Cultural Digital newsletter #127
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we have science, shocks, and Second Life. There's also humans v machines, and orchestras, but they didn't fit into the alliterative thing I had going on there.
First up, here are some very complicated things that are getting easier to do:
RADiCAL can do motion capture from your mobile phone. No suits with ping pong balls required.
Instant 3D Photography is a project from UCL and Facebook, creating an algorithm that'll make 3D panoramas from photos taken with a mobile phone.
Six things I’ve learnt about digitisation in six months from Alice Read at the Royal Academy of Arts. Alice also wrote about what she learned from her 6 years at Art UK.
George Oates: Making and Remaking Collections Online. "Oates discusses her developing practice in making and remaking digital collections, spanning web-scale services, unsolicited interfaces, messy metadata and gentle interventions in institutional practice".
Humans versus machines: Who is the better museum mediator? Notes following a session titled “Humans versus machines: Who is the better museum mediator?” at ECSITE 2018. Features lots of AI in museum/heritage contexts.
Shakespeare still shocks - even in Virtual Reality. "Ipsos MORI and The Royal Shakespeare Company partnered on an innovative programme of research to explore the emotional engagement of theatre, live to cinema and a virtual reality experience when watching a performance of Titus Andronicus".
Exploring The Digital Ruins Of 'Second Life'. I'm not 100% sure why I'm including this or how it fits, but that's fine.
Orchestras
A Manifesto for a 21st-Century Concert (Drinks Allowed.). Esa-Pekka Salonen likes a bit of tech. "These new, largely inexpensive technologies, Mr. Salonen believes, could give way to “a neo-Wagnerian idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk. You can write a piece for a symphony orchestra, electronics, holograms, V.R. and 360-sound design, this kind of amalgam of highly trained live musicians mixing with state-of-the-art technology.”
Behind the Scenes With the Stanford Laptop Orchestra. "The orchestra plays laptops like accordions, turns video games into musical scores, and harnesses face-tracking software to turn webcams into instruments".
Science!
Communicating Science with Social Media. Ant Lewis, ex of the Royal Institution, spent some time as a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellow and has written some really good guides "for charity, research centre, museum and university communications professionals". There's lots of good stuff here. Highly recommended.
Digitising collections: how technology is speeding up the process of big data. An interview with Steen Dupont from the Natural History Museum.
4 million digital specimens and counting. And here's their Vince Smith too. "For every scientist that comes to South Kensington to physically visit the Museum’s collections, 10 visit our digital collections, and this proportion is growing each year. The Data Portal has become the largest single gateway to Museum specimens, and use of this freely accessible data, is creating opportunities for research and collaboration that would have been unthinkable just three years ago".
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at National Museums Scotland, the Geffrye Museum, Roundhouse, and more.
Please do the sharing thing if you feel like it. No pressure.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. The latest update includes info on loads of Aus and NZ websites (who built them and which CMS they use). Find out more about The Library.