technology in translation™

library of congress and flickr - folksonomy meets history

The Library of Congress has over a million historic images in its online catalog.

Launched in 2004,  Flickr is the first social photo sharing service developed using "web 2.0" technology, with comment features, interest groups and tagging to create a rich collection of images and an engaged community of users.

In what may turn into one of the most interesting and useful applications of social technology, Flickr and the Library of Congress are partnering to put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. (ReadWriteWeb)

A tag is a key word or label attached to a photo, web page, blog post, video or other web-based information.  Folksonomy "is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate content." (wikipedia)

As part of the pilot program with the Library of Congress, Flickr has launched a new tagging initiative called The Commons. The Commons encourages people to help describe the historical photos being added to Flickr by institutions like the Library of Congress by tagging them or commenting on them. (ReadWriteWeb)

This means that we can each organize the photos with tags that make sense to us, attach relevant information and add personal perspectives.  These folksonomies and comments have the potential to deepen the meaning of the images and create new contexts and narratives for them.

It offers an opportunity for people to discover and participate in conversations about history and culture.  It also risks silly, meaningless or false annotations.  It's an experiment with precedents like Wikipedia and OhMyNews.

"From the Library's perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and -- most importantly -- wisdom," said Matt Raymond, the LoC's blogger-in-chief. "One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it."  (ReadWriteWeb)

Some tips on on how to explore the archive:

online document sharing - a "plain english" video explanation

The Common Craft Show is a terrific series of videos with the clearest and most fun explanations of social media I've run across.  Its tagline is "sensemaking for the masses". 

The videos are hand-made, using a white board, simple sketches and paper cutouts to explain social bookmarking, RSS, social networking and online collaboration.

Google hired them to create the video below to describe its tools, but the concepts apply to numerous services such as ThinkFree or Zoho.  Sharing online documents is central to effective online project management. If you're comfortable with Word and can set up an online account, you've got all the experience you need.

Click To Play

Jon Udell pointed me to this great technology in translation resource in a post about designing effective screencasts.

a million authors, a single novel

Last Sunday's Guardian has a piece about Penguin Books' experimental  partnership with De Montfort University's online MA program in creative writing and new media.  "They plan to create the world's first 'wiki' novel, fiction that will be concocted online by millions of contributors across the globe. Until the end of the month anyone can join in to help write the novel, which has the provisional title of A Million Penguins."

Gimmick or genuine collaboration?  Could be both - and it will be an interesting experiment in creative collaboration, content management, wikipedia-style ethical questions and the possibility of weaving a cross-cultural tapestry of characters and events.  Penguin says that they've been inundated with contributions and they're having a hard time keeping up with them. 

And while there's a lot of online discussion about whether or not it's possible to write a collective novel, the level of participation indicates a real hunger for different ways to making art in collaboration with, rather than isolation from, a larger community.  Something that goes a step further than sharing and rating solo videos and re-mixing multimedia content into a new piece.

Whatever the "quality" of the final product, it will not be a failure.  Because of Penguin's marketing muscle, it's the most expansive experiment I'm aware of that uses social software to create a single, community-generated creative work. And whether or not wiki technology actually suits the process, the challenges are already highlighting the ways it could help creators and publishers drive the development of social media tools. 

There's an interesting discussion on A Million Penguins at if:book.