Active Archives

Presentation of works by Michael Murtaugh

Links

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~murtaugh/acm-context/acm-context.html
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/363/davenport.html
http://automatist.org/contour/contour.html
http://unravelling-histories.org/
http://www.vathorstgroeit.nl/
http://scripts.kwfkankerbestrijding.nl/kbb/

Introduction

Through accident or providence, the published title of this talk today (ConText: Towards the Evolving Documentary) is actually the title of a paper from 1995 I co-authored with Glorianna Davenport, then my teacher and director of the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT Media Lab, where I was then completing my Masters thesis. In fact, I am happy to take this article as a starting point in revisiting the subject matter. Were I to give an updated title, however, it might be something like “Towards the Video Wiki”, or perhaps most to the point “What’s wrong with the YouTube Documentary?”

In a follow up to the above article, Glorianna included a section entitled “What’s wrong with the Television Documentary?”. The main points of the argument were the following:

->”Television consumes the viewer” — engagement with material is quite limited (passive reception), as opposed to the active engagement of documentary production.

->Television limits the way an author can grow a story — there is “no obvious way to connect audience to the process of story construction”. No direct way for audience to connect, to even, for instance, debate a story.

->Television is inherently non-interactive, the single means of control given to the viewer being the remote control, the “zap” at odds with the format of commercial television.

So in reconsidering this question, now in the context of documentary online, and taking into account developments in the area of (web) software in the last decade, there’s certainly been some improvement:

->The web has clearly shifted the passive vs. active ratio. Beyond just the fact that the web is inherantly “interactive” — in the sense of being typically driven by the actions and choices of the (human) browser, the development of (often free) web software has facilitated new models for production and distribution of content. Blogging software, in particular, has brought self-publishing to a truly popular scale.

->Production tools, like Apple’s iMovie, and increasingly inexpensive digital video cameras, have made desktop video processing an (almost) everyday experience. Happily gone are the days of expensive specialized hard drives and video cards, and crossing one’s fingers to hope for no dropped frames.

->Video sharing websites, YouTube being the most celebrated example, have radically altered popular experience and use of video. Software for publishing and receiving video feeds, are growing in use and starting to provide a real sense of alternative platform to television.

Despite these change, however, I think fundamental parts of the original “problem” remains. For the sake of brevity I will write using YouTube as an example, though the ideas apply to a range of similar kinds of sites and structures popular, and often grouped together under the “Web 2.0″ banner.

YouTube falls back on a single author model; though groups may register under a single account, the structure and working of the site makes makes no use of the fact that a video might result from a variery of sources and authors.

In this way, YouTube misses out on an aspect inherant in the medium of the web. The decentralized nature of the web de-emphasizes the importance of the single author. The free and open software movement is inextricably bound to the development of the web not only in terms of providing the software (like the Apache web server) underlying the web’s operation, but also in the reverse, as the social network and possibilities for collaborative development the web provides has enabled and catalyzed the process of the software development. Software designed for collaborative code work (like “CVS” (concurrent versioning systems), such as Subversion, and platforms for tracking and discussing software bugs (like TRAC)) have much richer models of users and relationship to work than YouTube.

YouTube’s access to videos encourages a kind of “positive feedback” popularity contest, as “star” ratings push videos to the tops of lists, and features like “Videos being watched right now”, “Most Viewed”, “Top Favorites” only close the loop of featuring what’s already popular to begin with. In addition, YouTube’s profit-making model of enabling special paid/commercial membership lead to ambiguous selection criteria, complicated by ambiguous language as in the “Promoted Videos” and “Featured Videos” of YouTube’s front page (promoting or featured by whom?).

YouTube’s contribution model is asymmetrical. For instance, while readily providing easy codes to embed a YouTube video player in other sites, the design of these players and choice of software formats aims to limit what precisely can be done with the video (such as download, extract portions of, reformat). As an other example of a “lop-sided” exchange, Google Video encourages contributors to provide subtitle files to videos, but provides no interface for later retrieving this data (other than by viewing as subtitles in their own player software). The assymetries are perhaps most evident in the usage agreements required by YouTube when posting a video (the latest versions of which explicitly deny a contributor any kind of commercial exploitation of an uploaded video, while at the same time granting the same to YouTube).

In general the financial model of YouTube, with plans to start embedding commercials in videos (in a “subtle” overlay style similar to what “people are used to” from television), is clearly a throw back to old broadcasting models and related problematics. Web 2.0 discussions of creating “sticky sites” thus is a modern spin on the “problem” or the remote control with the click replacing the zap.

Finally, Video remains “heavy” in terms of sharing the production process. Web software models such as the “wiki” provide a promising means of collaboratively authoring a text. In my recent and continuing work on online video, I take some inspiration from the ways wiki work.

My plan is to show a series of works, starting from work at the time of the “ConText/Evolving Documentary” paper, up to current work. In particular I want to give equal attention the “back ends” of the systems in considering how design of the editorial tools plays a central part in the design of an “Active Archive”.