The Martin Agency and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library have teamed up to create Clouds Over Cuba, an interactive documentary that retraces the steps of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the event nears its 50th anniversary. The two-hour film includes a collection of photos, footage, and speeches of President Kennedy and others involved in the 1962 event. During the film, a dossier will populate with multimedia items that can be accessed later through the web or from a mobile device. Clouds Over Cuba also includes the ability to sync to iCal or Google Calendar so that viewers can relive the days leading up to the crisis in virtual realtime.
Nearly a million documents that make up Winston Churchill’s archive, ranging from school reports, drafts of his famous wartime speeches, to cigar bills, have been made instantly accessible to students, historians, and even politicians looking for lessons from past coalition governments… The digital archive, which can be accessed remotely, is published by Bloomsbury. The annual subscription for universities and libraries and other institutions starts at £1,120 for a small college rising to several thousand pounds depending on the size of the organisation
Turning Street View Into Street Art
As Google’s Street View cars rumble through our cities and towns, they don’t capture merely the geography of our streets and buildings. They see and record the life there, people going about their days.
Those inadvertent portraits are now moving back from the digital realm to our earthly one, in artist Paolo Cirio’s projectStreet Ghosts.
Cirio finds images of humans on the streets of Street View and creates life-sized prints of them, and places them back on the spot where they were originally captured, such as in the picture above, taken from a Street View image of Dircksenstrasse in Berlin.”
(Art.sy) aims to do for visual art what Pandora did for music and Netflix for film: become a source of discovery, pleasure and education. With 275 galleries and 50 museums and institutions as partners, Art.sy has already digitized 20,000 images into its reference system, which it calls the Art Genome Project. But as it extends the platform’s reach, Art.sy also raises questions about how (or if) digital analytics should be applied to visual art. Can algorithms help explain art?
modern ways in which art is created, produced, distributed, marketed, preserved and supported have shifted as a direct reaction of the world’s transition to a socially connected, digital society - to the age of the internet.
Traditionally, artists have been going to a gallery with their portfolio, and the gallery decides whether the work is good enough to expose.
Now, they turn to the web - to exhibit their work and to sell it, too.
With new services such as crowdfunding, for the first time artists are able to raise money online to pursue their ideas
They looked at some one million tweets from six historical events over the past three years (Iranian elections, Michael Jackson’s death, the H1N1 outbreak, Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Egyptian revolution, and the recent Syrian uprising) and found that archiving is not keeping apace with the web’s fast turnover — as time progressed, the webpages linked to became increasingly unavailable. “We estimate that after a year from publishing about 11 percent of content shared in social media will be gone
Almost 30 per cent of recorded history, shared over social media such as Twitter, has disapeared, according to a new study of the Egyptian uprising and other significant events
Europe’s digital library Europeana has been described as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the sprawling web estate of EU institutions. It aggregates digitised books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe - including major national bodies such as the British Library, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum. Today Europeana is opening up data about all 20 million of the items it holds under the CC0 rights waiver. This means that anyone can reuse the data for any purpose - whether using it to build applications to bring cultural content to new audiences in new ways, or analysing it to improve our understanding of Europe’s cultural and intellectual history.
the way to protect books is you hold them close, and the way you protect digital data is you give it away
The team is working within the stone walls of the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai — St. Catherine’s for short. For 17 centuries, the Greek Orthodox Christian monks here have protected an unparalleled trove of manuscripts. Now the monastery is in a multimillion-dollar push to physically and digitally protect its treasures and make them easily accessible, in most cases for the first time, to scholars around the world. In the process, the monks will establish a model for the preservation of irreplaceable ancient manuscripts in a world where more and more of them are threatened by the chaos of war and revolution.
Visual data mining of Google Streetview images to determine the unique architectural “style” of a city bit.ly/N0fmNe’s-unique-style/
Ballet embraces the web - Guardian article
the Royal Ballet recently filmed an entire day of class and rehearsals, streaming it live on the web via YouTube and the Guardian – and attracting 200,000 viewers worldwide. Some of them were balletomanes; others were just curious passersby fascinated by what they saw.
The idea of a meme is itself new. Coined in 1976, the word “meme” – something that spreads rapidly through a culture – was restricted to scientific contexts until the mid-1990s, according to the Nexis database. Since then the usage of the word has exploded, more than tripling in the last five years.
The Sydney Opera House speaks of the internet as its eighth stage, allowing it to send entire performances to anyone with an internet connection for less money than it would cost to send them a ticket.
It’s remarkable to me that professors, artists, musicians and politicians are seizing this opportunity so much more quickly than a lot of the business community
How can museums preserve our digital heritage? (Wired UK)
Digital is bringing people into conversations within the museum who would never normally be involved in the care of traditional physical objects. The IT department has never had to think of its servers as an extension of the museum’s photography store or general object store before… The server has become the latest museum site in addition to the physical building.
