2. “Online”?
It’s a medium, not a method.
- mail vs email
- books vs ‘ebooks’ (*shudder*)
- fax vs carving things on monoliths and
dragging them to the appropriate
location.
3. Language shapes interactions
The language distinction between these
electronic media encourages people to
approach them as if it were some additional
thing to deal with.
Why we communicate is often forgotten.
5. Magic paper and physical
boundaries
Physical boundaries leak into digital interfaces.
‘Page’ viewers have their place, but they should
not be the final destination.
6.
7. @sebchan at EuropeanaTech2015:
Key points for us:
- everything should be online
- [every thing should have one URL]
- online content should be rich, detailed, connected.
- other [external] collections should be visible
- everything should be managed with a mesh of
systems.
- interfaces should avoid ‘feeling like a database’
12. David Foster Wallace, on Ambition:
“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very
dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high,
you never do anything.
Because doing anything results in— It’s actually kind of tragic because it
means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what
it really is.”
- As told to Leonard Lopate on WNYC on March 4, 1996.
(emphasis my own)
http://blankonblank.org/interviews/david-foster-wallace-on-ambition/
13. Images held hostage
There were over one million separate
illustrations, photos and embellishments in
just ~65,000 volumes.
Do “traditional” treatments of scanned books
enable better research than is possible with
paper?
17. It all starts with a URL
- have things at discoverable URLs
- (eg search in google, does it appear easily?)
- Have those URLs link to other things and
vice-versa.
- eg Wikipedia, academic articles, blogposts
But what if you don’t have stable and static
URLS?
18.
19.
20.
21.
22. Impact of this change?
Hard to measure:
20 million hits on average every month, over 230 million in 13 months.
Over 150,000 tags added by volunteers.
Dozens of projects already using content (research & creative)
Hundreds of contributors.
Iterative crowdsourcing is ongoing and essential.
eg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:
British_Library/Mechanical_Curator_collection/map_tag_status
32. Spotlight: BL Georeferencer
- Kimberly Kowal (BL) and James Heald
(Wikimedia volunteer) http://maps.bl.uk/
- First attempt - crowdsourced 3,221 maps in
~4 weeks (maps found in the Flickr archive.)
- Next attempt… 50,213 maps to go!
