Month: April 2010

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The Wonders of Flash

Despite the abundance of dynamic websites devoted to interactive history, I still am a big fan of the “Devices of Wonder” exhibit that can be seen at the Getty Museum. One of the most frustrating part of going to a history museum (at least most museums) is that the visitor is not allowed to interact with the objects that are on display. Going far beyond the typical photographic record of the object, which is the industry standard, the Getty has taken advantage of Adobe’s Flash platform to replicate many of the “devices” from its inventory and the Flash technology allows the web visitor to try out the various devices.

Without this sort of interactivity, it would be difficult to really get a sense for what these objects did and why people would have had them in their households. Now, however, we’re able to poke and prod without the risk of damaging the actual historical object. One might argue whether Flash is on its way out or not, but it does seem like the Getty chose the perfect new media technology for the task of replicating the interactivity. A digital picture (even a 3D picture) would have been too static. A film clip of a curator demonstrating would have been too dry. The Flash interaction, however, seems to be the best of both formats.

However, the exhibit itself reveals that the Flash technology is sometimes better implemented doing certain tasks and less well suited for performing others.The item “View of the Imperial Chinese Palace in Beijing” is a great implementation of Flash. Here, the user can change the back lighting to transform the image. The “Blue Bird: Magnetic Game” is another great interactive item with which the users can even try and play the game themselves!

Others, however, are either showing their age or fall just a bit short. For instance, when viewing the “Sorcerer’s Mirror” object there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of interactivity. Here, the user simply drags an picture or painting and drops it onto the mirror. The viewer is then presented with  a repeating image of what it would have looked like if that picture were reflected in the mirror. However, the potential that Flash possesses would have allowed for even more interactivity – like the ability for the user to tilt the mirror at will to see how the image changes as the mirror is moved.

Still other objects are shown as real-time low-quality video files that are difficult to see and only serves at the moment to date this exhibit (which is now about 9 years old). The Getty has a wonderful concept here and I wish that they would invest a little money to update and expand the number of objects that are here on display. This would allow the Getty to also explore newer technologies that have been developed over the intervening years – like FLEX and HTML5. I’d also like to see other museums around the world see what sorts of object they have in their collections that could get a similar treatment.

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Digital Scholarship and Research

We’ve spent most of this semester discussing the output side of being a digital historian, but this week we turn our attention to how we can also leverage digital technology to be better historians. For most historians, digital technology has simply sped up the process of what they already did with analog tools. For instance, many of my colleagues use a database (like FileMaker) to take notes instead of using index cards as one had typically done in the past. Others have utilized bibliographic software like Endnote, Biblioscape, Reference Manager (formerly ProCite), RefWorks, or now the free Firefox plug-in Zotero to organize their citations (which everyone should do, since it makes documenting your references sooooooo much easier and accurate).

These two examples are simply an extension of the older transition that all academics made when they switched from typewriters to word processing software and don’t necessarily “add” any value to the product of their research. However, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a great deal of potential in the very near future.

One of my favorite digital historians is Bill Turkel up at the University of Western Onterio. Dr. Turkel represents the cutting edge of historians (in his case and environmental historian) who want to press the envelope of technology to see what it can do for us to further our basic understanding of the past. Dr. Turkel doesn’t just use computers, he tries to think about devices or add-ons for devices that don’t yet exist and then builds them! This is fascinating stuff to say the least!

Another great story of using technology to be better historians comes from the UK last year. Scientists were able to train a computer and an electronic sniffing device to recognize the age of paper without the need to carbon test a fragment (and thereby destroying a part of the original document). When I “tweeted” about this last fall, Bill Turkel wrote to remind me that he had speculated about something similar in a blog post of his in 2008.

These are just a few examples of the potential to use technology as historians to not only present our craft, but to perform our craft more effectively and possibly in entirely new ways. What we need are more people who can “think outside the box” and dare to explore new methods that take advantage of digital technology’s potential and yet remain true to the mission of historians to explore and analyze the past.

So – What’s your big idea going to be?