Turing Festival: Slicing and Dicing the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳
John Peel, Centre for Creative Arts: an example of a virtual view on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ archive
In my role as the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Chief Technical Architect I try to ensure that we can make the best possible use of the latest digital tools and technologies in order to serve our audiences.
That means working with both programme-makers and programmers on internal systems that may never be seen by members of the public, but which are key to our activities - such as the Development PlatformÌýor the Digital Media Initiative.
It’s a privileged position, as it lets me see how all aspects of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ operate, and offers a unique insight into the creative processes that result in the amazing television and radio shows and online services that audiences treasure.
Time and again I’m reminded of a phrase that the artist Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said: "Good artists copy, great artists steal". It was his way of expressing the deep truth that all creativity in the arts and culture builds on the work of others, even if the tools and techniques of art change over time. Just as a builder needs bricks and mortar to make a house, so artists of all types need raw material to work with, drawn from many different sources.
One of those resources is the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳’s own archive, which I see used in so many programmes and websites. It is an enormous collection of building blocks for creativity , and it has been used for many years by programme makers inside and outside the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ to provide inspiration and material.
For some time now I’ve been part of the team driving a move to digital storage and distribution for the archive, and I can see clearly that this creates entirely new opportunities for making the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳’s history more widely available – where we have the rights to do so – as well as new ways to use it for public benefit.
What is the archive?
If you think about the archive at all you probably think of it as something like a library, with a well-ordered collection of polished and finished works that has every episode of Dr.Who, every Prom and the DVD Box set of Frozen Planet.
While the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ does indeed have ranks of videocassettes and DVDs all carefully catalogued and kept on shelves in our Perivale Archive Centre, and even has shops both and , the archive is far more than that.
For one thing, it’s a lot more than just television and radio. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ archive has twice as many pieces of sheet music and twice as many photographs than we've got pieces of video and film. That is because my colleagues and I in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Archive team believe that one of the archive’s main functions is to help people create new things.
If you want to make something new then you don’t want access to finished, polished and shrink wrapped DVDs.
Instead you want the gory details, the scripts, the original notes or score of some music, unique clips never used. You want basic building materials; the sound of a train passing, an aerial shot of the Pen-y-fan, a shot of a late 19th century gas light being lit. You want the raw building blocks, and as more and more artists get comfortable with digital technology offering the ability to merge footage and to recreate scenes in 3D, this need only increases.
Today the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ supplies raw materials like these to anyone in the industry through , which works well for large professional outfits who are primarily focused on creating what those working in the broadcasting world call "linear content" - traditional TV consisting of a single piece of continuous video played to large well defined audiences.
Digital technology and the Internet is changing that.
How demands on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Archive are changing
Experiences on-line and in games are no longer linear.
Augmented reality and modern films call for access to information at a much more granular level.
And the stories told with these resources are not necessarily aimed at an entire well defined audience anymore, as the internet both fragments viewing and creates new opportunities to bring people together.
This poses a lot of challenges, not least when it comes to providing easy access for this sort of volume of material. We don’t want to go about creating the on-line equivalent of a 'tape' (where we pre- and post-fix the video with 90 seconds of black, two frames of pure white, a nice countdown timer, colour bars, test-tones and what not [PDF]) even though that is how it has been done for television clips in the past.
How do we deal with rights, when agreements almost always have assumed you would 'air' an entire episode to a nation?
And, most of all, how do you deal with provenance, so you can later recognise that the period castle used as the background three minutes 'in' was in fact derived from something else?
At the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ the Archive Development team has been , and I’ve been lucky enough to be part of their discussions. Some of the work has led to the idea of a Digital Public Space, while my colleagues in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Archive and I have started on the cataloguing and provenance too, as without having proper names and labels for things it is hard to even 'think' about these building blocks.
More recently we've been trying to see what happens if you do this for real, collaborating with to create , a new platform for all types of digital art.
But like most people in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ I tend to look at and learn from large organisations, from people used to processes such as 'commissioning' and who by and large produce, or have produced, a 'single final product' like a programme or a website. Their concerns and understanding can be very different from a small game developer, someone with a wonderful business idea for a smartphone app, or a remix artist.
At this year’s I’m going to spend some time talking with smaller businesses to explore and discuss what new technologies and new business ideas could be fuelled by the archives of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and other cultural institutions.
First on Friday, in a panel titled ‘Mashing up the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, Slicing and Dicing UCL’, and then with a more on Saturday.
It’s part of a broader ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ initiative, captured in projects like the , for me and my colleagues to understand what is needed in terms of interfaces and catalogues, to explore a path through rights issues and, perhaps most of all, to understand how creators and innovators would like to work with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳.
With the help of the new digital tools ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Future Media can start to think about the archive in a different way, as a collection of assets that can be made available to creators from any sector and any size of company. These are early days, and we are all at the very start of a long journey – so I welcome your comments and contributions
Dirk-Willem van Gulik is the Chief Technical Architect, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Future Media
Comment number 1.
At 24th Aug 2012, daveac wrote:Thank for the great insight but unfortunately a red mist came over me when I read these words of yours:-
'If you think about the archive at all you probably think of it as something like a library, with a well-ordered collection of polished and finished works that has every episode of Dr.Who'
Yes I did ... but I know you didn't!
Not your fault, I know.
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Comment number 2.
At 27th Aug 2012, Craig Smith wrote:Dirk, it's interesting that with all the talk about media convergence and the , nobody has really looked at the aspect of archiving in depth. For me, the means to categorise and easily access the abundance of available content is a key benefit that is enabled by new technology. Glad the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is taking steps in the right direction here.
Who knows in a decade's time we may have access to the full ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ archives on demand - wouldn't that be something!
Craig
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Comment number 3.
At 1st Sep 2012, dukeofearl wrote:Do we really need this work done at all? - Just watch all the repeats of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ programmes on the various satellite channels (Dave etc.)
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