Posted on

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Glitch

This week I attempted to recreate the results of glitching files as demonstrated in this blog post by Trevor Owens. As we shall see, I ran into a few difficulties in reproducing this experiment exactly. But first what is a glitch? According to Wikipedia, “A computer glitch is the failure of a system, usually containing a computing device, to complete its functions or to perform them properly.” In this post, I chronicle my attempts to create glitches by using files in ways other than their intended purpose to reveal what we can learn about the formats themselves.

A Textual Audio Experience

I started trying to view an .mp3 as a .txt file. I could not use the same audio file as in the original blog post because the Library of Congress does not provide direct download any longer, having switched to streaming-only for access. Instead, I randomly selected an .mp3 of the Rush classic Tom Sawyer. From here I changed the file extension to a .txt file and opened it with my computer’s text editor. Here is the result:

rush
A real toe tapper

Just as with the audio file Owens used, much of the information in the .mp3 is a confused mess and the result of the text editor’s attempt at interpreting the bits as alphanumeric sequences. However, along the top there is some embedded metadata such as information on the writers of the song: Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee, Neil Pert, and Pye Dubois. These bits are meant to be read as text and therefore can be read by the program.

Where the Trouble Began

In the next step, I tried to view an .mp3 and .wav file as .raw images. Because I did not use the same audio file as the original blog post, I did not have a .wav file to accompany my .mp3 when trying to replicate this part. Rather than simply changing the extension on my Tom Sawyer .mp3 I used a media encoder and converted the file to a .wav file. From here, I changed the extension on each to .raw and attempted to view them in an image editor. Unfortunately these files would not open in any of my image editing software. Borrowing a computer that had Photoshop, I was able to view the results seen below:

01 Tom Sawyer wav and mp3 raw photoshop
On the left: .mp3 as .raw, on the right: .wav as .raw

Just as above, an image editor can do no better than a text editor when attempting to read the audio files in a visual manner. Unlike Owens’s results, my two images look largely the same. The .wav as .raw did produce a large black bar at the top of image, which I am assuming is due to the difference in original format. I thought the similarity might have been because I converted my .mp3 into a .wav, so I downloaded a different .wav audio file directly from the web and repeated the steps and yet it still yielded the same results.

Complete Failure

While I was able to replicate most of the outcomes in the preceding section, I failed at the next step of editing an image with a text editor. The link Owens listed for the image in his post was broken, but luckily the original image was also available in the post. I downloaded this image and changed the extension from .jpg to .txt. I opened the file in the text editor, deleted some of the text, and changed it back it into a .jpg. Unfortunately, the file would not open in any of the image software I tried, including Photoshop. I kept receiving error messages that the file was unsupported, corrupted, etc. I tried these steps again but with copying and pasting parts of the text back into itself or even deleting only one character. I even attempted using a different image entirely and doing all the same steps again. Alas, all my attempts failed to produce a glitched image that could open.

Tom Hanks typing

Conclusions

While I was not able to reproduce all the tasks that Owens accomplished in his blog post, I was still able to see his main point that screen essentialism masks that digital objects are more than what they appear to be on the screen. The different ways the files can be read demonstrates the different structures of the formats, even if they look the same on the screen. My failure in this process has made me realize how much the public is pushed to a limited understanding and shielded by the programs that are meant to read certain files in certain ways. Perhaps my failures are just a result of well working computer software that allows you only to produce the desired outcome of these files. I encourage everyone to try glitching some files. Can you do it?

UPDATE: I was able to fix the problems I mentioned in this post. Here are the results:

Desert (2)
Glitched Image
doh
Correct comparison, .mp3 as .raw on left, .wav as .raw on right

To see how my issues were fixed, see the comments section below. Many thanks to Nick Krabbenhoeft for helping me fix the problems.

Posted on

History Unmade: Physical Space Reimagined in Washington D.C.

Historians place emphasis on revealing a part of the past by showing not only what was, but also what could have been. In particular, many focus on how different groups had agency in their situations and the possibility to shape outcomes very different than what actually occurred. What if we bring this notion of agency to the history of the built environment? Few people realize how different the world around them could have been had one building design been chosen over another. These decisions are often contested battlegrounds and the history of Washington, D.C.’s design is no different.

A Very Different Capital City

The designers of D.C. itself made it as a monumental city to represent America to the world. The decisions made about where and what was built were each scrutinized tremendously and the structures that came out of these decisions have become the iconic symbols associated with this country. Notwithstanding their current greatness, wouldn’t it be cool if this was the Lincoln Memorial sitting at the end of the mall?

03704_2011_001_PR
John Russell Pope’s Competition Proposal for a Pyramid with Porticoes Style Monument to Abraham Lincoln. Credit: National Archives

The Library of Congress has highlighted some of these designs and their history in the book, Capital Drawings: Architectural Designs for Washington, D.C., from the Library of Congress. While this book does a good job of explaining the context of these drawings in history, I think that placing them in the context of the space they would have occupied through the visualization on a map is much more powerful. The Center for History and New Media has created a great interactive map site called Histories of the National Mall where users can interact and learn the history of the mall as they walk around. While this site is excellent for actual histories that have taken place, it still leaves room for the histories of the imagined spaces on the mall that never were.

Deliverable

Similar to HistoryPin and PhilaPlace,  by using the Google My Maps application, I will create an interactive map, placing designs never built into the landscape, using images from the Library of Congress, National Archives, Maryland Historical Society, among others. I will start with the monuments and public buildings surrounding the national mall, and expanding to other locations should time and resources permit. Building off the map, I will create an exhibit site for this topic using the Omeka content management system and embed the map on it. The images used on the map will be placed on this site as well, making them browsable and usable in online exhibits on each building. Through the exhibit pages, I will provide the context of each design’s history, found in Capital Drawings and other books on the subject.

Histun
Current Status of Omeka Site

Audience

So there will be a map and website, but who will use it? This idea percolated in my mind for a while and oddly enough, at the beginning of February, the History Channel website posted an article called The Lincoln Memorial’s Bizarre Rejected Designs. This article received 24,000 likes and 8,500 recommends on Facebook. Clearly, there is a sizable audience for this topic in the wider community of amateur history buffs, local Washington, D.C. residents, or even the general populace that has grown up with the iconic monuments. Scholars of architecture, historic preservation, and history would also be interested in examining and learning about the possibilities of a cityscape that does not exist in reality today.

Publicity

To gain interest in the project, I will contact the repositories whose collections I am utilizing, in hopes that they would advertise it on their website, social media, and to patrons. Furthermore, the Center of History and New Media is a good partner to spread the word, as their Histories of the National Mall Site is closely connected and they know the constituents who would be interested in this type of project. Beyond these routes, I will contact local media outlets and use personal social media accounts to publicize.

Evaluation

Once the site is active, I will solicit feedback from users on the user experience and content of the site. Suggestions for future places would be useful to both have new material to post as well as tailoring the website to what the users want. Ultimately, there is no way to know if the users learn from the site, only that it has reached them through usage numbers. Hopefully, this site will give users an understanding that the space they inhabit is not static and encourage them to imagine what can be.

Posted on

Memory and Materiality: An Examination of Dear Photograph

On January 13, 2014, the Tumblr based blog, Dear Photograph reached 150,000 followers. Although the site has not been updated since last fall, its first three years of use provide a wealth of material I will use to examine how people interact with the past, form memories, and view materiality on the web. The blog of focus features digital photos taken by people of physical photos lined up with their original setting, with a caption beginning with “Dear photograph.” Meta right?

Here’s an example:

tumblr_mzatmrzMgf1qcuqzso1_500

Dear Photograph,
Trafalgar Square 50 years ago and my Granny never looked happier! If my house was burning down, this would be the one possession I would be desperate to save. I miss so many things about my Granny but most of all I miss her beautiful smile.
Clare

This example combines a personal photograph and message and places it in a setting of historical significance.

Some of the other photos are inherently more personal, both in place and in subject:

tumblr_n5md9wwfOG1qcuqzso1_500

Dear Photograph,
This is when I still had hair and my brother pooped himself.
We were happy, but we didn’t know it.
Domenico

If you do a quick Google search for “dear photograph” you will find, beyond the actual site (and its manifestations on other social media platforms) a number of articles profiling the site and its owner/curator, Taylor Jones. None of these articles are very long or in depth. The articles focus on “New-age nostalgia” or “digital nostalgia” but few delve into the ideas of memory.

One of the few scholarly pieces that deals with memory, Dear Photograph, and that sets the frame for my study is “Remembering with Rephotography: A Social Practice for the Inventions of Memories” by Jason Kalin. This article briefly mentioned Dear Photograph as part of a larger set of websites involved in “rephotography,” or retaking the same photograph in the same place at a different time to show change. Kalin argues that the way we share digital photos on the web  and use rephotography changes the way we remember things. Its application in a digital social environment allows users to “follow in the footsteps of previous walkers while simultaneously making that walk their own, thus producing a collective text, a collective, public memory of place that responds to past, present, and future.” In essence, these images are not only a way of remembering the past but are a means to create new memories, in a dialogue more public than ever before. This study will build off Kalin’s ideas as well as the general literature about memory to examine how Dear Photograph in particular reveals the changing nature of memory in the digital environment.

A piece in the New Yorker demonstrates another side to Dear Photograph, saying that “the project is a powerful reminder that digital photos can’t ever quite duplicate how it feels to hold a timeworn, sun-bleached, wrinkled old family photo in your hand.” This sentence gets to the heart of ideas espoused by Matt Kirschenbaum in Mechanisms when he discusses how the digital is often associated as something inherently not physical. Dear Photograph represents a juxtaposition of the nostalgia for the materiality of analog photographs while putting these objects within the structure of the new media that replaced them. Looking at these ideas and those of memory outlined above, I question, do memory and materiality relate to one another? Is Dear Photograph an attempt to adapt the memories associated with tactile feel to the digital environment? Through the examination of the content of images and text in the posts of Dear Photograph, I hope to answer these questions and reveal how this platform relates to the way we form memories in the digital age.

Posted on

A Glass Case of Emotion: User Movitivation in Crowdsourcing

The web is inherently made up of networks and interactions among its users. But what is the nature of these interactions – participatory? collaborative? exploitative? These questions play out when cultural heritage institutions take to the web and attempt to engage the vast public audience that is now accessible to them. Crowdsourcing is a means to allow everyday citizens to participate and become more involved with historic materials than ever before. Similarly, these volunteer projects can overcome institutional monetary and time constraints to create products not possible otherwise. What most interested me in the readings is the motivations of those involved in these projects. Why do citizens choose to participate? Why are institutions putting these projects out there? How do they play on the motivations of their users? These questions link back to the overarching general ideas about the nature of interactions on the web.

Why Wasn’t I Consulted?

Paul Ford describes the fundamental nature of the web with the phrase “Why wasn’t I consulted” or WWIC for short. Ford claims that feedback and voice on content is what the web is run on. By giving people a voice, even through the basest form of expression in likes, favorites, +1’s, or “the digital equivalent of a grunt,” users are satisfied that they were consulted and that they can give their approval or disapproval.

User experience, in Ford’s mind, is centered on their emotional need to be consulted. Additionally, the expression of approval is what feeds other users to create content, receiving a positive emotional response from those who consume their work. Organizations create spaces that shrink the vast web down into communities where the WWIC problem can be solved. Essentially, these structures create a glass case of emotion.

Ron Burgundy in a Phone Booth

Libraries, archives, and museums have to deal with users’ emotions when creating their crowdsourcing ventures. How do we create places where the users will feel consulted and desire to participate? Like Ford, Causer & Wallace in describing the Transcribe Bentham project of University College London, and the Frankle article on the Children of Lodz Ghetto project at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, emphasize understanding users and volunteers as well as finding the appropriate medium is important in these undertakings.

Causer & Wallace identify a much more detailed set of motivations of their user groups than Ford’s WWIC idea. Many of their participants claimed they had interests in the project such as history, philosophy, Bentham, or crowdsourcing in general. Other than these categories, the next biggest reasoning for joining the project was a desire to be a part of something collaborative. The creators of Transcription Bentham failed to create an atmosphere where users felt comfortable collaborating which may have been why the project decreased in popularity over time. The Children of Lodz Ghetto project, on the other hand, is much more collaborative with administrators guiding researchers through each step of the process. Eventually they hope to have advanced users take over the role of teaching newcomers. The Holocaust Museum’s project is a much more sustainable model that could lead to lasting success.

Crowdsourcing (For Members Only)

While collaboration and having an interesting topic is a key factor in motivating participation, how do online history sites get the attention of the public to join in the first place? The push for the openness of both the internet and cultural institutions is something I greatly support, but I think motivating the populace to get involved in these projects needs a return to exclusivity. There is still a prevailing notion that archives and other cultural organizations are closed spaces that only certain people can access. In many European institutions this is still the case. Why don’t we use the popular notions of exclusivity to our own benefit?

Hear me out. What these articles lacked was the idea that many people desire what they cannot get or what only few can. I’m not advocating putting collections behind a paywall or keeping collections from being freely available online. Instead, I think participation in crowdsourcing projects should be competitive or exclusive in order to gain the initial excitement needed to gain a following and spur desire for inclusion.

Other social media platforms such as early Facebook and more recently Ello or new devices such as Google’s Google Glass, have made membership or ownership limited, creating enormous desire for each. In these examples, the majority of the populace is asking why wasn’t I consulted? and therefore want to be included. Thus, having the initial rounds of participation be limited to a first-come, first-serve, invite-only platform would spark desire for the prestige of being the few to have access to the project.

In Edson’s article, he wrote about the vast stretches of the internet that cultural institutions do not engage, what he called “dark matter.” While there are huge numbers of people out there who are “starving for authenticity, ideas, and meaning,” I think the first step should be creating a desire to participate and then growing the project. Without something to catch the public’s attention, create a community, and grow an emotional desire to participate, another crowdsourcing website would simply be white noise to the large number of internet users in the world.  The users, who are visiting the websites looking for a way into the projects but denied, could discover the free and open collections which are there right now. After this first limited period, once the attention is there, I think scaling up would be easier. Of course these ideas will only work if the institution has created a place that understands the emotional needs of its users and provides a collaborative and social environment where users are comfortable participating.