Published: The Hedgehog Review! But not like you nor I imagined…
May 31 I woke to a surprise, an unanticipated message about one of my images from Leann Davis Alspaugh, the…
OPFCON: How has OPF contributed to the international digital preservation community? Where would this community be without OPF?
Last Wednesday and in another life, pre-COVID pandemic, I would have been visiting Vienna again. I visited for the digital preservation conference iPRES for the first time in 2010, and lived there for a short period of time last year.
Now, we’re in the midst of a pandemic and the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) 10th Anniversary Event could not happen in person but the OPF found a way anyway, and so 9-10 June 2020 became the online event OPFCON.
Fortunate enough have an abstract of mine be considered worthy of a panel towards the end of the event I was able to reflect on the last 10 years. My notes on those and the panel can be found below.
Digital preservation at the coalface: or how I learned that glamping doesn’t always involve the vast wilderness
The last Friday of March this year, I was invited by Elizabeth Kata at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to give a presentation at the Vienna Institute for Historical Research (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung). I don’t have a transcript for that day or a complete set of notes that I followed, but here is the essence of the talk. In it, Reflecting on community and self-development in digital preservation; I touch upon, among other things, community, recognizing privilege, and finding value and meaning in digital records.
I began and ended the talk by singing two Waiata, an important part of my previous role at Archives New Zealand.
Te Manaaki taonga
Te Manaaki taonga
E whakarauika ana I te tini e
E ranga ana I te tira
Hei huruhuru moo te manu ka rere
Hei Poutuumaaro mo te kainga
Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata
Manaaki taaonga manaaki tangata
(Tane chant: Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata.
Manaaki taaonga manaki tangata – Hi!)
(Last time Wahine join chant: manaaki tangata – Hi!)
The value/prestige in protecting treasures
They gather/connect the people like the gathering of fish
They weave the party/masses
To be like feathers of a bird that takes flight
To be a strong pillar for our home
The sewing of stories, the sewing of people
The protection of treasures the protection of people
My GLAM: Sitting at the Coalface
Back in October a good friend of mine at the Australian Society of Archivists Victoria Branch asked me to write a short piece describing ‘My GLAM’. I adopted the theme, “Sitting at the Coalface”.
GLAM stands for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. In the article I described where my focus in the digital preservation world has been for the last decade. I also suggested that one letter was missing from GLAM: ‘P’ for ‘people’.
The full text of this short piece is below.
Digital Preservation as a Thought Experiment
Back in 2017, I had an abstract accepted for a chapter in the ALCTS Monograph: Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future. With my author’s copy now available, I take a look at the background and its genesis below. The complete monograph is a fascinating read with some great contributors. You can find it online at the ALA Store.
Digital Preservation Risk analysis, Uncertainty, and Digital File Format Obsolescence (European Conference on Digital Archives (2010))
Full paper: The application of risk models to digital file format obsolescence I have seen a lot of conversation about…
Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum
When I visited the Brooklyn Museum in February they were in the middle of their Infinite Blue exhibition. Surveying the entire collection, Infinite Blue collected museum objects that prominently featured the color blue. Part of their Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum.
A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum presents the history of feminism and feminist art while showcasing contemporary artistic practices and new thought leadership.
While not explicitly stated in their literature, Blue seems to have been selected by the museum’s curators for embodying core feminist values:
In cultures dating back thousands of years, blue—the color of the skies—has often been associated with the spiritual but also signifies power, status, and beauty. The spiritual and material aspects of blue combine to tell us stories about global history, cultural values, technological innovation, and international commerce.
My first weeks at Artefactual Systems Inc.
There was a great response to my move away from the public sector into a private sector company (that’s right,…
Color Theory: What’s the deal with the palettes I’m using?
Following a recent conversation, I wanted to write this blog to add some final pieces of context to my current interest in color palettes.
Binary Numbers
The Binary Numbers project was changed earlier this year following Trump’s inauguration. The original was inspired by simple musings on Data as Art. It was updated again in 2014 after the work had stalled due to technical reasons. I increased the complexity of the images, and incorporated Heritage Color Palettes.
But the end of last year and the beginning of this were exhausting. Two months were spent in protest:
But it seems that this alone was not able to tear the wheels off a tanker in Tienanmen Square… and so I decided on something uplifting. For myself, and for the viewer.
Cinema Palettes was a fantastic Twitter account that takes a scene (not necessarily iconic) from a film and analyses the scene’s colors, presenting back to us, the palette used.
I had been following it for a while and I became curious as to what I might be able to do with it in the configuration of my Binary Numbers.
And so from January this year I adapted the Cinema Palettes concept into this work starting with 50 new color palettes.
The Painter Goblin Visits The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Top Five
I’m heading to Houston for the first time this Friday, for ten-days. I can’t wait! To fill my time before I go, I thought I’d pay tribute to some of the artwork I might find there. Well, I say me, but I mean, I asked The Painter Goblin to make these pieces for me based on what it could find on wikidata.org. I like what it discovered!
Enjoy!