Phare Conference 2011: a recap
Net terug van de eerste editie van de Phare Conference in Gent. 1 woord: schitterend!
De website van Phare was nogal schaars met informatie, dus het was een beetje afwachten wat het zou worden. Er waren al enkele grote namen die kwamen spreken, dus dat het in orde zou zijn, was wel te…
First thing i googled after the Phare Conference yesterday was this. The Iraq War Wikihistoriography by James Bridle.
Note: indeed, you’ve read it well, i googled this when i got home, not during the talk. James Bridles’ performance was too interesting to interupt. And sadly enough i can’t pause and rewind a live talk yet.“The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs” is a twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War.
The twelve volumes cover a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.
The set is part of a project exploring history and historiography facilitated by the internet, and visualising information, opinion, narrative and discussion.
There’s more information about the project at booktwo. There are also slides and an audio recording available from dConstruct 2010, where I first presented the project, and more photographs at Flickr.
The Phare Conference 2011 is over. Thanks to everyone for attending the conference or following our updates from work / home. Check this website during the next few days for updates and more videos.
The REC-reporters were Niké, Mieke, Rosa, Willem & Thomas, always at your service :-)
James Bridle is closing this year’s Phare Conference as we speak. Eager as we are, we already talked to him before he went on stage.
“Internet has completely disrupted our society.”
Brice Le Blévennec of The Reference Internet Company talks about an optimistic as well as a negative effect of the internet on our society.
Savvy faces
We know you always wondered HOW all those savvy entrepreneurs, dotcom juggernauts and ever-hungry media that are shaping the internet today, actually LOOK like. Some of them unfortunately wanted to stay anonymous, but most of them eagerly nodded “yes” when our swift photographer asked to frame them.
Jeremy Keith explaining what he talked about during his opening speech. He’s not pessimistic neither optimistic concerning the long term thinking about the internet. It’s just a win-win or lose-lose situation. (uncut video)
The advantage of digital media is that they create non destructive documents. But how can we make sure that they are still online in a 1000 of years? Following Irish web developer Jeremy Keith, the starting point is a html format: “it’s sloppy in the way the web itself is sloppy.”
Nowadays, we trust our dreams, culture and data at urls which are in hands of people we don’t know. On the other hand, self hosting still seems something too geeky. A positive evolution, however, is the existence of an enterprise called ICANN, which centralized the domain names.
Another problem Keith dealt with, was about the kind of data you want to put online and the rights of those data. Ever thought about the consequences of buying music online? What if the site will go offline and your music will be no longer playable?
“No civilisation has ever saved everything, but the problem lies in the way we are approaching it”, it’s time to start long term thinking about the internet.
