Students Begin Work on Closer
Aeshta van Dam, Connie Yeh, Shauna Jin, Kate Cunningham and Bas Bergervoet began working on the Closer project on February 15. Their goal is to explore ways of making archived audiovisual objects more accessible.
Closer is an initiative of V2_ and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The institute’s archive contains more than 700,000 hours’ worth of moving image, sound recordings and documentary films and two million photos from broadcasting history. Large parts of this collection will be digitized in the next few years. To make this multimedia archive more user-friendly, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision wishes to explore different ways of providing access that will be appealing to the audience. To this end, it has sought V2_’s expertise.
V2_ has been exploring the possibilities offered by new technologies for more than 20 years. V2_ has acquired much knowledge that can be useful in investigating different options for using new technologies in archives. It has proposed the Institute make use of augmented reality, the semantic web, human-computer interaction, and web design.
An interdisciplinary team of students has been assembled to explore these different options in depth. Aeshta van Dam, a student of virtual theatre and game design; Connie Yeh, an industrial design engineering student; Shauna Jin, an integrated product design student; Kate Cunningham, an ArtScience Interfaculty student; and Bas Bergervoet, a student in new media and digital culture, will brainstorm different ways the audiovisual archive can be more accessible to the public.
The students are excited about working in an interdisciplinary project group. They say they look forward to learning from people outside their own social groups, changing people's experience of the archive, and connecting, art, technology, culture, media and archives. “Archives are changing fundamentally; they need to become up-to-date so that they stay relevant,” the group says. “People look for information in different ways now than they used to. The Internet is very unstructured, and that's why this project is important.” The students have one concern: “We don't have much time to explore all the different options, and that means we need to do a lot of filtering.”
Closer will continue until the end of April 2010.
To follow the Closer project, see http://closar.blogspot.com.
