Creative uses of technology

Unlocking the treasures of the British Library

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:02:32 +0100

The British Library’s decision to let Google digitise 250,000 books from its vast archives has been widely, and rightly, welcomed but also stirred up some unexpected controversy. As part of the deal Google is making all the digitised books available for nothing in the public domain - as long as they are not used for commercial purposes. That sounds eminently reasonable at first sight and is a complete boon for scholars and anyone around the world who will have searchable access to books that have largely been forgotten about. After all, why should Google spend vast amounts of money doing this when someone else (maybe one of its competitors) could make money out of it when Google itself says it is doing it all for the public good and won’t even be placing contextualised adverts among the search results. Google claims that as a company it gains from the fact that there is more good searchable stuff on the web.
However, Glyn Moody, the highly regarded defender of an open web, points out that if the books are not available for commercial purposes then they are not really in the public domain and adds: “Far from helping to make knowledge freely accessible to all and sundry, the British Library is actually enclosing the knowledge commons that rightfully belongs to humankind as a whole, by claiming a new copyright term for the digitised versions”.
Google argues that if it (or others) weren’t digitising then none of these books would be available on the web at all and in any case nothing that it is doing affects the status quo - anyone can still use the British Library in whatever way they will including (presumably) digitising on their own. Google has a non exclusive licence that is time limited (though at the time of writing it has not said how long). The BL keeps the rights to its own digital copy of the books which is an insurance against the hopefully unlikely chance that Google may not be here in 50 years time or is taken over by a hedge fund.
All this immediately reminds me of a conversation I had with a previous chief executive of the British Library years ago who had a vision that Kings Cross could be turned into the Silicon Valley of books with local firms scouring the out-of-copyright resources of the BL to re-sell, re-mix or whatever to sell globally and generate local employment. The rationale - which has already been applied by the US government in making all its maps and associated data available for nothing - is that that the economy will generate much more wealth - and tax revenues - this way than by charging for what the taxpayer has already paid for and discouraging entrepreneurialism.
That would be ideal but it is highly unlikely that this or any other government would provide the resources to digitise the BL’s treasure trove of books. The next best solution is to let the likes of Google do it. And one has to say it is very public spirited of them to do it.
But it doesn’t answer the key question: what has Google actually got to lose by removing the restriction on commercial exploitation? It would enhance its primary aim of encouraging quality use of search and would surely boost its brand image. As it stands there is a danger that a new genre of “orphaned” books will be established - digitised books that Google doesn’t want to exploit commercially but won’t let any one else either. That sounds crazy.

Poetry to the people

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:23:08 +0100

Poetry books are notoriously difficult to sell in real life unless you are a superstar. It is even more difficult now since so many poems are free on the web through the sites like poemhunter.com and apps like the wonderful “Poetry” from the Poetry Foundation. How come then that I have just paid £7.99 for a single poem and am as pleased as Punch?
Because The Waste Land is a game changing iPad app by the redoubtable TouchPress who have also sold us The Elements, a multimedia introduction to the building blocks of science that has been justly acclaimed. In addition to the text of the Waste Land (with annotations and references that are many times the length of the poem itself) there is a BBC produced video performance by Fiona Shaw, the original manuscript complete with notes by Ezra Pound, readings of the poem by voices ranging from Seamus Heaney to Eliot himself plus commentaries from experts not to mention photos and images. I have already spent a counter-Twitterish two hours on it and I haven’t finished yet.
The Waste Land is but the latest phase of the revolutionary way new technology is affecting poetry (and other printed media) as text is unhinged from the printed page to discover its own pathways in the digital age.
The first effect of the revolution is that it is now much easier to access and read poetry whether buying from the web or downloading to your phone or mobile device. Unlike the chapters of a novel, a poem is not part of a narrative and can be read comfortably on the screen of a mobile where, thanks to satellite technology, it can even be linked to the places that inspired it (thereby taking poems back to their roots). If you have a tablet such as an iPad or Android you can store almost unlimited books on it which can be read wherever you please.
As an almost compulsive writer of poems I have found a direct link, at least for myself, between new technology and the quantity of poems written. When I carried a Psion 5 around with me attached to my belt I found I could immediately jot down an idea before it went into the ether and whenever there was a spare moment - say someone late for an appointment - I could type away. It was when I suddenly realised I had ten thousand words of poems stacked up that I started thinking about publishing them. Today with an iPad it is even better. Using the basic black on yellow screen of Notes (with no editing options to distract you) I find I can write anywhere including in bed in the morning if I wake up early without distracting anyone.
But all this is just about using text in a different way. A lot of people are rethinking poetry from scratch to utilise new media. One of the most prominent, Jason Nelson believes people “will see poems and stories not simply as the sole domain of text, but the intersection of many disciplines and arts. And this vision opens our eyes to the infinite possibilities within literature itself, and the exciting future offered by technological change”. You can see some of his work here http://www.secrettechnology.com/sydney/. Keep clicking (though you will need Flash). These are fascinating experiments but there are problems. Computer generated randomness, which characterises much of new digital poetry, may not be as successful with words as it is with colours as random colours cohere in a way that words don’t and it is more difficult to tell a random painting from a real one than it is a random poem from a real one. It may be that out of this will come a highly successful new genre that won’t necessarily be classified as poetry.
The third arm of the revolution is publication. It has been possible for some years to self-publish your own poetry as books (though not nearly so easy to sell them) through sites such as Lulu.com. It is now even easier to physically upload an existing book to the Kindle though re-formatting existing text to Kindle standards can be tricky if you do it yourself. Publishing to mobile phones either directly from the web or through an app offers another route to bring poetry to the people. There will always be poetry books but I have a feeling that before long more poems will be read online than from a book and with just as much pleasure. It has already happened to me.

City Poems is an iPhone/Pad app by the author which links classic poems to the streets of London. Geo Poems contains around 200 of his own poems similarly linked

Art of the cuts

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:47:26 +0000

Most street-based protests against the government’s cuts to public expenditure have had only limited success. Can Art do any better? I stumbled across Chelsea College’s experiment with protest art (Protart?) this weekend while browsing location based social networks. The first impression of the installation, situated across the road from Tate Britain, is diffused. It comes alive when explained. The welcoming avenue at the front is made of bits of wood from London streets - maybe the detritus of cuts - but it soon gets narrower symbolising the herding of a large number of people - or money, or resources or ideas - into a smaller space as Simon, a student from Camberwell College who designed it explains here. On the left of the video the tripod-like structures reproduce the small scaffoldings that protesters sit or stand upon to keep space between them and the police.
At the back there is a wooden building, or an installation if you prefer, in which random slogans are stencilled out. In front of the shed you are invited to place a head bag on your head to read slogans about new ways of living.
The object of the project If Not, Then What? curated by Cecillia Wee is to examine “how art and creative practice can create change in politics beyond the polling booth. . . . considering itself a temporary creative think-tank for arts involvement with politics”.

Making light of Love

Tue, 8 Mar 2011 10:21:34 +0000

Though no longer a journo, it is the discipline of deadlines that keeps the embers of creativity from dying. Most of my poems and paintings are written to someone’s deadline - especially the Daneshill Poetry Group who read each other classic poems on a chosen subject and invite me to write one. The subject for the March deadline (today) is “Light” They were written on the Notes function of the iPad which can be used instantly. That makes them iPoems, right (Hmm)

Light (1)
Love is a bitch that lights your life
Or would do
If you could only find the switch
Don't bother
These days, making light of love is cool
As a rule
Love makes a right fool
Of us all. Especially at night
For love is light.
It comes and goes
Like the summer of a rose
Usually driving us nuts
Switching itself on and off
And with far too many power cuts.
Better to write about it in a book
So you can build up to your own climax
Filling in what reality lacks
With love - who on earth wants the facts?

Light (2)
(Thanks to Martin Luther King)

Just as gathering darkness
Helps us
See better the light
Of the stars at night
So we must hope
Our darkest times
Spawn a latent light
That puts the blackness
Of the soul to flight.

Darkness cannot darkness rout
Nor hate kill hate
Only love does that
As light with dark

Saving Blackfriars and the Globe in Second Life

Sun, 6 Feb 2011 12:20:15 +0000

For years I walked from Blackfriars Tube station in London to the Guardian’s office in Farringdon Road ignorant of the fact that the site of the Blackfriars Theatre, which hosted Shakespeare’s troupe The King’s Men, was on the other side of the road. There was nothing to record its history - built on the site of the Blackfriars Monastery dissolved by Henry V111 - nor of the gatehouse nearby, the only property Shakespeare purchased in London.
This neglect of the Bard by Londoners sparked my Shakespeare’s London app for the iPhone which guides people around the buried memories of the Bard in London. It surprised me that London’s neglect of Blackfriars and other sites - was not shared by Americans who had written books about Blackfriars and built a replica of it in Staunton, Virginia .
I was amazed to find another replica of the Blackfriars Theatre constructed in the virtual world Second Life by a young Taiwanese-American Ina Centaur who has also built a reproduction of the Globe there where live performances of Twelfth Night have been staged. This is highly innovative initiative is now threatened with closure because Second Life, (SL) in its Philistinian wisdom, has decided to end the cheaper rate given to not-for-profit organisations to rent sections of land. In a few weeks rent will be doubled leaving organisations and people like Ina Centaur, who struggled to raise money to pay the lower rate in the first place, with no alternative but to close down unless they can raise funds elsewhere.
But from where? Clearly this is difficult at a time of international recession but the funds need are minute compared with real-life theatres. The rent of a non-profit sim tier (an SL expression for the computing power needed to service a section of land) is currently $150 a month before the planned doubling which has triggered an exodus of voluntary bodies from SL. If Shakespeare’s Globe in London or the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton (or other Shakespearean bodies) could jointly sponsor the experiment they would not only be part of a fascinating experiment but be gaining invaluable experience for the future.
Although Second Life has been experiencing difficulties, virtual worlds, led by youngsters are exploding. It is only a matter of time, surely, before a virtual replica of Shakespeare's London is built as a global educational/ cultural/touristic experiment. The grid of the City of London and its immediate suburbs has hardly changed since them and there is a wealth of maps and prints to show what the houses and theatres looked like. I confess to having tried - and so far failed - to get this moving as a cooperative global experiment using open source - but have high hopes that someone will eventually do it.
Meanwhile, it would be fantastic to build on what Ina Centaur has already achieved. If you have any suggestions please comment below or email me at victor.keegan@gmail.com. For anyone who is a member of Second Life or who wants to join (free) to be transported to the theatre click here .