29th July - 4th August
Discussed my ideas and work so far with Dave Robertson, my second supervisor, in two meetings this week.
Here's a summary of some of my thoughts.
5th - 11th August
I worked on my thesis proposal. But it was also Young Rewired State week!
**12th - 18th August
**Finally (belatedly) handed in my thesis proposal. (My review is scheduled for the 22nd August).
Last modified:
8th - 14th July
Semantic Web Summer School, much heat, much fun, much learning... Here's an index of my posts.
15th - 21st July
Friends visited. Progress included writing notes to myself to figure out just what my PhD outcomes really are, and why. Came up with:
1\\\\. Recommending how to usefully describe diverse amateur creative digital
content (ACDC) using an ontology.
a) What are the parts of ACDC that need to be represented? Identify and categorise properties. How do these differentiate it from other similar content?
b) What existing ontologies can be used to do this, and how do they need to be extended?
2\\\\. Building an initial set of linked data about ACDC, and providing means for
its growth and use.
a) Manual annotation of ACDC, and refinement (to test ontology).
b) Tools for automatic annotation of the parts of ACDC that it is possible to automatically annotate.
c) Tools for manual annotation by the community of content creators and consumers for the parts of ACDC that cannot be automatically annotated.
d) Tools to expose the linked data for use by third-party applications.
3\\\\. Create and test an example service which uses the linked data to benefit
content creators and/or consumers.
eg. Unobtrusive recommendations for collaborative partners (most likely); content recommendation; content consumption analysis (like tracking viral content); community building / knowledge sharing in this domain; ... .
22nd - 28th July
Brainstormed with Ewan about stage 3 (above), and came up with the idea of an interface that allows content creators to allocate varying degrees of credit for roles played by different people when collaborating on a project. This would serve to both gather collaborative bibliographic data, learn things about how different segments of the community allocate credit, and provide a potentially useful tool for content creators. With the future value that, if we can learn enough to estimate role inputs from different people, it could be used for things like automatic revenue sharing.
Then spent the rest of the week in London, frolicking amongst the YouTubers (including attending a meeting at Google about secret YouTube-y stuff), and annotated some ACDC. Write-up coming soon.
Last modified:
20th - 26th May
Continued to work on literature review. Nothing much to report.
Went to MCM Expo in London and managed to find time (around non-stop merch selling for TomSka and Eddsworld) to ask between 30 and 40 content creators - a wide variety of ages, experience, types of content - about their process and collaborative practices. The thing they all had in common (I randomly picked people as they were waiting in the two hour long queue to get autographs from Tom) was that they all do what they do because the love it, want to entertain people, and if the could earn a living from it too that would be amazing; but that's not why they do it. For many it's the dream, but not one they expect realistically to achieve.
That is why this is important to me. Because everybody should be able to make a living from doing what they love*, and the technology exists to allow it. How exciting.
Last modified:
6th - 12th May
Discovering lots of things to write about semantically annotating multimedia content. I decided there are three main ways to do this:
These categories overlap somewhat really, and when I get round to it I'll type my Venn diagram up.
Technical is easy, and a lot of that is automatically captured by hardware or software used to produce and edit works. It's also relatively easy to extract automatically. Standards like MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 take care of formalising it, and Jane Hunter turned these standards into semantic ontologies in 2002.
Bibliographic can largely - but not entirely - be covered by vocabularies that have been around forever like Dublin Core, FOAF and various library- originated things. Things that might be missing (or I just haven't found them yet) are associating roles with tasks involved in digital media production, since pieces are often a collaborative effort. has some idea of participants and roles, but the purpose of is digital rights management stuff, so it's more concerned with the distribution change, I think, than granular production of content. I haven't read much about it yet.
Content is more interesting, and potentially more useful for ordinary human beings. Imagine querying IMDB for "that film where John Goodman arrests an animated talking moose on a US highway" instead of scouring John Goodman's filmography or googling for pictures of animated meese until you see the right one. Annotating characters, objects and events, and stringing them onto a timeline is possible with OntoMedia. It's very focussed around narratives, which is great, but doesn't link back to technical so much. So if you did find the answer to that query, it wouldn't be able to serve up the timestamp of that particular scene.
On top of what I've looked at already, I still have this list to (re)investigate:
A thing I want to do is annotate some amateur content with OntoMedia and with ABC to see how they compare. Maybe I'll do asdfmovie, because it has associated comics, and multiple people participating in production. Then I'll do something live action as well, because I can't base all my research on non- sequitur lolrandom stick figure cartoons.
Now, back to work..
Last modified:
GemuCon, a first-time gaming convention, wasn't normally the sort of event I'd go to. Especially not with the £35 ticket price tag.
But it was being organised by one of my friends from my undergraduate, so I agreed to do the website (violating my no-more-freelance-work policy), and having botched together a custom registration system (scope creep) I was drafted in as 'Registrations Officer' on the committee, too. Since I was in Nottingham on the 4th for the Lovelace Colloquium anyway, I had no excuse not to go.
It was a good job I did, as the checking-people-off-who-arrive system was web based, and the hotel wifi was not playing ball from the outset. We'd thought of that of course, and brought backup wifi dongles. Neither of which could get signal. So half an hour before registration opened I was writing a script to export the database into a nicely formatted spreadsheet (sounds simple; wasn't; ask if you're curious) so that we had more than one machine (I had the database locally on my laptop) we could register over 700 people with. Then it was literally non-stop.
The other reason I was there was to morally support my good friend TomSka, who was attending as a guest because he is Internet Famous.
So my time was split between hanging out in the Operations Room (mostly) to help confused con-goers with things like registration, lost property, picking up merchandise, finding the stairs, getting free cupcakes; making myself useful by running up and down ten flights of stairs on errands (until I discovered the service elevator; two 6-man lifts between 800 people hadn't been so accessible); and hanging out with Tom and Matt.
On Saturday I helped him on his merch stall (we sold everything but all of the wristbands and all of the keyrings and earrings).
During the quiet times when there were other big events on, and thus no customers, I had to make my own fun.
On Sunday I live-tweeted Tom and Matt's panel "How to YouTube".
[View the story "TomSka's YouTube panel at GemuCon" on Storify]
This generated a small amount of controversy, as people who have never had to live off advertising revenue often hate people who live off advertising revenue even if it means they have found a way to survive by doing something they love, and can provide what they create to the world for free.
Frankly I'm just excited that we do live in a world where young creatives can be their own boss, make a living from doing what they love, and where the only hoops they have to jump through to do so are getting better at their craft. Whilst the advertising-centric revenue model may be outdated and may be despised by a good number of people, it's working for YouTubers at the moment and I haven't seen a better alternative present itself. Not everyone, particularly consumers of amateur media, can afford to pay for content they consume; accessing content for free empowers consumers too because their entertainment choices are not controlled by the same person who controls their finances (and thus probably most other aspects of their lives). I'm also fairly convinced that if the advertising revenue model falls flat in the future, amateur content creators will be much faster to recover and adapt than traditional media industries would.
The other great thing about this business model - for YouTubers at least - is that many/most don't start out with financial motivations. After a while they realise thier hobby is giving pleasure to increasing numbers of people, so they carry on, and suddenly a side-effect is that they're making money as well, at no cost to their audience. (This may change as YouTubing is acknowledged as a career choice).
Maybe naive or overly idealistic, but I don't believe anyone should be stuck doing a job they hate. It's a very, very long term goal for society, but the ultimate utopia is a world in which everybody is motivated and empowered to develop skills they enjoy or knowledge they're passionate about, and to put their abilities to some use that can sustain an acceptable standard of living for themselves and their family. Technology plays a crucial role in this (for a start, all the jobs nobody wants to do will be automated).
Anyway, Tom and Matt's panel was full of sound advice for digital creatives just starting out, though the current landscape is a very different one from when _they _began their YouTube journeys (for example: no YouTube).
Though I didn't experience much of it myself, GemuCon had all sorts going on. There were a few rooms packed full of video game consoles (for people to entertain themselves at leisure, as well as scheduled tournaments with cash prizes), a room of tabletop games, merch dealers and artists galore, various panels with the various guests, a talent show, a cosplay masquerade, and parties all night every night. Now, I don't like parties, but even I couldn't resist hanging around at a rave for a bit when the music was Pokemon theme remixes, or the Zelda soundtrack. Et cetera.
The most impressive thing about this wee convention (and 700-odd people is wee, compared with similar more established cons) is the air of friendliness and solidarity that seemed to be ever-present. Granted not everyone could have been happy at every moment, and there was definitely douchebaggery from time to time, but in general there was a unification of nerds; an unspoken understanding between the stereotypically socially awkward that allowed people to come out of their shells and enjoy themselves in a way that they might normally suffer abuse for, thanks the the common background provided by video game and Internet culture. This is somewhat tongue in cheek, but... hopefully you know what I mean.
I made a few new friends, too.
If you're thusly inclined, check out 'official' photos (here and here) and videos (here) from Team Neko.
And if you visit the new GemuCon holding page, don't forget to Konami Code.
Last modified:
