Intute blog

Intute has been counting-down to the festivities with our Advent Calendar – which we hope you’ve enjoyed reading. This final post is about NORAD Tracks Santa and the visualisation tools of Google Earth.

As part of an ongoing tradition stretching back to 1955, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) will once again be tracking Santa as he makes his Christmas Eve journey across the globe to deliver millions of presents.

The excellent NORAD Tracks Santa website provides a potted history of how the Santa tracking service came into existence; it transpires that a misprinted Sears Roebuck & Co. telephone number advertising a Santa hotline directed dozens of children through to NORAD’s predecessor organisation, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD). Rather than simply advise people of the error, CONAD’s Director of Operations, Colonel Harry Shoup, asked his staff to provide radar sightings of Father Christmas, and inform the public, and so a tradition was born!

Since that initial batch of calls, NORAD staff have dedicated time each Christmas Eve to respond to thousands of enquiries from children and the general public, and sent out regular updates about Santa’s progress.

As technology advanced, emails tracking Santa’s journey began, and it is now possible to follow Santa’s flight in 3D using Google Earth. The images below show Santa and his reindeer passing over Mount Everest last year!

Google Earth tracking Santa

Passing over Everest

So how do NORAD actually track Santa? According to their site, there are a number of tools which work together to monitor his progress. The commencement of the “present run” is monitored by “the North Warning System”, which spots when Santa’s sleigh becomes airborne from the North Pole. At that point, satellites positioned in geo-synchronous orbit at 22,300 miles from the Earth’s surface are able to monitor the heat signature given off by Rudolph’s nose! Of course, when Santa enters North American airspace, he is tracked closely by fighter jets, whose pilots are thrilled to see him! There is also a global network of “Santa Cam”s, which only operate on Christmas Eve, but which are able to provide high quality imagery and videos following the momentous journey!

YouTube video Santa’s journey 2008.

The NORAD Santa site also provides some very important information about Santa, as well as a host of Frequently Asked Questions concerning NORAD, the Santa service, and related issues!

Merry Christmas from all at Intute, and happy Santa spotting!

From roast goose to mulled wine to plum pudding, classic foods associated with Advent and Christmas draw from a vast range of traditions and family lore.

Stuttgart Nativity, 9 1/2" Springerle cookie baked by Ken Hamilton. Image reproduced by kind permission of Ken Hamilton.

Pictured above is an example of what may be the ultimate Christmas cookie, a Springerle cookie depicting the nativity. This cookie was baked from a mold copied from a wooden original in the Wurttemberg Museum, Stuttgart. Springerle cookies hail from late medieval south-eastern Germany and are called ‘little jumpers’ or ‘little knights’ because they rise in response to the antiquated leavening agent hartshorn (ammonium carbonate). Connie Meisinger, who runs the dedicated Springerle site, House on the Hill, demonstrates the complicated process of making these cookies:

Instructional YouTube video embedded by kind permission of Connie Meisinger, House on the Hill.

These unusual biscuits exemplify themes currently developing in the history of food, a field which is expanding due to use of the internet as a research aid. Springerle cookies, like other time-honoured recipes, reveal through their ingredients and methods of preparation their times and places of origin. These cookies are additionally notable because they depict visual motifs with cultural messages and historical meanings that have changed with the centuries and are still recognized and preserved today by mold carvers and cooks.

The Internet now brings a multitude of traditional recipes together in all their variations, and food enthusiasts’ blogs provide an increasingly detailed commentary on the significance of particular ingredients and associated cooking techniques. Lynette Eyb, books editor at the Heritage Key blog, recently listed top food histories, which cover eating trends from prehistoric times; to ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt; to the social impact of the potato.  The Imperial War Museum is about to launch a major new exhibition, The Ministry of Food, which reveals how the British public coped with food scarcity during World War II. But historians’ analyses have only started to reveal the evolution of a type of edible oral tradition which may be mapped in scholarly terms.

In synthesizing some of these sources, Intute’s Hospitaility, Leisure, Sport and Tourism section reveals the potential here for applying methods of research previously developed in the field of folklore to the history of food. Following precedents set by the Brothers Grimm, the English folklorist and historian, George Laurence Gomme (1853-1916), established methods for tracing the lineage of folktales, customs and related linguistic expressions. Gomme used these techniques to follow particular tales to their places of origin and also used them to assess political conditions from much earlier times. Such methods could be applied to recipes. Just as folklore can be dissected through tale types and trademark motifs, recipes possess particular ingredients and techniques, which can be traced to certain regions. The provenance of recipes grouped online could shed light on much broader subjects, such as immigration; socio-economic status; regional history; trade; and war conditions.

Intute has a number of sources related to this topic:

• Intute reviews related to the history of food
• Intute reviews of recipe sites
• Intute review of The Times list of 50 best food blogs.
• Intute blog posts on A Seventeenth Century Recipe for Mince Pies and Christmas cakes, Japanese-style.

Japanese Christmas cakes. Image reproduced with kind permission of Keiichirō Sugimoto

Soviet Christmas Card, Copyright © 2000-2007 by Boris A. Glazer

The original theme for this Advent Calendar post was a whimsical look at how the Christmas story would have played out these days of social networking.  Of course, you could argue that the gospels already provide, through Matthew and Luke, different points of access.  However, for this post’s purposes, the critical issue is that they were written after the event, after reflection and involving a certain amount of editorial control: each gospel by named one individual in a linear narrative.

The first major world event I can remember in “real-time” is seeing the cruise missiles over Baghdad, in the First Gulf War. It was shocking, to see this footage apparently unfiltered as the commentator struggled to find words. No-one knew what was going to happen. You felt you were seeing what the pilots were seeing.  It was almost obscene. But it was a single source of information, one-to-many.

When the Twin Towers were destroyed as well as television coverage, photographs of the towers on Ananova were updated every few minutes. Press refresh… I was also in a chat room, speaking to friends in New York, stuck in their offices, wondering how to get home or if they were in danger. The world suddenly seemed a lot smaller. You could hear real people talking about real events.

The documentary 102 Minutes That Changed America used footage from mobile phones, and news coverage to create a collage of experiences, authoritative and democratic and powerful.

Video of 102 Minutes That Changed America, on YouTube.

Now, after the Tsunami and the New Orleans Floods, we expect to be able to see first hand footage, to judge for ourselves what is really happening.

“look at me looking at this”

In a recent BBC article, Social media challenges social rules, Bill Thompson, an independent journalist discusses the twitpic/tweeting nature of modern journalism, the rush for immediacy  and the need for social media ethics.  He cites the case of a soldier taking and distributing pictures of her colleagues killed in Fort Hood, and how this portrayed an inaccurate picture, distributed to millions of people. So much opinion and comment is now available.

It was also his description of conference attendees tweeting, and microblogging that resonated.  When is this social engagement, and when is this disrespect for the lecturer or speaker?  And how much does this need for immediacy preclude later intelligent comment and debate.  On the other hand, the pool of experience feeding into an event is increased, if you are lucky to have skilled and knowledgeable commentators present.

JISC 08 Conference

Now, the filtering process, the editorial process, lies with the user, and given Google’s personalised search, the user by their past behaviour is now influencing their own information sources, their reading. Somehow that seems less exciting, less honest.

Social media use in education raise issues of distraction – Study find link between Facebook use, lower grade in college – and also responsibility. JISC Legal has advice on Web 2.0 and the implications for HEIs. Students will need support to make best use of the social media available to them. Netskills have launched some online tutorials and guides on microblogging, rss, podcasting, social media and collaborative writing that can be downloaded and adapted.

But back to the events of Christmas Day…if social networking tools had existed round about 2009 years ago, Joseph might have been advised to use TripAdvisor to find a decent inn, check availability, but given that even the Internet could create more accommodation at holiday time, the baby Jesus may still have be born in a stable.

The Virgin Mary and the Child, by Albrecht Dürer (1512)

The Three Wise Men could blog their journey, as many modern travellers and pilgrims do. Travel reports of earthquakes, floods, plagues and Roman Legions on the bypass would be delivered promptly to their Blackberries.

One could speculate on the Twitpics sent by the innkeeper from his phone, the Amazon wishlist (“get what you really want”) to ensure only one set of gold, frankincense and myrrh are gifted, and later a Facebook group for the new disciples of this new Messiah. Look at RATM. On a serious note, social media are currently being used as tools in both sides of a conflict in the Middle East.

Something that is sometimes missed about Second Life is that all the content is generated by its residents: Linden Labs provided both a platform and the tools for people to build. Apart from a small library of basic items, every building, every tree, every table, every chair, every nut, bolt, rat, or aircraft has been made by a resident who has likely paid a subscription in order to work on the platform, and paid again in order to upload any media used in their build. For some, a good rate of sales makes their endeavours profitable. For many others, who just build for themselves or for friends or who give their creations away for nothing, there must be other motives.

In September this year I was given the chance to create a small project in Second Life with funding from the First World War Poetry Digital Archive. I would have a whole region to use to highlight and re-present materials from the archive. I decided that one way to do this would be to follow the typical career of a soldier from training camp to front line and to narrate this career via some of the audio interviews with veterans which the archive holds; to counterpoint it with poetry from the poets in the collection; and to illustrate both with images from the archive.

The plan was to devote the whole ground level of the region to creating a reproduction of a typical western front trench section. Within this would be space for a medical station, a dugout, and a section of no-mans-land. Above the region, out of sight of the ground, I would build a model of the training camp. This would serve as context for the relevant archive and poetry material, but would also serve as a place where the Second Life user could orient themselves, find out a little about the region and the archive itself, and also pick up a free uniform which they could wear while touring the region.

In the construction of these scenarios, much was built and scripted from scratch. Some items were adapted from existing objects with suitable modify permissions; others were begged from their creators or bought on the open market where budget allowed. A few residents donated objects to help decorate the region, including the excellent tanks and the period aircraft. Many others gave us advice, support, and encouragement in our endeavour.

When we opened, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Some superlatives levelled at us were very flattering indeed. Within two days we were being featured in the in-world Showcase pages for educational sites. It became clear that we had created something which touched people on quite a deep level. Word spread via the very active SL blogging community, and we were featured both on TV in-world and on radio off-world. In the first month we had over 1500 visitors, with the average visit time being around 90 minutes. People were not only visiting: they were staying and exploring, often returning on several occasions. People were also creating other works using the region for their raw material.

Something interesting happens when you place the eyewitness accounts alongside the poetry. These two types of narrative are both trying to convey the experiences of life on the western front, and both seem to complement and reinforce one another. The raw emotional power of the poetry bypasses your intellectual response and touches you on a deeper level. And sometimes, the detail of trench life told by a veteran has, in the very fact of its mundane ordinariness, a poignant sort of poetry of its own. Together, and in the immersive setting we have attempted to create, the effect proves very powerful. Speaking to people about their reaction to the installation I often hear words like ‘traumatic’, ‘emotional’, and ‘moving’. I can say from my own experience that, after working very closely with the material for the duration of the build, I more than once found myself weeping at the end of the day. It seems as if the juxtaposition of these two types of narrative adds up to rather more than the sum of their parts.

There was another element that we tried, in a small way, to weave into the experience.  By handing out a free soldier or nurse uniform at the landing point, and by encouraging people to wear them while visiting the region, we introduced a very low-level form of role-playing. The idea of the uniforms was to add to the visitor’s own sense of immersion, but also to reinforce that sense in any other visitors who happened to be present. On the whole, visitors do take the time to change into the uniform, and the effect works as intended. This is as far as we were able to take the idea at this stage, but it started me thinking about the concept of actors, and of using actor/roleplayer figures in the region: a person in suitable attire who is briefed with the details of their part and is able to converse with visitors ‘in character’. This is certainly something I would like to explore more in the future if I get the chance.

Role-players in the environment of Second Life are interesting to me. In the context of the First World War material, we had visitors who, from whatever their initial interest, had cast themselves in that period.  In the process of creating or adapting their own vision of a particular role, they represent another possible view of the history: one created by a knowledge of historical material coupled with an emotional response to that material and distilled through the personal sensibilities of the roleplayers themselves. I do not, however, think of the term “role-player” only in its more formal gaming sense, but more broadly, to encompass anyone who uses a virtual world to re-invent themselves in some way. In this I also find, perhaps, one reason beyond profit why people build in Second Life: the ability to create, or be part of, a personal narrative. There are many communities in Second Life where I see this taking place: the Steampunk communities of Caledon and New Babbage; the various period recreationist or re-enactment groups; the Tinies of Raglan Shire or the Furries of Luskwood; as well as many many other groups, sub-cultures and communities. These groups are authoring their own narratives on a daily basis and perform feats of great creativity in support of that narrative.

Images from CC licenced images on flickr by Chris Stephens, Alun Edwards, PJ Trenton, and Wildstar Beaumont.

This online Advent Calendar post from Intute examines the potential for the Internet as a new medium to promote democracy and political transparency. Can the public use the Internet to check up on their political representatives and make them more accountable?

Recently the Global Language Monitor announced that based on its annual global survey of English words and phrases that appear in the media and online “Twitter” is the top word of 2009 . But is the Internet really changing the nature of politics?

Senator Obama meets potential voters (2007). In the presidential election campaign Twitter and other social media were used succesfully by Barack Obama's campaign, although he has rarely updated his Twitter status since then.

The Pew Internet Survey of the American Life survey has a selection of recent research studies which have been tracking the impact of the Internet (and its associated new ‘web 2.0′ features) on American life. In its most recent survey, published in September 2009, it posed the question will political engagement in blogs and social networking sites change everything? Certainly it found increasing numbers being involved in web 2.0 activities. 19% had posted material about political or social issues or a used a social networking site for some form of civic or political engagement in 2009. However, rather dispiritingly it also felt that those involved remained disproportionately higher income and well educated.

However, this has not stopped governments worldwide launching interactive websites where users can contribute to policy making initiatives.  A recent example was the National Conversation site which was used by the Scottish authorities to promote discussion about the future government of Scotland. Its ‘blog conversations’ fed back into the writing of this week’s white paper on the constitutional future of Scotland.

This is just one example of government bodies seeking to promote greater interaction. Another more interesting example, using Google Maps technology is the Safer Streets project which is encouraging members of the public in areas such as Brighton and Luton to tell their local council/ police where they feel unsafe to go out.

However, some of the more interesting initiatives are being made by grassroots campaigners who wish to use the internet to encourage local community power.

The Guardian newspaper: 'Investigate Your MP's expenses'

With the recent controversy surrounding MPs’ expenses, the Guardian newspaper launched a site to get citizens to help investigate examples of malpractice. To date volunteers have trawled through over 700,000 pages, making a number of interesting discoveries which were later exposed and investigated by journalists.

In the USA this trend is more advanced. The Sunlight Foundation is a leading organisation.  Its recent projects have included Party Time where users can find out what parties and social events their representatives are attending! Congrelate enables members of the public to sort, filter and share their own data about money and politics in the USA.

Watch the video ‘Sunlight Foundation : Making Government Transparent’:

This is just one of the many emerging examples. if you are interested in finding out more an excellent site is the DoWire Democracies online which maintains a number of wikis, highlighting recent and good examples of community practice.

Image credits:

• Obama reach, from a photo on Flickr by Neil Coleman, licensed under Creative Commons

A user-generated resource on mental health law in England and Wales aimed at mental health practitioners such as lawyers, doctors, social workers and nurses is the subject of this online Advent Calendar post from Intute.

WikiMentalHealth was set up by Jonathan Wilson, a solicitor specialising in mental health law, but it is set up so that users can contribute to and edit content once they have registered on the site. The wiki is divided into three main sections: Case law; Legislation and General information. Mental health law cases are provided with a summary and a link to the full judgement on the legal database Bailii (where available). The Legislation section provides guidance on three key pieces of mental health legislation: the Mental Health Act 2007; the Mental Health Act 1983 and the Mental Capacity Act 2005. The General section has links to legal resources, articles and a glossary of abbreviations.

WikiMentalHealth

Given the very formal nature of the information available through this site it is perhaps an unusual ‘Web 2.0′ candidate and indeed many web users looking for primary legal materials will often be put off using wikis or other sites with user generated content in case the information is inaccurate. The WikiMentalHealth ensures reliability by not allowing the legislation pages to be edited. The information is taken from the Statute Law Database and from OPSI (Office of Public Sector Information) or is provided via a link to these databases. Case reports on the site include links to the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) website, the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) website or to the full written judgement on Bailii. However users can edit or add pages to the other sections, contribute links or write articles. Most pages of the wiki have an associated ‘discussion’ page where users can post comments and questions. Alternatively, users can leave feedback in the Suggestion box.

WikiMentalHealth home page

This is just one of the sites offering user-generated content highlighted in the Law section of Intute:

• Others that may be of interest include Crime and Justice Students produced by students at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and the European Society of Criminology where students studying crime and justice subjects can share information and discuss topics of interest.
• Another is the Personality Rights Database a user-edited wiki produced by the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law based in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh. This wiki has legal information on the protection of personality in a range of jurisdictions.

The way the Encyclopedia of Life harnesses all levels of expertise to accomplish a vast global project is today’s Advent Calendar post from Intute.

The red, red Robin, the holly and the ivy are but three of the species included in the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).  This vast project, launched in May 2007 with the ultimate aim of creating a page for every known species on earth, has a five year plan to generate a million species pages, to digitize a large portion of the biodiversity literature, to generate educational materials for students, schools and universities, and to use the EOL resource to learn more about the world’s biodiversity.

From the beginning it was obvious that so ambitious a project could only succeed by bringing together every available source of knowledge.  Whilst the EOL is managed by a partnership of natural history institutions in the United States, its content results from collaboration with a multitude of institutions and individuals from across the world and, as the months have passed, the website has become more sophisticated in offering anyone, expert or not, the opportunity to contribute.

To be successful it is absolutely imperative that the EOL maintains its reputation as an authoritative resource;  to achieve comprehensive coverage of the world’s biodiversity at the expense of accuracy would be pointless.  Thus the project has developed a hierarchy of contributors and a system of validation which aims to ensure that all content is in due course checked for accuracy, whilst allowing the user to distinguish between “authoritative” and “unchecked” information.

Any user of the site need only register to be able to add text, or images and videos (via Flickr), but these appear on the site with a yellow background until they have been reviewed by a curator, and a visitor to the site can choose between seeing everything or only “authoritative information”.  Professional scientists can provide their credentials to sign up as curators to review content relating to the group of organisms on which they work, or register as content partners to contribute an existing online database.

The Help Build EOL page  invites scientists, students, and teachers to contribute to the project in a variety of other ways such as adding tags to images or comments to content, or by submitting taxonomic information (a classification scheme or information on names) for a particular group.

The Encyclopedia of Life has achieved a lot in its first two years.  Its further development, both in number of species covered and in depth and richness of content, will depend on its continued success in encouraging  users to generate content and, at least as importantly, to monitor its quality.

Second Life ™ has been mentioned already in this Intute Advent Calendar, giving excellent examples of how a virtual world environment can be used to simulate real life situations, to allow virtual meetings, conferences and lectures, events, exhibitions and language learning. There have been recent reports of the failure of Second Life to live up to the hype, but the potential of virtual worlds – multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) – is still being explored in education. It is perhaps Second Life’s potential as a First Life marketplace that has failed to live up to the hype.

Mont Saint Michel, created by Moeka Kohime

Second Life is all about user-generated content.  In contrast to other virtual worlds/role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, Second Life relies on the ingenuity, the entrepreneurship and creativity of its resident builders and designers to create the environment the residents inhabit.   3D polygonal shapes (or “prims”) such as cubes, spheres, and cylinders are used to build objects which can be linked to form more complex objects.  Prims can be edited, texturised and copied to create clothes, buildings, bridges, snow, trees… the list is limited only by the imagination, skill and time of the creator.  A skilled creator combines striking visual design from these basic elements with efficient use of prims: only a certain number are allowed per region.

Second Life in Education

JISC recently publishing a report Getting Started with Second Life, aimed at staff who are looking to use virtual worlds for learning and research.  Virtual World Watch Activity Snap Shot  #7 Winter 2009 reports on current virtual world activity in UK Higher and Further Education, with all apart from one university developing “something”.

What use are engineers and architects making of this virtual world?

The potential of Second Life to for engineers and science lecturers was explored in a online seminar organised by the HEA Subject Centre for Engineering.

A discussion underway at the EngSc Second Life seminar

The University of Ulster’s Engineering Education Island is an example of a project which The University of Ulster cites the decline in the number of students undertaking engineering and computing degrees as a spur to explore new and innovative ways to teach engineering subjects.

Video from YouTube about the Engineering Education Island Second Life Project.

Cornwall College, who host Cornwall College Island,  are setting up a project which involves a group of students building a house in Second Life while peers studying for accreditation in other construction-based trades such as plumbing and carpentry work closely together in order to make the house function. This promotes team-work as well as homing skills.

Second Life is widely used to visualise new or lost buildings.  Funded by JISC to build a virtual 3D model in Second Life of the Pompeii Court of the Sydenham Crystal Palace, the project held its launch party yesterday.

Gweondiline in atrium looking through to back

Examples in the professional and commercial world:

• A report of a collaborative building project – Studio Wikitecture – Crowd sourcing the architectural design process
• An architecture and design firm based in Amsterdam prototyped in the online, multi-user virtual world of Second Life before construction started – Construction Complete! Before and After Images of Architectural Prototyping in Second Life

Further Links:

• Higher Education in Virtual Worlds: Teaching and Learning in Second Life
• Engineering in Second Life
• Annotated bibliography of Second Life Educational Resources
• Second Life Education New Zealand

A Google Maps application that is editable by any signed-up user who can can build up and share community-tagged interactive maps, based on a theme or just points of interest is the theme of today’s Advent Calendar post from Intute.

It is increasingly common these days to visit a website and be confronted with a Google Map. Made freely available by the Google folks, this is an application which allows a webmaster to create his or her own customised map – these can be as basic as a street plan showing an office location, or more sophisticated with directions, interactive features such as scrolling, zooming, the ability to switch between street maps and satellite imagery, and user-generated content.

Tagzania is building a community of mappers using the Google Maps application. With a purported 30,000 “tagzanians” to date, this is a pretty large user base already. The idea behind Tagzania is to allow any registered user to create a map, which he or she can then add to with their own content, such as place markers, notes, YouTube videos, images, URLs and much more. These maps can then be shared among the community.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this is the ability to add content to other users’ maps – for example, one user may have tagged a particular place; if you happen to have a photo or other information you wish to add to their basic data, that can be done with a minimum of time and effort. It allows for proper “community building” of mapping applications – examples I’ve spotted already include an estate agency map, showing the locations of available property, and a series of placemarkers for academic and commercial conferences, which include user notes, links to the conference websites, and custom tags.

It took me less than 5 minutes to register for an account with Tagzania, and to create a simple, embeddable map showing the location of the Intute Executive office in Manchester. Expanding this to create a mini-application showing all the Intute offices, opening that up to allow tagging by fellow Intute staff or the wider community, or sharing that content would be very straightforward.

Tagzania also provides a blog, which includes discussions from the developers about new features and software; an interesting note is that the site doesn’t purely rely on Google Maps - it also includes data from OpenStreetMap and Mapstraction.

The Intute World Guide also makes use of Google Maps – check out our range of City Maps, including Amsterdam, London, Sydney, Cairo, and Hong Kong, shown below.

World Guide: Hong Kong map

Image sharing website Flickr is the subject of today’s Advent Calendar post, with perspectives from Tim Machin and Larissa Douglass.

Museums, galleries, heritage collections and Flickr by Tim Machin

Staffordshire Hoard: Cheek piece, fittings and zoomorphic mount

Flickr has been enthusiastically embraced by a whole host of individuals and organisations. In particular, museums and art galleries have made exciting use of it. In the press recently were images of the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of exquisite dark-age metal work, unearthed in a field by a metal-detector enthusiast, and valued at over £3 million. These images, in a savvy move by the local museums concerned, were placed on Flickr, together with images of the crowds queuing outside to catch a first glimpse. Elsewhere this year, crowds again featured – this time, the round the block queues for Banksy vs Bristol museum, together with an evolving record of documenting Banksy’s continuing interventions in the Museum.

It’s easy to see why museums are keen to show how popular they are, and embed in public consciousness why something like the Staffordshire Hoard should remain on Mercian soil. And its not just these ticker-tape responses to breaking events that Flickr is well suited – it is after all crammed full of the output of various digitised collections, and august institutions such as the V&A have embraced it as a way of engaging with visitors, whilst the Dutch Nationaal Archief, has used its geotagging functions discover the location of hundreds of photographs taken in WW1. Indeed, Flickr has embraced this use – launching a project called ‘The Commons‘ to encourage and describe all (well, some) of this stuff.

A group of Dalmatians and their owners before the judges, 1920s or 30s / by Sam Hood

But there’s something equally exciting going on outside the institutions. I’m going to ignore the countless ‘Museums of…’ which have cropped up on Flickr (for everything from unselected pools of images of graffiti to projects to ‘exhibit outside the academy’), and focus on the way that museum’s collections and gallery exhibits have been photographed by visitors (against the traditional gallery rules) and uploaded, and museums’ own feeds borrowed and remixed.

Singapore- no camera

Here we have groups exploring museums as social spaces, for example, Museums at Night and Museum Watchers. Other groups reunite collections or support new (or counter-hegemonic) narratives, for example transferring the Benin Bronzes of the British Museum into a symbol of modern Nigerian culture. More simply, Flickr lets lovers of Women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, dogs in art and the curious bring together collections of art and objects. In a world of tagging and Creative Commons, ownership of the images as well as control of the way exhibits, collections and artefacts are represented, is questioned and the role of the institution (and the professional status of curators) is challenged.

V&A museum, Cast courts

Context, supported by scholarship, is everything in museums and galleries – setting objects into the place in a particular world view, or relating them to a cultural tradition – and as such, hotly contested. Once you kick away these kinds of supports, whether by allowing all users to tag and curate photos in groups, or giving visitors’ own photographs the same status as official documentation, you de-centre privileged (and expert) views of the objects. A space is opened up not just for alternative narratives, but their effective dissemination and (perhaps) eventual mainstream acceptance, but this is at the risk of substituting context for opinion. Pictures of dogs in art for well, just pictures of dogs.

Mark Dion, collection of specimens

In museums, this kind of thing already has a rich history – (non-expert) artists like Banksy, the Guerilla Girls, Fred Wilson and Mark Dion have been intervening and re-curating collections, both officially and unofficially for years, re-examining the academy from within, using its own mechanisms. Perhaps this is not yet happening in online communities in the same way – can the Guerilla Girls please sign up for Flickr?

guerrilla girls in Chelsea

See Intute for other academic resources in Museum, Library and Archive Studies.

Urbex “communities” on Flickr by Larissa Douglass
User-generated content becomes especially relevant to historical research through the Urban Exploration (Urbex) communities on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites. Urbex, a growing movement over the past two decades, began as amateur photographers spent weekends gaining entry to and photographing sealed and abandoned buildings, institutions and municipal structures, including hospitals, asylums, schools, churches, barracks, sewers, subways, mines, factories, military bunkers and air bases. Images in these collections, taken before demolition – or, more rarely, restoration – efforts, document the monumental changes of our era. Buildings which once constituted the monolithic infrastructure of the establishment have been unfunded and declared redundant or fallen into neglect. There are now Urbex communities in every major city in the developed world; and their photos testify to the trajectory of that development. On Flickr, pools of photos tagged as, ‘Decayed yet Hauntingly Beautiful‘, ‘The Light Painters Society’, ‘broken but loved’, ‘Urban Secret & Forgotten Places’, ‘Abandoned Places and Things’ and ‘Exploring the Megastructure’, enable Urbex groups to preserve the ongoing, hidden history of these sites.

The UK has a vibrant Urbex movement, with some cities even boasting their own organized groups, such as the Leeds Historical Expedition Society, founded by Phill Davison:

Leeds Historical Expedition Society banner, reproduced by kind permission of P. Davison

On Flickr, Davison’s work complements material available in formal research institutions. Where archival records stop, he and other contributors to Flickr’s Urbex communities complete the historical narrative. In the example of Chapel Allerton Hospital, Davison provides a ‘missing piece’ to the account of Gledhow Grove in Chapel Allerton, Leeds, designed as a stately home in Greek Revival style in the 1830s by John Hives Architect John Clark. Leodis, an online photographic archive managed by Leeds Library and Information Service and hosted by Leeds City Council, presents images of Gledhow Grove when it was still in good repair in 1950:

Gledhow Grove (Chapel Allerton), reproduced by kind permission of Leeds Library and Information Services, www.leodis.net

Davison noted that the house has been left derelict since 1994, and recorded on Flickr its subsequent ruin in 2007:

"Grandeur" - Chapel Allerton Hospital (formerly Gledhow Grove)

It remains for a portal such as Intute to bring these diverse internet sources together and present them as a coherent body of research resources on particular topics. In its Humanities, Architecture and Planning, and Geography and the Environment divisions, Intute has several sites reviewed which support this topic, including:

• Britain in pictures
• Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
• CUBE : Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment
• Flickr : photo sharing
• Flickr Friends of The Twentieth Century Society
• Ideal homes : suburbia in focus
• Leodis database
• The architectural league : NY
• Urban conservation glossary
• Urban Morphology
• Urban Morphology Research at the University of Birmingham
• Urbanicity

Image credits:

• Staffordshire Hoard: Cheek piece, fittings and zoomorphic mount by portableantiquities, licensed under Creative Commons
• A group of Dalmatians and their owners before the judges, 1920s or 30s by Sam Hood, no known copyright restrictions, from Flickr: The Commons
• Singapore- no camera by daniellih licensed under Creative Commons
• V&A Museum, Cast courts by VeronikaB, licensed under Creative Commons
• Mark Dion, collection of specimens by libbyrosof, licensed under Creative Commons
• guerrilla girls in chelsea by jeannejo licensed under Creative Commons
• Leeds Historical Expedition Society banner © phill.d urbEX photography, reproduced by kind permission of phill.d.
• Gledhow Grove (Chapel Allerton), by kind permission of Leeds Library and Information Services, www.leodis.net.
• Grandeur, from a photo on Flickr by phill.d, licensed under Creative Commons.