OKAPI Spotlight- May 2008

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, join our email listserv or contact Lizzy Ha.

On Campus

Mixing and Remixing Information
Monday, May 12 1-2pm
110 South Hall, UC Berkeley
http://blog.mixingandremixing.info/s08/class-projects/
Students of Raymond Yee’s “Mixing and Remixing Information” recently just presented their semester long projects. This class focused on creatively remixing and mashing up different web 2.0 content and services, in order to create something new and potentially useful for the public.

Around the World

Prescot Street
http://www.lparchaeology.com/prescot/
A website documenting ongoing excavations at Prescot Street, a site in Aldgate, which is near London. The site allows the public to access current data, photos of the day, video, as well as teaching materials.
WorldWide Telescope
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
Created by researchers working at Microsoft, “The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.” The user is able to take guided tours and explore, on their own, the universe.

From Collaboratories to Public Space: Bringing the World to Students and Putting Classrooms in the Wild
Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 5:00 to 8:00 pm
http://www.iskme.org/about-us/about-iskme
A panel discussion focusing on the vast amount of online resources that students, faculty , and teachers potentially have access to recently occurred in San Franciso. Entitled From Collaboratories to Public Space: Bringing the World to Students and Putting Classrooms in the Wild, this discussion was sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), whose mission is to “understand and improve how schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them build their capacity to collect and share information systematically, apply it to well-defined problems, and create knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success.”

Summer Course: Digital Documentation and Representation of Cultural Heritage

Anthropology 136e

Digital (New Media) Documentation and Representation of Cultural Heritage: Field School-San Francisco Presidio
Instructors: Professor Ruth Tringham, (Anthropology) and Dr. Michael Ashley, (Architect of Media Vault Program and Manager of New Program Development, Office of the Chief Information Officer) 
CCN: 12115
Location: San Francisco Presidio
Maximum number of students: 25

The idea of this field-school has developed as a result of both the design charrette held in August 2007 by the archaeologists of the Presidio Trust to plan their research and public programs of the El Presidio (Spanish and Mexican) fort and the Presidio Trusts new plan for the Main Post including the Anza Esplanade. In addition the UCB Dept of Anthropology is currently administering and sponsoring a large private grant (Shaw Foundation), which includes funding for the new Coordinator of Public Programs for the El Presidio (Levantar) project at the SF Presidio. Finally, during the last two years Dr. Ashley and Professor Ruth Tringham have successfully taught summer session classes at the SF Presidio (Anthropology 136i and Anthropology 136e), establishing a small multimedia center as part of the Presidio Archaeology Lab and thus making contributions to their digital resources. The Presidio archaeologists are very keen for us to continue this educational program.

The course will be on “New Media and Cultural Heritage” and will focus on the real world challenge of creating interpretive walks and other installations for the public that involve wireless technology, digital geomapping, storytelling etc, globally and, specifically, at the El Presidio fort and the de Anza trail (the Levantar Project), which is the current focus of research of the Archaeology Group at the SF Presidio. The course will involve the design, field trial, and documentation of these different formats of representation of cultural heritage places. The aim is to seek alternatives to permanent markers of information about places, leveraging different forms of digital media. The course will take advantage of the many specialists in these technologies in the Bay Area with whom we have contact and who have offered to contribute their help to the course (CyArk, Cultural Heritage Imaging and others). It will also build on our own research in the Remediated Places project at Catalhöyük and the SF Presidio.

Students will participate in all parts of the process of creating these installations, from initial research, through design, development and production. Coursework will include:

• Critical assessment of New Media technologies that are used or potentially useful for the documentation and representation of cultural heritage places, including interpretive walks.
• The development of content for such interpretive walks at El Presidio.
• Each student will be expected to complete a collaborative team project led by one of the instructional team comprising the production of an interpretive walk and its full and detailed digital documentation.

OKAPI Mashups

Below are some of the mashups (hybrid web applications) we’ve been working on as part of Raymond Yee and Rick Jaffee’s Next Generation Campus Information Services workshop.

Research Dashboards–Bringing Together Widgets for Research and Teaching

by Noah Wittman and Townsend Lab Team
http://www2.netvibes.com/townsend/

This Netvibes Portal contains a library of widgets of interest to arts and humanities scholars. Many of them were pre-existing. Some we configured ourselves using HTML and RSS feeds. The Townsend Lab team will be working with research groups on campus to better understand how such a resource might be useful.

Slickr–Importing Flickr Photos into Second Life

by Shawna Hein and Aylin Selcukoglu (iSchool Students) in collaboration with Noah Wittman, Ruth Tringham and the OKAPI Island Gang

The 3d virtual environment of Second Life is a fantastic venue for educational programming. Unfortunately, Linden Labs makes residents pay a small fee for each image uploaded to their server. This workaround allows free use of Flickr photos–Fantastic!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okapi/128/128/0

Don’t Tread On (or Eat Me): The ‘Invasion’ of the Burmese Python
By Lizzy Ha
http://lizzyh.nextgencampus.net/python.html

We cannot completely blame Florida for this. Although irresponsible Burmese Python owners have been releasing their giant, non-native, ‘pets’ into the Florida Everglades for years now, Floridians will not be entirely responsible for this coast-to-coast invasion of these giant pythons. The US Geological Survey recently released two ‘climate maps’ which highlight areas where Burmese Pythons will be able to live and thrive in the United States; the Bay Area is included. USGS and various newspapers have led us to believe that these pythons are moving out of Florida, northward and westward, slowly taking over this country. However, extensive research shows that one need not worry about these Floridian Burmese Pythons; one should be more worried about the Burmese Pythons that are already in one’s backyard. Burmese Pythons are already living all over the country, posing as ‘pets’ elsewhere. This project examines the areas outside of Florida in which Burmese Pythons currently exist. Hopefully these python owners are more responsible than those in Florida.

OKAPI Spotlight- April 2008

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, join our email listserv or contact Lizzy Ha.

On Campus

Center of Evaluation for Global Action
Thursday, April 17
4:00 - 7:00 pm
Berkeley Art Museum
RSVP: globalaction@lists.berkeley.edu.
http://cega.berkeley.edu
“With the launch of the Center of Evaluation for Global Action, UC Berkeley is bringing a scientific lens to the practice of international development—by rigorously testing poverty alleviation strategies, and learning what works to improve the lives of the poor. Join us for a conversation with Ariel Fiszbein, Chief Economist for Human Development at The World Bank, followed by a discussion panel and catered reception. The full program is below.”

A Faculty Conversation About Scholarly Communication
Monday, April 14, 2008
2:00 - 3:00 pm
Seaborg Room, Faculty Club
http://www.berkeleyfacultyclub.com/directions/
“In the last few weeks scholarly communication issues at Berkeley and nationally have made headlines…Join your colleagues for a conversation about what these recent headlines portend for the future of scholarly communication both here at Berkeley and within the University of California as a whole. Professors Mike Eisen (Molecular & Cell Biology), Nick Jewell (Public Health) and Randy Schekman (Molecular & Cell Biology) will share their thoughts. University LibrarianTom Leonardwill moderate.”

OpenCast Community
http://confluence.media.berkeley.edu/confluence/display/WCTREQ/OpenCast+Community-+Home
UC Berkeley is currently working to develop a more modern and sustainable podcast/ webcast system, which will also “integrate current technological advancements such as Apple’s Podcast Producer and existing academic community source frameworks such as Sakai.” The pilot, OpenCast System, will begin Fall 2008. It appears that the user will able to easily capture, create and process, and share their work with ease. UC Berkeley hopes to “develop a flexible object model that will allow other schools to potentially participate in a broader community source initiative.” OpenCast System will be able be used within Sakai, but will also be developed so one does not need the Sakai environment to use it.

Around the World

UNESCO publishes a book on Open Access to Knowledge in South Asia
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=26393&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Recently published by UNESCO, Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – the South Asian Scenario, this book “describes successful digital library and open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region that are available in the forms of open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories.” This book can be downloaded as a .pdf. UNESCO states that this book “may be considered an authoritative source-book on open access development in this sub-region.”

Aluka
http://www.aluka.org/
“Aluka is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. Our name, ‘Aluka’, is derived from a Zulu word meaning ‘to weave’, reflecting Aluka’s mission to connect resources and scholars from around the world. Aluka seeks to attract high-quality scholarly content about Africa from institutions and individuals across the globe. By contributing their collections to the Aluka platform, content owners will have a means of offering access to their collections to an international audience—without having to develop and support their own technology platforms. Aluka’s web-based platform provides powerful tools for research, teaching, collaboration, and knowledge exchange.”

Remix ‘Nude’ for Radiohead
http://www.radioheadremix.com/information/
Once again defying the idea of copyright and ownership in music– and embracing individual creativity- Radiohead is giving the public a chance to remix their latest single, ‘Nude’. The public, rather than just being able listen to the song, has a chance to use digital technologies to create their own version of ‘Nude.’ The participant can “buy the separate components or ’stems’ (bass, voice, guitar, strings/FX and drums),” add their own beats and instruments, or simply just remix parts of the song in order to create their own version of ‘Nude.’ You can do this by adding your own beats and instrumentation or just remixing the original parts. Remixes will be uploaded and judge by ‘the public.’ The participant can “also create a widget allowing votes from [their] own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be sent through too.”

MUXTAPE
http://muxtape.com/
Inspired by the idea of mixtapes, which involves creatively arranging a mix of music to share with another person, Muxtape is an online community which creates digital mixtapes. Users upload songs, which are then streamed for others to listen to. Songs cannot be downloaded. In order to create an eclectic collection- a true mixtape- “users may not upload multiple songs from the same album or artist, or songs they do not have permission to let Muxtape use.”

Visualize African Connectivity
http://www.youtube.com/sciencedissemination
“This “Internet Weather”-like map shows the network performance measured from Trieste Italy to African Universities, from April 2007 to March 2008. Darker red dots indicate higher speeds such as enabled by ADSL or better. Clearer, lighter red dots indicate lower speeds, in some cases as poor as 56kbps modems. If a site is unreachable its dot disappears, so flickering dots indicate fragility. If all dots disappear the measurement host experienced an outage. Africa’s network performance is over 10 years behind that of Europe and the US and falling further behind. These measurements are made by the international PingER project and provide hard evidence of the extent of the Digital Divide for planners and policy makers. A high-quality version of this video is available upon request.”

Cal Day (April 12): Bridging Real, Imaginary and Virtual Worlds

A Public Archaeology Program produced by OKAPI and the Berkeley Archaeologists at Catalhoyuk
12-3pm Pacific Time (8-11 pm GMT)

April 12, 2007

Locations

Archaeological Research Facility: http://arf.berkeley.edu/
Okapi Island in Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okapi/

Program
12pm - 12:45 Lecture: “Bridging the gap between Real, Imagined and Virtual at the 9000-year old archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey” by Ruth Tringham, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, and Principal Investigator of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Catalhoyuk
Room 108, Archaeological Research Facility (Webcast live in Okapi Island)
1pm - 3pm “Immersive 3D Visit to Catalhoyuk”
Visitors to the Archaeology Research Facillity will be guided by life-sized avatars (Cal faculty, students & staff) on a virtual tour of Catalhoyuk. Virtual visitors can join the tour as well.

OKAPI Spotlight - March 2008

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, join our email listserv or contact Lizzy Ha.

ON CAMPUS

Advancing OpenCollection Project
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Spring2008/1187.html
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UC Berkeley and its consortium partners at the Museum of the Moving Image (New York) and the University of Toronto will work together to help create “a truly scalable, flexible, internationalized, and full-featured web-based collections management solution for institutions and collections of many sizes.” This 28-month project will first focus on working with OpenCollection, an open source application, which will be the foundation for this project. The Information Systems & Technology (IST)-Data Services will work closely with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Berkeley Natural History Museum, Berkeley’s Education Technology Services (ETS) and other IST units.

Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service
http://communityrelations.berkeley.edu/caps/caps_2007-2008.htm
Deadline: March 18th, 2008

“The [UC Berkeley] campus community is invited to submit nominations for the Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service to recognize students, staff, and faculty for their contributions to civic engagement in 2007-2008. Individuals, groups, and programs may be nominated in the following categories: Civic Engagment, Research in the Public Interest, Service Learning Leadership, Campus/Community Partnerships and Community Impact. A nomination form and guidelines can be accessed from the Community Relations website at communityrelations.berkeley.edu and the Cal Corps Public Service Center website at calcorps.berkeley.edu .”

AROUND THE WORLD

Intellectual Property Donor Sticker
http://gizmodo.com/361552/intellectual-property-donor-sticker-proves-your-unrealistic-arrogance-after-youre-dead
First posted at Gizmodo.com, this sticker, clearly inspired by the Organ Donor sticker, is placed on the back of one’s driver’s license. It states: “In event of death, please donate all intellectual property to the public.” Under the current copyright law in the US, a work can “be stifled by 70 years of copyright protection.” Like the author of the post, we are also not sure if this sticker is legal binding or not. Perhaps a future version of the Organ Donor sticker can include the option to be an Intellectual Property donor right under it?

OMEKA
http://omeka.org/
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University just released a public beta of Omeka, a free open source web platform for publishing online collections and exhibitions. Omeka is for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, educators who are interested in collaborating with others to build and create online collections. This web platform “is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content rather than programming.” OKAPI hopes to collaborate with others and use Omeka in the near future.

Encyclopedia of Life
http://www.eol.org/
Recently launched, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is focused on “organiz[ing] and mak[ing] available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth.” Each of the 1.8 known species will have an individual webpage. EOL is for everyone to explore, though there will be “several linked pages aimed at more specialized users.” EOL is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and  Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as well as by smaller donors. The EOL team is made up of scientists and non-scientists from all over the world.

Bayanihan Books
http://blog.bayanihanbooks.org/

Based in the Philippines, this group works to solve two problems surrounding today’s textbooks in the Philippines: 1) there are not enough books for students in public schools, and 2) these textbooks are full of errors that range from spelling to factual and everything else in between. Bayanihan Book proposes to “improve quality and reduce cost of the textbooks, simplify public access to educational materials, and allow more publishers to participate,” by inviting volunteers- “educators, authors, editors, proofreaders, illustrators, photographers, reviewers” to help create textbooks. The public will review textbooks before being published “under a license that would permit everyone to use and publish the textbooks without paying royalty to anyone.”

Article in California Magazine notes the importance of “events” in Second Life

There’s an interesting article by Hubert Dreyfus in this month’s California magazine about Second Life. They never mention the educational aspects of Second Life - strange since it’s in a university magazine. But they do make one point about the role of Second Life in bringing together people and creating community for specific events. This resonates with what we are thinking for Okapi island. I’m not overly thrilled with the article, but I need to read it again more carefully

Okapi Island Spring 2008. Thoughts to start off with

What is our ultimate purpose?
Education (K-Grey)?
Sensual experience
Platform for showing remixes
Platform for communication?
Immersion in an archaeological site?
Immersion in the archaeological process?
Communication?

To Plan
Events, talks, movie shows, audio shows – not just the big event.
Building and other Competitions
Regular tours (eg every Friday when we are “in residence”
This includes events in Second Life that are around real-world happenings and performances (eg Catal team symposium at Sociaety For American Archaeology in March)
It also includes real worl events where we can bring Second Life to the Real World (eg Cal Day)
We need to do more serious advertising of these events

Signs
Update signs, esp about join us on Okapi Day
Results of Okapi Day

Museum etc.
Have Okapi island harvest media from database rather than upload them

Embedding/Mash-up of Remixing Catalhoyuk data in Okapi Island

Prehistoric Houses:
Clues to what is down below
Build some furniture in one

Playpen-Sandbox
Tidy up ie get rid of extraneous and irrelevant exercises
Commentary on the good one (revolving picture cube)

Graffiti Board
Change pictures?

BACH tent
Put active stuff on the floor that links to the pictures on the wall

New areas (invite Catal people from list)
Create 4040 area with new pics
Polish area
West Mound (SUNY Buffalo and Cambridge

Sounds
Incorporate Steve Mills Catalhoyuk sounds

VideoWalk
Add walks from BACH tent to South/Mellaart area

Some things for people to buy or win:
Avatar gestures such as
archaeological gestures (trowelling)
Turkish dancing
Keepsakes: images of artifacts, movies of digging
T-shirts for avatars

OKAPI Spotlight - February 2008

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute,  join our email listserv or contact Lizzy Ha.

ON CAMPUS

Berkeley Research Impact Initiative
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/
The Research Office and University Library are co-sponsoring this pilot project designed to make the products of Berkeley research more broadly available. BRII funds will subsidize Berkeley faculty members who would like to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication, but who may not have adequate grant or contract funding to cover the associated “access” charges required by many journals.

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA
October 24, 2007 - March 2, 2008, Berkeley Art Museum http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/ripmixburn
The Berkeley Art Museum invited guest artists to remix two digital works in the museum’s permanent collection. Currently, both the original and remixed works are on display at the museum. The public is also invited to remix these pieces. All artworks are also available online for downloading and remixing.

Panel Discussion: Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D)
1-3PM, February 15, 2008, Stephens Hall http://www.ias.berkeley.edu/southasia/conference/conference08schedule.html
“At the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), 174 countries adopted the Tunis Commitment to bridge the digital divide and to promote ICTs as instruments of sustainable development. ICTs are now being used to assist in social development and poverty alleviation in several developing countries, through ‘ICT for development’ (ICT4D) projects. The hope is that these technologies can be used to support health, e-governance, and agricultural applications for rural populations and simultaneously create new business opportunities. Many case studies have highlighted the potential of ICT4D in the education, small business and health sectors. This panel will critically examine the social impacts of ICT4D, focusing both on social critique as well as on opportunities to extend the promise of these technologies.”

AROUND THE WORLD

Flickr Commons: The Library of Congress Pilot Project
http://flickr.com/commons
Currently a pilot project, the Library of Congress placed 3,000 images on Flickr for people to view, download and share, as well as help to make the collection ‘even richer’ by contributing tags, notes, and comments. Since the Library of Congress is not the intellectual property owner of the photos, they are working closely with Flickr to create a “no known copyright restrictions” statement.

World Digital Library
http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org/project/english/index.html
The World Digital Library intends to digitize and share important cultural materials from around the world (ie manuscripts, books, maps, musical scores, films, etc) on the Internet, free of charge, and translated into many languages. The purpose of this project is “to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.”

ccLearn
http://learn.creativecommons.org/
Part of Creative Commons, ccLearn, which was created in 2007, is focused on “minimiz[ing] barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.” ccLearn sees the Internet as an important space in which open educational resources can be created, shared, and reused by people all over the world.

Okapi Island in Second Life - opportunities for students (and others) Spring 2008

Remixing Catalhoyuk Day on Okapi Island, 28 November, 2007

After our wildly successful Remixing Catalhoyuk Day at Okapi Island on November 28, 2007, we (Ruth Tringham and Noah Wittman) are looking for a renewed, enthusiastic team to join us in further developments and preparation for another big open day event during the Spring semester 2008. Our island is now beginning to gain public visibility.

Many of our team have participated through the sponsorship of the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. If you will continue with us, please let me (Ruth Tringham tringham@berkeley.edu) know as soon as possible. If you are interested in applying to the project through URAP (where you can receive credit), go to the URAP portal at http://research.berkeley.edu/urap/.

You don’t have to be an undergraduate apprentice to collaborate with us. We have graduate students, staff members and other undergraduates working with us, and joyously welcome anyone with interest and/or skills to help us. These are the qualities we are looking for

• Knowledge of and/or strong desire to learn about archaeology
• Strong oral and written communications skills, including event organization
• Any special skills and/or interest in the senses of place: visual, soundscapes, haptic…
• Facility with digital media and multimedia production tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.)
• Experience with 3d modeling desirable for apprentices seeking to do modeling work
• Knowledge of Linden Script Language or experience in scripting/coding desirable for apprentices seeking to do in-world scripting
• Ability to work in a team

If you are interested in participating, please write to Noah Wittman (wittman@berkeley.edu) and Ruth Tringham (tringham@berkeley.edu). We also welcome skilled collaborators who are not on - or even near - Berkeley campus.

How do we share and communicate a sense of place to another person or a larger audience, who may be academics, professionals, different grades of K-16 learning, lifelong learners, or journalists–all of whom will re-contextualize our archaeological interpretations in one way or another? How do we express the senses of a place that in the past was alive with people, events and meaning, and now seems dead and empty (but perhaps it is not)? How do we convey to our different audiences the changing meaning and meaningfulness that a place may have for diverse actors through its life-history to its current life perhaps as a heritage site? This project comprises the development of one of the very very few archaeological sites in the on-line “world” of Second Life. We started this project in Spring 2006 because we believe that there is great potential of this platform for interactive educational and research projects about archaeological places. We are beginning to have many visitors and a public presence, and there is much room for student input and creativity.

Apprentices and other participants will work with Ruth Tringham, Noah Wittman. and other project team members to design and develop 3D model of Çatalhöyük, a 9000 year-old Neolithic village located in modern-day Turkey that has already been brought into Second Life on Okapi Island. Çatalhöyük is the focus of extensive archaeological investigation by Ruth Tringham and other scholars. This Second Life project grew out of a Web-based project to disseminate the media database of Çatalhöyük called Remixing Çatalhöyük. Depending on interests and skill sets, participants will be responsible for building 3D models, scripting interactive features, implementing virtual tours, designing museum exhibits or planning events (a Neolithic faire?) and other educational activities. We welcome your participation in this exciting, innovative project!

Remixing Çatalhöyük (the parent project)
http://okapi.berkeley.edu/remixing

Okapi Island, location of Çatalhöyük in Second Life (a work in progress _needs your help!)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okapi/128/128/0
More Okapi Island info: at this website: http://okapi.wordpress.com/category/second-life/
and in this movie: http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/video/sl_short.mov

More on Çatalhöyük
http://www.catalhoyuk.com/
http://www.smm.org/catal/