[Pixar's Bob] Whitehill, who evaluates every shot and determines where each object and character should exist in 3D space, says that while the process might be arduous—it took about nine months to complete—there is a distinct advantage in creating a 3D version of “Finding Nemo” versus a live-action film. “Imagine if you were recreating a movie ten years after it was filmed—getting all the actors back, putting them in the exact same position in an identical set and having them deliver their lines exactly as they did before with the cameras positioned just so—it’d be impossible. But we can do that here because our films are computer generated. It’s really not a conversion—we initially filmed ‘Finding Nemo’ in 2D. This time, we filmed the exact same movie in 3D.”

As Alan explained via Zoom from his home in London, it sometimes happens that he will give a friend a hand-drawn birthday card, and they will say things like, “I’m going to keep this because this’ll be worth something.” But will they—and does it matter? “That expectation weighs heavy on all artists,” he said. “We’re all sort of fighting through this process of trying to be the artist that everyone expects us to be, who has the legacy and the archive and whose signature is worth something.” He streamlined the box of his childhood artwork from thousands of images down to less than a hundred. Even before discovering Westren’s work, he was thinking, “What story is it that I want to tell about my own life? I don’t want to burden anybody if I die for whatever reason. I don’t want someone to have to go through six boxes of my stuff. I want them to know what’s important.”

arXiv’s goal is equitable access to scientific research for all – and to achieve this, we have been working to make research papers more accessible for arXiv users with disabilities. We are happy to announce that as of Monday, December 18th, arXiv is now generating an HTML formatted version of all papers submitted in TeX/LaTeX (as long as papers were submitted on or after December 1st, 2023 and HTML conversion is successful – more on this below).

HTML is not replacing PDF but will be an additional format available for arXiv users. Submitters will be invited to preview the HTML version of their papers during submission time, the same way they have always done with PDF....

The request to offer arXiv-hosted papers in HTML format comes directly from scientists with disabilities who face barriers to accessing the research they need. HTML formatted papers are more easily and accurately read by screen readers and other technologies, which can assist researchers with reading disabilities, including blindness, low vision, dyslexia, and more.

At the end of our workshop, we reflected with our participants:

“AI provides a more personal human dimension to a long-lost ancestor. Genealogy is more than just data; it’s telling a story, working towards a concept of a 3-D human being. AI creates that 3-D concept in your mind. It’s a more holistic picture, and a sense of being and belonging.” – Viola Baskerville

“The software still has its limitations, but I can see how this has terrific future potential for creating a realistic image of an ancestor that can put ‘skin on their bones.’”- Workshop Participant

Despite the limitations, this workshop provided a way for participants to connect more strongly with their ancestors while learning about historic resources and exploring new technology. Feedback from participants revealed that the deconstruction of the AI technology and the opportunity to learn more about the tools was the most popular aspect of the workshop. The recent explosion of AI image-generation tools means that we all need to become more savvy consumers; understanding technology is often the first step in digital literacy.

– Sonya Coleman, Digital Engagement Coordinator and Lydia Neuroth, Virginia Untold Project Manager

If it were possible to view the story of your community in a moment of time, what would you see? Through this interactive map, we are telling the history of the Dennys River over 9000 years, from its origins in the Native American Dawnland, to the awakening of the spirit of conservation in the twenty-first century.

In the seven chronological layers of this digital map, you can follow the story of the Dennys River, of the communities it has served, and still does. By selecting any one of these layers, the viewer will be able to explore the places of historical significance within each era, which are listed here across the top of this webpage.

By clicking on each locale, you will find the name, historical and contemporary images, and further historical details listed under the heading “Learn More.” The viewer may explore each era from the menus above, or by selecting the symbols representing how these sites were used over time, whether as domestic homes, for commerce, industry, recreation, or in other ways, and often in combination. A concluding layer on the population history of the towns in the Dennys River watershed is based on U.S. Census data from 1790 up to the present.

The project required collaboration with individuals and groups including the geographic information systems (GIS) program at the University of Maine at Machias (UMM), the Passamaquoddy Tribe, and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in nearby Eastport. While the grant paid for a local web-design business to create the website, volunteers also donated hundreds of hours of their time, requiring significant coordination among the project partners.

In addition to society staff, participants included historian James Oberly (University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, emeritus), Passamaquoddy tribal preservation officer Donald Soctomah, archivist Louise Merriam, geographer Tora Johnson (UMM), glaciologist Dominic Winski (Univ. of Maine, Orono), data scientist and intern Patricia Tilton, web designer Ashley Dhakal, and numerous volunteers. With such varied expertise and backgrounds, the team had to address differences in understanding and perspective among its members. For example, we recognized that when geographers track changes in place, historians study changes over time. The varied approaches taken by academic historians and local historians also came into play; where academic historians tend to work alone, usually thinking in time periods such as decades or centuries, local historians, by contrast, often reflect on personal connections to a specific place and time.

Our historians needed to become familiar with ArcGIS, a powerful mapping program used often by geographers.

Critical to the success of the project was learning to use software and technology new to the DRHS. Our historians needed to become familiar with ArcGIS, a powerful mapping program used often by geographers. Johnson, who heads UMM’s GIS program, helped the team to acquire a basic understanding of story maps, which became central to the interactive web map. To guide her students, Johnson asked the society to create a spreadsheet listing the names and locations of the sites and provide volunteers to guide them to those locations in the field. Following the initial fieldwork, the data was returned to the lab to be cleaned and assembled. Multiple sets of latitude and longitude coordinates had to be rectified, and ID numbers hastily assigned in the field needed to be compared and unified. Johnson created a mobile app for use with ArcGIS to allow Tilton and me to return to the field and fill in missing data. A patient investment of hundreds of hours resulted in data collection for over 450 historical sites.

The innocuous-looking wall label--featuring a single artist, title, date, medium, dimension, and collection--represents a cultural paradigm based on singularity and stasis and rather than multiplicity and movement. The most dynamic art of the past half-century will die if this paradigm isn't overturned.

On Feb 15, tech industry veteran Susan Zhang tweeted about a dataset someone was trying to sell her: “University of Michigan LLM Training Data.” This dataset apparently contains 85h of recorded academic speech and 829 academic papers for the low, low price of $25,000. She shared the email she received as an image in the tweet, along with a withering suggestion that UM was selling out....

It appears that Catalyst Research Alliance had been trying to resell data that was already public....

We also need to watch our archives. A faculty colleague of mine who works in archives containing non-English materials recently mentioned they’d been contacted directly by a tech company for access to these archives (they declined)....

Perhaps these incidents should serve as lessons that datasets—at least those representing natural language—should now, sadly, be closed by default.

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G...

ARCHANGEL creates assurances of digital record integrity using distributed ledger technology (Blockchain). Blockchain is best known as the technology underpinning Bitcoin – a digital currency used by millions online. But Blockchain has other uses beyond the financial sphere. ARCHANGEL proposes Blockchain as a way of safeguarding data against tampering and restoring trust in the digital record. Blockchain works as a database that multiple parties maintain. Everyone can check and add to it, but no one can change it. ARCHANGEL is combining Blockchain technology with neural networks trained to fingerprint documents as they are received in the archive. Fingerprints are immutably stored in the blockchain, and when the document is released the fingerprint can be verified; it will stay the same no matter what format changes occur to the file over time.

The National Archives, London, UK

So why Blockchain? Why not a centralized database of such fingerprints, managed by the archive? This is fundamental to the changing basis of public trust that ARCHANGEL addresses. Historically, an archives’ word was authoritative, but we are now in an age where people are increasingly questioning institutions and their legitimacy. ARCHANGEL enables a shift from an institutional underscoring of trust, to a technological underscoring of trust in which multiple independent archives maintain a Blockchain network. ARCHANGEL has so far been deployed for initial trial across the national archives of the UK, Australia, Norway and Estonia as well as NARA in the United States. Each archive mutually underwrites the archive of the other – archives across the globe are helping ensure the integrity of others’ archival data without having to share their information.

Using ARCHANGEL technology, archives hash and register digital fingerprints of documents into a permissioned Blockchain, maintained collaboratively across many participating archives - even across international borders. Documents can be verified against the original signature at any time, including at release, to ensure the record’s integrity. Archives around the world will be able to protect each other, checking for accidental and deliberate corruption of data. ARCHANGEL will ensure that archives can be trusted forever, not just for study and reference, but for matters as serious as legal cases, official investigations and for holding organisations and governments accountable.

[Describes four different levels, from raw instrument data (1) to derived variables (2) to space-time maps (3) to scientific analyses and models (4)]

[Mirrored at http://tinyurl.com/exempt-software-preservation]

c. Adverse Effects of Remote User Limitation on Students
The user limitation on off-site software access also limits the extent to which out-of-commerce
software can be used by students of digital history. If professors want to encourage students to
consult out-of-commerce software to help the next generation of computer programmers and
computer historians learn about the origins of their disciplines, they may find themselves out of
luck....

This challenge has plagued Jon Ippolito, Professor of New Media and Director of the Digital
Curation program at the University of Maine. Professor Ippolito teaches graduate students in an
online digital curation program, encouraging the students to experiment with antiquated software
using a non-traditional environment, such as through emulation.33 This experimentation can be
tedious with the current remote user limitation: “Interpersonal sessions with numerous students
can be a nightmare because one person demonstrates the software and everybody else watches—
but no one wants to watch someone else use interactive software.”34 The limitation is an even
greater impediment to learning when students want to explore a software program requiring
collaborative, interpersonal engagement in real-time—like a chat client. Without simultaneous
remote access, a student researching chat client software will be alone in the chat room, unable to
explore the software’s functionality.35

[Conventional breakdown of digital preservation as a field; some discussion of the complex makeup of digital files and objects]

Some fonts have been identified as perpetuating racism: for example, Neuland, which designer Rob Giampietro describes as “stereotypography.”[3] This font, originally developed for circus broadsheets, continues to be used in publishing for African American and First American authors and subjects. Similarly, as Cherokee Nation scholar and artist Roy Boney, Jr. notes, Papyrus, a font frequently used for Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and First American subjects, “paints [First Americans] as noble mystic savages while forcing us to continually live as relics of the past.… It belittles our standing as vibrant, 21st-century people with strong cultures.”

An overwhelming majority 97% of researchers agreed that data curation adds value to the data sharing process, 96% agreed it was worth the effort, and 90% felt more confident sharing their data due to the curation process....[curation] makes data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

If it were possible to view the story of your community in a moment of time, what would you see? Through this interactive map, we are telling the history of the Dennys River over 9000 years, from its origins in the Native American Dawnland, to the awakening of the spirit of conservation in the twenty-first century.

In the seven chronological layers of this digital map, you can follow the story of the Dennys River, of the communities it has served, and still does. By selecting any one of these layers, the viewer will be able to explore the places of historical significance within each era.

Amber Sewell, "A Case for Open Peer Review Podcasting in Academic Librarianship"

Models of open peer review are being explored in multiple disciplines as academia
seeks a more feminist, care-based approach to scholarship. One model of open peer review that
aligns well with the work of information professionals, particularly those with information
literacy instruction duties, is an open peer review podcast. This type of podcast, recorded before
a manuscript is submitted for publication, brings an informal peer review process into the open
as a host facilitates critical discussion of a research output between the researcher and a reviewer.
This approach fosters a supportive community with shared values while utilizing the affordances
of podcasting to make invisible labor visible and bring whole personhood into scholarship and
scholarly communication. The author provides a case study of implementing this model with the
creation of The LibParlor Podcast.

The experiment’s results will be unveiled on Saturday when the Nasher opens the exhibition “Act as if You Are a Curator"....

Last year’s Bucharest Biennale in Romania was organized by Jarvis, an artificial intelligence program that selected a dozen artists after assigning “score values” based on their popularity and how they fit into the exhibition’s core theme of popular culture. A year earlier, the Whitney Museum and the Liverpool Biennial commissioned a project called “The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine,” which used a tool developed by OpenAI to generate fictitious artist biographies and absurd curatorial statements — a satire of the clichéd artspeak plaguing real biennials.
“You really get a portrait of the art world,” said Christiane Paul, a Whitney curator behind the project. The tool, she said, quickly identified rote patterns in exhibition texts at odds with curatorial goals to show the real diversity of the global arts scene.

But many of the chatbot’s descriptions were plagued by bromidic taglines like “experience the art” and “immerse yourself.” The human curators added their own commentary on the labels to point out its quirks and inaccuracies....

“The issue you run into from the start is creating an echo chamber,” Paul, the Whitney curator, said about the concept of automated curating. “This is not going to suggest anything revolutionary because it’s just drawing on what is out there. And the lowest common denominator is what’s out there.”

The collective Looty in London virtually reclaims items from Western museums to give people from former colonies a chance to learn about their stolen heritage....

At Fort Qaitbay in Rashid, along Egypt’s northern coast, visitors will soon be able to stand where the Rosetta Stone is thought to have been found, point their smartphones at a QR code and watch the stone pop out of their screens in an augmented-reality installation. The stone is being “digitally repatriated” by Looty, a collective of London-based designers who, as they put it, virtually reclaim artifacts in Western museums that were plundered during colonial times.

After faculty protests and a debate over racial equity, the state’s public universities reconsider whether high school students can skip a foundational course.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are often used for text classification due to their high accuracy. However, DNNs can be computationally intensive, requiring millions of parameters and large amounts of labeled data, which can make them expensive to use, to optimize, and to transfer to out-of-distribution (OOD) cases in practice. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric alternative to DNNs that’s easy, lightweight, and universal in text classification: a combination of a simple compressor like gzip with a k-nearest-neighbor classifier. Without any training parameters, our method achieves results that are competitive with non-pretrained deep learning methods on six in-distribution datasets.It even outperforms BERT on all five OOD datasets, including four low-resource languages. Our method also excels in the few-shot setting, where labeled data are too scarce to train DNNs effectively.

Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive

by Darius Kazemi, (source code)

Hello! Hopefully you are here because you want to make an archive of your tweets like this one. There are options for this like Tweetback but you have to have some computer programming knowledge to run that. I wanted to make something very simple. The process for this is:

fill out a small form here
drop your twitter archive zip file (in the format that it was available circa December 2022) into this page
wait
get back a zip file with a bunch of HTML files in it that you can upload wherever you host your web stuff now

This even works if you only have access to your website through something like cPanel. Basically if the way you update your website is by uploading files to a web host, then this solution is a good one for you! Once it's uploaded, there is a styles.css file that should be pretty easy to modify if you want to customize things.

Note: your browser will process the whole thing so if it's huge and/or your computer is slow... be prepared to wait a long while. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. You might get a notification that your tab is slowing your browser down. Just wait a while, you'll get an "archive.zip" in your downloads bar. It'll be over soon. Just like Twitter.

This text is written to outline what artists may choose to do on the subject in order to i) simplify our life in the long run, ii) generate income, and iiii) take ownership of the way our work will be presented in the future. I welcome variations, additions and comments. Yes, it is absolutely unfair for the artist to have to worry about conservation of their work. Now let’s get on with it.

More so than with emulation, migration can alter the look and feel of a work. A simple instance is migrating a software-based work from an older computer and monitor that runs at 1024 x 768 pixels to a new computer and monitor that runs at 1920 x 1080 pixels. This example changes the work in a significant way, there are now twice as many pixels (twice the resolution) and the aspect ratio has changed from 4:3 to 16:9. Does it significantly change the essence of the work? If yes, is that OK? Is it what the artist wanted? Is the artist, or their estate, involved in it? A more minimal migration is to adapt a software-based work from one programming language to another but to keep the display details the same. For instance, to migrate a program from C++ to JavaScript. This could be a major change to the code, but only a minimal change to what the audience experiences....

While Ippolito provides an example for reinterpretation as porting code from one language to another, I feel this is migration, but it might be the extent of the changes the language shift causes that would place it in one category instead of the other. I imagine reinterpretation as a possible necessity if the original source code isn't available, but a documentation video exists as a reference. Reinterpretation might also be the preferred action defined by an artist to keep a work contemporary, rather than utilizing older hardware and software paradigms....

I think it's best for the direction to be indicated by the artist. For example, some works require a fixed dimension that lend themselves more to emulation, while others are more flexible with resolution so that migration is more ideal. For other works, such as my own Process series of work, the point of the work is to be interpreted in unique ways, so reinterpretation is ideal. If the artist doesn't state a preference or it's not implied through the documentation, it's the conservator's choice.

Regina Harsanyi opens with a few axioms to keep in mind when thinking about TBM conservation. Those include “storage is not preservation”, “variable media collection requires a migration mentality”, and “mutability over immutability”.


Expanding on that, she says:

“Most artists you’re aware of right now that are making code-based work are probably using p5.js, right? p5.js may not be supported by a browser in the future. So it doesn’t matter if you have it connected to a cold storage wallet, or even if you’re storing the documentation in a smart contract. If a browser that you’re interfacing with, which is out of your control, doesn’t support that rendering of that codebase, or your computer doesn’t — you don’t know how much is going to change about your computer — you have to think about how that p5.js codebase can migrate to a codebase, a format, something that doesn’t even exist yet. So having that migration mentality ahead of time, and being prepared for that, is the most important thing you can do for any of your artwork. And if you think about it, even works on paper, pigment on canvas or wood, sometimes those need to be migrated too.”

Preserving on-chain data will probably require downloading a blockchain node. That alone has several implied questions that conservators need to ask, like:

How is this software compiled?
What makes a computer compatible with this software?
How are soft and hard forks on this blockchain pushed to all nodes to download and update?
How could all of this affect the NFT over time?

And there are severe limits to what data can be stored on-chain. An Ethereum smart contract can only hold 24KB of data and Tezos approximately up to 60KB. Most “on-chain” artworks are running with blockchain data, but aren’t actually being rendered on blockchain software. This creates a dependency on off-chain data, which could be stored on anything from a web server or Google Drive folder — creating a single point of failure — or a more robust service like IPFS.

[Uses d3 to create svg rather than canvas. Allows curved lines for a more biomorphic look. Code at https://gist.github.com/nbremer/21746a9668ffdf6d8242]

The biggest visual changes are a circular grid in the background, adding the option to choose smooth connecting lines and adding an SVG glow filter around the stroke (I just liked the look).

Some ideas are still the same. The mouse over interactivity that highlights one shape and dims all others, the small tooltip that appears when you hover over a circle to see the exact percentage, and the way the function gets called and how you supply the possible options.

Welcome to Digital Preservation Q&A, where you can ask questions and receive answers from other members of the community.

Hint: Tackle your photos last.

Discmaster lets you sift through 11 terabytes of CD-ROM and floppy disk archives.

Benj Edwards - 10/18/2022, 5:31 PM
Vintage floppy disks go under the microscope.
Enlarge / Search through millions of vintage files with Discmaster.

Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.

How to serve better content, with better access, using better tools

It's become a commonplace to hear that 2020 has forever changed the art world and cultural heritage in general. But this is a story we've heard before, during the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, when museums like the Guggenheim, Whitney, and SFMOMA made a leap to digital collections and programming. What lessons can be learned from the digital gold rush of the turn of the millennium, and how should museums apportion resources strained under the pandemic to take advantage of this latest transition?

This discussion focuses on case studies of digital solutions from today as they compare to solutions to similar conundrums from 20 years ago, including how to serve better content with better access and better tools. For this collaborative presentation, the three participants invited the audience to help them compare the relative success of digital solutions from the past and present.

The presenters include Meredith Steinfels, Assistant Director, Digital Platforms, Media, and Archives Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth; John P. Bell, Director, ITC Data Experiences and Visualizations Studio, Dartmouth; and Jon Ippolito, Professor of New Media and Director of the Digital Curation graduate program at the University of Maine

This talk focuses less on blockchain’s general promise as a preservation medium and more on the particular case of the digital Warhols, which both in form and spirit would seem a perfect application of NFTs to preserve historically important works of digital art. Which promises of the crypto-dream of permanent access to digital heritage ring true for this case study, and which are overblown?

[Digitized by DIG student and Registrar of the US House Mackenzie Good] The silver mace, symbol of the House’s authority, has been in use in the House since 1841 when the Members met in the old House Chamber. It was crafted by William Adams, a New York silversmith. The original mace had been destroyed when the British burned the Capitol in 1814, and during the intervening years, a wooden mace was used. The mace is made of 13 thin ebony rods representing the original states. The rods are bound together by the twining silver bands, which are pinned together and held at the top and bottom of the shaft by repoussé silver bands. The inscription “Wm. Adams/Manufacturer/New York/1841” is engraved on the bottom band. A silver globe with an eagle perched on it sits at the top of the mace, with the Western Hemisphere facing front.

[Gets names wrong but critique is valid]

A USENIX article makes an important distinction between “decentralized” (which blockchain is) and “distributed” (emphasis added):

A distributed system is composed of multiple, identified, and nameable entities. DNS is an example of such a distributed system, as there is a hierarchy of responsibilities and business relationships to create a specialized database with a corresponding cryptographic PKI. Similarly the web is a distributed system, where computation is not only spread amongst various servers but the duty of computation is shared between the browser and the server within a single web page.

A decentralized system, on the other hand, dispenses with the notion of identified entities. Instead everyone can participate and the participants are assumed to be mutually antagonistic, or at least maximizing their profit. Since decentralized systems depend on some form of voting, the potential for an attacker stuffing the ballot box is always at the forefront. After all, an attacker could just create a bunch of sock-puppets, called “sibyls”, and get all the votes they want.

In a distributed system sibyls are easy to deal with because there are responsible entities in the system who act as gatekeepers. These gatekeepers are often recruited to also prevent “undesired” activity. This is especially true of financial gatekeepers who perform payment processing and have legal obligations to block large swaths of criminal activity.

Decentralized systems purport to eliminate the presence of gatekeepers. But there is a problem as without such gatekeepers there is no efficient solution to the sibyl problem. Instead there are ugly hacks, such as a “proof of work” system where sibyls are only prevented by the need to waste resources, or “proof of stake” where the design literally becomes “he who has the gold makes the rules”.


....

Given all the talk about bored apes, why should galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) pay any attention at all to NFTs? There are several reasons. First, NFTs are collectible digital assets, and the GLAM sector long has been involved in accumulating, curating, and preserving collectible digital assets. In the world of curation, an NFT really is like just a different form of investment into the very thing we love as collectors and guardians of rare and unique material—just in digital form.

Second, NFTs can have brand value. Based upon their one-of-a-kind nature, NFTs can carry cultural cachet in at least two different ways. For one, the subject matter of an NFT can be unique enough that the token carries a certain level of prestige. Additionally, the entity that issues the NFT can be credible enough that the issuance of a token from that institution bestows distinction upon the issued token. Therefore, association with a reputable institution increases the value of the NFT.

The answer to “why NFTs” is summed up as:

because we can; and
because we would look cool.

To better understand how algorithms interpret art that even humans might not fully understand the meaning of, artist and researcher Matthew Plummer-Fernandez started a blog called “Novice Art Blogger,” in which a computer experiences art for the first time.

His code randomly selects an abstract piece of artwork from the Tate online archive and then sends the picture to an image-classification algorithm. The deep learning algorithm was created by researchers at the University of Toronto, and they’ve made their work available publicly for anyone to use.

The algorithm looks at images and tries to translate them into text captions based on what it sees. To teach the software to recognize different shapes, actions, or colors, researchers provide pre-captioned data with descriptions of each image, and the computer compares the new images to the ones already in its system. Plummer-Fernandez’s code spits out the photo plus the generated caption, along with a description of the “nearest neighbor,” or a description photo the abstract art most resembles.

Join journalist and editor Maria Bustillos in conversation with author Glyn Moody for a discussion about copyright, digital rights and the 21st-century walls blocking access to culture.

Since 1991 when he somewhat accidentally landed a curatorial position at the Guggenheim, Jon Ippolito has been passionately dedicated to building curatorial projects, research initiatives, and collaborations revolving around the preservation of time-based media art. Through projects such as the variable media questionnaire, exhibitions such as Seeing Double, and books such as Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (co-authored with Rick Rinehart), Jon’s thinking about how to approach the documentation and preservation of art has unquestionably influenced a whole generation of professionals – not least of which through his role as director of the digital curation program at the University of Maine where he has been for the past twenty years. Tune in to hear Jon’s story!

[Twitter Space organized by Kate Vass Gallery, Zurich on 17 October 2022 with Tina Rivers-Ryan, Serena Tabacchi, Colborn Bell, Jon Ippolito]

[ Study of 59 NEH-funded websites suggests big, rich institutions can be worse at digital preservation. Over 20 years, academic sites outlasted non-academic (74% v 45%) but those of R1/R2 universities expired faster than those of colleges that only offer an Associates/BA ]

we can hire more diverse perspectives in engineering, so that people from communities that are directly affected can contribute to the design and implementation of these systems. But some folks, like Timnit Gebru, formerly responsible for ethics at Google, has long asked the question of whether we need to build these systems at all. If we know that a process has greater negative effects on one group of people over others, do we need to start automating it at all? Do we need technologies to assist in the massive disproportionate use of the prison system against Black men or Chinese Uighurs? Might we invest in making those systems more justice-centered first? Technology is not the only way to build better systems. We can shift priorities. We can look at things from different positions. This is another strength in diversity: it amplifies the breadth of imagination in a room....

I fear that the great risk of artificial intelligence is not that we build a machine that rises up and enslaves us, but that we build a machine that we surrender to out of boredom. That our exhaustion at the idea of chiseling out ethical, moral perspectives for ourselves means we will hand life and death decisions to a Roomba....

Let’s put relationships at the center of our conversations around technology: if Facebook is making us hate each other, let’s ask whether we need Facebook in our lives. If automated surveillance systems are leading to false accusations against our neighbors, let’s ask if we need them in our neighborhoods.

The problem with this approach is that the longer the string of bits is that you want to store, the more time and money it takes. Robotic hardware performs the synthesis reactions, and each hardware unit can only synthesize a single DNA molecule at a time. The raw materials the hardware uses to perform that synthesis also add a cost for each stored molecule. While this isn't a concern for small-scale demonstration projects, the costs quickly become prohibitive if you start storing large amounts of data. Citing a DNA synthesis cost of about .03 cents per base, Park said, ".03 cents times two bits per base pair times, say, gigabytes—that's a lot of money. That's millions of dollars."
....
by assembling DNA using a small bit of a large volume of pre-made DNA, the cost of synthesis goes down dramatically. Each assembly reaction can also be run in parallel; in contrast, synthesizing individual sequences ties up the machine they're running on until the synthesis is complete.

[Requires ORCHID or institutional login]

2D & 3D, Algorithmic, Animated, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Codework, Combinatory, Generative, Glitch, Hypermedia, Immersive, Interactive, Kinetic, Locative, Mobile, Multimedia, Networked, Virtual Reality (VR), Virtual World, Web-Based/Net—these are some of the qualities found among the 38 collections of digital art and writing at the Electronic Literature Organization's The NEXT.

Envisioned as a combination museum, library, and preservation space, The NEXT maintains and makes its archives accessible for the next generation and responds to the growing need for open-access, travel-free cultural and research experiences for today's public and scholars.

Meredith Lowe started Archives Gig in 2010 and has been posting jobs for Archivists, records managers, and students ever since. We profiled the site back in 2013 and wanted to provide a quick update....

How is archives job hunting different now versus ten years ago?

This field has been steadily moving toward seeking those with skills in digital curation, projects, and collections, and those who are looking to work in the GLAM fields would be well-served to pick up skills in those areas. With the pandemic, there has been a big shift to remote work in all sectors, and that includes the archives field. Although most positions are still in-person, there are a lot more remote-only positions as well as hybrid schedule options – and I think with digital projects that hybrid/remote work is even more achievable.

Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR)

COPTR helps practitioners find tools needed for long term digital preservation tasks. It describes 568 tools and 20 workflows.

Find a digital preservation tool using the Tools Grid (or by stage, function, content type or file format). Or watch this video to learn more.
View digital preservation workflows
Add a tool, or find out more about how you can get involved
Add a workflow
About COPTR, including how to Contact Us, how COPTR is structured and how to access COPTR data via the API.

NEW FOR JULY 2021: COPTR has been re-launched with new functionality. Find out all about it in this video presentation.

[Useful chart of movie and image aspect ratios and display resolution names]

01 - POLITICAL AND LEGAL QUESTIONS
02 - ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND DEVELOPMENT FINANCE
03 - NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT
04 - AGRICULTURE, FORESTRY AND FISHING
05 - INDUSTRY
06 - TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
07 - INTERNATIONAL TRADE
08 - POPULATION
09 - HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
10 - HEALTH
11 - EDUCATION
12 - EMPLOYMENT
13 - HUMANITARIAN AID AND RELIEF
14 - SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND EQUITY
15 - CULTURE
16 - SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
17 - GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTORS
18 - ORGANIZATIONAL QUESTIONS

The Mailbag project is a draft specification and mailbagit open source tool for preserving email archives using multiple formats, such as MBOX, PDF, and WARC.

Currently there is no single effective preservation format, so the Mailbag approach is to preserve multiple formats in a stable and computer-actionable package. MBOX or EML files provide structured access for computational use, PDF files preserve the document-like rendering of email well and provide easy dissemination, and web archives preserve the potential interactivity of email HTML and CSS, as well as embedded and linked Web content from external sources.

The Mailbag specification is an extension of the Bagit specification. A mailbag is a special type of “bag,” with designated storage for common email exports like MBOX or PST, PDF files, and Web Archives. Mailbags also contain specific metadata about its contents to enable them to be computer actionable, as well as limited serialized email header data.

Many of the tools available for email processing are also challenging for many archivists to use. Email also must be processed near-to-capture, to ensure that content hosted on external servers is not lost. The mailbagit tool enables archivists to rapidly process email archives and package them into Mailbags. A basic graphical user interface (GUI) lowers the barrier for this work.

A restaurant near my apartment sells “curated salads”; a home goods store sells “carefully curated sheets”; a babysitting agency offers “curated care”; my inbox bulges with curated newsletters, curated dating apps, curated wine programs. Kanye West, the Trumpist rapper, calls himself a curator, as do Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, and Josh Ostrovsky, who under the name the Fat Jew spews plagiarized jokes and alcohol advertising to millions of followers on social media. It’s been well over a decade now since the figure of the curator—a once auxiliary player in the world of art—became vulgarized and generalized in consumer society, and still its demented currency endures; you can eat burgers at the Curator restaurant at Heathrow Airport. Actual curators, by which I mean the people who care for objects in museums and organize exhibitions and biennials, have had to start looking for new titles. (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this year’s winner of a major prize for curators, prefers “draftsperson.” She says, “You curate pork to make prosciutto.”)

The curator, especially the curator of contemporary art, is a young figure in art history; we critics have thousands of years on them. Aristocrats, physicians, and clergymen proudly oversaw the connoisseurship and display of their own Wunderkammern in the early modern period, while at the Louvre, the first of the national museums established in the late eighteenth century, the décorateurs who hung paintings and installed sculptures were artists themselves. Audiences discovered new painting and sculpture at artist-juried exhibitions such as the Salon in Paris, and later at commercial art galleries; braver souls might first see the modernist avant-gardes in exhibitions artists organized on their own.

Only in the middle of the twentieth century did the curated exhibition take over from the salon, the dealership, and the independent show as the principal launch pad of contemporary art. In fits and starts, the professional curator arrogated responsibilities once held by the artist, the collector, the historian, or indeed the critic, becoming the figure who assigned meaning and importance to new art: someone the art historian Bruce Altshuler has called “the curator as creator.” Soon after, the curator stepped beyond the single museum or institution to become a roving organizer and analyst of contemporary art.

The gallery with the most innovative model, however, is undoubtedly EPOCH Gallery, founded by Peter Wu+ (the + sign in his name designates his conviction that his work is always inflected by collaborations with others).

At EPOCH, artists’ works are placed in an immersive virtual environment thematically linked to the exhibition. Recently, the locations have been one-to-one models of geographic locations varying from Matanuska Glacier for CRYOSPHERE or LACMA’s east campus for ECHOES.

Audiences move around and discover the works in situ, which endows the exhibition with a sense of space that makes evident how dull and claustrophobic online viewing rooms really are. Online, no reason exists to replicate the white cube. The installation of works in the environment creates a unit whole and so EPOCH sells the entire exhibition as editions, with artists splitting 60% of proceeds evenly with 15% supporting a charity relevant to the exhibition. The group shows have highlighted artists working in a range of media like Nancy Baker Cahill, Lawrence Lek, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Candice Lin.

Given the focus on the art’s environment, it comes as no surprise that EPOCH also takes its ecological impact seriously and selected Algorand, a blockchain developed by an MIT cryptography professor that uses the more ecologically-friendly verification technique proof-of-stake....

Though curation may seem to reintroduce the gatekeeping that so many have decried around mainstream contemporary art, the galleries and curators help us learn enough to respond knowledgeably and navigate the media hype. Emergent art practices are always complicated and typically derided, but with a little help from our gallery friends we can get by the nonsense to embrace new ways of seeing.

imgs.ai is a fast, dataset-agnostic, deep visual search engine for digital art history based on neural network embeddings. imgs.ai utilizes modern approximate k-NN algorithms via Spotify's Annoy library to deliver fast search results even for very large datasets in low-resource environments, and integrates the OpenAI CLIP model for text-based visual search. Try it below on the complete Rijksmuseum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art collections (CC0) or sign up for an account to access more functions/datasets (institutional email address and approval required.) imgs.ai is developed by Fabian Offert, with contributions by Peter Bell and Oleg Harlamov. Get in touch at hi@imgs.ai.

The established interpretations given to objects within specific exhibitions, as the case of the Viking helmet illustrates, are displaced from the museum’s control and curated by YouTube’s algorithms, including its technologies of personalisation (Pietrobruno 2021). Search engine results on YouTube featuring images of Viking helmets in thumbnails and in video content are constantly fluctuating as streams of videos are personalised to individual users. Although it is the emerging media form of the present age, the personalised shifting SERP has not substantially impacted the way that the Viking helmet at the SHM has been displayed. Yet developments in exhibition design are beginning to emulate this medium. Citing Peter Higgins (2020, 322), Michelle Henning (2020b, xliv) identifies this recent trend: “From an exhibition design perspective, the potential of new media seems very exciting, with ‘individual profiling’ increasing the possibility of personalised content.” As outlined by John Bell and Jon Ippolito (2020, 487), that the self-organised museum involves curation to nurture theMachine learing, algorithms meaning of a disparate set of objects reflects the malleability of communication within the network and in turn counters a traditional format that generally utilises a single assemblage of materials.

Poly Haven is a curated public asset library for visual effects artists and game designers, providing useful high quality 3D assets in an easily obtainable manner.

There are no paywalls, accounts or email forms required, just download an asset and use it without worry.

All assets here are CC0, which means they're practically free of copyright and you may use them for absolutely any purpose.

With the new LiDAR scanning functionality of the iPhone 12 Pro and the proliferation of apps that help you upload your scans directly to Sketchfab, we want to see what you can do with iOS LiDAR. This week we challenge you to scan street art (murals, graffiti, statues, etc.) using the iOS LiDAR sensor on your iPhone 12 Pro or iPad Pro, upload the model to Sketchfab, and tag it #LidarScanChallenge.

[Google Translate:

In early December, Hyperallergic drew attention to the results of a study on NFTs published in Nature Scientific Reports . The result is sobering and confirms fears: The NFT market follows similar dynamics as the art market. Ten percent of NFT buyers make as many transactions as the remaining 90 percent. The average retail price of 75% of NFTs is $15. Only 1% of NFTs sell for over $1,594. And you don't have to be particularly subtle to notice that there are new gatekeepers. These are the four major NFT marketplaces: Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, Foundation and OpenSea.

The NFT market follows similar dynamics as the art market. Ten percent of NFT buyers make as many transactions as the remaining 90 percent.
The Filipino artist Skye Nicolas has dealt with the standings of the NFT marketplaces in a series, which he then also sold on various NFT marketplaces. "THIS ARTWORK IS WORTH MORE ON SuperRare", for example, reads one statement. "THIS ART-WORK IS WORTH LESS ON Foundation" is another statement. By which he alludes to the fact that SuperRare is curated, so artists are selected – applications are possible, but the number is circulating around 60,000, so the chances of getting a chance are rather slim – whereas for Foundationonly an invitation is needed from someone who has already sold on the platform. In addition to the statement, the digital poster features a quote from Beanie, a well-known NFT collector, who tweeted on March 19, 2021: "Artists are doing themselves a disservice listing on Foundation . The prices are lagging big time and you will dilute your brand value. SuperRare has a distinct price premium because it is professionally curated, OG , and has an active secondary marketplace. FDNis mostly memes.” Aha, “professionally curated”. One may wonder for a moment, because what is supposed to make this new space so attractive is not the absence of gatekeepers and the widest range of offers. In turn, something doesn't seem right with the offer, because the oversupply of memes is criticized.]

Why did Intel abandon SGX?

As a secure enclave technology, SGX was commonly targeted by security researchers who discovered numerous vulnerabilities and attack methods.

Examples of attacks targeting Intel SGX include...

In summary, Intel had more to gain from SGX's deprecation from the perspective of security.

Considering that most users don't care about Blu-ray playback on the PC, taking that decision must have been straightforward.

Impact and solutions

The issue impacts Ultra HD Blu-ray discs that use DRM, so if the Blu-ray Disc Association ever decides to lift the strict protections, the playback will return to nominal resolutions (3840 x 2160).

Also, since SGX was removed in recent chip generations, users who would like to avoid problems can stick to using 7000, 8000, 9000, or 10000-series CPUs.

Skylake (6000 series) has SGX but misses HDCP 2.2, and that would cause hurdles with HDMI 2.0 transmission.

CyberLink, the company behind the "PowerDVD" software product, has updated its FAQ to reflect the problem with newer gen Intel processors, claiming inability to resolve it in any way.

"The removal of the SGX feature, and its compatibility with the latest Windows OS and drivers, has caused a substantial challenge for CyberLink to continue supporting Ultra HD Blu-ray movie playback in our player software." - details the FAQ page.

"So much so, that it has been determined that it is no longer feasible for CyberLink to support the Ultra HD Blu-ray playback on newer CPUs and the latest Windows platforms."

In addition to using an older Intel CPU, CyberLink also advises people not to upgrade to Windows 11 to avoid having the needful drivers replaced.

LIMA/Dutch Digital Heritage Network
A Practical Research into Preservation Strategies for VR artworks on the basis of Justin Zijlstra’s 100 Jaar Vrouwenkiesrecht

[2021 pp 29-30]
Recommendation Checklist for the Preservation of VR artworks
*Acquire two sets of compatible HMDs upon which the VR artwork is installed and running (In
tis case, Oculus Quest 1 and 2 are both compatible with the existing apk file).
*Make sure no automatic updates can occur by disabling all wireless communications
*Removing the batteries from the device when not in use
*Obtain a 360º video from the artwork. This can be done either by creating a 360º video from
te source code, or by making a screen recording of the device during usage. Preferably, the
atist should be requested to do this.
*Create copies of the 360º video at the highest available resolution and using a lossless,
ucompressed video format, such as .avi or Ffv1.
*Create detailed documentation including
–step-by-step compilation and installation instructions
–minimum requirements for the software environment
–a list of compatible hardware
–minimum hardware requirements
–on / off and troubleshooting guidelines for exhibitions
*Interview the artist about the artwork and the artist’s intended interaction.
*Obtain the original source code from the artist, if available.
*Create a Disk Image including the project source code and required plugins, add-ons and
sftware development environment.
*Migrate the software to Open Source and Long Term Support solutions wherever possible
ad test compatibility with current off-the-shelf HMDs (See Appendix A.8).
*If the previous step was applied, create a list of hardware alternatives and make new Disk
Iages with the new Source Code, Dependencies, Software environment and most recently
eported application.
*Store the Disk Image files in two separate platforms (offline media, such as CD, DVD, SSD
drives or LTO tapes are valid options) and periodically monitor their integrity and re-write if
necessary

THE 6TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF NETWORK SOCIETY: INSTANTLY RECIPROCAL THE MOMENTS FOR COOPERATIVE LIFE

Streamed live on Dec 17, 2021

On March 18th, 1990, thieves broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole several invaluable masterpieces. 28 years later, the frames remain empty....

With the power of augmented reality, we saw the opportunity to put the stolen art back where they belong.

We realized that many visitors to the museum either had no idea about the heist or didn't know what the looted works looked like.

As technologists and lovers of culture, we asked ourselves: how could we help visitors see what is no longer there? Using AR, supercharged by Apple's ARKit, we were able to make this a reality.

While NFTs have dominated the discourse around art this year, everything about them feels opaque. How to obtain, define, and conserve NFTs are still confusing matters for many. To get to the bottom of things PAMM’s Director of Digital Engagement will moderate a panel with artist Sofia Crespo, curator Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, and Art Blocks CCO Jeff Davis. The panel will discuss how NFTs have changed the practice of digital art, where NFTs sit in the broader tradition of digital art, and where this all might be headed.

In many cases, you might need to work with people that you don't want to bring on as workspace or base collaborators. For example, you might need to collect information from contractors, clients, or volunteers without showing those people anything in your bases; you might also want to show people some parts of a base without showing them all of the information in a base.

In these types of situations, you might want to consider Airtable's forms (for soliciting data from external collaborators) or share links (for showing data to external collaborators).

What can an institution become when it is organized with the network at its core? This question, which has been a topic of concern for art institutions since the rise of the public internet, is newly relevant thanks to the ascendance of blockchain-based forms of social organizing at a time of ongoing crisis for many legacy institutions.

Collecting art, making grants, and other functions long performed by arts organizations are increasingly being taken on by blockchain-based digital cooperatives known as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), which are organized using tools such as NFTs (non-fungible tokens, a means of certifying digital assets on the blockchain). Co-organized by the New Museum’s digital art affiliate Rhizome and interdisciplinary contemporary arts organization Kadist, this event asks to what extent the work of institutions might be propelled forward using these new models.

Gathering artists, developers, and thinkers for a series of conversations and presentations, the afternoon-long event will also consider the apparent contradictions inherent in these forms, which are both financialized and cooperative; how these relate to the contradictions involved in traditional institutional models; and how these contradictions might play out in the future.

the whole blockchain did not need to be verified but only a randomly previously chosen block did [to be less time/energy intensive] Arweave calls it a blockweave....

Miners store information on their servers because they are incentivized to do so through payment....

Arweave uses a fee structure where users pay once to store information forever instead of being bound to monthly or yearly subscription fees....

storage prices are going down year-after-year, and not by a little, but by a lot.

The average storage prices for data have decreased by 30.5% over the past 50 years.

Arweave designed a system so that all of the costs paid to host data onto the Arweave network go into an endowment that will be able to pay for the cost of storage based on the interest generated from the endowment....

The one-time payment is still very, very affordable.

Generally, you will end up paying around one cent for 4-6 MB of permaweb data.

For instance, this would workout to be about one tenth to one hundredth of a cent for smaller documents (50 to 250 kb), or about 2 cents for a larger audio file (10 MB)....

Arweave describes the Permaweb as:

"… a global, community-owned web that anyone can contribute to or get paid to maintain."

The permaweb looks just like the normal web, but all of its content - from images to full web apps - is permanent, retrieved quickly, and decentralized - forever. Just as the first web connected people over vast distances, the permaweb connects people over extremely long periods of time."....

Permaweb URLs look like a long string of random letters and numbers with arweave.net in the center....

Arweave created its own digital currency called an AR token. Any data that is put onto the permaweb needs to be paid with the AR token to be put on there. This is also what the miners receive for hosting their data on their servers....

Already there are over 300 applications built upon the system [including filesharing (Dropbox) and jamstack apps]

We are happy to introduce Juried Protocol Galleries (JPG), a registry-based curation protocol that brings together collectors, curators, and artists. The JPG registry is a new primitive for the NFT ecosystem, allowing owners to make their NFTs available for sale and display in partnership with curators. Designed as an open protocol, JPG provides the foundation for a community-generated network of galleries and a new, decentralized marketplace for both primary and secondary sales.
The Protocol/The What

The core of the JPG protocol consists of a main registry, populated by NFT owners, and sub-registries, created by curators, that serve as exhibitions. Anyone can add their NFTs to the JPG registry by submitting proof of ownership and accompanying token data. The NFT never leaves the owner’s wallet. Curators can then select works from the main registry to include in their exhibitions via sub-registries.

The JPG protocol also offers marketplace functionality that allows NFT owners to list their works for sale through the gallery system. If a curator sells a work in their exhibition, they earn a commission on that sale, similar to traditional art galleries and existing NFT platforms but now open to all.

JPG allows NFT owners to give a specific curator address or list of addresses the sole rights to curate their work. If no ‘allow list’ is set, an NFT can be included on multiple sub-registries simultaneously. This allows owners to choose whether they want wide distribution or exclusivity. It also enables curators to build unique, high quality offerings and work directly with artists to organize primary sales exhibitions.
The Curation/The Why

An opt-in, on-chain NFT registry has many valuable use cases, but the JPG team is most excited about its potential to expand the possibilities for curation in the NFT ecosystem. The platforms that exist today generally exhibit one of two models: either they follow a high quality, high exclusivity approach that gives them curatorial control, or they take a more open, inclusive path that eschews curation altogether. JPG offers a third way, handing tools directly to the community so that anyone can curate exhibitions and become a tastemaker.

Curation is an integral part of every cultural economy, conferring meaning and value on objects through the thoughtful use of context and display. While the past decade has liberated curation from its status as a specialist practice, the growth of the NFT market has caused an ever greater blurring between the roles of the curator and the private collector. At JPG we believe that curators don’t have to be collectors, and that a truly decentralized culture is only possible when everyone, regardless of what they own, can share new perspectives and experiences through the exhibition medium.

the museum has an unusual acquisition model: 50% of the total MOCA token supply will be solely dedicated to growing the collection.

Collectors will apply to sell art to the museum’s Genesis collection in exchange for tokens. Submissions will be reviewed by Bell as well as two seven-member committees of artists and collectors for merit, and if approved, the team at Nonfungible.com will give a final appraisal of the value of pieces.

[MoCA co-founder Colborn] Bell said that MoCA, which has a legal entity as a nonprofit in the Caymans, has an “explicit obligation” to never sell the works accepted into the collection, and eventually, that inability to sell will be hardcoded into the DAO....

the team is plotting a reputation-based system that takes into consideration attendance at events, attention spent on the art, and MOCA token holdings to grant users the ability to write the history of the pieces in the collection — community-managed museum blurbs.

If the MoCA ever lends out art, the museums receiving it will be required to include these labels as part of the art.

“We want to conserve the early history of the crypto art space in an immutable way,” said Reneil. “Create an objective reality, an immutable reality from many opinions.”

Partner projects will also be invited to sponsor and curate their own museum wings....

Bell ultimately believes these collaborative, experimental efforts are why virtual museums will continue to flourish while meatspace collections flounder.

“I anticipate that the legacy museum and gallery system will also increasingly have an ‘audience’ problem as the younger generations will demand digital and social experiences around art,” he said. “More Meow Wolf and less Metropolitan or Gagosian.”

[More curated than some NFT museums, but still the rhetoric outpaces the interface. Includes an in-browser exhibition that looks like a very primitive version of Second Life VR called Somnium Web]

Our mission is to preserve the truth. A common truth is found when many voices are heard.

At its core, the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) challenges, creates conflict, provokes. M○C△ puts forward a broad representation of perspectives meant to upend our sense of who we are. It poses two questions: “what is art?” and “who decides?”

We aim to resolve these questions through a multi-stakeholder decentralized platform of art curation and exhibition.

What follows is the M○C△ mission.

M○C△ is a testament to those who dared to believe in a better future that prioritized sovereignty, market access, and freedom of expression in the arts. Crypto art is a visual aesthetic that communicates these ideals. Those who rise to the challenge of creating crypto art are evangelists for a new socio-economic paradigm. M○C△ takes collective actions to form a revolution.

As the first cultural institution of crypto art, M○C△ will become the premier space for discourse around digital art, crypto culture, frontier technology, and the NFT revolution. It will be an experimental playground for reawakening imagination. It will be free-form, refuse stasis, and seek inspiration and leadership from an inclusive and global community.

The M○C△ Genesis Collection is a time capsule for the Metaverse and its travelers. The artworks which comprise the Genesis Collection represent the earliest etchings on the blockchain, and will come to be regarded as the digital cave paintings of our transhumanist narrative.

[There was also an "Airdrop" that distributed tokens to the public:]

We distribute 3% of the token supply to the NFT community. You can check if you're eligible below and learn more about the airdrop on our Discord.

The Airdrop has ended. 59,039 $moca were claimed.

[Works look predictable: bored apes etc. with minimal curation/discovery]

What is BORED. Museum?
‍
BORED is a coin that represents an online collection and museum of artwork on the blockchain...
‍
What does it mean to be a BORED coin investor?
‍
BORED coin serves 3 main functions:
‍
1. BORED Museum uses taxes to buy artwork and constantly is on the hunt to find more artwork on the blockchain. We intend to curate, collect, and auction these NFT's to be integrated into our coin.

2. Each week, many artworks will be auctioned off on OpenSea where 100% of the profit will be used to buy back and burn the $BORED coin.

3. Our final goal is to curate and host an extensive NFT museum for people to enjoy throughout the years while tokenizing the concept of owning a bundle of NFT artwork as they appreciate in value over time.

What are the tokenomics for this token?

For every transaction, there is a:
2% Museum Revenue Share (Redistributed to all the holders of BORED coin)
6% Curate Tax (Buy/Collect/Trade NFTs, 100% of profits used to burn BORED coin)
2% Team Fee (Used for marketing and any human resource pay)

Art as a Toy in the Sandbox of Scientists

Near the conclusion of a recent paper devoted to the use of AI to disentangle X-ray images of Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s “Ghent Altarpiece,” the mathematicians and engineers who authored it refer to their method as relying upon “choosing ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (borrowing Voltaire’s words) by taking the first output of two separate runs, differing only in the ordering of the inputs.”

Perhaps if they had familiarized themselves with the humanities more they would know how satirically those words were meant when Voltaire used them to mock a philosopher who believed that rampant suffering and injustice were all part of God’s plan – that the world as it was represented the best we could hope for.

Maybe this “gotcha” is cheap. But it illustrates the problem of art and history becoming toys in the sandboxes of scientists with no training in the humanities.

If nothing else, my hope is that journalists and critics who report on these developments will cast a more skeptical eye on them and alter their framing.

In my view, rather than lionizing these studies as heroic achievements, those responsible for conveying their results to the public should see them as opportunities to question what the computational sciences are doing when they appropriate the study of art. And they should ask whether any of this is for the good of anyone or anything but AI, its most zealous proponents and those who profit from it.

This workshop on 25 May 2021 helps make sense of the craze over Non-Fungible Tokens—crypto-tokens that have helped some digital artists sell their work for thousands and even millions of dollars.

Our conversation focused on separating NFT myths from NFT reality, including:

What is an NFT, technically and legally?
Can selling NFTs help digital artists of any age profit from their work?
How much does an NFT cost to create, both financially and environmentally?
Do artists give up the copyright to their art when they sell an NFT?
Can NFTs serve as a digital collectible to help fundraise for school programs or sports?

(This recording edits out audience questions and interaction.)

Conducting the workshop is New Media professor Jon Ippolito, a former Guggenheim curator and expert panelist at the symposium convened by Sotheby's for their first auction of NFT art.

My colleague Joe Cora is a software engineer with a background in biodiversity informatics, and he and I just published a scientific paper—which is more predictive than inventive—in which we define a type of NFT that confers virtual ownership of a 3D model representative of a real and rare object, such as a holotype. We term this NFT the virtual equivalent of a real object (VERO). From the moment the VERO is minted, the real object and the virtual equivalent can be sold as separate assets by the owner. Because most regular NFTs lack interactivity, it’s difficult for their owners to feel in possession of them. Compare Jack Dorsey’s first tweet with a VERO of the Eiffel Tower. VEROs would provide a heightened sense of virtual ownership in online virtual worlds, where the owner can show them off to anyone and potentially everyone. Collectors will also be able to manipulate and display their VEROs without worrying about loss, theft, or damage.

How would VEROs help us to describe new species? High-resolution 3D models of holotypes are immensely valuable substitutes for real specimens. Once generated using some form of technology, for example a confocal laser scanning microscope or micro-CT, these 3D models can be shared with the entire taxonomic community. But generating these 3D models is expensive. This is one of the main impediments to the description of new species. VEROs provide a possible solution by allowing museums to use 3D models of specimens to mint and sell VEROs. A rare or one-off specimen, such as a holotype, should fetch enough money to pay for some or all of the costs of generating a realistic 3D model from that specimen. This would make the production of 3D models much more affordable. Just like regular NFTs, anyone can view these 3D models, allowing taxonomists in tropical regions, where so many species still await description, to describe new species without being heavily hampered by the availability of holotypes. This in turn leads to the generation of more holotypes, in turn leading to more funds through the production of more VEROs.

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways.

Local Contexts supports Indigenous communities to manage their intellectual and cultural property, cultural heritage, environmental data and genetic resources within digital environments. Local Contexts recognizes the inherent sovereignty that Indigenous communities have over knowledge and data that comes from lands, territories, and waters.
Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels

The TK Labels are digital markers that define attribution, access, and use rights for Indigenous cultural heritage. Eighteen TK Labels have been developed through direct community partnership and collaboration. Each TK Label can be adapted and customized to reflect ongoing relationships and authority including proper use, guidelines for action, or responsible stewardship and re-use.

Biocultural (BC) Labels

The BC Labels focus on accurate provenance, transparency and integrity in research engagements. The BC Labels are digital markers that define community expectations and consent about appropriate use of collections and data. They connect data to people and environments over time. The BC Labels provide a practical application of Indigenous data governance principles to issues of access and benefit-sharing for genetic resources.

As social distancing requirements remain necessary, and many around the world are experiencing renewed calls to stay home, ICI and Hans Ulrich Obrist are expanding do it (home) with a new version of the project that features 55 artists' instructions. These include new commissions as well as recent contributions from do it (around the world) at the Serpentine Galleries and do it (australia), produced by Kaldor Art Projects.

Explore this additional collection of do it (home) instructions that will take you away from your screens, and recreate an art experience at home. You will respond to the artists’ call, follow their lead, enter their world, and realize an artwork on their behalf. When you're ready to return to the screen, share that you did it! Make connections with other doers on Instagram, #doithome

do it (home) was first conceived by Obrist and produced by ICI in 1995, as a collection of do it instructions that could easily be realized in one’s own home. In Spring 2020, in response to the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new version of do it (home) was launched. “do it has always taken place in public and in private—spheres of life that for many have coalesced in recent months,” said Obrist.

Rhizome’s preservation director, Dragan Espenschied, articulates this as follows. The artifact—the resources such as files that make up the work, which are there even when the computer is turned off—are performed with other resources (usually ones that were not created by the artist) to perform the object. The object boundary includes whatever is considered to be the artifact, plus whatever other resources are brought into the performance.

Decisions about setting an object boundary for exhibition are, at best, subjective and unbound by convention. Should the work be presented in Netscape Navigator 3 running on the cloud, or should we read the source code aloud in a 24-hour YouTube performance?

As part of Rhizome’s online exhibition Net Art Anthology, which focused on historical works of net art, object boundary was drawn in a range of ways:

In some cases, works were presented in a legacy software environment....Form Art was presented via emulation—visitors to Net Art Anthology can open it in Netscape Navigator 3, running in the cloud.

In other cases, legacy websites were presented in a modern software environment. Life Sharing by Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org, 2001–2003)....were made available as a static archive.

In other cases, a work could not be presented without some sort of external resource. Electronic Disturbance Theater’s FloodNet was designed as an online protest in support of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, designed as a “sit in” against target websites that represented interests that were opposing Zapatistas. FloodNet used a java applet – a software application embedded in a website – to allow visitors to reload the target pages, thereby slowing them down. The inclusion of this work in Net Art Anthology involved not only offering access to the original work in a legacy browser that allowed it to function, it also involved reconstructing the target websites from saved material on the Wayback Machine.

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Untitled (Self-Portrait)
Price Realised USD 870,000
Estimate unknown
Closed: 27 May 2021

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Untitled (Self-Portrait)
token ID: 3190
wallet address: 0xfc1e8a007f83d197e7cd5e04408f0e3a33ab9747
smart contract address: 0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7
non-fungible token (tif)
4500 x 6000 pixels
Executed circa 1985 and minted in 2021.


Please note the Christie's team will contact all registrants for further information. Please be in touch with Client Services at OnlineUS@christies.com if you wish to bid on this lot.

Provenance
Estate of Andy Warhol, New York
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York

Special notice
Please note that you may elect to make payment of the purchase price for this lot in the cryptocurrency Ether. Payment in Ether must be made via a digital wallet transfer of Ether to Christie’s. The digital wallet must be maintained with Coinbase Custody Trust; Coinbase, Inc.; Fidelity Digital Assets Services, LLC; Gemini Trust Company, LLC; or Paxos Trust Company, LLC. Only Ether payments sent from digital wallets maintained at these platforms will be credited towards this lot purchase, and we will not recognize payments from digital wallets hosted at other exchanges or self-hosted wallets. The digital wallet must be registered to you, or, if you registered a bid as a company, then in the name of the company. You agree, upon our request, to provide documentation confirming that the Ether payment was made from a digital wallet registered in your name and maintained at one of the platforms listed above. Partial payments of a lot from multiple digital wallets will not be allowed. The cryptocurrency amount will be calculated by us based on the most recent published CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate (BRR and ETHUSD_RR) index rate as determined by us at the time the invoice is issued, and will be disclosed in the invoice. For further information and to view our Buyers Premium rates, please view the Conditions of Sale via the link below.

17:30 Panel 2: Technology, Memory and Change
George Legrady and Timo Honkela – Pockets Full of Memories (2001-2007): An Artwork Installation Integrating Data Collection and the Kohonen Self-Organising Artificial Neural-Network Algorithm [US]
John P. Bell, Jon Ippolito and Meredith Steinfels – Used to be Different, Now It's the Same? The Post-Pandemic Makeover of Museums [US]
Debate
Moderator: Harald Klinke [DE]

"Used To Be Different, Now It's the Same? The Post-Pandemic Makeover of Museums"
When

Thursday, January 21, 2021
3:00-4:00PM
Where

Zoom Webinar (link below)
Registration required.

sponsor

Hood Museum of Art
Intended Audience(s)

Public
details

Meredith Steinfels, Assistant Director, Digital Platforms, Media, and Archives, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth; John P. Bell, Director, ITC Data Experiences and Visualizations Studio, Dartmouth; Jon Ippolito, Professor for New Media, co-director of Still Water Lab, and Director of the Digital Curation graduate program at the University of Maine; moderator: Amelia Kahl, Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood 1918 Curator of Academic Programming, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

It's become a commonplace to hear that 2020 has forever changed the art world, and cultural heritage in general. But this is a story we've heard before. During the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, museums like the Guggenheim, Whitney, and SFMOMA made a leap to digital collections and programming, though many later retreated to habitual practices that were less adventurous. What lessons can be learned from the digital gold rush of the turn of the millennium, and how should museums apportion resources strained under the pandemic to take advantage of this latest transition? Registration is required. CLICK HERE to register.

["Ad hoc approval by team": this sounds like gatekeeping to me.]

Features is the hub of exhibitions, notable projects, and special releases happening in the world of SuperRare. Features are created on an ad hoc basis and are a curatorial decision made by the team. If your proposal is accepted, the exhibition will be promoted on our Instagram and Twitter as well.

What to prepare for an Exhibition proposal?

Title of the exhibition

Subtitle

Curatorial text (no word limit)

Cover image (2000 x 1000px)

Start date

End date

Location (virtual/IRL)

Location URL

Featured artists (links to SR)

Featured artworks on SuperRare (links to SR)

Curators (links to SR)

Related images, ratio 16:9 (cannot be NFTs themselves; can be WIP, installation views, posters, etc.)

Related videos, titles of the videos, format: MP4s/YouTube/Vimeo links (cannot be NFTs themselves; can be WIP, teasers, panels, interviews, studio visits, etc.)

Editorials (The minimum requirement is 500 words, with visuals <16MB each, a title, a banner image 2000x1000 px)

Who to contact?

an@superrare.com

When to send the Feature proposal?

At least 3 weeks before your preferred start date.

Comment on original article: "Wix is the Comcast of site builders. Both spend heavy money marketing, lock you in so nobody can leave, and raise the price each year."

Launched in 2009 by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with the Dutch public broadcaster KRO, Waisda? (which translates to What’s that?) is the first operational video labeling game to collect user-generated metadata in the cultural heritage field. The game consists of two or more users who play against each other by entering relevant tags that describe the content of the video fragment(typically between 1 and 10 minutes long). The goal of each player is to score points by entering the same tags as one of the other players. If a tag matches another player’s tag (perhaps from a previous session for the same video), both players are awarded points.
Woordentikkertje

The Waisda? game has been online in various versions and has been used to tag video archives of several public broadcasting associations. One version was called “Woordentikkertje”(which translates to word tag) which was launched in 2011. In cooperation with the Dutch broadcaster NCRV and the VU University Amsterdam the game was built around the popular tv program “Man bijt hond”(Man bites Dog). On the website woordentikkertje.manbijthond.nl users have created over 760.000 tags, and counting.
Research

With the crowdsourced tags from Woordentikkertje the VU University Amsterdam has been researching the ‘semantic gap’. This gap consists of the difference between the way users tag a video and how professional documentalists enhance content with tags. Where a professional describes a video on an abstract level (subject), a user describes the audiovisual content on a more concrete level (specific elements in the video). Michiel Hildebrand has published the current findings of the ongoing research here.
Spotvogel

The latest application of Waisda? is called “Spotvogel”, which translates to mocker. This online game was developed by the Dutch broadcaster VARA and Sound and Vision in order to create a more accessible and searchable archive of the footage from the Dutch televsion program “Vroege Vogels”(Early Birds). Likewise with Woordentikkertje, the Spotvogel game makes players compete against each other to tag video’s with relevant keywords. In this way, the online archive of 'Vroege Vogels' is enriched with crowdsourced metadata.

Suppose you compose an electronic artwork for an operating system that subsequently dies. It doesn't matter how much creative effort you invested it that program. It does not matter how cleverly you wrote the code. The number of manhours invested is of no relevance. Your artistic theories and your sense of conviction are profoundly beside the point. If you chose to include a political message, that message will never again reach a human ear. Your chance to influence the artists who come after you is reduced drastically, almost to nil. You are inside a dead operating system. Unless someone deliberately translates you into a new one -- with heaven only knows what liberties of translation -- you are nailed and sealed inside a glamorous sarcophagus. You have become dead media. Almost as dead as the quipu.

This is, of course, the dirty little secret of the electronics industry, and therefore it is the mark of Cain for electronic art. When we are surfing the web in 1995, we are surfing on a vast dark sea of dead computers. We have to surf, you see -- because we are just a white scrim of foam up on the surface. The waves of machines rolling in beneath us are moving in with the hideous relentlessness of Moore's Law, doubling in power every eighteen months, one order of magnitude a decade. If you are working on a cutting-edge computer today you are working on one percent of the cutting-edge computer you will have twenty years from now....

You see ladies and gentleman, we live in the Golden Age of Dead Media. What we brightly call "multimedia" provides an a whole galaxy of mutant recombinant media, most of them with the working lifespan of a pack of Twinkies....

It puts machines into a category where machines probably properly belong -- colorful, buzzing, cuddly things with the lifespan of hamsters. This PowerBook has the lifespan of a hamster.

Those who have bought into the NFT art craze—quite literally, by shelling out thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on individual NFTs—aren't just convinced that the art they buy is actually worth what they paid for it; they believe it's going to go up in value over time. These pieces are groundbreaking, the thinking goes—foundational entries in the nascent canon of digital art. But digital art isn't a new medium; it's been around since the 1960s. And according to digital art curators who spoke with VICE, most of the NFT art on the market pales in comparison to what the broader world of digital art has to offer.

"I think many [NFT artworks] will end up being hopelessly overpriced," Christiane Paul, a curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a professor of media studies at the New School, told VICE. "What I've seen billed as 'art' in so many of these NFT articles I find a little horrifying."
Advertisement

Most NFT artworks tend to be digital drawings, animations that play on a loop, or otherwise relatively basic computer-generated renderings. That's not to say they aren't interesting to look at, or even beautiful—certainly, lots of them are. But for the most part, NFT art is nothing new, Paul said. Digital artists have created interactive sculptures of the entire known universe, videos broken up into thousands of individual, privately held pixels, and augmented reality forests—made up of actual, living trees—that own and manage themselves. When work like that exists, Paul finds it baffling that people are so fixated on digital art that's far less expansive.

"I have not seen anything that is absolutely groundbreaking compared to digital art in general," Paul said. "By nature, these do not tend to be super involved pieces. It's not super sophisticated software. It's more like interesting little one-liners."

There's room for those making NFT art to grow, according to Chloë Diamond, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art. As of now, most artists are using NFT as a sales mechanism more than a medium. A majority of these works don't meaningfully engage with cryptocurrency as an idea, or use the blockchain as an integral part of their creative process.

Tool Management and Development

SPN will manage instances and provide access to tools for software preservation and emulation, such as EaaSI, software repository mirrors, and others TBD. Depending on the needs of the membership and the landscape of available tools, SPN may explore support for internal development or funding of new software to address common needs in software preservation.

Exclusive Emulation-as-a-Service-Infrastructure (EaaSI) Hosted Service pilot for 2021
Ability to guide development of community-driven software preservation and emulation tools
Investigation into consortial rates on hosted tool subscriptions: Code Ocean, Lab Archives, EaaSI when ready, Archive-It, LYRASIS, Preservica, others)
Development support for emulators and technical infrastructure that supports software sharing and reuse

[bottom line: it's rough] My previous post addressed the emulation of mobile Android apps. In this follow-up, I’ll explore some other aspects of mobile app preservation, with a focus on acquisition and ingest processes. The 2019 iPres paper on the Acquisition and Preservation of Mobile eBook Apps by Maureen Pennock, Peter May and Michael Day again was the departure point. In its concluding section, they recommend:

In terms of target formats for acquisition, we reach the undeniable conclusion that acquisition of the app in its packaged form (either an IPA file or an APK file) is optimal for ensuring organisations at least acquire a complete published object for preservation.

And:

[T]his form should at least also include sufficient metadata about inherent technical dependencies to understand what is needed to meet them.

In practical terms, this means that the workflows that are used for acquisition and (pre-)ingest must include components that are able to deal with the following aspects:

Acquisition of the app packages (either by direct deposit from the publisher, or using the app store).
Identification of the package format (APK for Android, IPA for iOS).
Identification of metadata about the app’s technical dependencies.

The main objective of this post is to get an idea of what would be needed to implement these components. Is it possible to do all of this with existing tools? If not so, what are the gaps? The underlying assumption here is an emulation-based preservation strategy1.

In the 1990s, Theresa Duncan and collaborators made three videogames that exemplified interactive storytelling at its very best.

Two decades later, the works (like most CD-ROMs) have fallen into obscurity, but they remain as luminous and compelling as ever. This online exhibition—copresented by Rhizome and the New Museum as part of First Look: New Art Online—brings them back, making them playable online.

the infamous “Phoebus cartel” in the 1920s, wherein representatives from top light bulb manufacturers worldwide, such as Germany’s Osram, the United Kingdom’s Associated Electrical Industries, and General Electric (GE) in the United States (via a British subsidiary), colluded to artificially reduce bulbs’ lifetimes to 1,000 hours. The details of the scam emerged decades later in governmental and journalistic investigations.

“This cartel is the most obvious example” of planned obsolescence’s origins “because those papers have been found,” says Giles Slade, author of the book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, a history of the strategy and its consequences....

Although the term “planned obsolescence” didn’t enter common usage until the 1950s, the strategy had by then permeated consumerist societies....

As another example of seemingly blatant planned obsolescence, Slade mentions printer cartridges. Microchips, light sensors or batteries can disable a cartridge well before all its ink is actually used up, forcing owners to go buy entirely new, not-at-all-cheap units. “There’s no real reason for that,” Slade says. “I don’t know why you can’t just go get a bottle of cyan or black [ink] and, you know, squirt it into a reservoir.”

The 30-credit Master of Science, which can be completed online or on-campus, will train students in the management, analysis and visualization of large and complex data sets. A 15-credit graduate certificate also can be completed online or on-campus. A four-plus-one option is available to qualifying undergraduate students in any UMaine degree program, enabling them to complete their bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in DSE in five years.

“The multiple paths to graduation make the new program highly flexible in meeting individual student needs,” says Harlan Onsrud, UMaine professor of spatial computing. “Our students will have the opportunity to become familiar with various data science, data mining, data engineering, business analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence topics. Computer programming, statistics germane to data science, and systems knowledge may be picked up as part of the program if applicants don’t already have these foundations.”

male focus on the accurate cartographic representation of topographical features; conversely, women’s focus on the creation of new data, conveys instead an emphasis on initial visibility (if not their specific nature) i.e. demonstrating the existence of topographical features where they might be otherwise entirely absent from the map.

[$80/month, with free trial:]
Collaborative transcription, translation, OCR correction and subject indexing
Multiple export formats (TEI, CSV, HTML, IIIF/Open Annotation)
1 project
Unlimited documents
Up to 10,000 pages
E-mail support

Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-sized institutions — such as libraries, museums, historical societies, archival repositories, cultural organizations, town and county records offices, and colleges and universities — improve their ability to preserve and care for their significant humanities collections. These may include special collections of books and journals, archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine art objects, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, furniture, historical objects, and digital materials.

Applicants must draw on the knowledge of consultants whose preservation skills and experience are related to the types of collections and the nature of the activities on which their projects focus. Within the conservation field, conservators usually specialize in the care of specific types of collections, such as objects, paper, or paintings. Applicants should choose a conservator whose specialty is appropriate for the nature of their collections. Similarly, when assessing the preservation needs of library, museum, or archival holdings, applicants should seek a consultant specifically knowledgeable about the preservation of collections in these types of institutions.

The program encourages applications from small and mid-sized institutions that have never received an NEH grant; community colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Tribal Colleges and Universities; and Native American tribes and Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian organizations with significant humanities collections. Furthermore, organizations or collections that represent the contributions of under-represented communities are highly encouraged.

[Install libdvdcss with homebrew]

Jon Ippolito, "Shuttered Gallery to Virtual Museum," Maine Archives and Museums Quarterly (Portland, Maine) 23, no 3 (August 2020)

[Photogrammetry setup for iPad that results in a spinning YouTube video. Sponsored by Perloff Foundation]

[I appreciate the intent, but who in any small organization would ever bother to collect something if they had to consider all these steps?]

2019 Levels of Digital Preservation /
Curatorial Guidance with Decision Guide and Decision Tree
Contributors:

National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)

The CI (Cultural Institution) Notices are specifically for archives, museums, libraries and universities who are engaging in processes of collaboration and trust building with Indigenous and other marginalized communities who have been excluded and written out of the record through colonial processes of documentation and record keeping.

The Open to Collaborate Notice indicates that an institution is committed to developing new modes of collaboration, engagement, and partnership over collections that have colonial and/or problematic histories or unclear provenance. This notice indicates an institutional commitment to change and to develop new processes for the care and stewardship of past and future heritage collections.

The Attribution Incomplete Notice is attached to collections or items that have incomplete, inaccurate, or missing attribution. This notice is a signal to viewers alerting them that the record and/or metadata is incomplete. Visibly identifying collections is the first step towards correcting existing attribution to include: contributors, collaborators, other authors and/or communities of origin.

MUSEUM MEDIA Edited by Michelle Henning

Museum Media explores the contemporary uses of diverse media in museum contexts and discusses how technology is reinventing the museum. It considers how technological changes—from photography and television through to digital mobile media—have given rise to new habits, forms of attention and behaviors. It explores how research methods can be used to understand people's relationships with media technologies and display techniques in museum contexts, as well as the new opportunities media offer for museums to engage with their visitors.

Entries written by leading experts examine the transformation of history and memory by new media, the ways in which exhibitions mediate visitor experience, how designers and curators can establish new kinds of relationships with visitors, the expansion of the museum beyond its walls and its insertion into a wider commercial and corporate landscape. Focusing on formal...
READ MORE
About the Author

MICHELLE HENNING is Professor in Photography and Media at the University of Liverpool, UK. She is a practicing photographer and designer, and has written widely on museums, media, and photography in her books Museums, Media and Cultural Theory and Photography: The Unfettered Image....

21 Diffused Museums: Networked, Augmented, and Self‐Organized Collections pp. 473-98 by John Bell and Jon Ippolito

The Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N) is seeking applications for individuals and institutions to support professional development in the area of digital preservation. We are interested in hearing from institutions who are looking to enhance their digital preservation capacities, as well as those who may have digital preservation challenges stemming from the COVID-19 outbreak.

DPOE-N, hosted at Pratt Institute and New York University and generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is motivated by the pressing need for libraries, archives, and museums to collect, preserve and provide access to born-digital materials to fully reflect today’s world. Born-digital materials are those that originated in a digital form. The digital files created today will form the archival record of the future that scholars will use to create understanding and historical narrative around all aspects of arts, science, society and culture.

Professional development funds are available to support library, archive and museum professionals in the area of digital preservation from a wide variety of providers, such as the Society of American Archivists and Northeast Document Conservation Center, as well as with workshops hosted by Pratt Institute and New York University. Online workshops as well as face-to-face trainings (when travelling is appropriate) are supported. Please see our Digital Preservation Training Opportunities page for an ever-growing list of available training which could be funded with DPOE-N Professional Development Support.

[Inuit project required more expert context, but this article makes reference to the Zuni community tagging project at University of Cambridge:] The Recontextualizing Digital Objects around Cultural Articulations Project, a collaboration between the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center at Zuni (New Mexico, USA), the Museum of Archaeol- ogy and Anthropology (MAA) at the Cambridge University (UK), and the Department of Information Studies at UCLA (California, USA), explores how digital repositories can be developed which recognize diverse forms of expertise, including the expertise of source communities, in describing museum objects. Their goal is to create a Web-based system which permits Zuni accounts to be directly incorporated into MAA’s catalog, but that also functions according to local cul- tural protocols about the sharing of certain types of sacred or sensitive knowledge (Srinivasan, Becvar, Boast, & Enote, in press).

The world watched in heartbreak on Monday as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was engulfed in flames. Countless people across the globe recalled visiting the cherished landmark -- they shared digital images of the cathedral online, inspiring hope it could be rebuilt with such resources. Indeed, Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral has for centuries inspired artists, photographers and others who sought to replicate its form. Among those was the late Andrew Tallon, a professor at Vassar who used laser scanning to create massive digital files that captured the cathedral down to its precise measurements.

"Can it help us rebuild? Yes, it can," Columbia art history Prof. Stephen Murray told ZDNet with respect to Tallon's work. "I think it's terribly important."
....
Tallon used a Leica Geosystems laser scanner, which as Murray explained, sends out laser strobes to measure the distance between the scanner itself and anything the laser hits. Mounted on a tripod, you can sweep an entire building, creating billions of dots of light across the structure. "You watch those dots of light come to life on your computer screen in a three-dimensional sense," Murray explained.

Murray also noted that laser scanning is a "surprisingly physical task," involving carrying the scanner to hard-to-reach spots. "It's not for the faint-hearted," he said. "It demands intense skill and patience."

[But IBM did an independent study, and it was 2-5 years for CDs you burn yourself!] With CDs and DVDs, the user does not notice early degradation because the error detection and correction capability built into the system corrects a certain number of errors. The user notices a problem only when the error correction coding is unable to fully correct the errors.

One method for determining end of life for a disc is based on the number of errors on a disc before the error correction occurs. The chance of disc failure increases with the number of errors, but it is impossible to define the number of errors in a disc that will absolutely cause a performance problem (minor or catastrophic) because it depends on the number of errors left, after error correction, and their distribution within the data. When the number of errors (before error correction) on a disc increases to a certain level, the chance of disc failure, even if small, can be deemed unacceptable and thus signal the disc’s end of life.

Manufacturers tend to use this premise to estimate media longevity. They test discs by using accelerated aging methodologies with controlled extreme temperature and humidity influences over a relatively short period of time. However, it is not always clear how a manufacturer interprets its measurements for determining a disc’s end of life. Among the manufacturers that have done testing, there is consensus that, under recommended storage conditions, CD-R, DVD-R, and DVD+R discs should have a life expectancy of 100 to 200 years or more; CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM discs should have a life expectancy of 25 years or more. Little information is available for CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs (including audio and video), resulting in an increased level of uncertainty for their life expectancy. Expectations vary from 20 to 100 years for these discs.

Few, if any, life expectancy reports for these discs have been published by independent laboratories. An accelerated aging study at NIST estimated the life expectancy of one type of DVD-R for authoring disc to be 30 years if stored at 25°C (77°F) and 50% relative humidity. This testing for R discs is in the preliminary stages, and much more needs to be done.

Steven Keating had always been interested in data and learning about things, which is why he volunteered to do a research scan when he was a student. The scan revealed an abnormality. In 2014, the abnormality had grown into a massive tumor. Soon he learned that there were many barriers keeping him from accessing his own data. "And that's what I've been sharing, which is this question: How come as a patient we're last in line for our own data? How come my doctors and my university researchers can see my tumor genome and I can't?"

"There is no one, open, electronic medical record system that everyone knows," explains Liz Salmi, a blogger and patient advocate. In The Open Patient: Healing through sharing, a powerful new documentary from Red Hat Videos, Steven and Liz share their personal stories about advocating for open medical data that's available in an easy-to-digest format patients can access to make proper decisions.

[A compendium of digital curation jobs, especially for technical positions at North American libraries]

Touch screens to guide visitors through the show were replaced with an interactive phone app, which is also a way to visit the museum remotely.

Digital Curation at the University of Salford (Toni Sant's program)

What is Digital Curation? What is an Art Collection? What is a Digital Archive?

Understanding Metadata & Paradata

Practical Ways of Curating Art in Digital Environments (from technology in the gallery to video screenings and presenting art online)

Individual and/or small group tutorials on directed independent study
Sharing outcomes of practical work practical projects


70%

Practical projects/exhibitions
30%

Reflective writing and essays

£1320 per 30 credits for UK/EU students (£2445 per 30 credits for international students)

The School of Arts and Media is the largest School at the University of Salford with more than 4,000 creative students. Across sites at MediaCityUK and the University's Peel Park campus, we offer a huge variety of courses, from fashion image making and styling, television and radio, creative writing and music to journalism, animation, design and performance.

This broad range of disciplines offers enhanced opportunities for specialist and interdisciplinary study, including collaborative work across subject areas.

Objects in our collection that have killed Sean Bean – a thread.

Happy #YorkshireDay everyone.

TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet, like the one we used for the Timeline above. Experts can use their JSON skills to create custom installations, while keeping TimelineJS's core functionality.
Knight Lab
Watch this brief video for an overview of how to make a timeline.
Tips & tricks

Keep it short. We recommend not having more than 20 slides for a reader to click through.
Pick stories that have a strong chronological narrative. It does not work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline.
Write each event as a part of a larger narrative.
Include events that build up to major occurrences — not just the major events.

Media sources

TimelineJS can pull in media from a variety of sources. Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Dailymotion, Google Maps, Wikipedia, SoundCloud, Document Cloud and more!

“DXing,” a form of popular radio listening involving scanning the spectrum for distant transmissions, which predates the beginnings of broadcasting itself. 4 Our own history focuses on the rise of spectrum recordings of broadcast transmissions by members of the DXing community, the RSA’s efforts to produce a community archive of extant recordings, and initial efforts to institutionalize RSA materials within the broader collections maintained by the Internet Archive.

The overwhelming majority of my digital conversations with family, friends and co-workers happen on messaging apps like iMessage, Google Hangouts and Slack. My email accounts have turned into a passive channel for receiving receipts and newsletters. This may be the case for many people. People from 16 to 44 years old spend more time in apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Twitter than they use Gmail, and people older than that spend more time using Gmail than messaging apps, said Amir Ghodrati, director of market insights at App Annie, a research firm.

[Description of Guggenheim/NYU rescue of one of my net art museum commissions. Deena Engels, Lena Stringari, + Emma Dickson ported this interactive flag for the Internet to JavaScript, adding comments with the original Java to show what changed]

Jon Ippolito, who was a curator at the Guggenheim in the early 2000s, described net.flag as “an emblem for the internet as a new territory, one composed of people from various geographical regions and ideologies”. The idea was to allow online users to create their own digital flags based on the colours and insignia of real national flags. The original piece included around 60% of the countries the United Nations recognised in 2002. Napier and his assistants downloaded and analysed each flag to create the correct colours and proportions, and included written descriptions of the meanings attributed to each element. People could browse through past creations, as well as save and share their own work.

The basis of net.flag was Java applets, a technology used to make interactive applications that is no longer supported by today’s internet browsers. NYU students conducted research in collaboration with Napier and the Guggenheim’s curators before embarking on an analysis of the code. Deena Engels, a clinical professor of computer science at NYU, and the computer scientist Emma Dickson oversaw the transfer of the work to the current programming language Javascript.

The basis of net.flag was Java applets, a technology used to make interactive applications that is no longer supported by today’s internet browsers. NYU students conducted research in collaboration with Napier and the Guggenheim’s curators before embarking on an analysis of the code. Deena Engels, a clinical professor of computer science at NYU, and the computer scientist Emma Dickson oversaw the transfer of the work to the current programming language Javascript.

One of the complexities of digital conservation is preserving a work’s original character while accepting that it must move forward to survive, says Lena Stringari, the deputy director and chief conservator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. “This is a delicate balance,” she adds. While net.flag’s code was restored in a similar “style” and the work’s essence was retained, some aspects have changed.

Napier wanted the full list of countries to be included in the restored version—including recently recognised states such as South Sudan—as that had always been his intention although time constraints had prevented it. “It would have been awkward to put out a piece that is about international flags and not include them all—it would immediately imply favouritism or colonialism or something,” Napier says. Other changes included smoothing the jagged edges of shapes in the old computer renderings and adding non-Latin character sets, including Arabic and Chinese, for the texts....

Stringari says that digital conservators forage beyond their relatively small field for strategies: “We refer to various industries, software engineers, archival preservation protocols, emulation models and many other areas that can inform what we do as conservators.” All works based on code and current technologies will require frequent monitoring and migration, she adds.

Having conserved many of the works on his website, Napier knows that net art needs constant attention. “Nothing lives forever, so it’s a question of how long it is relevant,” he says. “Paintings are conserved because they matter to people in the present day. I hoped that net.flag would last as long as it was relevant, and I think it still is today with the political climate we’re in. The piece still speaks to the internet as a place of tribal warfare for territories.”

When it comes to traditional enterprise applications, the average release cycle of a web or desktop application can often be 12-18 months (and sometimes even longer), and its lifespan can be well over 15 years [but] from our own research across hundreds of enterprises, it appears to be a mere 14 months before an enterprise mobile app gets rewritten, and during that time at least 3-4 updates of that app will be produced.

A study from Adobe finds that, on average, mobile apps achieve half their lifetime usage in the first six months.

And that’s factoring in all the apps that do really well. Roughly a quarter of apps are opened just a single time, according to both the Adobe research and previous studies.

most people don't realize that the tops of discs are just as prone to damage as the bottom - if not more so! Although you can physically see the shiny data layer from the bottom of a CD-R, it is actually applied to the TOP side of the disc, just under the label. On some CD-Rs, the data layer is under nothing but a thin layer of lacquer. Damage to the top of the disc can destroy the data all together.

There are a few side notes that we cannot ignore here: The first being that CD-Rs and DVDs are constructed differently. The data layer in a DVD is more protected than that of a CD. However, this does not make it immune to damage.

Second, it should go without saying (but we'll say it anyway) that you should never write on or label a double sided DVD - since both sides are read by the laser.

Last, some CD-Rs have additional protective layers on the top of the disc, for example those with a "white printable surface." These CD-Rs, while more expensive, are far less susceptible to damage.

So what harm will come from writing on discs?

Obviously, ballpoint or hard tipped pens can scratch the surface of the disc where the data reside, possibly rendering it unplayable. Anything that puts high point-pressure on the surface can damage the delicate layers beneath. Although this might not happen every time, it would be worth not taking the risk.

But what about those soft tipped permanent markers that everyone uses? Can those cause harm, too? Possibly. The tip won't harm your disc, but the ink might.

There is growing concern that components of ink from markers previously thought of as "safe," such as many commonly used permanent markers, will eventually penetrate and be absorbed by the inner layers of your disc, damaging the surface where the data is stored and rendering the disc unplayable.

[From the comments] they aren't using actual DNA here, it wouldn't be copied or even accepted by your body in any way, it'd be destroyed. Any cell you put it in would be destroyed or die (DNA is a cell's underlying "programming" that makes it work in the first place, you can't just throw some DNA into a cell and expect it to go about it's business). The only way it would survive would be if you put it in a container of some sort (not savvy with human implants, but a silicon casing or something that the body wouldn't attack would work). You wouldn't need to encode it either as the person trying to steal it would have to literally rip the implant out of you, just have it implanted somewhere discreet and you're golden.

The startup says the key to its approach is separating the process of synthesizing DNA molecules from the process of encoding the digital data. Park says Catalog’s method involves purchasing large quantities of small DNA fragments—about 20 to 30 base pairs long—from synthetic DNA suppliers. Catalog designed a machine that can dispense and stitch the DNA fragments together in programmable ways. The idea is that Catalog’s process uses a relatively small number of DNA molecules—fewer than 200—which can be combined in an exponential number of ways, Park says. The process requires less DNA synthesis, which is the “expensive and slow part of the work,” he says.

Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the nonprofit Semiconductor Research Corporation in Durham, NC, says it sounds like Catalog is using a so-called “library approach,” which involves “encoding information by taking a combination of DNA molecules from a defined lexicon of molecules.”

“By doing this, they don’t need to synthesize new DNA for every new piece of information to store. Instead they just have to remix their pre-fabricated DNA,” Zhirnov says in an e-mail to Xconomy. (His research interests include DNA data storage, and he says he has no ties to Catalog.)

Park claims that by next year, Catalog’s machine will be able to encode 1 terabyte of information per day in DNA, at a cost of several thousand dollars. Current standard methods of encoding data in DNA would cost billions of dollars and take several weeks to accomplish the same task, Park says.

When Microsoft Eats Your Documents
By Bennett Leckrone January 27, 2020 Premium content for subscribers. Subscribe Today

Archivists and authors say software glitches and autosave failures are gobbling up their work. But are the scholars taking adequate precautions?

[Users "curate" an image by stopping a generative process at the right moment]

I’ve been playing lately with generative art and with this project I wanted to do something that’s more interactive. I took the code behind pollock.exe and made a page where you can tell a bot when it should tweet the artwork.

The algorithm (or “the machine”) generates a “painting”, and you, the “curator” decide when it’s finished and should be shared. Or you can scrap it and start over.

I made this as a fun little side project, but I think it does pose some good questions about creativity, and shows how machines and people can work together to create something.

And I specifically used Glitch as it lets anyone take the source code and remix it. I thought about variations on the idea, for example, maybe the curators should be working with the same exact “painting” (right now, every person sees their unique artwork), so I might explore those ideas later, or maybe someone else will.

Video Compression as Fast As Possible [explanation of compression algorithm]

What happens if record (make copy) from one tape to another tape 20 times in PAL.

Jason Scott
@textfiles
Thanks to all the new followers. "Metadata is a love note to the future" is mine, not a quote from somewhere, and I believe it. And live it!
9:28 AM · Sep 29, 2011

Wax is an extensible workflow for producing scholarly exhibitions with minimal computing principles.

It’s comprised of: a few Ruby gems for processing image data and associated metadata (wax_tasks, wax_iiif), a Jekyll theme (wax_theme), and (hopefully soon!) a lot of documentation and recipes for creating, deploying, and maintaining digital exhibitions.

The exhibition sites created by Wax are static.

This means they consist of flat HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that don’t need to communicate in a complex way back to a server. This makes them cheaper, safer, and generally easier to maintain—as long as you’re willing to learn some new skills.

The skills needed to create Wax sites are fundamental.

This means they are largely transferable for use in other digital projects. ‘Learning Wax’ does not mean learning how to use a platform. It involves learning the basics of web development, data management, and plain text editing while leveraging a few great open source libraries and frameworks along the way.

Wax keeps the collection presentation separate from the collection data....

This is to say that Wax has a relatively high but general-purpose learning curve. To get the most out of Wax, you should have some familiarity with:

Using an interactive shell (e.g., Bash/Terminal) to install and interact with programs, files, and directories on your local computer.
Using Git and GitHub to version control and collaborate on projects.
Using Jekyll to generate static sites.
Creating and normalizing data files (e.g., CSVs, JSON, YAML)
Using file-naming conventions and best practices.
Editing HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript.

[A somewhat tongue-in-cheek forecast of obsolete things, created by futurist Ross Dawson in 2007.]

Extinction Timeline: what will disappear from our lives before 2050
By Ross Dawson

When people talk about the future, they usually point to all the new things that will come to pass. However the evolution of human society is as much about old things disappearing as new things appearing. This means it is particularly useful to consider everything in our lives that is likely to become extinct.

Below is the Extinction Timeline created jointly by What’s Next and Future Exploration Network – click on the image for the detailed timeline as a pdf (1.2MB).

[Variable Media Network references throughout, plus this intriguing collection model:]An interesting model of both collection and distribution was used at the William H. Van Every and Edward M. Smith Galleries at Davidson College, NC, USA. The common university model of display is employed where artworks can be found in campus buildings and loaned to other institutions but recently a giant video wall, usually used for lectures and presentations has found itself the home of new media art by contemporary digital artists initially selected by members of the Art Collection Advisory Committee. The unusual acquisition process involved discussion by gallery interns and stories shared about their favourite artworks which led to public votes on which to acquire. The goal was to foster a sense of community involvement in the acquisition process while celebrating the unique contributions of each artist and work. The Galleries initiated a Give Campus Campaign which raised just over $7500 to acquire ten new artworks for the collection. The collection ranges from sixteenth century woodcut prints to the new media artworks recently included into the collection, demonstrating that integration is possible by use of an experimental and innovative approach.

•
We examined the availability of data from 516 studies between 2 and 22 years old
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The odds of a data set being reported as extant fell by 17% per year
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Broken e-mails and obsolete storage devices were the main obstacles to data sharing
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Policies mandating data archiving at publication are clearly needed

The DMPTool is a free, open-source, online application that helps researchers create data management plans. These plans, or DMPs, are now required by many funding agencies as part of the grant proposal submission process. The DMPTool provides a click-through wizard for creating a DMP that complies with funder requirements. It also has direct links to funder websites, help text for answering questions, and resources for best practices surrounding data management.

[Good general introduction to writing a data management plan] Since 2011, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has required data management plans (DMPs) for incoming grant applications. This guide will help you understand the NSF’s data management requirements and help you write a useful, compliant plan. At first glance, the inclusion of data management plans may seem like another box to check off in the grant application process; however, these plans are becoming an increasingly important part of NSF grant applications and are becoming more thoroughly reviewed. To keep your application competitive you’ll want a DMP that is as good as your research.

There are many examples that illustrate the spectacular growth forecast for scientific data generation. As an exemplar in the field of engineering, consider the problem of health monitoring of industrial equipment. The UK e-Science programme has funded the DAME project [13] - a consortium analyzing sensor data generated by Rolls Royce aero-engines. It is estimated that there are around 100,000 Rolls Royce engines currently in service. Each trans-Atlantic flight made by each engine, for example, generates about a Gigabyte of data per engine – from pressure, temperature and vibration sensors....Similar (or larger) data volumes will be generated by other high-throughput sensor experiments in fields such as environmental and earth observation, and of course human health-care monitoring.

A second example from the field of bioinformatics will serve to underline the point [14]. It is estimated that human genome DNA contains around 3.2 Gbases which translates to only about a Gigabyte of information. However, when we add to this gene sequence data, data on the 100,000 or so translated proteins and the 32,000,000 amino acids, the relevant data volume expands to the order of 200 Gigabytes. If, in addition, we include X-ray structure measurements of these proteins, the data volume required expands dramatically to several Petabytes, assuming only one structure per protein. This volume expands yet again when we include data about the possible drug targets for each protein – to possibly as many as 1000 data sets per protein....

From these examples it is evident that e-Science data generated from sensors, satellites, high-performance computer simulations, high-throughput devices, scientific images and so on will soon dwarf all of the scientific data collected in the whole history of scientific exploration.

to be able to use data for the intended original purpose or reuse data for a new purpose needs more than physical integrity, it requires knowledge about the data from a scientific point of view. Research data may also be in binary format and so can’t be visually inspected. Consequently, there will be a need for supplementary information that is not contained within the data files themselves. Some of this context, such as experiment set-up, needs to be captured at the point the experiment was undertaken; other context, such as analysed data or a journal article, may appear months or years after the experiment was undertaken. In general, the creation of the additional context or semantic information does not happen once and then is preserved, but is added to over the lifetime of the digital object. Consequently, we need to take a whole lifecycle view on the preservation of science. Thus we consider the preservation problem as not one of how to preserve scientific data, but rather of how to preserve the *scientific memory* in the digital era. It is thus a problem of knowledge management, as much as the technical challenge of maintaining bit identity....

We wish to move from a point of view of preserving artefacts, such as documents or data, to preserving research itself. It is the knowledge of the science which makes the artefacts useful in the future, both to understand and validate the work undertaken in the past, and to give sufficient understanding of these artefacts so that they can be reused in the future. Thus we see that preservation should be seen as knowledge management. A vision of a preservation system should try capture and preserve both the explicit knowledge of the science, embodied in data, documents and their relationships, but also the implicit knowledge, trying to capture the experience and intuitions behind the decisions made in the scientific process.

“I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that’s it,” Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.

Apparently, that’s not what happened. Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. Macaw’s an expert at finding old games and strange compilations. He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.

Brewster speculated on Twitter that his cousin possibly uploaded the game to a BBS, because it somehow ended up in the “Frostbyte” archive, a collection of old games that was uploaded to the Internet Archive. If you’re curious how it plays, you can check it out using this in-browser DOSbox emulator.

[GIS data to map out clusters of possible grave sites and other data to assist in recovery of missing persons, mentioned by Shelley Lightburn] The Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) is a bi-communal body established in 1981 by the leaders of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities with the participation of the United Nations. Following the establishment of an agreed list of missing persons, the CMP’s objective is to recover, identify, and return to their families, the remains of 2002 persons (492 Turkish Cypriots and 1,510 Greek Cypriots) who went missing during the inter-communal fighting of 1963 to 1964 and the events of 1974.

The CMP has three Members, two appointed respectively by the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities and a third Member selected by the International Committee of the Red Cross and appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General. Furthermore, the CMP employs a bi-communal forensic team of more than 60 Cypriot archeologists, anthropologists and geneticists, who conduct excavations throughout the island and anthropological and genetic analyses of remains at the CMP Anthropological Laboratory.

The CMP does not attempt to establish the cause of death or attribute responsibility for the death of missing persons. Its objective is a humanitarian one, bringing closure to thousands of affected families through the return of the remains of their missing relatives.

This is an ideal attribution
"Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol is licensed under CC BY 2.0

This is a pretty good attribution [missing title]
Photo by tvol / CC BY

This is an incorrect attribution
Photo: Creative Commons

This is a good attribution for material you modified slightly
"Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol, used under CC BY / Desaturated from original

This is a good attribution for material from which you created a derivative work
This work, "90fied", is a derivative of "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol, used under CC BY. "90fied" is licensed under CC BY by [Your name here].

Don't make it too complicated. The license tells you to be reasonable:

You may satisfy the conditions in (1) and (2) above in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means and context in which the Licensed Material is used. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy some or all of the conditions by retaining a copyright notice, or by providing a URI or hyperlink associated with the Licensed Material, if the copyright notice or webpage includes some or all of the required information.

There is no one right way; just make sure your attribution is reasonable and suited to the medium you're working with.

Below we will detail the current state of the law, including the four factors, transformative uses, and cases for reference.

[Do any of these harvesters finally work?]

This article is about how to decode a JPEG image. In other words, it’s about what it takes to convert the compressed data stored on your computer to the image that appears on the screen. It’s worth learning about not just because it’s important to understand the technology we all use everyday, but also because, as we unravel the layers of compression, we learn a bit about perception and vision, and about what details our eyes are most sensitive to.

It’s also just a lot of fun to play with images this way.

The NewPalmyra is one such initiative. Inspired by Bassel Khartabil – a Palestinian-Syrian software developer who had played a key role in pioneering open access data in Syria – this grassroots project creates 3D models based on crowd-sourcing and open data....

Similarly, when an earthquake wrecked central Kathmandu in April of 2015, $4.1bn was pledged by international donors for reconstruction, and an organisation called Rekrei stepped up. Previously engaged in Project Mosul, which creates 3D models of items in Iraq’s Mosul Museum – some of which will also be featured in the V&A’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale – Rekrei began attempting digital reconstructions of the World Heritage-listed Durbar Square in the middle of Kathmandu.

Unlike Warsaw or Palmyra, however, there were very few plans from which to rebuild Kathmandu. Much of the information did not exist prior to the disaster; Nepal’s Department of Archaeology held few plans for the some 220 monuments destroyed in the earthquake.

Instead, they have relied on crowdsourced images, which were sorted by volunteers and fed into the photogrammetric modelling program Sketchfab to reconstruct the geometry of the lost buildings.

Pride of place belongs to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault....

Nat Friedman, however, hasn’t come for the beat-the-apocalypse aesthetics. On Oct. 24, the tall, thin, 42-year-old chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., Microsoft’s world-leading code bank, hops in a van and drives about 15 minutes from his hotel to an abandoned coal mine, where he puts on a miner’s helmet and headlamp. Deep inside one of the mine’s frigid, eerily quiet arteries, Friedman comes to what looks like a metal tool shed....

This is the Arctic World Archive, the seed vault’s much less sexy cousin. Friedman unlocks the container door with a simple door key and, inside, deposits much of the world’s open source software code. Servers and flash drives aren’t durable enough for this purpose, so the data is encoded on what look like old-school movie reels, each weighing a few pounds and stored in a white plastic container about the size of a pizza box. It’s basically microfilm. With the help of a magnifying glass, you—or, say, a band of End Times survivors—can see the data, be it pictures, text, or lines of code. A Norwegian company called Piql AS makes the specialized rolls of super-durable film, coated with iron oxide powder for added Armageddon-resistance. Piql says the material should hold up for 750 years in normal conditions, and perhaps 2,000 years in a cold, dry, low-oxygen cave.

Friedman places his reel on one of the archive’s shelves, alongside a couple dozen that include Vatican archives, Brazilian land registry records, loads of Italian movies, and the recipe for a certain burger chain’s special sauce. GitHub, which Microsoft bought last year for $7.5 billion, plans to become by far the biggest tenant. Eventually, Friedman says, GitHub will leave 200 platters, each carrying 120 gigabytes of open source software code, in the vault. The first reel included the Linux and Android operating systems, plus 6,000 other important open source applications....

Open source software, in his view, is one of the great achievements of our species, up there with the masterpieces of literature and fine art. It has become the foundation of the modern world—not just the internet and smartphones, but satellites, medical devices, scientific tools, robots.

This page shows a list of our Industry-specific Data Models in 50 categories that cover Subject Areas and are used to create Enterprise Data Models.
Here is an alphabetical list all of our 1,800+ Data Models.

Click here to see where our Models are used.

We have written a Short downloadable Tutorial on creating a Data Warehouse using any of the Models on this page.

[Animates global data such as winds from Dorian or fire particulates from the Amazon. Creator acknowledges inspiration from Wattenberg and Viegas' Wind Map]

[Ben Fino-Radin's] Starling is a decentralized storage application designed for use in archival settings, where the ability to demonstrate the authenticity of a file over the course of time is of paramount importance.

Lots of copies keeps stuff safe

When you store files with Starling, it will store however many redundant copies of your file you want, and ensures that these copies are kept safe.

Proof of authenticity

Why blindly trust a black-box owned by one of the big three cloud storage providers? Starling leverages the power of the crowd, using Filecoin’s openly documented cryptographic proofs, so that you know for sure that the person you are paying to store your data is really doing what they say they are, and that your files have not been modified or become corrupt.

Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович" is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.)
@PwnAllTheThings

Exhibit B is this opposition research document on Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Exhibit B is also written in Word. Several of the Web links in it are broken and contain the error message "Error! Hyperlink reference not valid." But in a PDF-formatted copy of the same document published by Gawker a few hours before Guccifer 2.0's post went live, the error messages with roughly the same meaning appear in Russian.
The image on the left, with an error message in Russian, shows the document as it appeared on Gawker. The image on the right shows it as it was published directly by Guccifer 2.0.
Enlarge / The image on the left, with an error message in Russian, shows the document as it appeared on Gawker. The image on the right shows it as it was published directly by Guccifer 2.0.
@PwnAllTheThings

The most likely explanation is that the Russian error messages are an artifact left behind when the leaker converted the Word document into a PDF. That kind of conversion would be expected if the leaker's PC was set up to use Russian.

The other piece of evidence is more circumstantial, but it still strengthens the case that the person publishing the documents intentionally or unintentionally left Russian—or at least Eastern European—fingerprints on the leak. It's the use of ")))" in the accompanying blog post. That's a common way people in Eastern Europe and Russia denote a smiley in text. The grammar in the post strongly suggests that English is not the writer's native language, although in fairness, there's nothing indicating that the writer's mother tongue is Russian or even Eastern European.

Our custom platform enables the public to submit questions or vote on questions they would like journalists to investigate and report. For newsroom staff, our platform becomes a centralized Engagement Management System, keeping valuable insights and data organized, exportable and ready for action. Reporters can easily get in touch with the public directly, and staff responsible for audience growth love that the public can opt-into newsletters and deeper relationships with the newsroom.

Export HTML copies of your notes from Apple Notes

I have tested this on the OS X El Capitan GM and a few of the developer seeds (I can't remember which ones); it probably doesn't work on older versions.

To go in the other direction, see Steven Frank's notes-import script.

People exert significant amounts of problem solving effort playing computer games. Simple image- and text-recognition tasks have been successfully crowd-sourced through gamesi, ii, iii, but it is not clear if more complex scientific problems can be similarly solved with human-directed computing. Protein structure prediction is one such problem: locating the biologically relevant native conformation of a protein is a formidable computational challenge given the very large size of the search space. Here we describe Foldit, a multiplayer online game that engages non-scientists in solving hard prediction problems. Foldit players interact with protein structures using direct manipulation tools and user-friendly versions of algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodologyiv, while they compete and collaborate to optimize the computed energy. We show that top Foldit players excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to achieve burial of hydrophobic residues. Players working collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not only conformational space but also the space of possible search strategies. The integration of human visual problem-solving and strategy development capabilities with traditional computational algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific problems.

Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.

Precisely which computational activities should be preserved in a less computerized world is a matter for those billions of people themselves to decide. The question of whether a particular machine hurts or helps the common good can only be answered by the commons itself. It can only be answered collectively, through the experiment and argument of democracy.

The zero-carbon commonwealth of the future must empower people to decide not just how technologies are built and implemented, but whether they’re built and implemented. Progress is an abstraction that has done a lot of damage over the centuries. Luddism urges us to consider: progress towards what and progress for whom? Sometimes a technology shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the best thing to do with a machine is to break it.

Yesterday, the Library of Congress handed a significant win to digital preservationists. On October 26, 2018, the Library of Congress granted an exemption to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision for libraries, archives, and museums to circumvent technological protection measures on certain lawfully acquired software for the purposes of preserving software and materials that depend on it. This exemption will significantly reduce the legal risk involved in preserving software that is no longer available for purchase. The new exemptions will go into effect on October 28, 2018....

The final rule allows eligible libraries, archives, and museums to circumvent technological protection measures on certain lawfully acquired computer programs (including video games) to preserve computer programs and computer program-dependent materials. The final rule includes the SPN’s suggestion, in consideration of the opponents’ concerns about breadth, that the exemption be limited to computer programs that are no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace. The Library of Congress did create some limitations on the exemption, requiring that the computer program is not distributed outside the physical premises of the eligible library, archives, or museum.