your feed needs would be waiting for you. The problem is that aggregators always reminded me of the early Sears Roebuck Catalogue. When, in the United States, the consumers were all too dispersed and distant to come to the store, Sears Roebuck brought the aggregation of the department store to them. Of course there were others who had the idea earlier. Hammacher Schlemmer was sending out its catalogue a good 45 years before Sears Roebuck, and Montgomery Ward had a mail order catalogue 21 years earlier. However, the "Consumer's Bible," as it was often known as, offered everything one needed together in one place. You could get everything you needed from underwear to cars, from kitchen utensils to the house itself.

Like aggregators, catalogues too dominated the consumer's life for some time, but as the society has changed from literate to oral, so consumerism has changed. The catalogue has slowly been replaced over the past 30 years by the Mall. Another aggregate space, but one that is much more social (at least in the US). It is a place not just to shop, but to eat, socialize and share.

Robin Good suggested, today on Twitter, that Streamy was the next big thing after mere aggregators. Perhaps. I have looked at Streamy and it is very impressive, but my feeling is that it is only really impressive if you like malls. Streamy moves beyond the aggregator enabling the accumulation, sharing, commenting and discussion about consumables. I don't always want to be suggesting that the web is mostly a recapitulation of 20th century consumerist culture, but it does seem that the fall of FriendFeed.com, and the rise of Streamy, is not a step forward, but just another recapitulation disguised as an innovation.

The Tables and Chairs of Database Origins

2009-06-16T22:01:00.004+01:00

A friend was over from the States this weekend. She is the one who invented boundary objects, and she always gets me thinking. She gets me thinking largely because she is so smart, but also because she puts things in a way that gets you thinking. That is a rare gift.

Anyway, I got to thinking about databases. There is so much rubbish written now about databases, both from the techie side - knowledge as semantic first order logics, metalanguages, and meta-descriptions, and from what we could call media anthropology - database as metaphor for social relationships, surrogates for ontologies, etc. I was also reading Lev Manovich's softbook Software Takes Command, where he talks about the early days of Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte and their personal computer as new media. Rather, the personal computer as a universal media machine. What got me thinking was how my friend talked about databases, and how databases are missing from Lev Manovich's book. She talked about them in relation to ever more global indicators, not as mere data repositories. We can talk about how publishing, writing, TV, video, radio, sound, letter writing, the business ledger, etc. etc. have been transformed into software, and how they have been translated, mixed and extended as new media, as Manovich does. But where are databases? I thought that if word processors are the media machine's typewriter and now publisher, if spreadsheets are its ledgers, email its letters, and now we have TV, film, radio and photography on-line, what is the genealogy of the database?

I do realize that the genealogies for all of these systems are complex, and that what is most important is the transformation from media to media machine to integrated new media, but that is not what I am talking about here. What I am talking about here is where is the genealogy for databases, they seem to be the odd one out.

Some histories place the database within the genealogy of information management, within the history of the Archive and the Library. But this can't be right. Databases are not repositories, though they may now function as repositories, but this certainly is not their heritage. Others place it within command and control systems. Though this certainly was the origin of the word itself, from tabulations coordinating command and control systems, this does not seem right either as it is to specific a locale for a genealogy. It is as though we were to say that John Smith was the first to explicitly acknowledge his name, therefore he is the origin of the Smiths.

They genealogy has to lie with tabulation. It has to be found in the 19th century rise of tabulation, census, and indicators, and, technologically, with the tabulation machines (Herman Hollerith's machines, IBM, etc.). Now I don't have the time, or the space, to explore this here. However, what I would like to ask, as a way forward, is "Why has some centralized, imperial and state instrument like tabulation come to be a dominant application on the Web and underlie the functioning of just about everything?"

You want that wrapped or just in a bag?

2009-05-22T13:04:00.006+01:00

Kevin Marks' blogged a year ago in An API is a bespoke suit, a standard is a t-shirt, that the problem with an API is that it:

is like being a bespoke tailor - you have to measure them carefully, and cut your code exactly right to fit in with their shapes, and the effort is the same for every site you have to deal with (you get more skilled at it over time, but it is a craft nonetheless). (1)

Alternately, he sees Standards, like HTML5, OpenID, OAuth or OpenSocial, to be like "like designing a t-shirt".

when a site adopts a standard format for expressing their data, or how to interact with it, you can put your code together once, try it out on some conformance tests, and be sure it will work across a wide range of different sites. (2)

Today he Tweeted that he wanted to know if this metaphor made sense. I thought I would do a @ back, but then thought that this deserved more discussion. So here is a bit of a response to Kevin (albeit unsolicited).

It is true that APIs are "tailored" in the sense that Kevin Marks says, and this is a major drawback. However, there are further problems with standards that far outstretch this tailored inconvenience.

First of all, Standard APIs simply move the tailoring from the API to the wrapper. Fine, you no longer have to tailor your code to all those APIs, but every publisher has to tailor a wrapper.

Second, why do we think that tailoring is such a bad thing? The assumption here, and I hope I am not reading too much into Kevin Marks' statements, is that what we want is nice simple and standardised information. Well, the whole social web thing seems to disprove this. The power of the web is in the diversity, complexity and, yes, even the messiness.

To push this metaphor in a different direction, the problem is that all we seem to be able to find in the shops now are racks and racks of sub-standard (pardon the pun) t-Shirts. What we really would like are some choices, not racks of the same things, no matter how many amusing slogans are printed onto them.

If I could push the metaphor in yet another direction, t-shirts, no matter how convenient, simple and comfortable, are simply not appropriate attire for many social settings. I do not simply mean here that we should not wear t-shirts to weddings or the opera (this is admittedly a matter of debate), but that for many cultures t-shirts are not acceptable attire period. Are we all expected to dress, or share and transform API data, in the same way?

The problems with standards in general, and such content transforming standards in particular, is that they have to take a single view of the world for granted. This may be conceptually trivial as in cases of transport standards such as TCP/IP where its world is the world of distributed servers. But the Web is not a world of information, but is a world of discussion, translation, use, sharing, conversation, performance, selling, etc., etc., etc.

Kevin Marks is right that APIs also over determine what they see as useful in their data. In part, I don't see this as a necessarily bad thing as each API reflects a context for the information as well as the information. However, a far more simple solution, than the mass produced t-shirt, would be something like Jeff Lindsay's webhooks. Rather than a commodity metaphor, Jeff's webhooks are more like recycling. Rather than sending out racks of t-shirts, webhooks would be more like this:

"Here is some old plastic that we collected."
"Ok, crunch it up and send it over."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"That's none of your business. However, we are going to transform it into a whole new set of things."

Mass production or sustainability. I suppose that is the question. Is it better to take our information and let people re-use it, in whole new ways, or to broadcast out our information in increasingly narrow channels? I would chose the former in both cases.

The PUSH and PULL Museum - Jeff Lindsay's WebHooks

2009-04-06T11:19:00.006+01:00

Jeff Lindsay, or NASA Ames Labs and general WebHooks guru, gave a presentation back in February at Google about WebHooks. WebHooks are a very simple idea, a RESTful POST and PULL system for a programmable Web. The idea of WebHooks is simple, make it so that Web users can set a condition when met on your system through an update or commit will send your information to a URL. That is pretty much it. However, the point, and its implications, goes much deeper than this.

First of all, as Jeff Lindsay, and Kurt Cagle at O'Reilly, point out, WebHooks are really much more revolutionary than they seem at first sight. In the current world of the interactive Web, even Web 2.0, it is largely a PUSH, or some might say POST, world. Users access our web pages, ask for resources which are broadcast on other web pages. Now, as Web 2.0 and Social Computing have shown, there is a lot of potential in this model. Especially with the addition of Mashups, APIs and AJAX. However, what this model is lacking, according to Lindsay, is the a real programmable web. As Jeff Lindsay says, this time as progrium:

To users, web hooks are a way to get events and data in realtime from their web applications. From this they can use the data however they like, empowering them with the ability to extend and integrate, and start seeing the true vision of the programmable web. (Quoted From)

The technology of this is very simple, trivial even, but the implications for the Web, and museums, is vast. We can envisage a Museum 2.0 world where every time we update, commit our documentation, or even simply add to our online resources, that thousands of users will get data sent to URLs. What will these URLs do with this data? That is up to them. They may mash it up, they may insert it into their own databases, they may simply embed it within their own web pages. It is up to who develops the URL as to how it will process this data.

Obviously licenses will have to be developed and certain decisions made about use of museum data, though museums are already making their on-line data available via Attribution/Non-Commercial license. However, with the ability to allow users to decide what data they want, under what conditions it is to be provided, and how they will use it, could completely transform museums. Simply to have the ability for Source Communities to be certain that all data concerning their patrimony is automatically sent to them, for their use, without having to constantly come and request such information, will radically shift the power of description and identity in museums.

A brave new world? Probably not. But the beginnings of a radical shift in who can account for museum collections? We can but hope.

What the G20 could mean for museums

2009-04-06T09:13:00.006+01:00

What could the outcomes of the recent G20 meeting mean for museums, aside from perhaps easing the financial strain that all are feeling? Most would say, "Nothing really". However, there was a very significant change at the last G20 summit which, if nothing else, should serve as both a warning and a model for museums. The significant change was what George Soros calls a "Turning Point". This turning point was that the core nations of the G20, the G7 or what we could even call the G1 (the United States), gave up much of their power which they held in the form of special voting rights. In particular, from 2011, the US will no longer have its veto rights. More power has been shifted to the "developing" countries - in particular India, China and Brazil - not only on the G20, but also within the IMF, the World Bank, and perhaps even onto the UN Security Council.

The significance of this, from museums' point of view, is not only the shift in financial power that this will certainly create (that is the point of it), but the shift in political power and the possibility of real multilateralism.

I do not need to go into any detail here about the colonial foundations of museums, especially those of the Euro-American museum tradition. It is not only that our museums were founded during the height of the colonial period, to support colonial ideals and ends, and that we hold vast colonial collections. It is also that our whole tradition of practice sits on colonial foundations. Of course I also do not need to go into detail about the enormous amount of work that museums have done over the past 20-30 years to transform these colonial foundations, what was at one time called the New Museology. Nor do I need to cover here, again, the work of many museums over recent years to incorporate deep forms of collaboration with source communities and stakeholders (see Peers and Brown for a good recent summary). The important thing to realize here, and the relevance of what has happened this time at the G20, was that the same thing could have been said of the world's financial governance over the past 30 years. That we could have gone to the IMF, the World Bank and the even the G20 and found ample evidence of a greater degree of collaboration and consideration of the needs and concerns of "developing" nations over the past 20 years. The point is that despite new levels of inclusion, of collaboration, of a shift from institutional concerns to those of other stakeholders within the IMF, the World Bank and even the G20, these institutions remained colonial - or rather neo-colonial.

These institutions remained neo-colonial despite new levels of collaboration and dialogue because their primary goal, and their primary source of authority, was preserved through their control of resources. The IMF, the World Bank and the G20 remained neo-colonial because the handful of ex-colonial countries retained the power to define what the resources were, how they could be accessed and how they could be distributed. This was the fundamental change heralded at the last G20 summit. For the first time in its history, for the first time in several hundred years, the process of real multilateralism was begun. Not finished, not implemented, but at least begun.

This is the wake-up call for museums. What we are seeing, or what I hope we are seeing, is a fundamental shift from a neo-colonial control - a benevolent paternalism that acts for the good of its public, but retains how its resources are used and even what they mean - to a situation where those effected by these resources, those who have a major stake in these resources, have a major say in their definition, allocation and use. Museums as a neo-colonial institution, in the sense of Julia Harrison, have a history, even contemporary history, very similar to these financial institutions. Not as powerful, that is certain, but just as superintending. The wake-up call for museums is that their world of privilege, of having the sole right to define, describe, and determine use of their collections, is coming to an end.

No longer will cries for the primacy of preservation for a global good hold sway - cries similar to the foundation of both the IMF and the World Bank for the preservation of the global economy. No longer will the claim of institutional nor professional rights take precedence over the rights of local patrimony and use. We have all seen that the foundations of the world markets are crumbling. They are crumbling because they are rotten to the core. The new consensus is being driven by a new multilateralism which is far bigger, far more diverse, far more distributed than every before. Museums too are build on similar foundations, with similar materials, and similar ideals. Is it time that museums consider giving up their special voting rights before it is too late for us too?

Powerhouse Museum in Australia goes all CC

2009-04-04T09:19:00.002+01:00

I just read at Creative Commons Australia that the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has gone all CC. Now this is a very good thing that should be encouraged by all museums. Not least as the Powerhouse Museum has also put a large number of its images into the public domain under Flickr Commons. However, the blog went further to say that "In an Australian (and possibly world) first, they’ve released all of their collection documentation under CC."

Now, as you all know, I fully support such a move, but it most certainly is not a world first. The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology has been offering all of its collections documentation on-line since 1996, and have been offering it under Attribution, Non-commercial CC license since 2007. Not to complain, mind you, as I applaud the move by the Powerhouse. Just to set the record straight.

Strange how many people think the same -- at the same time.

2009-03-15T12:26:00.003Z

After finishing the previous blog-post this morning, I noticed Robin Good's entry on Bye Bye E-Learning: Emergent Learning Paradigm More Important Than Digital Delivery Tools. Well done Robin (the other one). Nice to see the pressure building.

Also, found a few good examples of what these more hybrid and decentred approaches are arguing against. See HASTAC's Future of the Digital Humanities, and Mellon's A Digital Humanities Manifesto.

Project Bamboo: Opportunities lost

2009-03-15T11:14:00.000Z

In January I went to the 3rd Workshop for Project Bamboo in Tucson, Arizona. Project Bamboo is an eHumanities project, funded by a well known foundation and lead by two very large US universities. I am not going to say who these players are, you can see the main website to figure this out. Also, I am not casting aspersions onto any of these institutions. The foundation has been a generous and visionary funder of many worthwhile projects. The two universities are leading Higher Education institutions with excellent reputations. I am interested, though, in saying a few things about the ongoing trend in university computing, especially in the humanities, towards large, centralized and service architectures. I am not the only one who finds this trend bizarre, out of touch and even damaging (see Lev Manovich, Alan Liu, Haidy Giesmar or Jussi Parikka for more on this).

I have been working in or around what we today call eHumanities for over 30 years. I know that what I, and others, were doing 15 to 30 years ago can't really be called eHumanities, but, if you will just for the moment allow me to extend the present into the past. Having such a long-term view of these sorts of developments, and having sat through more seminars, workshops and development meetings than I care to remember, what is striking about all these past eHumanities initiatives is that none of them currently exist. They have all promised to be the next big thing, promised to sort humanities computing out, to provide just those tools which will bring the humanities into the computer age, to build the tools that the humanities need. What is blatantly clear, however, is that none of the hundreds of initiatives and projects that I have witnessed over the past 30 years have any existence now. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) no longer exists (though it was resurrected as Cyber 1 in 2004). The explosion of CD-ROMs in the 1980s and 1990s, now seem to be pitiful relics of a pre-WWW world. The TLTP (Teaching and Learning Technology Program) of the 1990s spent over 22 million pounds and achieved little of lasting influence. Even The e-University Project, which finished in 2004, has had little lasting influence. The only initiatives that have lasted have been archive based projects. Ones where large archives, or concordances between archives, have been slowly digitized and offered on-line.

So let's return to Bamboo. Bamboo is offered as:

“... a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:

How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?” (http://projectbamboo.org/what-bamboo)

There are a number of familiar assumptions embedded in this project. First of all, it is clear from the Project Bamboo Directions specification that one of the basic assumptions of this project is a one stop humanities services provider. Such a strong SOA model for any community must assume at least two things. First, that the present situation of service provision within the community is a problem, and, second, that the service needs of the community are definable and amenable to SOA tools.

The first of these assumptions is not only false, but not just a little insulting. There is a general assumption among IT departments and university administrators that the humanities are Luddite and need sorting out. In fact, e-Humanities, on-line performance, web-arts, and other humanities web work is healthy, exciting and thriving. It does not need sorting out. What it does need is something even approaching a sustainable level of infrastructure funding.

The second assumption, though related to the first, needs a bit more consideration. There is a fundamental assumption that to effectively and correctly make use of academic computing, it must conform to some sort of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is understandable when considering that university administrators always seek something that they can measure and control. However, why they don't think that this is necessary with the Sciences, whose ICT has always been fragmented, task specific and decentralized, is never explained. The fact that computing in the humanities is constantly striving for the unique, the critical, the local and the subversive, simply confirms to the auditor and administrator that something is fundamentally wrong. Therefore, something centralized, uniform and accountable will sort this "chaos" out nicely.

This approach has been tried and tried again over the past 30 plus years, but fortunately to no avail. It has always failed because the two basic assumptions have always been wrong, and remain wrong. Unfortunately, the powers of control and accountancy do not give up that easily. I am not really at all worried that this time they might succeed and enforce a uniform methodology onto the Humanities -- this really isn't going to happen. What worries me, yet again, is that another large pot of money is going to be dumped down the proverbial drain. Money that is desperately needed for some actual humanities research.

A small peak at what Bamboo wants to do shows the same failure, and the same inevitable outcomes. This stage of the project is exploratory and consultative. They have been convening a number of workshops, and setting up a larger "community" of consulting committees. This seems, on the surface, to be the right thing to do. Set up a broad consultation to get the broadest consensus as to what services are needed. Then commence a development program that takes the community input, translate this into a plan, and then build the services. This is an all too familiar model of SOA and is represented explicitly in the Bamboo project.

The problem is that this model, in all its applications, ignores the most difficult and problematic bits of its implementation. The only certain and unproblematic link in the above model is the link between the Plan and the Build. Questions about the representativeness of the Community, of how the Exploration is conducted, of what is chosen and what is ignored in the Plan are all treated as unproblematic. The outcome of this naive approach is that a partial model of the consultation -- The Whole Thing model below, is transformed into an even more partial, local and planable model -- the More Realistic Vision below.

The problem with SOA, and this model of eHumanities services, is that as the model becomes more defined, the less it has to do with what the humanities do, until it gets to a point where what is realistic bears no relationship with the realism of humanities research.

So what is the real mistake here. Well, it is partially that the model of Service Architecture, while it may be applicable to well defined service contexts, simply does not apply to humanities teaching, research or production. However, I think that the larger error is a complete misunderstanding of what flexibility, locality, and innovation entail. Project Bamboo, inadvertently, highlight this error in its own name. The project defines "bamboo", and hence the proposed metaphor, as:

“In the natural world, bamboo is a highly flexible organic material that serves multiple purposes: it can live as a single stalk on a desk or grow quickly into renewable forests; be used for constructing buildings or decorating them; become as strong as hardwood or as flexible as cloth; … We envision our approach for arts and humanities digital services to be similar: configurable, flexible, sustainable, and reliable – hence the name, Bamboo.” (http://projectbamboo.org/why-name-bamboo)

What they completely miss in this metaphor is that while it is true that bamboo is a "highly flexible and organic material", the fact that it serves many purposes does not arise from any form of design or planning in the making of bamboo. None of the properties of bamboo that make it so incredibly flexible, both literally and it terms of the uses it can be put to, were designed for these purposes. In fact, the amazing properties of bamboo were not designed at all.

This is the point. What characterizes the humanities, and almost all of important human endeavour, is the ability to turn the mundane, common and innocuous into the new and innovative. What is needed in the eHumanities is the basic resources and the freedom to explore and innovate. What is not needed is yet more expensive programs designed by system engineers and administrators who have no understanding of what constitutes the useful, the innovative, or the important in the humanities.

Museum Authority and the Developing Debate

2009-03-11T11:46:00.003Z

There is an utterly brilliant animation by Michael Edson on the Smithsonian20 blog. Basically, it presents the common problem with museums - and we could include archives and libraries here too - that they see any form of open access to collections information as a direct threat to their authority. It also, in a very enjoyable way, makes the point that none of the arguments for this are in any way true.

I would go much further, as I have done for over 20 years, that the basic premise is completely wrong. Museums, and museum professionals, only have authority to the degree that they continue to control access to, and the public accounts of, their collections. This is not very difficult when a museum has all of its collections under its own roof, but what museums do not yet realize, and Michael shows this all so well, is that increasingly they are not even able to control these traditional forms of presentation. On-line access to digital collections, no matter how they are served out, is making the traditional position of museum professionals as the arbiters of understanding completely untenable.

This should come as no surprise, though it is a bit surprising that it has taken so long. Back in 1997 I said the following as a conclusion to a talk that made this point to a Museum conference at Leicester University in the UK.

"As museums, we cannot do this [make ourselves relevant] by simply accepting the hype of the internet and offer up more of the same restrictive icons electronically. We do not need virtual museums, we need means of access and communication which speak to new audiences and more directly to our local communities.

We may be able to effect this development, but only in a small way. We can only achieve and effect by concerning ourselves with how we are used, rather than on what we produce. The internet is not the answer, it is but a medium. The question is whether it does become a medium within which various groups and interests may find a voice."

As far back as 1995 we released a report about a project that I was directing that made these very points. The report was called Objects and Learning, and was a report about the Virtual Teaching Collection. The Virtual Teaching Collection was a project run out of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge, and was working on a system that would allow users to collect, link to, share and discuss digital collections. It was developed just before the Web took off, so it was an application rather than a Web App. As such, it has passed into the history of Applications on no longer supported operating systems (in this case Mac OS 9).

I suppose that the point of this Post is that though finally there is a growning consensus, even within some museum staff, that the traditional attitude of the museum as an authoritative expert institution is no tennable, there has been some voices around for a couple of decades who have been saying this all along. Mostly, though, I think that my real point is that the battle is far from won. The resistance I see today from museum professionals remains distrubingly like Michael curator in his animation. We have a long way yet to go.

Concepts and a RESTful Web

2009-03-09T11:14:00.006Z

I just finished reading Ryan Tomayko's really enjoyable blog post "How I Explained REST to my Wife." I also read most of the miles of comments which have built up around this now famous blog post over the past two months. The comments are really very interesting, not so much for what they say, as most are really rather banal, but for what they tell us about Ryan's main point in his description of REST. The comments split pretty much into two topics, leaving out all the "Well done!" and "This is rubbish!" comments. Basically the comments talk of Sexism and What Really is REST?

What interested me about these comments was the hugely diverse readings of Ryan's post. Many focused on how Ryan referred to his wife as "Wife", also arguing that he had implied that his "Wife" was predisposed to be technically incompetent simply by having to explain what are a set of web design principles, and some technical specifications, to his partner. In fact, I do not see that the sexist argument applies at all here. There is no sense that Ryan assumed that his wife was predisposed to technical incompetence, quite the opposite. Though, by Mrs. Tomayko's own assertion, it did make her sound a bit thick. By far the most sexist, and even offensive, statements are to be found in the comments.

What I think is really interesting about the comments, with appologies to the Tomaykos for what they have had to endure, is that these comments counter what seems to be Ryan's main point: that what is really holding back the development of a RESTful Web is the absense of standards. Ryan makes a clear association between the advance of database services on the Web with the acceptance of SQL as a standards query language. He goes on to assert that such a universal standard for REST resources, the nouns in his explanation to his wife, would have an equal or greater benefit.

The comments to Ryan's post counter this arguement by their very diversity. One of Ryan's assertions is that REST resources are "representations" and, hence, correspond to a "concept". After his wife makes clear taht she is not really sure what a URL does, Ryan explains to his wife:

Ryan: Oh, right. Those tell the browser that there’s a concept somewhere. A browser can then go ask for a specific representation of the concept. Specifically, the browser asks for the web page representation of the concept.

The wife has already unquestioningly accepted this association of a representation with a concept, and the two, unproblematically, with a web page when the conversation contiues:

Wife: What other kinds of representations are there?

Ryan: Actually, representations is one of these things that doesn’t get used a lot. In most cases, a resource has only a single representation. But we’re hoping that representations will be used more in the future because there’s a bunch of new formats popping up all over the place.

Wife: Like what?

Ryan: Hmm. Well, there’s this concept that people are calling Web Services. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people but the basic concept is that machines could use the web just like people do.

Wife: Is this another robot thing?

Ryan: No, not really. I don’t mean that machines will be sitting down at the desk and browsing the web. But computers can use those same protocols to send messages back and forth to each other. We've been doing that for a long time but none of the techniques we use today work well when you need to be able to talk to all of the machines in the entire world.

But what does Ryan mean by "computers can use those same protocols to send messages back and forth to each other"? What messages, saying what, doing what, specifying what, and to what ends? I think this is where Ryan's post deviates from what REST is, to what the Web is, and I disagree with him on what the Web is or should be.

The problem is that Ryan makes a common mistake. He takes the trivial things and makes them seem to be the problem, and, hence, transforms the really complex problems into trival issues (a traditional error that Clay Shirky identified in the Semantic Web arguement back in 2003) . The problem in the above discussion between Mr. and Mrs. Tomayko is not "How do you get machines to pass information back and forth using REST principles?", but "How do people find, understand and use a web page?"

Web pages are not representations of concepts, they are complex performances, accounts. They are purposfully designed and constructed accounts of something. The complexity is extended as a web page, or web resource, does nothing until it is accessed, used and/or read. The really difficult problem in all of this is getting from the web page to a concept period. On top of this, as the long list of comments to Ryan's post demonstrate, a web page does not represent just one concept, but potentially an infinite set of concepts. What is one person's representation of REST, is another person's exemplar of sexism, and another person's evidence of complete missunderstanding. The concept is not in the web page, but in its use. And its use is as diverse as its users.

This is the real rub, whether the web is a RESTful place or a SOAPy place. In fact, I lean very strongly, if not completely, to the RESTful side, but this is not the point here. Whether to REST or not to REST is an important issue, but one, with others such as the Semantic Web, that will continue to get diverted down blind alleys as long as we think that concepts are simple, stable and representational.

Remembering my Father

2009-02-06T22:49:00.010Z

A week ago tonight, my father died. Don't worry, I'm not going to go all soppy on you. My father and I were not close, he was 86 and a half, and it was not unexpected. He had a long life and, as lives go, a good one. He found success, or at least some, and lost it. On top of all trials and tribulations, throughout his life, he seemed to enjoy it. His death, however, did cause me to remember. To remember a father who must have died, or had been killed, long ago.

You see, my father, as I knew him over the past 20 to 30 years, was typical of most Americans of his age, and of the age since Regan; he was superficially liberal, but right-wing in practice. In fact, and this is one thing that I will never understand, he found religion later in life. It is not that he wasn't spiritual for all of his life. In fact, I think that he always was "a believer", but he wasn't at all of the organized church. Actually, when he did find religion, he couldn't be content with one that was just lying around, so he made his own.

I am not keen to discuss this aspect of his life, the Judaic and Christian fundamentalism, the colonial apologetic, and the soft misogynism, but to try and remember an earlier man -- a man who I could recognize in myself, a man who has a genealogy with my own. But a man who I did not remember.

In my attempt to remember this man, I chanced on a memory which seemed in conflict with the man I knew. The conservative, who argued that power was always right, that the weak deserved to be subjugated, and that civilization was for the chosen few. These concepts have no meaning for me, except as the actions of those alien to my own sensibilities, but, for him, they became his pillars of belief later in life. This is why the one memory was so confusing. It was not of the man, but pointed to a man who stood for, and stood by, very different beliefs.

When I was a young child, about 8 or 9, back in the 1960s, we had one of those wonderful cadenza like record players. It was so high off the floor that I could easily curl up under it as I played my fathers records. I played many different records, but my favorites were always to folk singers -- Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers. I would particularly like the protest songs, though I didn't really understand the history being sung, and certainly not the politics that they represented. This specific memory was of one song in particular. I did not remember the name, but the tune and a few words. A quick look on YouTube found it. It was Pete Seeger singing Which Side Are You On?.

For those of you who did not live in the 1960s, or who did and didn't know, if you listened to such music, and especially if you owned such music, it was a clear indication of your politics. You would have been decidedly left. In fact, you could easily be thought of as socialist. This was my father's music, and it became my music too. It still is my music, and it still is my politics.

I am not interested any more to understand my father's reasons, psychology or crises that caused him to leave this music, and their politics, behind -- to even deny them later in life. It doesn't really matter now. However, for whatever it is worth now, I prefer to remember a man I never really knew, but who must have had a profound impact on my life -- or perhaps it was just his music.

My daddy was a miner,
And I'm a miner's son,
He'll be with you fellow workers
Until the battle's won.

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Imagined Futures

2009-01-26T21:45:00.001Z

Just because it is true that we must imagine our futures before we can make them, this does not mean that we make the futures we imagine.

Federated Cloud Computing - Museums were there first

2008-09-07T19:06:00.003+01:00

Last Tuesday, Google announced its Chrome Browser. I am not particularly interested in problems about "letting cartoon cats out of bags," but more so in the issues about ownership and rights to information that this move highlights. It is clear that what Google are doing is to set the stage for their moves into Clouds, which I, for one, am not completely opposed to. I think that there could be enormous benefits from Clouds, and I am more comfortable with Google's future role in these SaaS services than most of the other players I can think of. However, I do agree with Tim O'Reilly that there are far more advantages to innovation and user control in Federated Clouds and distributed open-source. However, one aspect of Clouds that caught my attention as I was watching the Chrome announcement on YouTube was just how similar many of the claims about Cloud computing are to what I study in the history of museums.

I realize that this, stated so directly, probably seems at least trivial if not downright daft. However, please bear with me. The key stated advantages of Cloud Computing -- aside from the technical advantages of performance, reliability and location independence -- are multitenancy, low barrier to entry, scalability, virtualization and security. The rise of public museums in the 19th Century claimed just these advantages, though in slightly different terms. Early public museums were vast centralized stores of the collected objects of the colonial world, collections that were deliberately duplicated across museums to create local redundancy of information. They were public institutions -- sort of -- creating an economy of scale from the multitenancy of both public and expert communities in one place. Increasingly throughout the century, and into the 2oth century, access to what was once expensive information collections open only to the very few, was made available to much larger numbers of users. Museums, as both large institutions and through networks of sharing, were ideally scalable information instruments. The increasingly professional nature of museums throughout the 20th century provided increasing levels of security both for the collections and for the associated information. Lastly, it is hard to argue that museums are not the preeminent instrument for creating diversity of access through virtualization. Museums as service institutions could also be said to be SaaS institutions as well. The value of museums are not, and have not been since the mid-19th century, mere collections of stuff, but are systems that provide numerous systems of access and use for the collections they house.

Now, why am I telling you all this? Why am I making what seems to be a somewhat true, but ultimately vacant analogy? The reason is that it is not all that vacant. The problem with museums as information access and service instruments is, and always has been, that ultimately the instrument and the centralization of services get in the way of innovation, diversity of understanding and cultural difference. This problem has been written about by James Clifford in his many papers about contact zones and indigenous knowledge, and is the same point made by Tim O'Reilly in his recent post about Cloud Computing. When museums have worked to create a service based access and use, as they have in particular over the past 30 years, they have forgotten that when these information accounts and services are centralized, through the institution or through standards of practice, they set the stage for what other can and cannot do. If we want to go and use an museum, we have to go and sit at their table, and their agenda is the only agenda on the table. This is the fear with Clouds as well.

This is not to conclude, as Tim O'Reilly does, that Cloud Computing is necessarily a bad thing. I agree with almost all of his conclusions, but that this is inevitable. It is not inevitable with museums either, but both seem to be going in the wrong direction for federated, user managed services and access. The language of the Cloud is so similar to the language of universal centralization dominating museums that it is scary. Scary because both could lead to increased marginalization and disenchantment from the diverse communities that find so much value in open-source and Web 2.0.

Critique of us: Open Objects Initiative

2008-07-29T10:43:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I put down some of my concerns about how Contact Zones were being used. I also spent part of the day writing a critique of the Open Objects Initiative for a publication we are working on arising from a conference we did here in Cambridge in April, Subversion, Conversion, Development - Public Interests in Technologies. I got a bit of a terse email from Matt Ratto about my critique, but as it will be on-line anyway at Thoughtmesh I thought it would be alright to publish it in full here.

As part of an introduction, I would like to say that though it does seem very critical, I think that it is a critique of us, myself included. We are easily bedazzled and confused by our language, and terms can carry a force that we don't readily recognize. I suppose that this is the issue I was beginning to unravel in yesterday's post -- that we create a term for a specific context, and then believe that it is easily and systematically extendable to other contexts. It is the "easily and systematically" bit that I think is in error. Extension of ideas, practices, technologies, and even language is always a problematic exercise, and always involves degrees of translation, modification and even subversion (see John Law on this point). So this is not so much a critique of the OOI, its goals or its programme, but a critique of the bedazzlement of language that bedevils all of us.

======================================

Open Objects Initiative: A Critique of Openness
Robin Boast
28 July 2008

I must begin by saying that though this is a critique, to a degree, of the OOI, I largely agree with the underlying goals and principles of the OOI. Certainly, all good thinking people must agree that there is a fundamental asymmetry between ownership, access and use of knowledge, especially in regard to marginalized and indigenous communities. In fact, these asymmetries run very deep and extend very widely to most people within society. It is a myth that contemporary programmes of collaboration, as well as the prototypic "open access" media – the web, are symmetric. Knowledge is a prime commodity and, as with all commodities today, it is fiercely sought after and huge resources are invested to appropriate and control it. Insidious programmes of control, such as the Semantic Web, are marketed as improved means for accessing the world of knowledge. However, they are little more than thinly disguised means for a Wellsian technocratic control and appropriation of diverse and sovereign knowledges.

In this sense, the OOI is to be applauded. It is one more initiative that seeks to explicitly recognize and support the diversity and sovereignty of knowledge communities. However, in this programme, I find some fundamental asymmetries. I must also say that it is a bit difficult to comment fully on the OOI as there is little information available. The OOI website offers little explanation, and the workshops and downloads of the site almost universally meet with a 404 error. However, there is enough to see that there are fundamental confusions underlying the project.

The About page of the OOI website tells us that the OOI "is a consortium of researchers and institutions driven by a desire to address questions of openness and diversity as they relate communication and exchange across cultural divides.", and that this is to be achieved through a concern for how groups "intersect through objects". Again, this is to be applauded, but it goes on to say that:

"By “intersect” we mean to emphasize how people who do not just have different ‘values’, but different ways of producing and legitimating knowledge, relate to one another through material objects. The central premise is that a more thorough attention to the experiences, emotions, and engagements that objects make possible can provide deeper insights into how people communicate, debate, and exchange understandings about the world despite cultural differences."

This expresses clearly my first concern with the OOI. It is the "provide deeper insights" bit that concerns me. I have seen nothing from the OOI that speaks of ensuring that these communities have the means for local archiving and managing their local knowledge, for creating and promoting those programmes that ensure real symmetry between knowledge communities in the access to, use of and ownership of knowledge, nor for the programmes and protocols that will ensure symmetry of control when different knowledge communities actually meet over these objects. The impression that I get from the statements on the OOI webpage is strongly appropriative. That the real goal is to gain a, different, academic understanding of how people do meaning. In my experience, it is just this programme of research objectification that most of the communities that I work with object to.

What most knowledge communities want is not just to be taken seriously, not just to have their forms of knowledge recognized, and its authority recognized, but also the right and the means to control and manage who can speak about their knowledge – to stop the Western Liberal programme of speaking and performing for others – of appropriating these statements and performances. I am sure that the members of the OOI will say that they have no such intentions, and I would happily accept that they mean it. However, their programmes suggest that they are proceeding down just this track, no matter how unintentionally.

An example of this is the Cross Cultural Partnership Agreement Template. Though, again, seemingly laudable, this project suffers from just the issue I raise above, that of creating a generic, universal template for use by diverse, sovereign and competent knowledge communities, from just those people who are not locally involved. Though I recognize that the document is intended as a 'boundary object' between the diverse needs of collaborating communities and the law, it remains an example of the error of generalization. Not only does it not recognize that for the majority of indigenous communities, today, there is sufficient legal expertise to cover these situations, but that real symmetry is achieved not through global generalizations, but through local negotiations and the creation of local objects (by which I mean local, negotiated agreements). Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) have filled this role for over 20 years, and are now the preferred legal document for collaborations with Native American and First Nation peoples. Where more formal contracts are needed, and the CCPA is but a contract, these groups have legal departments who are well skilled in drafting them for the local needs and cultural requirements.

However, the real failing of the CCPA, in my mind, is that it seems to accept, uncritically and unreflectively, that a local collaborative negotiation between some academics, some legal experts and some local communities, can be generalized for diverse and incommensurable national if not global collaborations. This is the typical Western and Enlightenment assumption applied, that underlying all objects, all practices, all social communication is s set of, largely if not universally, transcendent principles. It may seem absurd that I am invoking enlightenment assumptions in this day and age, but simply because we are dazzled by the pastiche of a post-enlightenment critique, does not mean that these transcendental assumptions do not remain built into the fabric of our cultural practices, nor that these practices do not remain a form of philosophical colonization. They remain programmes of imposing one set of cultural assumptions onto others, and they do not promote symmetry, they denies it.

Today, the key issue in knowledge management and IPR is not the creation of standardized modes, meta-descriptions and forms of practice, but of ensuring, often under law, the rights of individuals, communities and institutions to the ownership as well as the local control and means of distribution of their knowledge. This too goes beyond Copyright, but not in the direction of Copyleft. It is moving, clumsily, toward a realization that whole new means are needed to ensure the preservation of the local means of knowledge production, use and reproduction that do not demand of it the role of a universal resource.

So what is the alternative? There are certainly many, but one critical feature must be that in any collaboration, any meeting of diverse knowledge communities, over objects or not, must first deal with the issues of symmetric power. It must deal with the issues of individual and cultural privacy, community ownership and rights to the dissemination and performance of that knowledge. Power of the control and rights not just to their knowledge, but to the means of ownership, expression and distribution of that knowledge. Also to the rights to determine and manage who can speak for that knowledge community. To this end, I feel that the concept of a Contact Zone, in Jim Clifford's sense rather than Marie-Louise Pratt's sense, is a more useful concept to the one that seems to be promoted by the OOI of observing the performance of the Other while being sympathetic to their difference, but of largely ignoring the real asymmetries of that engagement. Contact Zones, in Clifford's sense, promotes the idea of a symmetric space, where communities with quite incommensurable ontologies meet on largely equal terms. Where the communities have ultimate control over not only what they say and how they say it, but over its performance for an 'outside' community. It is this that is critical, the recognition that the presentation, the performance, of knowledge is as much a part of knowledge as is its content, and that symmetry must be extended to performance as much as to content. It is here that I find the OOI fundamentally lacking.

Contact Zones: Contested Spaces or Everyday Practice

2008-07-28T17:43:00.004+01:00

I was reading a paper I found on the Web by a friend of mine, Matt Ratto, about Contact zones in digital scholarship: Corpus construction for spoken and signed languages. In that paper, Matt and his co-author, Ernst Thoutenhoofd, that large collections of everyday speach, called linguistic corpora, had found that the the rarified language examples of linguistics simply don't exist in everyday speech, except among linguists. Of course, this would not surprise Wittgensteinian scholars, but this got me thinking about the main topic of the paper -- Contact Zones.

Contact Zone, as a term, was coined by Mary Louise Pratt in her monumentally important book Imperial Eyes to designate those spaces or dialogues where two different cultures meet, usually in colonial settings and where there are quite disparate power relations, but manage to create a space where communication and learning occures. However, today, it seems that contact zones are everywhere, the term being used to describe just about any place, publication or performance where two knowledge groups meet.

Matt and Ernst's paper got me thinking. Isn't it that every engagement, in 'normal' social practice, is more or less a contact zone? Isn't it that when we look at what people do, rather than the rarified models of what people do, that they are always engaging in this sort of negotiated, autoethnographic (to use Pratt's really awful term) practice? Isn't the contact zone another example of the linguist's language, existing only in an academic rarification?

Now I should make clear that I am enormously fond of the idea of a contact zone. Not only as a means of understanding that exploitative period of colonialization, which is very much still with us though in different form, but also in its more constructive twist given by Jim Clifford in his Museums as Contact Zones. However, no matter how good an idea may be, it still deserves critical examination, especially in its use.

For me, at the moment, contact zones seem hugely underdetermined. Basically, it seems that any setting where we find disparate knowledge groups coming together and interacting, or at least attempting to, is a contact zone. In other words, we take what Pratt calls the imagined norm as a baseline, and then put anything that doesn't fit into contact zones. This imagined norm is that belief in a rarified and abstract set of forms or rules that we believe govern what we do. As a transcendental norm, we act on the assumption that this norm must underly all we do, that we are all more or less competent in achieving the standard. But this demands the acceptance of a tautology in everything we do. That there is some ultimate and true form that we all strive for.

The assumption that seems to underly contacts zones is that there is some 'normal' setting which doesn't require the negotiation of disparate and often incommensurable knowledge practices. Prof. Pratt, in her later paper, Arts of Contact Zones, she said that she later began to use contact zones "to reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing". She used as an example of this later use of the term a contentious course that they developed at Stanford called Cultures, Ideas, Values.

To make a long story short, what struck me about Prof. Pratt's characterization, especially after reading Matt Ratto's paper, was that it seemed what was being discussed was not a particular space or zone, but a sensitivity to a certain genre of practice. A practice that, by necessity or choice, actively destablizes and diversifies the usual categorical and practical stabilization of the setting and and engagement between the participants.

Though this needs a great deal more thought, I am beginning to wonder if what we call contact zones are, in fact, what we could also characterize as normal practice -- what we all do everytime we engage with other groups who have different understandings of the world than ourselves, which is just about always. However, it could be (should be) that contact zones designate the recognition or sympathy that to engender and enable more symmetric engagements, we need to stop trying to stabilize such engagements and allow them their difference?

Wikipedia, Freebase and the Semantic Web

2007-08-14T10:46:00.000+01:00

There is a lot of discussion about how to organize information on the Web. For that matter, there is, and always has been, a lot of discussion about how to organize information generally. I have been on Freebase for about the last month and have found the differences between its approach and those of Wikipedia, at one extreme, and the Semantic Web, at the other, very enlightening. It is not that I think the Freebase is the ultimate answer, I do not. However, I do think that it offers a very interesting alternative to the other two extremes of information organization. Freebase offers a middle ground between the two extremes. It offers the ability to add as much information as possible, but makes only one requirement -- that each 'topic' has only one instance. In recognition of the Semantic Web, a series of high level 'types' are being created, but, unlike the Semantic Web, anyone can extend and create new types as they wish. This may not seem like much of a change, but it is, in fact, quite profound.

The key differences between the Semantic Web and Wikipedia are very telling. If we first look at the difference with the Semantic Web, we see that Freebase has abandoned the central tenant of the Semantic Web (SM). This is that there is a universal logical structure to all knowledge, and that this can be defined (by a select few at the top of the W3C). The Types of Freebase may seem to be very similar to the high-level types of the SM, but they are much more like a hybrid of RDFs and OWLs. Rather than creating a pyramid of truth, as SM is trying to do, Freebase's Types are a more traditional, and more pragmatic, categorisation of things. The high-level Types of Freebase to not, yet, claim to be higher order concepts, but generalised conventions such as 'people', 'places', 'times', etc. I will not go into the discussion as to why these Kantianesque categories are problematic as it doesn't really matter here. We can happily use these categories within Freebase even though in most contexts they are problematic and uncertain. The key point here is that the pragmatic categorisations -- Types -- of Freebase are infinitely extendible where those of the SM are ultimately reducible. Freebase may seem very Semantic Webish, but it is not as it inverts the logical structure of its categorisation. Whereas the SM starts from the messy diversity of the information world and, it hopes, progressively refines it to basic principles, Freebase starts from some pragmatic general categories and allows us all to extend them.

The differences with Wikipedia are even more interesting. Whereas Types are a kind of inversion of SM's hierarchy, Freebase takes on the Wikipedia's uncontroled extension through its definition of 'topics'. By insisting that each "thing" in the world has only one instance -- one topic entry -- Freebase hopes to overcome the multiple accounts that proliferate on Wikipedia. They hope that it will be the categorisations that will proliferate, not the instances.

This is not a bad idea, though it is fraught with its own problems. Robert Cook and I had a few discussions about this problem here and on Freebase, though I don't think I expressed my concerns very well. Perhaps I can clarify a bit here.

What is very interesting about Wikipedia, and all Wikis, is that when a topic is begun it takes a bit of time to stablise. The process of stablisation usually occurs as a certain group of wiki-editors appropriates the topic and keeps others from complicating their version. As a result, others, who may disagree with the now 'authoratative' account create other entries with different accounts. We might call this process "budding'. Other accounts "bud" off of the original stable account to create a constellation of accounts around any topic. It is this budding that Freebase is attempting to avoid.

As I have stated below I do not think that this is a problem as I see it as a sensible pragmatic decision. Not lease as this problem, how to link-up all the different account which surround a topic, is one of the most difficult in the history of philosophy. Thomas Kuhn, for one, demonstrated in the 1960s that this kind of budding around a stable topic is the key mechanism of paradigm shifts in science. Others have argued since that it is a key mechanism in all knowledge production. As such, to legislate against this budding around topics could have serious implications for the future of Freebase.

A problem is, though, that to go down the route of Wikipedia won't work either. There is no way of accounting for the discursive connections between the stable topic and the buds. By Freebase keeping one topic instance and one topic instance only, they overcome the problem of the multiple instances, but at the cost that they deny any mechanism for accounting for the new and diverse opinions that create paradigm shifts in knowledge. What I am arguing here is not very different to that proposed by Marvin Minsky in his Society of Mind theory. Or, for that matter by Danny Hillis, the founder of Metaweb.

I am afraid that I too have no real solution to this problem, but I do ask the people at Metaweb to not ignore this problem by claiming that the single instance topic is philosophically real.

Freebase revisited

2007-08-02T11:41:00.000+01:00

I was very pleased to see that Robert Cook responded to my comments below, and felt that he was right on one point, that I needed to clarify my final point. I agree that I did finish off a bit abruptly.
It is not that I think that Freebase will fail. In fact, I think quite the opposite. Though, I do think that my point is germane not only to Freebase, but to such knowledge accumulations generally. The problem is that we think we know things by knowing how to name them -- and knowing what the name means. We are, in the West, constantly taught that this is how we know. We are bombarded with training manuals that classify the subject and explain to us this classification. We are constantly exposed to a media that is classifying and naming the events around us. We are constantly trying to understand what is going on around us by finding the appropriate names and the appropriate meanings for those names.
We are told that we are this sort of an employee; that we are that sort of a resident; that we are this class of a tax payer; that we are male or female or gay; that we have this type of body; or, hopefully not, this kind of disease with these characteristics. We are classified, ordered and named constantly. We are told that the advances of science and medicine and society are this or that sort of thing. We are told that the problems of the world are due to this type of person, or this type of belief or, worse, this type of religion.
We are also told that types of things have definitive characteristics. When these definitive characteristics are correct, the thing is right, when they are incorrect, the thing is wrong. We see this in the gay debate, or the debate about terrorism. It is not that different people have different characteristics, or that they interpret their characteristics differently -- or even that the social context of these interpretations is very complex -- but that there are bad characteristics, ones that do not fit the norm. But, of course, what is the norm, and how is it defined? I'm not going to go into that, as there is a huge literature on this subject. I would just point you to, if you are interested, the work of Michel Foucault and the hundreds of works about the social construction of the norm.
We could also ask the question, which is more pertinent to the Freebase discussion, What is a thing anyway? Is it a unique entity that simply has names and characteristics defined onto it, or is it something more fluid, dynamic and constructed? Now I'm not an idealist, I do not believe that everything in the world happens in my head, and that there is no reality outside of my mind. But there is a big difference between the physical object and what we say that physical object means.
Naming and classifying an object is certainly a kind of meaning, it would be absurd to say it wasn't. However, it is but a 'kind' of meaning, if I can use classification to explain classification. We use classifications because they are useful, very useful, but usefulness implies use. We use classifications, or whatever method, to understand things because the actions performed, social and practical, allow us, with others, to construct an account of the world that supports other meaningful actions. In this sense, we do not have understanding, as we have a car or a house, but understanding is something we do. It is a skilled activity.
We could say the same of things. We do not know things because they have innate characteristics, that we know more or less well, but because we are able to perform particular meaningful actions with them. Classification is one such meaningful activity that we do with things.
In this way, Freebase offers a very useful approach to the accumulation of accounts of things. Not because it is realistically or definitively defining the world of things, but because it will allow us all, through a dynamic classification, to define our many different domains of understanding. More importantly, Freebase offers to possibility to ensure that these different domains are communally defined and maintained. It should ensure that these various orders of the world, the various domains, are the emergent result of communities of knowledge, not single singular assertions of a single community.
In my next post, I plan to discuss why Freepress is a much better approach to this problem of knowledge order than the simple Wiki.

Freebase: Ideology vs. Practice

2007-07-19T16:04:00.000+01:00

I have been on the alpha version of Freebase of about a week now and I'm very impressed. It is an interesting experiment in how to find a reasonable median between the vast openness of Wikis and the narrow-mindedness of the Semantic Web. Though the user expandable types and properties, it looks to be a very exciting development. The community definable domains will prove even more exciting, I believe, as the folks at MetaWeb realise just how powerful these are for different domains of expertise and knowledge.

I was somewhat dismayed, therefore, when I read Robert Cook's latest blog in his Freebasics blog. This blog entry is a comparison between Freebase and Google Base, most of which I agree with. However, he goes on to say that Google Base has many different records for each object where ...

"Metaweb, by contrast, has just a single record for the Canon EOS 20D with redundancy and discrepancies resolved. Metaweb contains only ‘reconciled’ data, and maps a single object to a single thing in the world."

and that ...

"This idea of reconciliation is core to the idea of a Metaweb Topic. From my earlier posting:

A topic represents a person, place, thing or idea.
No two topics should have the same meaning.
A topic should be important enough that a group of sane people would have something to say about it."

The fact that a topic on Freebase represents a person, place, thing or idea is just fine, as is the point that a topic should be important to a significant group of people. I am not sure why he defines them as being necessarily sane, as it is my experience that different groups of people have different interests, often vastly different, sane or otherwise.

The major problem I think arises from point number 2. Cook goes on to underline this point ...

"All distinguish Metaweb from other online data sources, but the second one is the most important. A key value of Metaweb is to squeeze out redundancy so that people (and machines) have definitive information."

But what is "definitive information"? Knowledge is not a definitive set of attributes or properties, but a rich history and contemporary discussion about the object. From this emerges attributes and properties, but these are constantly under dispute. Could we imagine a scientific discipline where there was only allowed one account of any process or object? It would be disastrous. Could we imagine any industrial process where only one account, or topic, could have only one meaning? Culture, industry and science as we know it would cease to be.

Knowledge is promoted, grows, evolves and develops through disagreement, challenge and critique. It is just those unresolved differences which makes knowledge possible. Remove them, and you remove the possibility for knowledge. Try to remove them from Freebase, or to severely restrict them, and Freebase will fail.

It is not needed, so why have such a requirement?

Semantic Nodix: Freebase

Semantics, Categories and Knowledge

2007-04-01T11:51:00.000+01:00

This is the first of a many-part blog about what knowledge is on the web. I will start from the several, conflicting, claims about what knowledge is and how it works, or should work, on-line, and will continue by explaining what I think knowledge is and why it already works on-line.
Why should I worry about such esoteric themes? My concern is that there is a lot of claims being made these days about what knowledge is and how we can automate it on the Web. This includes the many discussions about the Semantic Web and Web 2.0, as well as the endless whine, from some quarters, that the Web is a confused mess and, therefore, urgently needs organising.
My argument, which will take a few instalments to make, is:

That what makes the Web a powerful knowledge source is that it is self-organising.
That knowledge, and hence understanding and competence, is not a matter of knowing the categories that make up a subject and the rules that relate these categories, but is a process of engaged work and interaction.
That what makes something meaningful, and hence knowledge, is a process, not a thing. It is therefore something you do rather than something you get.
That knowledge making, and knowledge representation, is necessarily a messy business that requires a diversity of approaches.
That translation between logics and knowledges, like languages, is not a straightforward rule based process, but is partial, interpretive and, at times, impossible.
Finally, that despite the fact that the Web is a network of computers which are calculating machines, machines that require categories and rules (algorithms) to work, the Web is, nevertheless, an excellent system for sharing and creating knowledge.

Knowledge as organised words and concepts: The Semantic Web:
I want to start by giving my description of The Semantic Web. I know that this seems to be a waste of time as there are a huge number of descriptions and explanations of The Semantic Web, but my description has a slightly different purpose than these many others. My purpose is to examine The Semantic Web as a claim to organise knowledge.
Just to get it out of the way, I should start by stating that I am not opposed to XML or RDF, or even necessarily to ontologies (as used in computing). I regularly use XML and am beginning to use RDF as a means for querying resources. They are both powerful tools and immensely useful. However, as I hope will become clear, they are not straightforward systems for representing knowledge.

The Semantic Web, as defined by the W3C, is not just a series of mark-up languages, but is a multi-tiered model of knowledge (see The Semantic Web Revisited. This vision starts from what it sees as the most basic Web-resource, the URI, and moves up through a series of 'syntaxes' that situate the 'meaning' of the Web-resource in ever more universal categories.
At the base of this pyramid of meaning is what is called a "surface syntax", the XML. XML, as many of you already know, is a convention, as defined by The W3C, for marking-up components of a Web-resource with names (tags). The XML convention does not place any requirements on what these tags should be, just on the syntax of the mark-up. This is what gives XML its wonderful flexibility to represent just about anything in any form and in any language. It is completely local. It allows the author, or authors, to describe the resource using any form of tags, or names, they wish (see W3Schools XML introduction).
Above the XML layer is the XML Schema and Query languages. These are equally useful as they allow the author(s) to describe what they see as restrictions on the structure and content of the XML document. Basically, the XML Schema file is somewhat like a data-definition for a database, though it does a bit more (see W3Schools XML Schema). XML Query, or XQuery, is a developing language for writing queries to XML files, preferably with XLS (XML Schema) definitions (see W3C XQuery overview). Both of these conventions extend the open mark-up of XML so that XML files can be queried as data sources. These conventions are also very flexible and extensible allowing authors to define their data as they wish, and extend these definitions to other XML resources.
Up to this point, it all seems quite sensible. We have a much more flexible and extensible mark-up language, which can define information almost anyway that the author wants. We have a Schema and a Query language that allows for open and extensible definitions for how the author thinks people, or machines, should access and search this resource. Because of the structure of these three documents, we can even see other people writing XML Schemas and XQueries for any XML file whether they authored it or not. This makes for a very open-ended Web.
This may accommodate the needs for flexibility locally, at the file-face, so to speak, however, we are told that "there is no structure", "no agreed terminology", "no order", and hence "no knowledge" at this level. Something must be done, and W3C has done it.
Above these primary layers in the pyramid is the next major layer, the RDF or "Resource Description Framework". W3C defines the RDF as metadata and uses the Dublin Core as its basis. RDF defines the metadata for a file using XML syntax and predicate logic. Predicate logic is simply a form for an assertion. That a subject (a webpage or other URI) has a property (a name, a date, a place, etc.) which is an object ("Robin", "2007-3-28", "Lecce, Italy".) In other words, we can say that this Blog has an author who is Robin.
RDF allows for the association of a set of assertions, set out in predicate logic, about a resource. However, the use of the Dublin Core suggests that the class of statements found in an RDF is of a different order-a higher order. It is at this stage that we see what the Semantic Web is all about. The organisation of knowledge on the web through every higher orders of [general] assertions.
Above the RDF is another layer, the OWL or "Web Ontology Language". The OWL is distinct from the RDF and always refers down to it as OWL is a more restricted language that is intended to be more "machine readable". The justification for this further level is made clear by the W3C's "OWL Web Ontology Language: Overview".
The Semantic Web is a vision for the future of the Web in which information is given explicit meaning, making it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate information available on the Web. The Semantic Web will build on XML's ability to define customized tagging schemes and RDF's flexible approach to representing data. The first level above RDF required for the Semantic Web is an ontology language what can formally describe the meaning of terminology used in Web documents. If machines are expected to perform useful reasoning tasks on these documents, the language must go beyond the basic semantics of RDF Schema.
OWL provides a language for defining Classes, the Members of Classes, the Properties of the Class and the Relationships between Classes. In other words, OWL is a language for defining higher order classifications between objects defined in the RDF. OWL is a type of ontology, as used in computer science, that defines the higher order classes and logical relationships between objects. (see Ontology_ Computer Science at Wikipedia)
Perhaps an example might be helpful here, one drawn from W3C's webschool.
OWL Example (Airport)
OWL Resource: http://www.daml.org/2001/10/html/airport-ont
Class: Airport
Properties:

elevation
iataCode
icaoCode
latitude
location
longitude
name

Here a document has defined a class called "airport" which has certain properties (elevation, iataCode, longitude, latitude, etc.).
You may think that this is just another layer of metadata, and you would be right, but this is not its intention. OWL is meant to be a higher-order classification of objects than RDF. Where RDF is fairly open as to what subjects it can assert properties to, OWLs are seen as something much more universal-as essential classes such as persons, mammals, airports, continents, countries, etc. These are seen as "common metadata vocabularies", or fixed vocabularies and definitions. Vocabularies that are shared and fixed either across communities of users or across the Web.
However, even if OWLs are higher-order agreed classes that can handle subsumption and classification, there are many other kinds of logical processes that it cannot handle. To extend the logical and autonomous reach of the Semantic Web, W3C is developing RIF, Rule Interchange Format. The intention of RIF is to allow rules to be translated between rule languages allowing different systems, based on different rule systems, to interoperate.

In the next entry to this blog, I will explore that amorphous collection of grassroots Web that Tim O'Reilly has called Web 2.0.

What is RESCITE?

2007-02-18T14:44:00.000Z

RESCITE it a personal blog where I explore my thoughts about WEB 2.0, information and how it moves and is modified in different contexts. This sounds a bit pretentious, as does the name, but I do not mean it to be. I chose the title RESCITE because of the many entangled meanings of the word 'recite' and 'resite', both which imply accounts and movement of knowledge. The strange spelling is not to be cleaver, but because 'recite' was already taken as a blog name.
I welcome comments, as the whole point of the exercise is that I do not, and will not, have an answer, but that this is a set of my ideas and impressions on a general problem. The problem is that we usually assume that we know things by knowing the meaning of words, and that these words have rules for how they are used. Knowing the rules is knowing how or knowing what. However, we all use words differently, at different times and in different settings. We know what we mean, and others know what we mean, because the words make sense in a particular setting. They are used correctly, even if they are not used according to the rules.
Rather than dictating how we use words, ideas, information, knowledge, I argue that we need to find ways where people can use these objects to make sense. That means allowing them to "mis"-use them. It is the many ways that these objects -- accounts, stories, words, information, images, etc. -- can move around and be re-used, made sense of locally, and made use of to communicate with others that I am interested in.