Live art

AHDS Performing Arts has acquired four new collections of live and performance art material, including the world-class Live Art Archive and Digital Performance Archive.

The Live Art Archive holds information on almost 16,000 events from 1960 to 2003 while the Digital Performance Archive charts developments in the creative use of computer technologies in performance. These seminal research resources provide access to a wealth of information on live art, performance art, installations, physical and dance-based theatre, multi-media work, and bio-art events that have taken place in the United Kingdom and sometimes beyond.

The collections, freely available and searchable online, give details of artistic events that have included figures such as Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George. These resources have been developed by Professor Barry Smith (University of Bristol) and Professor Steve Dixon (Brunel University) as well as world-famous performance artist STELARC.

Live art and other AHDS Performing Arts resources freely available online from http://performingarts.ahds.ac.uk/collections/

Slave trade

The trans-Atlantic slave trade remains a major field of academic enquiry and public interest. Coinciding with the bicentenary of the abolition of the trade in Britain, this new database of over 34,000 slaving voyages is the largest single resource of information available for the study of pre-colonial African history.

The resource provides details of the itineraries and characteristics of ships involved in the trade as well as covering the human dimension, including information such as the numbers of slaves embarked in Africa and disembarked in the Americas and the owners and crews of the ships involved in the traffic.

It provides details of the geography of the trade, notably ports of provenance and return of ships, trading destinations in Africa, and ports of slave embarkation in the Americas, together with the time schedules involved in completing the various phases of voyages.

Professor Philip Richardson of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, built the database from new research and previously published information resulting from three decades of work from numerous scholars.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A revised and enlarged database 1500-1867 is freely available via AHDS History.

The AHDS has been amassing a large collection of user statistics relating to the use of the Stormont Papers website.

Key findings suggest that the bulk of users may not be looking for the things we expect them to be looking for and pre-arranged hyperlinks on a home page can provide a user-friendly way of letting users get to know the content of a resource.

The ‘long tail’ of search terms

There are many interesting conclusions to be drawn from the data. One of these is the existence of the ‘long tail’ pattern within user searches. (See the Wikipedia article on the ‘long tail’ for more about the concept.)

A small number of search terms are repeatedly used. Roughly ten weeks after the website went live in November 2006, there were 12 terms and phrases that had been searched for over 100 times. Searches on these 12 most common terms formed 21% of all searches made (1,911 searches out of the total of 9,136). However, there were a much larger 3,048 terms that had been searched for less then ten times. When combined, this came to 54% of searches.

Even allowing for spelling mistakes and typing errors, solitary or rarely-used search terms and phrases are more than twice as popular as very common search terms. The wide range of terms, phrases and words entered by users indicate a far greater use of the resource than might originally have been expected.

The point is this — in creating a resource, it is difficult to anticipate how or why it might be of interest.

Limiting the data made available limits the amount of successful searches that can be made over the resource. Freeing up as much of the data as possible gives more users more opportunity to search and retrieve the data they want.

Using pre-arranged links

There’s an added context to this. Of the top ten search terms made on the Stormont resource, all ten of them have been provided as ready-made links on the home page. Users click on the hyperlinks rather than type anything into the search box.

Why might the pre-arranged links be popular? The search terms were created by the scholars responsible for digitising and making available the resource and are derived from their knowledge of the resource. Users will see these search terms and follow them up; clicking on a link is easier to do than typing something on the keyboard.

But there’s a further reason. For those users unsure about the precise function of the website, or exploring the website without any particular purpose, such links provide an easier way to investigate the site.

Users tend to expect a positive response from a mechanism with a pre-fixed link; if they type a search term into an empty box they are less sure of getting a response they understand.

Pre-arranged links also have the advantage of guiding users to records or pages that might otherwise be hard to access. In the printed and digitised index to the Stormont debates, the Irish Republican Army is cited as I.R.A.. However, many users search for ‘IRA’ (without full stops) and are surprised to get relatively few hits. A pre-arranged link (connecting IRA with I.R.A.) is a simple way for this to be circumvented.

Ban all digital cameras by Alastair Dunning, AHDS Communications Manager

There are too many digital cameras in the world. As a result, there are too many images. Let’s grab the problem at the source and ban all digital cameras.

Look at Google images. What do you get? A hotch-potch of hackneyed sunsets, drunken student parties and gawping sportsmen.

Often the quality of the image is poor, over or under exposed, or out of focus. Most frequently, there is little information to tell you about the image — who or what it is of, when it was taken and where it was taken. The situation is less extreme within the education sector — people are a bit better, but not always, in realising the importance of quality and context. But even here, in digitisation projects up and down the country, there is never-ending concern with scanners and cameras and resolutions and formats.

Is it really worth it? How much do you get from an image online? Take a Jackson Pollock painting — full of bumps, eddies of paint, stripes of colour, paintings gradually evolving as the paint changes and even falls off with time. What do you get online? A flat, eye-straining mish-mash of faded colour called mist_lav3b.jpg, pushed into a corner of a web browser against a stark white background. And then you look again and what do you find? The same painting but drastically cropped, with achingly bright colours and entitled Lavendar_Moss.

It could be done better. A high-quality, luscious, layered digital image embedded in an intelligent website. But we don’t yet have the screens big enough nor even, in some instances, the bandwidth to communicate such images. And imagine the cost of creating such high-quality images! Buying scanners and cameras, finding space to set them up and arranging a plethora of tripods, stands, lamps. And the expertise required too, handlers, conservationists, camera staff, and assistants. You can see this for a few select images, but not for every single one.

There are other problems with digital images. Chucked into databases they slow everything down; you never find the ones you want — for instance, finding high-quality images of canonical arts history paintings is tremendously difficult. And as for the copyright problems… well, let’s not go there.

Cheerleaders for images will make a fuss about these comments. They will talk about physical images being locked away in archives, and interested parties being thousands of miles away from the paintings or sculptures they want to see. Digitising images, for them, solves all these problems.

This may be true. But the obsession with providing access to images for a ‘universal’ audience gets in the way of the more sophisticated way in which the Internet can act as a communicative tool. An unhealthy focus on the mechanics of digitising images takes time away from communicating the intellectual work associated with understanding such images: the describing, interpreting and analysing.

A simple example: one could spend a mountain of time taking photographs of a famous building and putting the resulting images on the web. Alternatively, you could spend time identifying the building’s date, the architects involved, the materials used, the building techniques employed, the sculptural decorations, its social functions… Without the latter, the resource is little more than a visual reference that will be difficult for people to find on the Internet; include the latter and you are presenting information that might be of use to historians, artists, geologists, engineers, sociologists…

It is this added information, or metadata, that gives richness to a resource, that opens up the many ways in which it can be both discovered and used. On the Internet, content is little without the contextual information that informs it. We should concentrate less on ‘freeing’ the objects held in museums, libraries and archives and more on freeing the knowledge that those in education have already inside their head. It is the skills, information and knowledge that are the really valuable assets.

So next time you’re about to press that button on your digital camera think about it. Maybe what’s more interesting is the stuff we can’t see, the ideas inside your mind, rather than the stuff we can already see in the physical world.

Give everyone a digital camera by Mike Pringle, Head of AHDS Visual Arts

This is a world of pictures. It always has been.

Pictures allow us to marvel at the prehistoric world expressed in the cave art of Lascaux, and to celebrate the entire wealth of human experience across the centuries since. History is carved into the magnificent statuary of the ancient Greeks, carefully arranged in the geometry of Roman mosaics, and sewed into the patient thread work of the Bayeux Tapestry. What would we understand of the Renaissance without Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling? And would we pay millions of pounds for a written description of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers?

But how many people have seen these treasures in the flesh?

In the nineteenth century, photography changed the way we could see the world. With photography, anything can be an image. And anyone can create it; view it; share it; own it; comment on it; enjoy it or hate it.

Photography allows us to watch the world outside our own place in it; brings that world into our space and helps us to become part of it. The human race can watch one of its representatives take a step on the moon; it can recoil at beagles smoking cigarettes; it can secretly enjoy the thrill of pornography.

Images make us examine who we are: from the base creatures whose actions are captured in stark black and white in 1960’s Vietnam; to the sentient beings who warm instinctively to the photograph of a baby’s first smile, or carry a tatty, well-viewed picture of a lover with us at all times.

And now, with the inconvenience and expense of film lifted by the digital camera, we are suddenly swamped with images. Hundreds of thousands of buildings captured, a million smiling babies, tens of millions of holiday snaps, and billions of photographs of family and friends. And the average picture is low resolution, blurry, poorly lighted, ill composed and completely lacking in any associated textual information. Yet, people still take pictures. More and more pictures are created, despite the drawbacks. Why don’t we learn that the pictures are not good enough, and give up? Why are billions of bad photographs produced? Well, simply, because even a bad photograph is a better, more natural, way of conveying information. Before the digital camera, holiday makers could only convey their joy to those back home through a postcard — a few lines of meaningless text only made coherent by the glossy photograph on the other side. The problem with pictures is not in the pictures, but in the limitations of current technology.

From the very moment that Tim Berners-Lee conceived his idea for sending packets of text down a wire, the model for the World Wide Web was destined to be dominated by the written word. Even the name behind the idea, hypertext, makes it clear where the emphasis lies. This is understandable given the restricted capabilities of the early technologies and, of course, considering the importance of the written word. But the emphasis on primarily text-based information seems to have dominated ICT research and development ever since, sometimes to the detriment of alternative, and possibly better, modes of communication. Indeed, if we consider Berners-Lee’s next generation model, the Semantic Web, we see a continuation of an explicit word-led agenda.

Nonetheless, the capability for embedding images into a webpage was an integral part of the earliest instantiations of Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML). It was issues of narrow bandwidth, slow modems and lack of processing power that made the use of images problematic for early adopters of the Web. Just as it is things like lack of decent resolution or problems of camera-shake that often define ‘bad’ pictures. Such problems will, eventually, disappear but, until technology catches up with the human desire to communicate through pictures, we must rely on words to convey pictures. Unfortunately, in many ways, text is a poor cousin to pictures (although, ironically, text is of course also a visual medium). Frederick Brooks proposes that our broadest-band channel is the sense of vision and, of all the mechanisms for increasing communication, it is imagery that relates most directly with the way we naturally interpret and communicate information (Brooks F., The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 61–68, 1996). Take the following example:

date: c1930s place: London
description: Hoover Building,
Western Avenue, Perivale
architect: unknown
subject: Art Deco, Hoover

Such information (metadata) relating to a picture contains the pertinent information about the subject matter. But without the picture, it is virtually meaningless.

The reason we rely on text to describe and help us find images is because our technologies are not yet smart enough to be able to understand pictures without such added interpretation. The reason so many people are producing images with their digital cameras, their cheap scanners and their handy mobile phones, is because this is how people want to capture and convey information. Cameras are improving all the time and, as a result, so are the pictures.

Meanwhile, developments into technologies such as content based image retrieval (CBIR) continue to explore ways of interacting with digital pictures, particularly on the Internet.

Maybe the technology is starting to catch up with us. One day, we hope, machines will be clever enough to rise above the simplistic abstractions of text and allow us to engage with the full richness, complexity and range of valuable information inherent in every image.

Let’s give everyone a digital camera and record the world as it is meant to be seen. This is a world of pictures. It always will be.

A recent deposit at AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics, The Corpus of English Dialogues (CED) is a 1.2-million-word computerised corpus of Early Modern English speech-related texts.

The corpus was compiled by Merja Kytö from the Department of English at Uppsala University and Jonathan Culpeper from the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and the project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the Swedish Research Council.

The CED forms part of the research project “Exploring spoken interaction of the Early Modern English period”. The aim of the project is to enable empirical linguistic research on substantial amounts of data drawn from a variety of corpora, notably the CED, but also other sources such as the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.

Dialogues are of prime interest to the study of the development of English because interactive face-to-face communication has been found to play an important role in language change.

To give a picture of spoken interaction of the past, as mediated through written records, the CED draws both from texts which include constructed dialogue and those which purportedly record language from authentic speech situations — of the 1.2 million words, some 870,000 words comprise direct speech.

The CED consists of dialogues from a 200-year period, and is divided into five 40-year periods. There are five text types in the CED. The text types representative of constructed dialogue are drama comedy, didactic works (language manuals and other handbooks) and fiction; the text-types representative of authentic dialogue are trial proceedings and witness depositions. In addition, a small group of miscellaneous dialogues is included in the collection.

The corpus texts have been coded to indicate foreign language words, narration, compilers’ comments, editorial interventions, and font changes. Each corpus text is introduced by a number of parameters providing information on the period in question, text-type, name of the text, name of the author (when applicable), and contemporaneity of the source text and the printed version used.

The CED comprises 177 text files and is distributed in plain text file, XML, and WordCruncher formats. A guide accompanies the corpus files and is also available in hard copy distributed by Uppsala University Library.

The Corpus of English Dialogues is freely available on request from the AHDS web site.

Further Information on the corpus can be found at http://www.engelska.uu.se/corpus.html

Employment, hours and wages in the engineering employers’ federation, 1914–1968

This recently deposited resource at the AHDS is an especially rich source of data from payroll records in UK engineering. It covers the period 1914 to 1968 and provides exceptional detail for the inter-war period (including the Great Depression), WWII, and the post-war recovery period. Here, the creators Professor Bob Hart and Elizabeth Roberts of the Department of Economics at the University of Stirling describe the resource and their experience in depositing it with the AHDS.

Between 1914 and 1968, the Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF) systematically assembled important elements of the payroll data of its member companies. Membership accounts for roughly one-third of total engineering employment over this period and the data cover about 15% of total employment. The core variables are total weekly earnings, basic weekly earnings (i.e. excluding overtime) as well as their hours’ equivalents, basic hourly rates and hourly earnings. Basic hours and total weekly hours are also provided. An invaluable, and relatively rare, feature of the data is that these variables are delineated by piece-rate workers and hourly-paid workers. For 28 engineering districts, we also have matching unemployment rates from 1926 to 1968. One important feature is that the unemployment and payroll information combine to permit quite micro-level research into the flexibility of pay and hours to changes in business cycles, including the cycle incorporating the Great Depression.

The original type-written and hand-written volumes of EEF payroll data are officially archived at the University of Warwick’s Modern Record Centre. Starting in 2003, the complete EEF payroll data have been transcribed on to spreadsheets to provide electronic access. Warwick arranged for the material to be sent on loan to Archive Services at the University of Glasgow. Glasgow provided space and computer facilities that enabled a group of undergraduate students to transcribe the data on to pre-designed spreadsheets. Both Warwick and Glasgow were exceptionally co-operative and helpful throughout. Checking, data sorting and subsequent related research were undertaken in the Department of Economics, University of Stirling. The work was funded by two ESRC grants.

After receiving permission from the EEF (the copyright holder), all the files were documented and transferred to AHDS History at the University of Essex. Information was provided that allowed AHDS to catalogue the data and to specify the data access conditions. We also gave a few technical details, such as coding schemes and descriptions of field names. This process was relatively painless due to the clear documentation provided by AHDS combined with the very helpful advice of Dr. Zoe Bliss.

In 2008, we will also provide the complete strike records of EEF member companies from 1920 to 1970 in the same manner. This work is currently in progress under another ESRC project ‘An evaluation of UK engineering strikes between 1920 and 1970’.

Robert A. Hart and J. Elizabeth Roberts

Resource available at: http://www.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/collection.htm?uri=hist-5569

Information about depositing resources with the AHDS available at http://ahds.ac.uk/depositing/