Swinging City Rycroft, Simon
2011, 20160309, 2010, 2011-01-01, 2016-03-09, 20110101
eBook
This book works with two contrasting imaginings of 1960s London: the one of the excess and comic vacuousness of Swinging London, the other of the radical and experimental cultural politics generated ...by the city's counterculture. The connections between these two scenes are mapped looking firstly at the spectacular events that shaped post-war London, then at the modernist physical and social reconstruction of the city alongside artistic experiments such as Pop and Op Art. Making extensive use of London's underground press the book then explores the replacement of this seemingly materialistic image with the counterculture of underground London from the mid-1960s. Swinging City develops the argument that these disparate threads cohere around a shared cosmology associated with a new understanding of nature which differently positioned humanity and technology. The book tracks a moment in the historical geography of London during which the city asserts itself as a post-imperial global city. Swinging London it argues, emerged as the product of this recapitalisation, by absorbing avant-garde developments from the provinces and a range of transnational, mainly transatlantic, influences.
Natural History science is characterised by a single immense goal (to document, describe and synthesise all facets pertaining to the diversity of life) that can only be addressed through a seemingly ...infinite series of smaller studies. The discipline's failure to meaningfully connect these small studies with natural history's goal has made it hard to demonstrate the value of natural history to a wider scientific community. Digital technologies provide the means to bridge this gap.
We describe the system architecture and template design of "Scratchpads", a data-publishing framework for groups of people to create their own social networks supporting natural history science. Scratchpads cater to the particular needs of individual research communities through a common database and system architecture. This is flexible and scalable enough to support multiple networks, each with its own choice of features, visual design, and constituent data. Our data model supports web services on standardised data elements that might be used by related initiatives such as GBIF and the Encyclopedia of Life. A Scratchpad allows users to organise data around user-defined or imported ontologies, including biological classifications. Automated semantic annotation and indexing is applied to all content, allowing users to navigate intuitively and curate diverse biological data, including content drawn from third party resources. A system of archiving citable pages allows stable referencing with unique identifiers and provides credit to contributors through normal citation processes.
Our framework http://scratchpads.eu/ currently serves more than 1,100 registered users across 100 sites, spanning academic, amateur and citizen-science audiences. These users have generated more than 130,000 nodes of content in the first two years of use. The template of our architecture may serve as a model to other research communities developing data publishing frameworks outside biodiversity research.
The Artist Placement Group Rycroft, Simon
Cultural geographies,
07/2019, Letnik:
26, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Mid-20th century experiments in aesthetics underpin the establishment of the first artist-in-residence schemes which were established by the Artist Placement Group from 1966. Documents from two ...underused archives, the Tate’s Artist Placement Group archive and the John Latham Archive, tell the story of the organisation. Tracing this story helps outline one aspect of the pre-history of impact in the geohumanities. The Artist Placement Group had a radical agenda that was in part taken from the artistic philosophy of one of its co-founders, the conceptual artist John Latham. Artists who were placed in a variety of workplace and community settings were not obliged to produce art objects, but rather to work with organisations in a way that might affect their development. This affective engagement in which the outcomes of the placement were co-produced with participants bears many similarities to contemporary practices of impact in the geohumanities. Despite their idiosyncratic outlook, underpinned as it was by Latham’s time-based cosmology, the Artist Placement Group placed artists in a number of large and influential organisations. Although the Artist Placement Group ultimately failed, the lesson from the story told here is not one that suggests our current endeavours might suffer the same fate. Rather, it is to celebrate and highlight the possibilities and potentials of belligerently different ways of thinking and doing impact.
The Scratchpad Virtual Research Environment (http://scratchpads.eu/) is a flexible system for people to create their own research networks supporting natural history science. Here we describe Version ...2 of the system characterised by the move to Drupal 7 as the Scratchpad core development framework and timed to coincide with the fifth year of the project's operation in late January 2012. The development of Scratchpad 2 reflects a combination of technical enhancements that make the project more sustainable, combined with new features intended to make the system more functional and easier to use. A roadmap outlining strategic plans for development of the Scratchpad project over the next two years concludes this article.
We describe an implementation of the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) standard that allows for the exchange of biodiversity information contained within the Scratchpads virtual research environment with ...external collaborators. Using this single archive file Scratchpad users can expose taxonomies, specimen records, species descriptions and a range of other data to a variety of third-party aggregators and tools (currently Encyclopedia of Life, eMonocot Portal, CartoDB, and the Common Data Model) for secondary use. This paper describes our technical approach to dynamically building and validating Darwin Core Archives for the 600+ Scratchpad user communities, which can be used to serve the diverse data needs of all of our content partners.
Recent work by cultural geographers on visual art has emphasized performative and participatory aspects focusing upon the embodied and multi-sensory experience of encountering and being part of a ...work of art. Research on non-figurative art has much to offer in elucidating the relationships and distinctions between representation, non-representation and abstraction. Non figurative artists were representing or enacting a new kind of materiality, one that was putative, in process and ever changing. That materiality was based upon the adoption of a mid-20th-century cosmology and inspired by recent advances in the understanding of matter and the universe. Kinetic art, which is characterized by a set of abstract aesthetics that represent or reproduce real or illusory movement, was, especially in the post-war period, inspired by this new cosmology. Mid-century kinetic artists created non-figurative abstract models of the latest understandings to bring their associated energies, forces and motions to the senses of the viewer-participant. The models that kinetic artists produced in a variety of media were designed to be experienced in an embodied manner rather than simply viewed. These and other models of a mid-century cosmology signify a period in which the practices of representation were shifting significantly and consequently demand our attention.
Sound collections for singing insects provide important repositories that underpin existing research (e.g. Price et al. 2007 at http://bio.acousti.ca/node/11801; Price et al. 2010) and make ...bioacoustic collections available for future work, including insect communication (Ordish 1992), systematics (e.g. David et al. 2003), and automated identification (Bennett et al. 2015). The BioAcoustica platform (Baker et al. 2015) is both a repository and analysis platform for bioacoustic collections: allowing collections to be available in perpetuity, and also facilitating complex analyses using the BioVeL cloud infrastructure (Vicario et al. 2011). The Global Cicada Sound Collection is a project to make recordings of the world's cicadas (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) available using open licences to maximise their potential for study and reuse. This first component of the Global Cicada Sound Collection comprises recordings made between 2006 and 2008 of Cicadidae in South Africa and Malawi.
This collection of sounds includes 219 recordings of 133 voucher specimens, comprising 42 taxa (25 identified to species, all identified to genus) from South Africa and Malawi. The recordings have been used to underpin work on the species limits of cicadas in southern Africa, including Price et al. (2007) and Price et al. (2010). The specimens are deposited in the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa (AMGS). The harvesting of acoustic data as occurrence records by GBIF has been implemented by the Scratchpads Team at the Natural History Museum, London. This link increases the value of individual recordings and the BioAcoustica platform within the global infrastructure of biodiversity informatics by making specimen/occurence records from BioAcoustica available to a wider audience, and allowing their integration with other occurence datasets that also contribute to GBIF.
The conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006) is sometimes cast as disconnected from the currents of British visual culture. Latham's idiosyncratic cosmology, based upon time and events and ...incorporating human creativity rather than matter and energy, is used to distinguish this disconnection. This article argues, however, that his work can be seen as closely related to that of other mid-century cultural producers who were engaged with alternative cosmic speculations, and part of a broader shift in the register of representation. Papers from the Latham digital archive help make this case.
The conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006) is sometimes cast as disconnected from the currents of British visual culture. Latham"s idiosyncratic cosmology, based upon time and events and ...incorporating human creativity rather than matter and energy, is used to distinguish this disconnection. This article argues, however, that his work can be seen as closely related to that of other mid-century cultural producers who were engaged with alternative cosmic speculations, and part of a broader shift in the register of representation. Papers from the Latham digital archive help make this case. (Author abstract)
Support systems play an important role for the communication between users and developers of software. We studied two support systems, an issues tracker and an email service available for ...Scratchpads, a Web 2.0 social networking tool that enables communities to build, share, manage and publish biodiversity information on the Web. Our aim was to identify co-learning opportunities between users and developers of the Scratchpad system by asking which support system was used by whom and for what type of questions. Our results show that issues tracker and emails cater to different user mentalities as well as different kind of questions and suggest ways to improve the support system as part of the development under the EU funded ViBRANT programme.
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