Digital R&D fund for the arts Data and archiving Podcast 4 transcript John Wilson: Hello, and welcome to the fourth in a series of podcasts by Arts Council England, looking at key digital topics brought to light by the Digital R&D fund for the arts; the seven million pound investment in digital projects across the arts sector, delivered by Arts Council England, Nesta, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in partnership. This programme is all about data and archiving. There are a huge number of arts based collections out there, with many arts organisations holding, and indeed creating them all the time. But how can digital technology help to make these archives and the data within them accessible and useful? In this programme we’ll be exploring a number of data and archive projects, including one from the Public Catalogue Foundation, making available huge amounts of public art work; Andrew Ellis: By the end of 2012 around 210,000 paintings will be on the Your Paintings website. Those will come from approaching 3,000 collections across the United Kingdom. Those paintings are the work of approaching 50,000 artists. John Wilson: The British Museum’s approach to data and archives; Dominic Oldman: Some organisations might have information that The British Museum doesn’t have. There’s some information the British Museum has that those other organisations don’t have. But by combining them, and combining them with rules about that information, we may be able to infer additional information that none of those organisations knew before. John Wilson: Another view comes from the Google Art Project; James Davis: Some visitors want an official curatorial view only, and other people want to say what they want to say only, and other people have a sort of range of responses in-between. It’s about a tailored, customised set of thinking that caters for a wide range of possibilities. John Wilson: Along with how the use of the archives has changed with the times; Catherine Kimbell: We’ve had gay and lesbian records that have suddenly been discovered because someone’s effectively decoded what they were called in Victorian and pre-Victorian times, so all the time we’re trying to harvest what users are finding out about the records, and adding that to the sum total of what we know about them. John Wilson: But first to my guests on the programme today, and joining me in the studio are Drew Hemment from FutureEverything, Bill Thompson from the BBC, and Dr. Paul Gerhardt, who runs the Independent Consultancy Archives for Creativity. Welcome to you all. A word of introduction, first of all. Drew, tell us, what is FutureEverything, and how does the organisation use archives and data? Drew Hemment: FutureEverything is a digital arts festival and an innovation lab. We’ve been involved in open data projects for quite some years. As a cultural organisation we don’t hold a collection but we’re very much engaged and inspired by the potential of living archives. John Wilson: Bill Thompson, you made a brief appearance on an earlier podcast. You work at the BBC. You're in the Archives Development Department. What does that involve? Bill Thompson: Developing the archive, that’s the easy way to say it. But I glory in the title of Head of Partnerships Development within Archive Development. There’s a lot of developing going on. Really I'm part of a small group that’s thinking about how the BBC can get the most public value from the things it has stored over the years. The BBC’s archive is massive and growing every day. It’s been curated. It’s been looked after, largely so that it can serve the interests of the BBC itself, in terms of programme makers. What else could be done with it? How could the BBC work closely with other institutions that either create or curate material on behalf of the public to enhance its value to everyone? John Wilson: Paul Gerhardt; I presume you're serving a similar role but within the wider arts sector, offering advice on how arts organisations can make use of their archives and make them more available to the public? Dr. Paul Gerhardt: Yes, part of the job is to put together the arguments, to help them frame and win the funding they need, in order to carry out the digitisation of their archives, in order to make them publicly accessible. John Wilson: Well, an obvious place to start when looking at the archives is, of course, The National Archives. Earlier this week we spoke to Caroline Kimbell, Head of Licensing at The National Archives about why digitisation is so important. Catherine Kimbell: Far more people can interact with documents when they're online than can physically sit in a reading room with a box in front of them. The ratio here is about 200 to 220 views of a document online to every 1 production here, so access is a big one. But another main reason is preservation. I think certainly if your collection or your material gets used in an education context, then if you are not Google-able, to this generation of students you don’t exist. If you can’t Google it, it isn’t there, and it’s not going to get used. Even if it’s only a very top level description of what you’ve got, or what you do, or where you're going, and you can’t find it online, you're really going to struggle to A) reach the ‘born digital’ generation as your audience and your participants. As a result you’re going to struggle to convince your funders what it is that you're doing and how you let people know about it, because the digital route to finding out what’s going on is the primary route these days, for most people. John Wilson: Caroline Kimbell, Head of Licensing at The National Archives, on the issues of access and preservation of data. Bill Thompson, an important point that she made there is that there’s a generational thing, isn’t there? To a younger generation, if you're not there within the Google setup you don’t exist. Bill Thompson: Yes, she said that, and it may be true, but I think that’s a problem, not something we should be endorsing. The fact is, Google-able does not mean, or should not mean, findable. There are many other ways to get access to information than using Google. To believe that something has to be in a search engine in order to be found is, I think, to betray a lack of understanding of how the internet works now and how the web could work in the future. There is an enormous amount of development about technologies, things like the Semantic Web, that would reduce the need for search engines. John Wilson: Yes, we’re going to talk about that later actually. Bill Thompson: Well, the point about the Semantic Web, and other things like that, is that you don’t then have to have this very simple-minded approach. That you type in some key words into a form on a web page and it finds your stuff. You actually do proper, serious research. It seems to me that Caroline is slightly giving in to the laziness of young people and the commercial interests of Google, by saying, ‘If it’s not Google-able, it might as well not exist.’ If it’s not visible on a screen it might as well not exist. I agree entirely. The material has to be digitised. But we shouldn’t just accept the one model of search that Google have built their business around and which they seem to see as the only one we should accept. John Wilson: Paul Gerhardt, do you agree with that? Dr. Paul Gerhardt: Let’s take one step back and say the good thing is that what we can no longer do is to separate the task of preservation from the task of access. There was a time when institutions and curators, could spend all of their working lives making sure stuff was looked after, well labelled and behind closed doors. You cannot do that today. If you're going to invest in preservation then you've got to at the same time invest in the means of making that material available outside of the institution. John Wilson: Well let’s move on and take a look at the specific arts archive which has evolved with the development of technology over the last few years, to offer the public an insight into dance and choreography. The Siobhan Davies Replay Project began in 2006 in partnership with Coventry University, the AHRC and the Arts Council. It’s believed to be the first digital dance archive in the UK, possibly even the world. Sarah Whatley, the archive’s Principal Investigator for the project, explains why and how they did it. Sarah Whatley: Siobhan Davies Replay is a digital dance archive. It includes nearly all of the material documentation, film media, still image, textual material, relating to the work of Siobhan Davies, the choreographer. Principally from 1988, which is the point where she established her own company, but it also reaches further back to the early 1970s. In a way it mirrors the development of contemporary dance in Britain. You can find many, many videos. We wanted to emphasise video because in dance it’s incredibly difficult, even today with YouTube, Vimeo and all the other online platforms, it’s actually still quite difficult to get access to dance. Certainly in 2006, when we began the project, which doesn’t seem that long ago, it was almost impossible to get access to dance on film. But in addition it includes thousands of images, still images, photography of the work in production, and in rehearsal. One of the more exciting aspects, we think, is a lot of unseen documentation. Film material of the studio based work; the dancers in the studio, in rehearsal, making work. From a user point of view you get a glimpse into the dancers’ making/thinking process. We’ve also got two prototypes, which we call kitchens. They're places where the user can see very much all the layers that formulate a single choreography. The kitchens provide access to all of those rough sketches and processes along the way to the work being finished. Why we like them is because it gave us a chance to play with the visual design. The visual design of the kitchen reflects something of the design of the dance. For example in ‘Birdsong’, which is a work that’s made in the round, so it’s a circular choreography, the visual design captures something of those concentric circles, and how the work moves inwards and outwards to the centre of the circle. John Wilson: Paul Gerhardt, let me turn to you first of all. We heard Sarah Whatley there talking about how the Siobhan Davies Replay Archive helps to present not only the finished project, but also talks us back through and shows us the creative process. That seems to me like a very good model for other arts organisations. It could be quite inspirational. Dr. Paul Gerhardt: I think it’s a great model, and I think it’s a good demonstration that a small archive, focused on a particular art form, can design a relationship with the user that’s going to really fulfil the purpose. There’s an important point here, which is there are issues around our big national archives that are very complex, and difficult, and are being tackled. But what the smaller archives; the arts bodies, and the cultural bodies with interesting small archives, what they should do is not wait for these big glaciers to start to move, because they can do really interesting things already. That’s a very good example from the Siobhan Davies Dance Studio. There’s another one. If you look at the British Council, and the work they’ve done on their small but fascinating archive of films made in the 1940s, which were made for an overseas audience. They have been rediscovered, digitised, put on the British Council site and reinterpreted by a young team working for New Deal of the Mind. It’s a really fascinating example of how a new generation has interpreted a bunch of material that was created well, well before they were born, and probably their parents as well. John Wilson: Drew Hemment, the key here is being proactive with the archive. Again, it’s not letting it sit there, but it’s actually doing something new with it. You can create something new out of what’s been sitting there in the past. Drew Hemment: Absolutely. But I think the nice thing of the Siobhan Davies Archive, and what it can illustrate to people thinking of taking on this challenge themselves, is there’s a question that comes before that actually, which is the question of what you capture. I thought that illustrated really nicely how you give people access to dance. What we saw there was it’s not just about the video; it’s all those additional materials. That really nice idea of revealing the different layers of the choreography, capturing that. Also I very much like the way that the design was very sympathetic to the art form, that the visual design really responded. John Wilson: Yes, she was saying how it mirrored what was happening in the dance piece itself, on the screen. Drew Hemment: Yes, so I think there you’ve got a really good illustration of someone who’s really thought through what they're trying to capture, and how the final form’s going to be appropriate and is going to enable an audience to get access to that work. John Wilson: Partnerships are very important. Building an archive from scratch can be a difficult business, and it’s clear that establishing a partnership between organisations is crucial to a lot of these digitisation projects. I’d like to take a look at two different ventures involving partnerships that are bringing art to the online world. Firstly, Andrew Ellis from the Public Catalogue Foundation, the PCF, whose work to digitise oil paintings from all the public collections from across the UK enabled the Your Paintings project, partnered not only with the BBC, but also with the audience, by inviting them to add their own labels, or tags, to the art. Andrew Ellis: We were interested in the idea of involving the public in helping in some way. Particularly given that projects, particularly in the US a project called The Steve Project, ran out of Indianapolis and Washington, I think, was using social tagging processes to show how audiences were actually using different words to catalogue paintings to the words that were being used by the authoritative curators. That interested us, because obviously it’s the audience’s vocabulary really which is the one that’s going to be used to do the searching. What really determined the direction we took was coming across a project ran out of the Astrophysics Department in Oxford, called Galaxy Zoo, in which they had a million photographs of galaxies. Their PhD students were labelling them one by one. It was taking a long, long time. They came up with a fantastic web interface - a tutorial for the public - explained to the public how you identify different galaxies. They put some very clever algorithms behind the scenes to raise the reliability of the data. That struck us as being a good way forward, so we talked to them, and we talked to the University of Glasgow, about the art historical classification systems we wanted in place and also an audience focused consultancy that the BBC brought in to tell us how the public wanted to find paintings online. We brought all that together, created a classification system that suited both the art historians and the public, and then with the algorithms generated by the astrophysicists we created Your Paintings Tagger. That is our mechanism for asking the public to help us to classify and tag - with key words - the paintings on the Your Paintings website. John Wilson: Andrew Ellis, from the Public Catalogue Foundation. Now, in the second example of a partnership venture, the Google Art Project sees gallery spaces and art works from across the world being put online. James Davis, from the Google Cultural Institute, explains more. James Davis: On the art project specifically we’re working with around 151 partners from about 40 countries around the world. This is expanding all the time. You can see in terms of the scale of how the project has increased. From 17 museums a year ago, it’s around 150 museums now. This is because the cultural sector and their audiences both agree that a platform like this is a very good way forward and our audience write to us and they tell us so. They provide us feedback which we incorporate into the product. Because we know it’s not perfect. We’re continually trying to innovate, and add new features and use new technologies, but also increase the accessibility, so that we can get to an even wider audience. Because we all believe that art actually has a massive audience online that is as yet untapped, so we’re just beginning. One of the advantages that we have is that we use lots of Google’s platforms and technologies - some of the invisible stuff that you’re not really aware of when you're a user of google.com. There’s so much incredible powerful technology going on behind the scenes that you don’t really appreciate when you are just using google.com search. We use tools like App Engine and Picasa to drive how this project works, and this is to our advantage that we have access to those. One of the challenges, if anyone else was trying to put something like this together, is what projects and services they would use to drive things behind the scenes. I’d have to say that we own some of the best products and services to do that. Anyone is welcome to use Google products and services for their own ends, and lots of art related products use Google technologies behind the scenes. John Wilson: Well there we are. We heard James Davis from Google, and before him Andrew Ellis from the Public Catalogue Foundation - two different approaches to similar projects. We’re talking about partnerships here. Bill Thompson, let me just ask you about Google first of all there. They’re offering this service for free. You can visualise galleries around the world. You can see paintings on walls. What do Google get out of it? Bill Thompson: Well, Google get a number of things out of it. Firstly, they just get visibility, and exposure, and are seen to be nice people. Let’s not underestimate the importance of the PR aspect of it. They also get to try out these tools and services in different environments, more interesting environments. But let’s not forget the fact there are people in Google, who we have just heard of there, like Steve Crossan, who runs the Google Cultural Institute, who really care about this stuff, who actually do want to make significant partnerships, who want to make the world a better place, who have this bag of tools and technologies they’ve got from Google and can use it in interesting projects that cost Google very, very little. There are all these things going on. However, at the core of it, you should remember the internet mantra: ‘If you're not paying for something, then you’re the thing being sold’. Ultimately what Google get out of this is more ways to expose more people to adverts online, which is how they make money. John Wilson: Paul, so Google there, according to Bill, is taking the commercial long view. At the moment, with opening up the galleries, putting them all online, it all looks very benevolent. It looks very altruistic. Dr. Paul Gerhardt: Obviously that would depend a lot on your long-term understanding of Google, its strategy, and where it’s going to sit. But it’s not dissimilar from the partnership strategy of the Public Catalogue Foundation that Andrew described. Because the reason that Your Paintings was able to be effectively launched, and to get the reach that I hope it has today, is because it was launched in partnership with the BBC. Also, in exactly the same way that Bill described, the BBC is benefiting from an association with a national collection of oil paintings throughout the UK. It’s benefiting from being able to link that collection to its own programmes on art when they go out in peak time, and to say, ‘If you enjoyed that programme, go and see these paintings, or go to that gallery’. It’s been just as important for the Public Catalogue Foundation to find that major partnership, in order to win eyeballs, and to get the access it needs, as it has been for the galleries to work with Google. John Wilson: Well, let’s look at how tools are needed to develop large scale archiving and data management. We heard earlier Andrew Ellis explaining the tagger tool that the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC have created in the Your Paintings project. But during this summer of British sporting success, the V&A have been producing a collaborative archive with its audience about the Olympics and the Paralympics, using the well-established image archiving tool, Flickr. The audience was asked to upload photos onto Flickr of any graphics relating to the games. This could have been anything from quirky shop displays to the road markings of lane closures, protest signs and ticket designs. Catherine Flood, curator in the Word and Image Department at the V&A tells us why they use the audience’s help. Catherine Flood: We decided that Flickr would be a good place to host it. Then we promoted it through Facebook, and Twitter and also through a blog on the V&A site. We pulled out some of the interesting contrasts that we’ve got between graphics supporting the Olympics, graphics criticising it, scale, projects that were projected over buildings, right down to little stickers on the Tube. We just pulled out some of the themes and wrote about them on the blog. There was a little bit of encouragement to begin with. We took quite a lot of our own images to give people an idea of the sort of things they might include. But then it was really up to people to interpret it the way that they wanted to. When we catalogue actual physical objects in our collection, we pay quite a lot of attention to tagging and key words. Obviously when you hand that over to the public, you can’t control it. But I think what we might do, when we download these images from Flickr, if we have the resources to, we might add some more tags of our own, to make it a more usable database for researchers in the future. John Wilson: Catherine Flood from the V&A. Paul, Catherine here was saying that curators felt they needed to often add their own tags and to correct what had been created by the public. Doesn’t that defeat the whole object of the exercise though? Dr. Paul Gerhardt: I think potentially it could, but I would prefer to interpret that as a sensible engagement with the audience. There has to be a to and fro. There has to be a respect for the understanding that curators bring to the material, as well as an interest in, and a welcoming for the vocabulary of the audience, as Andrew Ellis put it very effectively earlier on. I'm just thinking of another example of audience engagement which, if you like, goes beyond the tagging approach. That is the archive that’s been established by the film director Sally Potter. She has put her professional work, much of the private research and production work behind her films, online, in an archive called The Sally Potter Archive, known as SPARK. What SPARK offers to users is the opportunity to actually develop learning pathways through Sally Potter’s work. It could be the colour of a dress that was worn in one of her films. You follow through the design, the decisions made, the production shape, and work out the thinking and the methods behind it. These learning pathways become part of the richness of the site itself. You can jump on, piggy-back them. You can explore them yourself. You can develop your own pathways. Opening up audience engagement can be a very rich experience in its own right. John Wilson: Bill Thompson, you’ve mentioned metadata, and we’ve been talking about the ways in which the archives and the data can be classified through labelling and tagging. Just explain in a bit more detail about the idea of metadata, and why it’s so important. Bill Thompson: Well, in a sense, metadata isn’t even an idea. It is just the catalogue. As in it is the description of an asset, of an artefact, of an item in the archive. It is useful, technically, to distinguish between the recording of a podcast, or a television programme, or a still photograph, if you like the bits that make up the actual thing; the asset, and how it is described. That’s the metadata. It’s the data about the data. What’s of interest, what’s exciting, is how you structure it. That you don’t just collect a 500 word description of something, but you actually break it down into a series of fields with values, to say the recording date, the length, the bit rate, the names of the contributors. If those contributors have names like John Wilson or Paul Gerhardt, you link that in some way to bibliographical records of those people. You start to create a mesh of interlinked information that allows you to position a particular asset within the overall framework of an art form, or an organisation, or an individual. That allows you to take the journeys that Paul was talking about earlier and go from one collection to another collection seamlessly. John Wilson: This needs structural coherence though, doesn’t it, for the information that one organisation is uploading to be understood by another organisation, for it all to mesh together? We heard earlier, you used the phrase Semantic Web. Let’s have another example. This is Dominic Oldman, Deputy Head of the Information Systems Department at The British Museum, one of the leading research museums in the UK, describing his approach to the Semantic Web and how it can be useful at the BM. Dominic Oldman: The problem is that museums all have different databases. They always use different ways of formatting their data within a database schema. Syntactically we’re completely at odds with each other. Also, semantically we don’t describe the data in the same way, as well. We have different taxonomies. We have different terminologies for describing our data. The Semantic Web allows us to put our data in a format which is compatible syntactically. But also it allows us to describe or map our data, to descriptions which are common between different organisations. Instead of having a web page that has a location address, a URL, like www.britishmuseum.org, you put those addresses on individual pieces of data, so instead of linking between pages, you link between pieces of data. Because you do that, you can combine data from different sites, and you can start pulling them into your own applications, manipulating them, and analysing them and perhaps even inferring new knowledge from them, if you're combining them with knowledge of other organisations. In the Semantic Web there’s another term called Linked Data. Linked Data allows you to set these hyperlinks between different snippets of data from different organisations. The Semantic Web is about describing those snippets of information in a very similar way. If I describe an object in the same sort of way as the V&A or a university, then I can establish not just hyperlinks between pieces of data, but potentially I can link data simply by having an agreement about what those pieces of data mean. That means that possibly I can federate searches across different organisations without actually having any particular link between them, simply just having a common understanding of what that data means. It acts like a single database. John Wilson: That’s Dominic Oldman from The British Museum. Now, all this talk of data taxonomy and Semantic Webs, I can imagine there’s a lot of arts organisations that would find this stuff pretty daunting. Okay, so I'm a small arts organisation. I have digital assets. I can’t speak this language. I'm being left behind, I think. I have a mass of data. I've collected it. I have no technologically inclined employees. Where do I start then? Dr. Paul Gerhardt: I think probably one of the things that unfortunately we have to say, is that you mustn’t start from the language that you’ve already developed around your own assets because that’s going to be misleading. We’re talking about external standards here, not ones that come out of your experience and your direct relationship with the material. You will have to get advice. You will have to talk to people like Bill, and others, who can provide some expertise and guidance on minimum approaches that are required, in order to eventually standardise your metadata with some of these other projects. Bill Thompson: Paul’s absolutely right, you do need advice. But there are projects out there which are trying to educate the sector. I've been working within the BBC on The Space. It’s this attempt to bring the best of digital art to every screen. As part of being part of The Space, you have to give us metadata. We tell you what we need. There is a metadata scheme underpinning The Space website, which we have mandated. Now that’s partly because it’s the only way to make it work, but also partly to educate the arts organisations to say, ‘This is the sort of stuff you will need.’ John Wilson: ‘Get used to it.’ Bill Thompson: Exactly. Well, no, not get used to it, but learn about it a bit, appreciate why it is useful. We hope that will give them the ability to take part in some of the wide range of activities that are around for arts organisations that want to get involved with digital projects, and services, and stuff like that. Like, for example, hack days. John Wilson: Hack days Drew, that’s when you are asking people to come in and hold your hand for a bit and help you through this process? Drew Hemment: Hack days are one of a number of mechanisms for really trying to exploit the potential of these archives and databases. Hack days would tend to be maybe a workshop, with some coders and developers coming together with some of the data managers. They may start with some problems or some challenges. You might just get your hands dirty on some data, and really try and see what kind of applications you can build, and how you can structure that around a particular - in this case cultural – organisation’s needs. John Wilson: Well let’s look at some of the opportunities and the challenges that arise when thinking about other organisations accessing the data in the archives for their own websites, and how you can develop a system that enables them to do this. One way of opening up your data is through what’s known as an API, Application Programming Interface, a kind of technological conduit into a big software system. One example of a cultural organisation offering the use of their API is the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Their API is – and I'm quoting from their website here – ‘A set of services that you can use to display Brooklyn Museum Collection images and data in your own applications.’ Incidentally, Art Finder, and the Google Art Project have both used the Brooklyn Museum’s API to display the collections on their websites. Drew, there’s a question of trust here, I presume, isn’t there, that you're offering up this information, this technology, and hoping that other people are going to use it well? Drew Hemment: I think there are two sides to that. One is people using your technology. One is about accessing the cultural content as well. I think the point just made is a fundamental one. We’re really looking at a shift here where we’re looking at recorded culture being made available to people. API is one of the ways to give people access to a platform. The key there is that you're allowing people to build on your work, and you're giving access to that work, so yes there are issues of trust. But I think I’d flip that and say the starting point is a spirit of generosity. Again, as a pointJohn Wilson: Which is what Paul was just saying there. Drew Hemment: -previously well made. That’s not new. The aberration is modern society that locks culture down. We’re returning to a situation where culture is more about a living tradition, where we can build on the work of others, as we’ve always really done. John Wilson: Which to me sounds like API facilitates that sort of spirit then? Bill Thompson: It does, absolutely, just because it gives you an easy way to identify what’s there, and to get your hands on it, and use it in new ways. Also it’s a way that doesn’t necessarily remove it from where it’s originally being stored. Crucially, with an API as the method of accessing a collection, the original collection remains intact and where it was, but it can be used in a variety of different ways. You have that link back to the provenance, you actually know where something came from, whereas if you just throw everything into the big digital bucket, you don’t know what came from where. That doesn’t mean it can’t be used creatively, but in the context of our discussion about digital archives, and cataloguing, and cultural heritage, once you break those connections it becomes much harder to assert the cultural value of something. John Wilson: But if it can be used creatively, it can be misused creatively as well, I presume? Bill Thompson: But use and misuse are the same term when it comes to creative use surely? Dr. Paul Gerhardt: Misuse has always been possible. It wasn’t a game. Bill Thompson: It should be encouraged Paul. Dr. Paul Gerhardt: It wasn’t invented in the digital era. It’s always been there. Indeed misuse is in the eye of the beholder. A creative use of material will be interpreted by some as being an abuse of that access and by others as being the most creative response to it. We have to take that on board as part of our process of trust. John Wilson: Drew, on this question of the sharing of data on open data systems, this is something that you're pursuing within FutureEverything at the moment, isn’t it? Drew Hemment: There’s a parallel with all this interest in opening up and making accessible cultural experiences, and cultural works, and that is the movement around open data. Usually that’s thought of in the context of government data, public data about our lives, our transport, our weather etc. There’s a movement to making that available, publishing that in accessible formats, in formats that computers can read and make use of, in order to make government more transparent, but also to spark innovation, so that people can access that data and create new services that wouldn’t have been conceivable previously. That really prefigures many of these discussions and debates in the cultural space and we can certainly learn from that. There’s been lots of work done about the underlying infrastructure, the standards, that resonates through this debate, and it’s very much a parallel concern. John Wilson: There are opportunities for arts organisations to use their data in creative ways. Data visualisation - this is almost creating visual patterns with data, isn’t it? Drew Hemment: Well, data visualisation is maybe one branch of data arts. Data visualisation is a means of making data intelligible, so it’s actually, I’d say, more of a design practice than an art, strictly speaking. One of the issues about data is it is zeros and ones. Machines can understand it, but we can’t. Data visualisation is a very, very particular practice, which is all about interrogating, exploring that data, writing algorithms and code to manipulate that, to expose different dimensions, to reveal some picture about the patterns, about the stories that the data is trying to tell us. John Wilson: This technology is developing all the time, things are happening so quickly, so this might be a very difficult question. It’s crystal ball time here. I want to ask my guests what they think the future holds for data and archiving across the arts and cultural sector. Paul, traditionally archives have always been about the past, but what about the future for the past? Dr. Paul Gerhardt: I think we’re going to be moving on from the concept of archive. The word archive very much still has locked within it this notion of institutions that hold material, which they have sufficient control over, to release in dribs and drabs however they wish. In essence what we’re talking about, are collections of our cultural memory. Those centres of memory are going to have to become as important to the public, the learner, the teacher, as our public libraries of books are. We’re going to have to find ways in which we can draw on the public value, the educational value of those collections, particularly moving image collections – which is my particular interest – in the same way that we can draw on the printed word. As we have done for 500 years, since Gutenberg. John Wilson: Bill Thompson? Bill Thompson: I agree entirely with what Paul said. If there’s been a degree of consensus around the table today, it’s partly because the three of us have been thinking seriously about these issues for a long time and have come to similar conclusions. If you observe the impact of the technology, something’s become obvious. We need to have standards for digitisation so that the material can be made accessible. We need to have an emerging ontology, with a vocabulary and a taxonomy for the metadata, so that we can find the stuff that could be accessed. We need to sort out a rights framework, and new forms of artistic expression so that people can make use of this material, both to highlight the old and to create the new. We do something for the arts that is similar to what the internet has done for commerce, and the military, and governments, over the last 15 or 20 years. We actually take advantage of the affordances of this new platform to revitalise all of our creative practice. John Wilson: That’s the key opportunity, Drew, is that the archives will not just be about understanding the past. It will be about creating the way that we understand the present and will be developing new artistic practices in the future. Drew Hemment: One thing that is new about today is that every interaction we make that involves any kind of digital tool, leaves a trace. Many of those interactions are with art works. For the first time we are creating these living archives and we’re interacting with historic archives in new ways. We’re transforming them into much more dynamic entities. This does really open up some very exciting opportunities, some not insignificant challenges, and you’ve been hearing some of the ambition and some of the drive and commitment that’s looking at that space right now. John Wilson: Well we’d very much like to hear from you on all of the subjects raised in this podcast. Please do Tweet us at #artsdigital. Many thanks to my guests: Drew Hemment, Bill Thompson and Dr. Paul Gerhardt. Female Presenter: The Digital R&D fund for the arts is open for applications until 30 December 2013. To find out more information or to apply, visit www.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk. You’ve been listening to a podcast from Arts Council England. Don’t forget to share and bookmark these podcasts on the Arts Council iTunes channel, or at the Arts digital R&D website: www.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk.