Began with Rugby World Cup 2011. Wanted to recreate childhood experience of driving around with parents reading out stories from a guide. So got 140 stories prefaced of extracts from RadioNZ archives - 4minute sound bytes. Then road tested them, listening to stories and taking photographs.
Didn't originally realise how important these photos would be. Originally envisaged as CDs they could hand out at airport but then found out the cost this would involve and rethought... How to get the stuff out? Could deliver as mp3 files so people could download trips. Put together iPod app with sound and images. Put together a google map with access to all stories. But main way was on YouTube. And had to use images taken as historic images often had rights issues.
Roadside Stories possibly not that successful with rugby fans -- but the YouTube videos have been viewed often and often also embedded in other contexts.
Main problem is that does involve staring at still photos - hope to work with archives to move beyond this and put together some war stories.
Max Sullivan, Victoria University of Wellington: Digitising sensitive material
Digitising Salient student magazine. Contains a lot of images that can be considered offensive - nudity (inc. child nudity), violence, death. 50,000 images on website and haven't dealt with this before or had policy to deal with it, though have withheld images for cultural reasons.
Image of dead child from Vietnam War. Does portraying it respect the person?
One with headline re "rapes chicken".
Need to display images in context. If you can't display in context maybe shouldn't display it at all. Eg album cover with naked 13-year-old - okay if used to illustrate article on music.
Need to create a defensible position - create and display a policy.
Will display Salient in full; but want people to see images in context, so will block the images from search engines. Will also develop and display an image policy.
Why block all images? Easier to be consistent, easier to implement, avoids having meetings about each image (because will soon be doing the 70s!)
More info: An Investigation into the Display of Potentially Offensive Salient Magazine Images
Stuart Yeates, Victoria University of Wellington: Digital usage statistics
Web stats - google analytics, apache logs, other systems
Good for some things - how many people use site, what pages more frequently used, did people stop using search after upgrade, did marketing lead to uptick in usage?
Do we value reuse and remix? Everyone.
Do we measure it and report it upwards? A few tentative hands
"Bureaucracies measure success in terms of what is reported up the management chain. If you have no plan to report, you are planning to fail."
Broadcast vs kaitiaki - broadcast is all about selling slots, measuring bums on seats. If we're to be guardians, we don't have content, users have content loaned to us for their future selves. If they're not doing stuff with it, why the fuck do we have it?
Easy measures
- links from (crowdsourced website) to you - wikipedia special:linksearch page
- link from twitter to you
- use on domain-specific aggregators
Chris Thomson, University of Canterbury: Digitising a bibliography of writing by Māori in English
Bridget Underhill created Kōmako bibliography as dissertation. Bibliography is authorised - she contacted writers and whanau for consent and to annotate.
Chris involved much more recently. They're doing project mostly in spare time. Bibliography is a Word file, non-searchable pdf, and in print. Want to turn into flexible data format, interoperable with other systems, maintainable and updateable.
Using TEI, eXist-DB, and XSLT and XQuery. Doing everything with xml which can be verbose, pedantic, heavy-handed but others love it.
"XML is like violence - if it doesn't solve your problems, you are not using enough of it." attributed to sparklemotion
OxGarage to convert docx to flat TEI XML
Lots of tools out there for learning this stuff.
Coming soon: www.komako.org.nz
Clarion Wells, NZ On Screen, How to Survive the Content Apocalypse
Clip of Rotting Hill zombie apocalypse in NZ outback which Clarion says is how she feels about the web.
NZonscreen has thousands of title free to watch. Tasks include selecting, clearing, sourcing digitising, writing. Very high stats. But besieged by horde of information. How do we survive and thrive in information apocalypse?
4 rules
- use the right tools - have built own ruby on rails applications, and challenge is to keep it simple and usable. Use analytics tools to get info about visitors and measure performance
- find your peers and work with them. Don't become isolated. NZonscreen team from film/tv background, involved in industry. But also part of cultural and heritage sector.
- find allies outside of your peers. Find common ground in sectors beyond your own. Eg approaching Tourism NZ re helping tourists find out more about locations of favourite films.
- make yourself known to the public - survival depends on people knowing you exist. Active on Facebook and Twitter, strong relationships with the Press, approach radio and tv when something to offer.
