Home » Posts tagged 'British Library'
Tag Archives: British Library
Travel opens the mind
Fig.1 Against the British Library opposite St.Pancras International .
I love to travel, not just on holiday with friends and family, but alone. Maybe this happens to you too, but I always find travel, especially new trips and destinations, is a catalyst to reflection.
I’m on the earliest train out of Lewes, East Sussex to Birmingham (5:20). I get a lot done.
If I have a place where I am most creative and productive this is it. How does it open the mind? All I’m doing is reading a book about boy soldiers in the First World War while revising a hefty piece of fiction centred on this period. ‘Angel of the North’ is the story of an amazing girl and woman who experiences the first war like no other … ‘
Anyway, on the basis that I have always been advised that research helps solve all fiction writing problems I am taking this as literally as is possible and start today as an MA student of First World War studies at the University of Birmingham.
Will I as a result ‘research the subject until I hear its people speak?’ This is what the historian E R Elton said.
How more deeply embedded is a visual memory if you crafted the drawing or painting that is the catalyst for its recall.
Fig.1. Hockney on iPad. Now here’s a lifelog to treasure. How does the master i-paint?
If a moment is to be captured, maybe David Hockney has the answer with a iBrush painting on an iPad. This is closer to the truth of a moment, seen through the artist’s being, their psychological and physiological approach to what they both see and perceive in front of them.
When we do we form a real memory of the actions required to undertake a task. We build on our initial attempts. The memory to ski, to dance, to swim, to skip, to ride a bicycle, to write, to draw, to pay a musical instrument – these cannot be caught by a complex collection of digital recording devices. Perhaps if the player wore a total bodysuit as actors do to play CGI generated character then we’d have a record of the memory of this experience. It wouldn’t a digital memory make – just a record.
The Semantic Web aims to standardize transmission and translation of information, is an important effort in this area. (Bell and Gemmel, 2009 p. 220 )
Is it really necessary, possible or desirable to take the moronic qualities of sports coverage and impose it on a person going about their every day and far less eventful day. This is the premise for a comedy sketch. (Bell and Gemmel, 2009. p. 224)
Fig. 2. How we learn. Conceptualised in SimpleMinds while taking the Open University Masters in Open and Distance Education.
All praise to the blogger Mark Stewart but does such a record need to be entertaining to gain validity and so a place in Digital Lives at the British Library. (Bell and Gemmel, 2009. p. 225)
Though remembering and talking through a difficult time can also offer its solution. However, these is a difference between hoarding the memory or keeping it to yourself, and letting it go. The wrong memories permanently on recall will be multiple albatrosses.
Take WW1 veterans, or any war veterans, some want to tell, some went to bury. Why should people in the future feel obliged to record it all, to have more than enough to bring it back?
As written language is such a recent phenomenon it is perhaps not the best or even the most natural way to remember.
Going back we had the drawn image and the spoken word, but never the absolute of a panoramic or 360 digital picture, but rather moment filtered through the mind and expressed at the fingertips as a painting or drawing.
Fig. 3. Web 1.0 invigorated by Web 2.0 into a water-cycle of, appropriately, clouds.
Weather systems and water courses, urban run–off and transpiration.
Here the flotsam and jetsam of web content, the good, the bad, the ugly and ridiculous, the massive, the moving, the invaluable as well as the ephemera, is agitated, mixed–up and circulated, viewed, pinched, reborn, mashed up, bashed up or left to atrophy – but it is in the mix and open for business. Find it and the thought, or image, or sound bite, the message, the idea is yours to dwell upon and utilise. It is education, revelation and knowledge of a new order. Expect more of the same and the unexpected.
Related articles
- I’ve long visualised digitization as creating an ocean of content. With Web 2.0 this ocean developed currents, weather systems and a water-cycle. (mymindbursts.com)
- Digital content, like its liquid equivalent in a digital ocean, has an extraordinary ability to leak out. (mymindbursts.com)
- The greatest value of extending our capacity to remember, but externally and internally will be to take a record and build on it, treat it is as living thing that grows into something more. (mymindbursts.com)
- The idea of a machine that acts as a perfect memory prosthesis to humans is not new. (mymindbursts.com)
- The power to remember and the need to forget (mymindbursts.com)
- Automatically captured autobiographical metadata (mymindbursts.com)
- I use dreams to dwell on a topic. (mymindbursts.com)
- The diffusion and use of innovations is complex – like people. (mymindbursts.com)
- Automatically Augmenting Lifelog Events Using Pervasively Generated Content from Millions of People (mymindbursts.com)
- Grimms Fairy Tales – visualization to empower or distort meaning and memory. (mymindbursts.com)
Mind Bursts 