Proposal Prolog:

I recently retired from George Eastman House where I served as Director of Interpretation (and for a time, by default, as make-shift CIO).   Collecting institutions unaffiliated with muscular university information technology face special challenges in the management, cataloging, interpretation, and sharing of fine-art photographs and related artists’ media.  For medium size or smaller museums and other independent organizations, the production of adequate collections information, mark-up, and data conformation for international aggregation has been difficult to staff and fund.  Even with today’s tools and increasingly powerful open-source cataloging projects, directors and trustees of institutions with other pressing programming priorities view such work as labor-intensive irksome toil – budget lines with the lowest return on the dollar and decades in the wilderness.

Proposal

My proposal is a thought experiment that would put aside the above conundrum, and imagine refinements to the somewhat industrial systems of Digital Asset Management (DAM) – allowing the museum asset (digital facsimile or born-digital object) to function as an armature for the accumulation of image/object metadata and all manner of links and affiliations.

We’ve gone from zero to sixty in terms of open access, social reading, massively-collaborative composition, and other features of the post-authoritative textual world.  I fully expect that we’ll break Mach 1 in a few short years.

Where does this leave us with regard to acknowledging our sources?  Will we continue to cite for the same reasons?  Will we devise new ways of bringing previous writers into our own texts?  What will documentation systems look like in a dozen years?  And exactly how far behind will our pedagogy lag?

In the spring of 2010, inspired by groups and communities who were social reading novels, member of the Twitter community decided to do a “One Book, One Twitter” reading online. “Let’s love one book together, our actual geographical location be damned.”  Very loosely organized participants voted on their selection – Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”. Considering the content and nature of the work it was a controversial choice. Confined to the 140 character limit of the Twitter platform and structured into a schedule of chapters, denizens of the domain began with high hopes and a lot of enthusiasm. I will consider the preparations, execution, and conclusion of this crowdsourced attempt to facilitate a global social reading, the pitfalls that the endeavor encountered, and the benefits of such a massive attempt to read together.

I will need a smart setup (computer, access to the ‘net, projection) to show a backdrop presentation.