The development process has begun!

The major development component of this grant is concerned with sustainable data relations: developing standardised and automated processes for importing data from our partners into the daao and exporting to Trove, the HuNi linked data project, Primo and other research focussed discovery services.  Jo Croucher, our data manager is leading this element of the project and will be working with Alastair Weakley from Interaction Consortium.

A secondary component of this project cycle is a revision of our User Experience (UX) Design. Now that the new site is up and running we have a good sense of what elements of the site need improving. Olivia Bolton has been leading this component: conducting user testing and collating feedback from our members and working with House of Laudanum our UX designers on the site changes.

If all goes to plan the development work will be completed by end December. This gives us good time for importing the new data sets and testing our new integration systems. We already have test records on the DAAO from the VCA, Melbourne Uni’s Special collections, RMIT Design Archive and NVG. Work has also commenced on pulling in Paul Thomas’s Biennale of Electronic Arts  Perth data. http://www.daao.org.au/projects/biennale-of-electronic-art-perth-beap/

Emily Wubben, our Melbourne project officer is doing an amazing job working with Melbourne University’s cultural collections to co-ordinate our efforts. She is also working on a project to expose 300 significant Artists Books held by Baillieu Library’s Special Collection. You can see her efforts here http://www.daao.org.au/projects/artists-books/. Emily will be posting on this blog about her work with Melbourne Uni’s Cultural collections soon.

Hi all,

just thought I’d share some of the enthusiasm we have been experiencing here in the DAAO team about working with the DAAO’s new relational structure. Much of the thrust behind the redesigned architecture of the DAAO, changing the the database from, in lay terms, a flat table structure into multiple tables was so we could link the data better. Ie, if an exhibition is represented then the exhibition itself becomes a record and it is easier to link each artist and the work they exhibited to the exhibition. Then we can start discerning patterns. Who exhibits together frequently? What crossovers are there?

Excited by the Sydney Biennale (BOS18), and in the middle of User Experience revision of the site,  I thought it might be timely to create a record on the Biennale, so we can update existing’s artist’s exhibition records and use the exhibition itself as motivator to add some artist’s records. I created project on the daao http://www.daao.org.au/projects/sydney-biennale-18-for-18-sprint/*.

I began with Khaled Sabsabi http://www.daao.org.au/bio/khaled-sabsabi/#artist_summary who previously was only mentioned as an associate of http://www.daao.org.au/bio/mazin-ahmad/ ( please note I haven’t written a biography- so please feel free to contribute if you have expertise on Khaled’s work!).  I connected him to the BOS http://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/biennale-of-sydney-4/ and then to  The Edge of Elsewhere http://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/edge-of-elsewhere/ where I noted  Phaptawan-Suwannakudtthat  http://www.daao.org.au/bio/phaptawan-suwannakudt/ also exhibited. Phaptawan is also at the BOS18 as is  Jonathon Jones  http://www.daao.org.au/bio/jonathon-jones/ who is also showing at at the Indigenous Triennal  ‘unDisclosed’ http://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/undisclosed/ as is Nyapanyapa Yunupingu http://www.daao.org.au/bio/nyapanyapa-yunupingu/ as is Alick Tipoti  http://www.daao.org.au/bio/alick-tipoti/ who are both exhibiting at BoS18.

Link, link, link. It gets addictive. I start adding in works for each artist exhibiting at BoS18 and then associated prizes and then what collection the work is in. More links. I get happy as go back to a previously slight record and watch it build. I get excited when I see my activity stats rise and think I want to get on the front page as a ‘most active member’. Michael Bogle is currently no 2 and  Joanna Mendelsohn is no 5. How can I knock them off their position? My competiveness and compulsion unfurl even more. But more than that, I just like watching the records get richer, more meaningful, more complete. Its satisfying.

I am not even half way through the Biennale of Sydney project. There are still biographies to complete, works, exhibitions and collections to update. Exhibition records can get big, particularly once you get the linking bug and follow trails into other artists and exhibitions. But its FUN. really!  and the good news is that soon it will be easier!

Now that the site has been up and running for 9  months, we are getting a good idea of what is working and what isn’t. Olivia is currently working with House of Laudanum ( our UX designers) to revise the contributing procedures to the site, particularly in the edit form. This process should be mainly complete by Oct 15. But don’t wait till then. Jump in- its compulsive AND you’re helping to create richer records on Australian Art and Design and that is, dare i say it, also a really worthwhile contribution to Australia’s cultural heritage.

*The BoS 18 x 18 sprint is a featured project on the home page of DAAO as is Joanna Mendelsohn, Catherine de Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, and Cathy Speck ( with others) ARC funded Curator’s Project and Melbourne University Special Collections Artist book project being run by Emily Wubben.

The project is now in ‘technical scoping stage’. We have now hired a Data Manager, Ms Jo Croucher, who will be designing and running the integration of new data sets into the DAAO. We have also hired a very capable administrative officer, Ms Ran He, who now rounds out our team.

Finally, DAAO was part of a major cultural data sets consortium (including AusStage, AusLit, ADB and others, and led by CI Deb Verhoeven (Deakin)) that was successful in receiving NeCTAR funds to develop a virtual laboratory. This is first humanities project to be involved in these generally STEM focussed projects. Quite a coup!  I have posted on it on this blogs “news and updates”.

Hi all,

A lot of the focus of this year’s project is to begin cementing closer ties with Melbourne institutions, specifically, University of Melbourne, RMIT, Deakin and Swinburne.

I had a very productive day down in Melbourne on Monday where I met with Jaynie Anderson from University of Melbourne and Harriet Edquist from RMIT to get the ball rolling on exposing some of the incredibly significant collections that these Universities hold.

We have begun hiring our Melbourne staff and the first cab of the rank is Emily Wubben who will be co-ordinating the ingestion and interoperation of collections at Melbourne University. Emily is ideally suited to this task.

She completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in 2011, with first class honours. She has worked with the Cultural Collections of the University of Melbourne in various projects and in 2009 she undertook an internship with the International Art Curatorial Department of the National Gallery of Victoria.  In 2011, as the first recipient of the University of Melbourne’s Museums and Collections Award, Emily travelled to England and completed an internship with the Museum Collections of the University of Birmingham. She is currently studying a Master of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne.

Its very exciting to finally being working the wealth of quality content that both UMelb and RMIT hold. Its also great to get to go down to Melbourne occasionally for work! I love lunching at Mr Tulk!

Here is a picture of Emily, so you can put face to name. Welcome Emily and welcome to our new Melbourne partners!

Our new Digital Content Project Officer, Emily Wubben

Hello All,

DAAO is back and ready for business again. Olivia and I are back after very restful breaks and currently in the process of setting up our new offices, hiring staff and returning emails. All is going smoothly in our first week. A good sign.

Its nice to start the year with some good news, so here it is. As well as being successul in our LIEF grant, DAAO was also part of the Australian Cultural DataSets Consortium which was successful in winning a NECTAR Virtual Laboratories grant (Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI): Unlocking and Uniting Australia’s Cultural Data). This consortium was led by Prof Deb Verhoeven of Deakin Uni. Deb is also a CI on our LIEF grant and a member of DAAO’s Management Committee.

I’ll post more on Virtual Lab project (VL)  once the project is up and running in a couple of months.

Please note, this year Olivia and I are both working only three days a week. Currently MON-WED. We both have other projects happening in our other days, so will be unable to reply to DAAO queries outside of our DAAO hours. We will, however have a full-time senior Data Manager on deck and a part-time admin assistant, so we are confident our reduced hours (due to budget constraints) won’t impact on our ability to get the job done efficiently.

Schedule for MARCH:

-Set Up office and hire staff in Sydney and Melbourne

-Finalise MIA and get accounts active.

-Project Planning- set benchmarks and schedule for project

-negotiate with Suppliers- review technical specifications of site

-Liaise with CIs.

-Set up Advisory Committees.

-First trip to Melbourne to meet with CIs and breif/hire staff.

Its great to be back and we are really looking forward to this consolidation year on the DAAO and to incorporating our new partners into the project.

This site is very new and technically quite complex. Its normal on complex sites that bugs will appear from time to time.

So don’t worry, if a few links don’t work or if some of the display looks odd from time to time, we are working on it 😉

[November 2011 update ] We generally fix things very quickly, however over the summer break, Olivia and I will be taking a much deserved break and so won’t be able to respond to bugs as promptly as we normally do.

Please report any bugs you have found, or any parts of the site’s functionality or navigation that  confuses  you in the comments below. We will fold this feedback into our continuing development of the site. Please feel free to also tell us what to love and what you find useful.

Hi All

The Sydney Morning Herald did a little story on our incredible administrator, Kim Goodwin last weekend.  Kim was the inaugural winner of the Nick Waterlow Scholarship in Art Administration. For those who want to read on http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/from-tragedy-comes-artistic-new-life-20110423-1ds0n.html

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while. What with data migration, site building, interoperability negotiations and stitching up our next LIE, blogging became priority c 😉

quick update;

data migration is more or less complete. We are just mainly ‘cleaning up’ now. Data Migration would have to be one of the most intense work experiences i’ve ever known. You learn so much about your  data and all the really grunty bits of data organisation. Huge learning curve for all of us and tremendously exciting- but also exhausting. I imagine Liz will post on the process sooner or later. ( She’s been quite heroic! – We love our data dudes at the DAAO!)

site building : we are working with editing interface now- bells and whistles are being attached each day. Alastair from IxC, (our developers) is an island of calm in an sea of activity tickets that fly around in the online project management system.  All appears to be happening more or less on time. all good there.

LIEF and interoperation: It is becoming apparent that we have a pressing need to develop some seriously efficient  automated and semi-automated  work flow tools for interoperating with large datasets. All the collections and research insitutions  I have met get the usefulness of our project and how it will expose quality datasets to eachother. Consequently,  everyone is signing on.  I was in Melbourne last week and was overwhelmed with how many major resources there are in Melbourne alone. We will be working very closely with many Victorian research and collection institutions in the next round. Its is very exciting and will enhance our research capacity enormously.

and finally! here are some identity concepts to comment on.

Both are still in development and both have been presented to Management Committee  and DAAO production teams (last Friday).  I won’t disclose our thoughts as yet, so as not to colour any opinions.  Comments are open. let us know what you think.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

in context:

and another:

and in context.

Yesterday we had a our ‘kick- off ‘ meeting with our new developers ‘The Interaction Consortium‘ – known as IxC for short. This officially inauguarates the building stage of the project.

Greg Turner (Director, PhD and Technical Information Architect among other things) drove the meeting that was attended by the DAAO project team, Lead CI Prof Ross Harley and our trusty site designers, House of Laudanum and Alastair Weakley ( another Director of IxC, who also has a PhD and is also terribly clever and experienced at developing cutting edge data driven sites).

Greg re-establishing definitions of success for project.

It was very exciting to finally get everyone in a room together and to plan the build. Everyone is the room is so committed to making the new DAAO a real example of best practice E- research. There is something so wonderful about saying things like’ so we’ll have completed data migration by March’ , or we’ll be ‘editing data  in the site in April’ , ‘we’ll be testing most functionality in May’.

check the focus in the room. No Ross is not asleep, he is deep in thought.

So watch this space! there’ll be lots to show and tell soon.

As part of the process of opening up the DAAO to the structures and benefits  that the internet has to offer, we are moving to Creative Commons Licensing system. From May 1 all text contributions will be licenced under Creative Common Licence.

This is a small step that has big benefits.

Its a small step because our existing Contributor and End-User Licence Agreements are already Creative Commons licences in spirit, in as much as our current licences allow others to use and share our content, so long as they attribute back to us and that our work is not used for commercial purposes. However, our licence does not say that anywhere near so clearly and many are confused by the legalese of the current licence. This is a problem if we want to collaborate with other institutions in sharing our data. We must have clear and easy to understand processes and human readable licences that embody the spirit of our project- and the spirit of our project is to enhance research and foster innovative collaborations around Australian Art and Design.   Creative Commons is “a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.” http://creativecommons.org.au/ Creative Commons is part of of the ethos of openness and innovation in which the DAAO places itself- front and centre.

The Creative Commons equivalent of our existing contributor’s agreement is called an Attribution-Non Commercial Share- Alike 3.0 Australia Licence  (or a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 for short)

Click the link to see how at easy to understand the Creative Commons version of our agreement is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

There is, of course, also the legal code version http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode.  (Even this is well written and user friendly legal code).

The big benefits? By moving to Creative Commons licences we move to a well-known, community supported, plain English system that is becoming the standard within e-research and the GLAM ( Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector). By being clear about what the rules of use of, and contribution to, our site are, we make it easier for other institutions, particularly museums and art galleries to inter-operate with us, and in so doing enable our content to reach larger cohort of researchers. It also facilitates new data sets being  exposed to each other and that opens up the door to new  research questions and new approaches to art and design research.

I’ll finish this little post with a link to a talk that Mike Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy  from the Smithsonian Institution, to explain and champion the value of the commons to research. http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/m-4402558 (Thanks to Liz for sending me the link).

For further questions on the changeover to Creative Commons, please read our FAQ document.

Creative Commons Change Over FAQ