Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) acquired the archives of Salman Rushdie, the author of “The Satanic Verses” and a Writer-in-Residence at Emory. Among the archival material are handwritten journals, notebooks, photographs, manuscripts and “forty thousand files and eighteen gigabytes of data on a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops, and an external hard drive.” [1]
Born-digital materials pose new preservation problems due to hardware obsolescence and software formats, as we have discussed before, that can be saved in recent formats. But if you are interested in primary sources, you will be interested not only in content, but in context too. That is why MARBL decided to recreate Rushdie’s Desktop, through an emulator.
The New York Times reports that, “at Emory, Mr. Rushdie’s outdated computers presented archivists with a choice: simply save the contents of files or try to also salvage the look and organization of those early files. Because of Emory’s particular interest in the impact of technology on the creative process, Naomi Nelson, the university’s interim director of Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, said that the archivists decided to try to recreate Mr. Rushdie’s writing experience and the original computer environment.”
Until September 26, 2010, visitors of the art exhibition “A World Mapped by Stories: The Salman Rushdie Archive” will be able to explore Salman Rushdie’s desktop, at Woodruff Library.
How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities? If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media? What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete? What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use? What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them? Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked? – from the conference website
Divided into ten categories, you can access YouTube videos on General History, Music, Art, Cultural, Ancient or World History, between others, from several institutions.
One of the examples from this list of resources is an animation of the Bayeux Tapestry – that tells the story of the Norman conquest of England-, by the graphic designer David Newton. The animation relates to the second part of the tapestry, beginning with Harold’s coronation and the appearance of Halley’s Comet until the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released, last September, a draft version of an Open Educational Resources (OER) Toolkit in order to help individual academics and decision-makers in higher education institutions “who are interested in finding and using OER in the courses they teach, or who wish to publish OER that they have developed”.
The two first chapters of this draft give us a background to OER and talk about the emergence of Open Education. The third chapter explores Copyright and Creative Commons licenses. Fourth and fifth chapters help us finding, creating and sharing Open Educational Resources. The sixth chapter is dedicated to establishing institutional OER projects, from making the case, to strategies to follow, monitoring, evaluating and measuring the success of the project. The chapter ends with considerations about funding and some examples. The last chapter is more practical and lists all the things one need to consider when setting up an OER project.
As an indication of the commitment to the sharing of knowledge and the free flow of ideas, UNESCO published the book, edited by Susan D’Antoni and Catriona Savage, “Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace“, the UNESCO’s first openly publication.
World Wide Web (WWW) change the way we work, the way we spend our free time and the way we interact with other people. With the so called Social Web, anyone can produce content and publish it on the web, in a very easy way.
Social Web is about collaboration, remixing and sharing. Users of WWW generate a lot of content, that other users find useful to reuse. Suppose you need a picture for a presentation for a conference or a music for your video or podcast or you want to use an excerpt of a film to demonstrate something or you want to share an ebook with your students or simply you want to remix content and turn it into another work.
The first problem in using content from the web is copyright. Except for works in Public Domain, if you find a picture, an ebook, a music, a video, etc in the web without any explanation about how can be used, you must assume it is copyrighted. If you want to use it, you must ask the author. This means that you have to find the author’s contact, ask him and wait for his answer. It happens a lot that an author does not provide a contact (an email, for instance) or the author takes too much time to answer or even the author simply don’t want to receive lots of emails asking.
That’s why Creative Commons (CC) licenses were created in 2002. With CC, authors retain their copyright and at the same time can tell you what you can do with the work. Let’s see the options:
Attribution
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
Share Alike
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
Noncommercial
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
This means that you can use this post, share it, publish it and modify it as long as you say that I am the author, as long as you don’t make money with it and you license the result with a CC license.
Imagine that you visit a museum and by pointing your mobile phone to an object of the exhibition you can see more information about it, or if it is a reconstructed archaeological artifact, you can see it in pieces as when it was found and then see the virtual reconstruction of the object.
Imagine that you can insert information, through your mobile phone, about the objects you are seeing and explore information that previous visitors left.
Imagine that you visit ancient ruins and by wearing special glasses, you can see how historians think the completed buildings were, at those times or even see virtual humans dressed, acting and talking as supposed.
Augmented Reality (AR) is a field of computer research that refers to the mixing of real world images and computer-generated data, that augments meaning to those real world images.
Since 1959 the Italian publishing firm VISION has been applying a patented system which consists of printing on transparent material the image of the reconstruction of the ruins of an ancient monument or of an archaeological area, in such a way as to overlay this reconstruction on a photograph of the same subject in its present state. In About Us Webpage of VISION
A simple form of augmented reality, still widely used nowadays, is a televised football match, which give the viewer several graphical information, during the game.
Augmented Reality is gathering a lot of interest, recently. Last July, Apple has filed a patent related to AR. According to Ori Inbar, from Games Alfresco,
Although the term Augmented Reality (AR) is not explicitly mentioned in the patent – it describes very common mobile AR scenarios.
Some people don’t believe Apple will be able to defend this patent due to published prior art on this field. Today, we have already several AR browsers, like Layar, Wikitude, Sekai Camera or Acrossair, for iPhone or Android Mobile Phones, and there are several projects on this field, some of them funded by European Commission.
a) Accessing information in context with the exploration of the site through position and orientation tracking.
b) Personalized and thematic navigation aids in physical and information space through the use of visitor and tour profiles taking into account cultural and linguistic background, age and skills.
c) Visualization in 3D of missing artefacts and reconstructed parts of damaged sites on Head Mount Displays.
d) User friendly multi-modal interaction for obtaining information on real and virtual objects through gestures and speech. In addition, tools enabling site administrator to organize the presentation of site information in creative ways will be provided.
You can find several publications, presentations about the project and a video of the first results here.
The goal of LIFEPLUS is to push the limits of current Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, exploring the processes of narrative design of fictional spaces (e.g. frescos-paintings) where users can experience a high degree of realistic interactive immersion. (…) According to its key mobile AR technology, visitors are provided with a see-through Head-Mounted-Display (HMD), earphone and mobile computing equipment. A tracking system determines their location within the site and audio-visual information is presented to them in context with their exploration, superimposed on their current view of the site.
You can see some videos and a making of the project here. Information about the characters animation can be found here.
iTacitus explored ways of using augmented reality to provide compelling experiences at cultural heritage sites. For example
* Superimposed Environments: 3D objects are placed into the scene on the spot in order to overlay the real scene. Like missing paintings, statues or architecture models.
* Annotated Landscape: Abstract context sensitive information overlays showing images, texts and videos about a certain spot.
* Spatial Acoustic Overlays: Transporting a place’s original ambiance by virtually placing spatial audio clips in the surroundings.
DNP-Louvre Museum lab, in Tokyo, and Metaio, developed an experience to the museum, where the visitors are guided through the exhibition, having more information about what they are seeing and even having the possibility of seeing an object being virtually reconstructed:
(via Games Alfresco)
Another example of how augmented reality can be used in an attractive way in museums is Mobile Augmented Reality Quest (MARQ) 2005-2007, an electronic tour guide for museums based on a self-contained, inexpensive PDA.
The AR tour is delivered in the form of a team-oriented game. An arbitrary number of teams of visitors (target age 12-16) are cast into the role of investigators trying to solve a number of puzzles to solve that involve finding specific exhibits in the museum and manipulating the 3D cyberspace that surrounds the exhibit. Successful completion of a puzzle leads to the revelation of another part of the story. An interesting aspect of our project is also that it will for the first time involve the creation of massive amounts of professional and didactically relevant content for a mobile AR application.
Mobile Augmented Reality Quest (MARQ) 2005-2007
A situated Augmented Reality game played in a Museum in Austria (via Games Alfresco)
Multimedia is emerging as the defining medium of the twenty-first century. The World Wide Web, CD-ROMs, virtual reality arcade games, and interactive installations only hint at the forms of multimedia to come. Yet the concept of integrated, interactive media has its own long history, an evolution that spans more than 150 years. [1]
The concept of multimedia changed through time and will probably change in the future. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, editors of the book “Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality”, define five characteristics of the new media that makes them different from any other media:
- Integration, “the combining of artistic forms and technology into a hybrid form of expression”;
- Interactivity, “the ability of the user to manipulate and affect her experience of media directly, and to communicate with others through media”;
- Hypermedia, “the linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal association”;
- Immersion, “the experience of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a three-dimensional environment”;
- Narrativity, “aesthetic and formal strategies that derive from the above concepts, which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentations”.
The book is divided in five chapters, titled with the above characteristics, and in each chapter we can read some of the most important essays related with each characteristic.
In the first chapter about integration, there is an essay from 1849, by Richard Wagner, the German composer, about his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork. In 1916, Marinetti et al., wrote about “The Futurist Cinema”, declaring cinema as the supreme art “because it embraced all other art forms through the use of (then) new media technology”. [2] In 1924, Moholy-Nagy reinterpreted the Wagner’s concept by calling it “Theater of Totality”:
It is time to produce a kind of stage activity which will no longer permit the masses to be silent spectators, which will not only excite them inwardly but will let them take hold and participate – actually allow them to fuse with the action on the stage at the peak of cathartic ecstasy. [3]
In interactivity chapter, we can read essays from John Cage about the participation of the public in a performance, being a perfect example of this his piece 4′33”, and authors like Wiener, Engelbart on “Augmenting Human Intellect”, Krueger [video] or Alan Kay.
Hypermedia opens with the known “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, where he describes the Memex and invents the notion of what we know now as hyperlink. In this chapter, we can find other articles like the one from Ted Nelson, who coined the words hypertext and hypermedia and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented World Wide Web.
The chapter about immersion has essays from Morton Heilig, considered as the father of virtual reality, and his vision of “The Cinema of the Future”, as an experience of a virtual world, and the description of “The Ultimate Display” by Ivan Sutherland:
In 1966, Sutherland took a crucial step toward the implementation of his vision by inventing the head-mounted display – a helmet-shaped apparatus designed to immerse the viewer in a visually simulated 3-D environment. [4]
Scott Fisher, that worked in Aspen Movie Map Project, from MIT, in 1970s, William Gibson, that coined the term cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer, the creators of CAVE and Char Davies, author of Osmose, an immersive, interactive multimedia work, are other authors from which we can read some essays.
Narrativity starts with 1964’s “The Future of Novel”, by William Burroughs which “express the essential narrative strategies of computer-based multimedia storytelling long before their time.” [5]
The chapter continues with essays by Allan Kaprow, who coined the term Happenings in 1950s, Roy Ascott, Pavel Curtis, about MUDs, Pierre Lévy and Janet Murray, author of “Hamlet on Holodeck”.
“Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality” sums up works from artists and engineers that worked with multimedia concept, which are crucial to understand the “relentlessly changing nature” of multimedia. [6]
[1] Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds. 2002. Multimedia : from Wagner to virtual reality. [Expanded ed.]. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001], Overture, xv. http://www.w2vr.com/.
[2] Ibidem, Overture, xxi.
[3] László Moholy-Nagy, “Theatre, Circus, Variety,” in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall Packer e
Ken Jordan [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001], 25.
[4] Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds. 2002. Multimedia : from Wagner to virtual reality. [Expanded ed.]. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001], 253. http://www.w2vr.com/.
0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game that was born in the winter of 2001/2002.
Wildfire Games, the team behind the game, is switching 0 A. D. from a closed development process to open source, making the code available as GPL and the art content available as CC-BY-SA .
This way, other people can contribute to the project:
We’re releasing this as a work-in-progress, pre-alpha project, aimed at developers who might be interested in this kind of thing, in the hope of sharing resources with a community that would otherwise be excluded from our development process.
The team has several departments, including an History Department since the game will be strongly guided by history.
Erik Johansson, a.k.a. feneur, producer and project leader 0 A.D., told EuroMACHS, via email, that
Generally we don’t have much need in the History area at the moment as the design for the game is finalized since several years and it will not be until we start developing the campaigns/scenarios for the game that we might need historians to be involved with the game itself.
For now,
the history department mostly writes history articles for the website and checks out specific things if we find something in the design we might need more info on.
Nevertheless, if you want to contribute with texts you can always post an application thread to the forum, with an example text of your writing. Later on when the team starts to create scenarios/campaigns, you can help too, “as they will need to be as historically accurate as possible”.
If you are a programmer and want to join the developers team you can start to read the Getting Started Guide.
New media has become the number one source of information for the people who use them. If you use FriendFeed or Twitter, two systems that allow communication in real time, you probably already got news about an event that happened just a few minutes ago or you even followed an event, while it was happening, which is very frequently in conferences, where participants transmit what is occurring in real time, through Twitter.
But how about past/historical events?
In less than four hours, you will be able to follow, minute by minute in real time, the launch of Apollo 11, in its voyage to the moon, in a celebration of the 40 years of the event.
You can follow the route and the velocity in the website We Choose the Moon and you can follow the astronauts through Twitter too. For now, the crew is resting.
The idea is not new. In April, this year, a group of people decided to commemorate the date of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, by transmitting through Twitter (only in Portuguese), minute by minute in real time, the events that led to the coup d’état.
It would be interesting to study these cases to find out how this kind of activity can improve the public knowledge of the past.
RSS 
Attribution
Share Alike
Noncommercial
No Derivative Works
The concept of multimedia changed through time and will probably change in the future. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, editors of the book “Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality”, define five characteristics of the new media that makes them different from any other media:
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