Innovation Showcases
Data Lifeboat - Preserving Billions of Images on Flickr.com: How We're Tackling Preservation of a Huge Social Media Collection
Innovation Showcase George Oates
Flickr.com was born in 2003 and has grown to a visual archive of over 50 billion images. It is also held inside a company, which could be read as a risk to its survival, especially considering how many web platforms have dissolved over the last 20 years, taking the content down with them. We have an opportunity to preserve this unique and vast collection, and the Flickr Foundation's Data Lifeboat initiative is our major strategy to succeed. It is a collective selection process to archive "slivers" of Flickr because essentially, Flickr.com is simply too big for any one institution to take on. Data Lifeboats can be created by anyone with a Flickr account, and sent anywhere for safekeeping, whether that be to the family Dropbox account or a traditional archiving institution. Learn how the Flickr Foundation is developing the technology and also a LOCKSS-like institutional network to get serious about preserving this fantastic visual archive for access across the next century.
A Little History of the Sikhs: Reflections and Innovative Practice from a Decade of Work Growing from a Small Local Community Initiative in London
Innovation Showcase Rav Singh
A little History of the Sikhs brings alive Sikh, Punjab and North Indian history found in museums, institutions, and within the public realm in European cities and shapes how residents from the Indian subcontinent can access, appreciate, and draw confidence from the stories we present of individuals, events, and artefacts that are accessed in the cities in Europe we call home. In this session, the founder, Rav Singh, will share examples of work that grew from being a visitor who brought audiences to engage with museums to now being a partner and co-curator of exhibitions with Historic Royal Palaces, a mentor at the London Festival of Architecture and a guide at the Royal Hospital Chelsea.
3D Printing & Cultural Spaces: Case Studies
Innovation Showcase Samuel Foulkes, Tom Babinszki
Clovernook's Arts & Accessibility Initiative provides free services to cultural spaces across the United States. We showcase some of their work in this session, using examples to frame different ways that spaces can think about applying 3D printing to their work. This session will provide attendees with an overview of the current state of 3D printing technologies, and how models can be used in a variety of cultural contexts. We will highlight the breadth of applications that widely available and inexpensive 3D printing technology can apply to across the arts sphere, and provide start-up ideas for cultural spaces interested in learning more. Attendees will also learn how models can improve cultural access not just for individuals who are blind or low vision, but also positively impact wider audiences - whether it be an exact replica of an art object, a 3D scan + print of an actor in a performance, or an abstract concept translated into a tactile format.
Innovative Re-use Scenario of a Digital Museum Object: Shaping an Accessible Natural History Experience and a Sustainable (Business) Model
Innovation Showcase Tina Schneider
Tactile models in museum exhibitions are often visually basic in metallic or grey colours, supported by braille and lack interactive components. Can technology transform these simple models into a more engaging tactile experience that follow the “Design for All” idea while allowing visually impaired people a fully independent usage? To investigate this, the Berlin Museum of Natural History and industry partner werk5, a model building company, transformed the 3D scan of a dor beetle into an up-scaled responsive tactile object. Various in-house experts, such as staff from the education and entomology department, steered the project, together with industry partners and an accessibility expert. Stages of the project included material tests, the development of an audio description and of a gesture recognition software with tactile sensor technology. First a prototype, then a demonstrator was built, which were both continuously tested and improved. A focus group of visually impaired people supported the project team and provided continuous feedback. The outcome is an accessible and responsive tactile model that offers a novel form of interaction and is suitable for people with and without visual impairments. It can generally represent a new kind of accessibility offer and knowledge transfer. To increase the reach of the project, the analogue model was transferred into the digital realm in form of a web-based application, which also offers a sign language version. Furthermore, a business model was conceived to enable the distribution of the physical tactile model.
