This session by Dan W (http://www.iamdanw.com/) who is the resident Creative Technology Research Associate at Pervasive Data Studio. Apologies for the bitty nature of these notes…
Example George Melliere – using film to create ‘magic’ – early form of special effects.
Example from Paper Camp – newspaper created from blog posts. Cheap to print because decline in newspaper printing means lots of spare capacity in printers.
The Nature of Technology – what it is and how it evolves – by W. Brian Arthur. Argues that this happens through transferring technologies between domains (re-domaining) – applying things that are created in one domain to a different area.
Most of the time when you write software and you find a problem – someone else has already solved it – about taking tech from one place and applying in another.
Dan tells story of how Twitter grew out of hack week – company was actually originally setup to build list of all podcasts.
In biology this repurposing happens as well – feathers probably developed to keep warm, not flying.
Dan doesn’t know about libraries – so interested in finding things from libraries and applying to Internet. Libraries used to loaning stuff.
Dan loves ‘tangible browsing experience’ in library – different to internet…
Papercamp and Bookcamp – about bringing ‘internet people’ to look at paper/books etc.
Example of calcwars – book created from twitter stream of debate between Newton and Leibniz of who invented the calculus
Libraries good at preservation – Internet rubbish at preservation – e.g. Geocities
RFID – becoming more and more common in libraries – but for incredibly boring purposes! Dan thinks we can do more, better, possibly sillier, things with it. Example visualisation of RFID tags moving around space
RFID tends to store identifiers – so need to dig into data stored against those identifiers in other systems
Example of using Oyster Card to show percentage of tube stations visited.
RFID radios – physical representation of an album!
@GusAndPenny – cats with RFID tags – tweets when cats go through catflap
Experiment in Holland of allowing people to classify books by putting on specific shelves – doesn’t work because of people – turns out they just put books back anywhere!
I always think it’s something of a failure that library cataloguing has not managed to share some of the wheels it has already invented, e.g. some real basics of filing rules or name entry that would improve something like iTunes/Musicbrainz no end. Egs from my own mp3 player:
Abba
ABBA
Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
You referred in a separate post I think to the problems of classical music description on this kind of thing too. If only there was a standard way of describing such things! See also the numerous attempts to come up with standard databases/lists of authors or academics.
It goes the other way too, especially with database and metadata structures. E.g. matching headings based on ids rather than strings, ditching MARC, etc.