Schedule

This paper discusses British Library research and engagement projects, which have used interactive fiction and digital game making tools as a method for reinterpreting digitised library collections to facilitate new understandings of historical events, or to create new media adaptations and interpretations of classic literary works.  

There are a growing number of easy to use digital tools offering new ways to curate and tell stories beyond the printed book and the spoken word. This paper is an overview and evaluation of experiments and collaborations, which have used British Library digital collections in such creative projects. 

The Off the Map game design competition set UK higher education students the task of creating video games, text adventures and virtual interactive environments using digitised maps, views, texts, illustrations and recorded sounds as creative inspiration. Competitions were themed to coincide with British Library exhibitions on gothic literature, William Shakespeare and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  

Interactive fiction writing summer schools were held at the British Library in 2017 and 2018. Using Twine, an open-source programme for writing interactive narratives, over five intense days, adult participants learned how to build non-linear digital story games with expert tuition from specialists in interactive storytelling. 

Twine was also used by many participants in online interactive fiction writing jams, ran in partnership with Surrey Libraries and Read Watch Play: a global online multimedia reading group that has monthly themes. Jam participants were encouraged to use the British Library’s vast collection of public domain images available on Flickr Commons. The Bitsy game development community also engaged, using their software to create retro style 2D games. 

In 2017 Odyssey Jam was held for the water theme and in 2018 a Gothic Novel Jam celebrated the 200th year anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Gothic Novel Jam received 46 entries from all around the world including the UK, Australia, America and France. Most entries were interactive fiction, 2D and 3D explorer games, but other types of submissions included a digital headstone generator, an atmospheric audio soundscape and a table-top role playing storytelling game based on a Victorian séance.  

The Library’s emerging formats programme has been researching how to collect and digitally preserve web-based interactive narratives, such as those created in the Library’s summer schools and online jams. In 2019 Lynda Clark a postdoctoral researcher from Nottingham Trent University worked with the Digital Scholarship, Contemporary British and Web Archiving teams to build a UK interactive fiction collection in the UK Web Archive. Her research project examined web-archiving tools to determine options and possibilities available to curators collecting complex digital works.

2020 marks the centenary of UCL Department of Information Studies. The paper will focus on the participatory process applied in the curation of the exhibition Geographies of Information: 100 years of Information Studies at UCL, aimed at offering researchers, students and visitors an opportunity to learn about the history of the department and the role that teaching has played in the creation of an international, professional workforce over the past decades. Starting as the first British School of Librarianship in 1919, the department paved the way for other Higher Education institutions in Britain, leading training programmes for information professionals in an expanding job market. The success helped establishing its worldwide reputation, promoting professional standards that influenced information management practices worldwide through an international cohort of students.

The paper will explore how this digital exhibition benefited from a process of active engagement of current students and alumni in an oral history programme with the aim of facilitating the exploration of key issues faced by information professionals in their jobs, including ethical issues, engagement of different communities of practice, development of digital humanities and uses of artificial intelligence to mention just a few. It will analyse the design of a series of interactive exhibition panels covering the history of the department and its impact on the sector, including: extracts of interviews produced through the oral history programme accessed through mobile interfaces that allow visitors to move from the written to oral text; objects sourced from UCL Special Collections immersed in original sound compositions mixing newly recorded material and sounds from the British Library sound archive; and a digital map highlighting the provenance and place of work of the alumni linking past and present and opening up a dialogue with future potential developments in the field.

The creation of soundscapes to enhance immersivity in heritage spaces presents numerous questions around the use and physical logistics of implementing audio hardware. Using 360 video, ambisonic audio and head mounted displays, a ‘rapid prototyping’ workflow for sound design in these spaces and places has been considered, explored and developed. The use of these tools has improved the ability to creatively design immersive soundscapes in advance of having full access to the exhibit in question. This allows curators and stakeholders to have input into the soundscape before investing in the full commission and the infrastructure required for playback. Feedback and creative play can now be injected in the design phase without having to affect the space physically. Using theory and practice from both virtual/augmented reality and sound design for stage, and the associated techniques in transforming a space to a place, this presentation will address the technological impact of implementing this for the museum sector. This work is based on a practical experience at the Science and Industry Museum Manchester, and is now being developed to be applicable to other heritage sites.

The Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) is an independent gallery in Manchester which has promoted the work of contemporary artists from China and artist of Chinese heritage since the late 1980s. Since 2018, initially supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Centre has provided meaningful access to its historical records on site and via a dedicated online catalogue (http://archive.cfcca.org.uk/).

This paper examines the CFCCA Archive & Library’s work with born-digital records. Making them accessible for research and preserving the context in which the Centre has presented Chinese contemporary art over the last 30 years. It will examine the challenges we faced in making our collection accessible within a limited budget, and the procedures we established to curate born-digital content from its creation to its final distribution.

Historically, TV production forecasts the mode of linear media consumption in a passive role. While TV serves globally as a source of information and inspiration, its engagement model remains practically unchanged since its invention. It is reasonably curious why the relationship between TV and its audience for nearly two decades has not evolved alongside emerging platforms. The determinants of such non-evolving relationship are both technological and habitual: the former, the long tail of legacy systems; the latter, the long tail of mutually dictated producing and viewing behaviors. The legacy systems and workflows are optimized for linear presentation of the TV medium, which entails a passive mode of consumption. While this framework still meets the expectations of an aging population, issues surface with the rise of new modes of consumption enabled by a new media industry.

Limited program choices no longer hold the attention of youth, who will not plan their time or location to serve a TV schedule. Though recently more TV programs are available on demand through platforms such as Disney Plus and BBC iPlayer, somewhat diversifying the mode of dissemination, this new model is mostly used for catch-up TV services. As the same programs are consumed, the downstream mode of consumption remains the same in terms of content and audience relationship, therefore, no conditions are upheld to transform the production practice. Emerging scenarios for TV audience interaction imply a different lifecycle of media assets with adaptable reusability that is not supported by current TV practice. The aired documentary is a final cut after which vast amounts of source materials are discarded. To make an interactive version, one can curate far more re-usable source materials and make them available on-demand. This would bring improved economic viability to the production cost with value extended, and may contribute to a solution to the challenges currently facing the TV industry, such as the growing market demand for personalized repackaging with on-demand delivery. Current TV production is inefficient in terms of 1) asset share for on-demand program versions, 2) multiple formats support, and 3) interactive content. This research argues that a different mode of production is required. A new methodology will need to account for agility in the creation of assets, in anticipation of alternative lifecycles of produced assets. A new methodology will also need to account for multiple distribution channels and dynamic storage with a proper archival system to link common assets across the versions. Future digital archiving systems for this kind of production will need to support an interoperability as well as fluid interactivity with on-demand media systems, to generate bespoke program content. The future program content such as documentary and factual programs, may present UX design as part of the program to support viewers’ real-time queries as an aesthetic experience.

Under a proper UX framework, documentary practice can be reframed by coupling traditional and interactive media delivery. This study demonstrates real-time software architecture with end-to-end workflow and UX based on complex query to support interaction fluidity and reusability of documentary assets. A method of curatorial activity was employed to model Interactive Digital Curation workflow both for professional production and audience experience. Findings include 1) production ontology provides means to account for metadata consistency throughout the curatorial lifecycle; 2) User Generated Time Series Data (UGTD) emerged as the most important aspect of workflow, both for media production and audience interaction; 3) real-time interaction with media adds value to digital curation life cycle management.

The aim of this research aspires to offer part of a solution to the larger picture that TV industry faces today by designing and prototyping the cases to support 1) diversified modes of consumption, 2) economical multi-use of secondary TV program source materials, and 3) integration of TV production practice with interactive platforms to support an extended interactivity. The challenge remains in the gap between TV and disruptive technology practices: newer technologies may host interactive and immersive contents with on demand delivery, mostly coded in niche formats that are incompatible to the broad-spectrum TV programming. Targeting an interactive documentary experience, this research tested back-end crossover of linear media production pipelines with interactive media programming. The platform used in this project enables users to apply semi-structured semantic metadata to media assets, then the metadata is used to organize assets for real-time interactive retrieval. By connecting this platform to a highly responsive user interface (UI) and a media display system, users generate live media streams presented as program content without further asset modification or editing.

The contributions of this research are as follows: 1) a production methodology anticipating downstream audience experience from the pre-production phase, 2) a workflow streamlining iterative curatorial cycles from production to consumption, 3) an architecture to support established media production workflows with dynamic storage and retrieval using complex query schema, and 4) an introduction of User Generated Time Series Data for processing the complex query schema.

In his outline of ‘critical digital humanities’, David Berry (2019) asserts that ‘future directions for the digital humanities must be more critically oriented and more reflexive of the way in which computation is no longer merely a tool for thought, but an infrastructure or milieu’, adding that ‘a way of critiquing the, sometimes, instrumental tendencies within the digital humanities could be a greater focus on the socio-technical aspects of the technologies’. In response to Berry’s call, this presentation makes a case for the capacities of live performance with digital technologies to challenge and critique the ‘mileu’ of the digital as it happens between people and devices – the contemporary ‘network’ we have created that James Bridle (2018) describes as including ‘human and nonhuman agency and understanding, knowing and unknowing, within the same agential soup’ (p.5). I argue that the live activation of technologies in performance works offers an energised and powerful context for such critiques to be engaged and for the intersection of agencies, feelings and processes within this ‘soup’ to be examined.

In making this argument, I reflect particularly on my sited creative practices, which mix the digital processes of a smartphone with organic growth in urban green spaces through a methodology grounded in their common wildness. I also refer to the performance-making of Javaad Alipoor/Kirsty Housley and in particular two recent pieces - The Believers are But Brothers (2017) and Rich Kids: A history of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2019) - that prompt the audience to engage with some of the content of the performance through Whatsapp and Instagram respectively.

In both cases, I am interested in how everyday ‘socio-technical’ engagements with our devices can be unseated, re-viewed and interrogated through the prompts such live activations offer; how these engagements might draw particular attention to the ways the platforms and applications involved ‘produce’ and ‘programme’ contemporary ‘social life’ (Seymour 2019, p.23). I also address what live performance as an art form can offer as a critical mode of creative practice that is distinct from some of the more familiar forms of post-digital practice in visual and internet arts. The presentation concludes that the live encounter is particularly potent in refracting and engaging ideas and questions related to the streams of information in play in the network and the hidden processes of a digital mobile device, prompting a productive affective uneasiness between a participant and their personal technologies.

This paper shares insights from digitally curating my own completed Practice as Research (Nelson, 2013) PhD, including ephemeral, affective art installations. The projected abstract animations were accompanied by wordlessly sung sounds in a darkened gallery space. On entering the gallery the audience stepped into the installation and became participants; the art installations were experiential, in the mode of a performance. The performance scholar Peggy Phelan stated: ‘Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented’ (1993, p. 146). Fruitful tensions arising from digitally curating these experiences are discussed: scholarly research, artistic practice, preserving for re-performing (Boutard, 2015), materials and conservation (Laurenson, 2006) and active facilitation of the personal digital archives of others (Hobbs, 2001; Sabharwal, 2017; Rinehart and Ippolito, 2014). Digital curation is reflected on in the light of practices that were disruptive to the art world: Fluxus (Santone, 2016) and László Moholy-Nagy’s advocacy of using means of reproduction for producing new works (Moholy-Nagy and Passuth, 1987). Digital curation can facilitate artistic output being used by others (Cook, 2013), becoming a tool, even a framework (Watkins, 2018). Digital curation aids lensing artistic works through how they can be shared with an audience. Conceiving of and creating pieces that show how they are made, turning spectators into participants (Watkins, 2019), noting their feedback (Rosenberg, 2009), their social interactions and how they photograph and video their own experiences of the installation (Henkel, 2014). The appreciation of the audience as they create their own personal digital archives can be palpable and reinforces Edward Lordan’s exhortation to: ‘Integrate your activities so that members of your audience can take full advantage of everything and every way, you have to communicate’ (Lordan, 1999, p. 16). Digital curators, artistic practitioners and practice-based researchers may find the paper useful.

Boutard, G., 2015. Towards mixed methods digital curation: facing specific adaptation in the artistic domain. Archival Science. 15, 169–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9218-0
Henkel, L.A., 2014. Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour. Psychological Science. 25, 396–402. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613504438
Hobbs, C., 2001. The Character of Personal Archives: Reflections on the Value of Records of Individuals. Archivaria 52, 126–135.
Laurenson, P., 2006. Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations. Tate Paper. 6.
Lordan, E., 1999. Guidelines for implementing new technology in public relations. Public Relations Quarterly. 44, 15–17.
Moholy-Nagy, L., Passuth, K. (Eds.), 1987. Moholy-Nagy, 1st paperback ed. ed. Thames and Hudson, London.
Nelson, R., 2013. Practice as research in the arts: principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York.
Phelan, P., 1993. Unmarked: the politics of performance. Routledge, London ; New York.
Rinehart, R., Ippolito, J. (Eds.), 2014. Re-collection: art, new media, and social memory. Leonardo. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Rosenberg, D., 2009. Curating the practice/the practice of curating. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 5, 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1386/padm.5.2-3.75/1
Sabharwal, A., 2017. Digital humanities and the emerging framework for digital curation. College & Undergraduate Libraries. 24, 238–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2017.1336953
Santone, J., 2016. Documentation as Group Activity: Performing the Fluxus Network. Visual Resources. 32, 263–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2016.1239040
Watkins, J., 2019. Interactive Visual Music. EVA London 2019.
Watkins, J., 2018. Composing Visual Music: visual music practice at the intersection of technology, audio-visual rhythms and human traces. Body Space Technology Journal.

This paper is an overview of preliminary research undertaken for the creation of a framework for collecting and distributing new media art within regional art galleries in the U.K. From the 1960’s practitioners have experimented using computers, and the art-form has evolved into multiple strands of production, presentation and distribution. But are we, as collectors, researchers, artists and enthusiasts facing an uncertain future concerning the integration of new media art into institutional cultural organisations? Recently, concerns have been raised by curators regarding the importance of learning how to collect new media art if there is to be any hope of preserving its past. A fear of the unknown of experimental models of curatorial activities such as collecting, preservation and documentation appear to be a barrier to some mainstream, university and municipal galleries when acquisitioning or commissioning new artworks into their collections, while methods of distribution using new media platforms are still at a very experimental stage. This paper explores that by collaboration, experimentation and the sharing of knowledge and resources, these concerns may be conquered to preserve and make new media art accessible for future generations to enjoy and not to lament over the obsolescence of what it once was.

Digital curation has become an inclusive umbrella concept (Yakel, 2007) for collecting, curating, managing and preserving digital assets for personal or institutional use. Following the emergence and expansion of digital music aggregators such as Spotify, personal music streaming playlists constitute a platform of curatorial performance as a remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1998) of physical music collections. The declining popularity of tangible music containers and the at first unlicenced, then legal growth of the digital audio followed by the contemporary dominance of streaming, manifests an environment where ownership as a key prerequisites of personal collections and curatorial practices is replaced with the concept of access (Mulligan, 2011) or transformed in a way that what is owned is now not the physical or digital object, but the experience of interaction (Burkart, 2008) (Hagen, 2015) (Sinclair & Tinson, 2017). This is mainly due to music “reverting to its age-old transience” (Pareles, 1998) after a century or so of celebrated physicality. The remediation of the practice is inevitably influenced by the remediation of the object from mechanically, magnetically or digitally stored data in a physical container that can be collected and interacted within the affordances of the container, to address information for the object that is stored digitally elsewhere, collected as bookmarks (Sesigür, 2019) and interacted with within the affordances of the aggregator platform. Thus, a streaming collection is defined not directly by the objects that are collected and curated, but by the act of collecting and curating. Furthermore, alongside the ownership aspect of this shift, remediation of music collections as streaming playlists relies heavily on the environment of these practices, digital services providers (DSPs), where vast catalogues are readily available. On one hand, this eliminates the physical acquisition process to create a personal information collection (Bruce et al., 2011) amongst which a curation can be made and maintained. On the other hand, in the era of infoglut (Andrejevic, 2013) the sheer amount of information provided is difficult to manage. To deal with this problem, curation can be utilised as a “constructive model and metaphor offering a solution to the issue of information overload online” (Liu, 2010, p.3). Following Liu’s proposition, personal playlists on streaming platforms can be understood as digital curation tools, highlighting the concept of capta, as the selection amongst a mass (Checkland & Holwell, 1999) to “transform data to information, [by] addition of context, and hence meaning” (Bawden, 2001, p. 95). Through this framework, this paper suggests digital curation as a key concept for a remediated understanding of collecting music in the streaming age. Transformed nature of the object, the collection and the collector in a data and information environment will be made sense of by utilising approaches of personal information management (PIM) as well as traditional collection studies, placing digital curation at their intersection to conceptualize the remediation of the music collection to the playlist in the streaming music era.

References:

Andrejevic, M., (2013). Infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. Routledge, New York.

Bawden, D. (2001). The shifting terminologies of information. Aslib Proceedings,53(3), 93-98. doi:10.1108/eum0000000007043

Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1998). Remediation: Understanding the new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bruce, H. W., Wenning, A., Jones, E., Vinson, J., & Jones, W. (2011). Seeking an ideal solution to the management of personal information collections. Information Research, 16(1). Retrieved April 16, 2018, from http://www.informationr.net/ir/16-1/paper462.html

Burkart, P. (2008). Trends in Digital Music Archiving. The Information Society, 24(4), 246-250. doi:10.1080/01972240802191621

Checkland, P.B. and Holwell, S.E. (1999), Data, capta, information and knowledge, in Hinton, M. (Ed.), Introducing Information Management: The Business Approach, Elsevier, London,
pp. 47-55.

Hagen, A. N. (2015). The Playlist Experience: Personal Playlists in Music Streaming Services. Popular Music and Society, 38(5), 625-645. doi:10.1080/03007766.2015.1021174

Mulligan, M. (2011, December 9). Why The Access Versus Ownership Debate Isn’t Going to Resolve Itself Anytime Soon. Retrieved February 3, 2020, from https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/why-the-access-versus-ownership-debate-isnt-going-to-resolve-itself-anytime-soon/

Pareles, J. (1998, November 15). MUSIC; With A Click, A New Era of Music Dawns. Retrieved April 5, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/15/arts/music-with-a-click-a-new-era-of-music-dawns.html

Sesigür, O. (2019). A Study Of Personal Streaming Playlists Through Digital Curation (Doctoral Thesis). Available from the Turkish Council of Higher Education Thesis Center database. (Thesis No: 580181)

Pflieger, J. C. (2009). Adolescents’ parent and peer relations and romantic outcomes in young adulthood (Doctoral dissertation). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global database. (UMI No. 3371229)

Sinclair, G., & Tinson, J. (2017). Psychological ownership and music streaming consumption. Journal of Business Research, 71, 1–9. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.10.002

Yakel, E. (2007). Digital curation. OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives, 23(4), 335-340. doi:10.1108/10650750710831466