Event: xrchiving.london
A culture and technology mixer.
I was kindly invited along to xrchiving.london by one of the organisers, Tam McDonald from cradleofenglish.com. The schedule of speakers and topics looked just like my kind of thing, so I was up at 5am last Saturday to make my train on time for a daytrip to the capital.
Xrchiving’s first incarnation took place in November ‘22, and this year is sponsored by King’s College Libraries & Collections, taking place at Bush House. As the event’s name suggests, the conference is broadly concerned with XR (extended reality), with specific focus on 3 areas of interest: sustainability, the GLAM sector, and social good. One aim of the conference is to create an atmosphere of networking and sharing that might set the stage for, as co-organiser Geoff Browell puts it, “radical interdisciplinarity”.
I was thinking of putting down a blow-by-blow account of each part of the schedule here, but in the interest of brevity I will opt instead to pull out some of the topics, themes, and ideas that resonated the most with me. I hope it gives you some things to think about and follow up on, too.
The Guildhall Digitisation Project
In his keynote speech (among many other thoughts) current Lord Mayor of the City of London Corporation Michael Mainelli officially announced the in-progress initiative and ambition to create a digital twin of the City of London Guildhall.
The project, which I am happy to say I am involved with myself, seeks to create a body of digital 3D data based on the historic site which, alongside other uses, will be deposited with the Europeana Twin It! initiative.
I’m not only glad to be involved with a new commercial project, but also happy that in some small way I can contribute to positive relations between the EU and UK :)
Standards for 3D
The first panel session of the day was concerned with 3D data acquisition and publishing standards. Drew Baker, Research Fellow at Cyprus University of Technology, gave an overview of the planned update to the London Charter, a guide to
“ensuring the methodological rigour of computer-based visualization as a means of researching and communicating cultural heritage.” - londoncharter.org/introduction
The original charter was first published online in 2006, a time before smartphones and the boom in widespread 3D digitisation in the GLAM sector, has not been significantly updated since 2008.
I look forward to following developments here, aware that the goals of the Charter are sympathetic with other standards initiatives such as GLAM3d.org, Community Standards for 3D Data Preservation, the IIIF 3D Community Group, and the Europeana 3D Task Force Report.
The only thing I felt was missing from the presentation was an indication of which organisations or projects (and how many) had implemented the suggestions of the original Charter.
Any plan for a standards initiative should include a strategy to reach the right people and plans for ongoing efforts to nurture and support ‘community champions’ for the standards in question. Without such planning there is a risk of simply creating another competing standard.
(Data) Sustainability
The second session “Generating the future with data” was an interesting look at approaches to long term data availability.
George Oates shared her ongoing work at the Flickr Foundation, sharing some insights into life as an archival entity housed within a business corporation. The Foundation has recently hired its own archivist, uncommon in the context of a commercial company, in a bid to “backup and sustain access for 100 years” to the huge amount of data hosted by on flickr.com.
George indicates that there is a need and opportunity to preserve not only the huge visual data set that Flickr hosts but also the social layer of users and community interaction, and even snapshots of the site’s web interface. This final point was echoed by Catherine Williams, Head of Archives and Research Collections, who agreed that “the interface tells us something about how users are living in that space.”, referencing similar work that was considered while she was working at the BBC. The panel seemed in agreement that collecting and archiving as much data, metadata, and paradata as possible will afford the most value to to future users, but doing so comes with plenty of challenges.
My mind somewhat boggles at the idea of working with so much data and such long term goals, but it is great to learn about the ways people are chipping away at constituent elements of the task. Catherine indicated the need to consider the “datafication” of collections and do the work that can “present archives as data” so collections can be queried and visualised in many different ways. George introduced the idea of a “data lifeboat” that might anticipate a flickr.com going down and help maintain access to the data archive.
It’s one of my biggest regrets that I didn’t get close to creating anything like a “Flickr Foundation for 3D” within Sketchfab/Epic Games during my time there. I feel this even more acutely when Jane Winters, Chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition, shares that 3D, XR, and VR data is considered ‘endangered’ by her organisation.
Speaking of endangered, one thing I would have liked to have heard in a conversation about sustainability is some contextualisation of digital preservation within current global challenges: conflict, the climate crisis, inequality.
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot in regard to 3D data: how do we balance the need for ever growing data centres, web servers, and with the ongoing climate crisis? How do we optimise data collection, preservation, and access to engage the greatest number of people online with the smallest impact on our planet?
Participatory Spatial Culture
Hexology Demo
Over the lunch break we were offered a demonstration of the Hexology app & platform at the nearby St Mary Le Strand church. The premise of the app is quite simple: discover media and feeds of content via location based technology (GPS, beacons, QR codes).
The idea (as I understand) it is to encourage user exploration of a location to uncover more information and experiences related to it. Once subscribed to a location’s official feed, users may then receive updates from the venue. A nice twist is that it is also possible as a user to contribute your own content to a location via comments and the use of hashtags in the app.
While I do like this premise (especially allowing audiences to contribute community knowledge), I still have a hard time watching a group of people in a unique and beautiful physical space glued to their phone screens.
StoryFutures 3D Scanning Workshop
I have been aware of StoryFutures for a long time now, and while I am not new to 3D scanning I chose to join this 45 minute workshop to learn a bit more about the team and their work.
The workshop itself was very simple: scan a partner using the Scaniverse app and snap a picture of “big me, little me” using the augmented reality view of the 3D scan.
This activity is based on workshops that the StoryFutures Academy team have been doing to engage literally 100s of UK librarians with 3D technology. After we had all had a go a creating a 3D scan, the team illustrated how to use 3D scanned (or 2D) content to engage audiences with location based history, using examples from StoryTrails (created with Niantic Lightship / Nexus Studios) to illustrate.
I think most attendees enjoyed the immediacy of the activity, and I really appreciated the ‘minimum viable product’ approach used to engage professionals with the concepts of 3D scanning and AR storytelling.
This kind of work feels like a good compliment to the longer term and more in-depth standards based work covered in the earlier sessions of the day. I believe there will always be a spectrum of activities and approaches to 3D digitisation & publishing because not all cultural organisations share the same goals or resources.
AI, Blockchain, The Metaverse…
By 5pm I must admit that my early start was catching up on me, but some of the final sessions were a little more abstract and went somewhat over my head. The main thing I felt that was being said by some of the speakers was that “technology is the solution… to everything”, but at the same time there was a lack of examples to illustrate this in practical terms.
AI, the blockchain, The Metaverse, computer-human interfaces, and Elon Musk were all mentioned in relation to education, climate change, political accountability, the diminishment of public spaces, and more. Compared to the content that we had been listening to earlier in the day it felt like, as a fellow attendee described it, ‘buzzword bingo’.
Back to Reality
One thing that the conference confirmed for me is that I am much more interested in live and practical projects, over more conceptual or theoretical academic practice. I don’t suggest one activity is more important than the other, of course, and believe there is in fact a positive tension between ideas and ‘the real world’ that can help inform and improve both disciplines.
It was nice to let my mind balloon with a thousand and one ideas for a day and I returned home with a renewed eagerness to get making 💪.
Great to hear an update on flickr's plans for digital archiving. I have a lot of pictures posted over there and I have wondered how sustainable the data was. Thanks for the report.
Nice one, Tom: a good write-up and well worth getting up at 5 in the morning to begin harvesting your inspirations! I appreciate the additional plug for enhanced cultural relations with Europe, as British history going back over two millennia suggests we'd be hard-pressed going it alone! Thanks, and congratulations!