Author Archives: futurilla

Digital arts use in the UK

20 Monday Jul 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

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A new April 2009 report from Arts Council England, “examining current public attitudes to and experience of arts content online”. It’s just been published on their website. Arts Council reports often need to be taken with a pinch of salt but, surveying just 132 people in the U.K., it found that…

“Creating and participating in the arts digitally is considered a very niche activity by all segments, appealing only to the most ardent ‘leading edge’ enthusiasts. There is little expressed desire for these kinds of opportunities among participants, suggesting that the much discussed ‘co-creating’ and ‘remixing’ generation is still only a small minority.”

[people] “find the extent and variety of art that is available in the digital space overwhelming and intimidating. […] only those who are currently engaged with the arts are likely to explore [future digital] opportunities.”

   Related on the JURN blog: Validating interactive new media as a research output and The audience for quality intellectual content is constantly shrinking.

Why is this important? If the public, the funders, and even our fellow academics all make a collective mehh, whatever! in the face of rich interactive arts-related intellectual production, then the resultant mood risks adding to the ongoing undermining of the humanities — since it effectively shuts us off from one possible method to refresh and reinvigorate the humanities. A method that might have served to generate public support for spending scarce public cash on arts-related intellectual production.

A financially viable model for arts criticism and coverage?

18 Saturday Jul 2009

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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The U.S. National Summit on Arts Journalism is calling for entrepreneurial ideas on how to revive arts journalism, as dedicated newspaper art critics go the way of the dodo. The conference will be held in Los Angeles, sponsored by USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, and it will be webcast worldwide on 2nd October 09.

“There are many ideas currently buzzing for attention. Our intention here is to try to identify some of the most promising and give them wider circulation. […] We’re looking for sustainable new models […] These can be established projects or startups, but must already be launched or on a clear trajectory to launching. Size of the project is not necessarily a factor, but impact is.”

Projects can be submitted online and will be public, and they’re not looking for blogs or other media made viable only by unpaid work. Five will be picked to receive $2,000 expenses to attend the conference, and (potentially) one of the three cash prizes ($7,500 / $5,000 / $2,500). Sadly, only projects in Canada or the USA are eligible for entry.

The good old days

16 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search

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Ah, the good old days…

[At] “The first library I worked in […] the database subscriptions were delivered on CD-ROMs and loaded on an IBM server for distribution throughout the local area network. […] a librarian would use a dial-up modem to connect to a commercial information services corporation, Dialog, which charged by the minute for connection time, and charged individual fees for searching a database, displaying citations, and for downloading each and every item. […] It was all too easy to spend $100 of the library’s money on a search which might take 8-10 minutes. […] Any student doing research had to physically be in the building in order to do any work. Once the search was completed, they then had to trek around the [library] stacks to locate the individual article in the [print] journal.”

Spezify

15 Wednesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ 2 Comments

I can’t remember the last time I saw a new search-engine that more than mildly impressed me (*), but the just-launched Spezify is impressive and different. It’s primarily a visual search-engine aimed at designers and creatives, but also slips in relevant text and audio links. I gave it a tough one: Mongolian folk song, and it delivered very well…

spezify

Yes, those are the results! And, as I know this search inside-out, I’d say they’re a reasonably strong and relevant set of results. It seems to be aggregating Yahoo / Bing / YouTube, maybe even Google, but it’s refreshing to see the way the results are mixed and presented. I can see my Visual Communications and Fine Arts students flocking to this.

Sadly, there’s no Firefox search-box addon yet.

    * (Actually it was probably We feel fine)

If you’re a kid who speaks Arabic, and who loves landscape pictures, Google is working for you

15 Wednesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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A fab round-up of some recent Google research projects. Including… analyzing and searching Arabic text … help children aged 5 to 13 find what they are looking for … a system to measure distances in Flickr-sized collections of images (presumably leading to “show me long sweeping views” filter, and possibly to automatic geo-location of photographs in Google Earth) … and more.

Depth-sensing is, of-course, potentially on the way in pocket s-3D digicams. Depth information would be encoded in the image metadata, as a by-product of stereo-3D imaging.

“Web search” links vanish from Google Scholar

15 Wednesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search, JURN's Google watch

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There seem to be some changes going on at Google Scholar, under the hood. First the RefWorks functionality recently vanished, and now all “Web search” links have vanished. Scholar used to place “Web search” under many links, offering a one-click method of searching the Web for the title/author in the hope of finding the full-text or a commentary. Now we have to manually copy & paste.