A Digital Collection in Three Days? You bet!

A digital collection in three days? You bet! Bring your shoes to WWW7 and have them digitised for posterity.

Shoes???? - a scientific, a pop culture, a historical collection?

Photographers, curators, technicians, web developers and historians, cataloguers and archivers will work together at WWW7 to create a unique digital collection. Cultural institutional experts and multimedia specialists will meet their technological counterparts. Collaboratively, they will create, digitally record and display a special collection of selected artefacts. Together they will share their knowledge in a series of workshops.

One part of the activity will be the making of the collection. The other will be the workshopping of techniques, issues and dreams associated with on-line cultural institutions of the future.

Participants will record and carefully document the processes being employed. As the digital collection evolves, world experts will canvass and workshop the experience, issues and concerns of administrators, lawyers, users and curators. WWW developers and those who set standards will met face-to-face with the everyday workings of the cultural communities for whom they have developed many of the technologies. As soon as they are created, the digital recordings will be available on the web.

Participants will be able to consider prototypes of the leading examples of digital management systems. Discussion will focus on what is favoured and what isn't. These deliberations will be reported as a brief for follow-up work in the 12 months before the next WWW conference in Toronto in April 1999.

NOTE: the Cultural Track is part of the main WWW7 Conference and participants can attend sessions within the track and/or in other tracks.

The aim of having a 'shoe museum' in development is to provide a live example of the processes and range of equipment, expertise and activity involved in making a digitial collection. The growing collection will be used as exemplary of what can be done. Discussions in the Cultural Track Plenary sessions should be representative of a wide range of interests and fields of endeavour. (For details see draft program and special guests list.)

Imagine your shoes visiting the following workstations:

entry point - (take off your shoes please)
photography station - let them pose for the photo of their life
live video station - move them about a bit
sound recording station - walk on grass, sand, paper, tell their story
3-D image-recording station - make your shoes VR-like
cataloguing station - describe the digital objects that have been made from your shoes
exit (and put your shoes back on your feet)

What will happen next? Can anyone determine what shoes you are wearing by checking them against records of shoes kept for forensic scientists? Has anyone else worn their shoes on five continents? What kinds of people have shoes like yours - would they be fun to have lunch with? what else have Nike wearers in common? etc...

Last updated on 23 March 1998. Contact: Webmaster. This URL: /cshoes.html