Dynamic Archiving

HASTAC 2013: Korsakow as Curatorial Tool?

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:31:41 +0000

HASTAC 2013: Korsakow as Curatorial Tool? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/29/2013 - 13:31

HASTAC 2013: The Storm of Progress

On Sunday, I presented on the use of Korsakow as a tool for digital curation as prototyped at the Brakhage Center for the Media Arts. Eric Coombs and I created an archive of the 2005 symposium as a means to test Korsakow for archival and curatorial ends. The HASTAC talk was an opportunity to exchange with other working with the software.

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HASTAC 2013 will bring together 5 keynote speakers, 150 refereed papers, panels and demos, a maker space, curated digital performances and over 200 attendees including established and emerging scholars, artists and authors, tech entrepreneurs and teachers, to explore alternative modes of creating, innovating, and critiquing that better address the interconnected, diverse, interactive global nature of knowledge today, both in the academy and beyond. Our scheduled sessions will deepen our understanding of the role of digital technologies and media and the changes in behaviour and ways of learning and working currently underway.

2013 marks the 10th anniversary of HASTAC’s founding. In that spirit HASTAC 2013 is showcasing work that is either reflective or prescient, that evaluates our digital histories and seeks to construct our digital future(s). We invited contributors to take this opportunity to look back, theorize and archive. We invited them to engage in the creative, if impossible, attempt to glimpse the digital future. We challenged them to shape it. And researchers from across Canada, the United States and Europe and from as far away as Australia are coming to Toronto to share how they and their teams, their research labs,
their classrooms and their students are building the technologies and subjects of the future right now or imagining new horizons of possibility for the ways in which we will make, teach, learn and find community in the coming decade(s).

Sunday April 29 10:30-11:45

Session 40:

“The Korsakow System: Database Filmmaking for the Web” Matt Soar, Midi Onodera, Mél Hogan (with the help of Eric Coombs), Florian Thalhofer.

More: http://melhogan.com/website/hastac-2013-korsakow-as-a-curatorial-tool/

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Nicole Robicheau presents ‘The Border Between Us’

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:38:32 +0000

Nicole Robicheau presents ‘The Border Between Us’ Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/13/2013 - 12:38

Nicole Robicheau will be presenting her work (via Skype) alongside M.E. Luka on Tuesday March 12th (time tbc). Please join us at the Brakhage Center (ATLAS 311).

Project Description: The Border Between Us is an interactive documentary about two border towns and twelve people. It’s set in Stanstead, Quebec and Derby Line, U.S.A. It looks at life in the two communities post-9/11.

Click to Run

What follows is an interview with Nicole about her documentary, conducted by Mél Hogan for the Korsakow blog on November 10, 2012:

What brought you to this border town: Stanstead and Derby Line?

Iwanted to do a project about borders. I’ve long been interested in how such an arbitrary demarcation can affect the lives of people who happen to find themselves on either side of it. Doing research on the Canada-U.S. border was a tangible way to examine a border that’s near me, and one that is going through drastic changes. I came across Derby Line and Stanstead in my research, and the unique character of the two towns, and I was immediately drawn in.

Tell me more about this idea of the border as an arbitrary demarcation…

I’ve crossed quite a few borders overland and I’m always struck by how these lines that delineate nation-states seem to be carved up without any regard to the life that surrounds it. And certainly many borders of current countries, if not all, were decided by people in places far removed from the actual line, just by looking at maps. It’s impossible to see lived experience by looking at maps. Not to mention the fact that usually people who decided these boundaries didn’t even have the right to do so in the first place. Yet very few of these lines are now being challenged.

You have a background in journalism. How has that influenced the way you’ve approached your topic?

Ithink in the beginning, I approached the story very much like a journalist would. In fact, I was working as a radio reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) at the time, and I began by looking into its archives for contacts of people who had been interviewed and were somehow invested in all the changes that were happening along the border. What was different for me with this project though was that I was really interested in capturing the stories of everyday people living along that line. I was tired of having to interview experts, which I always had to do in my work as a journalist. With this project, I was actively militating against my journalism training, which usually had me interviewing people in positions of authority.

– >> READ MORE

Nicole Robicheau is a storyteller and media maker who primarily works and lives in Montreal. She has previously worked as a radio journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She also does aid work with the Canadian Red Cross and has also also worked with various organizations in Africa and in Europe on media development.

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M.E. Luka presents Archiving Artspots

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:23:49 +0000

M.E. Luka presents Archiving Artspots Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/13/2013 - 12:23

M.E. Luka will be at UC ��«��Ƶ, Monday March 11th (2-5pm) and Tuesday March 12th (time tbc) to present on her doctoral project (Archiving Artspots) and lead a Korsakow workshop. Please bring your laptop and join us at the Brakhage Center (ATLAS 311). You can download Korsakow here.

Archiving ArtSpots: seeking creative citizenship
What is the relationship between art and media production and dissemination? This is the large umbrella under which much of my professional work and scholarly research takes place. Currently, my focus is on production practices and creativity in cultural media production, including the meaning and potential of creative citizenship, and the often precarious work of artists and creative producers in daily life and professional engagements. More specifically, my doctoral research is an in-depth, highly reflexive study of the long-running television and internet program, CBC ArtSpots (1997-2008). Ten years of thoughtful creative activity resulted in multi-layered curatorial discussions, a proliferation of practices, reams of visual and audio footage, and terabytes of backups and storage: what was the generative relationship between art and digital media in Canada at the cusp of the 21st century? I seek pathways through archival materials, communications methodologies, potentially totalizing narratives, and theoretical frameworks about the work of art and artists in relation to broadcast and digital media. By digging into the video art and broadcasting roots of ArtSpots, I intend to cast light on the helpfulness of mobilizing old and new methodological and creative processes side-by-side with theoretical structures and strictures.

My current interest in historicizing and rethinking the ArtSpots project is intended to situate it in the larger context of cultural media production, and cultural engagement generally, both at the time, and as it continues to impact today. The joining of cultural studies and the sociology of art with a political economy analysis offers a starting point, enabling the examination of systems and patterns concerning the everyday social and productive relations of individual and collective creators involved in cultural production. However, much of the existing theoretical work about the arts and broadcasting is informed by empirical work outside Canada, including Lynn Spigel’s work in the United States (2008) and Georgina Born’s ethnographic work in the U.K. (2004). By taking a look at how and why artists engage with the Canadian broadcasting and digital media system, a deeper understanding of the inventive and precarious nature of an artist or media professional’s creative labour in the broadcast environment in Canada can be realized. The need for such attention is evident, considering decreasing levels of government and private funding of visual arts and non-profit media. From this examination, a complex understanding of what is meant by creative labour and creative citizen engagement within cultural media production may be generated; including how cultural space is fashioned for such production. An element of my current research investigates ArtSpots as such a cultural space (Luka, pending): a fluidly evolving digital archival and/or (perhaps) virtual space.

I am using the strategy of mobilizing media production as a way to interrogate and reflect on the ArtSpots space – potentially engaging a deliberate (and deliberative) embodiment of the theoretical, historically-based “remediation” endeavour that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) might suggest may be inevitable as technology develops, and which draws from Marshall McLuhan’s legacy of deliberate engagement with materiality in/and media. This may bring me closer to media archeology as a theoretical framework through the methodological forays I undertake. As I’ve noted in an interview for No More Potlucks 25 – Archive#:

Can the reverberations of this project be felt along the trajectories created over this time period – and since then – and through the continued interactions and engagements among those involved? Are the material outcomes and shared experiences of ArtSpots a collection of topoi, as Erkki Huhtamo might suggest (Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011), engendered by cultural agents (artists, curators, technicians, etc.), invoking affect, aesthetic reflections, and cultural critiques? I’m not sure that explains nearly enough, but it does provide an interesting egress from the historical material content to the idea of mediated archive…

In addition, I am interested in how Lynne Huffer (2010) characterizes the work of Foucault in relation to archives. In particular, the suggestion that experiences are “archivally thick” critical contributions to archives strikes me as useful in thinking through power and social relations, very much the concern of Foucault. Such archival practices “puts us into the question[s]” asked in terms of affect as well as the subject relationship (Huffer, 334-5).

Methodologically, my approach includes engagement in material practices myself: the research-creation project I am conducting for my doctoral dissertation research probes ArtSpots through a specific set of mixed-methods. This includes organizing and recording in-depth interviews and discussion groups, editing them together with some of the ArtSpots’ archived video productions (embedded with high production values) and combining these into a short series of non-linear documentary structures through Korsakow software, along with images based on freeze-frames grabbed from the almost-moribund (or partially archived?) ArtSpots website, scanned pictures of production notes, etc. Additionally, my methods program includes a deliberative mash-up of scatterings of post-it notes, workflows incorporating Evernote(s) and website-based field notes, hard-copy bibliographies and handcrafted reflections, and mappings of my house of theory, as well as the themes and questions that arise through tilling the verdant soil of discussion groups and in-depth interviews, including seeking feedback on how I am processing this unusual experience. Taken together, these seductively productive incursions hurtle me into provocative interrogations of vernacular and cultural citizenship (see Joke Hermes and Toby Miller as well as William Uricchio and, in Canada, Caroline Andrew et al), bringing these together with the creative commons, cultural industries and digital archival practices, interrupting and tracing the concept of creative citizenship that I seek to move toward.

Works Cited:

Andrew, Caroline, Monica Gattinger, M. Sharon Jeannotte, and Will Straw, Eds. (2005). Accounting for Culture: Thinking Through Cultural Citizenship. Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Born, Georgina. (2004). Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Secker & Warburg.
Hermes, Joke. (2005). Re-reading Popular Culture. Malden, Oxford & Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
Huffer, Lynne and Elizabeth Wilson. (2010). Mad for Foucault: A Conversation. Theory, Culture & Society 27, 324-338. http://www.sagepublications.com. DOI: 10.1177/0263276410383712. Retrieved 24 November 2012.
Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka. Eds. (2011). Introduction. Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1-6.
Luka, Mary Elizabeth. (pending). Mapping CBC ArtSpots. Diverse Spaces: Examining identity, heritage and community within Canadian public culture. Ed. Susan Ashley. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Miller, Toby. (2007). Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Spigel, Lynn. (2008). TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Uricchio, William. (2004). Beyond the Great Divide: Collaborative Networks and the Challenge to the Dominant Conceptions of Creative Industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1: 79-90. Sage Publications. Retrieved 23 February 2011.

Mary Elizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar and doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Joint Program in Communication at Concordia University, where she’s probing the meaning and potential of “creative citizenship,” including the work of artists and creative producers in daily life. Luka is also an award-winning documentary producer and director for television and the internet, and—because she likes to start things—has helped to develop programs, projects and a great deal of talent related to her fields of interests, particularly in the Atlantic Region. As a consultant in the cultural non-profit sector, she recently assisted Women in Film and Television – Atlantic and the Canada Dance Festival develop their strategic and business plans. M.E. is actively involved as a volunteer for professional and community organizations related to the arts, media, and culture, including as founding Vice-Chair of Arts Nova Scotia, the brand-new independent, provincial funding body for the arts in that province, and as a member of the Creative Nova Scotia Leadership Council, an advisory board to the government of Nova Scotia regarding the creative and cultural industries. The videos appearing in this article are drawn from the non-linear documentary work-in-progress grounding her doctoral research.

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Dynamic Archiving: Demo Dec 12, 2012

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:07:37 +0000

Dynamic Archiving: Demo Dec 12, 2012 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/13/2012 - 12:07

We’ve got a working demo of our curatorial project built in Korsakow.

For now, we’re using the default interface and have a few glitches and details to work through but we feel that already Korsakow is proving an efficient curatorial tool – making the media richer in its connections.

Click to Run

Some of the issues we are working through include the design and layout as well as the limits of the technologies: the software, the platform, the media formats, and so on. There’s been a lot to consider.

Stuff we’ve learned so far (which may be a reiteration of the software FAQ):

Naming your files properly is important. Don’t put in any spaces or weird characters or else the path isn’t likely to work in certain browsers, like Chrome.

The web can handle much better video compression than it once could, and formulas could be revised to reflect this progress. Depending on the source of your video, video online can be of high quality using the H264 codec with mp4 as a container. In our experience mp4 looks better and generates smaller files, but mov load faster. This requires further explorations.

For audio, acc and mp4 don’t work so stick to mp3.

Another audio bug seems to be that it can play overtop other media assets – as in audio from one clip continues to play when another one has been selected. Not sure if it something on our end – in the programming – or with Korsakow.

The playhead the comes with the software seems to run off the page.

Transparent png don’t work – they come with a boxy background.

On our end, we need to add titles to some of the images to give them context and guide users. We also need to rethink the trajectory – while nonlinear, it is thought out to guide the user in a choronological order i.e., you can only go forward in time, not back, but you have many options for moving forward. I’ve noticed in testing it out, however, that some trajectories are less likely to the point of being likely passed by completely. This will need tweaking. Some “main” SNUs don’t have enough previews popping up to complete the three, which becomes a design consideration. I’d like for us to test out the Preview text that comes in Korsakow, and a few of the other features we haven’t yet explored… look forward to Demo 2 in the next few months.

Mél Hogan

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Dynamic Archiving

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:52:38 +0000

Dynamic Archiving Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/01/2012 - 11:52

We’re using Korsakow software to prototype a dynamic archiving model for a Brakhage Center sponsored Film and Poetry Conference from 2011. The process is documented and blogged by Dr. Mel Hogan, who is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Curation at CU ��«��Ƶ.

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Dynamic Archiving: Splicing Audio

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 17:40:22 +0000

Dynamic Archiving: Splicing Audio Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/01/2012 - 11:40

Having now completed the inventory of the 2011 Poetry and Film Symposium put on by Tom Gunning and the Brakhage Center for the Media Arts, Eric Coombs and I now combing through the various media files associated with the project: images, pdf documents, audio, etc.

Most of the symposium was audio recorded, including films, readings, talks, videos, performances, introductions and claps. We’re in the process of matching audio to events listed in the inventory, and making the adjustments when we discover recordings for unlisted moments or events. The opposite is also true – we can’t find the opening remarks so we’ll have to cross reference with another audio recording of the event.

We’re hoping to get our hands on the papers presented as to pull quotes and use text to also represent voice in our curatorial display. We’re saving some of the audio glitches and scratches for possible sound loops in Korsakow – exact use to be determined. We’re also thinking of keywords now that are going to help assemble the showcase…

Technically, we splice the audio leaving a bit of room tone before and after (some of the recordings have rough starts/ends) to give breathing room to the tracks. We adjust the gain bu lowering the dbs of very loud tracks. We then export the splices into event based folder, in .aif 16 44.1 Khz (a quality to match what was recorded) labeled by the speaker or film and so on. We can mass convert to mp3 later, but for now retain the best quality as back up. There are obviously many debates in the archiving world about format and quality and how it relates to authenticity, but we’re of the view that that implies a neutrality to the technologies used to record–and create–the original. So we are cognizant of the issues but forge ahead.

We have yet to come up with a great folder/label system but we’re working on it, thinking it through. This is proving far trickier than any technical aspect so far…

-by Mél Hogan

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Dynamic Archiving: SNUifying

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:41:08 +0000

Dynamic Archiving: SNUifying Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/01/2012 - 07:41

After much time spent organizing our media assets and splicing audio, we’re ready to perform a few tests in Korsakow. Because of a small glitch, we’re opting to use the Beta version (and to become Beta testers).

Our process today consisted of first creating assets from the audio and stills we have. Using video seems the best way to match content to context, though we will likely test out other possibilities and combinations. Working with Korsakow is highly iterative. We’re constantly toggling between the interface and the preview mode, making adjustments, problem-solving, redirecting, and so on. Being two sets of eyes on this is proving very useful – Eric and mine’s attention seems to be grabbed by different parts of the project, which come together in a very complementary way.

Some preliminary questions specific to our project, and things we’ve noted about the software:

the video could be of much better quality than the suggested settings point to currently. The Web seems to handle video much better now, and so we’re going to try to push the quality up a little.
could Korsakow eventually handle HD?
a mobile-friendly version is in the works – important!
will Korsakow eventually be able to handle links? does it already? to be explored…
we’re imagining a slideshow options but are unsure of our needs at this moments
is there a way to make a SNU appear at the end of another – continuity – linearity – or is this anti-Korsakow?
what could be done with PDFs/text – pull quotes?
what to do with films for which we only have the audio (no visuals)
how to archive silent films for which we don’t have the rights to visuals

Tips/things to remember:

setting the playhead to “interactive” – it’s not, by default
duplicate a SNU if you want it to be a start SNU but also a SNU with a preview that you can see again
there’s an invisible (?) glitch when setting the timecode for a SNU using the automatic way – makes the SNU switch order!

Helpful resources:

Dayna’s awesome performance of Korsakow: SNU theatre.
The Korsakow Manual

That’s it for now. Prototype (of 3 SNU) should be good to go next week.

by Mél Hogan

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Dynamic Archiving: Korsakow as a tool for digital curation?

Anonymous — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 17:01:52 +0000

Dynamic Archiving: Korsakow as a tool for digital curation? Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 10/13/2012 - 11:01

I’ve just embarked on a project at the Brakhage (Media Arts) Center (University of Colorado – ��«��Ƶ), and my job here is to come up with modes and models for digital curation. The idea is to help showcase various collections in the archive and organise them – so I proposed a tool that could conceivably organise a collectionby showcasing it: Korsakow.

Korsakow is a non-linear database driven repository and a tool created for storytelling (and, as far as I can tell, subverting traditional documentary forms). From experience, it is also, by default, a method and means of working: aggregating, sorting, and displaying collections in a multimodal way. The creative process is highly iterative and requires a continuous conversation between the software and the media at hand. In other words, while you can (and often should) plan out the relationships (keywords) between media assets, this planning is perpetually revised through interaction with the database and interface. It’s neither about randomness nor chance, but rather about a set of limitations in our conception of links, or, in what we determine should be connected to what. Largely keyword driven, the software demands curation – choices to provide context to media. What’s special about the way we are thinking of using it is that its application will be to a collection of disparate media sources, and eventually collections of collections in the archival sense, which as far as I know, hasn’t been applied yet. As my incredibly insightful collaborator, Eric Coombs, sees it – usually technologies are invented for practical uses and subverted by artists; this time we’re repurposing an artist’s tool for a decidedly pragmatic end goal. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve committed to documenting our process here – and later on the BC blog perhaps – to detail the conceptual transformations, failures, obstacles, and epiphanies of our curatorial journey.

Korsakow is a ‘dynamic storytelling’ tool; it is Flash-driven and as such is limited to desktop, online, and kiosk display. Plans are underway to release an HTML5 version, which will be mobile-friendly and possibly offer new features. Korsakow was invented by Florian Thalhofer, a Berlin-based media artist. Its development has since been taken on by a team at Concordia University, in Montreal. This team is lead by Matt Soar in the Communication Studies Dept., working with various programmers (Sean Fraser and Dave among others) to continue the development of this amazing, unique, and free (for educational purposes) open source tool. One of my goal is certainly to see how our project at the BC can generate financial or technical (or both) support.

What we’ve outlined as the first step is to create an inventory of the one-off Poetry and Film Symposium from 2005 as an archival project prototype. If all goes well with that one, we’ll have generated a model for the regular symposium content. The content consists primarily of audio recordings and stills, and a few videos. Some of the media is of mediocre recording quality, which may pose an interesting archival challenge in software that begs for rich and vibrant content.

The discussion today revolved mostly around how to conceptualise the archive for this project. Can Korsakow effectively replace or provide an alternative to the ‘online archive,’ which typically resorts to long lists, sorted according to author, media and date? Can Korsakow provide an archival ‘experience’ to researchers? How will we curate the content? Will we select everything (all recorded media) or highlight key moments only? What are the implications of either option, for the research archive? Should duplicate all ‘raw’ materials in a comprehensive archive – maybe archive.org or or through torrent files or as a back up copy on our own server? Who is our intended audience? How will the archive be used and possibly misused? What advantages can a Korsakow archive provide a researcher? What are its drawbacks on the front and back end? Can the collections’ contexts be effectively generated through keywords? What will determine the connections between speakers and ideas? How can we make the material we have come to life through audio and images?

These are the questions we begin this journey with… the next few months will therefor demand attentive listening to/looking at all the media on hand pertaining to this symposium, and noting keywords to begin mapping the project. To be continued.

by Mél

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