Last weekend CAF team members, Jo Holder , Catriona Moore (who is also on DAAO Editorial Board) and I travelled in sunny crisp weather to Bathurst and Dubbo to continue our work with artist researchers and researcher communities in regional NSW as part of the Future Feminist Archive project. John Bayliss, Head, Macquarie Regional Library read Simone Taylor’s (Local Studies Officer, Dubbo Branch)  talk on archives and Pearl Gibbs. Eric Riddler, visual library archivist at AGNSW ( and another member of DAAO Editorial Board) also came to Western Plains Culture Centre in Dubbo to give a wonderful presentation  about resources available on local Dubbo artists, reminding us that Hera Roberts was another Dubbo legend https://www.daao.org.au/bio/hera-roberts/personal_details/? . Jessica Moore (WPCC Collections Officer) gave a fascinating talk on data management developments  and their implications at WPCC.

In Bathurst, FFA artist researcher Fiona MacDonald reported on her ongoing work on Vivienne Binn‘s Full Flight. Some of Fiona’s archival research is hanging on the wall behind the absorbed participants in the reading room at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in the image below. We also had data pushes at both locations where we added new records for local artists and exhibitions. ( I’ll load all into a project folder soon ;-))

The FFA project presents lots of interesting new challenges for DAAO data schema. The FFA is documenting much innovative participatory art projects. For instance,  how can we as a database adequately capture the complexity of Binn’s ‘Full Flight’, a two year journey of travelling and engaging with local communities? In the image above, four posters contain unbroken lists of names of people involved in the project. We need to always be thinking about the role do we play as a digital content provider and metadata aggregator in supporting archival researchers – how do we enrich each other across digital analog platforms – how does the scrape of meta data work with material decay and loss let alone digital entropy? How can we ensure that our database practices don’t contribute to the erasure of some of the very complexity we are seeking to represent and distribute.

We do many things on a digital design level to distribute our data as freely as possible so it remains dynamic, open and free so that we can deliver an inclusive picture of that variable and various concept ‘Australian art and design’. But we also need that hands-on, face-to-face involvement with the curators, collections managers, archivists and researchers working with the communities whose incredible archives are largely unknown outside the area. We’ve been doing a lot of face to face this year and the feedback we’ve been get from so many different communities, groups, individual and institutions this year has been very gratifying. And all the user testing has been incredibly useful. (It’s on the list!) Thanks.

We have also acquired some new moderators for DAAO, Jessica Moore, Collections Officer, http://www.westernplainsculturalcentre.org”>WPCC and Fiona MacDonald FFA artist researcher of Bathurst Archives. BRAG among others. Welcome to DAAO! Moderators are our custodians and we very much appreciate the over 150 moderators on DAAO who each tender to their specific little gardens of interest. To find out more about moderators and how to become one: https://www.daao.org.au/about-daao-moderators/

On Saturday 20 June, DAAO was in Brisbane conducting a data-sprint and test of our new edit interface. Success on both fronts! We had the most wonderfully diligent crew comprising Rachael and the boxcopy gang (Zoe and Cameron), Paul Andrew from the Remix Project https://www.daao.org.au/projects/remixorgau-project/ , who brought along artist and writer Virginia Barrett  https://www.daao.org.au/bio/virginia-barratt/personal_details/ and together they worked on adding a bit more QLD performance art history into DAAO. Paul, one of our moderators, also helped trained other artists and academics who came along.

We hit our initial target of 20 emerging Queensland artist records associated with boxcopy in 3 hours! The records we worked on can be found here. https://www.daao.org.au/projects/boxcopy-data-push/ . It was a really fun day.  Thanks boxcopy.

The other reason for this data push was to test our new edit interface. This is the part of the website where members enter information into the database. DAAO is a complex database and so it’s vital that it be easy to use. If our user interface isn’t clear, members get frustrated, data gets entered incorrectly and thus the quality of our data and community suffers. Over this past year, we’ve been working hard with many research communities getting our hands dirty by actively using the database WITH our communities so we can get a clear picture of where we need to enhance or change the user experience of the site. We’ve been gathering feedback from meetings and training sessions with academic researchers, artists, designers and curators, and then redeveloping aspects of the site based on these sessions.

Last week we did a big deployment that addressed many of the issues that members were experiencing with the edit form and boxcopy was our first test of the new edit interface. It was a really gratifying experience: after about 15 minutes, I was more or less redundant, everyone registered and just started creating or enhancing records, creating links between artists and groups, creating new exhibition records, we even started linking images! It was more or less seamless. The new interface only slightly alters the old one but in a few significant ways 1. It makes creating new works, exhibition, recognitions etc a one step process (cutting out the awkward two step process we had before) 2. It has streamlined the EDIT buttons so they are easily to find. 3. it has made version history more obvious. Each of these changes has clearly had an impact if the boxcopy session is a good guide. We will continue to monitor these changes in upcoming sessions.

Thank you to all the researchers and research institutes, such as the Australian Institute of Art History, artists (in particular the Artist Run Initiatives, such as Fontanelle , Gray St Workshop  and boxcopy), art colleges like the National Art School,  curators, such as Gemma Weston from Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, and the Contemporary Art and Feminism Project who have involved themselves so enthusiastically in the DAAO the past year by hosting training and feedback sessions, talks and data pushes. Each of these feedback sessions has been invaluable to improving DAAO’s content and design which was a key component of our project this year.

We are so happy to announce that Dr Dorothy Erickson’s contribution of 662 artist records (with an associated 11222 entity records) from her research into artists, artisans, designers, makers and manufacturers of cultural heritage for Western Australia 1829 to 1959 has been uploaded into DAAO.  Some sample records can be seen here:

Dr Erickson is an artist and jeweller, art historian, curator,  who was the WA  Editor of ArtLink for 10 years. She was also an original contributor to the Australian Dictionary of Biography ( the legacy data on which DAAO was founded). The research she has contributed in this latest data important is really rich data with related entities in Work/Event/Recognition/externalResource/Place and was a great test for our new party matching and Import modules which handled the complexity of the matching well. It also fill significant gaps in our information base. Dr Erickson’s work and the inclusion of ( former Curtin academic, now COFA) Prof Paul Thomas’s research  from Biennale of Electronic Arts  BEAP has resulted in over 13,000 entity records relating to Western Australian artist, works and exhibition being incorporated into DAAO during the LIEF 2012 project.

To find out more about Dorothy, there is a nice interview here:

http://www.craftaustralia.org.au/library/interview.php?id=dorothy_erickson_kinetic_jewellery

As we start winding up the 2012 project- we are seeing the fruits of our labour bloom.  Our information base is really starting to grow.  Last week we finally exceeded the 10 K mark for artist and designer biographies. In fact the figure this week is 10, o99 individuals and 485 groups. This will continue to grow in the next few weeks.

Perhaps the most exciting growth has been in our newer areas of focus: exhibition and works which have doubled in size over the past year.

We have just harvested our first data set from University of Sydney, Power Institute. This is a wonderful development as we we now have a sustainable and automated workflow between the significant research held by Power Institute and DAAO.  A wonderful example of this relationship can be seen i the recent uploading of data on  exhibition : J.W. Power: Abstraction Création, Paris 1934 which is a reconstruction of J.W. Power’s 1934 Paris solo exhibition with the Abstraction Création group.  The research of  curators, Ann Stephen and  A.D.S Donaldson  was entered into Power Institute EMu system and the harvested in DAAO using a new import module. The information on works is really detailed and it is wonderful to have this research finally exposed.  You can see more here: http://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/jw-power-abstraction-creation-paris-1934-1/

We’ve been back on deck since mid January  and heads down doing final fixes on the import and party matching modules that will enable us to automatically import records from our partners.  We have already successfully tested some of our new functionalities with Deakin Research Online repository of artists’ works and imported creative works data.  http://www.daao.org.au/bio/collection/deakin-research-online/

These final stages of the 2012 LIEF project are exciting as we see all the hard work of our data manager and developers come to fruition. We are deploying these final fixes to the production site on Wednesday. On Thursday we will begin bulk imports – so get ready to watch the stats rise.

Oh and BTW; our membership is growing remarkably; last count 1602! including 149 moderators! not bad at all.  I’ll be posting more details on our membership and how people are using the site shortly.

And one more piece of happy news: DAAO is pleased to announce the birth of our second child since the project began last year. Ran and her family now have another adorable  boy, Jinbo (born three weeks ago).

As many of you know, DAAO is partner in the successful bid by the Cultural Datasets Consortium to build the first virtual laboratory for humanities e-research in Australia: the HuNI project,  http://huni.net.au/ (federally funded through NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources).

Conal Tuoey, the project’s technical co-ordinator who oversees the development and implementation of the HuNI VL technical infrastructure has just posted a very user friendly explanation of what the HuNI project is doing with all our data and what ‘linked data’ actually means. Some data sets such as Australian Dictionary of Biography and Australian Women’s register have already been linked. DAAO is next on the list!  http://huni.net.au/huni-linked-data-first-datasets/

Anthony White, one of our CIs from Melbourne University, just emailed me this link on the possibilities of collaborative interdisciplinary work in art research and digital humanities. This article doesn’t discuss issues of copyright, but it certainly makes clear how the mess of image copyright in digital age (and the risk adverse positions that many institutions need to adopt) presents challenges to art and design research, particularly to projects with a free and open source ethos such as DAAO. We have find that most copyright holders once contacted, are happy to share, but the resources required  for clearing copyright are  onerous.

But attitudes are changing. The introduction of thumbnail images into daao as reference tools to source images was a huge milestone for DAAO and augurs well for future collaborations around image based research.

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/art-history-failing-internet/

DAAO people by greg turner (IC)

DAAO people by greg turner (IC) zoom 1

DAAO people by greg turner (IC) zoom2

I have been meaning to post these sample visualisations of the people and associates data on DAAO for a while. Greg Turner from our developers IC (formerly known as IXC) was playing around with our data and produced a huge file (too big to post) of DAAO’s people connections (our people records were about 8,000 at the time). It’s pretty tantalising stuff. As DAAO gets more comprehensive data coverage (and it will after this LIEF  ) and once we have the facility to link all our data up (result of next LIEF), the power and usefulness of these types of visualisation will expand as will our facility to enable users to produce them.

Hi all

just a brief little post about our Melbourne Project Officer, Emily Wubben and her latest adventure in the world of Australian Art. Emily  (along with colleague Jason Benjamin) has just authored her first book. Quite a feat for one who is so darn young.  The book is based on the  exhibition she and Jason mounted at Ballieu Library ( one of partners)  this year.  http://www.unimelb.edu.au/culturalcollections/exhibitions/forthcoming.html

The book, Architectural ornament: the history and art of Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne (Cultural Collections Dept, University of Melbourne, 2012) is an absorbing study of a fascinating place. Congrats to Emily- team DAAO is lucky to have her.

We are now posting little updates and news on DAAO’s new twitter page. http://twitter.com/daao_aust

For those who like their info small, fast and often come and follow us and join the chat on twitter!