MRW12: The Science of Music (H.A.W.K. Demonstration)

February 1, 2012
by Graeme Earl

As part of Multidisciplinary Research Week see how the same motion capture that was used to make ‘Lord of the Rings’ is being used to understand the different ways in which musicians use their hands to play the piano.

Links:
http://www.davidowennorris.com/
H.A.W.K.
Professor David Owen Norris
Dr Cheryl Metcalf
Video clip here: University of Southampton Youtube Channel

H.A.W.K. on the BBC: Southampton pianists scanned using new technique

Press Release: January 2012

MRW12: Digital Humanities: Where Digital Technology and Music Collide

February 1, 2012
by Graeme Earl

£3.6M funding for DE USRG members

January 23, 2012
by Graeme Earl

Simon Cox and Oz Parchment have secured £3.6M from EPSRC in a consortium with Oxford, Bristol and UCL for computing resource consisting of a £1.7M upgrade to Iridis and £1M of GPU resource (to be housed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) along with associated running costs and support staff. This will be of considerable interest to DE researchers, and also to our colleagues in the Computational Imaging USRG and the Computational Modelling Group. The funding derives from the BIS strategic investment in UK e-infrastructure.

CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy – Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK on 27-28 March 2012

January 1, 2012
by Graeme Earl

Please see below the call for abstracts for The 1st Annual Conference of CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy, which will be held at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK on 27-28 March 2012. Participants from a range of scholarly disciplines are invited to present research related to digital culture and the digital economy. Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Jussi Parikka from the Digital Economy USRG and Dr Astrid Ensslin. Paper abstracts of up to 300 words can be submitted to code@anglia.ac.uk until 31st January 2012. In particular, abstracts related to the following conference themes are sought, though abstracts addressing other aspects of digital culture are also welcome:

Theme 1. Materiality and Materialism

It is straightforward enough to understand computation as a relationship between material objects (hard drives, screens, keyboards and other input devices, scanners, printers, modems and routers) and nominally immaterial ones (software, programming languages, code). This approach to the ‘stuff’ of the digital risks ignoring a set of crucial questions around the relationships digital technologies construct with a range of material objects: from the ‘analogue’ world modelled in weather systems and battlefield simulations to the body of the information worker interacting with spreadsheets and databases; from the range of artefacts that form the subject of the digital humanities to the materials, bodies, spaces and places of art practice and performance.

Theme 2. Performance, Production and Play Innovative aspects of our interaction with performances and the production of artefacts for continuous engagement have evolved exponentially through the digital age, particularly with the development of ideas related to play and serious gaming, which brings novel opportunities for creative expression, not to mention innovative approaches related to parallel disciplines in science, education, healthcare and business. The collaboration between performance, production and play and adjacent academic fields is of particular interest given the cross-disciplinary requirements of the Digital Economy Act.

Theme 3. Digital Humanities – Archives, Interfaces and Tools Digital Humanities works at the intersections of traditional research and technological innovation. Its techniques have helped to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for instance, and have even been used by the FBI to determine the authorship of sensitive documents. Today scholars in the digital humanities are primarily concerned to offer a gateway to previously hidden records of culture and heritage. A high-resolution digital photograph of a Chaucer manuscript, for instance, reveals its delicate pen strokes, and when placed on the internet, can pave the way for school children, university students, and those interested in culture generally, to learn about medieval literature from primary resources.

See www.anglia.ac.uk/code for details of CoDE projects and affiliated staff.

Digital Economy All-Hands Meeting

November 23, 2011
by Tom Frankland

The conference began on Tuesday evening at Newcastle University’s Culture Lab with an opening reception and technical demonstrations. The following morning John Baird began proceedings with a welcome talk which focused on work conducted under the Digital Economy theme. He began this talk by making a comparison between the aims of the Digital Economy and the philosophy of Steve Jobs, who he quoted as saying:

“technology alone is not enough … its technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.”

The first talk of the day was by Professor Jim Hollan from the University of California, San Diego, who had been invited to the conference as a keynote speaker. Jim spent the first half of his talk discussing how the traditional form of computers was rapidly disintergrating into a variety of new forms. He suggested that one of the most exciting things about this development was that it was providing new opportunities for social scientists to capture genuine ‘real-world’ activity. The second half of his talk focused on what he referred to as ‘history-enriched digital computing’. Jim has published numerous papers on this concept, the most notable being ‘read wear’ and ‘edit wear’. Jim also presented some software he has developed called ‘ChronoViz’. ChronoViz allows multiple chronological data sources to be visualised alongside one another and annotated, a task which is currently very difficult for most social science researchers.

Tom Frankland discussing his PhD research poster

The next session was a series of talks by a panel of industry experts. These were Gary Bolton from Microsoft, Ian Marshall from the financial services, Dave Sharp, a games developer from Binary Asylum, Alan Whitmore from medical science and Aart van Halteren from Philips Research. Each speaker was asked to identify their top challenges for the Digital Economy in respect to their specialist areas. While each of the speakers presented relevant and challenging issues for the Digital Economy, it was the issues raised by Dave Sharp that promoted most debate from the audience. His speech critiqued the relationship between the creative industries and academia, and he suggested that there needed to be more emphasis on turning good academic ideas into commercially viable solutions. He stated that academia moves too slow for the creative industries, and that academia left graduates ill-prepared for jobs.

After lunch we headed off to smaller workshop sessions. The workshop I attended focused on the use of game engines to support academic research, which offers numerous advantages over other tools including reliability and the availability of numerous pre-built libraries. We also talked about ‘gamification’; the process of turning mundane tasks into ‘games’ which are fun for the user.

The next session I attended was about music and sound. The first presentation in this session examined how families or groups of people in the same household use and consume music. The speakers had found that new technologies have energized opportunities for sociality in the home and have enriched social interactions around music. The next talk examined the potential of musicological tools in two contexts – in the British Library and in secondary school music classes. Based on ethnographic studies conducted in schools the speakers had developed a tool built around YouTube, which supported students by indicating which chords to use to play along with a video clip. The final presentation in this session was given by a curator from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The Pitt Rivers museum has a large and relatively unknown archive of sound recordings, and this talk explored how this archive of sounds was being put to use in the museum to improve the visitor’s experience of their collections.

Given my interest in archaeology I attended the cultural heritage session next. The first talk in this session was about an exhibition hosted at Doctor Johnson’s house in London. This exhibit consisted of a pen and paper interface which allowed visitors to invent their own word for a dictionary. Once a visitor created a physical entry into this dictionary it was automatically transferred to a digital exhibit and website. Overall visitors input 742 original and innovative words into the dictionary! The second talk examined Scottish heritage sites that are currently unstewarded and have few visual remains. To address this the speakers described a location-based system they had developed which augmented the environment using audio. Among the teams’ findings was the discovery that some features in an open environment can constrain where visitors move, whereas others encourage further exploration. The final talk in this session examined how community cultural heritage can be supported by technology. Their work lead to the creation of CURIOS, an open source website and data management system.

The final talk of the day examined how the concept of ‘futures’ could be used to develop new ways of thinking about the digital economy. The speakers gave examples of how predictions of the future have helped to shape new technologies, and suggested that we could perhaps use ‘futures’ as creative spaces for design, helping us to escape present-day constraints to thinking. The day ended with poster presentations and dinner, which were held at the Great North Museum in the evening. Both myself and Ramine from Southampton University presented posters in a lively and stimulating session.

Don Marinelli gave a hugely entertaining and persuasive keynote presentation at the beginning of the final day of the conference. His talk focused on the ‘Entertainment Technology Centre’ that he and Randy Pausch set up at Carnegie Mellon University. Despite having an academic background and working in academia, Don became disillusioned with it for many reasons and therefore decided to try out a new style of student program focusing on interactivity and group work. There are no structured modules taught on this course, except for in the first quarter. Don emphasises links to industry on the course and companies pay to have work done by the students. The ETC is so respected commercially that students are guaranteed a job in industry on graduation. My favourite aspect of the ETC was the effort Don and Randy had put into making the facilities ‘cool’, and there was a definite focus on fun in the department.

Overall the Digital Economy all-hands meeting was an excellent conference to attend with many fascinating talks, especially from the keynote speakers. For a longer version of this report complete with social media commentary, please visit Storify.

The next conference will be hosted on the 23^rd-25^th October 2012 in Aberdeen.

JISC DataPool Project

November 1, 2011
by Graeme Earl

The DataPool project will build capacity within the University of Southampton to support effective data management practice across all disciplines, including multi-disciplinary activity, throughout the data lifecycle. A focus on cultural change will be underpinned by development of a clear policy framework, an enhanced technical infrastructure and a strategy for supporting researchers in managing their data in line with the middle phase of the 10 year roadmap identified by the previous JISC funded Institutional Data Management Blueprint (IDMB) project.

Objectives

• Implement an institutional research data policy with guidance for researchers;
• Launch and populate an institutional data repository as part of the research data management infrastructure;
• Embed effective research data management through close alignment with the University’s multi-disciplinary Strategic Research Groups;
• Provide integrated training for PhD students through the institution-wide Graduate Centre and curriculum development;
• Develop the skills of professional support staff such as librarians, IT specialists and bid managers so they can provide coherent institutional support for data management requirements.

Project methodology

The project will take a three-pronged approach:

• Research Data Management Policy ratification and implementation
• Research Data Management System implementation
• Integrated Training, Guidance and Support

By seeking early ratification of institutional research data policy, DataPool will provide the community with evidence of an institutional approach to implementing policy. We have commitment from senior staff such as the Associate Deans Research and the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, as well as researchers representing different disciplines, with data policy “champions” identified for each Faculty. High quality guidance will be provided on specified and requested topics to enable researchers to respond to, and comply with, the policy.

As part of an integrated data management infrastructure a model for using both an institutional instance of Microsoft Sharepoint and EPrints repository software will be developed for the deposit of metadata that describes the research data to be archived, and for the actual deposit of the datasets into a pilot university data repository.

DataPool will deliver a flexible model supporting service and training for researchers, students and support staff. A series of case studies based on real, disciplinary examples of data management practice will involve different data types produced by postgraduate and undergraduate students as well as researchers. A full data management training programme will be offered through the university Professional Development Unit as part of continuing professional development activities for all academic staff. Data management training workshops incorporated previously into a masters course will be extended to other masters modules. Cost monitoring will be used to model scalability of the training programme and provide an evidence-base for financial decision-making.

 Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• Institutional policy will be shared on the institutional and DCC websites to maximise exposure, with a report on our implementation experience;
• A model for integrating a data repository into the wider institutional data management infrastructure and culture;
• Specialist repository support for discipline-specific data shared with the UK repository community (e.g. through the EPrints Bazaar app store);
• Training materials and case studies to be shared with the community for reuse;
• A model for embedding training in a graduate school programme for PhD students;
• Training needs analysis and training programme for support staff to share with all HEIs;
• Examples of training case studies to enhance continuing professional development for researchers and curriculum development for students;
• Cost-modelling, including cost-benefit analysis of whole-institution data management training commitment.

Further details: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/datapool/

The Future of Technology in Education #FOTE11

October 22, 2011
by Lisa Harris

Key takeaways for me from a great day at Future of Technology in Education (#FOTE11) at the University of London yesterday:

There was angst from the IT department as the ever increasing consumerisation of technology challenges creaking university systems and a too prevalent culture of ‘computer says no’. It is more productive for staff and students to collaborate and operate outside the system using free online tools (Google docs, Dropbox and Skype do the job perfectly well for me).

Vendors who try too hard to plug their stuff to an ed tech audience risk the ire of the backchannel (you know who you are!)

While a sense of place is still important, (we had a great tourist’s guide to Bristol from @nick_skelton ) mobile phones have allowed people to make their meeting plans on the fly (for example, student bars are struggling) and economics keep many students away from campus (eg living with parents). And this is before the increase in fees…

Time and time again we heard examples of poor communication (between university and students, teaching staff and students, IT and staff/students…etc)

We don’t know enough about what students want and how students live – it was agreed we should try *asking them*more often.

The importance of digital literacy – plenty of staff and students just don’t have it. Thankfully, there seemed to be general agreement that the ‘digital native’ is simply a myth. @suebecks gave a great presentation with many fascinating examples of the importance of digital skills to employability.

There was more emphasis on challenges than solutions. How do we take change forward…we have identified the need for it, but how to make change actually happen? Andrew Bollington provided a reality check, suggesting that appreciating and incorporating the contrasting perspectives of finance, strategy and marketing would be a good start.

@andypowe11 provided a great summary of who and what was shared on Twitter – as you can see, quite a lot!

Originally published on www.lisaharrismarketing.com

Another great #digitalsurrey event

September 22, 2011
by Lisa Harris

It was good to catch up with mobile supremo Jane Vincent from the University of Surrey at Digital Surrey last night. The topic was recent developments in mobile, presented by Jon Bishop, Head of Social Media at PayPal UK (@jonin60seconds). Jon’s slides are available on Slideshare and a detailed review of his talk was very quickly posted by Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit)

The purpose of this post is to flag up some points arising from listening to Jon, that could be pursued in a research project by Jane and myself as a sequel to our investigation from a few years back of the role of mobile communication in e-government. We suggested in this paper that mobile phones may offer the most viable electronic channel through which to encourage large-scale take-up of online public services, but ‘m-government’ would take a significant amount of time to become a reality unless there was a substantial change in social practices.

It was clear from Jon’s fascinating discussion of mobile payments in Africa that the developed world has a lot to learn from successful services developed in Kenya.

In the UK, mobiles have become even more central to people’s lives and business is clearly waking up to the marketing potential of location based services. But effective interaction with government services via mobile looks no closer than it did back in 2007.

The Digital Surrey community are by definition enthusiastic adopters of new developments in technology, but I’m not sure that the general population is quite ready for NFC and QR codes…and as Jon noted, 76% of websites are still not optimised for mobile devices.

Infrastructure issues still remain…just try staying connected while travelling by train.

And are smartphones really that smart? My BlackBerry (a recent model) takes forever to simply load a website, and if password access is required, forget it. I certainly won’t be using it to buy anything with. Perhaps a ‘hype v reality’ project might be a useful exercise…

Many thanks to Jon, Abigail and the rest of the Digital Surrey team for laying on great weather and free beer, as well as an informative and entertaining evening! For information about upcoming events, check out the website

Originally published on www.lisaharrismarketing.com

Reflections on the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference #PLE_SOU

July 22, 2011
by Lisa Harris

Last week Hugh Davis, Su White and I hosted the 2nd International PLE Conference in the brand new Life Sciences Building at the University of Southampton.

The event provided a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and experiences around the development and implementation of PLEs, including the design of such environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. There were around 90 visitors from all over Europe and as far away as New Zealand and Pakistan.

The event included a number of innovative features:

Un-Keynote sessions in “Fishbowl” formats: a small group of participants move in and out of chairs in the centre of the room when they wish to contribute directly to the debate. This enables the whole audience to experience a lively and intense discussion that is facilitated by the presenter.

Bring Your Own Laptop: for practical real time participation in a specific topic.

Speakers Corner: a time and place is announced for informal discussions on a particular theme.

Pecha Kucha: a simple presentation format where you show 20 images each for 20 seconds. The images forward automatically so the presenter has to be concise and stay on track 

During the event, a number of additional useful tools also emerged. Standouts for me were:

Scoop.it (via @pgsimoes) which is a curation service that allows you to find things that interest you and gather them all into one place or showcase on your blog

Packrati.us (via @torresk) = Twitter + Delicious. It automatically saves tweets or retweets with a url to your Delicious account

Debategraph (via @thanassis_t) enables communities to visualise, synthesise and evaluate contributions from its members and facilitate constructive dialogue around the issues raised.

We had an active backchannel including Tony (@aeratcliffe) who stayed up all night in Canada two nights running to watch the livestream and contribute via Twitter. There were some interesting combinations of online and offline communication. During the first unkeynote, two backchannel participants from different countries were introduced to each other via Twitter by a delegate in the room. On another occasion, delegates moved from the café area into the conference room part way through a session, intrigued by the content of tweets coming from inside the room.

A big THANK YOU is due to all the tech support guys from iSolutions who enabled high speed *reliable* wifi connections (how rare is that?!), live streaming and video capture of sessions (including contributions via Second Life and Skype).

You can watch opinions and insights from presenters and participants , read presentation slides on Slideshare (thanks to David Delgado), see photos on Flickr and read full papers.

Twitter provided some great feedback (and speculation about the location of PLE2012!) 

Originally published on www.lisaharrismarketing.com

Web Science Conference in Koblenz

June 22, 2011
by Lisa Harris

Just back from a great Web Science event in Koblenz. Social network analysis was by far the most dominant theme, and the full selection of papers can be accessed here.

Where were the business peeps though? A commercial perspective on some of these great ideas would have been very useful. For example, Karolin Kapler’s excellent presentation titled ‘social media as a new social fetish’ has significant relevance to marketers tempted to evaluate the impact of Facebook communities on the basis of ‘likes’. Karolin discussed the trend of ‘interpassivity’ where users substitute an online action for a ‘real’ one – for example, setting up an impressive selection of RSS feeds does not mean that any of them are actually read, or ‘liking’ a particular cause may not necessarily lead to a charitable donation. Businesses who are currently paying out cash or other benefits for ‘likes’ on their page ought to bear this phenomenon in mind…

For a tweet-sized flavour of the conference, check out the Alchemist analysis

And the Rhine boat trip was fabulous J

Originally published on www.lisaharrismarketing.com