Associate Professor Shirley Alexander, Director, Institute for Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia. Phone +61 2 330 2480 Fax: +61 2 330 2217 Email: S.Alexander@uts.edu.au
The overheads in developing and implementing new technologies are considerable, and in the long term, the users of these systems, as well as the administrators who make decisions about funding such innovations, will demand more than the simple transfer of existing media to new media in a format that just looks up to date.
This paper describes the use of the WorldWideWeb as one of a number of media to enable users to examine and contribute to a resource base of Australian cultural materials in an integrated manner. The particular role of the World Wide Web is to foster collaborative enquiry and the development of public programs by members of the general community, cultural institutions and universities as well as promoting collaborative skills among computer scientists, media producers and scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the development of Australian multimedia products.
We have selected a sample of twelve Australia Streets from around the country with all states and territories represented. The definition of 'Australia Street' has been broadened slightly to encompass derivative forms such as 'Austral' and 'Australie', and includes the Austral Downs cattle station in the Northern Territory. The sample was chosen with reference to demographic, botanical and architectural data to represent a cross-section of Australian domestic lifestyles and habitations. From each Australia Street site we have selected two habitations for detailed research and representation in the curriculum materials.
The Australia Street Archive has met with an enthusiastic response from residents, local libraries, councils, history groups etc. around the country. The level of community cooperation with the project is inspiring.
The main direct outcome of the NPRF project is a set of curriculum materials in CD-ROM form intended for use by tertiary students in Australian Studies at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, with hopefully some complementary applications in the upper secondary curriculum. The indirect outcomes include a television documentary on Australia Street (hopefully the first in a series on the 7-up, 14-up model), and a national museum exhibition co-ordinated through the Our Place Contemporary Australia Gallery at the Australian Museum to link up Australia street sites around the country. The prototype CD-ROM direct outcome is due for completion by the end of 1995 and negotiations are underway with the ABC for production of the television documentary.
The Nation Project as a whole and the Australia Street Archive in particular sit very well with the cultural policy of the Australian government announced in the Creative Nation statement of October 18, 1994. That statement identified the development of Australian content for distribution in digital multimedia form by CD-ROM and digital networks as an urgent priority in cultural policy. It identified as key components of this strategy collaboration between media and computer specialists within educational institutions, and between educational and cultural institutions and the community. The Nation Project and its Australia Street Archive meet all these criteria, and also the criteria for proposals under the Cultural Development Initiative
The conclusions of the Broadband Services Expert Group in its Interim Report Networking Australia's Future (July, 1994), state that "content creation and infrastructure development ... is a major area of opportunity for an educated and innovative Australian workforce" (p83). The government has indicated that local libraries should be the major point of access to the information superhighway for community users. The National Library is in the process of creating a World Wide Web server to provide access to information on the Internet and information about its collections and services. The National Library is also developing the National Document Information Service (NDIS) which is a network linking Australian and New Zealand libraries.
This was the context for the successful application for this project, which is to establish an Australia Street site on the World Wide Web on a server in Sydney at UTS and accessible to the Australian public directly through terminals in galleries at the Australian Museum and the National Library and around the country through local libraries and any other location connected to the Internet. The National Library will also install a link in its server for those people who can't access it directly. Its aim is to promote collaborative enquiry and public programs by members of the general community, cultural institutions and universities.
It is not possible to make a simple transformation of CD-ROM- based material onto a WWW site. CD-ROMs are static products, while network sites are amenable to constant interaction and collaboration. On the other hand CD-ROMs can make much greater use of audiovisual material and of sophisticated narrative structures.
While at the moment WWW museum sites are largely text-based, with only a few sites as yet fully exploiting the potential for graphics and sound, the technology offers an important opportunity to develop interactive multimedia applications accessible to the public. There are other WWW services such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat) can be used to promote on-line discussions about material on the CD-ROM and WWW, which is a crucial ingredient in encouraging public participation with the project. For this reason it is a priority to develop content and application prototypes for networked distribution that will draw on the communication strengths of existing media and complement their use with the future of interactive networks. It must be a high priority of research to test the different ways of enabling access to information that will encourage public participation in interactive use of networks.
The primary objective of this project is to develop and mount an Australia Street site on the World Wide Web. This can be broken down into a number of component objectives, as follows:
The audio-visual material comes from a number of sources. The overwhelming majority of it is being recorded on location at the twenty-five homes that have been selected for detailed research. The twenty-five homes are located in twelve Australia Streets across the country, selected on a state-by -state basis according to the proportion of the national population in that state, and according to range of variables including demographic factors, architecture and biological diversity.
To encompass a suitable diversity we have extended the definition of 'Australia' Street to include Austral, Australie and Australind. There are four street sites in Sydney, one in Goulburn, three in Melbourne, one each in Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Zeehan (Tasmania), and the Austral Downs cattle station in the Northern Territory.
In each home and garden we are taking between 250 and 350 35mm photographic transparencies, documenting each wall and significant piece of furniture, ornamentation, etc inside the house, and the different aspects of the garden and exterior of the house. We are recording from one and a half to two hours of oral history interview with the principal resident(s) at each location, to give a very finegrained account of each part of the home, its history, uses and personal associations.
The sound recordings are being edited into short sections of between 45 and 150 seconds, to accompany the short sequences of still images to which they refer. Within these images there will be hot spots which a user can click on to select the next sequence of sound and image to which they wish to move. This selection will be activated in order at the conclusion of each segment, without the need for the user to select a path from a menu.
The underlying concept is that the user will be drawn into the narrative by the power of the sound and image, and in reacting to the content of a sequence they will make an intuitive selection of an object or direction depicted in the image to determine the path of the narrative.
If required the user will be able to withdraw to a set of indexical references and/or a geographical map in order to make menu-driven choices for direction. However, we are anticipating that this narrative option will only be selected occasionally by most users, or by teachers, etc wanting to access a particular category of content.
As well as the oral histories and photographs that we are recording, there is an extensive range of archival imagery (posters, photographs, maps, etc.) to accompany the older Australia Street sites. These are also woven into the sequences of sound and image.
The experience we want to create for the user is that of watching a television documentary composed of still images (instead of moving ones) and sound, where s/he has determined the path of the story according to his/her responses to the content on a moment by moment basis, without the interruption necessitated by regular reference to a menu.
To achieve the first of these we circulated drafts of the original project proposal as it was being formulated among team members from different disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, architecture, cultural studies, education, environmental science (including ornithological and botanical ecology), history, information studies, media studies, sociology. Because the multimedia form of the outcomes were integral to the design of the project the drafts were also circulated among multimedia developers, educational technology experts and conventional media producers.
This process of collaborative drafting produced a proposal that all contributors thought they could accept, though there was universal awareness of the difficulties of true interdisciplinary collaboration once the project reached implementation stage.
The decision to go with a set of curriculum materials and resources in the CD-ROM version, and a re-purposed set of these resources for the WWW version, allowed for some flexibility in the content outcomes, because it permits the inclusion of unreconciled information with pointers to the user about the conceptual and methodological difficulties posed by the materials.
In other words, in developing the interdisciplinary nature of the project our aim was never to produce a neatly synthesised, universalised set of conclusions across disciplinary boundaries, but rather to highlight areas of confluence and conflict in the interpretation of the materials we were presenting. This is achieved in part, by the provision of interpretive commentaries by a variety of disciplinary experts.
Once the project was funded and development commenced, a reference group to guide the team was convened. It had about ten members representing the key disciplinary areas, and included representatives from the educational and public programs divisions of the museum, and multimedia developers. This group met regularly through the key decision-making stages of the research phase, as the data about all the Australia Street sites was gathered and sample streets and consequently houses selected for detailed examination and recording. This reference group will be used for in-house evaluation of early prototypes before final versions of the products are produced for evaluation before launching.
With respect to the integration of the diverse range of development and production skills required for the successful development of the final product, the project has been conceived from the outset as analogous to the production process in a conventional medium such as film and as a process in which we are essentially defining a new medium. In other words, we recognised that many of the skills we required were highly specialised and without any necessary historical relationship to other areas of skill involved in this production.
Of the two principals involved in the project, Shirley Alexander has a disciplinary background in computer science, a professional background in learning and multimedia, and a research focus on the evaluation of the educational efficacy of new information technologies. Chris Nash has a disciplinary background in media and political studies, and a professional history in radio, film and television production.
The research assistants hired for the project have disciplinary backgrounds in applied history, cultural studies and botany; the multimedia developers are recent computing science graduates; the photographers are professional newspaper/magazine photographers; the graphic designer comes from a television background; the oral histories are being recorded and edited by radio producers; and the image editing is being assisted by a film/video editor.
For others however, there is no absolute truth, and individuals are continually engaged in a process of interpreting a range of opinions, viewpoints and interpretations, discarding some and retaining others, until a commitment is made to a personal view which is defendable. This view is often not static and the individual is continually engaged in a process of re-interpretation and re-construction.
This WWW project provides an opportunity for readers to become active participants in the construction of the Australia Street Archive. Readers become collaborative authors as they contribute their own individual interpretations, annotations and meaning construction on all aspects of the archive including issues raised by residents of the houses and streets, or on some of the commentaries provided by the discipline experts.
These individual comments will then be linked to the original archive material and become available to other users of the system for reading, annotation and further comment. Users will also be encouraged to contribute their own images and documents for scanning, and to record their own oral histories for incorporation in the program.
The variation in interpretation of data between disciplinary experts, institution and individuals will be available to the user as he/she follows the annotations within each document.
Some of the more interesting and provocative exhibitions along these lines can be found internationally at the Museum of the Moving Image in London, the History Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilisation in Ottawa, and several years ago at the Museum of Victoria in the exhibition about Jewish and Italian community heritage in Carlton, Victoria.
With their Our Place Contemporary Australia Gallery the Australian Museum in Sydney has taken an important step beyond the recreation of static simulacra within museum galleries. Our Place is a gallery within the Australian Museum where community organisations and groups come to exhibit artefacts, stage events and cultural performances relating to their life in contemporary Australia. It is a step beyond traditional public programs in that the exhibitions are initiated from within contemporary communities and involve the temporary relocation of community products and processes into the museum as a link to the ephemeral and everchanging nature of community cultural life. However, it still involves the modification and translation of community cultural activity into forms limited by the structure and parameters of museum spaces and schedules.
One of the aims of this Australia Street World Wide Web project is to take the community linkages one step further in their development, by establishing the museum as merely one node among many on the Internet that will link communities and individuals in dynamic interaction around a set of common interest and concerns, viz. the expression of their cultural heritage and social identity in the intimacy of their domestic spaces.
Traditionally audiovisual media, including interactive multimedia, are used to augment the attractiveness and interpretative richness of objects and display simulacra in museum galleries. In this instance the displays and surrounding interpretive material will be used to emphasis and augment the communicative and interactive processes between the museum gallery and other sites involved in real time communication and sharing of information, documents and records.
Of course, while the communication process itself will be 'real', the electronic imaging and reproduction of documents, records and participants will be itself a succession of signs or simulacra representing the objects and people of which they are the images. We are certainly not suggesting that these simulacra are any more 'real' or 'authentic' than the representations involved in traditional exhibitions. The difference lies in the fact that the representations will be generated in real time by the community participants themselves, rather than by museum professionals on behalf off community members.
Certainly the technologies and professional practices used to create the
images will be under the supervision of technical and curatorial staff, and
the representational outcomes will be a product of the interaction between
the professionals, the technologies, the institutional parameters, the
collaborating members of the community and the members of the public
visiting the museum at any given time. The crucial point is the power
shift involved in
The initial launch of the Australia Street program in the Australian Museum
in Sydney and the National Library in Canberra will take place in
January/February, 1996. After its six week run in the Our Place gallery
the Australia Street program will move into the Search and Discover Gallery
of the Australian Museum, and will continue to be accessible on the World
Wide Web for all individuals and organisations with direct access to the
Internet, and through local libraries throughout Australia linked to the
National Library through its library network.
Conclusion
This is an ambitious project, involving a broad range of institutions as
well as disciplines. The essence of the project is collaboration not only
between the participating institutions and disciplines, but also between
members of the general public, whose role is seen as that of collaborative
authors of the project.
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