Archive of Research
Excerpted from a conversation with Doug MacLeod
Director of Projects for the Netera Alliance
June 25, 2004.
In March 2004, I attended the Arts Netlantic International Conference
on New Media Research Networks at UPEI and the Charlottetown Confederation
Centre. [1]
The Netera Alliance* of Alberta presented the panel discussion: 3D Web
New Media Research Network. Following up on that presentation, I arranged
to later conduct telephone interviews with both Doug MacLeod, Project
Director for Netera, and Dr. Robert Woodbury, the panelist from Simon
Fraser University.
*From the Netera Alliance website:
Netera Alliance is an Alberta-based, not-for-profit alliance that coordinates
Alberta's Information and Communications Technology research infrastructure,
in the shared interests of the major research and education organizations
in the province. Its mission is to build an information and communications
infrastructure that is among the best in the world, and foster its effective
and efficient use by researchers in the province of Alberta, Canada.
It supports research in any discipline -- from science to education
to the arts -- enabled by high-speed research networks, high performance
computing, distributed data storage, advanced collaboration tools, scientific
visualization resources, remote instrumentation, and other more specialized
information technologies.
Valerie LeBlanc: I heard your talk at the Arts Netlantic Conference
in March, and I have since guided myself through online information
about the Netera Alliance. To start today, can you give me some information
about your background and involvement with the Netera Alliance?
Doug MacLeod: I am the Director of Projects at the
Netera Alliance until next Wednesday.
VL: Have you made plans for what’s up next?
DM: Well I am looking at some new and different things,
in particular I am working with one of one of our projects; the ‘eduSource’
project, [2]
to try to make it work as a viable initiative, relating a lot to what
you are talking about, using digital archives. … What is so important
is to enable sharing the archiving of individual collections, while
valuable to an individual institution, or a person, it is not as valuable
as if that archival information could be shared not only across the
city but across the province, across the entire country, and hopefully,
across the world. This is particularly important in the educational
community where it costs so much to produce multimedia-learning objects
that can be shared easily. If they can be found easily, then they become
so much more valuable. … That's where I am coming from and that's
where some of my future work is going. However, to answer your question,
I started out as an architect. I did work on a number of architectural
projects but I got involved with computer graphics of an early age,
at an early stage of design. Then I started to work back and forth between
architecture and the advanced aspects of computer graphics. I left architecture
in 1991 to head up the Banff Centre's Program in Virtual Reality, in
the Arts Virtual Environment Project.
That was a real eye opener, not only in terms of the many different
possibilities for the new media itself, but also in the deficiencies
of the new media. All of those wonderful beautiful projects that those
artists worked on, none of them run anymore. The whole project wrapped
up in 1994, so less than a decade afterward, none of them now operate.
VL: That is really significant to hear.
DM: Well it is relevant to the current discussion because
if there were proper standards in place, at least for archiving these
projects, they would have some life after the equipment is long gone.
Like how do you store something like that? We haven’t even begun
to scratch the surface of how to store interactive pieces in a meaningful
way.
VL: Speaking of digital repositories, I would like
to ask you how Netera became connected with A.VI.RA (a contributor controlled
digital gallery) and I am not sure what the connection is except that
I saw you present together at the Arts Netlantic Conference.
DM: As the Director of Projects, I was looking for
opportunities for Netera and its various partners. So when the New Media
Research Fund became available, I looked around. From my knowledge of
who was doing what, we put together a team from four universities across
the country, to try to work together. (The University of Toronto, Simon
Fraser University at Surrey, the University of Alberta and the University
of Calgary) I had known of Rob's (Woodbury) work with A.VI.RA and was
very interested in it because it was architectural, reflecting my own
background and, because he has a unique point of view on how to archive;
in a sense, to metatag information.
VL: I would like to talk about metaging and the metaging
methods that are being explored.
DM: Metataging is bad and the methods are worse, but
what it is all about is how do you describe things in a manner that
makes them useful. That's really what metaging is, how do you organize
your information. A lot of our metaging is in response to the chaos
of the World Wide Web where, if you search for something, you may get
thousands of hits. Most of them will be irrelevant, some of them will
be wrong, some will be inappropriate and some will be dead links. So
by the time that you find what you actually want, you will have expended
a lot of time. What we are trying to do with metataging is to provide
people with the information they need to find exactly what they want,
when they need it.
VL: So, specific metaging. That’s where I believe
Dr. Brian Wyvill of the University of Calgary; Computer Science Department
of the University of Calgary and his ‘non-polygon’ representation
research would come in? (Also presented with the Netera Panel at
the Arts Netlantic Conference)
DM: No, that was mainly Rob Woodbury with the A.VI.RA
project, and us at Netera. We have been building tools to help out with
projects like eduSource. So Brian's work is very important in terms
of its approach to representing complex forms in a simple fashion.
VL: One of the things that Brian mentioned at the UPEI
Conference was how much less space that non-polygon representation takes.
Can you comment about that?
DM: We need all of these kinds of methods to represent
3 dimensional works across the World Wide Web, but it only emphasizes
the need for really flexible standards to describe them. The way I see
it, there are all sorts of different kinds of digital content; there
is stuff that is just simply scanned, like a 3d scan of an artifact
and Richard Levy's work shows some of that. (Dr. Richard Levy, Faculty
of Environmental Design, University of Calgary also presented at UPEI)
You can elaborately model something using a program like AutoCAD or
Visualization Studio, or you can describe it with a mathematical formula
like Brian Wyvill has, or you can generate it algorithmically like some
of the wilder people in the field do. Those are all different approaches
but how do you describe each of those things so that you can find them?
We don’t really have the words yet to figure out how to really
describe 3d content on the web, so that is part of the thing that we
were trying to do with the project.
VL: Can I ask you what kind of bugs you found, or what
kind things you were able to work out so far?
DM: The real thing we found is that these are very
early days. There are not really good standards for 3d content on the
web, there are not really good standards for metataging, and quite frankly,
even the stuff that we have been working on for other projects isn't
really appropriate for digital content and 3 dimensional digital content.
A lot of the things that are put into current metadata standards don’t
reflect the needs of real users. I have seen this in educational projects
where there are 85 fields in the current IEEE (The full name being the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) long standard
in their learning object metadata standard but a lot of them have no
relevance to a teacher in the classroom.
And some of the fields that should be there are not. These are the kinds
of things that we need to work out. And what does that mean, how do
we do it. We know that there is a need for standards, but we have to
make those standards as invisible as possible. Here I would use the
example, in computer music, of the MIDI standard. (Musical Instrument
Digital Interface) The explosion of instruments and different possibilities
that it permitted was absolutely astounding. It was a huge thing, it
allowed all kinds of different controllers, and everything now speaks
MIDI. And again, perhaps it is a bad standard, perhaps an ill considered
standard, but as a standard, it enabled so much.
VL: In your address at UPEI, you talked about accessibility
from the low end - the home pc and open source tools, and sharing content
- and you mentioned something about the development of the (SONY) Interactive
PlayStation.
DM - ... I think that I was talking about video
games in terms of their abilities to actually embody higher order learning
skills while at the same time, engaging people with what they are doing,
so that they don’t really know that they are learning. But one
of the things that I find so interesting about video games is that,
unlike our online projects like the 3d web, they have a really robust
set of tools for supporting the people who are using their products.
So if you are playing a video game, you can go to a website and get
all sorts of hints and tips, you can become part of a chatroom. You
can see snapshots of other places, you can even download the code for
some of these games so you can modify them yourself, and the companies
encourage this. So think about that in terms of our own approaches,
to not only software; think if Microsoft made the code available so
that you could change it and make it better. But think about what it
would mean to artists as well. Would they ever feel comfortable about
letting their works out to be modified and modified significantly; perhaps
in ways that they don't intend and that they don’t want? But that
is just part of the game now, it puts content creators in a very different
space. Let's say you are a painter, then how do you distribute your
work? If someone takes your painting, and then you see it as a background
in somebody's music video, is that fair use? It is really difficult
to say.
VL: There are a lot of copyright issues at present.
Actually the legal system should be scrambling as it has a lot of catching
up to do. I would like to ask you about the need to have continuous
research and project funding. You brought up the topic at UPEI and I
wonder if you could talk more about that concern.
DM: I am always happy to talk about that and I can
go on for quite some time...
VL: I wasn't sure if it was a side issue or a main
point when you brought it.
DM: It is an absolutely critical issue, no more so
that right now. Just imagine if we don’t enable research, or think
that research is important; then Canada will fall further and further
behind. I thought it was very brave of Heritage Canada to go forward
with a new media research project. They knew it was different, they
were a little bit clumsy in the way that they did it, and yet at the
same time, it was absolutely necessary. But now we are faced with the
specter of all these research streams coming to an end. The e-learning
program is now ended; there is no more national research in e-learning
going on. The Canarie e-content program has similarly stopped, nothing
more happening there.
VL: I didn’t realize that Canarie was cut.
DM: These are critical things and I shouldn't
show my bias, but we are fighting this rear guard action against the
value of research and at the same time, we need a radically different
and enlightened approach to research. We need to understand why open
source is so important, not just as a research tool but also as a business
tool. In other words, we cannot jumpstart any Canadian industry without
providing small and medium sized enterprises with the kind of software
tools that will allow them to build businesses. If Microsoft comes in
with a learning object repository tool that is closed, proprietary,
and can’t be easily purchased by other people, we will be in a
big battle. So these things are critically important and the unfortunate
part about a lot of the research programs that were set up is that they
were set up with an old business model in mind. From my point of view,
the graduate students and university research groups provide the best
means of quickly, easily and inexpensively generating software tools.
I have got real examples. On one of our early e-learning projects, a
huge company said that they would build the tools for us. They couldn't
do it on time, and they took all of the money. They wouldn't share the
source code. We had to scramble and go back to our research partners,
our grad students who quickly cobbled together the kind of things that
we are still using today. And from that point on, I said this is the
way to do it; work with the universities who want to do these things,
and get them the proper kind of resources so that they can actually
share the information. At this point in time, Canada still maintains
a slim leadership role in e-learning internationally but with the collapse
of Canarie's application programs, we are soon going to find that we
are out of the running. There are people in Australia, Africa, Europe,
and in the United States who want to work together with us to get an
open source code. But we now find ourselves without any national programs
to help us with that.
VL: Did all of this happen in the last few weeks, was
there some press release about Canarie losing its funding?
DM: No, unfortunately. What happened was, when the
Chrétien Government became the Martin Government, everything
went on hold. Because everybody is focused elsewhere, it is simply not
considered important enough to get the funding that would allow tech
to keep ongoing.
VL: I came back to Canada, from doing my masters degree
in the fall of 1993, to Alberta. I found there were a lot of cuts to
educational funding. Do you feel that it was similar to the present
time period?
DM: Well what happened, in that exact year 1993, when
the Liberals came to power, we had a huge research grant at the Banff
Centre, and they cut it. In fact, there were contracts in place and
they still pulled the money from those contracts. And they dismantled
the Department of Communications as well. That was a significant blow
to the whole field. It goes in cycles. And then in 1998, all of a sudden
the floodgates opened because there was money and they couldn’t
throw it out fast enough. It is almost like we need a rational program
of research. And it is stupid because you can get money to buy a super
computer any day of the week, but you can't get the money to do the
kind of applications development that would actually prove the worth
of the networks and those super computers! As far as I am concerned,
we could do a lot more with a lot less money, if it was full funding,
and if we could make sure that there were projects done for the common
good. It could really seed the market if those people who did those
projects were willing to make all of their findings open source and
freely available.
VL: Along the same lines, you are speaking of the federal
level, but what about other sources of funding? I know that many individuals
and groups have sponsored the Banff Centre research, and there are many
companies involved in the Netera Alliance Group, I am just wondering
what is your perceived ideal breakdown of funding?
DM: Since 1991, I have been working to raise funds
for new media, for education and online learning. The amounts of money
that I actually got out of industry are miniscule. Industry hasn't stepped
up and probably won't step up.
VL: There is a danger there too, isn't there, when
funding is coming only from industry?
DM: Yes, and typically, if they do contribute, they
don't contribute cash, they contribute in-kind, yet, in-kind contributions
are not recognized by most funding agencies. So the role that industry
can play is small, and it gets even worse when we are talking about
small and medium sized enterprises that really need to be involved to
take these tools and commercialize them. We can't expect them to put
cash in.
VL: They usually don't have it, small and medium sized
businesses are often struggling.
DM: They are, and some of the most significant problems
on the projects that I have worked on come from getting the private
sector companies to ante up and fulfill their commitments. It is always
difficult for them to put anything, even the things that they say they
will put into the projects. We need a new deal. We need a new understanding
of how research actually happens.
VL: So that has been a major part of your work, keeping
things happening, through fundraising?
DM: Yes, I write proposals. I do fundraising and then
I get the whole thing moving. And then I start looking for the next
one. That is what I have been doing for about the past 14 years.
VL: So you are the good grant writer.
DM: Well, I had a great deal of success from 1998 to
about 2003 and then the money started to dry up, so we got into a whole
different thing here.
VL: We have already ‘sort of’ talked about
this but, I would like to ask about the sharing of costs when a project
is in the research stage. For instance, Nortel is part of the Netera
Alliance, and Nortel has had some trouble in the market. There are also
a lot of educational institutions in there, and other companies. I am
just wondering if any of them step up when there is a need for some
research. Well I guess you have already answered that.
DM: Yes, the short answer is no.
VL: Well, the other thing is then, how equal is the
Netera Alliance then? What kind of alliance is it?
DM: The Netera Alliance essentially, includes government
agencies and private sector companies, but sometimes I have felt that
the private sector companies are really there, simply to monitor what
is going on, to make sure that it doesn't intrude into their own business.
The private sector companies don't put much into these things. It is
really a group for the universities to get together and plan common
research infrastructure. I don’t think the private sector companies
in Canada have the inclination, or the resources to really contribute
to research and even if they did, they have to be so careful in terms
of proprietary work, that they have to put all kinds of restrictions
on the research. So if we develop a set of software tools that would
make the best learning object repository in the world, and if a major
company puts money into it, they are not just going to let us give it
away.
VL: Right, they want a user fee or they want to sell
the software.
DM: User fees, they want royalties; they want this
and they want that, what can you do? It is really difficult in terms
of this work. That's why we are saying, let's make it open source, then
those companies can take it and commercialize it, if they want. But
a small company can do it as well as a large one. We really need our
politicians, our government officials, and our business leaders to understand
the value of open source.
VL: Yes, that's a hard idea to sell isn't it?
DM: Now, notice, I said open source. I am happy for
any major company to take our open source code, package it in its own
way and sell it. Add value to it, if they can do it, that's great. That's
what the Linux model is, and I think that’s where we are moving,
versus this whole...
VL: That's a really good point to make, and a really
good selling point.
DM: Well, versus the Microsoft approach, which is to
bludgeon the competition so there is no competition and then make products
that are really pretty crappy but because they have a monopoly on the
market, we have to suffer through using them.
VL: And then they are updated so quickly that you are
tied into it and don’t really have any other way to move. And
here I would like to ask you about the concept of the digital divide
[3];
if you see one, do you ever see it becoming a thing of the past?
DM: Well there will always be a digital divide. I am
just back from Africa (doesn’t mention which country / countries)
and I can tell you that the problems that they are facing are so much
greater than ours that we should be ashamed to complain at all. But
nonetheless, the group that I was meeting with Schoolnetafrica [4]
still wants to proceed, and what they said to me was, " If we have
an Internet connection, we will certainly use it and share any content
that we can, if we just have a computer without an Internet connection,
we will take information to Students on CD's and DVD's. If we don't
have computers, we'll print information out on the nearest computer
that we have and take it as hard copy to the students who need it. We
will do whatever we have to in order to get the content out to the students.”
And if they can do that, if they are willing to do that, then we should
be equally willing to find innovative ways so that everybody can share.
No matter if they don't have a computer, if they don't have the Internet.
Don't stop this new revolution in terms of content and education because
we can't get the same bandwidth for everybody in the country. And where
they could, like in Uganda, people were creating fabulous learning objects
that are absolutely as good as anything that we are producing. And if
we could share our tools with them, those content pieces could be available
right around the world. And the best way to solve the digital divide
again comes back to not saying to the developing country, “You
should buy this and this and this,“ but to say, " Okay, you've
got some great content, we've got some great content, for no cost to
either of us, why don't you share your thousand objects with us and
we will share a thousand objects. And we'll have a community, our children
will actually have a better sense of the world view than if we didn't.”
These things are enabling and we know that there are all sorts of bottlenecks
along the route. There are lots of places in Canada that don't have
Internet connectivity, we certainly have to address that, and we will
certainly never have equal connectivity for every Canadian but we still
have to move forward.
VL: In terms of Information Technology, some countries
are really far ahead. A lot of the IT Databank contracts, were being
awarded to companies in India way back in the early 1990's. Do you know
anything about how it got to be so strong?
DM: Well, I am hoping to find out more about the Indian
situation this summer. I have been invited to India in August, so I
am interested in seeing what they do. But I think that we just have
to accept the fact that people over there are hungry and they realize
the value of; I mean hungry perhaps in more than one sense, including
- hungry in the sense that they want to do things. They are not going
to be limited by any of the things that might slow us down; they are
just going to do stuff. We have interesting situations where architect
friends of mine say they get these emails saying that for seventy-five
dollars, somebody in India is offering to do computer rendering of their
buildings. They get five renderings for seventy-five dollars. When I
started out, full colour rendering cost you ten thousand dollars. How
are we going to compete against that? We have to be clever about the
way that we decide to compete. It comes back to design, which brings
the whole thing together. Design is the one thing you can't outsource,
and it is the one thing that our government agencies don't seem to value
enough. For example, we can get scientific research grants, you can
even get some arts grants, but they don’t know what to do with
design. It is very short sighted because it is design that makes a big
difference in how people use websites, get information, and use the
tools. They don't seem willing...
VL: Usually it is left to the private sector.
DM: Yes, and while the government makes a big noise
about innovation and productivity, it doesn't matter if you produce
the goods faster and better if nobody buys them, and that's where design
comes in. I mean look at the iMac, you know, its an okay computer, but
people bought them because they were well designed, and that latest
VW bug, the retro bug, they bought it because it was a cool design.
VL: Yes, and also because of the marketing.
DM: We say it dismissively sometimes but after WW2
there was that collective initiative in France to position it as the
manufacturer of high quality goods and they did everything they could
in terms of product placement, and now for example, French fashion is
always considered to be some of the top-notch stuff.
VL: But actually Japan started to move ahead more in
terms of manufacturing.
DM: Absolutely, and there is no reason why Canada,
with a very focused initiative couldn't establish itself as one of the
top design nations in the world. We've got the people to do it; we just
have to support them.
VL: Well, when you come back from India, if you are
willing, I would really like to talk to you about what happens there.
If you look at India, there is a huge film industry that puts out billboards
and huge posters, and a huge art industry, and every time there is an
election campaign, the artwork that goes out for it is just amazing.
I guess the power of numbers helps, but I also think that it is the
education, and a good sense of design too.
DM: Yes, there is power in numbers but there is also
power in the quality that we can put out. For Canada, I regard the entire
English speaking world, and the entire French speaking work to represent
our markets. We need to provide good products, good design, and probably
in more languages as well - but you know that the opportunities for
a country like this shouldn't be limited by any kind of boundaries,
not provincial and not national ones either.
VL: Okay, that's great. Another question, you work
on a lot of projects that deal with data sharing and I would like to
ask if you have any personal collections or archives, or anything that
you would like to mention.
DM: Well, one of the things I was trying to do a couple
of years ago, I started out way back in maybe 1984 or so; creating a
royalties database with McClellan and Stuart so that they could track
their royalty payments to people. And it was done in FileMaker on a
Macintosh. Since then, I have kept using FileMaker for a variety of
different things. At some point, I decided that I would make a database
of really important notes and quotes and things and, that is one of
the things that I have done with it. Now, I have been trying
to figure out a way that I could integrate those notes with all of the
meta data. I support meta data stuff, and I realize that top-notch researchers
are working with it. They are very smart, and they are important in
the projects that I work on, but the work that is done seems so esoteric
sometimes. It doesn't seem connected to what real people want and I
would be delighted if there was a universal note-taking thing that people
could use and work it as a database. It would be a fascinating thing
to see across schools. (Sounds like what Rob Woodbury is working
on) For example, looking at the work flow of a teacher preparing a lesson
plan, transferring it onto a chalk board or a white board, students
writing it down in their notebooks and then nobody looks at it until
the test. At the end of the year the students throw away all of their
notes, the teacher just does the same thing next year, and the wasted
energy is fascinating. I am wondering why you couldn't make one set
of notes that is shared, or enhanced each year, and built on so there
would be continuity between courses and teachers. So everything gets
better each year, rather than just repeating the same old stuff.
VL: Right, so we can go further.
DM: Yes, and that is something that I am interested
in.
VL: Thanks for talking to me today.
DM: Thanks.
- Valerie LeBlanc
August 18, 2004
Notes:
[1] Arts
Netlantic International Conference on New Media Research Networks
at UPEI and the Charlottetown Confederation Centre proceedings:
http://www.upei.ca/artsnetlantic/documents/conference/NMRN%20Conference%20Web%20Site/NMRN%20Conference/pdfs_docs/proceedings.pdf
[2] eduSource
http://www.netera.ca/projects_current.html
[3] digital
divide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide
[4] schoolnetafrica
http://www.schoolnetafrica.net/