[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

Pluralistic: The (open) web is good, actually (13 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since.

A great round-up from Cory, featuring heavy dollops of Anil and Aaron.

[this is aaronland] generative adversarial therapy sessions

Mobile phones and the “app economy”, an environment controlled by exactly two companies and designed to extract a commission from almost every interaction and to promote native and not-portable applications over web applications. But we also see the same behaviour from so-called “native to the web” companies like Facebook who have explicitly monetized reach, access and discovery. Facebook is also the company that gave the world React which is difficult not to understand as deliberate attempt to embrace and extend, to redefine, HTML itself.

Perversely, nearly everything about the mobile/app economy is built on, and designed to use, HTTP precisely because it’s a common and easy to implement standard free and unencumbered by licensing.

Internet Artifacts

I love this timeline of internet firsts. Best of all:

You may touch the artifacts

The websites on display work—even the ones that used Flash!

Never Been Seen | Science Museum Group Collection

This is such a great use of an API—you can choose to view an object in the museum’s collection that no one else has seen yet.

It’s like the opposite of Amazon’s recommendation engine: “No one has ever purchased these items together…”

Dams Public Website

I had the great pleasure of visiting the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp last October. Their vast collection of woodblocks are available to dowload in high resolution (and they’re in the public domain).

14,000 examples of true craftmanship, drawings masterly cut in wood. We are supplying this impressive collection of woodcuts in high resolution. Feel free to browse as long as you like, get inspired and use your creativity.

[this is aaronland] #mw19 – the presentation

The web embodies principles of openness and portability and access that best align with the needs, and frankly the purpose, of the cultural heritage sector.

Aaron’s talk from the 2019 Museums and the Web conference.

In 2019 the web is not “sexy” anymore and compared to native platforms it can sometimes seems lacking, but I think that speaks as much to people’s desire for something “new” as it does to any apples to apples comparison. On measure – and that’s the important part: on measure – the web affords a better and more sustainable framework for the cultural heritage to work in than any of the shifting agendas of the various platform vendors.

CTS - conserve the sound

An online museum of sounds—the recordings of analogue machines.

Web Design Museum

The museum exhibits over 800 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1995 and 2005.

[this is aaronland] fault lines — a cultural heritage of misaligned expectations

When Aaron talks, I listen. This time he’s talking about digital (and analogue) preservation, and how that can clash with licensing rules.

It is time for the sector to pick a fight with artists, and artist’s estates and even your donors. It is time for the sector to pick a fight with anyone that is preventing you from being allowed to have a greater — and I want to stress greater, not total — license of interpretation over the works which you are charged with nurturing and caring for.

It is time to pick a fight because, at least on bad days, I might even suggest that the sector has been played. We all want to outlast the present, and this is especially true of artists. Museums and libraries and archives are a pretty good bet if that’s your goal.

Typewriters in the Technical Museum in Figueres | Flickr

If you enjoyed reading Marcin’s serendipitous story on Twitter, here are the pictures to accompany it.

Museum of Endangered Sounds

Sounds from our collective technological past.

(I’ll look past the fact that the sound labelled “ZX Spectrum” is using an image of an Amstrad PCP 464)

MoMA’s Digital Art Vault

Ben Fino-Radin describes how the MoMA’s archivematica “analyzes all digital collections materials as they arrive, and records the results in an obsolescence-proof text format that is packaged and stored with the materials themselves.”

[this is aaronland] did I mention it vibrates?

history is time breaking up with itself

A great piece of hypertext from Aaron on the purpose of museums, the Copper Hewitt Pen, and matter battles.

twoway.st - an independent explorer for the British Museum collection

I like this. It fills like a very webby way to explore a museum collection. Use any axis you like.

This is a sketch made quickly to explore what it means to navigate a museum catalogue made of over two million records. It’s about skipping around quickly, browsing the metadata as if you were wandering around the museum itself in Bloomsbury, or better yet, fossicking about unattended in the archives.

The Smithsonian’s design museum just got some high-tech upgrades

A profile of the great work Aaron and Seb have been doing at the Cooper Hewitt museum. Have a read of this and then have a listen again to Aaron’s dConstruct talk.

The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt: Finally, the Museum of the Future Is Here - The Atlantic

Remember Aaron’s dConstruct talk? Well, the Atlantic has more details of his work at the Cooper Hewitt museum in this wide-ranging piece that investigates the role of museums, the value of APIs, and the importance of permanent URLs.

As I was leaving, Cope recounted how, early on, a curator had asked him why the collections website and API existed. Why are you doing this?

His retrospective answer wasn’t about scholarship or data-mining or huge interactive exhibits. It was about the web.

I find this incredibly inspiring.

Describe Me

A great Zooniverse-style project for the website of Australia’s Museum Victoria that allows you to provide descriptions for blind and low-vision people.

Airbag Intl. / Archives

Greg says:

We need a web design museum.

I am, unsurprisingly, in complete agreement. And let’s make lots of copies while we’re at it.

Planetary: collecting and preserving code as a living object | Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York

Aaron Straup-Cope and Seb Chan on the challenges of adding (and keeping) code to the Cooper-Hewitt collection:

The distinction between preservation and access is increasingly blurred. This is especially true for digital objects.