Archive of Meanings
Excerpts from a conversation with Robert Woodbury
Thursday, June 17, 2004
In March 2004, at the Arts Netlantic International Conference on New
Media Research Networks at UPEI and the Charlottetown Confederation Centre.
Dr. Robert Woodbury, of Simon Fraser University, formed part of the Netera
Alliance panel that lead the discussion: 3D Web New Media Research Network.
During Session 3 of the Conference: Focus on Technology, Dr. Woodbury
presented: Design Elements For a Digital Repository for Cultural Artefacts.
The focus of that talk was the A.VI.RE System. [1]
(A contributor controlled digital gallery)
Valerie LeBlanc: As I understand, the implementation
of the A.VI.RE System in Australia was the first large-scale use of the
gallery system?
Rob Woodbury: The gallery design evolved from several
systems and A.VI.RE is kind of the culmination of that design. I am very
cautious about using the word first in a field where the librarians will
tell us that in fact, they have had important archiving systems for centuries.
They are also our biggest source of how to meaningfully structure cultural
information. They have been at it a long time and librarians receive several
years of education around how to do that in terms of access to information,
sharing information and re-use of information. But they do not present
the entire solution to society; they don’t provide the whole picture.
VL: Did the A.VI.RE project originate in Australia, in
Canada, or was it a combined effort?
RW: It originated in Australia through the University
of Adelaide and the University of Queensland. We (the creators of A VI
RE) had done similar projects, found each other through those earlier
projects, and got together to collaborate. My connection with Canada is
that I am Canadian and I moved back here 3 years ago bringing the A.VI.RE
project with me.
VL: I want to ask you about the scope of the project.
I saw that with the article that you published for the Arts Netlantic
Conference at UPEI, there were a lot of researchers mentioned. I am wondering
if you could give me an idea of how many people were involved initially
in setting the project up?
RW: Like all projects, it has related projects. That
large author list is a group that worked with me on the Heritage Canada
Project and reported at the PEI Conference. A.VI.RE was only a part, and
the core A.VI.RE group is much smaller - 3 people. But there are other
people, in Australia in particular, who are now involved in it. The actual
technical design and implementation for the system has been a 3-person
enterprise for about 4 years.
VL: How extensive is the browsing system? For example,
in Australia, did it span one museum, an entire university, a state, states,
or over the whole continent throughout different universities?
RW: Well every university is far apart from every other
university in Australia. The A.VI.RE system is the latest in a series
of such systems and in fact, its first really serious public release will
be in a couple of weeks. (Date of interview: Thursday, June 17, 2004)
Prior to that, my partners Michael Docherty and Hank Szeto (both of
the Information Environments Program, School of Information Technology
and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland) with another
person built something called DigiLib. [2]
That was a small trial system intended as an image archive system. It
received some use within the university there. At Adelaide, we built vGallery.
It didn’t start off as a gallery system, it started off as a way
for students to post work to their instructors. We quickly zeroed in on
the gallery metaphor for designing it, because it worked. That system
has now been used in literally dozens of courses across the University
of Adelaide, by thousands of students and dozens of teachers. So it is
through those 2 early systems that we worked out the design and user model
that we really wanted to support. It is the very familiar metaphor of
a ‘gallery.’ The project has been picked up by RMIT University.
We worked with them on other projects, in and around, vGallery. [3]
They have the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory [4]
and some very large collections of digital material. We are working with
them now to get that collection into A.VI.RE. In answer to your question
of the scope of the thing, we are being cautious of this concept of building
'vapourware' - people are saying they have things that they don’t.
VL: I am familiar with the term.
RW: Well, what is there of A.VI.RE, is very well engineered,
and we are being careful to develop it along a model where we expect people
to really use it. A.VI.RE is really the opposite of a big splashy demo;
it is a carefully considered, carefully constructed system that we intend
to use for a variety of purposes.
VL: Can I step back for a second, to ask about your work
with Michael Docherty and Hank Szeto? You mentioned that over a four-year
period, you were the three main people working with the A.VI.RE.
RW: Yes, Michael is the Director of the Information Environments
Program at the University of Queensland, which is really Australia's major
digital media school. And Hank is a very talented software engineer and
web designer.
VL: I would like to ask about audience reaction. So far
there have been researchers, and curators involved, and I think there
has been some public, from what I understood from the paper presented
at UPEI. Am I correct in thinking, that there has been some public involvement
as well?
RW: Yes, through the predecessor systems and right now,
we are running user trials on A.VI.RE. Michael Docherty is in Germany
at present, using it with a group of Students. Basically they are documenting
the city of Ruebeck, Germany on video. We haven’t put A.VI.RE to
the kind of use that its predecessor vGallery was put to; it was used
by literally hundreds of Students for handing in their creative work,
and not just handing it in. We used it to set up assignments where they
had to evaluate each other’s work, where the Instructors would engage
in, almost ongoing, studio critique setup, mediated by the vGallery. So
we used it in a variety of ways to make the process of conversation around
designs, richer for architecture students.
VL: So was it like a blog, or a chatroom?
RW: It was much more sophisticated. Blogs, chatrooms,
they all are flat, they just record. A blog is one person writing; a chatroom
is people talking; a Wiki is collaborative authoring. With this system,
a curator has the ability to set up a gallery space and to invite exhibitors.
In this case, students in courses can put exhibitions in a particular
form in the gallery. Then there is a process of critical engagement with
the subject in the gallery. That is also displayed, so it is filled with
social process, models of social process of running a gallery as kind
of a protean process that can be used to serve a lot of different ends.
For example, posting creative new work in design classes, to run an e-journal.
It works with more standard conceptual standards of what online galleries
might be, to really capture the core social process that goes on between
the participants in a gallery.
VL: Do you use live web cam interaction?
RW: When you use a metaphor to build a system, when you
use an idea, you pick aspects of it; you've just described the synchronistic,
the immediate event, while what we really pull out of that idea of gallery
is that part of it that exists over time. Now most of the time, in a physical
gallery, the only thing that exists over time is the catalogue; everything
else is ephemeral. For us, an online gallery has the potential
to be a much more durable object, once an exhibition is in it, why ever
take it down. You don't need to, you can engage in discourse around the
content of the gallery, so why ever take that down?
VL: In what form would the discourse take place? (To
this point it doesn’t sound different than what many people currently
do; build websites, leave them up, sometimes for use in online education.
Rob explains the unique security system to me.)
RW: Well, it floats between the sort of classical act
of writing marginal notes, going back to the Talmud* - the Talmud is a
massive system of marginalia. (*Collection of Jewish law and tradition)
We have conventions for writing in the margins, and we worked those
out over a thousand years. That's one way in which the discourse takes
place. We are supporting/ harmonizing the technical device for this using
Wikis. They are like blogs from more that one person, they are really
places for people to write collaboratively, and one of their peculiar
properties is that if you type something called a Wiki name, which is
really just a word with capitals in it, it makes a new page for you, with
that name. It provides for a wonderful kind of free writing. The
thing with the gallery though is: if you know what is written there has
meaning and value to the participants, you have to be more careful when
you are in a bulletin board, an online conference, or a chatroom. It’s
the system, not the people that have to be more careful. An annotation
is about something. It might be about an element in the exhibition, it
might be about the exhibition; it might be about the artist or exhibitor.
The exhibitions are about things, some are works of art in their own.
But exhibitions in architecture tend to be about just that, so we need
to be able to link the material that is exhibited to the reality of the
‘out there in the world,’ and people do them, and they have
identities. So it is a system that captures ‘who’ is exhibiting,
‘what’ are they exhibiting, and by focusing the conversation
around the appropriate parts of the exhibition, our hope is to create
a richer form of discourse than you could get in a chatroom.
VL: Are you saying that there would be blind memos that
you wouldn't want to go back directly to the Architect or Artist, depending
upon the group of people who were actually looking at the work?
RW: You've got it, there is, in an online gallery, an
inevitable need for permission, and you need to have that permission system
to work within the social process of the gallery. So, there isn’t
one central permission system and it’s because of the computing
systems. The people who play the role of curator, and there is not one
curator; the people who have control of a space in which they act as the
mediators of the discourse, are the ones who really have to make the decisions
about setting things up so that the appropriate kind of privacies are
respected.
VL: I see. I want to talk a little bit about the 'footprints'
that you talked about at the UPEI Conference. I can perceive of some of
the dangers, but you mentioned that there was some reticence about putting
up ‘footprints’, trails.
RW: Well, imagine what our standard convention of a library
contains for the public. There is no notion of ‘footprints’.
When you go in, you have no idea of how the stacks have been browsed,
and you wouldn't want to know that because it is huge amount of information.
However in the case of a gallery system, let’s use someone as interesting
and dead as Robertson Davis.
VL: Excuse me?
RW: Let’s just use the example of someone interesting,
and dead as Robertson Davis, the Canadian author. Let’s say he walked
into a gallery system. His novels were permeated with hagiography. (The
writing and critical study of the lives of saints) If you walked into
an exhibition of art that he interpreted, organized into religious tones,
and wrote about it, it would be nice in the future to have that essay
associated with that artwork. Lots of people would be interested. So a
gallery system is about finding ways to preserve meaning, not just to
preserve, to engage in and preserve meaningful discourse. That’s
what the idea of ‘footprints’ is about. You want to know the
significance of ‘footprints’ that have gone through the gallery
before, because they might be really interesting. But you need to pull
that out from all of the noise, which is why we have the role of critic
in the gallery. And the critic might be the Curator; the critic might
be the exhibitor. In a gallery that is being used as a workshop, only
the people exhibiting might ever see inside of this creative workshop,
so they might play the role of exhibitor, critic, and viewer in that particular
gallery space. In using a gallery to run a studio course with Students
of Architecture, you assign external reviewers. Their job in the critical
process context is to write to the gallery's contents, and you assign
those people because you value their opinions. In the context of the design
class, you want those opinions to be public to the design class. You want
them to know what this architect brought in from the outside, the professional
world, has to say about a student's work, and you want all of the other
students in that class to know.
VL: So I suppose in the world without the archive (gallery
setup), the visiting Architect would hold individual discussions, with
students, and that person would know what the Architect thought of the
work, and have time to assess it. If the whole group has access to the
discussion, everyone in the class can learn from what the Architect has
to say to a particular Student.
RW: Further, in the following years, if the next group
knows that, and here is where the curator (the class instructor for example),
builds another gallery of exemplary work and presents it at the beginning,
or part way through a design class, ‘Here are some responses to
a similar problem last year, here is what some of the best people in town
thought about them. Now we can look at these examples and look at the
work you are developing in the light of these approaches.’ This
is what we have done with vGallery. It is a way for a design teacher to
keep a discourse going across student’s cohorts. It was designed
to support creative teaching the way I do it but it was also designed
to support architecture schools. Lots of architectural design and art
history (departments in) schools have online slide collections but most
are doing it very badly, not because of any lack of curator skill or insight,
but because getting a system to do this well isn't easy. You can do it
on a small scale very effectively, but if you want to do it across the
school it gets quite complex from an information environment perspective.
VL: I want to ask you a question about what is sometimes
called the digital divide. Do you think it exists?
RW: I am not quite sure what you mean by that.
VL: Ok, do you mean anything by it?
RW: I don’t use the term, I use the much older
'C. P. Snow's concept' - of the science/ humanities divide. [5]
VL: Well I guess I kind of mean the same thing, polarized
societies where some people will never have the chance to be in on the
scientific side. They will be in the humanities, if anywhere, I am talking
about the everyday world and the quality of lifestyle that people are
able to obtain.
RW: Look at kids today.
VL: Look at kids today?
RW: Look at their ease with digital material of all kinds,
and look at, - You know we complain about out schools being under resourced,
but there is a relative richness of access inside schools. With the existence
of access, our kids are growing up with complex computer systems. They
find it as easy as the way we used to think of the telephone, they are
living is such a highly mediated world that I don’t think that they
know anything else.
VL: Yes, I think that in North America, that is the case
by and large.
RW: Yes and in Europe, Australia, Korea and Japan …
VL: So I guess we are mainly talking about the northern
hemisphere. You know I have been a little shocked lately while teaching
in media arts and digital technologies, of coming across a few students
who feel that once they leave the Institution, they may just drop off
the radar. I am concerned about it because these are kids who grew up
with computer access from a very early age.
RW: They may drop off for what reason?
VL: Yeah, well that’s what I am looking at.
RW: For reasons of their technical skills?
VL: No, they are pretty technically adept, but they are
worried about technology changing so fast, that if they don’t immediately
get into a job that supports the changing technology, in a couple of years,
they may not be able to adapt.
RW: But that's the universal, I would argue that in every
top field, if you take a significant break, you almost have to retrain.
In every field, it requires not just technical but current knowledge and
I am hard pressed to think of a white-collar domain in which that is not
true.
VL: I agree with you there and I just wanted to talk
to know your views.
RW: Pragmatic people stay engaged with the professional
side of life, and they inevitably change what they do over their lives.
And what they do when they are 30 might bear very little resemblance to
what they do when they are 50. I recently read a book written by a person
who started his professional life as a computer programmer and became
a manager. He viewed his professional life as a game of trading. He said
the overall pattern throughout his life was to trade computer expertise
for social expertise. …So whether starting as engineers, or librarians,
or teachers, or anything else, by the time of turning 50, the role of
teachers, if they remain in their field is one of mentorship.
VL: That transition kind of makes sense to me. It probably
involves many steps along the way.
RW: Yes, many people's professional life are transitions
made of many steps.
VL: Thanks. You have an extensive profile as a scholar
and a researcher. Do you have any personal archives or collections that
you would like to mention?
RW: Well I have children so I don’t have time for
hobbies but my own archives are around my research. I carry on personal
research papers, but the archives that I am most interested in terms of
architectural education, which is where my roots as a teacher lie, are
in Australia alone. I cite Australia because I have actually done the
numbers.
VL: How long were you in Australia?
RW: Nine years in Australia, and twelve years in the
United States. Australia has fourteen schools of architecture; most of
them are relatively small. Typically, I think most are smaller than Canadian
schools. Canada has ten schools of architecture, that’s actually
pretty funny when you compare the numbers because Australia has about
twice the number of students of architecture per capita as Canada. In
Australia, we estimate that there are two million copyright slides free
slides of architecture in faculty members offices. They are meaningful
images, and when those faculty members retire or die, no one will ever
see those slides again. They will end up in the rubbish bin. These are
slides that faculty members may have used throughout their teaching, some
of them are just record shots, some are wonderful photos that for teaching
architecture. There is a pool of precedence that has a personal voice;
they were taken because somebody who was seriously interested in architecture
thought that they were worth taking. If I could get those schools to make
those collections available online, then I reckon, I would have done architectural
education an enormous service. These are different than students see in
the professional glossies designed as eye candy, showing architecture
in its most dramatic light. But what you want to know when you study architecture
is the nitty gritty. You want to look into corners, to see the details,
you want to see what does and doesn't work. It is very hard to get that
kind of information out of the glossies, which form the main source of
visual imagery available to students. So these resources have a huge value
and in the resource-crushed societies that we are living in today, architecture
schools are closing down students’ access to the slide collection,
because they can't afford it.
VL: That’s weird.
RW: Slide collections are horrible things anyway
because you can check a slide out and it can disappear. If you make them
digital, they will never disappear, provided you get your backup right.
I think it changes the way in which images, visual material about architecture
can be used in the context of an architecture education and it applies
in any visual field.
VL: So what are you doing to try and solve that problem?
RW: We have agreements from several people who have collections
but the really important thing is that you have to make a process of putting
the thing online as easy as it can possibly be. Then people will look
at the reward of doing it, better engagement with the Students. And if
they can put their material online as easily as picking slides out of
folders and stuffing them into a projector tray, then they'll do it, that's
the trick.
VL: To me it almost seems like a project where you have
someone go around and personally see to it that it would be done.
RW: I think for the first one hundred thousand slides
you are right, because they feed it. But once there is that kind of number
of images online, all of a sudden, making lectures becomes a really much
different kind of process. Making up lectures, finding material for your
lectures becomes something that you can do from your office. Further,
once you have made up your lecture, you never have to empty the slide
tray; you only put the next lecture in. Students can get your lecture
just as easily as you can online.
VL: I suppose conversely, another way of doing it would
be to have a digitized bank that could be pulled from. They wouldn't have
to be online, it wouldn't exist online, but they could be brought up for
specific times.
RW: You can certainly do that if management process is
your goal, my view on design school is that, except for stuff that has
to be confidential, like grades, the highest level of control that you
want is the entire school. I see no educational benefit to not putting
everything online all the time and that's because architecture, like most
creative things is disciplined study that is helped by peer conversation.
The more students can talk to each other around their discipline, the
better.
VL: Then our online work becomes a very useful tool.
At times I think people still tend to see it as something extra or fringe
in some disciplines. It is a concept that is being more developed and
people are actually starting to see the wonderful advantages that there
are.
RW: You are right. I just mailed you another paper on
A.VI.RE that will be published shortly in the Information Technology Construction
Journal; it is a whole lot more detailed. [6]
VL: I will read through it. Thank you for talking to
me today.
RW: You are welcome.
- Valerie LeBlanc
August 18, 2004
Notes:
[1]
A.VI.RE http://www.avire.net/tiki-index.php?page=Welcome+to+AVIRE
[2] DigiLib
http://www.architect.uq.edu.au/digilib/
[3]
vGallery
http://online.adelaide.edu.au/learnit.nsf/0/4a9c6da46d21b413e92569880022a9f3?OpenDocument
[4] Spatial
Information Architecture Laboratory. http://www.sial.rmit.edu.au/
[5]
C.P Snow's concept - of the science / humanities divide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Snow
[6] The
paper on A.VI.RE forwarded to me by Rob Woodbury on June 17:
http://www.itcon.org/cgi-bin/papers/Show?2004_10