Search Disabled |
|
|
|
Search Options | Help | Site Map | Cultivate Web Site | ||||
|
|
|||||
| Home | Current Issue | Index of Back Issues |
| Issue 2 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Philip Hunter - October 2000
The Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts (EVA) conference 2000 was held at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh between July 27-29. The conference was co-sponsered by VASARI, SCRAN and the the National museums of Scotland. Philip Hunter reports.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This conference was one of a series organised on an international basis by VASARI. It covers a great deal more territory than its title: 'Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts' might be taken to imply: networked multimedia in the cultural context is its current interest, reflected in the range of papers and workshops given at this meeting.
The first day of the conference was split into three main areas: Open Access to Cultural Heritage Using Information Systems: Strategic Issues; Cultural Tourism & Technology; Cultural Web Portals. The second day sessions were: Education, Museum, Library and Archive Case Studies, Film Music and Performing Arts, New Technologies. The final day (Saturday) was devoted to two workshop sessions in Abden House (part of Edinburgh University and the headquaters of SCRAN). The first was about funding opportunities, both commercial and through the EU telematics programme (both are possible for some projects). Bernard Smith was on hand to give one of his characteristically information rich presentations about how to set about applying for telematics programme funding. The second was on issues around running Cultural Web Portals.
The opening part of the conference consisted mainly of papers on national strategies and related activities in Europe and Russia. The keynote speaker was Professor Anatoly Rakhaev, Russian Vice-Minister for Culture. The jist of his talk was that we need the information society for prosperity. The Russians, as was made clear by subsequent discussions and papers, have vast cultural resources available in theory, which might be digitized and form valuable cultural resources for the whole world. His Russian translator later gave a presentation entitled: ‘Cultural Information in Russia: a progress report’ which illustrated various problems, such as language difficulties with dissemination of Russian resources since generally there are no cyrillic character sets on European users computers.There was another presentation by Vito Capellini, who argued that we are actually ‘aiming at a universal catalogue, so finally we can know what is in the world’. He also pointed out that UNESCO is pursuing the same idea.
There was an interesting Bulgarian presentation on image compression (DJVU and LDF): these new formats produce smaller files than the JPEG format, and visibly better results. We may find that these eventually replace the current hegemony of the JPEG format for high quality images on the Internet.
 |
| A presentation at the Edinburgh EVA |
Bamber Gascoigne argued that the development of the internet is third in the line of:
Historyworld is an upcoming site which developed out of a CD project, and Gascoigne has been working on the Web version for the last six years. The text was completed in a Fox Pro Database and is assembled on the fly according to requests. Each piece of text is designed to fit properly into whichever context. Gascoigne used the example of an episode in Scottish history – Robert the Bruce – this is an episode which might form part of a narrative in the histories of both England and Scotland. The design of the system makes it possible to jump from a date in the timeline of one narrative to the same date in another, rather than in the beginning of the narrative of another. Coming soon!!
 |
| Bamber Gascoigne and Loyd Grossman in a panel session |
On the Friday after the conference proper closed, we were given an interesting tour of the new part of the National Museum which features a number of multimedia components. It transpired during this tour that the architects had one idea of how things ought to be, and the curators had another. They have around thirty multimedia displays which are not networked to a central server. The builders did cable the electrics through the floor, as is perfectly reasonable, but unfortunately sealed the channels in concrete before the computer cabling could be installed.
 |
| Restaurant favoured by the conference participants |
Six Cultural portals were featured in this session, and presented as tools for jungle exploration and protection against the data deluge. The portals featured included SCRAN's national portal and Mario Buccoli's 'Museumland'. This part of the conference tied in well with a special workshop session held at Abden House (SCRAN's home territory) on the Saturday afternoon (more later in this report).
Klaus Reinhardt spoke about the Exploit project, whose dissemination vehicle the Web magazine Exploit Interactive is produced at UKOLN [1] . This was a particularly interesting presentation, as it gave details of some of the other aspects of the project which as yet have a lower public profile such as the Exploit Portal, which is a European research gateway for libraries projects. This allows simple and advanced searching of a database containing information about all fourth framework programme telematics projects. This database will be extended to Multimedia Content and Tools projects of the new IST Programme, as well as national projects of the library and information sector.
 |
| Cultivate Interactive Display at EVA |
The TOSCA system was also particularly interesting (under the heading of tourism). It stands for: Tourist Orientation and Support in Cultural Assisted Tours. Tourist orientation has to be understood in a wide sense - not only making tourists follow a fixed pre-defined tour but also offering them information enabling them to get oriented, and to enable the dynamic configuration of their visit, either during or prior to it. Typically, orientation systems allow the definition of pre-defined paths that will be followed by tourists when using these orientation devices. The other alternative is to let the user move freely within the site (either actually or virtually) and let him access updated information associated with his current location. Two possible scenarios have been envisaged for the TOSCA prototype: insite and off site mode. The insite mode is in play when the user is actually walking around the site using TOSCA to get information. The offsite mode is when the user is not actually walking around the site but is just using the TOSCA system to move inside a virtual site and obtain information (which could be inside a tourist office). TOSCA has technical solutions for some of these, and there was an impressive virtual reality version.
Catherine Grout is the JISC Image Co-ordinator, and gave a presentation Scoping and Implementing the JISCs Distributed Image Service for Higher and Further Education in the UK (JDIS). The JDIS is conceived to function within the DNER framework. The DNER (soon to be renamed) is a managed environment for accessing quality assured information resources include scholarly journals, nonographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data as well as moving picture and sound collections.
 |
| Coffee break in the National Museum of Scotland |
David Anderson, Director of Learning and Visitor Services at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and also co-author of A Netful of Jewels: New Museums in the Learning Age gave one of the most interesting of the papers: Networked Museums in the Learning Age [2]. He pointed out that one of the difficulties philosophically and practically is the sector's persistence in believing that its role is to provide information, to an information society, in an information age. The economy of developed societies today is about as dependent upon information as that of Switzerland is dependent upon cuckoo clocks. Successful societies in the current century rely upon the added value provided by learning and creativity, and upon clear understanding of the difference between (in ascending order) data, information, knowledge, learning and wisdom each of which implies a different role for citizens/users. A useful illustration of what he meant was supplied in the form of pictures produced by visitors to the V&A when they were given free use of a digital camera in the building. Many of these were of high quality, using existing exhibits in new and augmented ways. In other words, a museum shouldn't just be about the supply of what it already has: its resources should be used with imagination and intelligence. He suggested that when we hear the words 'information society' or 'information age' when referring to culture, we should reach (metaphorically) for our revolvers.
 |
| Presentation on ceramics printing |
Bernard Smith argued that people have unrealistic expectations of what the EU 5th Framework is about, and what is available from it. From his point of view, the Digicult section of the programme has as its function the facilitation of the networking of Libraries, Museums and Archives. He suggested that a good way to go about securing project funding is to treat the EU as a black box: find out what sort of proposals have been submitted and what comes out at the other end. Around 190 proposals were received as a result of the most recent calls (3), unfortunately mostly not very interesting. 3 experts are responsible for making decisions about project funding. The programme has funded 30 proposals so far from the most recent calls.
So far there is about 1.8 m Euro worth of participation - mostly large consortia dealing with expensive problems - these projects have a sense of character about their proposals and in their fundamental research objectives. The programme makes the decision to fund or not to fund on research objectives, rather than cultural content. Most of these projects in fact do not have cultural content in the title - around 50% of the proposers fail to realise this isn't the critical part. If someone says 'tech tool for access', that's fine. But no research objectives are pursued without cultural content being part of the picture. Essentially applicants should look at the nature of the process undergone by applicants. The process happens in one week with 24 evaluations. Project proposals fail because they don't know (for example) what technology they will use. Others have ideas of the technology they will use, but not of the content. The programme is interested in solutions, but not problems. Also the programme does not fund digitization programmes. Automatic markup of gothic text is one project which is an exception.
The second workshop was on cultural Web portals, after a lunch in a pub nearby to Abden House. The question of the definition of a Web portal surfaced early, after a general discussion of the experiences of existing portals. So far, beyond the walls of those institutions actively engaged with the theoretical side of delivering cultural information in the networked environment, the conception of a cultural portal has generally been taken to imply a single or principal doorway to a number of related sites. In other words, the value of the portal lies in the fact that, by visiting one particular site, it is easy to move onwards to a number of closely related sites. About half of those present at this workshop seemed most comfortable with this model. However very quickly a number of important issues surfaced, such as: if a cultural portal offers useful information derived from a number of separate resources (such as the British Library, the Smithsonian Institution, The Louvre), perhaps the best way for the information to be presented is as an amalgamated sequence, rather than as separate pages or links. In which case a number of subsidiary issues follow on: what about the branding visibility of the supporting institutions? What kind of technology is required to make the portal function? What are the implications for the user interface? How is the distribution of income to be managed between the resources? What are the implications for the proper citing of resources accessed? How does the user know the provenance of what has been used?
Those who were interested in this complex side of portal development discussed it intensively during the whole afternoon, and the time passed very quickly. Towards the end of the session, one of the members of SCRAN who was chairing that part of the workshop observed that if, when the SCRAN project had been set up, they had been forced to consider issues of such complexity, it would have been very likely that it wouldn't have got off the ground at all. Which would have been the case for many multimedia cultural projects. However the changing shape of the means of delivery and access on the Internet means that these issues must be considered if cultural portals are to make sound decisions now about services and content which will be available several years down the line.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Philip
Hunter
Information Officer
Editor of Ariadne
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 1225 826354
p.j.hunter@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
For citation purposes:
Hunter, P. "Reach for your Revolvers: EVA 2000, Edinburgh", Cultivate Interactive, issue
2, 16 October 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue2/eva/>
|
|