The first talk of the day was by Professor\u00a0Jim Hollan from the\u00a0University of California, San Diego, who had been invited to the conference as a keynote speaker. Jim spent the first half of his talk discussing how the traditional form of computers was rapidly disintergrating into a variety of new forms. He suggested that one of the most exciting things about this development was that\u00a0it was providing\u00a0new opportunities for social scientists to capture genuine \u2018real-world\u2019 activity.\u00a0The second half of his talk focused on\u00a0what he referred\u00a0to as ‘history-enriched digital computing’. Jim has published numerous papers on this concept, the most notable being ‘read wear’ and ‘edit wear’. Jim also presented some software he has developed called ‘ChronoViz’. ChronoViz allows multiple chronological data sources to be visualised alongside one another and annotated, a task which is currently very difficult for most social science researchers.<\/p>\n The next session was a series of\u00a0talks by a panel of industry experts. These\u00a0were Gary Bolton from Microsoft, Ian Marshall from the financial services, Dave Sharp, a games developer from Binary Asylum, Alan Whitmore from medical science and Aart van Halteren from Philips Research. Each speaker was asked to identify their top challenges for the Digital Economy in respect to their specialist areas. While each of the speakers presented relevant and challenging issues for the Digital Economy, it was the issues raised by Dave Sharp that promoted most debate from the audience. His speech critiqued the relationship between the creative\u00a0industries\u00a0and academia, and he suggested that there needed to be more emphasis on turning good academic ideas into commercially viable solutions. He stated that academia moves too slow for the creative industries, and that academia left graduates ill-prepared for jobs.<\/p>\n After lunch we headed off to smaller workshop sessions. The workshop I attended focused on the use of game engines to support academic\u00a0research, which offers numerous advantages over other tools including reliability and the availability of numerous pre-built libraries. We also\u00a0talked\u00a0about ‘gamification’; the process of turning mundane\u00a0tasks into \u2018games\u2019 which are fun for the user.<\/p>\n The next session I attended was about music and sound. The first presentation in this session\u00a0examined\u00a0how families or groups of people in the same household use\u00a0and consume\u00a0music. The speakers had found that new technologies have energized opportunities for sociality in the home and have enriched\u00a0social interactions around music. The next talk examined the potential of musicological tools in two contexts – in\u00a0the British Library and in secondary school music classes. Based on ethnographic studies conducted in schools the speakers had developed a tool built around YouTube, which supported students by indicating which chords to use to play along with a video clip. The final presentation in this session was given by a curator from\u00a0the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The Pitt Rivers museum has a large and relatively unknown archive of sound recordings, and this talk explored how this archive of sounds was being put to use in the museum to improve the visitor\u2019s experience of their collections.<\/p>\n Given my interest in archaeology I attended the cultural heritage session next. The first talk in this session was about an exhibition hosted at Doctor Johnson\u2019s house in London. This exhibit consisted of a pen and paper interface which allowed visitors to invent\u00a0their own word for a\u00a0dictionary.\u00a0Once a\u00a0visitor created a physical\u00a0entry into this dictionary it was automatically transferred to a digital exhibit and website. Overall visitors input 742 original and innovative words into the dictionary! The second talk examined\u00a0Scottish heritage\u00a0sites that are currently unstewarded and have few visual remains. To address this the speakers described a location-based system they had developed which augmented the environment using audio. Among the teams’\u00a0findings was the discovery\u00a0that some features in an open environment can constrain\u00a0where visitors move, whereas others encourage further\u00a0exploration.\u00a0The final talk in this session examined how community cultural heritage can\u00a0be supported by technology. Their work lead to the creation of CURIOS, an open source website and data management system.<\/p>\n The final talk of the day examined how the concept of ‘futures’ could be used to develop new ways of thinking about the digital economy. The speakers gave examples of how predictions of the future have helped to shape\u00a0new technologies, and suggested that we could perhaps use \u2018futures\u2019 as creative spaces for design, helping us to escape present-day constraints to thinking. The day ended with poster presentations and dinner, which\u00a0were held at the Great North Museum in the evening. Both myself and Ramine from Southampton University\u00a0presented posters in a\u00a0lively and\u00a0stimulating session.<\/p>\n Don Marinelli gave a hugely entertaining and persuasive keynote presentation\u00a0at the beginning of the final day of the conference. His talk focused on the ‘Entertainment Technology Centre’ that\u00a0he and Randy Pausch set up at Carnegie Mellon University. Despite having\u00a0an academic background and working in academia, Don became disillusioned with it for many reasons and therefore decided to try out a new style of student program focusing on interactivity and group work. There are no structured modules taught on this course, except for in the first quarter. Don emphasises links to industry on the course and companies pay to have work done by the students. The ETC is so respected commercially that students are guaranteed a job in industry on graduation. My favourite aspect of the ETC was the effort Don and Randy had put into making the facilities \u2018cool\u2019, and there was a definite focus on fun in the department.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/digitaleconomy.soton.ac.uk\/files\/2011\/11\/Tom-and-Poster1.jpg\")
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