Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web

February 15, 2012
by Graeme Earl

Angeliki Chrysanthi from the Archaeological Computing Research Group has written three blog posts about a workshop held this month in Brighton:

“The aim of this Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields of both the production and consumption of 3D content for cultural heritage. Together they will explore the opportunities and challenges offered by the type of experiences that are enabled by mobile technologies and which might be different to those experiences enabled by more traditional devices such as PCs, 3D TVs or large scale installations.” http://culturalinformatics.org.uk/?q=3dmobilewebworkshop

The three posts are available via the sotonDH website:

• Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web – Part One
• Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web – Part Two
• Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web – Part Three

DE USRG Advisory Group meeting 12.12.2011

DE USRG Advisory Group meeting

USRG Leadership Meeting 05.12.2011

Meeting for all USRG chairs.

USRG Leadership Meeting 08.03.2011

Meeting for all USRG chairs.

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.

DE Lunch 21.11.2011

This event focused on DE industrial activity and collaboration. There were three speakers:

• Howard Scott spoke about a new mobile business venture and digital marketing
• Roksana Moore (Law) provided an overview of the type of IP issues that we may face as part of academic research; copyright (journal rights), contractual issues, patents , confidential information and the public domain, open research and alternatives to IPR copyleft and open source.
• Kevin Forshaw from R&IS spoke about University support for spin-out and other commercialisation possibilities.

Digital by Default (The Barbican, London) 01.12.2011

Technology has a central role to play in the reform of the public sector, offering more innovative and individualised services. Digital by Default: a revolution in public service delivery will provide essential information on how public sector organisations can deliver efficient, cost-effective public services that are responsive to the needs of citizens and businesses.

• Details of the event

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

EPSRC /Energy USRG meeting

October 22, 2011
by Graeme Earl

EPSRC presentations on:

1. Energy Overview – Dr Jason Green
2. Renewables – Dr Neil Bateman
3. Demand Reduction/Cities & Energy – Dr David Holtum
4. Transport – Dr Nick Cook
5. Digital – Dr Jason Green

The Big Digital Debate (Google Central Saint Giles)

October 16, 2011
by Graeme Earl

The internet has changed the economy – and our lives – for good. Over the last decade the internet economy has been a key driver of growth and jobs. Today, Britain leads the world on ecommerce, spending more and exporting more than anyone else. By 2015, the internet economy is forecast to rise to 10% of UK GDP.

But while the internet economy is a powerhouse of growth for the UK, creative industries, from film-makers to newspapers, are under more pressure than ever before to make the web pay for their content.

The result is an explosion of innovation in high-quality online content. Great content is being delivered in new ways through platforms like Netflix or iTunes to new fast-growing formats like Kindle or tablets. But what are the models of innovation that will help high-quality providers grow?

Different players are betting on different models: advertising-driven, or subscription-based. But can either approach succeed?

And consumer demands are changing too – with news becoming quicker, faster and fewer than 140 characters. And with the bulk of the world’s online videos just a few minutes long how will what we think of as high-quality content evolve in the future?

Details at: http://biginnovationcentre.com/Events/7/The-Big-Digital-debate