A Commission from Het Nieuwe Instituut, Part II

Since this commission began, there’s been a visit to MVRDV in Rotterdam, a Part I blog post, and an interview about these ideas with Annet Dekker published on the HNI website. Annet also wrote a great scene-setting post there too, about the challenge of this kind of digital archiving, with a great reading list: Bringing out subjective relationships: Relations of technics, concepts and actors in digital archives.

I must admit, it’s taken me much longer to complete this speculative commission that I’d first thought. I’m now sure answering the questions it asks could be a life’s work, and that made it a bit daunting to try to collapse the huge range of initial ideas into two blog posts (and the interview). In any case, I’d be curious and appreciative of any reactions you have to it.

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New Representations of Work

One theme that’s emerged through conversation and research is that we’re missing an opportunity to do better, more relational, and richer archival representations of organisations. There is very much more available to us than the more traditional “bucket of files” which is often deemed the equivalent of an archive (when really it’s just a backup of a bucket of files.

In a previous life, I was art director at Stamen Design in San Francisco. When we had a design intern join us for a few months, Zoe Padgett, I wasn’t sure how to keep her busy and engaged from the outset, so I dreamt up a piece of work that could simmer away while she was with us: to visualise the company itself. In this project now, I’ve found myself returning to what she made. It feels like a new representation of corporate life, and has a particular focus on the people in the company, not necessarily the company’s output. During her internship, Zoe conducted a bunch of interviews, surveys and other chats, and painted a picture of us that we’d never seen before, even though we lived it each day.

Zoe studied us and the studio, figuring out who we were, where we’re from, and what we liked to eat when we were in the office. One of her interview questions was ‘what is your favourite animal?’ and that resulted in one of my favourite staff lists ever.

The other thing I enjoyed about Zoe’s approach was that it wasn’t particularly about our projects, our output, but about us. There is (and has always been) so much more material available to us about the whole company that what it makes public, to illustrate and even explain the company dynamics.

MVRDV is a titan in the architecture world. It’s a big, successful firm that’s made hundreds of projects, many of them built, and the public facade online reflects that. It’s ultra-professional, and (interestingly) specialises in creating hyper-real aspirational imagery around its projects. One tricky part with architecture archives though, is that it’s almost never possible to collect The Thing made by architects. Inevitably they’re about process around the thing, and in fact, it’s actually quite rare that an architecture project gets built in the world, in which case it’s all process.

Today though, there’s a pretty big gap between representing the process of creation and what we often think of as the archive… The digital archive is handed over as a bucket of files, like someone dragged a backup disk onto another backup disk, so what you’re seeing is files and folders and files and folders. No sense in there of who did what when and why.

The disk

A working file

Browsing bucket of files

Tree skeletons

 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still interesting to look at working files. But, what I can’t know from the bucket of files in its current form is who made them, at whose request, for what stage in the project, whether the boss was happy with it, whether it reached the client, or anything like that. We can’t know that from Zoe’s Stamen Menagerie either, to be fair.

(Does this mean I want to be a social historian?)

This problem is hard, and most companies probably don’t really record this kind of information in a organised or archival way. Is there more of an opportunity than ever to witness the people involved in the creation of raw archival material? How does having a named account on a web service where you upload stuff (Dropbox, Google, Instagram, Flickr) improve potential for identity in archives? It’s no longer endless folders of IMG_3467.jpg, is it? Can we do better? How can we do better?

Actors in the Archive?

I wanted to know much more about the who, so I set about a quick study of the MVRDV actors to see if I could figure out anything about who worked there. The first piece was a bone simple survey that asked a few simple questions:

1. What are the four most important projects at MVRDV?
2. What’s your job title? optional
3. What year did you start at MVRDV? optional

With the caveat that the staff probably didn’t know anything about me or this commission so why would they do the survey, we ended up with 25 responses from the company. Even in these responses, the results were as expected: respondents would probably mention the famous projects.

MVRDV Stage 1: Staff Survey, Top 4 Projects

#	Project	Votes	%
TP261	Markthall	19	76%
TP065	Expo2000	15	60%
TP010	Villa VRPO	7	28%
TP028	Silodam	6	24%

I’ve published the raw results and some cooked views on it as a Google sheet, with permissions set to ‘anyone can comment’. I liked that because people had been asked for their Top 4, it seemed like there were quite a few personal favourites mentioned in the results too. 33 projects got a special mention in the end.

Another highlight for me was a glimmer of something that you probably wouldn’t find in a bucket of files; someone’s answer to “When did you start?” was “I don’t wanna know”.

The Soylent Archive: It’s Made of People

I’m drawn to projects that put people in the centre. Here are some of my favourite examples.

1. Hacking Rambert
You’ve probably heard of Leila Johnston, and if you haven’t, you should have a look at her work. She’s a prolific writer, thinker, and maker who’s constantly putting out incisive, original work around the collision of art and tech. Anyway, I watched with interest as she worked on her latest project called Hacking Rambert, installed as ‘digital creative in residence’ at Rambert Dance Company in London.

I looked into a lot of interesting things. Time. The building. Code. Rendering sound. Musicality. Portraits. Heat. I looked at people – especially dancers. How is it possible that most people never get really good at anything, yet other people find themselves here, doing such an extraordinary thing for a living?

I particularly enjoyed Johnston’s portraits of the dancers, especially in the context of the ephemeral performance. I love that she made digital captures of the dancers, and then printed them in 3D physical form, and even more so that a lot of it was very ‘lo-poly’ or low resolution. As Johnston suggests, low resolution can mean high fidelity and that’s not something traditionally witnessed in archives, I’d suggest, except maybe after years of work?

She also published a short book about her reflections on the residency, and one phrase struck me, her conceptual prompt, “how can I ensure I’m not doing ‘interior design’ or simple illustrations of dance concept on stage etc, but show something of the authentic situation of digital and its relationship to dance, as it stands in 2016?”

Hmm… authentic situation of digital… in 2016.

2. Tracking Transcience
Is a much older piece of work, but still living, which is sort of nuts for a digital thing. Tracking Transience was started in 2002 by an artist called Hasan Elahi (who has gone on to make all sorts of brilliant things). After 9/11, Elahi got hassled a lot as he travelled, always getting bothered at borders and airports and questioned unfairly, so he did something amazing. He put his whole life online, in remarkable detail. Where he was all the time, what he ate, what he bought… the lot. So the next time he was hassled, he could point to precise evidence of his whereabouts.

In 2002, this was a radical act, and I think that level of transparency still is radical. As much as the world has turned since then, and many of us post a lot of ourselves online, it’s rare to show ourselves wholly. It’s even more rare for a company. Transparency can be threatening, but maybe if there’s a company who would be up for it, perhaps it’s MVRDV.

3. Who lives in the Wellcome Library?
A project I’ve been working on over the last ten months or so with the Wellcome Library touches on this idea of trying to find the actors in a collection system. Library websites can be really dry, and almost always rely on people knowing what they’re looking for, so we tried to directly reveal the WHO and not just the WHAT.

With our What’s in the Library? project, we looked at the data from a bird’s eye view, and were able to display the people in it. Visualising people in a dataset like this can show you a really different dynamic in the collection. Just by clicking around and exploring interconnections of people and subjects, you can learn something about who was writing what, and when.

It’s simple, but a nice way to explore.

Who are the actors in the MVRDV performance?

Even though this commission wasn’t about making a piece of software, I did a few sketches about showing people, who they worked with, and how many of their projects ended up getting built. I wonder what data you’d need to drive a visualisation like this?

When I began this project, I started following MVRDV on the popular web services like Facebook. I noticed an announcement that they appointed five new partners, and immediately wondered about all the things that had led to that announcement.

Then I wondering how the staff at the firm has changed over time, and who worked together a lot and formed great collaborations. Which of the lots of fresh interns made a great impression and stuck around? What might be interesting about mapping job titles and pay rates over time?

Turns out you can start to see this sort of thing, if you look, on LinkedIn. I spent an afternoon looking up everyone who listed the company in their profile, and made a note of when they started, and you can easily see the growth of the company over time:

Start dates for MVRDV staff listed on LinkedIn

This is just a small thing I suppose. I remember on the visit to the company back in November last year wondering if I could access the more HR-related records. I’m looking for some kind of overlay of all the digital output of the company with the people that made it.

But, what about born-digital work?

It’s really hard! You must be indefatigable, and not many of us are.

• Track and manage all external systems. In my first three months of making Good, Form & Spectacle, I’d used about 30 online services in some way.
• Try to use a common thread across your projects, like an sequential identifier. MVRDV does this, and I’ve started to. (HNI is #011.)
• Make plan for documenting and packaging near-past work. Teach all staff, and even better, collaborate and talk over it all together. Add this step of describing together to your workflow.
• At some point you’ll have to attack the early projects. As a first step, you could archive at least one born-digital element for each?
• Determine “important” projects by interview and/or data analysis (cost, profit, built/not built, staff happiness, press attention etc). This sort of analysis will be interesting for future visitors too. Even imagining that your company may be interesting enough to be poked at by a future researcher is a good thought, because it’s useful to imagine an audience for your archival narrative.
• Assess whether old works need to be able to be re-run or just well-documented. Even though a Proper Archivist would want to truly encapsulate it, that just might not be possible. These vast software systems we see today (Facebook, etc) would require archival infrastructure the like of which has not been seen in order to be encapsulated for posterity.

A Live Archive?

Let’s just say you’ve done the hard work of going back over your work and archived it all beautifully. What might you do into the future, as you work?

Since very many of us are now using computers to do our daily work, we create and hold  dates, files, IDs, assets etc for all sorts of things as we go. This is broadly good. It’s a lot more raw material than we’ve had before, and it has some automated metadata that’s useful (instead of being ‘in the shoebox under the bed covered in dust and only brought to an archivist posthumously’).

For me, one of the main revolutionary aspects of Web 2.0 was this idea that you could be looking at a live dataset in a webpage. Before that, everything was fixed (if updated here and there). Since then, a lot of the web and its design has become centered on liveness, or recentness. It’s possible to know in bizarre but fascinating detail who did what and when.

Look at this animation of six weeks of coding on the open-source Linux operating system:

So what could a live archive be like? What if archiving things was a moment-by-moment active task? Remember that a backup is not the same as an archive, mostly because it’s not especially described separate to its existence. Perhaps there are instant or daily uploads into it, like you’d upload to Dropbox or Google or wherever. Perhaps there’s also a daily ingest by a local institution or one you’re a member of. (So for me, that would be Islington Council Libraries and Heritage Services, or maybe even the British Museum). Perhaps it’s about drip-fed longevity instead of great globs. Perhaps a junior archivist could actually be a computer program. It might compute things about your work, a bit like Slack’s weekly updates, or the lovely, now defunct Dopplr Annual Report.

When I was starting up Good, Form & Spectacle, I was fantasising about what sorts of roles I’d like to have make up the company, and archivist was hire no. 2. Therefore, I was envious when I came across an LA design studio that has created a position called Studio Mirror, whose main role is to document things, and then report back after projects are finished. What luxury!

The studio mirror is a distinct role and a job title. In our studio Luke’s role was to archive our work and reflect it back to the team in a unique way, much like the documentation of these principles. Pursued with persistence and the eye of a journalist, the Studio Mirror should capture not only WHAT is being made but HOW and by WHOM. This isn’t simply dumping files on a server but rather curating the content in a way that is compelling and consumable for the team. For example, our studio created a quarterly magazine. You can read ADQ2.1: The Launch Issue here.

There are many reasons to identify a single person to own the documentation process. First and foremost, the details of a project are easy to forget, especially when projects last several years. Archiving work is both productive and functional; a reflective studio believes that the work can always be done a little better. Finally, a well-documented project also makes it easier for new studio members to enter a project quickly and efficiently.

But perhaps the most important value for persistently documenting the collective work of a studio is that it is a sound investment in the future. The longer I work the more I have come to appreciate how people behave throughout the entire design process. Thus, the story of the product is not only how the product itself evolves, but also how the individuals and team grew while making it.

In a world which demands so much in the present, I value that at some point in the future I can look back through our quarterly magazines with a glass of whiskey in my hand, examining the process of what was made and how we made it, and think, “That was a good place to work, I learned something and we made great things.”

https://medium.com/@rhysys/no-dickheads-a-guide-to-building-happy-healthy-and-creative-teams-7e9b049fc57d#.2qjb1n672

There’s a mountain of live reporting tools to show you exactly where your devops systems are at, and the smallest changes in performance of massive systems (and small ones) like web services or data centres.

the web is covered in dashboards

These sort of things tend to show you what’s happening, and not always why, and I think that’s the tricky part and not just with born digital stuff.

I’m afraid I don’t have a mind blowing conclusion. It’s a combination of creator-awareness, small bit archival just-in-time processing, and humans to keep an eye on it all.  It’s helpful to imagine yourself leaving notes to the future, and how they might be read. I’ve enjoyed reflecting on my own work through this, and making small interventions.  I’ve started a Slack channel where I post photographs of every whiteboard before we erase it, annotated and dated, with the view to making an artefact of it at some point down the line. I’ve started writing README files for all client and project folders, about how the work came about. And one thing I’ve tried to do from the outset is write a lot about what’s happening along the way.

So what could this mean for MVRDV? There’s some thinking to do about how transparent they might like to be with Het Nieuwe Instituut. There’s an opportunity to share company machinations in very great detail, very much more than a back-up bucket of files. In order to fully do that, and fully embrace the capacity for our born digital work to generate all this metadata, there must also be spiritual confidence that this level of revelation around client correspondence, finances, HR, good times, bad times, failures and so forth must be as easily discoverable as the folder of working files for TP261, the Markthall.

If I had another twenty years to think about I might be able to figure something out. I guess the main thing is that we’re not just what we produce.

New Work: The Waddesdon Bequest Explorer for The British Museum

As we work on publishing an announcement over on the excellent British Museum blog, I thought I’d sneak a Friday morning post over here about this new project. It’s for THE BRITISH MUSEUM! Yes, that big one in London! Woo!

Ahem.

tl;dr http://wb.britishmuseum.org

The Waddesdon Bequest

In 1898, Baron Ferdinand Rothschild bequeathed the collection he and his father had amassed and displayed in the New Smoking Room at their Waddesdon Manor. It’s almost 300 finely crafted objects, to be “placed in a special room to be called the Waddesdon Bequest Room separate and apart from the other contents of the Museum and thenceforth for ever thereafter, keep the same in such room or in some other room to be substituted for it,” as Rothschild wrote in his bequest.

This year, the museum opened a beautiful new gallery to house the collection, Room 2A, and the new collection explorer we’ve made is part of a suite of digital accompaniments, along with a new app called Baron Ferdinand’s Challenge and another secret thing soon to be revealed.

In Gallery vs Not

The British Museum team came to us knowing they wanted people to use the new explorer while they were standing in Room 2A, and hoped it could deliver more than the labels could provide during a visit. At the start of the work, I sat quietly in the corner of the gallery, and watched people come in and out for about an hour, surveying the sights.

Visitor Survey: One hour in Room 2A

Points of interest

I was particularly looking to see how many visitors were holding their phones as they entered, and it was about 70/493 people. Most people were holding the phone passively, not looking things up. Lots used them to take photos. If anyone managed to get on the somewhat weak WiFi, they’d stop still – one chap for about 10 minutes – and mostly message with a friend.

While it’s definitely a qualitative peek into activity in the gallery itself, it seemed fairly obvious that the gallery was mostly a bit small to have these 500 people going deep on the collection in the space itself. But, it certainly wasn’t something to discourage wholeheartedly at all. It just made us wonder about the much larger audience out there on the web, and how we might be able to help them appreciate the experience of being there too.

What’s it like being in the gallery?

It was then that I decided to make all our views gallery-centric, sorting everything (all lists etc) by “next neighbour”. That turned out quite nicely, I think, because you can see typological and material similarities in-gallery represented online. We also had a floorplan and case numbers to work with, so we integrated them into the display.

Here’s a view of one of my favourite cases, Case 5A.

You can tell from our summary sentence that the 37 objects in this case are made of gold, enamel, copper, silver, steel, earthenware and metal. They were made in Limoges, Germany and Netherlands. Four of them were made by Pierre Reymond. That provides yet more spelunking and jumping opportunities, and we wrote these kinds of summary sentences for a few of the other views too.

Arranging things

Hannah Donovan, a designer who’s working mostly in music, just gave a great talk at Web Directions in Sydney where she recognises several discovery-related issues in her presentation called Souls & Machines: Designing the Future of Content. Her point is that we have access to too much stuff now, and “when I don’t know what I want, I need context, connection and perspective“. She notes:

1. Content without context is meaningless
2. Content without connection isn’t relevant
3. Content without perspective has no feeling

It’s that nutty problem we’re all facing now as we present vast warehouse management systems metadata sets online and make them easy to navigate. There’s a vast expanse between dry metadata and curatorial depth, especially en masse.

I hope what we’ve made feels very, very simple. We’ve arranged the objects in the collection using all the facets we could present well, like size, weight, maker, and technique. While these lists are straightforward, they also start to hint at Hannah’s context, connections and perspectives. You can start to make deductions about the collection — most of the things are enameled, lots from Germany and made in the 16th Century — the kind that aren’t possible if you’re only presented with a list of search results ordered by, say, Title.

Balls!

At Good, Form & Spectacle, one of the threads running through our work is to always look for small tools to share with others, and we found one in this project.

One of the dimensions we used to help people explore was to look at each object’s size, or more accurately, its volume. I have never found dimensions written in text on a page to be particularly useful or comprehensible, so we decided to draw each shape. That’s not much good either, unless you have something for scale, so we chose a tennis ball, because we guessed that lots of people would have seen one, and that sized object fitted between the smallest and largest in the collection.

So, we’ve carved out and documented that little bit of code for other people to use, called it dimension-drawer. Frankie has written more about it in his How big is that? post from earlier today.

It’s brilliant to make a Tiny Spelunker for such a prestigious institution and glorious collection, especially after our R&D work on Two Way Street. Thank you to Dora, Chris, other Chris, Ellie, Gina, James and Lesley for being open to it.

• Visit the Waddesdon Bequest Collection Explorer at the British Museum

It’s Made of People

Today I’m hosting a panel at the British Library Labs Symposium. I’ve called it ‘The Ups and Downs of Open’ and invited Paul Downey, Mia Ridge and Jenn Phillips-Bacher to be my panellists. I worked with Jenn and her team on our recent What’s In The Library project, and we swapped wrap-up blog posts (which is an emerging trend I’m enjoying).

This post is from Jenn, Web Manager at the Wellcome Library, and was codenamed “the aftermath”.

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While most (normal) people spend the summer looking for excuses to get out of the office, I invited Good, Form & Spectacle to work with Wellcome Library on the month-long project that became What’s In The Library? Concentrating our work in July was both a blessing and a curse: a blessing, because we had very little meddling of the type that plagues web projects – but also curse, because as my excitement grew about the potential of Good Things To Come, the colleagues I really wanted to share with were sunning themselves on distant shores.

The team produced scads of working prototypes over four weeks. George summed it up best. It was so worth doing – creative, experimental and loads of fun. But now that the dust has settled and the team has dispersed, I’ve had a bit of time to think about how this project will push conversation and (hopefully) change at the Wellcome Library.

Four big themes stick in my mind. Pull up a chair.

1. It’s true what they say. Silos suck.

Wellcome is like any other massive institution that accretes collections data, systems, and people. We are working with four separate silos of collections data [we probably have more, she sobs] – MARC21 and local metadata in the library catalogue; archival collections described in ISAD(g) in our archives catalogue; keyword descriptions of images in our picture library system; and all of the lovely, full-fat full-text from OCR plus all other data related to our digitisation programme.

But when I look at these data silos, I’m not seeing the problems related to cleanup or systems maintenance – I’m seeing the messy humanity behind it all. Someday in the future when we welcome our fans with a nicer-to-use interface, it won’t be made by magic and clever data manipulation. It’ll be a result of all of the human effort expended on changing the way metadata is collected, created and stored in the first place.

Silos suck because they have to be broken down in multiples. It’s rarely just one; sometimes it’s four. Or more. Time to beef up those influencing skills!

2. It’s hard for us to give stuff away even though we want to.

So here we are, sitting on a goldmine of repurposable metadata, an institutional imperative for openly accessible and free content, and surprisingly low usage. For an organisation whose remit is to GIVE STUFF AWAY, we’re not quite set up to be so magnanimous. Why is it so hard for a digital library like ours to be open?

The glib answer would refer back to Theme 1: Silos. I might also call out black box library management systems, which allow us to get data out, but make it difficult to see it until then, and good luck using it to clean up the metadata en masse.

My more sincere answer is that we like a bit of polish, uncomfortable with being a bit rough around the edges. Let’s keep it all on the down-low until our website and search tools are perfect, yeah? I’m really keen to take our imperfections out to our audiences and find out what they think. Is there utility and charm in what we have? Can we think about ‘open content’ meaning more than just free to use? What about making it open to corrections, feedback and conversation, too?

We’re also very proud of our role as collection stewards. Some (myself, for example), might say we take it a bit too far, as evidenced by this gem I stumbled upon in our Scale prototype

Catalogue record for a piece of Wellcome ephemera, a bookmark for the Research Library. Will we digitize it? Only time will tell.

But what do we lose when we let people do whatever they want with the digital content? I’m inclined to say “not much”, but when trying to open our content for widest possible use, we often find ourselves having to negotiate the anxieties around perceived loss of ownership.

3. Showing the Thing is essential.

Week Two’s work was where we Showed the Thing. At the time I was thinking merely of showing the object, whether it’s a single image, a 280-page book or data – what can be shown digitally to represent our collections. But it ended up being more than just Object-as-Thing. We don’t normally have daily access to an multi-disciplinary development team, so it was really exciting to develop Way-of-Working-as-Thing. With new stuff being built every day, it felt so dang liberating to see things actually working. My colleagues could see what I’d been yammering on about, in real life, no abstractions or even wireframes. Working code. Yay!

The other thing we showed was progress. G,F&S blogged prolifically about the process, tracing how and why decisions were made, and asking questions of us. It’s hugely rewarding to see the project documented this way. We’re not just showing you the Thing. We’re showing the workings behind the thing. Awesome stuff; we need to do more of this.

4. Metadata is our first stab at web content. Let’s edit it.

With over 962K MARC records in our bibliographic database representing our whole collection (with some added subscription content), there’s no way on earth we’d ever be able to create interesting, contextual, editorial content for everything.

But we have a bit of content already, by virtue of it having been described in a catalogue record. What happens if we start thinking of descriptive metadata as editorial content? Are there improvements the editorial team can contribute to the catalogue records, to make the data friendlier and easier to read on screen? Can we get cataloguers to think of themselves as editors or writers who are already have expertise in creating structured content? (BTW, very interested to hear from anyone who’s worked with cataloguing teams this way).

…
So what started out as a ‘digital’ project, in the end, became – and will continue to be – a people project. Go figure. I have at least 23 more ideas to explore with Wellcome Library teams, all of which can be prototyped and maybe even developed for real. And the faster we can do it, the better.

*not an exaggeration.

What’s In The Library? A Project with the Wellcome Trust

We’ve been working on a new project called ‘What’s In The Library?‘, installed at the Wellcome Trust in the Library web team, and today we’d like to try something new. Even though we’re only half way through the project, we’re sharing it with you as is. You can also read the project blog, which we’ve maintained since the beginning of the work.

We’re set up to explore four main themes over four weeks:

1. Week 1: Scope of the Collection
2. Week 2: Show The Thing
3. Week 3: Content and Context (we are here)
4. Week 4: Scalability.

As every good project should, we began with a short scoping phase on site at Wellcome, where we dug into everything we possibly could. It’s so important to hit the ground running at the beginning of prototyping work, and one of the ways to do that is to make sure you have your working data in hand, in this case, a static MaRCXML dataset of some 962,701 records. Thanks to Joao for making that happen! We also took an escorted wander through the stores and stacks. It’s always a thrill to go behind the scenes and see how much effort and skill goes into preserving our heritage.

The Wellcome team knew early on that they wanted to explore those four main themes, so ended up using that brief to structure the whole project. It was exciting that we’d have an opportunity to extend some of the ideas and themes we’d already been working on in previous R&D projects too. The V&A Spelunker was very much about showing the scope of the catalogue, and Two Way Street showed the things in the British Museum in a completely new light. Our emerging practice around “no search box, and what happens when you don’t allow yourself one” is represented here too. We’re trying to show the shape of the thing, in a variety of dimensions.

MaRC is weird. I’m sorry, but it is.

Week 1: Scope of the Catalogue

Even though I’d been thoroughly doused in MaRC in my work at Open Library, the rest of the G,F&S team — Frankie Roberto and Tom Stuart — were new to it. So, we used that naivety to the full, and approached the big blob of MaRC with neutrality and fresh eyes. I must admit to encouraging the guys to not worry too much yet about the tendrils and foibles of it, and to try to keep the utter uncontrolledness at a distance, since therein madness lies! Ahem. So, what do we start with? Showing counts of things, ordered lists of things, draw everything, show whatever’s there to help you get a feel for the shape and grain of it.

We quickly spotted that there is also more than one subject classification scheme at work: at least the widely-used Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and the Barnard Classification System, specifically for the history of medicine collection. Then there are the internal knobbly classification bits, resulting from individual cataloguers, historians and archivsts, and their own personal styles.

(We also ended up writing a MaRCXML to PostgreSQL ingester available on Github, if that’s your bag.)

Then we started drawing pictures of the data, exploring overall MaRC field usage. We were thinking about a theory that the amount of characters in any one field could indicate some blunt level of quality. This turned out to be not useful (arguably because of the somewhat unruly data).

Here’s a map of all the MaRC fields used across the dataset (184 in total). The black cells indicate the fields that are used most, which, at Wellcome Library, turn out to be mostly ID-related.

Tom wrote a great post on all the other visualisations we were making in Week 1. There’s a lot to look at, like this page that summarises the metadata about Daniel Defoe, and we hope you can’t find any dead ends, but instead find yourself tumbling around the MaRC.

I’ll never forget Open Library advisor Karen Coyle‘s observation that library metadata is diabolically rational. It’s a constant quest to put things in boxes, and agree on the boxes, make new ones when you need them, or appropriate other people’s boxes for your own purposes. In my experience, when you make humans do that that, you get mess, not order. (Incidentally and possibly in contradiction to that, I was interested to see that Julian Assange is now talking and thinking about cultural diversity and digital colonialism, but that’s another story, or blog post at least.)

Breaking Open a Cultural Dataset

Week 2: Show The Thing

This week was about just what it said on the tin. We tried to show as many things as possible, using two basic dimensions, subjects and time.

You can see some attributes of this specific catalogue, like the giant peak in 1800 (result of a specific collection of 18th century books), and dips in the publishing history in general in the two world wars last century.

There are more lists of subjects and orders and views, now linking through to digitised materials where we can, instead of surfing the data structure itself. Here’s a path to a book about animals and medicine:

Search Logs are Fascinating (and anonymous)

I think there’s a bit of a myth surrounding the power of search in cultural collections, and in particular, this odd idea that people always know what it is they’re looking for, even if they’re looking at a collection for the first time. It’s clear as a bell that this isn’t really the case when you look at the search logs for the Library’s search box. About 98% of the search terms are broad, like images, alchemy, shell shock, medicine, art, anatomy and the like. Lots of the search terms are medical in nature, which is good. That tells us that most people know Wellcome is a medical collection. There are also some fun ones like cafe, jobs, and OCLC, which might show that when people see search box, they don’t care where it’s pointing.

Richness, Context and MaRC

Week 3: Content and Context

We’re on the Tuesday of Week 3, so there’s not much to show yet. We’re taking a step back from the computers and metadata to a certain extent, and coming back to humans and what they know about the things in their collection. We’re working on hand-crafting an interesting and deep webpage about James Gillray, famous London satirist and caricaturist alive from 1756-1815.

V0011312 A doctor kicking his rival out of a female patient’s sickroo
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
A doctor kicking his rival out of a female patient’s sickroom, while trampling another underfoot: satirizing the change of government and the exclusion of Fox from Pitt’s ministry. Coloured etching by J. Gillray, 1804.
1803 By: James GillrayPublished: 20 May 1804
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Much more than a MaRC record, and something that helps people connect with broader themes he represents, and to dive around in the rest of the collection, and even pop out into the broader web.

The hope is that this work might inform a content development approach for Week 4, when we try to scale some of what we learned up to work across the whole catalogue. Not sure if that’s going to be possible yet, or not.

That’s it then. There’s a ton of stuff to read on the project blog, and of course you can click around in the project site — please be gentle and have low expectations of performance! — it’s prototypical code, and not tested by more than a handful of people.

Thanks to Jenn Phillips-Bacher, Alex Green and the team at Wellcome for encouraging us to go public with this work in progress. Jenn has also blogged today over at the Wellcome Library blog.

Now we’re all curious to hear what you think!

We’re In The Papers!

It’s quite possible we’re much more excited about this than you might be, but, thanks to friend-of-GF&S, Danny Birchall, we got a mention in this month’s Museums Journal!

3D printing in the Digital column for this month's Museums Journal pic.twitter.com/GllqTvQVp5

— Danny Birchall (@dannybirchall) July 2, 2015

There might be possibilities for outreach too. Good, Form & Spectacle’s “museum in a box” prototype offers small replicas of cultural heritage objects that can be sent to schools or offices.”

Woo hoo! (Now we just need to grab a copy to pop in the archive.)

3D Rendering of The Small Museum V1

Continuing our quest to write up the Somerset House Small Museum residency, we’re now five chapters of twelve in, having just written up the Displays, Exhibits and Exhibitions bit. While we were there, Tom did a 3D capture of the space itself which is SUPER COOL. We thought at the time that this should be part of the project archive.

The Small Museum at Somerset House, March 2015
by nebulousflynn
on Sketchfab

Defining beauty

I’m very excited to dive into twoway.st and (in honour of the British Museum’s current exhibition Defining Beauty) to see what beauty I discover.

There’s a lot of Greek sculpture in the exhibition so I’m starting with Made of marble.

I’ve found Made of ?, there are 5,811 things made of ?.

1,998 things are Made of human bone???

1,004 things are Made of coconut!

677 of papier mâché.

493 of donkey skin… it gets weirder and weirder…

Made of fish tooth (26 things), bear tooth (25 things), sheep tooth (24 things). Where are the hen’s teeth? Brilliant, just found chicken eggshell (24 things).

Whoops I skipped right past marble, back to page 1, a monumental 10,178 marble objects.

This marble Venus is rather beautiful, resting her left foot on the head of a swan.

Following the Depicted Aphrodite/Venus thread there are, unsurprisingly, lots more depictions of Venus, 3,446 in total. But surprisingly (for me) the depictions are mostly on paper (1,367 of them). And mostly from Italy.

Here are a couple of the Venus/Paper/Italy beauties:
– Venus drying her left foot, with Cupid
– Venus pulling a thorn from her left foot, with a rabbit

What’s with her left foot?

Anyway, I seem to have gone down a rabbit hole of Italian C16th engravings.

Back to Greek stuff…via Subject: Classical Deity

Nice. Pots and sculptures that’s what I’m after…

I recognise these guys, they are pretty beautiful, and they’ve been on tour with the Body Beautiful exhibition to the US and Australia.

Another Venus, from the photo it looks like she’s tucked away in some storeroom. The Place information is blank, so it doesn’t look like she’s on display. Maybe she got some limelight in the exhibition…

I haven’t had a huge amount of luck finding objects that are actually in the show. One facet called Appeared in exhibition: Human Body in Greek Art has a lot of the biggies that I know appear in Defining Beauty (Discobolus, Ajax, Westmacott Athelete). But some others like Lely’s Venus, Illissos, Dionysos are missing from that facet. Perhaps if the database was used consistently then you would be able to find the complete set through the Appeared in exhibition facet.

What’s so brilliant about twoway.st is there is cool, surprising, and beautiful stuff whichever way you turn.

It is a very freeing experience.

You don’t have need to have any knowledge of the collection before diving in. And even if you have a bit of prior knowledge (I worked with the collection for nearly 10 years as part of the digital team), it makes you realise how many more objects there are to discover.

A beautiful new way of exploring the awesome collection of the British Museum.