All the buzz last week was about participatory culture. Everyone is an artist (that is, everyone who was selected) on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, via Antony Gormley's One and Other. Herds of social media consultants have been hopping and tweeting from conference to party following the Travelling Geeks, at 2morro, at Reboot Britain, with C4's 4IP hosting a talk by Manuel Castells and at masses of other events I have lost track of in a haze of Twitter hashtags. At all these events the message can be boiled down to this: The public expects to participate. Social media is changing our expectations. Our data must be free and open. Our democracy and institutions are at crisis point. We must break down large bureaucracies and enable networks.
There may be some room to contest this, to ask 'Is it really the case that we expect to participate? Don't we just really want to be passive, to be entertained, lectured at and represented?' There isn't room in this post though. Let's accept for now that it is a big shift.
Left and right both embrace the notion of participatory culture, at least notionally. Jeremy Hunt, shadow secretary for Culture, Media and Sport and keynote speaker at Reboot Britain, coined a neologism of 'collaborative individualism' to give it an acceptable Conservative edge.
Openness and public participation in a digitally enabled world seem to be embraced even by the organisations most known for upholding their authority around canonical culture. The Guardian reported from a talk about the future of museums by our two most famous national museum directors, Nick Serota & Neil MacGregor. The report emphasised their acceptance that the future of museums is digital and that we will see curators having more conversations with audiences. A closer reading of the talk reveals more caution but it shows that they know they need to radically change policies and staff skills to deal with different expectations.
This is not really about radical openness, however. It has to be a radical shift in how museums maintain control and moderate successful public engagement. This weekend, we heard that the National Portrait Gallery had threatened to sue a Wikimedia Commons user who had taken 3,300 high res images from the NPG website and placed them on Wikimedia. The legal issue revolves around whether copyright resides in a reproduction of an out-of-copyright painting. I like the fact that those portraits are now available on Wikimedia for public to add links to and to enrich other wiki articles. However, I don't like to see combative and uncollaborative practice and think DCoetzee shouldn't have hacked the site to take high res images [Edit on 14th July - please see comment from Anonymous explaining that this wasn't an act of hacking but that the images were obtained using Zoomify then stitching the images back together]. The NPG does offer 60,000 low res images free to download. I wouldn't think of taking so many images without collaborating with the museum. A proactive approach is for museums to look at ways they can release 'safe' collections and call for the public to play with them, making clear their legal constraints and policies.
Sandy Nairne is the Director of the National Portrait Gallery and one of the contributors to a DEMOS publication called Expressive Lives. Of course, this was released last week, the week of participatory culture. The interesting notion of 'the expressive life' was introduced by BillIvey in a 2008 report and is the starting point for this publication. Sandy's essay refers to William Morris and Joseph Beuys who aimed to return culture to the people - who said that culture is something we can all do and that culture is for the good of the people. More than any other contributor, Sandy helpfully articulates the value of learning programmes in cultural organisations. He doesn't, however, engage with the issues of digital culture. Similarly, the Get It: The Power of Cultural Learning report, which he mentions, doesn't engage with digital culture.
This intersection of public learning and digital culture is one which the sector needs to address, not just in theory but in the practice, in terms of training, evaluation, data publishing, information management, UGC mediation and copyright. The place where this is being addressed is a new strand of work by the Collections Trust called Open Culture. To end the 'week of buzz', Nick Poole, the Collections Trust's CEO gave a talk about 'citizen curators' and Open Culture. His presentation covered the way citizens created all kinds of animated real-time content of the Soho fire. And when did the Soho fire happen? Only on Friday, a few hours before Nick's talk. Cultural artefacts are being made everyday and published to audiences at great speed. These records are the cultural archives of the future. This kind of fast and expressive culture, culture that says 'I was there and I felt this', is compelling and relevant to people.
What are we going to do to respond to this change?
An Attic Advent: 10th December
1 hour ago
8 comments:
You say "The NPG does offer 60,000 low res images free to download."
This is true only to the extent that you are permitted to view them on their website. Even at low-resolution the NPG expects to be paid a licensing fee for any use outside of their site. Each low res image is also embedded with EXIF data saying: "Unauthorised reproduction prohibited."
Wikimedia has had a running conflict with the NPG over photos of public domain paintings, even at low resolution, going back more than 3 years. They have shown little interest in collaboration.
By comparison, the Victoria and Albert Museum (also in London) has been very helpful in allowing Wikimedia photographers access to document their collection.
Wikimedia prefers collaboration where possible, but the NPG allows no use and no photography of their public domain works without paying an access fee, and many Wikimedians view that as an intolerable infringment upon what the public domain is supposed to be.
Useful comment, thank you. I didn't know about the issues you've had trying to collaborate. I appreciate you take an ethical approach and value the work you do in enabling common access to public information. I took the phrase 'free to download' from the NPG so took it on trust. But I recall now making a whiteboard presentation using NPG portraits. At the event they were invisible to the audience as they were so low res they looked like soup. You cite the V&A as comparison to the NPG, but I suspect the V&A is quite exemplary and unique in its approach.
I would like to take issue with the phrase, "DCoetzee shouldn't have hacked the site to take high res images." It gives the impression that DCoetzee somehow accessed a private part of the site through illegal means. The NPG provided higher resolution scans of images through the Zoomify feature. Once you zoom into each part of an image, it's then possible to stitch together a high resolution image of the whole, which is what DCoetzee and others did. At no point did DCoetzee access any part of the site not publicly available.
Referring to this practice, the lawyers have accused DCoetzee of "unlawful circumvention of technical measures for restricting image use." Wikimedians note that Zoomify's firm states that it is not a security measure but a "viewing solution." Also, it was not remotely unlawful under U.S. law, where both DCoetzee and the Wikimedia Foundation's servers reside.
For an in-depth account with a pro-DCoetzee bias, see the internal newsletter of Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-13/Copyright_threat
Not that rare.
GalleriNOR (Norway), the New York Public Library, Deutsche Fotothek, the Library of Congress. Wikimedia is open to collaboration on many fronts.
NYPL contributed 84 thousand photographs of public domain works.
Deutsche Fotothek is probably the most noteworthy though as they donated ~250 thousand images to Commons, including arranging for the use of a large number of works that otherwise would still be prohibited by copyright.
I meant the V&A is rare in England for its open practices. It's helpful to know about international examples of good practice. Thanks
Thanks for explaining how the images were obtained. I had wondered. Not hacked then, but a creative approach.
This is a such a great post - thanks for the wealth of connection points to the debate on developing online public/civic/digital space.
The development of this civic/digital space seems to me to be at the heart of all the intiatives you cite and discuss.
On the NPG story - I blogged about this.
In the post I muse on the tension between the NPG's apparent bid to earn money from their digital rights, and their responsibilities as a public good institution
www.peoplepoints.co.nz
So happy to have found your blog!
I don't think there is any harm in publishing photos from museum and public domain works.From the part of wikimedia going against collaboration is not going with the intention of contributing knowlwdge and facts.
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