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Interface Mock-ups:
March 16, 2007
February 28, 2007
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE WORKSHOP
Yesterday the SP-ARK team ran a usability workshop in conjunction with The Screen School at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Using 6 different versions of the first page of Sally Potter's 'Orlando' script from various stages of her adaptation process, we trialed an offline, paper version of our pathway concept.
Students who attended came from departments as diverse as Film, Media, Modern Literature, TV/Print Journalism, Sociology, Image and Communications, Computer Arts, Performance Making, Cultural Studies, Screen Studies, Screen Documentaries and Scriptwriting.
We will post a video of the workshop shortly.
The students were polled on various aspects of the workshop. When asked about SP-ARK 95% agreed that archival materials should be made accessible online, 80% said they thought it was important to interact with other users online and 95% said that social networking technologies are useful for education.
When asked about the workshop 80% said that they learnt about the creative process from the material presented and 75% said they learnt from interacting with other students' ideas.
Photos by James Karinejad
View all Goldsmiths workshop photos on Flickr
Dr. Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies commented:
“How will the physical archive transform in the digital era? What is the next stage after the DVD in the proliferation of cinema? The SP-ARK vision of Social Learning gives us a glimmer of the future today. Instead of locking archive materials away and restricting availability, it promises ready access to anybody anywhere with a computer and the internet.
Furthermore, the solitary archive user is transformed into a producer and a member of a community by the ability to build pathways of connections and commentary through the material. In the process, the cinema is extended from a fixed object to be viewed into a dynamic, interactive, and growing network of digital debate and active learning.”
Posted by Alex Johnson.
February 18, 2007
OPEN KNOWLEDGE CONVENTION
Andrea Rota from Liquid Culture kindly invited Alex Johnson (New Media Director), Christopher Sheppard (Executive Director) and George South (Consultant) to present SP-ARK at the Open Space session, part of Open Knowledge 1.0 at Limehouse town hall this Saturday.
Limehouse town hall
This event was the first in a series to be put on by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a group set up to ensure that the “increased and more equitable access to knowledge…as well as its collaborative development” offered by the technological revolution is actualized.
Open media panel
Though a day of discussions on the semantic web essentially all pertained to issues of online archiving, most immediately pertinent to SP-ARK were the insights given by Paula Ledieu during the Open Media session regarding her experience in what she frankly termed the “fuck up” that was BBC’s Creative Archive project (now, two years after its launch, in the process of a PVT). Previously Project Director of the BBC Creative Archives project, now Managing Director and Director of Open Media at Magic Lantern Productions and at OK1.0 to present on OMNI, she stressed her concern that the public had “failed to exploit the institutional momentum that presented itself a few years ago regarding public access to public assets…To enshrine archives to look at and not participate in is not acceptable”.
Open media panel (L-R: Paula Ledieu, Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum from Platoniq, Zoe Young, coordinator of Transmission's metadata working group)
Whilst Potter’s work is not a public domain collection, we fully support Paula’s reasoning that it is critical that it is communicated to the BBC (as well as the BFI and those in other public sectors that hold collections) that we know they have been holding these collections in trust for the public until they can provide - as a clause in the BBC’s Charter describes - “meaningful access”. We now have the technology before us to do just this - to make our UK cultural heritage accessible to all in a participatory form. Taking this landscape into consideration SP-ARK is a clearly a timely project.
In her capacity as ex-Director for Creative Commons International, Paula also requested that the community refocus on outcomes rather than philosophy when it comes to the use and re-use of data and to question the underpinnings of a system that conflates legal and business models. SP-ARK were keen to discuss with other participants how aspects of our application might be made more open and developed within this culture of openness and free information, given the certain restrictions imposed on the project by Adventure Picture’s necessity to ‘protect’ certain uses of Sally Potter’s assets (a working, live archive still used by the original creator herself). During the Q&A George South and I discussed how the main impetus of SP-ARK was as an open learning tool, rather than the importance being placed on the redistribution of assets for secondary creative use, and that all user content would be made available through CC -or equivalent- licenses.
L-R: Christopher, Alex and George
Saul Albert from The People Speak encouraged us to look at incorporating tools that are already actively being used by the open media community and Dr Lars Christof Armbruster invited discussion on the concept of an application (SP-ARK) being simultaneously academic and user run, citing the 911 archive at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as an academic resource that includes new media aspects and UGC and has just been acquired by the Library of Congress. Paula Ledieu and Jessica Clark from the Center for Social Media at the American University, Washington expressed their interest and a wish to hear more on SP-ARK.
Thanks to Rufus Pollock and the OKFN team for letting us get involved and congratualtions on a great event.
Posted by Alex Johnson.
