Posts tagged with history-and-historiography

01.7001 New York Rising

Its been a while since I updated my blog so I'll begin by recounting my recent trip to New York. I have been working with Gabriel Ortiz of nGrinder to help develop business ideas and trying to drum up clients for a new Flash based content management system that he and his developer in Japan have been working on. With that in mind we set out to New York to continue our networking extravaganza at the Future of Web Design conference. To be honest it was not as memorable as the Future of Web Apps in London however I made some significant links with one or two of the delegates there and learned quite a bit about the development of user interfaces and system design as well as seeing an interesting debate about how designers and developers should deal with each other: The Digg developers seem like an unruly bunch of prima donnas but I guess when you've been on a lead developer company team for over five years you consider youself indispensible and therefore entitled to that sort of ridiculous behaviour.

The after conference party was paid for by Micro$oft this time and took place around the block from Times Square. It was a bit of a farcical affair with representives trying to give a presentation in the club to live audience of drunk designers and developers. I'd like to meet the clever spark who organised that. It might have been more beneficial for Microsoft to leave bits of their kit lying around for everyone to play with we probably would have learned a lot more and actually engaged with the brand, suffice to say it was a lot of money spent for not much return on their part.

After drinking on their purse, eating the fine food on offer and doing bit of a last minute  networking with anyone who looked vaguely finance based, Gabe and I drifted towards Times Square at midnight where, concurrent with the conference the 2008 election campaign was drawing to a close. I have to say although I consider myself engaged I've never been particularly excited about conventional politicing however on this night the excitement about Obama ignited a new hope in me, irrational as that may be. As we arrived at the electronic light show and multitudinous crowds in the streets Obama was being announced as the winner and everyone went wild even the police who have to remain impartial were in good humour. Cue a million jokes from a mutual friend of ours as he said could now do anything he wanted 'coz we got a black president'.

What does Obama's presidency mean for me personally? Well I feel like we're living in a time of great historical significance but then probably everyone who has ever lived thought that unless you live in Milton Keynes where time doesn't pass. I feel like my contribution to the planet really means something it also means I have no excuses for doing whatever I want in life and neither does anybody else. It reinvigorated my faith in Americans or at least some of them and I had a warm fuzzy feeling for a couple of days.

Professionally though his presidency means a lot more. I would like to see his interest in education, history and science really affect the way Americans and indeed all of us go about our lives and business in the future. We as a race need to move forward from this momentous occasion and realise that anything we want to do with the world to be can be achieved. Its a question of what motivates us and though I think that actually Obama will have his hands tied and, personally, will not be able to achieve as much as some people may hope. I feel its not his responsibility to change things, its ours we Americans showed that by electing him in the first place so that he could be a symbol of that change.

As a person involved in using digital technologies I feel its important that I develop myself and my business towards the spreading of information and knowledge to others and make a contribution to that effect - I still haven't worked out the details of this but I have a lot of space here to blog about what that form that effort will take in the future and more importantly the results.

But before my grand master plan to change the world I need to go take out the recycling....

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01.7001 The 4th Dimension in Social Media

As some readers may know I only recently set up this site and between my consulting work, web design and doing my own personal projects I've had barely enough time to really sit down and write about something meaty. I want to open up another dimension in social networking or rather I wish someone else would...

When I was talking with Mario F. Ruckh of My Heritage at the FOWA 2008 I was instantly grabbed by the concept of his site. It was nothing new mind you - yet another site that would facilitate the greater part of the middle classes in finding out whether they were related to nobility...yawn. Geneaology has never really excited or ignited passions in the wider public because it has always been such personal and private past time. The only time you would share your family history with outsiders was if it was somehow exceptional and interesting or if you thought it was exceptional and/or interesting. Most people's families aren't that interesting... or are they?

Leaving aside the grand stories of royal families and great dynasties, historians these days tend to relish getting their hands on primary source accounts of ordinary peoples lives. Social histories as opposed to royal-dynastic or military accounts can be more tedious and at times very difficult to uncover especially from the distant past but the data offered by primary source material about peoples lives, attitudes, socio-economic backgrounds and motivations could be far higher more valuable.

MyHeritage.com is currently in its fourth round of funding and has an international staff. Its website provides comprehensive tools for recreating massive family trees though be careful because you can only go so far with your family before the owners charge to increase the size of your tree. What if we could combine family data to recreate social networks from the past and therefore trace histories of individuals back to perhaps 200-300 hundred years with fairly good accuracy before records really degrade. Some families may be traced up to a 1000 thousand years with a fair degree of accuracy due to the existence of primary souce books and artefacts that may confirm certain connections.

All of this information could also be geo-tagged and then combined with archaeological data or architectural/land ownership data to show a pattern of human interaction and movement that is more accurate than any historical social model yet in existence. Is Google doing this yet? I know that KML data in Google maps has time data associated with it so, for example, one can view Londons Financial District and view buildings from different time periods in multiple locations appearing and disappearing by using a time slider. It's pretty cool.

Now imaging taking a city like Split where the Emperor Diocletian built a palace which becaom a provincial capital and over 1500 years later still has people living within its ancient walls, some of whom can trace their family lines back 500 years or more due to the existence of some very musty books. Now lets imagine we can re-create the different phases of the architectural elements of the city and overlay that with the social data, familial connections and ownership patterns of the town.

As a historian I get so excited about these possibilities and yet as so often is the case the people working at my heritage never quite saw just how valuable their data wasfor social research and modelling. This because they are so desperately trying to monetise it and conventional internet business models (none of which are a guarenteed money earner in the long term) are capable of taking into account the intrinsic value of much of the metadata. Most business know that their data is valuable but even the hi-tech ones don't always see how they can leverage all aspects of it.

I'll be posting more on this topic as its my pet project to work on an interactive museum exhibit that will take advantage of these technologies...

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