Archive.org wins

Finally getting some idea of how to locate the content from Landscape-Portrait
in the public realm, and hopefully rendering it accessible via the use of RDF
Linked data markup.

Just has an email from Jeff at Archive.org. There is a way to batch  upload
data and metadata to the archive, what is better still is that there is a
static URi, so this content can be included within a structured publication
of Open linked data.

With this in mind I have stopped uploading content to WIkipedia, as I no
longer think it is the right place. My plan had been to upload new pages
for each of the postcodes featured in Landscape-Portrait but this has proved
an unsuccessful approach and extremely time consuming. Far better to
create my own linked data page for each postcode and feature the video
content their.

Wikipedia Video Upload

Just finished uploading video from Landscape-Portrait to Wikipedia. It's a very time consuming process and prone to errors which force you to restart the process from scratch. It's taken my 2 hours to upload 18 video clips, including mark up etc. Kept getting errors for long file names, duplicate files names etc. There isn't (for newbie users like me) any batch upload facility which is annoying, anyways its done. The content I uploaded was my interview on the site so I made available within the public domain, where it does not have to be attributed and can be used in whatever manner. For other participants I'll probably use a sharealike attributable licence.

The next part of the project is to access this media through DBpedia using RDF Linked Data, now that might take a time.

Landscape-Portrait - Bournemouth - Final phase

Trying to get the final  phase of the Landscape-Portrait project of the ground, just written this overview of the next phase:

Landscape-Portrait. Final Phase.

The final outcome of the Bournemouth iteration of the Landscape-Portrait project will consist of the publishing, dissemination and promotion of audience generated content to the digital public realm.

The publishing of project content (video, text, data) will conform to guidelines outlined by the W3C[1] and the Open Data movement, where data and material is conceived of as ‘free to use, reuse, and redistribute’.

Specifically I will publish users video content using URI’s [2] (Uniform Resource Identifier) that locate the content in a fixed universally accessible manner. This procedure will be complimented by the publishing of related meta-data, which describes content using Open Data and W3C recommended schema -  such as RDF and linked data[3] - consistent with the development of the semantic web.

Locating and describing content using a formally approved schema makes it possible to offer content to other agencies, practitioners, projects and audiences in a coherent and dependable way. This approach to data and material dissemination has been adopted at a governmental[4], public and private level. In making use of these practices within a public arts project, pertinent questions about arts engagement with use and legacy values are developed, further extending the  conception of ‘durational’ public art practices.

Once elements of the Bournemouth project have been published and made available within the public realm there will be a requirement to promote this content. There are a variety of Open Data tools and services available for this purpose. It is an ambition of this phase of the project to encourage use of this content by governmental (for example local councils), public (charities, NGO’s) and personal (community activists, artist and residents) agencies and practitioners.

The final phase of the work will take approximately four days and will involve myself and other members of the original collaborative group in discussion about how to best achieve this phase of production.

The hoped for outcome of this phase will be the use of the video content produced during the Bournemouth installation by a range of entities, big and small, personal and public, cultural and civic.

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[1] See here for a in depth overview of the formats: http://www.w3.org/TR/gov-data/

[2] See: http://labs.apache.org/webarch/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier

[3] Tim Berners-Lee outlined four principles of Linked Data, paraphrased along the following lines:

        Use URIs to identify things.

        Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up ("dereferenced") by people and user agents.

        Provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, using standard formats such as RDF/XML.

        Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data to improve discovery of other related information on the Web.

[4] http://data.gov.uk/

Forma - LP -Updates

Had a really good meeting with David Metcalfe and Caroline Smith from Forma yesterday. Landscape-Portrait has been engaged in a form of touring for the last seven years and we all agreed it was now time to move it to phase 3. Phase 3 involves making the data usable in other formats. This is closely linked to initiatives around Open Data. It is also perhaps concerned less with the liberal idea of 'openness' which dominated the talks at the recent conference in Berlin, but rather a concern to the methodologies used to create the data, the notion of a public art work as an engine which animates this process and a concept of the outcome of such as project as a component in a larger network; which neatly creates a tension between artwork and resource. There is also a wider issue of the semantic web, and how the video data recorded by LP might be made 'intelligible' via a robust mark up, how do you mark up video for use in Open Data projects. We talked about funding to create this next phase of the project, looking at academic, commercial and civic funds. Be interesting how this develops in the current funding crisis.

Martha Rosler - If you lived here......

This quote from Martha Roslers book "if you lived here" seems really pertinent to my thinking about Landscape-Portrait:

"Social activists, certainly, continue to recognise the importance of documentary evidence in arguing for social change. It is the necessity ot acknowledge the place- and time - from which one speaks that is an absolute requirement for meaningful social documentary”

"Naturally, this shifts the terrain of the argument from the art object - the photograph, the film, the videotape, the picture book or magazine - to the context, to the process of signification, and to social process."

The idea of documentary evidence - allowing "acknowledging historical context yet allowing 'unquantifiable sources' - LP can be seen in this light, in try to create a dataset of documentary evidence as part of a integrated practice. How this data might be used, either in gallery, planning office or locally convened online campaign is relevant to its audience.

The other thing to think of here is time:stamp. LP is ambiguous about this, the video is not dated, whilst it acknowledges place - via a Google map. Is it important for each of the video portraits to be dated.

meet SCAN - Planning phase 2

Now the dust has settled on phase 1 of the Bournemouth project I met up with Helen from SCAN to discuss next steps. For me the important outcomes are the use of the media by the collaborators involved in the project.

Of our two main collaborators, I am hopefull that Craig will use some of the video portraits on the Townsend area on his website. Talking with Craig I understand there is a good chance that he may produce additional umbrella community websites for community groups to use. Dianne is planning an exhibition of her photographs, her work will also be incorporated into a exhibition which will travel the local libaries and Bournemouth central library.

Tony White has been working on his text works which so far consist of a blog entry and comments in the 'comments' section of the landscape-portrait website.

CACI The Home of Demographics

I had an interesting conversation with CACI today about using Landscape-Portrait content within their own marketing strategy. Obviously this would require consent from participants and it does feel inappropriate and slightly unnerving. Landscape-Portrait was conceived as a critique of market driven demographics, however I always imagined the the outcome of the project, perhaps the legacy of the work, would be an online resource/artwork that would sit next to commercial services offered by companies using acorn data; such as UpMyStreet.

What is more interesting is the idea of a seperate project, which uses the sampling tools developed by Landscape-Portrait and creates a project directly for CACI. I'm thinking here of an artist in residence type of opportunity; It would be interesting to have an artist working alongside statisticians in the creation of public data, "who ever designs the data defines the public" .

Newsletters

As a means of letting people know about the project we are placing adverts in local newsletters. These will include (hopefully) Heathlands primary school newsletter (West Howe) , the Rev Dick Saunders newsletter to parishioners (West Howe), not sure about Kinson, haven't as yet managed to find an equivalent there, and the funday poster in Townsend.

We've just produced some promotional material for Townsend childrens centre where we plan to have the Media Bus parked for their fun day on the 20th of March. The initial design here:

The text was based on this design:

After a chat with the center manager it was agreed that this design was not appropriate for the Townsend community poster, so it's been revised here:

Bournemouth visit 14-18 2-10

Just returned from Bournemouth after a week of meeting members of the three communities
we are working in - Kinson, Townsend and West Howe. We've got good support in all areas and met some good people who are committed to their community, and have shown good interest in the project.

On thing that comes up quite often is the thought that we are from the council, and the distrust of the council after years of being let down, and therefore there is a distrust of us as council representatives. This takes some discussion and hopefully is resolved. This has happened before, and much more deeply in Burnley.

Another thought, which is outside of the budget of this project, is the idea of visiting others towns that have the same Demographic types as the areas we are working in, in Bournemouth. So that might be parts of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee.


Spent some time walking around each neighborhood taking photos, to be reminded what a potentially loaded activity this is, obviously taking photos around children's playgrounds, but the just the idea of what you might and might not do with the image, and who and for who the images are being taken. Anyways images from Kinson, West Howe and Townsend can be viewed. These images will be used for publicity for the work. We've also engaged Diane Humphries, an local photographer to work on the project.