Back in October we missed this rather interesting conference on digitalization and reuse, hosted by the University of Turin and shared on YouTube by Wikimedia Italia.
Category: Uncategorized
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The Italian Court of Audit recommends Open Access for cultural works
As reported by Wikimedia Italia, the Italian Court of Audit (Corte dei Conti) recently released a lengthy (220 pages!) report (source) on the activities of the Italian Ministry for Culture, touching on the PND (Piano Nazionale di Digitalizzazione) and on specific pricing guidelines released in April (D. M. 161, 11 aprile 2023).
Ideologically we are pretty much aligned with Wikimedia’s position, but as a regular company that has to make money to survive, we can see the point of charging fees, if they were to generate significant revenue for museums and for those carrying out digitization and preservation efforts. We suspect that the monetization approach imagined by D. M. 161, 11 aprile 2023 is never going to generate significant revenue.
Instead, as the Court of Audit report rightly points out, on page 155, the problems with the current approach are that it neglects dissemination, and prevents the kind of free reuse that generates value, which is not the same thing as revenue. Simply put, many potential users are dissuaded by the very possibility of having to negotiate a license.
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Access and Recall
Anyone who creates digital experiences should read Cory Doctorow, particularly his blog, Pluralistic.
Recently he wrote this essay which touches on immersive digitization efforts for museums, which obviously hits close to home for us. In particular, this linked presentation by Aaron Cope explains the important concepts after which we’re titling this post. Check out his blog more generally if you’re interested in digital humanities and museums.
We want to provide access to works and places, bridging over limits of time, space and economic resources. This has both a technical aspect, related to the digitalization of 3D objects, of their shapes, visual and acoustic properties, and a legal aspect, related to the various ways in which powerful entities attempt to extract rents from what should be a public good.
The beauty of the web is that it allows regular people to bypass the agenda-setting role of media, we can independently publish, but also independently choose what to focus on, at a time of our choosing. We don’t have to follow the zeitgeist, we can focus on any point of the past, we can recall what we want.
The kind of server technology we choose, with the exception of this blog, is oriented towards permanence. While cloud providers and server-based dynamic technologies have significant recurring costs, our static client-based solutions can just keep going for decades. We don’t participate in the “metaverse”, we put artworks and experiences on the open web, for all to partake.
Quoting Aaron Cope once again:
The web gave us the ability to return to a thing outside the shared (or master) narrative at a time of one’s own choosing. Of shifting time in the service of one’s own interest or in the service of simply coming to an understanding of one’s own interests.
It lowered the barrier to speak to the future and to listen to the past. Not because we know why or can quantify its return in advance but because we believe what is most important is simply the ability to do so.Our visitors don’t have to be online at a specific time, they don’t have to use a specific device.
Offline museums are obviously massively important, they are unparalleled at preservation tasks, but the access they provide is limited in several ways. The most obvious ones are geography, time and money, but we cannot forget about sensory accessibility, and the sheer lack of space. Most items in any museum collection just sit in an archive, and they will never be shown.
It is also very hard to show items in their context, and particularly in their working contexts. We have worked on the digitalization of a dynamic sculpture, that would be rapidly destroyed if visitors were allowed to physically manipulate it. Similarly it is possible to share digital reproductions of working digital artefacts. For example Dominic Pajak created this BBC Micro that works both on regular devices and in XR. It is a full reproduction of both the hardware and software of a seminal 1980s computer, that none of us have ever had an opportunity to interact with in real life. The only place to experience this kind of computing history physically is the Computer History Museum in Cambridge, UK, but there are massive limitations.
That brings to the legal aspects. Italian legislation places heavy restrictions on the reproduction of cultural heritage artworks, that go way beyond the already draconian copyright regime we live in. For software conservation the situation is even worse, the source code is generally not available, without maintenance everything stops working relatively quickly, and often the only viable conservation strategy is a combination of emulation and blatant piracy.
Our promise is to deliver accessible web experiences that take advantage of immersive technologies, but are not beholden to them, and to do so at a price point that is competitive with regular websites, with no lock-in.
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ActivityPub enabled
Thanks to the official WordPress ActivityPub plugin this blog can now be followed on Mastodon, or any other Fediverse network.
These days we’re working quite a bit with RSS feeds and the concepts of federation and syndication. We have a couple of super basic RSS-feed generators based on web scraping, one is for the news posted by Italian municipalities, the other for Threads.net profiles. Combining something like that with one of the many RSS to ActivityPub bridges it could be possible to follow local news and Threads users right from Mastodon.
Getting closer to our core business, what would a Fediverse of 3D spaces look like? What about a Fediverse of spatial audio?
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MIMO Technique applied to the Greek Theatre of Tyndaris
We just published our first paper as a proper company! Check out the full text here.
We created a reconstruction of the current state of a Greek-Roman theater in Sicily using drone-based photogrammetry, we helped with the acoustical measurements using the MIMO technique, and we created a Unity application that allows users to move around the theater, experiencing both the acoustics and the visuals in different stages of history.
We also created a webXR version, which only shows the current state of the theater, and which doesn’t perform a proper reconstruction of the reverberation yet, but which you can try right now, on any device!
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Hello world!
We’re creating a blog for two reasons:
- Document the development of our solutions for digitizing cultural heritage artifacts
- Play around with WordPress, and more generally with PHP. Our webXR solutions are mostly incompatible with WordPress, we’d like to develop a couple of plugins to remedy that. The final goal is to make editing modular spaces just as easy as editing text.