Thomas, Web Applications
"You can't back up the Internet." That was from Aaron Straup Cope, and he was talking about digital preservation, but it could have been the subtitle for the whole day last Friday, at the Digital Cultural Heritage and User Experience symposium. You can't back up the internet: it is a forward moving thing, a live performance.
This year is Brooklyn Historical Society's 150th anniversary, and it’s a point of pride that we could play a role as a host, stakeholder, and instigator in this symposium. Brooklyn Historical Society is an urban history center in a landmark building. It has made a fundamental commitment to place-based, in-person, primary source research. But the network keeps growing, and these moments at our building now exist in a continuum of services. We meet our audience on line, and after they touch down here at 128 Pierrepont St, we continue to serve them online. A good day here is one like last week’s symposium, when an ongoing conversation touches down in a particular place and time to mark a moment, and then continues outside the walls.
The problem is that we don't always have the perfect day. My favorite characterization of this dilemma is the problem of changing from an information economy (where information is the scarce thus valuable commodity) to an attention economy. Aaron made a set of observations that are particularly trenchant in this context, encouraging cultural heritage institutions to have "the confidence to be invisible” and observing that "data, not answers, is the magic of libraries; they’re the thing that everyone refers back to."
That is a compelling statement of the role of the collecting institution: to be the scaffolding of trustworthy information and metadata that binds the networked world together. Liz McEnany observed that Wikipedia is “our biggest competitor” in this regard. Wikipedia, Google, and some other services have a commanding lead in being the connective tissue of the network, and the morning panel had some really insightful discussion about how to work in that particular environment, where the LAM community has vital information, but is not an indispensible part of the general online experience.
Liz was speaking as someone developing a commercial mobile app around historical places, but the lesson transfers easily to conventional LAMs. She observed that the key to overcoming this seeming opposition is narrative, story, and research, modes of communication that Wikipedia specifically doesn’t allow through the filter of “neutral point of view,” but these are critical to pointing individual people to meaningful experiences.
Molly Kleiman responded that one of goals of her publication, triple canopy, was to work “in defense of the minor”, and I think it’s one of the most intriguing notes of the morning session in relation to questions of attention and institutional purpose. This is a role that libraries and archives may have some daily experience with – the reference desk is some days a monument to (or maelstrom of) the minor – but it’s not an idea that is alien museums, from the (ready for a revival) cabinet of curiosities or the little jewel box galleries that are sprinkled around libraries and museums, curated with intense passion and scholarship, but too small for the main hall.
It’s easy to slip up and frame these two sets of ideas as a conflict between a nameless institution dispersing vast resources and metadata, and tightly focused narrative and didactic content from very specific people. It’s a credit to the assembled panelists that they saw a continuity of effort across these realms. A broad pool of metadata and resources is the wellspring for research and curation, and in this way, the digital institution replicates the physical institution. Libraries, archives, and museums answer the pre-network problem of information scarcity by collocating resources, so that users could go to one place and do their individual, idiosyncratic work. Now we are placing all our stuff on one network, so users can traverse the whole and use it as they will.
Ben Fino-Radin made the day’s allusion to the problem of Robert Moses (in this case, talking about monolithic systems for emulation and digital preservation), and I was grateful for the reminder that we can seek a Jane Jacobs approach to our digital work. Jacob’s model of the city provides some context and services – transit, sanitation, a grid – but every resident has their own geography, each neighborhood its own character, and presumably, each user and institution brings its own form of social capital to the network.
A lot of this conversation tumbled out from Seb Chan’s observations about "museum selfies", the photos people snap of themselves in specific places, near artworks and landmarks. The panel discussed these as being “more than postcards”, something with an experiential or performative dimension that connects a person and a cultural object in a moment and for an implicit audience. I long for a more rigorous analysis of what is going on with this phenomenon, because I see it all the time in the library. We can show pictures and talk for hours about an object, but setting someone down in front of the thing itself in the landmarked library is the actual transformational event.
That observation is a good pivot into the afternoon discussion, led off by a talk between Jonathan Bowen and Stephen Bury. Jonathan led off with the wry observation that the morning was for the casual Australians, and the afternoon for the buttoned-down Englishmen. The post-colonial issues embedded in that remark, spoken in Brooklyn near several major sites of the American Revolution, are too rich for me to parse. But I think it is fair to say that the morning centered on the framing conditions for our work and the emerging goals for our institutions, and the afternoon session shifted towards the pragmatic questions of carrying out digital projects and presented several compelling vignettes of how our work is enabling more and better research and creative activity in the present.
I had a professor at University of Puget Sound who liked the phrase “tacking a dialectic,” an allusion to sailing into the wind, making forward progress by moving towards your destination through different angles of approach. I think he would have enjoyed the afternoon, which tacked between the need for institutions to let individual passion steer a project and the danger that this will create exclusion by omission, failing to create tools and services that are of interest to a diverse audience.
Craig MacDonald and Zannah Marsh both had engaging takes on this. Craig made a nice observation about iterative design, suggesting that a successful, ongoing effort would alternate between deep engagement and broad assessment of outcomes. This is something that institutions, rather than individuals, are well suited to do. In an institutional context, it’s compelling to think about turning some staff loose to dig into a projects, however idiosyncratic they may be, while other look across the potential audiences and scope out the next place for a deep engagement. I can imagine a successful, respectful conversation that shows off smart work and then makes the case for cultivating that same engagement in another area.
Zannah spoke about allowing digital work let us deconstruct the museum experience and the nature of the artifact, so that we could play and experiment. It’s important to emphasize that her observations were grounded in work designing for science museums. I think this is a good reminder to listen to other disciplines, and remember that in a digital museum, the same object can be presented and engaged with in many more ways that in a physical museum. Zannah did some work at Brooklyn Historical Society earlier in the year and I got a great education from her comments during the symposium and the experience of seeing her work with her students to make a very intimate study of our collections through a process of design, deconstruction, and re-presentation. There are a lot of humanists in my line of work, and we privilege narrative text and argument, but I can’t say that graphic designers have any less of a real and deeply informative encounter with the materials in our collections, even though their work products are distinctly different.
I’ll sum up with a nod to both Stephen Bury and Francis Morrone. They are both exemplars of the way that work with highly physical objects – rare books, manuscripts, buildings, neighborhoods – is transformed by digital experiences. This is not a zero-sum game, after all. They paint a compelling picture of what our present and our near-future can be, with an easy motion between online discovery, scholarship and creative work using computers, and deep engagement with primary sources.
Finally, a little postscript: my notes are a bit of a patchwork, depending on when caterers showed up and that sort of thing. I didn't scribble name next to every note, so I also want to thank Ben Vershbow, Chris Alen Sula, Lacy Schutz, and Jefferson Bailey for their smart talk throughout the day. A video recording of the whole session was made, and we'll update you on that soon.
This year is Brooklyn Historical Society's 150th anniversary, and it’s a point of pride that we could play a role as a host, stakeholder, and instigator in this symposium. Brooklyn Historical Society is an urban history center in a landmark building. It has made a fundamental commitment to place-based, in-person, primary source research. But the network keeps growing, and these moments at our building now exist in a continuum of services. We meet our audience on line, and after they touch down here at 128 Pierrepont St, we continue to serve them online. A good day here is one like last week’s symposium, when an ongoing conversation touches down in a particular place and time to mark a moment, and then continues outside the walls.
The problem is that we don't always have the perfect day. My favorite characterization of this dilemma is the problem of changing from an information economy (where information is the scarce thus valuable commodity) to an attention economy. Aaron made a set of observations that are particularly trenchant in this context, encouraging cultural heritage institutions to have "the confidence to be invisible” and observing that "data, not answers, is the magic of libraries; they’re the thing that everyone refers back to."
That is a compelling statement of the role of the collecting institution: to be the scaffolding of trustworthy information and metadata that binds the networked world together. Liz McEnany observed that Wikipedia is “our biggest competitor” in this regard. Wikipedia, Google, and some other services have a commanding lead in being the connective tissue of the network, and the morning panel had some really insightful discussion about how to work in that particular environment, where the LAM community has vital information, but is not an indispensible part of the general online experience.
Liz was speaking as someone developing a commercial mobile app around historical places, but the lesson transfers easily to conventional LAMs. She observed that the key to overcoming this seeming opposition is narrative, story, and research, modes of communication that Wikipedia specifically doesn’t allow through the filter of “neutral point of view,” but these are critical to pointing individual people to meaningful experiences.
Molly Kleiman responded that one of goals of her publication, triple canopy, was to work “in defense of the minor”, and I think it’s one of the most intriguing notes of the morning session in relation to questions of attention and institutional purpose. This is a role that libraries and archives may have some daily experience with – the reference desk is some days a monument to (or maelstrom of) the minor – but it’s not an idea that is alien museums, from the (ready for a revival) cabinet of curiosities or the little jewel box galleries that are sprinkled around libraries and museums, curated with intense passion and scholarship, but too small for the main hall.
It’s easy to slip up and frame these two sets of ideas as a conflict between a nameless institution dispersing vast resources and metadata, and tightly focused narrative and didactic content from very specific people. It’s a credit to the assembled panelists that they saw a continuity of effort across these realms. A broad pool of metadata and resources is the wellspring for research and curation, and in this way, the digital institution replicates the physical institution. Libraries, archives, and museums answer the pre-network problem of information scarcity by collocating resources, so that users could go to one place and do their individual, idiosyncratic work. Now we are placing all our stuff on one network, so users can traverse the whole and use it as they will.
Ben Fino-Radin made the day’s allusion to the problem of Robert Moses (in this case, talking about monolithic systems for emulation and digital preservation), and I was grateful for the reminder that we can seek a Jane Jacobs approach to our digital work. Jacob’s model of the city provides some context and services – transit, sanitation, a grid – but every resident has their own geography, each neighborhood its own character, and presumably, each user and institution brings its own form of social capital to the network.
A lot of this conversation tumbled out from Seb Chan’s observations about "museum selfies", the photos people snap of themselves in specific places, near artworks and landmarks. The panel discussed these as being “more than postcards”, something with an experiential or performative dimension that connects a person and a cultural object in a moment and for an implicit audience. I long for a more rigorous analysis of what is going on with this phenomenon, because I see it all the time in the library. We can show pictures and talk for hours about an object, but setting someone down in front of the thing itself in the landmarked library is the actual transformational event.
That observation is a good pivot into the afternoon discussion, led off by a talk between Jonathan Bowen and Stephen Bury. Jonathan led off with the wry observation that the morning was for the casual Australians, and the afternoon for the buttoned-down Englishmen. The post-colonial issues embedded in that remark, spoken in Brooklyn near several major sites of the American Revolution, are too rich for me to parse. But I think it is fair to say that the morning centered on the framing conditions for our work and the emerging goals for our institutions, and the afternoon session shifted towards the pragmatic questions of carrying out digital projects and presented several compelling vignettes of how our work is enabling more and better research and creative activity in the present.
I had a professor at University of Puget Sound who liked the phrase “tacking a dialectic,” an allusion to sailing into the wind, making forward progress by moving towards your destination through different angles of approach. I think he would have enjoyed the afternoon, which tacked between the need for institutions to let individual passion steer a project and the danger that this will create exclusion by omission, failing to create tools and services that are of interest to a diverse audience.
Craig MacDonald and Zannah Marsh both had engaging takes on this. Craig made a nice observation about iterative design, suggesting that a successful, ongoing effort would alternate between deep engagement and broad assessment of outcomes. This is something that institutions, rather than individuals, are well suited to do. In an institutional context, it’s compelling to think about turning some staff loose to dig into a projects, however idiosyncratic they may be, while other look across the potential audiences and scope out the next place for a deep engagement. I can imagine a successful, respectful conversation that shows off smart work and then makes the case for cultivating that same engagement in another area.
Zannah spoke about allowing digital work let us deconstruct the museum experience and the nature of the artifact, so that we could play and experiment. It’s important to emphasize that her observations were grounded in work designing for science museums. I think this is a good reminder to listen to other disciplines, and remember that in a digital museum, the same object can be presented and engaged with in many more ways that in a physical museum. Zannah did some work at Brooklyn Historical Society earlier in the year and I got a great education from her comments during the symposium and the experience of seeing her work with her students to make a very intimate study of our collections through a process of design, deconstruction, and re-presentation. There are a lot of humanists in my line of work, and we privilege narrative text and argument, but I can’t say that graphic designers have any less of a real and deeply informative encounter with the materials in our collections, even though their work products are distinctly different.
I’ll sum up with a nod to both Stephen Bury and Francis Morrone. They are both exemplars of the way that work with highly physical objects – rare books, manuscripts, buildings, neighborhoods – is transformed by digital experiences. This is not a zero-sum game, after all. They paint a compelling picture of what our present and our near-future can be, with an easy motion between online discovery, scholarship and creative work using computers, and deep engagement with primary sources.
Finally, a little postscript: my notes are a bit of a patchwork, depending on when caterers showed up and that sort of thing. I didn't scribble name next to every note, so I also want to thank Ben Vershbow, Chris Alen Sula, Lacy Schutz, and Jefferson Bailey for their smart talk throughout the day. A video recording of the whole session was made, and we'll update you on that soon.
This blog post reflects the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Brooklyn Public Library.
Post a Comment
While BPL encourages an open forum, posts and comments are moderated by library staff. BPL reserves the right, within its sole discretion, not to post and to remove submissions or comments that are unlawful or violate this policy. While comments will not be edited by BPL personnel, a comment may be deleted if it violates our comment policy.
eNews Signup
Get the latest updates from BPL and be the first to know about new programs, author talks, exciting events and opportunities to support your local library.