Tech + Creative (almost) meet at EuropeanaTech 2015
17/02/15
Two fascinating days spent at the EuropeanaTech 2015 event in the Bibilioteque Nationale in Paris (worth a visit in its own right – small forest in the central courtyard where mythical creatures from the book stacks may roam at night).
Europeana? An EC funded organisation dedicated to digitising Europe’s cultural heritage and creating new ways for people to engage with their cultural history. Which neatly highlights both the vision and the bear trap that lie at the heart of the Europeana project.
It all depends which side of the ‘and’ you sit on.
In front of the ‘and’ are the technical teams. Their work is epic – researching, gathering, annotating, digitising, storing, sorting, sharing millions of items. Images, documents, objects, maps, Lithuanian place names, the Radio Times, Norwegian TV. With true passion they strive for perfect data - integrated formats, total metadata, ultimate tags, API heaven, search box nirvana.
On the far side of the ‘and’ are people who want more than this. More, said University of Amsterdam’s Jaap Kamps, because we want to discover and build narratives not just access information. More, said Akihko Takano (University of Tokyo), because we need ‘fields of association’ to work with, not just search fields. More, said Chris Welty from Google Research, because it’s OK to be half right (or even wrong) and fix it as you go. More, said the creative George Oates who wants to get her hands on these cultural assets right now and make wonderful things for people.
Public uses for digital heritage were discussed at EuropeanaTech, but strikingly absent from the technical presentations. This was something that creative people could figure out further down the line, once the data is complete. It’s an eerie replay of two decades spent with cultural institutions, jealous guardians of their collections and authority. Have we swapped one set of cultural gatekeepers for another?
So how about…
Breaking the ‘and-barrier’ between technical and creative. We were awed by the genius creativity being applied to digitising cultural heritage at EuropeanaTech. Creative practitioners need to know about this. Technical teams need to know more about how their data can be creatively transformed to engage the public. That way we avoid creatives asking for the technically impossible, and technocrats massively over-engineering their systems for what’s needed creatively.
And we need to pump out the digitised assets right now – imperfect, incomplete, work-in-progress as they are – to power the creative engines waiting to be fuelled. Great work already being done here by British Library Labs, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in NY and DigitalNZ. More of the same and the potential to explore what conference Chairman Bill Thompson called, “...the hybrid space between real and virtual…” is truly limitless.