News about projects of the Still Water lab at the University of Maine
The Digital Curation graduate program at the University of Maine offers online training in the workflow necessary to maintain digital files.
Demand for professionals who can manage collections of digital heritage and data continues to climb rapidly as related job postings rose by 130% in 2022, according to an analysis by UMaine’s Digital Curation program. This is a dramatic surge compared to the 61% increase over the pandemic years between 2019 and 2021.
Tags: digital curation, economics, study
NFTs and TikTok, two of the biggest digital trends in recent years, came under fire in 2022. Research by Still Water researchers helped to explain their advantages and vulnerabilities in over a dozen venues, including publications from Wired to Forbes and presentations from London to Shanghai. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: blockchain, network, New Media, presentation, preservation, press, publication, social media, Still Water, variable media
Disinformation. Tech monopolies. Surveillance capitalism. For all its benefits, our current Internet is rife with vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the powerful and lead to an erosion of trust among the rest of us. The latest of UMaine’s Digital Curation teleconferences asks whether changes to the fundamental dynamic of the web might help us engineer a more healthy and equitable digital society.
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Tags: blockchain, data, digital curation, network, presentation, privacy, sharing
A three-year analysis of jobs advertised on Twitter suggests that the pandemic increased demand for digital curation professionals, which has grown by almost two-thirds since 2019. Despite the maturity of the field–UMaine’s Digital Curation graduate program was launched in 2021–there still appears to be no consensus on what to call these positions, whose titles have ranged from the prosaic (Digital Archivist) to the esoteric (Emerging Data Practices Librarian).
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Tags: digital curation, economics, study
NFTs hold out the promise of democratizing art by letting digital creators sell their works directly to collectors. But does the reality hold up to the hype?
Tags: art, economics, network, New Media, presentation, press
UMaine’s Digital Curation program is thrilled to host a free public webinar with “free-range archivist” Jason Scott on Wednesday 5 May at 2pm EDT as part of its regular teleconference series. Anyone interested in attending can register for free. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: class, digital curation, presentation, preservation, variable media
Curators hoping to augment their collections with interactive exhibits often forget that today’s visitors walk in the door with powerful digital interfaces already sitting in their pockets. For the 2020 Maine Archives and Museums conference on October 8th, Still Water Co-director Jon Ippolito offers a workshop that walks participants through the creation of a cross-platform smartphone app to connect visitors in person or over the Internet.
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Tags: 3D, Android, app, Augmented Reality, digital curation, education, iPad, iPhone, mobility, museum, New Media, presentation, software, Still Water, virtual reality
How has the boundary between art and non-art shifted in the Internet age, and what does that mean for design, activism, science, and other creative activities? This question is the subject of a Dario Moalli’s fall 2019 interview with Still Water co-directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito in the venerable periodical Hestetika (Aesthetics). The issue has become more relevant during the COVID-19 quarantine, as exhibitions, concerts, and other artforms normally experienced in person have moved online. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: art, design, hacking, interaction, New Media, politics, press, publication, Still Water
As more of our work and entertainment moves online, the challenge of preserving websites and social media becomes increasingly urgent. In an interactive discussion on Friday 17 April at 1pm EDT entitled “Web Archiving for Everyone,” the latest guest speaker in UMaine’s Digital Curation program presents new tools and techniques for saving Internet culture for posterity.
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Tags: digital curation, education, history, memory, network, presentation, preservation, social media, University of Maine, web
At Yale’s May 11th symposium “Is This Permanence?”, Still Water’s John Bell and Jon Ippolito help curators and historians plan for a digital future in which “archival material” could be a contradiction in terms.
Tags: art, indigenous, LongHouse, memory, New Media, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, Still Water, University of Maine, variable media