Author Archives: admin

Hardware considerations

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A few days ago, I tried using the external DVD player that I bought to go with my laptop, to play a film on my Smart LG TV. I discovered that the DVD player only has a USB interface and that films on DVDs won’t play without an HDMI interface. So, to be able to play any of our collection of DVDs , we would have to buy an HDMI-capable DVD player which a quick search of the net determined would cost in the region of £30 – £50. Unlike my current very compact and easy-to-store external DVD drive (measuring some 14x14x1.5 cm), such beasts are larger, may employ a pop-up lid as opposed to a sliding drawer, and require an external power source. These are all factors which would affect the aesthetics of the piece of furniture on which our TV sits: it would mean accommodating an extra big black box with two lots of additional wiring for a facility that might be only rarely used – and this after having been pleased to get rid of our previous very large DVD recorder box. I guess it could be kept in a drawer and just installed temporarily when needed – but setting it up wouldn’t be easy because there is little space to get behind the 65inch TV screen to access HDMI ports and power points. Of course, such a device could also be used on my laptop – but I don’t really think I’d want to watch films on my laptop screen or even the 27-inch screen on my study desk. In fact, I wouldn’t want to watch films in my study: movie-watching is more of a relaxing lounge activity.

Many of the above factors are the reasons why we decided to dispense with a video recorder and the physical DVDs in the first place; so, I’m not really envisaging going down that route again. Nevertheless, it will be useful to have a clear understanding of all the possibilities and constraints when I get down to deciding which films, if any, I particularly want to keep and in what format.

Musings about video collections

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When I saw my first movies in the late 1950s, there was no way of keeping a copy of the one’s you especially enjoyed to view again at some time in the future. This was in contrast to some of the first books which I really enjoyed in the early 1960s – such as Coral Island and Greenmantle – and which have resided on my bookshelves to this very day, available for dipping into or re-reading at will (though, truth be told, this hasn’t happened much). All this changed in the 1970s with the emergence of the domestic video recorder, and movies could be rented, and eventually purchased, on video tapes. In the 1980s, you could have a collection of films in your bookcase along with your favourite books.

Unfortunately, there was – and still is – a significant distinction between the two media: books don’t require anything else to be able to read them, whereas video films need equipment to play them on – equipment that keeps changing as the technology develops. So, my collection of films on VHS video had to be swapped into DVDs; and last year we got a new TV streaming box which doesn’t have a DVD player at all.

However, leaving aside this pesky technology problem, I’m wondering if the introduction of films to our bookshelves has truly made a difference. As I hinted above, I don’t reread books very often; and yet having them on my shelves does make a difference. I guess their presence acts as a reminder of the impressions they made on me; and their physical presence does afford me rereading opportunity, whilst their absence might fuel a desire to obtain them. Is the same true of films? Well, I think in my case – yes! The visuality and motion in films undoubtedly make them seem more attractive than a book, and may be more likely to inspire a second viewing; nevertheless, as with my books, I don’t seem to have  taken much advantage of their availability. But I would, in principle, like to have a collection of my favourite films, even if only to know what they are.

Of course, films are not the only video material that we encounter today: we also watch huge amounts of TV, some of which we really enjoy and regard as memorable. Some people recorded and had collections of such material – and then encountered the changing technology problem. In the face of today’s streaming services, only the dedicated will have managed to retain such collections in a form that Is still accessible. My wife and I, thankfully, never went down that particular rabbit hole.

There are two other types of video material that I do have collections of. One is about a dozen pieces relating to office technology developments that were relevant to my job as an IT consultant. These were included in my work filing system, converted to digital files several years ago, and continue to be maintained within the filing system under its digital preservation maintenance plan. I feel no need to have these items displayed anywhere: they are accessible via the filing system’s index in just the same way as all the other 25,000+ items in the collection. The other type is the family’s collection of cine films from the 1950s onwards, and more recent videos taken on video recorders and then on mobile phones. These are included in the family’s photo collection, and maintained under that collection’s digital preservation plan. Interestingly, we do have these items on DVDs in very thin cases and on display in our living room bookcase, so the fact that we no longer have a DVD player attached to our TV does affect the accessibility of these family records as well.

While there are numerous similarities in the motivations and practicalities associated with collecting these three different types of videos – films/TV, work, and family, I nevertheless feel that I’ve collected the work and family videos for very specific reasons, whereas the collection of film/TV videos is much more like collecting books – it is based on very subjective appreciations of the content and, importantly, whether you own the item in the first place: if you really enjoyed a book you borrowed from a library would you be likely to go out and buy a copy just to put it on your bookshelf?

This last point is critical in todays streaming world, and it applies not just to video but also to music and books. The lack of physical media when films/TV, music, and e-books are consumed mean that there is nothing physical to go on our physical bookshelves; and in the case of films/TV and music, there is not even a digital file to store on your local device. This simple fact is probably the most significant factor in our decisions about collecting films/TV and music in today’s streaming environment. It also highlights the point that most physical collections of books and films/tv exist simply because the media was purchased in order to consume it – not because you wanted to build a collection. The collection was just a by-product of the process. I shall carry this thought with me as I set about deciding what to do with my DVDs.

DVD Dilemmas

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Last summer we boxed up our DVDs when we had our lounge redecorated, and there they have remained because we no longer have a video recorder to play them on. The box is taking up space in my study so the time has come when I need to something with them.


Of course, I could just take the whole lot down to a local charity shop – but it’s not going to be as easy as that. You see, mixed in among the movies that we just bought and enjoyed (like the Bourne series) are long time favourites that I’ve collected on VHF Video Tapes and then replaced with DVDs (like 2001); and some event DVDS that I’ve promised myself an enjoyable reliving at some unspecified time in the future (like the 2012 Olympics). I do want to keep some of these to enjoy them in the future, so I guess I’m going to have to go through the whole collection to choose which ones to keep a copy of and which ones to get rid of; and then I’ll have to figure out how to convert the ones I’m keeping to a more long-lived format. I’m anticipating that these decisions may also be affected by the sizes of the files that the conversions will produce: I’m not used to handling loads of gigabit-sized files.

The Spreadsheet – an OFC Superstar

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Since my last post here, over 7 months ago, we’ve completed first substantial drafts of all 10 chapters of the book on Collecting in the IT era. The literature survey has made a substantial contribution to the material; and the use of an Excel spreadsheet enabled the process. This is just another example of the massive contribution that the humble spreadsheet has made to modern life since its inception in 1979. Designed ostensibly for manipulating numbers, it has proved equally useful for organising text.

In my first foray into writing books at the National Computing Centre in the 1980s, I tried recording key points that I read or discovered about a subject, in a Word document, and then rearranging them into separate chapters. It was a pretty effective method – but only worked for fairly concise units of text and relatively few of them. For this book I have used a spreadsheet to assemble more than 3,400 chunks of relevant points from over 300 books, papers and other sources; many of the chunks consisting of part-paragraphs of over 80 words of text either copied from digital texts or hand-typed-in. Against each chunk are columns of reference details and allocations to particular chapters. The ability to apply consistent organisation over such a large volume of material, and to be able to search and filter every column, provides a huge advancement in capability over my 1980’s efforts; a capability to identify key points, to assess differing views, and to construct new thoughts and ideas around a particular topic.

The simplicity and power of its structures across both numbers and text, makes the spreadsheet a premier performer in creating order from chaos; it is the hammer and wheel for 21st century individuals.

Deep Roots for Modern Britain

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Mentions about the Viking, Roman or Norman invasions of Britain make me wonder if my family or any of my friends originate from those peoples. I’m also intrigued by the way recent work using DNA analysis can build up an overall lineage of modern people which originates in a small group of individuals in Africa around 200,000 years ago. So, I got to thinking that it would be an interesting TV programme to track down the origins of a whole bunch of our very diverse British population using modern DNA analysis. We might all be surprised about how foreign we all are and yet how closely we are all related.

Evolving Suspicions

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I’ve become intrigued by how we’ve managed to evolve the complexity of the human being, particularly after reading the following: “The inner ear is where the receptors for hearing (and balance) are contained. Specifically, the cochlea is a liquid filled (snail-like) spiral structure that internally widens in the middle such that different vibration frequencies will have heightened energy at different (specific) locations along the structure that cause the membranes to be displaced. Inside the cochlea, liquid filled tubes (scala) are separated by membranes, one of which (the basilar membrane) contains rows of hairs (the stereocilia) that cause neural activity when the membrane is displaced nearby.”

I thought it would be interesting to do a rough calculation of how long it would take for us to get from our originating bacteria to where we are today based on my top-of-the-head estimates of the number of mutations required and how many entities were contributing to them.

W: Number of mutations required: 10 million – 610 million: average 310,000,000

X: Number of generations required for a successful mutation on top of a previously successful mutation: 10,000 – 210,000: average 110,000

Y: Number of entities/couples contributing to generations: 1 – 100,000,000: average 50,000,000

Z: Number of years between generations: 0.01 – 20: average 10

Using the averages:

For W mutations to occur, taking X generations for each one, would take 310,000,000 x 110,000 generations

If there were Y contributing entities/couples, this would take (310,000,000 x 110,000)/50,000,000 generations

If there were an average of Z number of years per generation, the overall process would take     [(310,000,000 x 110,000)/50,000,000)] x 10 years = 6,820,000 years

Despite this being a possible result (considering the earth is apparently 4.5 billion years old), it is clearly wrong since the earliest microbes found in rocks are estimated to be 3.7 billion years old. Anyway, I’m feeling distinctly uncomfortable about all the assumptions I’ve made in the above calculations – essentially every element is totally flawed and the whole calculation is worthless. In any case, I’m still left with the feeling that, to have evolved such a huge set of such very highly complex and interworking physical mechanisms, completely by chance, seems to be highly unlikely. So, I’m left with a lurking suspicion that somewhere in the originating DNA, or early equivalent, was a programme of instructions….

POSTSCRIPT: Quite by chance I watched part of “Attenborough: 60 years in the wild” on the BBC this morning – the day after I posted the above material. The programme is highly relevant and I recommend it.

Google Scholaring

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The book on Collecting in the IT era, is coming on; we now have rough drafts for all the chapters. So, over the last couple of months I’ve been doing a literature survey – and discovered that things are a bit different from when I last did something like this about 40 years ago. If I remember rightly, I got the corporate library to interrogate some online databases for me, selected various items from the resulting printouts, and requested the papers and books that I wanted through the inter-library loan system.

These days it’s a little simpler: you do a search of Google Scholar which produces loads of hits presented as a series of abstracts. You click on the items you’re interested in, and, if you’re lucky, the paper will appear either in your PDF reader or in a web page. If the full version isn’t immediately available, a further search of the net may turn up a copy. Failing that, if you have institutional membership of a publisher’s archive, that may give you access; or else you may be able to pay a fee to get a copy. For books, and for papers which you cannot obtain by any of these options, then it’s back to the inter-library loan system (well that’s what it’s called here in the UK – I assume other countries have similar services). In this case, I found versions of all but 8 papers, on the net; and my co-author was able to obtain 7 of the remainder through his institutional memberships. Of the 22 books I needed, I already had 3, I bought 7 on eBay for less than £5 each (and free postage), and I ordered the remainder through inter-library loans via my local library in Bedford.

Now, I don’t know what percentage of the overall canon of human scientific works is included in Google Scholar’s database; but my initial searches gave me some confidence that it was enough to be very useful. For example, a search for the word ‘Collecting’ in the title, identified 80,900 results. I duly conducted a variety of searches and identified some 270 papers and books, of which about 130 proved useful enough to include in the literature survey. From those items, I identified about a further 15 or 20 papers and books to add to the list.

The process of actually reading and assessing the material, was, of course, hard work; but the mechanics of actually conducting the searches and getting the material was extremely quick and easy – much, much easier than I experienced 40 years ago. And, while Google Scholar may not include everything, it’s likely that any key material missing from Google Scholar will be referenced in the material initially identified. I haven’t spoken to anyone other than my co-author about Google Scholar, so this short overview cannot be considered in any way a thorough assessment. However, for what it’s worth, I think it’s been very effective for my purposes, and I’d certainly use it again.

Some final notes

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As our investigations relating to collecting practices in the Icon Age have taken a somewhat different turn since we first undertook this work, we have decided to terminate work on this Knowledge Development journey. As noted in the previous post, a wide variety of issues were revealed by the study. It made it clear that the texts selected for mark-up in the present day were often, but not always, distinct from those that had been selected many years before. This was not, in itself, surprising, but we wanted to understand what trajectories of reasoning had changed the most and this was not so easy to pinpoint. We were interested in whether things like the type of document marked up, when it was originally marked up, the place of work at the time, and the interest in the topic would make a difference to the degree of contiguity between the original markup and the new markup. However, none of these seemed to have a consistent effect. More than anything, we have concluded that understanding the nature and relevance of document markup practices for knowledge development is something that would require significant further investigation in its own right.

The story of storyboards

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It’s been well over a year and a half that I displayed the second set of storyboards on the side of my bookcase – plenty of time to experience what its like to live with them. However, I can’t say I’ve given them a great deal of use. Every now and then I’ve selected another sheet, hung it on the display, and had a glance at its contents – but perhaps only a dozen times across the period. That’s not to say I didn’t find the contents interesting. On the contrary, I found I was coming across points I’d already forgotten about, or wouldn’t ordinarily connect directly with the main topic of the storyboard – a finding which I also experienced in the first trial (see the heading facts/Discovered/Re-discovered in the ESB Evaluation Results post). Other members of my family were also interested when I showed them the display and explained what it was all about – but not enough to spend any further time exploring, even when some of the topics were things they were familiar with. The fact that this set of storyboards included several other types of items other than books (which the first set was limited to), seemed to make no difference to myself or to family members. Perhaps this overall reaction is understandable since viewers have no real reason to examine the installation in more detail. Like a picture on a wall, it provides an interest for the eye but demands no closer inspection. People need to have a reason, an incentive, to do more.

Of course, the fact that this is a static, paper-based, display conceals its hidden content: it does not connect with a modern person’s notion of interactivity. A screen-based display, as originally envisaged for the storyboards, might perhaps inspire a greater curiosity; though, beyond an initial inspection, I suspect there would still have to be a rationale for exploring. Maybe such displays are, in fact, just pictures on a wall – but with an additional dimension of background links which have to be displayed automatically, in turn or in other configurations, to enable its viewers to experience its complete composition. Would that inspire people to interact with the display, or would they simply stand and watch? Well, perhaps a bit of both: at least one doesn’t preclude the other – though probably best not at the same time unless by picture-in-picture.

As with the first trial, I had created PDFs of the storyboards for display in the Sidebooks app in my iPad. In addition, I created an equivalent display in my laptop. The latter was able to link out directly to associated items held elsewhere on the laptop (as opposed to including all the material in a single PDF for the Sidebooks display). I did look at the Sidebooks storyboards occassionally in order to follow a particular link. However, I rarely, if ever looked at the laptop version. I guess the iPad was simply closer to hand and provided more immediate access. The laptop version is certainly a powerful beast providing access to the complete version of the books, for example, which were not included in their totality in the Sidebooks PDF. However, on trying it out while writing this post, I found that it annoyingly shuts down the master front-end index PDF when a link is selected and another file is opened. No doubt this will fixable somehow or other, but it’s another example of how there will always be glitches when trying to interlink systems and files.

Inspiring viewers to access storyboards may be a little difficult, but that is the least of the challenges associated with such displays. Their production demands some creative energy and is extremely time-consuming: individuals would need a huge incentive to undertake the work for rewards which are way in the future. Perhaps, it would be easier to undertake the analysis as each item is acquired, instead of trying to produce a whole set in one go. However, people have difficulty in just labelling and placing newly acquired items in an organised store, let alone going through such a rigorous analysis process as well. In discussing this with my son, he pointed out that, in any case, one’s feelings about an object may be very different at the point of acquisition from those several years later. This thought prompted him to develop the notion of revisiting an object periodically to build up a picture of how one’s feelings for an object were changing over time – a development that could be displayed graphically on a screen. However, this would demand yet more work from innocent owners who just want to add something to their collections. There is one piece of information which would not require any work to generate and which could be used by a system to generate a timeline display, and that is the date of creation of the digital object. That might be interesting – but would only be factually correct if all the items were born digital; the date of items which were acquired in physical form and digitised later would bear an incorrect acquisition date.

Summing up my experiences with my two sets of storyboards, I have to conclude that, while the results are very interesting, the work to produce them is probably going to be too great for most collectors. Perhaps the circumstance which would provide the greatest incentive to undertake such work is when a collection is to be digitised prior to the disposing of the physical items – as was the case in my first storyboard trial when I digitised 36 books to remove them from my book shelves and destroyed them in the process. The heartache an owner might feel in undertaking such a final no-going-back act, might inspire the production of a set of storyboards in memoriam.

Practice Hierarchy writings

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About a year ago I reported that my colleague, Peter Tolmie, and I were working on a book about digitisation’s impact on collecting, based upon all the investigations and writings already described in this blog, as well as auto-ethnographic investigations of a variety of collections that Peter and myself have been associated with. The book will expand many of the notions put forward in the OFC tutorial, and therefore I shall continue to provide updates on our progress on the book, within this Order From Chaos journey.

Since my last report, we have moved on from the auto-ethnographic investigations and derived a draft Practice Hierarchy for collecting, which has eight upper levels – Initiating, Equipping, Acquiring, Depositing, Using, Revealing, Maintaining, and Disposing. We are now in the process of fully verifying, describing and illustrating all the elements. Having done that we plan to analyse and describe how digitisation has affected all these practices – though it may take us several months to get to that next stage.