Middleware and open data

Just a quick one.  Last week the project multitouch group met to discuss moving forward with the development of the project website and multitouch interface.  The upshot of the conversation was that Russell has commited to building a ‘middleware’.  Essentially we have our project data stored in a database for use in a program called ‘NVivo’ which is used for analysing qualitative data.  Russell’s team are going to build some code to allow this database to be searched from outside the program and then call up the data tagged with different themes.  While the middleware itself won’t be pretty to look at (little more than a search box), we’ll then be able to layer on top of that some more attractive and intuitive interfaces suitable for web and touch devices.

This is very exciting and links to a meeting I was at last week in Southampton as part of the HESTIA2 project, which was considering issues of linked and open data.  One of the conditions of research council funding these days is that you make your data open to all.  Traditionally this has meant putting things like interview transcripts in an online repository.  This is fine, but it means that people accessing your data don’t get any sense of the analysis that you have done – tagging different pieces of text and images against different themes.  The middleware that Russell’s team are building will actually make both the data and, crucially, our analysis, both open and linkable, which is a very exciting prospect.

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Edinburgh Showcase 4 July 2013

Last week the AHRC were running a series of events in Edinburgh as part of the Connected Communities theme.  I was there for two of these, a networking day on the Wednesday and the Showcase on the Thursday.  The Showcase is an opportunity to highlight project findings to a more general audience.  Myself, Beth and Dave were representing the Cultural Intermediation project at this event showing off some posters and our new toy – a 55″ touch table, which the AHRC were kind enough to buy us to use at this and future events.

Here’s myself and Beth posing for one of the official event photographers, with me trying not to look too camp.  It was a really fascinating day, with lots of interesting potential collaborators stopping to chat.  I had a really intriguing natter to the guys from Leicester Transport Heritage Trust about their work trying to turn an old tram shed into a museum and home for their collection – they could see some real value in being able to give people virtual access to some of their more fragile items through the use of a big touchtable.  There were also lots of interesting connections with other projects working on issues around asset mapping in local neighbourhoods, whcih seems to be a common thread across a number of Connected Communities researchers. I was particularly interested in the things that the walkinginterconnections.com project was tackling in terms of everyday lived experience for disabled people and questions of neighbourhood sustainability.

Overall a great couple of days, if somewhat tiring when having to switch between fearsome networking, selling the project on our stand and then the somewhat less glamorous job of driving the enormous van containing the touchtable back to Birmingham at the end of the event.

Reflections on the ECE 6th Conference, University of Toronto, and Artscapes, University of Kent

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Art, Birmingham, cities, communities, conference, connected, Creative economies, geography, Intermediation, Policy, Richard Florida, Toronto

At the end of summer term the academic calendar segues into conference season. First was the ECE 6^th Conference at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), University of Toronto from 18-21^st June. A highly stimulating yet exhausting programme ran from 8.30am till we had finished up to 7 courses of our dinners (around 9.30pm, depending on stamina). The conference was designed as a way to bring early career academics together from around the world in a process of field-rebuilding on the creative economy.  Generosity of funding by MPI enabled early career academics with limited or non-existent research budgets to attend – although Canadian immigration prevented two of the speakers joining us in person (Ammar Palik, Pakistan, and Andrés Goméz-Liévano, Colombia).

Richard Florida gave his time to meet one-on-one with each of the participants as part of a game in academic speed-dating. He also led a discussion on revisiting the creative class where he rightfully noted that 100s of trillions is invested in urban spending and urban practice therefore focus needs to be concentrated on how spending is translated into pragmatic strategy. Casinos, stadiums and bike lanes are not, of course, the simple solution. Issues of inequality and disadvantaged communities in urban space were discussed in the session and throughout the conference, with common agreement that the pay and conditions for the service sector were unacceptable. A set of fascinating papers ensued. In particular I was impressed by the potential of Dr Xingiian Liu’s data visualisations which showed how creative cities are networked in terms of level of workers and interdependence.

The next week it was onto a very different but interesting conference Artscapes: Urban Art and the Public at the University of Kent, 27-28th June. As an example of where site-specificity falls down, Dr Rob Knifton discussed David Mach’s Polaris (1983) which was set on fire by a protester on Southbank who suffered fatal burns. The paper recalled the type of intense public participation, and ‘radical decommissioning’, that artist Simon Pope articulates in the burning of Raymond Mason’s Forward in Birmingham City Centre in 2003 (see my artist talk with Simon here). Of particular note was an excellent keynote talk by Dr Jonathan Vickery which read Jochen Gerz’s 2-3 Strassen in relation to creative cities literature.  Vickery’s consideration of how culture in public space has to map itself onto broad objectives of governance and government usefully brought together the strands of thinking from both conferences which feed into our governance work. Exploring culture as a function of policy is one of our lines of thinking, and, taking a multi-level approach, in the next academic year we will be working with communities to learn more about how they connect into cultural and creative practice. More on this soon.