 
we've got quite a
decent number of people in the room now
and i'd like to
invite adam to kick us off if that's
okay?
Thank you
Nau mai, haere mai, piki mai
Tena kotou tena kotou
tena tatou katoa
I'm Adam Moriarty, thank you
for
joining us today I'm Adam Moriarty from
Auckland Museum
um and one of the members
of the AI4LAM
New Zealand Australia chapter 
thank you for for taking some time out
today to join us. I'm looking forward to today's
session we've got two fabulous speakers
but before we continue,  Alexis would
you like to introduce yourself?
yeah hi, good morning to
Australians and Good Afternoon to New
Zealanders and anyone else who might be
joining us,
I'm the Manager of Digital Innovation
here at the University of Adelaide
and in opening i'd like to
acknowledge the Kaurna people who are the original custodians of the Adelaide
plains
and the land on which i'm working and
joining you today, I recognise that we've got colleagues
from all across the country joining us
today and i'd like to extend that
respect
to other traditional owners and
acknowledge their past, present, and
ongoing connection to the land and
cultural beliefs.
i'd like to welcome you all on
behalf of the australian new zealand
chapter of artificial intelligence for
libraries archives museums.
In case you are not familiar
with this network it's a collaborative
framework for libraries archives and
museums to organize
share and elevate their knowledge about
the use of artificial intelligence.
In the early months of this chapter
we're pleased to report that around 90
people across australia and new zealand
have joined the relevant slack
channel
with more on the email list and have
demonstrated a really high degree of
interest and engagement so that's really
exciting to see,
and we're very happy to report that we
had about 80 registrations today
so if this is your first AI4LAM webinar we'd really like to
welcome you and and thank you for
joining us
I just want to in terms of
housekeeping point out that today's
session will be recorded
and that will be posted online after
the event. You'll be sent a link to that so
please feel free to revisit or share
with your colleagues
and i'd like to invite you to feel free
to use the chat function
at the the bottom of your
screen
in which you can introduce yourself, talk about your interest in the topic
of today's discussion,
or ask questions of our panelists at any
point during the session.
Our colleagues Ingrid Mason and Mary
Filsell are participating in that chat
function as well
and they're going to keep things
kicking along behind the scenes and
make sure that they're monitoring your
questions
So with that i might just hand back
to adam to introduce our excellent
speakers for today.
Awesome thank you, now i have that the
great pleasure of introducing
Sydney and Rhys. Starting with
Sydney Shep
is a reader in book history and the
printer at Wai-te-ata Press :: Te Whare Tā O Waiteata, Te Herenga Waka
the Victoria University of Wellington. 
She focuses on the interdisciplinary
study of transnational and cross-cultural book history and
print culture
in the context of history of empire,
history of technology
and the history of reading. Her current
research focuses on big cultural data
and collaborative kaupapa Māori approaches
and and is grounded in theories, methods
and practices of digital humanities,
spatial history, and cultural informatics
In 2014 she was awarded a Marsden fund
grant, her third, to study William Colenso and
the Victorian republic of letters
with a focus on personal geographies and
global networks.
Sydney is also a practicing letterpress
printer, exhibiting book artist and
designer bookbinder who undertakes
creative research commissions at Wai-te-ata Press
so thank you and welcome Sydney,
great having you here today
and and Rhys Owen, a research fellow
at Wai-te-ata press
his background is in software
engineering, logic and computation
and cultural informatics including
working with New Zealand biographical
networks and the national registrar of
archives
a necessary national register of
archives and manuscripts which led him
to a technical lead position in Sydney's
Marsden funded team researching William
Colenso
and now a new role as creative coder and
digital artist,
which is totally a job title i want in
case anyone's asking,
he now contributes to ongoing research
and development
in Māori information and knowledge
systems using semantic web technologies
as a member of Sydney's Victoria University Science for Technological
Innovation National Science Challenge team. Crikey though
what a biography
for both of you. At auckland
museum we've been watching the work that you've been doing for some time and
it's really exciting to have you talk about
the project and the Marsden grant
project that you've been running so i
will
hand over to you now and i thank you
and welcome.
Kia ora, welcome and bonjour. Kō Sydney Shep tāku ingoa.
Hei kaiwhakahaere o Wai-te-ata Press, Te Whare Tā O Waiteata.
And welcome to you all it's great to kick
off this session to share a bit about
some of the research that we've been
involved with
over the last few years and some of the
provocations that we hope
will generate discussion about
these kinds of projects within the
cultural sector but
I thought i'd start off 
with my favorite museum in the world
and anytime you know, if
they let me out of this country if
that's ever going to happen again this
is where
i would want to go. So this is the Pitt
Rivers Museum in Oxford
and it's about 26000 objects and it's
the original collection
that was collected by Lieutenant General
Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers,
i didn't give him that name, and he
bequeathed his original collection
to Oxford and he'd gathered it
as he went on his military excursions
around the world
fighting in the Crimean War, he served in
Malta,
in England, Canada and Ireland
and he was really interested in firearms
and weaponry
so that was the core of the collection. He used a global network of friends
dealers and auction houses to help build
that collection
and today it's grown to over half a
million items
including photographic film manuscript
and sound collections as well as
cultural heritage objects from around
the world and as you can see in this
image or two, cabinet upon cabinet of
stuff you can't fit anything else let
alone visitors in there. Their stuff is arranged thematically and
the museum enables the visitor to
explore
families of objects across time and
space
and engage in a kind of archaeology of
knowledge
Pitt Rivers' idea was to highlight how different cultures across
different times solved similar design
problems
what was called the typological series
or comparative system
helped to illustrate his views on the
evolution of design and technology
what he called the connection of form
which in turn made him an influential
figure in the development of archaeology
and evolutionary anthropology
so like many other collectors Pitt Rivers
transformed his initial
cabinet of curiosity and is collecting
mania
from a storehouse of static objects to a
dynamic visual
tool for creating organizing recording
and preserving knowledge
but i always thought how do visitors
interact with these Wunderkammern,
the surfeit of objects seen here
disposed in the bespoke display cabinets
or part of the museum's virtual tour on
the right hand side where you can do a
360 and go absolutely dizzily
through some of these collections. How do
viewers make meaning of something like
Neil Pardington's
photographic Kunst Cabinet, his artist cabinet, these were
shot at Te Papa and this series called
the vault
exemplifies that kind of
combination of allurement and engagement
with
the kind of perplexity and curiosity. How
do we
look at things like this whether it's
the
wet objects in the lower left-hand
corner or
the collection of skulls
in the upper left, quite a daunting
prospect even if you haven't been there
and what about this one the attic
at Wellington Museum, top storey of the
museum that is basically again a cabinet
of curiosities or
Wunderkammern so one of my inspirations
was the Wunderkammern, but the other was
trying to probe what the nature of
research actually was,
whether you're a historian or not, the
idea of serendipity is an integral part
of our
toolkit, part of the most exciting reason
that we're lured back into archives
again and again and again. So stumbling
across
hitherto unknown sources making
unexpected connections and telling new
stories with old objects is an
experience
that has been characterized as the
allure of the archive,
and indeed exemplifies the experience of
the Wunderkammern
or the cabinet of curiosities? In her
highly evocative work
Le Goût de l’archive, the allure or more
precisely, the taste
of the archive, french pre-revolutionary
historian Arlette Farge suggests that the
reality of the archive
lies not in the clues it contains but
in the sequences of different
representations of reality
so as a historian she characterizes us
as a prowler, one could even say a flaneur,
someone who is searching for what is
buried away in the archives, yes
looking for the trail of a person or
event, yes
but always remaining attentive to that
which has fled,
which has gone missing, which is
noticeable by its absence
i think of that allure as ghost-like
traces and suggestions
hints, whispers, odors that populate the
archival encounter
and that the result is storytelling.
It's a form of a palimpsest, a layering
or an assemblage of objects
that evoke much more than simply
physical material forms
So, Wunderkammern, serendipity and palimpsests,
these were the inspirations for a
2016-17 exhibition at the Alexander
Turnbull gallery in wellington
called Unexpected Connections, co-curated
by my research assistant Charlotte
Thompson Darling
and technical lead Rhys Owen as part of
our Marsden funded project on William
Colenso
and the Victorian republic of letters we
took a fresh look at the multi-layered
world
of 19th century polymath William Colenso
and his contemporaries.
Now like many Victorians William Colenso
was a man of many interests
often best known as a printer, but also a
missionary, a linguist
a educationalist, an author
a politician, a letter writer, botanist
lexicographer, explorer. Such polymaths both male
and female lived rich interconnected
transnational lives
that populate the pockets and corners of
our 19th century reimaginings
yet they remain challenging figures
biographers and historians alike
in 1938 Jean-Paul Sartre asked 'is
biography even possible?'
and some 70 years later Elizabeth Podnieks remarked that today the two greatest
challenges notable in biography
arise both from technologies that allow
for radical new ways
of producing disseminating and
theorizing the genre
and from an expansion of the definition
of what constitutes biographical
expression.
So we thought one way of exploring what
biography in the digital age might look
like was via
the exhibition which used the popular
Victorian aesthetic and knowledge
building platform of the Wunderkammern
objects were grouped loosely by themes
and housed in some of Turnbull's
original bookcases,
period furniture and a Persian carpet
evoked the
gentleman's club, or the salon.  Viewers
could sit, compose their own stories in an
atmosphere of intimacy and reflection. Some visitors suggest
we pipe in tobacco smoke, others
recommended
a half empty tumbler of whiskey on the
revolving book stand.
Our key aim was to study the
intercrossings of people,
places and communication forms,
technologies and practices
that shaped 19th century knowledge
networks.
We asked how can we model 19th century
polymathic networks
and think of biography as a complex
concatenation
of multi-dimensional and multimodal
meshworks
in Tim Ingold's sense of the term or as
Tim Hitchcock terms them life courses or
life grids. Now, social network analysis
is a pretty standard computational
approach
but we also wanted to understand the
development, circulation and impact of
ideas and practices across a broad
spectrum of scientific
intellectual religious political
cultural
and social domains. How could
a collection of both physical and
digital objects
help us to begin to understand the
topography, the temporal
and spatial groundedness of these
interconnected
worlds?
A highlight of the exhibition and its
ongoing legacy artifact is the digital
artwork entitled
Unexpected Connections re-imagining the
19th century through generative art.
I hope you had a chance to explore be
amazed be curious
and be filled with the kind of
unexpected connectivity
that we thought of when we were
imagining let alone building this the
work composes
multi-layered images, those palimpsests
drawn randomly from a curated collection
of some 300 digitized objects and it
complements the visual
or the physical exhibition by suggesting,
if not
exposing, how serendipitous links between
objects
can be assembled to create beautiful art
works evocative palimpsests
that have the potential to reveal new
connections and
tell new stories.
Unexpected Connections took a fresh look
at the Australian academic printmaker
and creative coder Mitchell Whitelaws
interactive work
Succession: digital fossils for an
industrial age.
Mitchell was up at newcastle on time and
he was thinking of
exploring what does industrial
capitalism
mean today? what is its effect in the
contemporary modern moment?
what is the future for industrial
capitalism?
His work reveals layers of our shared
heritage rearranging and compressing
them to seek out new meanings and latent
stories
as he says our industrial culture was
founded on coal
a fossil fuel a compressed residue made
from the dead bodies of
ancient plants and animals. For him
Succession in turn produces visual
fossils,
compressed energy to fuel reflection on
the past
and speculation on the future.
I'll turn now to my colleague Rhys to
explain how we localize the project
critically technically and aesthetically,
and some of the challenges that emerged
along the way.
We'll then conclude with some
observations of the future of this
legacy project.
So over to you Rhys.
Thank you sydney, thank you everybody
for
being here
I'm Sydney's software guy, i was a tech
lead on this project and she
simply asked me to localize to pick up
Mitchell Whitelaw's work and
produce a version suitable for the
Colenso
exhibition, so i'm going to dive straight
in
and look at a piece of code now.
There we go javascript
mostly Mitchell Whitelaw's of course
with some
possibly some changes
made by myself. There's only one word
that i'd
really like you to notice,
and that's that word random more or less
in the middle of the screen there
math.random so
Mitchell's the
the way the code was actually working
was with this constrained randomization
and the little piece of code that we can
see there
is actually deciding on how
the next image might be
overlaying, or cropped or replicated
tiled across the existing image
across the artwork that's being
essentially
built up. So
randomization and the selection of what
which images make the artwork
and randomization in
how the one artwork is transformed to go on
to the other
and critically an operation
called blending that happens in the
browser
that that does the detail work of
putting one image on
mixing two images to create a third
and this
is that basic set of
global composition operations
that that can be used to produce a third
image out of two inputs
so somehow Mitchell was
getting the the images that he was
making
from the material from Newcastle
mixing and matching and combining them
and blending them
using these fundamental operations in
the browser.
So just moving on,
we can now look at the entities that
were actually the the
the imagery that
that was the source for these for these
random
operations. What what you're looking at here are
what Digital New Zealand calls stories,  sort of
self-curated little collections of imagery or text
drawn from out of all
any or all of the repositories that
that Digital New Zealand
partners with ,so
you can see my name pops up in
in a few of these little collections of
images,
there's one from um
MTG Hawke's Bay and there's, a there's a
new
one there from someone called Mary Hay
uh i don't recall seeing that before so
um the research on Colenso
is ongoing clearly but
i used the Digital New Zealand API
to
randomly select from out of these
uh sets of images
and then to perform those random
operations
much along the lines of Mitchell's code
to generate the
the images that you see so
uh there's a fairly immediate
step in between
this the the the
uh stories that have been assembled here
and
the use of the images in the
in the application
and that's the question of whether we
actually have permission to do that
so i'm going to just use
one item
this one here which is William Colenso's
press proof of the treaty,
now you probably didn't notice but it
was in one of the
pictures that Sydney showed, uh
this the original was actually on the
wall
in the exhibition in the Turnbull
gallery
and the question is then can
we make use of this in the digital
artwork that was also on the wall
and the little iPad on
on the wall in the in the gallery room
so that's sorted out with this
uh with this from Digital New Zealand
and it's
saying that, the
Digital New Zealand is not aware
of what the rights status is
of the item that we just saw
uh Digital New Zealand doesn't know and
the reason for that
and we won't we won't delve
in behind it the reason is that
the Alexander Turnbull library doesn't
give us
give us a rights status for
for this particular item in terms of our
application that
actually means that we could not use
this
the image that you just saw
and and that led actually to a really
kind of odd thing that although the
the exhibition the the gallery
and the items on the wall were
primarily from the Turnbull Library,
the digital artwork
its kind of center of gravity is
is probably more Te Papa than
than anywhere else, with contributions
uh scattered around the country
and only a very small amount of material
from
the Alexander Turnbull library itself
so
that's the rights management issue.
Then the next kind of
issue that rolled into
the design and how the app actually
worked
was the question of
of what what you can actually do with
the Digital New Zealand API
now um the digital new zealand API
the licensing for it is a kind of a
moving target
and i was quite surprised
when we came to prepare slides for this
talk
at how far along that API has moved
it it now 
has rather more
in the way of constraints than it used
to
and um
looking at the looking at the fine print
here
it's clear to me that it's actually time
that we
re-engineered some aspects of the
application
because we we fall foul of some of the
conditions of use in the
revised Digital New Zealand API
On the positive side of the ledger
the whoever has revised the API
is now aware of a
particular structuring that we chose to
use for
for the API
and that structure
was that we would use the API in the
background
we were actually the API is used in the
gitlab pipeline
that does some processing of the
um the the metadata that's pulled down
from those Colenso
stories that you saw at the start and of
course as i've just described the very
first operation is to check the rights
for the images
there are quite a number of other um uh
um quite another quite a number of other
processes that happen in the background
to do with sorting out different types
of images and seeing whether the
the urls that Digital New Zealand
supplied were to web apps themselves or
to pdfs or whether they were directly to
images
whether there was security problems or
any other
sorts of problems but the 
output from the gitlab pipeline
is a configuration that is then
rolls into the web application so we've
got a a
kind of a two-part
structure we
have a we have a uh
a back room if you like that knows the
Digital New Zealand API
key, mine to be precise,
that its output is
is the whole of the web app and the web
app includes
configuration that allows it to reach
directly out
to whichever repository is holding the
image that is
going to be used so
inside your browser a random selection
of
five images will be made
those images will be retrieved from the
content partners from Digital New
Zealand's the appropriate content
partner
there will then be this dice rolling and
randomization in terms of cropping
tiling
placement of images but also in terms of
the
blending how the how the
actual screen in the application is
composed
right so there we are we we had our
exhibition
um so far so good
um a little while down the track
we struck some problems and
and i've dug out the email
uh that followed on from
from a um
from a major problem which occurred
wherever
we were picking out newspapers
image imagery of newspapers that was all
coming from papers past
and of course the first point to
make here is how absolutely
valuable being able to actually reach
out
to someone while trying to sort out
seemingly an issue with the API
with coding or whatever being able to
reach out to someone
at a National Library
was to to
to be able to move move forward
so here's a little conversation with
Emerson he explains
that uh Papers Past
were had a bit of a re-architecture of
their
their URLs that uh
Digital New Zealand hadn't
caught up with that there was a bit of a
gap in what was going on
at their end
so this this is the bit
that um was the unwelcome bit but the
unexpected bit
was to come back nearly a month later
and have
Sydney report that the workaround
that i'd put in place which was to drop
all of the newspapers
made the the uh
made the compositions from
the app much much
better now.
we we, Sydney and i ended up talking a
lot about
about this about
uh about random the
random but also about the fact that
that putting the puzzle together in your head
which is what you do when you have one
of these
very strange blended images
that it's what's going on in your head
that's really interesting
and that the the
processing that happens when you see
type when you see words
was somehow it seemed getting in the way
of appreciating the otherwise sort of
pastel or watercolor or translucent
overlays that were happening with the
non-type
material so
here
here is a commentator
that i found yesterday maybe
day before talking about this sort of
what's going on here this sort of theory
theorizing
but what i liked about this quote is
that the
the the commentator
uh chooses to refer to Brian Eno
who's um who
who's uh who's described himself as a
non-musician among musicians,
he didn't let the fact that he
was not a music virtuoso
stop him from being a very
productive member of
a rock band,
and that he found that the nature of
that involvement
was this iteration and
of um, in his case music,
of course, in my case what i was doing
was this
completely weird process that Mitchell
described he said he'd spent three
months
picking and choosing data
while writing code picking and choosing
images writing code
and then seeing what it looked like in
pursuit
of an aesthetic and
that was quite a new thing for me the
the whole idea that i might
actually my work might involve an
aesthetic
was um exceedingly strange shall we say
but i think on that on that note
um just um finishing up with that
progress if you like from software
engineer to creative coder
uh that
that transition is
is my reflection on
is thinking about that is really
my counterpart to what i think
the whole idea of the digital or
generative
artwork is that that it
it makes something go on in your head
but
i'd like to hand back to Sydney now
to carry the carry the discussion on.
okay thanks Rhys, I'm
aware of time and what i might do is
just
a bit of an overview of the what next on
this
project it is a legacy project
if we had world enough time and funding
we'd continue to refine to add to
to fix some of the quirks um but i guess
what was really
useful for us was to get some feedback
from specific users
and one of them suggested that the
layers and the masking effect
generate curiosity and the
juxtapositions often lead to something
akin to metaphorical astonishment
inviting me to not only understand the
component pieces
to reverse engineer the ingredients but
to also
pattern seek by imagining causal
connections between them
to resolve these gestalt images into
something connectively meaningful
other users said to us that you know
have you got an option
to share the images that have been
produced can we save and store the
images
and most intriguingly can we
generate our own images by selecting
which basic of five images that we want
so these all led us to start thinking
about where to take
the project but in a broader sense
quite apart from migration of
platforms and softwares and all that
gory stuff that you have to deal with
with legacy projects
we started speculating as to whether the
kind of
future of AI as embedded in
cultural heritage institutions, should it
be embedded as business as usual or is
it just a nice to have something that you
know creative researchers do
people who want to interrogate
historical processes,
is that the nice to have or business as
usual and is there a role there for
cultural heritage institutions to
champion
what in effect is a digital lab
so that you can not only build projects
like these
but more specifically build new kinds of
technical frameworks
for engagement with your publics. So i'll
leave it at that and we'll open the
floor to questions?
Wow thank you Sydney and Rhys that was
really
interesting and there are so
many threads that i would be interested
in picking up out of your
um so many different angles from which
we could explore this. i'd like to remind our audience that
you feel free to ask
a question or make a comment in the chat
window
and adam or i will um share those things
with sydney um
Ingrid and Mary will help us make
sure we're on top of those
but perhaps i can start and i'm
wondering how to
articulate this and i hope it comes
across correctly but you said
in the opening parts you talked a lot
about terms like storytelling and
palimpsest and
the way we do history often depends
upon material culture and archives and
those sorts of things
and there's a necessary and Colenso is a
perfect example of this isn't
a necessary, not necessary a
an effect of that which sometimes means
that when we tell history
it's centered on a protagonist to take
the storytelling metaphor a little bit
further that is
gendered in a certain way, that is
culturally represented in a certain way,
and um i wonder whether your project is
demonstrating a bit of the possibility
of tech to sort of toss that balance up
in the air a little bit more and perhaps
make the protagonist someone other than
the person who
wrote the archive, if that question makes
sense?
it's a really good question and thanks
for it because, 
my most recent work is shifting
the voice of the archive from
those you know single
embodied entities as in people
um to the objects and getting the
objects to tell their own stories
so what does an autobiography of a book
look like what is
what's you know the beautiful images on
your wall what are those birds talking
about between each other
that sort of thing so i think in my
research journey
the while um
making connections between disparate
objects
enables you to tell one kind of
narrative
i think the ways in which those objects
interact and
have different lives that aren't
subsumed
by that master narrative that single
male
colonizing perspective really liberates
a historian to think
in Hayden White's terms that all history
is
narrative but who is telling the story
and who is telling the story and who
owns the story is as much an indication
of your
positionality as it is an impoverishment
potentially or a liberation of those
objects in the archives
whether they exist or not...
That's an interesting comment there at
the end..
Adam did you have a question? yeah i
said and i'll say i'll just remind
people to yeah ask ask questions in the
chat
and we'll be monitoring those i guess
working
in in an organization that's spent i
don't know the last decade digitizing
collections it is really amazing to see
these kind of new ways
of of accessing them and sort of
exploring
the collections and so i guess just my
small pitch there is just you know
working with Digital New Zealand,
working with those large aggregators is
a fantastic way for museums,
archives, libraries to get their content in front of researchers
like yourselves and something that we
should continue to push that's not a
question that was just a pitch for
for Digital New Zealand to be honest
because i think they're amazing! 
my question is ... associated
Rhys's point about making sure your
rights
are clear as well there's a really
important hand in hand part of that as
well
and i i i say my that the rights teams
i'm sure in all organizations are
you know well aware of the many
challenges but trying to standardize and
i know the digital museum's done some
fantastic work
to try and standardize that i was really
interested in that last point you made
uh sydney around how do we how do we
embed this i know we've had some
conversations
is this something that we need to be
looking at you know ai
and um sort of machine learning do we
need to embed that into
our organizations as core functions and
you know should it be in people's PDs
uh or is this a separate function that
sits outside and i just sort of wondered
if you had any examples of
places that are doing this really well
or examples we could maybe go and have a
look at?
um and i can see there's benefits to
both ways i just kind of i don't want to
put that question back to you around
where do you see this sitting well i'll
defer to Rhys here because uh he's got
quite a strong position when it comes to
thinking about digital labs and how
those should be embedded in institutions
but i won't take his fire go ahead
i'm i
i i i suppose i should start out by
saying that um
my work for the last five years
probably has come to revolve
very much around git, 
around a code repository
and and
and i i think there's
that uh managed repositories
of code are actually becoming
as the that that can be the locus for
uh for software in general
and AI and in particular
and that that the
the the the sophistication that we're
now seeing
in um in
software development whether it's
proprietary
or the the the mixed
the mixed models between
collaborative and proprietary in the in
streams and the downstreams and the
upstreams
that there's there's room in there for
uh for creating online
digital labs and
i would say now the very definition of
an
online digital lab is
git lab or github with pipelines built
out from it
hosting a variety of web apps providing
for issues
providing gateways for support providing
wikis and blogs and all the rest of it
and and that that infrastructure that's
kind of
partly inside but
but largely outside an institution
is is there for the
there to be used by by
organizations that can build their their
capability
and
the capability alongside their community
i think you know thinking back to the
talk we had last time with
uh Thomas when we talked about actually
that there's we also need to
up skill um staff and uh think about
some
training because i know some of this is
going to seem quite impenetrable to
to some members of our teams and um
i agree that we need to be looking at
how do we involve
a wider community and using sites like
github
um but it we're going to require this
kind of to generally upskill and just
break down some of those barriers it
doesn't have to be really scary and
actually there's this fantastic
community out there who's willing to
help
um and we just need to uh yeah i think
think of strategies to enable that
and i think that's uh in the paper
Thomas presented last time there were
some really nice
methods and ideas around that, i'm just seeing in the comments there
that yes there's uh more
more 'co-labs' uh something that we
should be doing
and um the institutions across the board
should be be more lab-like
to enable this i guess if i could
interject to here
um you know having created a number of
projects which for various reasons
generally funding and time frames
um have a life and then have a pause
and sometimes die sometimes go into
dark archive um deep preservation if we
want to call it that
um and what that means is that you get
opportunities that are in effect lost
because someone else comes forward and
does virtually the same thing a few
years later
so the sustainability of these kinds of
initiatives has to be bedded
into an institutional framework and a
kind of cooperative model
whereby as all parties are being
upskilled
in developing these kinds of spaces
it's also a space of enabling the future
of these kinds of projects and more so
often you know projects like this set as
isolated
instances around the world and there's
never anything to move them forward
and i think you know that idea of
business as usual or technical
frameworks for engagement
starts uh shifting the rhetoric so it
becomes more institutionally focused
whereas where the people within the
institution are as much the makers
and the creative reusers of the objects
that they create
as those people who are doing the
research so as
you know if we can break those barriers
down then i think we'll be in a far
better position
to be able to create sustainable
monuments to the institutions that we're
reliant upon
awesome yes you've got my vote yeah that
sounds amazing um you did talk about the
institutions
and i you've you've provided some
feedback um from users and and visitors
who um
about their perceptions of the project
uh did you find
how did you find the feedback from the
institutions or the curators or
collection managers who are
involved or who whose collections were
used in this project
because we had done both the exhibition
and the artwork
the digital artwork um it meant we had
to get up close and personal with
institutions and their curators
we had a great day in Te Papa going
looking at their taxidermy collections
for example to select items to put in
the cases
um so so there were really great you
know
person-to-person opportunities but
moving it into the digital space was
interesting because
uh licensing rights management the sense
that these digital objects
stand apart from the institutions
physical collections was for me a bit of
a surprise
i don't see the digital object as a
surrogate i see it as an
another kind of object but the fact that
they sort of live out there their
product of digitization and then
anybody else can go away and play with
them suggest there's a kind of
disconnect
that was really bizarre and so
while they really loved the idea of what
we were doing
in creating this amazing artwork it was
sort of quizzical
some of the feedback in the visitors
books for example in the exhibition was
saying
i don't know why those ipads are there
you know it seems
it seems a bit of a temporal disjunction
and
you know we wanted people to be
surprised and engaged
and Rhys won't bore you with all the
horrors of trying to get the ipads to
work in the spaces but because it hadn't
been done before
you know there were these challenges
that had to be surmounted rather
than okay we've got the tech there let's
see what we can do
with it but you know institutions
enjoyed it
um it got good pr good press
but you know like many things um it was
a bit of a
flash in the pan because what we tried
to do was to
in both the exhibition and the artwork
shift
the institutional thinking about what an
exhibition could be
and how it could be mounted and that was
pretty controversial for a start
um and i'll just leave it at that well
perhaps i'm picking up on that thread
slightly do you have a question here in
the chat
from Nicola Frean
um asking about talking about the fact
that their team
spends a lot of time in engineering
editing description and context
to digitized content from unpublished
collections um
including some that are used in
Unexpected Connections and some of this
is around things like rights but some is
around complex provenance and purpose
and relationships between
items, she's asked about um
how this sort of metadata could be
managed in a way that it might always
travel with the digital surrogates that
you used and how
people see that carrying through in
future interfaces?
well certainly the way that Mitchell and
then we adopted his
method of display was that you have the
palimpsest but then you also have
every single item that composes the
palimpsest below
and a link to that institution
that object and of course the metadata
with it so you can drill down
to get that metadata so it does carry it
across with the with the object if it's
been linked
initially anyway have i got that right
rhys?
uh yeah uh that's
i mean part of it's what Digital New
Zealand does with the metadata in
between
does it um
Digital New Zealand is really trying to
uh make it easy and compress a
really quite complex rights landscape
down into a few very straightforward
handles
we were just looking for the magical
reuse
tag um but
but nicolas certainly right
and as far as there's a complex
set of relationships behind behind
rights and they're not of course
not all summed up in copyrights either
there are um
there are the sort of less legalistic
uh rights of traditional rights i
suppose you'd say
in in in and around
some of the imagery
i put in that link to knowledge graphs
because i think that
exemplifies at least what onto text can
do
in terms of um turning your collections
into a set of relational collections
with RDF 
triples and i think that way
at least gives you the possibility of
grabbing the more comprehensive metadata
data
and having it travel not only with a
single object but to see
those kinds of more invisible
relationships
being surfaced according to
you know your particular interest, if
it's a donor
some sort of provenance history, um i
think you know
that idea is something that uh i'd love
to explore further
with these kinds of uh objects.
Awesome, i am just going to i
noticed we now have just three minutes
uh
left on the clock so i just wondered if
there were any final points from
from Sydney, Rhys or Alexis?
all good well i do just want to say uh
say thank you very much for for your
time today it was a really fascinating
insight into the project that you've
worked on
and i know you've got other projects
that will sort of hopefully pencil you
in to come back and talk to the group
um so thank you very much for your time
today i do uh
in the the chat there ingrid has been
working with mary
to hello ingrid uh to put out as many of
the links uh that we've been talking
about today
and after today we'll be sending out the
video and those links again
uh so yeah thank you to to Mary and
Ingrid for
keeping that under control and keeping
us all informed uh
busy behind the scenes well i was going
to say adam
i think we've had a very quiet audience
today and i'm really intrigued to know
um why they're so quiet so i
while we're wrapping up i'm just
wondering um if they've got any takeaway
thoughts
i'll give give people timers as they
they're busy typing
they cannot feel free to take up this
conversation in the slack channel
which sydney and rhys and all of us are
part of as well
um so that could be another avenue if
people have thoughts after the event
um we have also uh when we share the uh
video after the event we'll also share
those links as well so if people want to
pursue those things at their leisure
um that's it let's say so um if you if
you are interested
make sure you you check out uh that or
join the slack channel
uh there's a really active conversation
happening there both within the
the new zealand australia group but also
the wider group
and i think it's whenever i jump in
there i uh
realize that there's uh so a range of
projects happening
and um it always makes me feel like i
have no idea what's going on but that's
fantastic cause i read something and
learn something new so
really encourage people to join in there
and uh join us for
the next time as we we continue to look
for speakers and projects
that we can share with the community uh
so that i say that was it from me just
thank you to all the partners
to Rhys, Sydney, to Alexis,  Ingrid and
Mary and to all the
all the people listening in the
background thank you for spending some
time
that was awesome, I took notes!
it's the right way i love your
transformation software engineer to
creative coder that is...
it was actually a bit scary it was like "
where's my spec?"
oh that whole foundation yeah what do
you mean you
what do you mean you just pick and
choose out of the data
what's really lovely wow
we've got
good thanks thanks for tuning in
you
