The Reverse-museum and interactive archaeology.

Like most students, I'm sure, I spend a lot of time in procrastination instead of the research and writing that I'm meant to. I prefer not to say, "wasting time", since it can be put to unexpected use, such as the inspiration for this article. As part of this, I subscribe to the British Museum on YouTube, and blundering through computer games based in middle-age and colonial age settings.

(My obsession for the past year has been Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which aspired to be as realistic in detail as possible. It has generated its own niche of internet fandom/nerdiness, which is concerned with questions from "how to construct an ideal suit of armour?" to "how could you accurately transcribe a illustrated Bible found in a monastery library?".)

By interactive museum work, I was inspired by the Queensland State Archives, which found a creative use for their collection of architectural drawings: converting them into stages of an arcade game, based on the classic Pac Man. For the cost of getting there, you can chase a mate and a few unfriendly sprites around the Thursday Island watch house!

The British museum videos are especially engaging in how they use their exhibits to tell a story. these are variously about the technology in use, or how useful the exhibit itself would have been originally, the political and economic context where from which it originally derived, or even how people used to pass the time in a given time and place.

This led me to stumble upon the channel for Tod's Workshop, where I finally learned points of trivia like the difference between a knife/sword, or spear/Lance. Then there's this wonderful piece, which starts with the question: "could arrows actually get through metal plate armour?".

(If the rest of this article doesn't make much sense, I promise it will after be watching through that video.)

This video has thousands of fans and has taken the internet by storm, with good reason. Structurally, it is as well assembled as the best academic articles where likely to find open (and perhaps, the best metalwork). It starts with a research question and analyses the sources available to give insight into the answer. Todd then outlines the design of a test for existing assumptions and knowledge, then finds people with skills and materials appropriate to putting a field test or experiment together. They execute the plan, discuss the results, and then tweak their experiment further before arriving at a solid and convincing conclusion. this would make it a great piece for teachers to show their students (especially the little boys).

More fascinating I think we can agree was how they managed to design and faithfully recreate solid steel armour appropriate to the time period, including with the tools and techniques of that time, especially considering most mediaeval tradespeople were illiterate!

This got me thinking about what a new field for the GLAMR industries might be, for which my working label is “reverse curation”, or “interactive archaeology” (© Douglas 2019). Not everyone could or would go to a physical museum and view original or recreated exhibits, regardless of the subject. Video series by archaeologists, curators, archivists etc. on their exhibits could be great for communicating their value to a bigger audience, particularly in combination with skilled enthusiasts to answer questions about things we know must have happened, but we're unsure how or why. Perhaps include a professional conservator or re-constructionist/restorer or dramaturg to make the direct link that this is a real and serious thing people are paid to do.

Another example is just as impressive, but more terrifying and more topical. Since the mid-1980s, a group of sailors calling themselves the First Mariners has been recreating epic sea voyages in what I can only really think of as reverse curation, but also describes itself as “archaeological re-enactment”. They started with a migration from Indonesia to Madagascar, which is theorized to have been achieved dozens of thousands of years ago. That's easy enough, until you question how people from that place and time would have crossed the whole Indian Ocean or especially why. Similarly, a Viking dragon boat was built to specification, to test a voyage from Denmark to Ireland by way of Scotland. In early 2020 (summertime for us), this epic voyages team will build an ocean going raft to sail between Timor and northern Australia, again to see whether and how it can be done. They're combining stone axes and reed-grass rope with G. P. S. Personally, I'm excited for this! I’m even tempted to go and be part of it!

In the near future, I foresee a collection of historical resources hosted on dedicated cloud servers, which people can interact with virtually, to a degree that no decent archivists/curator would allow physically. Returning to the example of Tod's Workshop, I was fascinated by the discussion of how the breastplate is a different thickness in different places. Imagine a digital tool which allowed you to take a virtual replica and analyse it in as much detail as you wanted; far more than you'd read on the attending label in a physical museum. You could track the thickness of the metal, its chemical composition, variations in design over time, place of manufacture, owner, and so on. This could be especially useful for exhibits which an audience couldn't physically interact in the first place: massive historical buildings for analysing their architecture and construction; any famous art museum; any maritime museum; a war memorial which allowed visualisation and interaction with the battlefields, down to the weather conditions. From there, it would be easy to make themed virtual exhibitions. An alternative or even transition state could have exhibit labels with Q. R. Codes, readable by the audience members' tablet or smartphone. This would allow them to take time to absorb the details of the resources, including with their own accessibility settings, and in their preferred language. Interface functionality could even allow exploring the pieces without the metric system (for those who insist on using 1:16^th inches).

Diversity and Self-Representation

The question of how people represent themselves online has been fraught with complexity since the earliest days of social media. I have been intrigued by this for a long time, especially after living in parts of the world which use modified versions of the standard roman alphabet – or a completely different one altogether – and still navigating the technology and online spaces. I want to now present my thoughts and experience about digital diversity, as part of #23things.

Self-identification is an issue which people need to address in their earliest days of internet access, like what should be your first email address, and user names for different online fora. I for example was so boring that my first email address was the suggested gordon_douglas@hotmail.com. When the time came to replace it, the first idea that came to mind was to represent that I was born in Canberra. This has the added benefit of making it easier for other people to remember, after I give it out.

Curiously, communities form even at this early stage: I remember a friend – whose address was an numbered variant of doorhandle_@hotmail – being approached by other people with doorhandle_ addresses, organising out of spite for whoever had claimed the original doorhandle of hotmail. This included “hacktivists” from vastly different areas, including him in suburban Brisbane.

Social media and games further allowed the potential to customise a virtual character so that it appeared nothing like you. You could be part of the Orcish Horde in World of Warcraft, or one of various alien races in Mass Effect, and no one would really care about your real-world demographics like gender, height, or ethnicity. Virtual worlds like Second Life took character customisation to its extreme, allowing people to express themselves as having giraffe heads walking on springs instead of legs. 

Real-world demographics do penetrate these virtual worlds, however. English is easily the dominant language of Internet users, with Chinese as a strong second [I suspect that this is only modern simplified Mandarin, but may also include Cantonese and Taiwanese]. Russian is only meant to account for 109M users globally, but seems to be very active in a number of specific communities. These include several of my favourite computer games, as well as Bitcoin mining. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Internet subcultures have also developed over the past decade, with a stereotypical link between Koreans and Star Craft 2 for example, and other games being released explicitly based on Chinese and Japanese history and mythology, to counter the traditional European default.

What this means is that language barriers still arise. How do you join or join a conversation with someone you met online, but whose name you can’t read? 

Indeed, default Internet users are still assumed to be people like myself: younger, Caucasoid, Anglophone, able-bodied, and male. Even with evidence that females gamers make a growing portion of the market, and that 50% of all internet users are from Asia – not to mention growing numbers of people with disabilities – old habits die hard. The major producers still see North America as their main market, and so continue to populate their characters with Caucasian and African Americans. 

Robertson, Magdy, and Goldwater, in their 2018 study on use of skin tones in emojis, found that the lightest skin tones were the most popular in personal communications, particularly in Asia. This may have a relationship to how anime traditionally depicts otherwise distinctively Japanese ways of life, but with characters of Caucasoid appearance. They noted however that people with regular and reliable internet access are more likely to be of lighter skin-tones themselves, and so are more likely to be digitally active and visible. In North America, with 94% internet penetration, the use of various skin-tones is markedly more equal than in other parts of the world, further reinforcing the existing relationships between ethnicity, poverty, and access to technology. 

The above study was based on the difference between uses of digital icons where the skin-tone could/not be changed. The default is still a bright yellow, such as in the Simpsons or the typical smiley-face stickers. There is still a great case to be made for virtual escape-zones, where the characters or avatars are so far removed from real-world ethnicities as to be meaningless, in terms of working backwards. 

Online spaces were not intended to be political, and indeed, there is fierce backlash against “political correctness gone mad” and “social justice warriors” taking over. Real-world politics has also become fixated with denouncing “identity politics”, and yet, what is politics if not about identity? We commonly describe ourselves to others by our occupation, which carries a range of demographic assumptions. We are encouraged - at least in traditional political institutions - to self-identify by where we live, but we will curiously tell people which sports team we support freely, while information like ethnicity or country of birth has to be actively sought. People have always been diverse, and it should be no surprise that their diversity carries over to the internet.

What's in the name?

Thanks for checking out my new 'blog, which I intend to use as a personal catalogue of my investigation of information management. It's a surprisingly broad area, which was a bit of a surprise to me when I first started looking at it last year. People originally called it "library science", which I had never thought of as a career path before. After all, there's the old saying that if you love books, don't work in a library, because you'll never get to read them.

The other possibilities are quite broad: I previously worked in an I.T. company selling equipment for 'big data' storage and processing, so that's not something which is going away. Public catalogues and archives are used by all sorts of people, for all sorts of things. I even used the earliest maps of Ipswich from Queensland's State Archives to make Christmas presents last year.

To introduce you to my thinking, then, I want to go through my surprisingly inspired thinking for the name of this blog.
First of all, you might notice that it's a Latin pun: Libera mea, "liberate me".

When I was reading and writing for I.T. blogs, I thought a bit about why people still refer to "libraries" for data. This word itself also has a Latin origin, ultimately from liber, the inner bark of trees [paper]. Because the only people concerned with books for a long time in my cultural/historical context were the Catholic Church, the word libraries stuck, replacing previous English words like "book-hoard" or "book-house". Fun fact: the word libricide was also briefly in use, for the destruction of books, and knowledge generally.

[Side benefit, I get to say that I needed to play a computer game for uni. work. Hopefully, that tradition holds up!]


If you ask me, catalogue [for those of us who aren't American] is a much better word for handling records of various types. It comes from Greek: variously translated as "a reckoning list", "a complete count", or a "record of words". Then again, describing myself as a "cataloguing student" would be even more boring than library/data scientist, or data/information management.

Why libram? It turns out not to be a real word, in an academic sense. It was invented as a deliberately arcane word for a heavy book, since being popularised by media like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. It struck me as being very appropriate then, to describe a digital/virtual record; in a literal sense, it is not a real, physical object.

I didn't have much interest in blogging honestly before coming up with this title. Here's hoping it's enjoyable for each of us, as we delve into Libram Mea in Terra Australis, my digital rants and data-dumps.