MRW12: The Science of Music (H.A.W.K. Demonstration)
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
by Graeme Earl
As part of Multidisiciplinary Research Week come and hear how our music researchers exploit digital technology within performance, musicology and composition.
For example, creating interactive systems aiding music rehabilitation for cochlear implant patients.
Presenters: Professor Jeanice Brooks, Dr Andrew Pinnock, Dr Richard Polfreman, Dr David Bretherton and Dr Ben Oliver
After the presentations visitors will be invited to try out some of the systems for themselves and view the posters.
This event is part of Multidisciplinary Research Week which is happening here at the University of Southampton from Monday February 6 to Friday February 10, 2012.
The programme brochure can be viewed here: BROCHURE AS PDF
£3.6M funding for DE USRG members
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
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.
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
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 23rd-25th 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.