Shanghai Daily Science podcasts and the Shanghai Postal Museum

Shanghai Daily newspaper has a range of podcasts that serve as English language audio guides to an eclectic collection of museums in Shanghai. These include the Shanghai Postal Museum, the Museum of Traditional Medicine, the Earthquake Museum and the Shanghai Eyeglasses Museum. I tested one out at the Shanghai Postal Museum. After a short argument I lost control of the iphone and followed my 6 year old son around, being fed choice bits of information. It was quite a surreal experience, walking around an almost deserted museum listening to a pleasant male voice with a strong Scottish accent describe the exhibits!
Starting with bits of clay inscribed with messages for an emperor, we then passed through an interactive display of signal towers being lit on the great wall. There was a history of stamps, post boxes from around the world, posties as revolutionary fighters and unionists, and then the enormous expansion of the postal system to service Shanghai (and China's) huge population. It was really interesting.
The museum is housed in a beautiful 'eclectic style' building from the 1920s/30s, and there is a roof garden which was closed when we went. Many of the displays feature interactive elements to keep children button pushing, and there is a lot of old postal equipment on display. Definitely worth the (free) admission. The English translations are adequate but the podcast is a great bonus.

Shanghai Urban Planning Museum

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre is at People's Square, Shanghai. Like many Shanghai museums it is pretty deserted on a weekday, so there was no problem wandering around and looking at the exhibits freely. The most publicized exhibit is of course the scale model of Shanghai, as planned for the year 2020. This takes up a whole floor, and is great on the detail. We found our very own apartment building!
It is a beautiful piece of work and shows what a fast pace of development Shanghai is undergoing, with a lot of the proposed buildings already built or currently under completion. Another floor holds a model of the Shanghai 2010 Expo site, which is also fascinating with some great building designs.

There are a few interactive exhibits to please the kids, one of which enables you to race a boat at high speed across the bay and under the proposed bridge linking Shanghai to the new deep water port facility, or alternatively to race along a road and through tunnels at breakneck speed.
Old Shanghai is documented with a display of large historical photographs and beautifully produced very large format colour books of the old Concession era architecture.
The website link to the English site version unfortunately doesn't work, so you have to just look at the pictures!

First post from Shanghai

Well, I've been in Shanghai for 10 months, and firstly wikipedia comes online here for the first times since last July, and now I can finally access this blog!
So now I will be exploring the museums and galleries of Shanghai once again, and posting any interesting observations I have here.

definitions of web concepts

Blog/Weblog: site that is an ongoing chronicle of information, frequently updated, personal website.
It features diary type commentary and links to articles or other websites.

Characteristics:
- main content area organized chronologically, often into categories.
- -archive if older articles
- Way for people to comment on content
- List of links to other sites (blogroll)
- One or more ‘feeds’ like RSS, Atom or RDF

Content:
Articles/posts/entries regularly updated. Can either write online or offline and upload later.

Comments:
Readers can interact by leaving comments
Pingbacks/trackbacks are when you inform bloggers whenever you cite an article from another site. (like a trail)

Blog or CMS?
Cms – content management system, blogger software is a type of content management system for bloggers, which manages the site whilst the blogger inputs the content.

Archives:
Backlist of articles often based on date, can be based on categories, or alphabetically

Feeds:
Automatically monitoring a site and posts updates when new content appears. Eg RSS Atom

Blogrolls:
List of links to websites, often in a sidebar eg Blogrolling or blo.gs or del.icio.us

Syndication:
A feed is a machine readable (usually xml) content publication updated regularly.
Reads the feeds RSS or atom, and provides you with new stuff. You feed the links to the RSS feeds you are interested in into the feedreader and it will inform you of new posts.


Trackbacks:
person A writes something on their blog. Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say and to be able to comment on her own blog. Person B vcomments on own blog and sends trackback to person A’s blog
Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post This comment contains a link to Person B’s post.(Can be faked)

Pingback:
Sound the same, but uses different technology (XML-RPC and HTTP POST. Harder to fake that trackback, both pingback and trackback aim to add some sort of verification to the comment process, as you can usually claim to be anyone at all.

Comment moderation:
Allows website author to monitor and control comments.

Comment Spam:
Useless comments/trackback/ping posted to a blog. Can contain links to other sites or domains. Can be managed.

Permalinks:
Permanent urls to your individual weblog posts, as well as catagories and other lists ofweblog postings. The url shouldn’t change as others may link to your individual postings.

Pretty permalinks:
Idea that the link should give some idea of what content is eg not /index.php?p=423 but /archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/ gives idea of date, subject, and gives user opportunity to hack into other articles by using /archives/2003/05/ for example.

Social Media:
Social media enable cultural participants to both explore images of themselves and
distribute those images across broad online social networks. Museums worldwide are
starting to use social media such as blogs, wikis and vlogs to engage online
participants with new interactive experiences.
From here

Winding up

Last week of internship - a very full couple of months, with a lot of hands on experience. Blogging, wikis, storyboarding, dvd production, a very useful experience.
I have been immersed in a part of the online world that is expanding and experimenting with the new technologies and web 2.0 processes in a way that it is encouraging to see. The move into the online world for museums is a very active process.

visualisations of the web

Another nice tool for visualising the activity of the web. This one creates colour coded diagrams based on the type of tags on sites or pages - images, divs,tables etc. It creates very attractive and varied visualisations, and is available on a blog here. ALong with processor it provides an ability to create simple graphics (not quite so simple with Processor)that are visualisations of the flow of type of information.
If there are more around, please let me know!

tips for blog extras

A few 'how to' tips for blogger blogs.
Add ing an image to your header. Go to customise blog, then click edit for the header. In the popup window you can select to add a picture, either from you computer or the internet.
Adding a tag cloud. I used zoomclouds, where you just have to enter your rss feed source, which you can get by going to your blog feed, and then copying and posting the address from the browser. Once you have this and enter it into zoomcloud, it generates your javascript, which you then copy and paster back into a blogger widget (add html/javascript functionality in the customize design option of you blog). In zoomcoulds there are many editable layout and designs to choose from.
Adding images to your layout - again, go to customize layout, and choose the add picture option.

web tools

Museums remixed blog mentions The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning having some web tools that enable users to reuse and remix openly avaialble web resources. Sounds like a good 2.0 resource.

Exploratorium Explainers

Just had a look at a museum blog put together by the floor staff at the Exploratorium. A good example of blogging as a sort of inhouse journal/avenue to communicate. Great photos, interesting anecdotes - some personal, some more to do with museum experiences. I really enjoyed it!

digital stories

More work on the digital stories for TAPIR and LSID. Scripting, workshopping ideas and then storyboarding. We are trialling using the TAPIR blog for comment and feedback.

discussing Hyperconnections

Internal discussion forum here at the museum last week about the implications and issues raised by Hennes, dsicussed previously on this blog.
From the point of view of a newcomer/outsider, it was interesting to see how personally people at the museum related to the article, and how protective and passionate they felt about the issues raised.
It was a good starting point for the discussion, as it was presumably designed to be, with some of the dichotomies raised in the article heavily criticised. The article is discussed on the audience research wiki, and some of the comments made have already been posted there.

Archiving this blog site

Have you thought of a way to archive this web site? It may be as simple as copying the entire content page into a Word document or similar. It would be nice for you to have a record if and when the site is no longer maintained. You have obviously put considerable work into your entries and the broad range of coverage.

web steering committee

Attended a meeting of the web steering committee, to discuss implementation of the new museum website. A web restructure is a great opportunity to consider the incorporation of all the issues we have been looking at here - web 2.0, audiences both virtual and physical, interactivity, and the development of an underlying technical structure that is flexible, adaptable and easily updatable. Content managment systems for places such as museums need to have specific and unique characteristics, and to be tailor made to suit all the facets of the website. It will be an interesting process to see how this particular website is transformed.

LSIDs

This is a summary and explanation of LSIDs, by TDWG that explains some more about their meaning, purpose and implementation.
Summed up under 3 headings:
1. Think global, then everything's local
2. Have calling card, will travel
3. Carry meaning, not just data

LSIDs and their implementation will add to the concept of the semantic web, where the connections and interconnections of knowledge start to be searchable, and compileable. The basis of this process is the making of online data machine readable, so that software can be taught to seek out and compile knowledge from all sorts of digital objects (see the machine is us/ing us). A specific example in relation to LSIDs from the Kevin Thiele's summary is that of the image of a funnel web spider. Currently Google images searches for images on the web, and searches the surrounding html text for some inferred meaning or label - sometimes it is right, sometimes it is wrong. If the image was tagged with an LSID, it becomes possible to go directly to the metadata, via a query, which will return tagged, machine readable information, for example 'this image is of an organism', and 'the name of the organism is Atrax robustus'. If the species name changes, a tag could point the query towards the originating LSID, and so always be able to seek out the correct name. In this case, LSIDs are pointing to LSIDs, adding to the power and functionality of the system.
The parts of the LSID include the unique specimen identifier, and the issuing authority, which when combined make it globally unique. Even when combined with other data from other databases, the LSID makes the particular digital object always tracable back to its source.
The challenge now is to explain this in an interesting relevant format suitable for a short video piece.

Podcasting as a communication tool?

At the MA Conference went to this useful session about podcasting - seems acheivable and I'm wondering if using sound files that answer audience research questions might be another form of giving information via a q&a? In response to your query about how audience research is used in a museum it could be interesting to interview people about their use of research or projects they've worked on and then post this as an easy way to capture and distribute information rather than having to write it out? Might be a useful student resource - once I get the right equipment you and I could give it a go?

Anyway, the museum detective website has useful tips on podcasting and many links. Joanna Cobley spoke about this and I have blogged about it at my conference notes. Worth checking out.

Conference blog experiment

Hi Mel, been at the Museums Australia conference and tried to blog it - with mixed results. My posts about the conference and my thoughts on the process of blogging it are here.

Sorry to have neglected you this week - see you next week and I'll try and give the wiki a go...

more on TAPIR, LSID and Digital Stories

Discussion is continuing on the TDWG blog in order to develop a digital story format for explaining the TAPIR and LSID concepts. Lynda, Paul and I also had a bit of a dicussion about blogs, blog formats, and how confusing their structure can be. Although a web 2.0 concept, Paul pointed out how linear they still are. We need to do more research into how to structure a blog - has anyone any overall suggestions or specific suggestions? Being new to the process, it is hard to work out what are the limitations of the particular blogging platform and what are my own limitations from lack of experience and knowledge. I am struggling at the moment with customizing feeds - comment feeds or post feeds, individual post feeds, what to link to, how to structure an ongoing dialogue so that one can easily follow a particular theme...any suggestions?

semantic web

Whilst checking out the TDWG blog, came across a reference to the 'semantic web', and a link to the w3c specifications. Again, a concept that fits into the web 2.0, DOI, GUIDs discussions.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

The reference was in a good explanation of LSIDs etc, called A Case for LSIDs and RDF in Biodiversity Informatics

more on digital object identifiers

Interview with Tony Hammond about Digital Object identifiers is available as a podcast here, on Jon Udell's blog. Tony Hammond is a publisher of scientific journals including Nature. May be interesting in regards to conceptualising LSIDs, waffles a bit though.
Also, Lynda pointed me towards the Encyclopaedia of Life site, a project that aims to create a web page for every species.

Tapir, LSIDs and TDWG and what it all means...

More on the categorising of flora and fauna. Following on from my post of 1st May, here, a discussion with Paul and Lynda has clarified a bit more about what all the acronyms mean and what the plans for the future are.

LSIDs are a categorising system that sets out to bring digital collections management in biodiversity up to a web 2.0 standard. Ideally it replaces and encompasses the two previous standards for flora and fauna, makes the data accessible and searchable, and allows much greater aggregation of data.
In a practical sense, what this means is that you can search for and find an object (which can be an actual specimen, but not only a specimen!), and then, using its LSID, locate other objects related to it by location, by species, by characteristics, by institution, or by any information that is conveyed by the LSID.

To borrow from the LSID website:

Every LSID consists of up to five parts: the Network Identifier (NID); the root DNS name of the issuing authority; the namespace chosen by the issuing authority; the object id unique in that namespace; and finally an optional revision id for storing versioning information. Each part is separated by a colon to make LSIDs easy to parse.

So what does this do for the biodiversity community? Well, if museums et al take up the system, it means that all this data is available online: for research purposes, for species monitoring, for mapping and locating endangered and rare species, and so enabling a greater and more immediate response to management and planning for the future. Again, the Hennes article comes to mind, with its discussion about the future possibilities for museums and their collections.

How is it implemented?
Unlike other online cataloguing systems, this would be applied at the level of the institution. If the institution already has a DOI system in place, it may need tweaking to comply with LSID standards. The internal museum system would not have to be changed, however, as the LSID is divided into component parts (described above).
It is overseen by TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval)
As the website says:

TAPIR combines and extends features of the BioCASe and DiGIR protocols to create a new and more generic means of communication between client applications and data providers using the Internet.

So, TAPIR oversees the implementation of the protocol. If you feel brave enough to tackle a sea of acronyms you can check out the TAPIR wiki.

Please let me know if any of this is inaccurate, i have done my best to put it in layperson terms. Conceptually it sounds like a great idea to me. We also discussed The machine is eating us, as an example of a great way to convey what are conceptually complicated ideas in a simple, effective, interesting format. Are there other, successful ways to deal with these issues in a very short timeframe? that is the upcoming challenge.