"Ill Get That Off the Audio": A Case Study of Salvaging Multimedia Meeting
Records
By: Thomas P. Moran, Laysia Palen, Steve Harrison, Patrick Chiu, Don
Kimber, Scott Minneman, William van Melle, Polle Zellweger (Xerox PARC)
Seeing as how I have an undergrad degree in archaeology, and am interested
in capturing, indexing, and archiving multiple medias (Radio-IDT), I found
this paper particularly interesting. I think the analogy to salvage is a
good one. Just as physical objects become set in a linear geologic strata
over time, so do media artifacts. By uncovering these layers in a
meticulous fashion, and under a strict methodology, context may be observed
and information gleaned. By capturing media with many time stamped
contextual cues, one can later sift through the layers with much more speed
and accuracy.
This research focuses on the creation of tools to accurately capture the
fluid communication of a meeting, and then utilize the multimedia records
within a larger work process. By observing a subject at PARC over a period
of several months (after he had been given time to become familiar with the
system), they observed the development of multiple salvaging strategies.
These strategies became extremely integrated with both the act of capture
and retrieval. This integration of activity may be the most compelling
results to emerge from the study.
Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms
By: Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer (MIT Media Lab)
We touched on some of this research the other day, speaking about the
string which wiggled in response to network activity. While the original
implementation of the Live Wire was done by an artist in residence at Xerox
PARC, this is a good example of Ishii and Ullmer's concept of background
information display. Pushing the idea of foreground/background
communication, they propose the three key concepts of Tangible Bits:
interactive surfaces, graspable physical objects, and ambient media.
There is some very interesting associated with this research, with no key
concept receiving more attention than the other. Graspable icons (phicons)
are being used to symbolize real world objects, as well as store data.
They are being associated with ubiquitous environments as well as with
traditional optical displays as alternatives to wimp input. particularly
interesting is their allusion to the use of light, shadow, and transparency
in future displays.
I could see much of this type of seamless tangible interfacing as an
extension to classroom 2000 (especially if granted the same budget).
See you on Tuesday,
Michael
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Michael Koetter
phone: <404 377-9386>
email: <michaelkoetter@mindspring.com>
url: <http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/idt/students/mkoetter/>
MS Candidate - Information, Design and Technology
School of Literature, Communication and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0165