JISC Digital Media Blog Archive
March 2009

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) survey

Posted by John Hargreaves on Tuesday 31 March 2009 at 2:58pm
Tags: digital collections

The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) provides free access to over 100,000 high quality digital images which are copyright cleared and free for use in UK education.

Contributions to the image collections are made by universities and museums from across the UK.

You can help VADS gather information about the usage of the image collections by completing a short online survey.

The survey will take a few minutes to complete and will be available online until Friday 3 April.

Newly updated metadata advice

Posted by John Hargreaves on Tuesday 31 March 2009 at 12:17pm
Tags: delivery | digital collections | metadata | news

We have just revised our Metadata Standards and Interoperability advice paper.

The advice document is one of a series providing the community with support on a wide range of metadata-related issues.

A hard day’s noise

Posted by Steve Hull on Monday 30 March 2009 at 12:28pm
Tags: audio editing | sound recordings

A scientist has used Fourier analysis to try to answer one of the great questions of 20th century popular music: just what was that chord at the beginning of A Hard Day’s Night?

mp3HD has arrived

Posted by Joel Eaton on Thursday 26 March 2009 at 12:45pm
Tags: compression | file formats

Thomson, who licence the mp3 patent, have announced the arrival of a new lossless format: mp3HD. The new format allows mathematically lossless compression of audio material while preserving backward compatibility to the mp3 standard, becoming a hybrid lossless/lossy format.

Evaluation software has just been released (testing is imminent here), to convert 44.1KHz 16-bit wav files - though it’s a shame testing can’t done be done on higher spec files and is currently limited to Windows or Linux machines, but let’s hope that won’t last too long.

Whether mp3HD proves as efficient as other lossless formats such as FLAC remains to be seen, but in the current climate, a hybrid format such as this could prove popular for people using different libraries, i.e. one on a home PC and on a portable device, without the switch to a whole new format.

Web photos may never look the same again…

Posted by Antony Theobald on Thursday 26 March 2009 at 12:22pm
Tags: finding images | photographs

A new service that overlays ‘product information’ hotpoints on web images has launched.

The Google-backed Pixazza is aimed at web publishers who want to make some extra cash by ‘visual commerce enabling’ (their words) existing images on their sites.

Product information hotpoints are overayed when a user mouses over the image. Image: Pixazza

In return consumers get the ‘engaging user experience’. And presumably some form of inner warmth from mousing over a snapperazzo’s latest uploads to discover just where Ms D-list bought her new shoes.

That said, it’s a clever idea and has some advantages over traditional web advertising for both publishers and audiences - the ads take up no extra space, can be implemented with a single line of javascript and are only visble when a user chooses to mouse over the image.

Amazon and Macy’s are among the 60 advertisers already signed up, and although the service has gone live on ‘multiple websites’ it’s not clear who they are - only that they are fashion-related so far.

Cloud computing

Posted by Steve Hull on Wednesday 25 March 2009 at 8:43am
Tags: e-learning | event | workflow

Last week the Futures Café at the University of Bristol held a presentation about cloud computing with particular reference to the use of Google Docs in education.

There’s a blog entry about it as well as a page with a couple of short videos and papers.  They provide a very good introduction to the tool as well as a worthwhile discussion of its pros and cons in the education sphere.

Bloom’s taxonomy for the digital age

Posted by Steve Hull on Tuesday 24 March 2009 at 2:44pm
Tags: e-learning | flickr | teaching | youtube

Mike Fisher has a fascinating blog called DigiGogy.  On it he recently created and posted a visual representation of Bloom’s taxonomy with a slew of Web 2.0 tools positioned on it in appropriate places.

Not as visually interesting but extremely interesting is a paper by Andrew Churches about Bloom in the digital world.  Both are referenced in another interesting blog, Brave New World, created by Tania Sheko.  And that’s all I’ll say.  You’ve got more than enough to be getting on with.

If you need to print…

Posted by Antony Theobald on Tuesday 24 March 2009 at 11:09am
Tags: news | printing

We have just revamped the printable versions of our web pages.

For environmental reasons, we don’t encourage you to print our pages unless absolutely necessary. However, if you do need to print, we have created a print stylesheet which strips out the sidebars and top navigation. Not only does this make the page easier to read, it uses up less ink and paper.

You can see what the printed page will look like by using your browser’s Print Preview (usually under File > Print Preview).

Some browsers (e.g. Mozilla, Firefox and Safari) will spell out URLs in brackets after hyperlinks. You can check whether your browser supports this by looking at the Print Preview of this page - if it is supported, links like the one in the previous sentence will be followed by the URL in full.

Remember to use your printer’s two-sided (duplex) printing option if it has one. You will also find that our advice documents print well in booklet format, using half as much paper again.

Join us at the JISC Conference

Posted by Antony Theobald on Monday 23 March 2009 at 1:16pm
Tags: event | news

We’ll be at the annual JISC Conference in Edinburgh tomorrow 24 March 2009 - come and say hello!

We’re on the JISC Services stand, so not only can you find out more about us you can also hear about out sister services - JISC infoNet, JISC Legal, JISC TechDis, JISC Netskills and JISC Procureweb. Hope to see you there.

NIACE E-Guides event

Posted by Zak Mensah on Friday 20 March 2009 at 10:48am
Tags: e-learning | event | news

We will be at the NIACE E-Guides National Event 2009: Refresh and Sustain on Thursday 26th March 2009. It will be a day full of workshops aimed at those interested in e-Learning. We have a stand and will be showcasing some of our digital media knowledge and be available to answer any questions on how to use your digital media.

SlideShare mobile version

Posted by Zak Mensah on Wednesday 18 March 2009 at 2:15pm
Tags: e-learning | mobile

SlideShare, the web service that allows sharing of presentations that we have recently covered in an advice document, has just launched a mobile version. This now further simpifies using the service with a mobile device.

In a quick test with the mobile version it loaded our presentation over wifi quickly and is easy to use.

We will give it a full workout and report back what, if any impact this has for e-Learning

Unlocking Audio at the British Library

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Friday 13 March 2009 at 3:32pm
Tags: digital collections | digitisation | news

JISC Digital Media will be at the Unlocking Audio conference at the British Library on Monday and Tuesday next week (16-17 March).

Joel and I will be there, conferring with the audio experts from the Sound Archive at the British Library, and other members of the Audio in Education community. We will have an open-to-all slot on Tuesday morning, if you are there too, where we’ll be talking about the support we’re offering the HE, FE and GLAM sectors in audio, and inviting your questions. If you have any queries about using audio in education, please come and make contact, and we can start to address them. Look out for the JISC Digital Media banner, and say hello!

Designing Sound - a new audio reference text

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Friday 13 March 2009 at 11:57am
Tags: composition | music | open source | software

Designing Sound gives us a new reference text on the physical and psychological nature of sound itself, and the modelling of audio environments, instruments and effects for the entertainment industry, music and research. It also includes tutorials and guidance on almost every aspect of the open-source sound design software Puredata, on which its author, Andy Farnell is a recognised authority.

Firstly, a disclaimer: I have known Andy Farnell for many years, and have been fortunate enough to work with him on many music and audio projects. This familiarity happily enables me to say with total confidence that the author of Designing Sound is an exceptional sound designer, with a deep theoretical and technical understanding of sound. Here he starts literally from first principles, and builds a foundation from the physics of sound, which informs the subsequent broad discussions and detailed expositions of how to generate and model real-world sounds with digital systems. There is also a welcome acknowledgement of the emotional effects of sound and music, which stops this becoming a dry and cerebral read, and constantly reminds us of why audio is such a powerful tool in artistic, scientific and educational communication.

The latter two thirds of the book is devoted to a full exploration of the open source object-orientated audio programming language Puredata, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Max MSP, and indeed shares the same roots. Puredata, as a bit of a ‘poor relation’ of Max MSP, has always lacked a definitive guide or manual. Not any more. The totally modular nature of Puredata enables the graphical assembly of almost any digital audio generation system, for both music and sound effect creation, and its use is explained in a logical and intuitive way, relatively free of technical jargon.

I would strongly recommend Designing Sound to anyone with an interest in sound design and generation, and it also carries huge relevance to musicians, sound engineers and composers, through a transparent and detailed examination and analysis of the very building blocks of sound. Any Puredata user will, it goes without saying, find it completely invaluable reference, as will educators and researchers in all areas which use creative sound design.

Promo film for the Red camera

Posted by Steve Hull on Tuesday 10 March 2009 at 1:44pm
Tags: cameras | resolution | video | workflow

Here’s a nice little promo with a few effects shots that lets you see the Red being used on a real shoot.

Note that the workflow they’re describing would apply to any digital camera that uses hard drive storage.  So what’s so great about the Red?  Simple: its resolution is so good that people are willing to use it for top quality TV and film work.

Spotify - The future of online music?

Posted by Joel Eaton on Tuesday 10 March 2009 at 11:30am
Tags: finding audio | music

Spotify is an online music streaming service with a difference.  On the one hand it provides a subscription based service where a daily or monthly pass can be bought and an unlimited amount of music can be streamed. However, in a bold new move a free unlimited streaming service is available to all. Obviously ‘free’ in this day and age always comes with a catch, and the one here is that between every few songs you are aurally gifted with an advertisement. The underlying question to the success of such a service is whether people will accept their personal listening time being invaded by the modern marketing machine? Whether in agreement with such practice or not, it is hard not to admire the ingenuity of Spotify and their way of reacting to the current trends in music listening and sharing. Specialist sites such as Boomkat and Bleep have long offered preview clips of tracks for free but is infiltrating music with ads a step too far? This issue has been a hot topic for years, as marketing and music have often gone hand in hand. From the soft drinks industry’s ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke’ back in the 70’s through to their use of artist endorsement including Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. With hip-hop and R&B stars name-dropping designer clothing brands and companies paying big money for the advertising rights of songs, and even albums (ahem, Moby), surely we are already accustomed to advertising ingrained in commercial music, or is this idea a step too far for most music fans?

To run Spotify you need to install its front-end software (downloadable from the Spotify website), which doesn’t look too dissimilar to a cross between Apple’s itunes and Adobe’s Photoshop Express, and runs on Windows and Mac OSX. It is designed primarily for personal listening as opposed to other streaming services such as Last.fm, which is more community orientated. Providing you with recommendations based on your recent searches and new content, the search feature allows you to search through millions of online songs with the rights all paid for by the advertisers. Although the search feature provides quick and accurate results, it is particularly restrictive in that you need to know what your searching for in the first place as there is no browsing or advanced searching features available yet.

So what music is available? Well, Spotify have climbed into bed with CD baby, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin and The Orchard, some of the industry’s biggest names. Also on the Spotify bandwagon is Naxos, the worlds leading classical music label. These deals have provided a wealth of music encompassing a wide range of genres catering for all tastes.  As a result Spotify’s popularity is steadily increasing and with the ability to share playlists with others boxes are ticked for fans of online networking and the sharing of listening habits.

Spotify has found a simple and easy way of delivering music into people’s homes for free and need to stay ahead of the game in order to hold onto and expand their market share. Early teething problems have already included some major security issues but hopefully these will be dealt with prevented from happening again in the future. Luckily they are already looking to the future with support for iphones and Android already in development, a far cry from the standstill adopted by many of the record companies in following market needs.

Introduction to VLEs

Posted by Zak Mensah on Tuesday 10 March 2009 at 9:19am
Tags: e-learning | news | vle

We have just released a new advice document titled Introduction to the Use of VLEs with Digital Media that covers the basics of what a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is and an overview of how digital media can be used within the VLE. We welcome feedback / experiences on any topics that you feel should be included to further clarify this topic. For example, when I first used a VLE I could not easily navigate it to find my grades. It can be a big leap and we hope to be along with you on the journey.

Pendulum update

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Monday 09 March 2009 at 11:44am
Tags:

(R)Evolution

As it turned out, my installation of Pendulum Music was more of a development of the original piece than a straight performance. The nature of the space allowed the audience to walk around and interact with the microphones, and experience it more as an audio experiment. I asked the stewards not to stop people swinging the pendulums (gently!), and as a result, people were experimenting and playing with them, and exploring the different feedback tones generated at different positions. It became more of an exercise in sonic entropy, with the movement of the pendulums dissipating the more intense feedback into the enormous and resonant space. Very powerful, and lovely to pique people’s curiosity with quite a whimsical, and not traditionally ‘musical’ audio piece. A great success !

One of the four amp/mic combos (Vox AC15 and vintage audio-technica) at close range, photographed by Kevin Scholtes

I’m now planning to develop the recording of the clocks at Blaise into a separate stand-alone piece, using non phase-aligned Low Frequency Oscillators to modulate a range of digital effects, and create an interesting and unsettling digital space for them. Hopefully the Art Week here at the ILRT will give me an opportunity to show this in an early form.

Augmented reality in the comfort of your home…

Posted by Steve Hull on Friday 06 March 2009 at 3:04pm
Tags: animation | video | youtube

There’s a remarkable little AR program you can run if you have a webcam on your computer.

Just print out the sheet and hold it in front of the webcam and, well, it’s much easier to look at the explanatory film clip than for me to explain it.  For those interested in developing an educational application using this software the source code is downloadable.

Summer workshop programme

Posted by Dave Kilbey on Wednesday 04 March 2009 at 1:11pm
Tags: news | training

We’ve just published our new series of courses for the summer term

All of these courses are scheduled to run in Bristol. However, we are often able to provide training for you in your institution and almost all of our workshops can be requested as a one-to-one (see the training page on our website for details of this).

The new courses are proving to be a big hit

Following the expansion of our remit into moving images and sound, we have started to augment our comprehensive list of courses. Our Digitising Analogue Video Recordings course has proved immensely popular and booked up almost overnight. For the summer term we have two of these workshops scheduled: one on 15th May and one on 4th August

Our new Audio Production: Recording Lectures, Seminars, Interviews and Podcasts has also proved very popular and is now full. This is due to run again on 26th June

More new courses in the pipeline

We are also currently in the process of writing a host of other new courses involving moving images and audio which will be appearing in the autumn term - more details to follow shortly.

Getting to grips with copyright

Copyright and Digital Images has been one of our most popular courses since its launch several years ago. Both spring term courses booked up almost immediately so we are offering two chances to attend this workshop in the summer term: firstly on 19th May and again on 7th July. This course is run by Naomi Korn, an independent Intellectual Property Rights consultant; a leading expert in the field and a very highly rated trainer.

A few places still available

If you require any guidance on building image collections or improving your Photoshop skills, there are still several places available on the courses running in March. Due to demand we have also just added a new date for Essential Techniques in Digital Image Capture on 28th April. This course will enable you to really get to grips with scanning images and using a digital SLR.

If you would like any further information about the training that JISC Digital Media can offer please contact me directly by phone or e-mail - details below.

Dave Kilbey (d.kilbey@bristol.ac.uk / 0117 3314332)

HD webcam and webconferencing

Posted by Steve Hull on Wednesday 04 March 2009 at 12:34pm
Tags: interfaces | news | software | video

Thanks to Steven Jack at the University of Glasgow for this heads up.  Tandberg has just announced a 720p webcam and a company called Mirial has just come out with webconferencing software that supports 1080p at 30fps!

New video file types document

Posted by Stephen Gray on Wednesday 04 March 2009 at 11:19am
Tags: file formats | news | video

Choosing a Digital Video File Type is a new advice doc that takes a look at different files types and how they might be used for different purposes. Suggestions are made for creating, capturing, archiving, and delivering digital video. Please comment if you have had any experiences (good or bad!) of using these or other file types.

Making a promo video on the cheap

Posted by Steve Hull on Tuesday 03 March 2009 at 4:28pm
Tags: video | youtube

This happened last year, but it’s still pretty interesting.  An unsigned band made a promo video for almost nothing using CCTV footage.  Here’s a brief description of it in ArsGeek.

Arrival of audio production training

Posted by Joel Eaton on Tuesday 03 March 2009 at 10:38am
Tags: audio editing | microphones | news | podcasts | sound recordings | staff training

It is exactly one month until the launch of the JISC Digital Media Audio Workshops, which kicks off with Audio Production: Recording Lectures, Seminars, Interviews and Podcasts.

The workshop on April 3rd aims to provide knowledge and hands on practical training with a variety of professional recording equipment to prepare you for all the common troubleshooting aspects and production considerations to be taken into account when recording spoken word events. The workshop provides a modular training approach culminating with an ‘On-the-day’ scenario, where participants combine all the skills taught into a real-time recording and production event.

Topics covered include:

• Production and recording techniques
• Correct setup and use of recording systems
• Basic and advanced editing skills
• Delivery and content management

**Edit** This is now fully booked (please see our summer training timetable for future dates).

Large scale photo project visible from space

Posted by Nigel Goldsmith on Monday 02 March 2009 at 9:20am
Tags: photographs | photography

The French photographer, JR has created a huge photographic installation on the rooftops of houses and on the sides of trains that pass through a large Kenyan slum.

The photographer hopes that the Google Earth satellites will record the project. The artist has previously displayed his large format prints in prominent positions around the world including TATE Modern in London.