Living in Digital Worlds

Designing the Digital Public Space

Naomi Jacobs, Rachel Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781472452832
• eBook ISBN: 9781317103981
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Living in Digital Worlds investigates the relationship between human society and technology, as our private and particularly our public lives are increasingly undertaken in spaces that are inherently digital: digital public spaces.

The book unpicks why digital technology is such an inextricable part of modern society, first by examining the historical relationship between technological development and the early progression of human sociality. This is then followed by an examination of the ways in which modern life is currently being impacted by the expansion of digital information and devices into multiple aspects of our lives, including focuses on privacy, bias and ownership in digital spaces. Finally, it explores potential future developments and their implications, and proposes that it is crucial to consider the design of technology and systems in order to support a positive and beneficial direction of change.

Each chapter includes case studies, primarily drawn from The Creative Exchange, a fiveyear programme which ran from 2012 to 2016 to explore the notion of the digital public space through collaborative cross-sector research.

Section 1
How did we get here?

1 Defining the digital public space

Today our world is made up of colliding parallel dimensions; the digital world is as ubiquitous as our physical world, and there is space in both worlds that we navigate and inhabit. This chapter discusses the origin of the term ‘digital public space’, how it is evolving in general practice and application, and how it might relate to these parallel worlds.

The Digital Public Space (DPS) project: BBC origins

The phrase ‘digital public space’ is becoming more widely known. There are however a variety of different ways in which it can be used and interpreted. As with any new term, there are divergent ideas of what it means. Therefore, before it can be explored in any great detail we must look at definitions of digital public space, and where the term originated.

Although a few isolated instances of the phrase can be found earlier, the first real use of the term comes from work by the BBC, announced in 2011. Earlier uses are mostly in the context either of use of the digital in cities (Frenchman & Rojas, 2006; Graham & Aurigi, 1997) or curated online spaces for the public to use (Hinssen, 1995). From May 2012 until March 2013, the BBC ran an initiative called ‘The Space’. Extended from an initial six-month pop-up service, this experimented with the idea of making the corporation’s extensive archives shareable, both within the BBC and with external organisations which might be able to make use of them. The Space was described as a service which ‘knits together BBC technology expertise and content from the corporation, BFI and UK arts bodies with £3.5m in Arts Council commissioning funding’ (Kiss, 2013). Its strapline was ‘the arts – live, free and on demand’.

Interaction was a key part of this early venture, as explained by Alan Davey¹, Chief Executive of Arts Council England: ‘What’s really exciting about The Space is that it will provide a communal playground for arts and cultural organisations, for technology wizards, and for audiences – anyone who’s open to new ways to connect with culture – to come in, to be creative, and to feed back about their experience.’

Key players in the development of this project were Tony Ageh (Controller of Archive Development) and Bill Thompson (the archive’s Head of Partnership Development). Following on from The Space, they led the DPS project which centred on a shared technical platform for indexing, searching and publishing material in partnership with other UK cultural organisations.

An article in JISC Inform² in 2013 sets out the following principles:

• Long-term sustainability of the material – it needs to be future-proofed against formats becoming obsolete.

• Detailed metadata needs to be available for every object.

• Freedom of access and use in education and research.

• Open technical standards.

• Trustworthy management of user data.

Arguably the most critical of these is the one which refers to metadata being available for every object. It is disingenuous to think of the DPS project as simply making the BBC’s previously broadcast programmes available online. As Brody and Fass describe it:

The Digital Public Space (the DPS) originally began life as a way of thinking about how the BBC archive could be made available and accessible to all. This was swiftly followed by the realisation that surrounding the BBC content was a huge seam of additional data and a new context for digitally mediated cultural experiences.

(Brody & Fass, 2013)

The archive is not just the programmes which have been commissioned, but every bit of information that was recorded and stored which surrounds those programmes. This might contain content including but not limited to scripts, soundtracks, contracts, unused footage and concurrent news. It is the surrounding content and links to other BBC materials and holdings that makes the possibilities of this connectivity so enthralling. This is made possible due to metadata: information about an item that allows it to be placed in a context. For example, traditional cataloguing information, such as the Dewey decimal system or ISBN numbers, allows books to be identified and placed within categories. If you go to the shelf to look for a particular book and the books have been shelved with others which fit in that category, you may find another relevant book which you did not previously realise existed. Metadata for digital content can be even more important, because you cannot easily ‘browse the shelves’ of the huge amounts of available information; information which may also be in many various forms and stored in different media. The connections between items are often going to be automatically extracted. This therefore requires correct categorisation and labelling, allowing links to be drawn between connected items, whether they are connected because they are created by the same artist, or have the same historical building or event as their subject.

Members of the DPS project hope that by creating a consistent system by which their collection is stored and catalogued, this can be extended out and linked with other similar systems. To this end, the working group led by the BBC includes partners such as the BFI, British Museum, Tate, the British Library, and many others. By pooling collective resources and strengthening the power of the way they are indexed, a truly comprehensive public archival service can be imagined. As Tony Ageh puts it: ‘The Digital Public Space is not a product or a service, but an arrangement of shared technologies, standards and processes that will be collaboratively developed and commonly applied, to deliver a set of principles, objectives and purposes against which collective enterprise can be evaluated’ (Ageh, 2013).

More recently, in a speech at Royal Holloway University in 2015, he described his vision of the DPS as ‘a secure and universally accessible public sphere through which every person, regardless of age, income, ability or disability, can gain access to an ever growing library of permanently available media and data held on behalf of the public by our enduring institutions’. These principles can be seen to be extremely aligned with the aims of the wider BBC. In 2006, Bill Moggridge wrote:

A policy goal of the BBC is to help people become engaged in the digital world, so they want to build engaging services for people who are not used to the Internet, or to any other digital media. For the design of the BBCi homepage, that means trying to make it really intuitive to explore the site, making sure that people have the opportunity to find out what they want easily. It also means helping them engage in dialogue by offering a simple way to comment on something they’ve seen, or send an email. Live chats and message boards are offered and connected with the BBC programs, so there is more two-way traffic.

(Moggridge, 2006)

This focus on audience engagement and interaction indicates that the BBC is interested not just in allowing people to access fixed content, but to create additional content of their own and contribute to the body of information.

The digital public space in this context therefore, appears to particularly pertain to open archives whereby existing data, metadata and digital objects can be shared in a meaningful way with and amongst the public. This worthy initiative is one that cultural institutions around the world are more and more seeing as a priority. Examples of this include the Tate’s ‘Insight’ project³ to digitise their collection, which has been running since 1998, and digitisation projects at many national collections including the Wellcome Library⁴ and Trinity College Cambridge.⁵

Larger international initiatives such as Google’s Cultural Institute, and Europeana, act not directly as stores for the digital artefacts themselves, but as curated spaces where archives from many different sources can be connected and displayed. In this way, they can be searched and linked more easily, by encouraging the use of metadata as described above. Clearly, we are moving more and more towards our cultural heritage not just being transferred to a digital form, but stored in such a way that it can be easily navigated.

The broader definition of digital public space

The BBC’s digital public space is clearly an exciting concept, but the term is too useful to leave in this specific context. More and more content and information is being made available online, and put in an associated framework where related strands can be brought together at the request of the user. But this is not limited to traditional ‘objects’ that may have been stored in a library, archive or museum. The ease of information transfer means that new information is constantly being created and shared. This may take the form of commentary, mashups, blogs or other new content created in a purely digital space by users as a form of expression. Increasingly it may also be information that previously would have been temporarily exchanged by individuals before vanishing, but is now retained in the online space forever – such as conversation and memories shared via social media platforms.

The objective of the BBC’s DPS project is about giving people access to digital content. Taking this a step further, the facility to access and manipulate is allowing people to interact with digital content. We often use metaphors of place and space when we ‘visit a website’ or ‘retrieve a file’. This may not purely be a habit of expression, but might be more fundamentally representative of the way that we manipulate information mentally, and indicative of something critical to the way people naturally interact online.

Ageh (2015) talks about the digital public space as a location, but then discusses mainly objects which exist within the space (metadata, archive material, created objects) without considering in detail the nature of the space in which these objects are located. There are various ways of considering digital public space – as a collection or archive, a single object made up of a collection, or alternatively as the vessel in which this collection is located. It is important to clearly define how digital public space will be used as a phrase going forward in this book, because there does not so far appear to be a clear consensus for this as a concept and so avoiding confusion with any other definition is paramount.

To start off with, let us look at each of the words individually. Each of the three words ‘digital’ ‘public’ and ‘space’ are ones we use regularly, but put together there are a variety of meanings, all of which have a great potential for exploration.

Digital

Although digital is a word used widely, from policy makers to equipment manufacturers, it is actually quite non-specific. Going back to the very precise definition, ‘digital’ describes information which is measured in discrete units, such as binary (on/off) states. Only values corresponding to one of these can be measured. The word comes from the Latin ‘digitalis’ which means finger – when you are counting on your fingers you can only use whole numbers. You cannot count to 4.6 using your fingers, only four or five. By contrast, an analogue scale or measure is smooth and gradated, and measurements can be taken at any point. An example of this would be a child who stands against a wall and makes a pencil mark once a month to measure their height.

However, these days when people use the word digital they are usually referring to the use of computers or other higher technology. Computers are by their nature digital, because they transpose information into a form that can be understood by a machine – using 1s and 0s of binary code. An image displayed on a computer screen has been translated into series of points, or pixels, which are either on or off. But because the use of computers is so pervasive in our daily lives, using the word ‘digital’ is becoming less and less specific. Phrases like ‘digital economy’, ‘digital strategy’ or ‘digital experience’ are trying to convey a much broader category of new technologies which cannot be identified simply as ‘using computers’, and so it becomes very difficult to pin down exactly what is meant by them.

When talking about digital public space, the term is going to be used to distinguish from non-digital public space, meaning that which exists free of high technological influence. Though as we will see, that does not exclude physical spaces. ‘Digital’ is a place characterised by the underlying principle of translating everything to 1s and 0s for storage, analysis, reuse and requisition. This brings with it implications of transferability and persistence: digital information is easy to copy, transmit and manipulate and this brings many implications for its use.

Public

‘The general public’ is a phrase that is used to mean, basically, everyone. It might seem that ‘public space’ then is something which has an obvious common sense meaning, as being available for usage by all. We might think about public toilets, or public gardens. This equates to the notion of the ‘commons’ or commonly held resources.

But dig a little deeper and it is a complex social construct. Public bodies are those which are funded, usually via tax, by the population of a nation to provide services for all. Part of this social contract is the understanding that those who have more resources available can contribute on behalf of those who might not be able to afford it. In that way, a society can make critical services available for everyone. Jill Cousins of Europeana, talking about the digital commons, describes the foundation of the concept of the commons as follows: ‘Underpinning the foundation of the commons is a set of resources in the public domain that are owned collectively or ‘held in common’ and shared openly among a community. The key feature is that, unlike private property, the ownership of resources held in common is inherently inclusive’(Cousins, 2012). For this to exist in terms of the digital realm, there needs to be a public social agreement in place to establish these ‘common resources’ as described above.

When talking about a digital version of this public space then, we are assuming that there is some overarching body which governs digital content. This is not the case – it is made up of a network of private co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of case studies
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1 How did we get here?
• Section 2 What are the attributes and effects of digital public space?
• Section 3 What are the consequences of digital public space?
• Section 4 How do we design digital futures?
• References
• Index