I got a good running start at this blog and then, basically, fell of the planet this summer. Okay, I didn’t actually fall of the planet, but I did go to London to attend EVA London 2006. This is a conference I quite like and have been going to, off and on, for more than a decade. I go because a) I like London, b) I learn alot, and c) I often feel like we here in North America sometimes act as if things aren’t happening unless they are happening here.
The good news is there’s alot happening over there…and like over here…some of it’s great, some of it’s unusual, and some of it, well it’s just over the top. I’m not going to tell you which bits are which, I’m just going to give you the skinny (and a few links) and you will make up your own mind which items are worthy of a second, or even third look.
Okay, except for Christian Nold. Christian is doing the some of the most interesting work I’ve seen in a long while. To quickly capsulize his work. He became interested in how lie detectors work, taught himself how to build them, and built a set of portable lie detectors-with GPS tracking capabilities. He goes into communities, gives them to people, who take walks carrying the little lie detectors. Upon their return Nold superimposes their emotional map onto actual maps, annotates them, and is coming up with some awesome results. Check out Christian’s work at http://www.biomapping.net/
The following colleagues presented the results of a study entitled A Comparison of Gender Bias in Art & Science Museum Websites Rod Gunn, Gloria Moss, University of Glamorgan; Jonathan P. Bowen, Museophile Limited; Isabel Bernal; Eleanor Lisney and Sarah McDaid. This paper I heard is currently only available in the EVA London 2006 Conference Proceedings, but you can read a paper by the same team delivered at Museums and the Web 2005 http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/bowen/bowen.html. I’d be interested in hearing what people have to say about this issue.
Saw a presentation of Virtual Calakmul here’s the website for the project http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/calakmul/
And Andrea de Polo gave us all a preview of The New Premises of the Alinari National Museum of Photography and AIM. More can be found out about this at http://www.alinari.com/ If there’s a new piece of technology to be used, they are apparently going to use it.
Gotta stop rambling now, but I’d like to leave you with one final thought and a useful link.
The final thought: Websites are not merely accessories (more on this in another posting).
And, remember, I’m primarily a content person and if it weren’t for the kindness of friends sending me links to keep me up-to-date on things I’d always be dead last at keeping up with current buzzwords and buzzterms.
So, if there are any of you out there like me with colleagues and friends constantly muttering about the benefits of Web 2.0, my friend Rachel, at the New Media Consortium, www.nmc.org, gave me a great link to a useful article on the topic so you won’t feel adrift at happy hour with the guys from i.t. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
