Blogs

Ted NelsonAfter all of this, the first keynote of this conference will be delivered by hypertext veteran Ted Nelson. He basically begins by saying the present computer world is appalling - it is based on techie misunderstandings of human life and human thought, hidden behind flash user interfaces. The GUI (or for him PUI - park user interface) presents a cosmology which categorises all computer tasks into paper-based tasks. WYSIWYG, too, remains paper-based, of course - what you see is what you get when you print it out. (Developed, of course, by Xerox - what a surprise.)

University of Sussex LibraryAnd we're off … the first sessions at AoIR 2004 (about 8 running simultaneously) have started now. I'm in one on mobile phones and wireless access. Kakuko Miyata starts this session, speaking of Internet use through mobile phones in Japan. She has three research questions: who uses mobiles to access the Net, how do people use these media, and does the use of the Net increase their social capital?

The view from my hotel room, complete with collapsed pier.Well, I'm in Brighton now - staying right now at a hotel just on the famous beach before I transfer to the University of Sussex for the Association of Internet Researchers conference today. Lots of noise last night, though, which isn't what you want when you're sleeping off your jetlag, so I've decided to make the best of it and get up early for a bit of a walk along the beachside.

We're on to the post-lunch sessions now - and the researchers' working group has been joined by the access working group. There are seven hypothetical usage cases for the archive which they've envisaged, and these will help us work out what the archive would need to be able to do.

Pierre Lévy now takes the discussion to another level; I heard him give a keynote at AoIR 2003 and was very impressed (and sufficiently confused at the scale of his project), so I'm looking forward to this.

Niels Finneman is next, speaking about the archiving of Danish election sites which led on to the question of developing a national Danish Internet archive. They didn't find either the Australian or Swedish models appropriate for their purposes, and so tried to find a middle way.

Alex Halavais is next; he also presented at AoIR last year. He points out that a few years back hyperlinks rarely crossed national borders (other than into the US, I suppose), but this has been reducing over time. Language borders persist, of course, and continue to mean there is little linking across language borders.

Paul Koerbin from the National Library of Australia now speaks on issues of how to select content for an archive of Internet content (and whether selection is even necessary given that there are wholesale archivists like Internet Archive). The NLA has a specific statute which leads its PANDORA project towards archiving selected content, however.

My first day in Britain is spent at the meeting of the researchers' working group for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). This is within a couple of hours of stepping off the plane from Brisbane - and I can now also claim the privilege of having showered next door to the boardroom of the British Library, which is where we have now convened (the boardroom, not the shower).

I attended a talk by Phil Graham from UQ Ipswich on Friday - mainly because of the intriguing title "Monopoly, Monopsony, and the Value of Culture in a Digital Age".