Seminar 3: Creative use of archive
Q&A
Bill Thompson, Chair:
I think we’ve heard from Paul about some of the real things that are being done
and what happens when you get access, particularly to audio-visual archives. But
of course, audio-visual archives are not the only things there are. And part of the
point about the Digital Public Space initiative and the data model that Jake is
talking about is that it applies to all sorts of digitised information. That’s text,
bibliographic records, scanned documents, anything, and will also incorporate
born-digital material that doesn’t have a real world equivalent. And so it is a very
broad, overarching model that seeks to provide a mechanism whereby you can
find, engage with, if you have the appropriate rights, use or reuse material from a
large number of cultural institutions and crucially as Jake said, to do a lot of that
work automatically.
So it’s not about individuals matching up their catalogues; it’s about taking existing
catalogues, applying some fairly straightforward principles to them, and then
ensuring that the computer can figure out what the connections are with a
reasonable chance of getting it right. That process can then be fixed.
And doing that facilitates exactly the sorts of creative reuse that Paul was talking
about. That John Akromfrah had to trawl through hundreds of hours of BBC
archive footage, looking for just the clips he wanted. That Cassette Boy, who
makes those fantastic YouTube parodies completely without permission that take
words, from largely BBC material, and reuse them, has to watch all of that stuff.
Just imagine how many hours of The Apprentice that poor man had to watch, just
to do the Alan Sugar parody. Whereas, with access to the Digital Public Space,
that sort of fatal, undermining of the credibility of a public figure could be down in
minutes instead of weeks, and obviously there are enormous public benefits that
would arise from that.
[Laughter]
So, I don’t know if anybody wants to kick off with any questions, to Paul or Jake
about what we’re up to, but we’re happy to field them; we’ve got about fifteen
minutes before coffee break to take questions from anyone.
Do we have a roving microphone?
We have a roving microphone; we have two roving microphones! Now, that’s what
I call being prepared. So who would like to kick off?
Eddy Morgan:
Hi, my name’s Eddy Morgan, I work at the BBC.
Can I ask a challenging question which is what I was feeling, Paul and Jake, when
you were presenting, which is, I felt there was, there still is, a kind of creativity, or
fun or excitement deficit, so Paul your examples were moving, and surprising, but
quite recherché, and Jake your examples were good, but quite sort of dusty and
encyclopaedic and Dorling Kindersley-ish and neither sets of examples would, I
think, at the moment, excite and cut through and surprise people. They were good
as they were but they weren’t life-changing-ly exciting.
Bill Thompson, Chair:
So you’re dull, technically proficient, but uninteresting, and far too concerned with
the negative aspects of human existence to be of any real value to the excited and
important people here.
Jake Berger:
Can someone get my coat please?
[Laughter]
Well, without meaning to sound euphemistic, it’s quite easy to be manually excited
which I think is what has happened up until this point and will continue to happen
for quite some time. It’s not easy to try and emulate even the creative processes
that exist in the head of a three- or four-year-old in a way that is useful and saves
some leg work, so that it’s a bit less of the perspiration and a bit more of the
inspiration. It’s gonna be a long time before the kinds of things that the pictures
that Paul has painted are suddenly made massively easier by the type of
automated, machine intelligence view that I’m talking about. But when that
moment does come, it will be fundamental and world changing, and I would say,
you know, hold your breath.
Dr Paul Gerhardt:
I think I would echo that. But the fact is that when you put artists in an archive at
the moment, unquestionably they are fascinated by historical documents, and they
document that experience, that is what really gets them going.
For me, as I was trying to hint, I think the really exciting time will come when what
Jake is building comes to fruition and artists can start to integrate different art
forms in a new form of expression. Now, I’ll say absolutely honestly, I have no idea
what the outcome of that’s going to be and I think that’s really the exciting concept;
that we don’t know what it’s gonna look like but it’s gonna be quite thrilling to watch
the process.
Naomi Korn:
Hi, Naomi Korn. An unsurprising question from me I think, you mention Jake,
about the desirability for the media to be reusable, and you also use the word
‘open’. Of course my eyes, everything open, and you said that and I wondered,
just specifically, what type of licence have you selected for accessibility of both the
data and also the media that’s found on the site?
Bill Thompson:
Ok, well, can you also explain that the media isn’t stored on the site, as it were.
Jake Berger:
Yes, OK
Naomi Korn:
That’s really helpful, thank you.
Jake Berger:
The media isn’t stored on the site. So, is that one done?
No, there’s a couple of things. This is a prototype system to see what would
happen if you tried to do the thing we’re trying to do. It’s not available. There are
literally two people in the entire world that have the password and one of them is
me. We are hoping to share it with the partner organisation who have already
contributed the material into that. Now the invitation there is for any organisation
that does contribute the material, they can have access to it but not at an open
access level. It’s kind of an experimental system at the moment.
We decided a while ago, well we realised a while ago that if we waited for all of the
non technical difficult stuff to be fixed before we started doing anything then I
would have retired and possibly rotted by the time that we started, so we thought,
let’s create a thing. Let’s try and get as many people as we can to play with it, to
want more people to have access to it, and then let’s see if that can help with the
emerging, I think, shift in mindset, mainly, well, partly, driven by the cultural
memory sector that all of this stuff just sitting in archives, waiting with the rights
holder waiting for that magic kind of, ‘It’s you’ moment where someone says, ‘I
wanna give you a £100,000 for that crappy piece of footage of 1970s Norfolk, that
actually it’s not gonna happen’. The way to make knew licensing opportunities is to
give some sort of visibility, you know, you go window shopping, you don’t buy
everything but you probably buy something because you have seen everything.
So, all of those very difficult questions we know need to be answered. They don’t
need to start now but they need to have finished before we do more work on this,
and we’ll be, hopefully, looking to people such as yourself to advise us upon it.
Dr Paul Gerhardt:
I think, also, there will be different answer to different organisations. The BBC will
have a solution to the problem which meets the BBC’s needs in its context, but
every other organisation will be looking at a different set of constraints, a different
set of requirements and so, the idea about the data model is the data model
should be as open as possible so the catalogue is as open as possible, the
underlying assets remain with the organisation that currently owns them, and they
then decide how to make them visible. But, crucially, you know they’re there so
you can either ask for them or you can traverse them.
Naomi Korn:
So it’s a very similar model to the Europeana model, then?
Dr Paul Gerhardt:
Yes, I was at a Europeana conference just a couple of days ago, just yesterday. In
that sense it seeks to be compatible with Europeana, but the Digital Public Space
goes beyond that. Europeana is just an index and doesn’t go above that. The
Digital Public Space model that Jake is working on tries to do something bigger, I
think, in terms of eventually dealing with issues around rights models, issues
around authentication and identity. And the BBC is one of a number of
authorisations, as Roly said at the start, grappling with these issues in partnership
with many other bodies because it’s something which we all face in common. I
think the reason why this seminar’s happening now between the BBC and Arts
Council England, for the whole sector, is because as we move to this digital
culture, we all come up against these issue again and again, and what Jake has
managed to do is persuade the BBC it is an engineering organisation, that it can
just build something in the corner that will help us at least understand the question
a lot better, even if the actual solution doesn’t look like that first answer.
Bill Thompson, Chair:
We’ve got time for another couple of questions. So do you want to take the
microphone, and then I’ll come to you, Susanna.
Audience questioner:
In the 1990s I was working with BBC Imagineering to make experimental
laboratories for mixing up all sorts of talents and also archive footage. How open is
the BBC, and indeed in partnership with the Arts Council, to incubation models for
the cross-discipline that we need to make what’s really going to be exciting and
entertaining, and money-making?
Dr Paul Gerhardt:
I think the answer to that is that they will be as open as the pressure that is applied
on them to open themselves up to this kind of opportunity and you know, it’s great
hearing Bill and Roly and Jake talking here this afternoon, but anybody who’s
worked with the BBC knows that there are great people to work with and there are
not so easy people to work with in an institution of that kind of size. There’s no
question, as I was trying to express in the conclusion of my presentation, that the
openness of the BBC of the future, will be directly correlated with the amount of
cajoling, and pressure, and support, and opening up of doors that the partner
organisations can apply to it. So the more partners the BBC has, the more
involvement in other cultural forms it has, the more, I think, we’re gonna see an
opening up of the assets that they have available.
Bill Thompson, Chair:
I hope that’s optimistic enough for you.
[Laughter]
Er, one question behind you, Susanna, and then if Susanna’s question’s brief we’ll
have time to come to you as well, and then we’ll break for coffee.
Susanna Simons, BBC:
Susanna Simons, from the BBC, but this is most definitely not a BBC question,
and it relates to the issue we were discussing before about there being open datasets but that the content behind it is not being opened, because there’s sort of an
essential conundrum at the heart of this about rewarding and payment for the
content creators and how they monetize the stuff that they’ve got within the
concept of a digital public space, and I’m thinking very particularly about music and
musicians, and in this case classical musicians, where we’re encouraging them to
make their own recording and retain the IP themselves with the hope that in the
long run they might get revenue back because the old recording model is bust.
And I’m struggling, really, with how the two ideas, the openness and then
regarding of the content creators, quite sit together.
Bill Thompson, Chair:
Would either of you care to solve the problem that’s facing the music industry?
Jake Berger:
I guess it’s a very difficult question and a fundamental challenge, and you know I
don’t have an answer to it. But I’m confident that there is an answer and even if it’s
not an answer that is palatable to this generation, I think it will be in ten years’
time, and if the answer isn’t palatable, if it isn’t happening legally then it will
happen on Bit Torrent, and an illegal version of the Digital Public Space – which
will probably be better than the legal one – and will end up with the same result.
Frankly, I’m not bothered which, to me the important thing is that everything held
by any public institution is fundamentally paid for by us and by our ancestors. One
could take a hard line and say, ‘Well in that case it’s ours, can we have it back,
please? Or at least can we look at it and do certain things with it?’
As I say, I can’t see an easy route through to resolution of that in the near term
with the existing regulatory legal frameworks, but I’m confident that the case is
strong enough for it changing that, by hook or by crook, it will. That’s probably not
a very political answer, but it’s my personal one.
Bill Thompson, Chair:
Paul?
Dr Paul Gerhardt:
Well, I guess...
Bill Thompson, Chair:
He’s dug a hole, do you want to leap in it?
Dr Paul Gerhardt:
[Laughing] I guess that the work around the Digital Public Space and access to
these collections is not happening in isolation. It’s happening at the same time that
there are structural changes across the provision of cultural in all the areas that
we’re familiar with. The issue is, as Jake has suggested, is the Digital Public
Space project gonna be ahead of the curve? Or is it gonna be somehow behind it,
later on, and picking up the pieces? I think being ahead of the curve means that
we can begin to tackle some of those problems proactively.
Bill Thompson, Chair:
Ok, thank you.