Wikipedia V's Archive.org

Finally loaded all my text video content into Wikipedia although how long they stay there is anyone's guess with my frustrating experience of having content deleted etc. What is apparent is that Wikipedia is not the place to upload this content en masse - Which is why i have uploaded the same interviews to Archive.org to think about using this as a store for the video, and then perhaps write a series of pages which locate and contextualize the video - and offer a fixed URI for it - all questions that I have posted to their forum.

Entry deleted

I've submitted four articles to Wikipedia now - three have been either deleted or marked for deletion. Not sure I agree with Laurent Lanier when he calls Wikipedia 'faux authorative'. Seems very authoritarian even didactic to me.

Postcode as data object

Working through the tutorials for DBpedia its interesting that DBpedia page/resource for specific postcodes do not exist yet, for example N194EH. What needs to be done then is to link a new postcode page to a number of pages within Wikipedia, for example the page about Upper Holloway and the page about postcodes and north London postcode pages. I would then add the video portraits from Landscape-Portrait that relate specifically to postcode, say N194eh, and these would then be incorporated into the next DBpedia dump.

In the process of researching this I found some nice toys/tools:

http://www.visualdataweb.org/relfinder/relfinder.php

Browsers: http://dbpedia.org/snorql/?describe=http%3A//dbpedia.org/resource/Alexander_Marcus

Query Builder: http://factforge.net/sparql

RDF linked Data

Just working my way through some RDF DBpedia tutorials and there is the start of some form of structure where by the video data from Landscape-Portrait might be published into the public realm. For example if postcodes are objects within DBpedia, then the video content of LP could be assigned to that name. Then when other users make use of that postcode name, they will be able to access the video content from LP along with descriptive elements such as what was the question being answered etc. Need to draw this out to make sense of it, and maybe run a query of the postcode and see what information is already assisgned to it.

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/

Semantic, RDF and Linked data.

Just writing a description of the final phase of the Landscape-Portrait Bournemouth project. In reading about the history of RDF as a subset of XML it seems to me, materially and maybe structurally, that there is a connection between the schema of RDF and the materiality of video. 

For example the portrait videos in Landscape-Portrait do not work in a statistical fashion, rather each video text is a temporal descriptor, rather than an abstract fixed piece of data. In order to access it a coherent taxonomy, such as that outlined by RDF needs to be employed. 

In essence the video functions as a container, much in the same way as XML/RDF is a  language for describing content in a uniform manner, video is used as a temporal container of descriptive information, which might be accessed by RDF protocols and made sense of at a machinic level by using a semantic approach. 

That said the video is also a signifier of a great deal of other information not quantifiable using a descriptive language such as RDF such as might be understood by Jameson's description of video as ‘a total flow’ of imagery, words, context. Overiding the hegemony of the linguistic medium' and perhaps this quote form Jameson points towards this machinic understanding: 

'“Yet the involvement of the machine in all this allows us now perhaps to escape phenomenology and the rhetoric of consciousness and experience, and to confront the seemingly subjective temporality in a new and materialist way, a way which constitutes a new kind of materialism as well, one not of matter but of machinery.' (Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991).