Zeega (was extraMUROS)
This project is a unique partnership between metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research unit at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; Frances Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design; and Zeega.org, an independent non-profit organization.
Matthew Battles, Managing Editor + Curatorial Practice Fellow, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Joseph Bergen, Lead Interaction Designer + Developer, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Luís Filipe Brandão, Lead Database Designer + Developer, Zeega.org
James Burns, Creative Technologist and Relational Knowledge Fellow, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Ari Kardasis, Designer + Developer, Zeega.org
Kara Oehler, Documentary Arts and Media Innovation Fellow, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Gerard Pietrusko, Embodied Informatics Fellow, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Alix Reiskind, Head of Visual Resources, Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design
Jeffrey Schnapp, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Faculty Director, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Jesse Shapins, Instructor of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Associate Director, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Ann Whiteside, Librarian/Assistant Dean for Information Resources, Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design
March 2012 Update
Alpha 0.5
We released the Alpha 0.5 version of Zeega to a limited set of users inside and outside the University on February 6th. This new version is the outcome of the rebuilding we began with Library Lab funding last summer and realizes our vision of providing robust tools for users to build and share media collections. This version is being used by undergraduates and graduate students in courses from VES to Romance Language and Literature to the GSD. It was also presented by Ann Whiteside and Jesse Shapins at the Association of Architecture School Librarians on March 2nd during the panel “Digital Collaborations within and beyond the design academy: The Library transformed.”
Wild Swans
In addition to these uses in courses and public presentations, the Zeega Alpha has been used by Harvard American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) to create a multimedia community memoir for spring show Wild Swans. Brendan Shea, outreach and education associate at the A.R.T., interviewed people across greater Boston and then cut these clips into brief segments that he uploaded to YouTube. He then used Zeega to combine this audio material with images, videos and sounds from across the web, effectively treating the Internet like an extended library. He writes, “Zeega turns the Internet into a limitless source of storytelling materials—illustrations, scores, video design, etc. Flickr and YouTube contain, essentially, millions of lenses looking at the same thing…. One of the best parts of Zeega is that, when you add media to the platform, it automatically cites the source and provides a link to the original image or video. An individual can curate a project like this, but the creative authorship is truly communal, when you think about it.” Read more in Brendan’s guest post for the British Council, a co-sponsor of the initiative.
Open-sourcing on Github
On February 17th, we made public Zeega’s Github repository. During an informal event with guests from the Berkman Center, the Library Innovation Lab, PRX, Frontline, the Academic Technology Group and others, James and Filipe lead a presentation of Zeega’s technical architecture and the model for contributing new plugins as layers. In the lead up to this presentation and since, the code has underdone a major re-factoring and a new version 0.6 of the alpha will be pushed live later this month. The presentation can be downloaded here.
Environment Built
Since last summer, we have been working to develop a multimedia publishing series that uses Zeega to create new narratives out of archival material held in Harvard’s libraries. metaLAB Fellow Jeanne Haffner will be series editor of “Environment Built,” which aims to provide an innovative place for discussion of contemporary environmental concerns, from a shortage of energy to the use of natural remedies for the effects of global warming on cities to environmental justice on a global scale. With increasing access to visual and other representational tools used in the practices that build our environment, our contributions seek to cast a new light on the problem of representation in the making. The series asks questions such as: How do visual techniques shape expert knowledge of environmental problems, and how are they employed in the practice of urban governance? In what ways do simple shifts in research methodologies lead to major revisions of our conception of the “environment”? How do digitalizations of “natural” places modify our understanding and experience of concrete spaces? As the world continues to deal with major environmental challenges, examining the genesis, reuse, and future transformations of the environment could not be more relevant.
The series will premiere in May with an event hosted at the Arnold Arboretum, an appropriate location as one of the first pieces is about the Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, drawing on images from the Olmsted archive and Loeb Library’s collection of lantern slides documenting the changing American landscape.
Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters
Since last March we have been working with the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies to build Zeega out as the technical foundation of the Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters. The project dramatically pushes Zeega’s capabilities for searching and filtering multiple media types through multiple views. Currently, the site networks over 890,000 items from multiple repositories across the web, including images, Tweets, videos, audio files, archived websites, documents, PDFs and user-submitted testimonials. Users can browse this material through a list view, as well as a “time and place” view that conjoins a time slider with a clickable map. Technically, to support this, we have begun integrating a SOLR database layer into Zeega, as well as configured our own installation of GeoServer to dynamically render points on the map. A new release in July will enable users to also register to curate their own collections from the broader archive, and these collections will then also become a part of the archive itself. The project was recently presented here at Harvard, as well as to the National Diet Library in Japan and at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Toronto.
January 2012 Note
Many people visiting this page are probably wondering what happened to the name extraMUROS. We loved the name, too, but over the course of working on extraMUROS last year, we mistakenly made the descriptions of extraMUROS and Zeega appear synonymous. So, in the interest of clarity, we have recently decided to only refer to the project going forward under the name Zeega. And this makes sense, as extraMUROS was initially conceived as a project to expand a working prototype of Zeega for the library community, to further develop integrated tools for collection-building, multimedia editing, and cross-platform publishing. The core goals and features initially envisaged under the rubric of extraMUROS will certainly continue to be carried out as Zeega is developed for use in libraries, archives and other collection-driven contexts.
January 2012 Update
In September, we submitted a proposal for additional funding to continue Zeega’s development to support the Harvard Library. The review committee approved this proposal with the caveat that they would like to see results of some usability testing and more thorough documentation of the coming year’s development initiatives.
Towards this end, we held a usability working session w/ Steve Chapman (HLS), Melissa Dollman (Schlesinger) and Paul Cote (GSD) on December 15th, 2011. Although it was very daunting to turn the tool over to them without any presentation, the feedback was tremendously valuable. We’ve compiled our observations of their behavior and notes from our general conversation here.
Jesse and Alix were joined in the session by Lindsey Wagner, Zeega’s new Director of Product + Projects. She has a background in UX design/usability, so it was great to have her. Since the session, she’s wireframed a series of UX updates to address some of the most crucial issues. You can see PDFs for design changes to the bookmarklet, collections interface and item browser. These are now being developed into code. We anticipate having a new stable version (that we’re calling Alpha 0.5) w/ these updates done by the first week of February.
In general, we’ve made tremendous progress on planning and documentation. We now have consolidated the technical description of the application into less than a page, as well as written an application glossary and technology inventory. You can read this here: Zeega Overivew.
We’ve also put together a road map of initiatives/features for the coming 6 months, with other initiatives lined up for the summer/fall (rollover each initiative to see more detailed notes). This is coupled with subtabs that document all existing features, as well as show features in development, in queue and under consideration.
Also, 19 students in the Fall 2011 Gen Ed. course “Re-Inventing Boston” used the ultra-early version we started building this summer (w/ our initial Library Lab funding) to create final projects using Zeega. They did this with only one brief introduction to the tool by Jesse and very modest email support. The faculty and TFs were thrilled, and are planning future integrations of the tool in their classes. During JTerm, we are planning to share brief surveys w/ students and faculty to get documentation of their feedback. Here are two project highlights which draw on library collections, which can be viewed using Chrome:
Home Sweet House: Dorchester, by Molly Ryan
‘With all Deliberate Speed over Time’: The Story of the Quincy School, by Anne La
We’ve also made a lot of progress on the Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters site, which is running entirely on Zeega and helping to develop the tool with feedback specifically from the library, archive and digital researcher communities (Professor Andrew Gordon, Director of the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, was a part of our Year 2 Library Lab grant). The project includes custom discovery tools to display results in list, map/time and tag views. The same data is then accessible within the core Zeega collections and projects editor. In this context, we’ve also begun sharing our API documentation with open-source development partners and giving them access to follow the project on Github. This project is a strong illustration of the concept of a Zeega site, an overarching implementation of Zeega that includes custom identity, interface and tools. We anticipate releasing a prototype of this around March 11th, 2012, marking one year since the earthquake, tsunami and their aftermath.
Lastly, we are cooking up plans for “Unlocking HOLLIS,” a Harvard Library-specific implementation of Zeega to be introduced this Spring. The basic idea is that HOLLIS includes an extraordinary and ever-growing trove of images, from early photographs and scientific illustrations to prints and paintings to digitized rare books, manuscripts, and maps. The HOLLIS catalog includes hundreds of thousands of unrestricted images—pictures free to use at Harvard and beyond. But the HOLLIS interface doesn’t easily offer a way to search exclusively unrestricted images. Thus for many users, HOLLIS isn’t a window, but a door—and the door is locked.
Using Zeega, we will develop an easy means for users anywhere to unlock HOLLIS to find, collect, and manipulate unrestricted images and other media at Harvard; to curate collections of such images; and even to associate those images with media from other sources such as Flickr, YouTube, and the Internet Archive, to create rich, immersive storytelling experiences. We call this project Unlocking HOLLIS for its potential to open the door to the trove of open-access media in Harvard’s libraries—and to let those images go out in the world to help teach, produce knowledge, and tell stories.
November 2011 Report
August 2011 Update
Over the summer, we have dug deep into the development of extraMUROS for anticipated prototype release in October. We have expanded our core team to include a new designer/developer, Joseph Bergen, and have rudimentary working interfaces for the project’s three primary interfaces: collections, map and time. In the collections view, a user is able to view all collections in the extraMUROS index, ranging from institutional collections such as digitized lantern slides held in Harvard’s Frances Loeb Library to user-generated collections. In addition, we’ve integrated sounds from Cornell’s Macaulay Library and videos from the Prelinger Collection. Collections are identified by different colors, and there is a fixed workspace at the top that allows users to curate their own collections. Using the map view, a user is able to view their queries sorted geographically on a grid. Intentionally moving past the “points-on-a-map” model, this view aims to support a mode of geographic browsing that provides only the relevant geographic information at different scales. Users can also shift to a 3D view that presents the different collections, tags and media types within a specific region. The time view allows users to filter the extraMUROS index with a slider.
On the technical front, to support this and other views, we’ve begun implementing a robust dual database structure, whereby we have a primary MySQL database used for saving quick user edits, and a Solr database for rapid search queries.
We also pushed forward on our beta sprint proposal for the Digital Public Library of America and on September 1st, we will have an updated series of demos and a new presentation video at the demo site (above).
May 2011 Update
Over the past two months we have been gathering feedback on our alpha platform through meetings with diverse stakeholders from inside and outside the University. Our conversations have ranged from new approaches to digital collections building to the future of multimedia scholarly publishing in the arts and humanities to the Digital Public Library of America initiative. From these discussions, we anticipate greater collaboration with groups such as the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, the Society for Architectural Historians, the Woodberry Poetry Room, and WGBH’s Media Library and Archives, among others.
We have also begun development of our showcase project, “Curating the American Landscape.” Using Loeb Design Library’s American Landscape and Architectural Design 1850-1920 collection of digitized lantern slides as a starting point, we are interconnecting these images with media from other institutions across the web. In addition to aggregating different collections and providing new forms of visualization and navigation, we will publish a series of multimedia features with Places, an interdisciplinary journal of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. These articles will use browser-based HTML5 editing and publishing tools developed through extraMUROS, and will be focused upon a series of historical and contemporary thematic foci, such as: World’s Fairs and Expositions; Infrastructural Networks; Environmental Conservation; and the History of Suburbia.
April 2011 Update
Since beginning work on extraMUROS in January, we have consolidated a core interdisciplinary team of seven scholars, librarians, archivists, artists, designers and developers from inside and outside the University. As a first step towards building towards the public release of a robust platform in October, we initiated a series of experiments addressing a variety of key use cases and user groups. These include: library discovery on multiple platforms, targeted at librarians and general researchers; incorporation of multimedia Illustrations into scholarly publications, targeted at scholars and publishers; in-class multimedia presentations and online exhibitions, targeted at faculty, teaching fellows and curators; and multimedia scholarly assignments, targeted at students. For an overview of these very early-stage experiments, visit http://extramuros.zeega.org/demo/, where there is also a screencast describing the project.
Download the proposal:
