Past Cider festivals and Events 2011 http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Past_Cider_festivals_and_Events_2011
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Past Cider festivals and Events 2011 http ukcider…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/past-cider-festivals-and-events-2011-http-ukcider/
February 24 2012, 2:54am | Comments »
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I posted to wordr.org
UK Museums on the Web 2011 storified
I went to the UK Museums on the Web conference on Friday as it looked good, but it far outshone my expectations. What really blew me away was the level of discussion and the range of exciting and people-positive things UK museums, gallerys and smaller projects in the related digital heritage ecosystem are doing. I’d not been before but it felt to me like they (or at least some of the projects in question) had leapfrogged the commercial world and were building out flexible new services with a durable and far-sighted backbone. Well, as far-sighted as you can be with digital development… Another takeaway for me was while the necessity-driven aspects of innovation are widely touted, what unfolded at #ukmw11 was just as much despite necessity as because of it. Whilst the spectre of unnovation was sulking in the corner somewhere, fostering truer collaboration took centre stage. This was clearest in the open-minded approaches to learning and feedback in ongoing development, and the emphasis on meaning over metrics (although measurement and impact were usefully addressed by Jane Finnis of Culture24). So alongside hi-res re-usable art digitisation from the National Gallery, mega crowdsouring that humanises structured data about World War One fatalities from the Imperial War Museum and the development of an objects-based collections system for Museum of London’s Picture Bank and Pocket Histories, we also got a peek at the British Museum’s trials of tablet-based augmented reality in elearning, a user-powered accessibilty widget GoGenie (in beta), and the user-centred design process of Pallant House Gallery’s online platform OutsideIn for socially excluded artists to manage and exhibit their work. In contrast to all the other presentations, the Belgian-based FreeYourMetadata trio chose instead to do some live “cleaning” of messy museum metadata using GoogleRefine on stage. Given how largely impenetrable the details of linked data and the semantic web are to most people, including most people in the digital industries, the relative simplicity and power of this tool sent ripples of excitement round the hall. I haven’t covered every project that was mentioned but further links to the above initiatives, plus others and some photos from the day are collected in the Storify below. View the story “UK Museums on the Web 2011″ on Storify] The day was organised by the UK Museums Computer Group (@ukmcg) and an idea floated on Twitter during the day that they could re-run the ‘hacking and mashups for beginners‘ workshop recently run at Museum Computer Network conference in the USA was something I’d be very interested in attending. In terms of other coverage, a blog post by newly elected UKMCG committee member Oonagh Murphy looks the first half of the day, with more promised, and another from David Little on the Digital Humanities staff blog at Kings College London gives a flavour of the design, UX and participatory themes. We’ll add other links to blog coverage here as they emerge, or feel free to add them yourself in the comments. All in all, lots of food for thought and a few synchronicities with the Open Plaques project. A mention must also go to @RichardOfSussex who I met there. Turns out he’s an Open Plaques contributor and knows a thing or two about the linked data world.
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- #ukmw11
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November 29 2011, 1:54pm | Comments »
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WhereCamp EU 2011, Berlin
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/openplaquesblog/~3/VWPN_YLJ0O8/wherecamp-eu-2011-berlin
Open Plaques are proud and excited to be attending WhereCamp EU in Berlin this Friday the 27-28th May. Our representative will be me! Jez Nicholson. I am one of OpenHeritage C.I.C.’s directors and an openplaques.org dev. WhereCamp is an unconference, meaning that everyone who attends also gives a talk. This leads to lots of ideas and loads of new contacts. I shall probably be speaking on openplaques and some of the issues that it has brought up. I also intend to have a bit of a plaque hunt as i’m sure that there are more than the 4 that we currently have in Berlin. Talking of countries, I now see that we have plaques from 19 different countries on openplaques
May 24 2011, 8:33am | Comments »
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Blue plaque art action in SW15
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/openplaquesblog/~3/d-ws6_2D7l4/blue-plaque-art-action-in-sw15
A blue plaque event with a twist is due to touchdown in Putney, south west London this Sunday 22nd May. It won’t resemble your average ceremony, although there will be some ‘unveilings’. In the shape of customised plaques that come and go (and other objects), things about people, place, history and memory will be uncovered in the timeframe of an afternoon in this community-based visual arts event curated by Rob Drummer. Tracing back and forth in time is about to get lively in SW15… The action of Something Important Happened Here centres on Deodar Road, which runs parallel to the Thames one street back from the river on the south side, halfway between Putney Bridge and East Putney tube stations.
On his blog Rob, a theatre director and artist, outlines the event’s format. The installation consists of numerous blue vinyl discs, similar to English Heritage Blue Plaques, temporary but providing splashes of colour along the street on buildings, pavements, lampposts and other surfaces where something important has happened. The installation in places is modified to suggest activity, some of the plaques are to be unveiled throughout the day, some installed and taken down – some appearing over the previous night but all vanishing at the end. He explains how the installation has been assembled in collaboration with local residents: The work is an attempt to tell the stories of the community, based upon direct conversation with them, drawing upon memory and recent events, their family history and anecdotes. Alongside these and part of the weave of a fictional heritage being created are alternative mentions, names, events commemorated in the same style. For more, go read Rob’s full blog post. Embedded in the street-level installation event, which fuses the real and imagined, there’s a sense of pushing back against prevailing currents. Something about Something Important Happened Here pokes playfully at our shrinking sense of roots and shared identity in the cityscape, and asks how we might reconstruct and make sense of it. But far from didactic or conclusive, it’s refreshingly open-ended. This move to share and discover real and invented memories by annotating our public space has more verve and audacity than Big Lunchism. The chance to pro-actively mark-up and interrogate your area is at several removes from the ersatz community spirit imbibed with outdoor tea and cupcakes (no offense meant to cupcake fans, obviously). There’s no apparent moral to this temporary plaque assemblage; it’s less about craving stability and more about being curious. Some might say there’s still a nostalgic undercurrent at work here, but looking back to your connection to a place isn’t the same as being backward looking. Mapping the contours of your past sheds light on now and reveals hidden connections. Something Important Happened Here is bound to surface the unexpected and unlock some intriguing insights into the local experience. A mischievous note is sounded in Rob’s mention that it won’t be entirely trustworthy, but that’s half the adventure. It’s not meant to be reliable or verifiable guide in the way blue plaques ‘set in stone’ [mostly] are, but as a momentary explosion of personal points of reference it’s set to be eye-opening. It all adds up to a vital reminder that home-made or official, factual or fake, the blue plaque concept is a token of our own making. [image courtesy of Rob Drummer] – Something Important Happened Here happens 1pm -5pm, Sunday 22nd May 2011. Meeting Point: Deodar Road, Putney, London SW15. Follow @Robert_ad on Twitter. Event hashtag: #DeodarRd The event is part of the closing day of Wandsworth Arts Festival – more news on their Facebook page
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May 18 2011, 4:46pm | Comments »
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History Hack Day
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/openplaquesblog/~3/XsiB8QTu8Dk/history-hack-day
This past weekend was the world’s first History Hack Day at The Guardian offices in London. This follows on from an increasing specialisation of hack days: we’ve gone from general hack days to hack days specifically on mobile technology (Over the Air), Twitter (WarbleCamp), science, music, charity, culture and now history. The weekend was put together by Matt Patterson who started the event by describing a vision of how a now ubiquitous web tool like Google Maps could have layers of the past attached. Imagine pulling out your smartphone and in addition to showing you the route from the railway station to the pub, it’d also show you what the streets used to be called, the industries and trades that used to operate where the identikit shopping centre now lies, a few glimpses into the sort of people who lived here and the ideas, rituals and objects they centered their lives around.
Jez Nicholson, Simon Harriyott and I were there to fly the flag for Open Plaques. We helped a few hackers use the Open Plaques data but also worked on our own projects. But for me, as well as slinging Ruby and SQL and Java and what not, it was interesting to see what people were building on a purely academic level. While there are APIs and open data sets becoming available for pots and pans and buildings, the next step for me is to integrate the history of ideas: I think the history of philosophers, religious figures, writers, scientists and most importantly their ideas frame the world as much, if not slightly more, than kings, tyrants and presidents. With that said, let’s have a look at what people did build, some of which used data from Open Plaques: First up, Simon Cross (from Facebook) and Seyi Ogunyemi built an Open Plaques hack in Python called Plaquathon which used Facebook Places to let you check into plaques. At the Open Plaques Open Day last year, integration with location-based social networking or some kind of social game aspect to Open Plaques seemed like something we’d like to have, so it was nice to see this being put together so quickly. Data from Open Plaques was also used by Morena Fiore and Chris Lock in a hack called “Price Re-enactment Adjustment Tool” (or “PRAT” for short) which showed (with a good deal of guesswork and fiction!) the effect of the Blitz on house prices. Buildings getting blown up nearby tended to lower house prices, while a celebrity moving in bumped the price back up. And by ‘celebrities’, they mean someone with a plaque. Finally: a piece of software that thinks Bertrand Russell is more worthy of the title ‘celebrity’ than Kerry Katona. There were two trains-related hacks: Paul Downey and his son Jed attempted to uncover details about historical railways, while Simon Harriyott built geStation, which shows the evolution of the UK’s rail network from 1786 onwards and used dbpedia, the RDF version of Wikipedia. (We’ll have to wait for “transport hack day” before someone builds a hack to make the trains actually run on time!) Wikipedia data was behind some other hacks too: Mike Stenhouse’s Pokemonarchs attempted to build a Pokémon-style card game from people, with importance derived from the number of results from Google Scholar, while the amount of edits to the person’s Wikipedia article measuring the amount of controversy they cause (George W. Bush, who has 40,723 edits, squarely beats both Jesus and Adolf Hitler on that front). Also using Wikipedia data was Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin’s History of the World in 100 Seconds which plots geotagged historical events on a map over time and shows how Western-centric history is, how Western-centric Wikipedians are (they acknowledge that), or possibly both. My own modest little hack is one to try and get more people out there creating free culture by photographing objects and places in the real world that have been requested by free culture projects in response to them “checking in” on location-based services like Foursquare. Currently, it is for Wikipedia, but will hopefully also integrate with Open Plaques. With a bit of luck, someone will check into a café for lunch and their phone will tell them to go and take photos of plaques and Roman ruins and other bits of urban miscellany. Rather than tie myself down to any specific mobile platform, I’m building a web front end and also a Twitter interface because that’s a lot easier than learning, oh, Objective-C, Cocoa, the Android APIs, C#, XNA and the Windows Phone APIs. Interestingly, I don’t think we saw any hacks presented that were built for a specific mobile platform rather than for the Web. Cristiano Betta produced a hack that was rated ‘Best of Show’ by the judges: a mobile version of A History of the World in 100 Objects, such that you can listen to the BBC programmes on a smartphone while seeing the real object in the British Museum. Cristiano has written it up for his blog. One of the more surreal hacks was Brian Suda’s ‘Titanic Matching’ app which lets you call up on a phone and matches you to a Titanic passenger, then tells you what happens to them. No hack day would be complete without something very silly from Tom Scott, and this time it was an app called “The Magical Mystical Ley Line Locator” which takes your postcode and shows you all the mystical ley lines you might be on. ‘Mystical’ being a code word for bullshit, of course. While hack day projects often do not turn into enduring projects (Open Plaques itself is one that did!), they do showcase what amazing things people can do when dosed up on caffeine and pizza and given access to data. For me, they vindicate the openness of projects like Wikipedia and Open Plaques, and hopefully serve as an invitation to companies and governments to join the web of linked data, preferably linked open data. Also, be sure to go and read Jeremy Keith’s blog post about the event. [image courtesy of Adactio on Flickr]
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- 2011
- Events
- #hhd11
- history hack day
January 25 2011, 7:07am | Comments »
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Open Plaques Open Day: UX and Design group
The nature of the Open Plaques project to date has seen the content and functionality grow through incremental updates and improvements. While these changes have really enriched the project, what our group wanted to do is step back and re-ask the questions that define the user experience of Openplaques.org and to see if we can make any improvements. The discussions within the group threw up as many questions as answers as we tried to understand our target audience, plotting the kind of journeys users might adopt and how we can use design to facilitate these paths. One topic that came up was our usage of maps and how we can make it more relevant to the data displayed, (or, indeed, if on occasions maps were necessary at all). It was really useful to have such an enthusiastic team coming up with ideas to intrigue and excite users, offering an incentive to click through and hop around the data. (perhaps in a similar way to how one can in Wikipedia). This has resulted in the addition of featured or related plaques on many of the page views with the goal to try and create some form of narrative that can be unique to each visitor’s interests. Plaque level detail Consensus reached on these issues resulted in a series of wireframes re-defining the information existing already in a way that is hopefully more relevant and useful to the people who are going to use it. Today, designs are being drawn up based upon this work and will be rolled out in the near future!
December 1 2010, 8:55am | Comments »
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John Lennon Plaque unveiled by Yoko Ono today
My first attendance at a plaque unveiling today, and it was a biggie. Yoko Ono unveiled the plaque to her late husband John Lennon outside their house in Montagu Square, London.
Lots of people attended, and the three speakers followed by Yoko summed up John Lennon’s impact upon the world and the importance of the location. A lot of work by English Heritage went into the day, and more importantly the process of research, planning and legal work to create and install the plaque.
October 23 2010, 3:47pm | Comments »
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