Category Archives: Research

This category collects items relating to my own, or related, research.

Videogames as Cultural Heritage

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videogamesAn engaging seminar at the Daiwa Foundation on 3/6/14, allowed games experts and enthusiasts James Newman and Iain Simons to treat us to an entertaining and thought provoking romp through the history of videogames. Their relaxed style kept our attention for around 90 minutes, which still wasn’t really enough time to cover all aspects of the questions ‘are videogames a part of cultural heritage, and if so, should they be preserved?’

The intuitive answer would seem to be ‘yes, of course’, but it is interesting to consider some of the evidence for why. A slide of Super Mario (1985) and Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) instantly transported many of the audience back in time; game imagery has the ability to evoke strong memories of place, music and feelings, perhaps akin to the power of smell. We could then, consider the preservation of out-dated games purely for nostalgia, but historic games also offer us a record of technology at a given point in time, an insight into what was considered a ‘game’ from a socio-cultural perspective, and material from which to predict future trends.

Irrespective of the reasons for preserving the games, there are problems with this. There is no legal deposit in the UK for videogames, and thus no systematic policy or funding (one consideration is that an archiving initiative should come from the industry rather than the state). Games archives require space for the accompanying technological platforms, which demand an increasing amount of conservation to combat the unavoidable decay (bitrot), as plastics become brittle and powdery, and circuit boards return, like all of us, to dust. Rewriting games into the current age so that they function on modern technology is a plausible solution, but not one appreciated by either games lovers or historians, as the authenticity experience of playing the game is lost.

Our speakers were both involved in setting up the National Videogame Archive, within the National Media Museum at Bradford.

A comparison of the videogames industry in the UK with that in Japan, showed us that serious game playing is very serious in Japan. Here, even the range of literature found in bookstores is wider than that found in the UK. Pictures from a six storey games emporium in Tokyo convinced us that historic games are fantastically popular, although interestingly, the players of archaic games were from the same youngish demographic as those of up-to-the-minute productions. The profitability of this type of venture clearly works out despite the outlay for space and maintenance.

I was left with the thought that games *are* part of our cultural heritage, and something very much worth preserving. From the perspective of library and information science, games can be regarded as documents; they can be studied from a variety of angles, in the same way books can within the context of ‘book history’.

Worth further thought is whether we are preserving the physical game alone, so that future players can have a go in a different time, or whether we are including the preservation of the experience of a player at a given moment. Watching a video clip of expert players in Japan, it was evident that understanding how it feels to play is a compelling quest, likewise we could explore the symbiotic movements of two or more people playing the same game. There is though, the question of how to record the feelings of the players, and what sort of measures we use to interpret any meaning to the record.

If we consider that future documents will embrace immersive, multisensory and participative experiences, then videogames are undoubtedly of concern to those of us within LIS. Serious leisure people, it has to be done.

Unreality – the future of documents

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At the start of a rainy February, it seems fitting to write about escaping into the unreal worlds of the mind, and the pleasing indulgence afforded by the inner flights of fancy conjured up by words on a page, a favourite memory, or simply the imagination. But what if we had some means by which these ‘unreal’ experiences could be perceived as real? A way in which we could experience fantasy worlds with the same sensory perception as that which we have when we engage with reality.

Developments in pervasive and multisensory computer technologies are leading us in just that direction, so that in the future, ‘reading’ a good book may deliver an entirely realistic experience, where the ‘reader’ participates in a simulated version of the story, and may be able to influence the final outcome.

These computer generated experiences could well be the next generation of documents, and library and information professionals should consider how they might fit within the information communication chain processes of creation, dissemination, management, indexing and use. It is entirely possible that we will see radical changes in information behaviour as documents become more immersive and pervasive.

Most of us enjoy becoming drawn in to a good story; the more vivid the text the more we enjoy the fantasy. I first came across the phrase ‘immersive text’ in relation to the Harry Potter series of books. Whether or not you are a fan, the popularity of the world of the school for witches and wizards drawn into the mind by JK Rowling’s words is undeniable. On watching the movies, I found myself wishing for a study like Dumbledore’s but I didn’t feel that I wanted to be any of the characters, and when I read about the Harry Potter Studio Tour, I didn’t feel compelled to visit a theatre set Diagon Alley. But it seems a lot of people do. Many fans want to drink in the world of Harry Potter, they want large doses of unreality.

But there is nothing really new here.  We are all ‘fans’ of something, and there are, of course, fictions, films, plays and games that tempt even the most dedicated of us all into unreal fantasy when we engage with them. One of the richest arenas for keen advocates of unrealism is provided by cult-tv and its close relation, cult-fiction. The exact characteristics which identify a television program as ‘cult’ are nebulous, but examples come readily to mind. Star Trek, as long ago as the late ‘60s early 70’s, spawned followers who afforded much time and effort in writing and distributing works of fiction related to the show (fanfiction). Unwilling to leave their engagement with the show alone until next week’s episode, they augmented their experience with fictions, poems, art work, songs and in recent years videos and conferences. As much as they could, they made (and still make) their imaginary world real.

Early cult-tv progams themselves encouraged the concept of unreal reality, by anticipating the technology which would make this happen. In the popular 1970’s children’s series TimeSlip, we see a ‘fantasy room’ which contained a tubular device (rather comical by today’s technological standards) which when placed on the user’s forehead allowed their dreams to be experienced as a reality. (Series 01, Episode 07 pt 2)

Wim Wenders’s film ‘Until the End of the World‘ (1991) depicted a more modern looking headset device, which again, allowed the wearer to experience dreams as a reality.

Whilst contemporary 3D films allow members of the audience to perceive objects as real visually by donning rather flimsy plastic glasses, a more convincing sensory experience remains elusive – within the realms of science fiction rather than science fact.

Ironically, it is science fiction cult-tv that shows us how this might work, and the holosuite – a concept popularised on Star Trek – The Next Generation is perhaps the most widely known portrayal of unreality tech. The holosuite is a space in which people engage within a computer generated unreality that is indistinguishable from reality. Fans of the show will be able to recall with ease, and in detail, all the best holosuite episodes but to summarise the holosuite could be used for shared experiences of entertainment (taking part in a crime novel or a going to a jazz bar), and also for examining historical incidents, or for training.

This unreality comes with issues however. Most centre around aspects of sensory stimulation – eating and drinking for example. Do you get drunk if you drink holosuite wine, and do you get fat if you eat all the computer generated cakes? But there are deeper issues: if you die in the unreality are you dead in the real world? If you fall in love is it ‘real’? More philosophically though, do characters generated in the holoworld have the right to existence? Once they have been created, do we have the right to turn them off by shutting down the program? One poignant episode considered whether a computer generated hologram had the right to leave the holosuite environment to persue his life elsewhere.

Fast forward to the 21st century and fandoms for newer television shows such as Buffy or BBC’s Sherlock enjoy even greater forays into unreality supported by developments in computing technology and social media. Crucially, the latter makes the distribution of fan-related works easy, and essentially, social media allows fans to find each other and to arrange shared activities such as cosplay, where fans dress -up to ‘become’ characters in their favourite unreality. Unreality is more ‘real’ if it is shared.

Cult-tv then, allows us to understand from one perspective, how far fans will go to make their unreality seem real.

But there is more. The ‘immersive’ adjective has moved beyond its association with traditional texts. Fuelled by the progress in networks and mobile computing platforms, electronic ‘immersive’ texts are emerging, which combine aspects of the traditional printed book, and televisual experiences. These documents reach beyond what most of us understand by the term e-book, in that the story follows the reader into the real world. Boundaries between reality and unreality become blurred.

In this new type of document, exemplified by ‘The Craftsman’ (Portal Entertainment), events unfold in real time, and engage their readers as part of the fiction. Readers receive texts, emails, calendar updates and ‘phone messages from other characters within the plot. The text plays out across a range of devices (transmedia), and can be put down and picked up again when convenient. Although we have the technology, the creative writing techniques to support this sort of fiction are in an early stage, and such immersive fictions are few in number. They are also expensive to produce, and reviews so far are mixed, with some commentators suggesting that action is limited and takes too long to update. These criticisms could be addressed in time, with more initiatives like “The Immersive Writing Lab”.

Yet the rise of ‘immersive’ doesn’t end with texts, electronic or otherwise. In recent months I have encountered ‘immersive-plays’ (Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man), ‘immersive-exhibitions’ (David Bowie is) and ‘immersive-installations’ (Tomorrow )

The unique selling point of each of the above is participation. The viewer is invited to step into the unreality and live as part of the fiction; although each still requires suspension of disbelief on the part of the ‘reader’ or ‘participant’.

So at the time of writing then, none of this is really real. In spite of the popularity of engaging with highly elaborate fantasies, demonstrated by cult fandom, transmedia specialists, theatres and museums, there is room for improvement when it comes to delivering experiences which cannot be distinguished from the real thing.

The emergence of multisensory computing and network technologies does however, bring the promise of applications which offer us a more realistic fantasy than those which play out in our imaginations.

In order for unreality to work, we need technology that allows us to sense everything in the same way as we do if it is real. This goes beyond seeing and hearing, to include touch, taste and smell. Recent work on this type of multisensory communication so far leaves us with rather clunky, physical devices, which go only part way to evoking a sense of reality. Wearable tech is hardly a lightweight experience and even though some of the demonstrations help us engage with a plausible world, it is still impossible to forget the simulation whilst wearing a headset, gloves and other unappealing apparel.  (see this demo from UCL)

Participants in the holosuite are clearly perceiving the computer generated world as real, via all of their senses, by some, as yet,fictional neurological mechanism (photons?). Whilst we can speculate on how to stimulate areas of our brains without visible means of support, experimental work in this area flags up a few ethical issues to say the least. Nonetheless, work such as that of @AdrianCheok, shows us how much progress has been made in haptics, and the multisensory internet, and suggests that the rendering of unreality as reality may not be so much science fiction as we may think.

In his book, ‘Beyond the Library of the Future’ written in 1997, Bruce Schuman speculates on what will become of the library. He presents several scenarios for the near future, and in one of these he suggests that the library in the year 2022 will curate ‘experiences’ – rather than just physical works. The experiences are envisaged as computer programs which allow a ‘reader’ to engage with a recording of a real experience (memory), so that they perceive it as real for themselves.

If we allow ourselves to extrapolate beyond our current technological boundaries for a moment, there is no reason to suppose that these experiences could not be fictional, an extension of the ‘immersive texts’ suggested by ‘The Craftsman’, or indeed, entirely imaginary.

Whilst it is easy to comprehend the lure of fantasy, allowing us to enjoy something in unreality which we could never experience in real life, such immersive encounters could also support training and development in areas such as emergency response, surgery, piloting a plane or dealing with difficult customers.

Immersive experiences will undoubtedly have an effect on information behaviour. The use of Google Glass and smart watches are already instigating  questions of ‘information etiquette’. There is certainly an interesting future for library and information professions then, in trying to organise not just everything we know, but everything we can imagine. Every unreality.

The British Origins of Information Science

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I was very happy to be invited to talk about the British origins of information science at a celebration of the 75th anniversary of ASIST last week – especially as it meant nipping over to Croatia and spending a day in the sunshine (v short stay due to other commitments alas ..).

The celebration concluded this year’s very popular LIDA conference, and attracted an audience ranging from legends such as Tefco Saracevic and Nick Belkin, to bright, beautiful students at the start of their careers.

The theme was Information Science in Europe, and the papers presented alongside ours were a pleasant reminder of how much interest for our subject exists internationally – I was also heartened to meet others who feel that disciplinary history is essential for understanding how we define ourselves today, and for giving any kind of intellectual basis to our speculation on our future. I am always excusing myself for caring about the past and it was good to perform for fellow history fans – although not all the presentations took the storytelling angle – German and Nordic colleagues presented a history through scientometrics, detailing counts of institutions, courses and papers in every which way.

Colleagues talking about the origins of information science in Italy and Croatia offered new names and insights that I was previously unaware of; always good to get new material.

The origins of information science in Britain is a story which has already been written about, in depth, and with an eloquence which comes with a lifetime of involvement – authors such as W Boyd Rayward, Michael Buckland, Jack Meadows and indeed my co-author David Bawden all stacked up across my desk as we attempted to add something meaningful, representative of our current day interpretation and understanding of our discipline.

The starting point for us, writing from City University London, has of course to be Jason Farradane, credited with coining the phrase “information-scientist” around 1955. For those new to the story, Farradane established the first information science course “Collecting and Communicating Scientific Knowledge” at the Northampton College of Advanced Technology. The College became City University London; Farradane established the Centre for Information Science (we are his direct descendants… ), and the course became our MSc in Information Science. See:

Robinson L and Bawden D (2010). Information (and library) science at City University London; fifty years of educational development. Journal of Information Science vol 36, 631-654.

Farradane’s original course was vocational, designed to train those handling scientific and technical documents in practice. An obvious, and still largely unanswered question is to consider how the course seeded a new academic discipline. Still further, how we came to our present day definition of information science as the study of the information communication chain, through the techniques of domain analysis, paying attention to factors for change including technology, economics, politics and social mores. There are many papers on this, and there will undoubtedly be more in the future, but try:

Robinson L (2009). Information Science: the information chain and domain analysis. Journal of Documentation, vol 65(4), 578-591.

The story of information science in Britain is intertwined with the development of the subject in the US, as well as in Europe, and most accounts agree that although the 1950s provided the right societal, technological and economical environment for the new subject, the issues surrounding the processes of information organization and retrieval were hardly new. Those championing information organisation and access have always endured an impossible torrent of new materials, and the cry of “too much information” can be traced back to biblical times.

As the 1950s heralded a new, post-war, industrial optimism, the accompanying flood of scientific publications brought attention back to the need to harness new knowledge in a way which facilitated its use; a way which promoted the prosperity presumed to arise from exploitation of information and intelligence. This movement centred on information within documents, reports and papers, as a crude division from librarianship and/or library science, which concerned itself primarily with whole “books” and the services associated with organising, storing, preserving and lending specific items.

This rather coarse difference between librarianship and information science, in terms of the level of indexing they dealt with, was certainly still evident in the mid-1980s, and is used to argue in favour of separate library and information science disciplines. However, a closer look at work undertaken at the turn of the nineteenth century reveals that our contemporary understanding of a document and the processes of the information communication chain, i.e. the idea that library science and information science are part of a single disciplinary spectrum, are Victorian in origin – although the main protagonists of these insights, (Otlet and la Fountain in 1895), used the term “documentation” rather than library or information science.

Information science as we understand it today is pretty much agreed internationally to have its origins in the Belgian/European documentation movement. The role of special libraries – well documented and represented in both the UK and US schools – is also acknowledged, but the relationship between the two movements, and their separate influences remains largely uncharted territory, (a question posed by Michael Buckland in 1998) and it may stay that way if, as seems to be the case, no particular records exist as to how the two movements came together. It is important to note that ‘history’ is just what we make out from memory or surviving records. If it was never recorded, we may never know.

The point at which documentation and/or special librarianship became “information science” is still open to consideration, and will be the focus of our next paper. The question of the extent to which the UK origins of information science differ from those of the US was also something we though worth highlighting – a brief glance at the contents of any US text or information science course content will reveal a much heavier computer science bias – and whilst it is easy to dismiss US information science as UK computer science, the overlap is more complex and it would be of interest to explore this in historical context in order to understand more completely how the discipline is regarded in different geographical locations. For anyone who cares, we do not consider information science to be part of computer science, although the disciplines undoubtedly have areas of overlap, especially, as is already well known, within the area of information retrieval.

In addition to the variance in emphasis on technology, our US colleagues did not focus so much on the intellectual tools associated with the documentation movement – although in the UK the information retrieval, or systems paradigm certainly had its day in the history of what is information science.

Nick Belkin reminded me of all the names I had not mentioned (enough!) during my 30 minute romp through our underpinnings – those names associated with classification (Ranganathan, Mills, Foskett), information retrieval (Spark-Jones, Robertson) and user behaviour (Wilson) – all subjects traditionally regarded as comprising the core of information science. Quite so– but constrained by time I attempted to focus on the origins of our endeavours, which (although Belgian rather than British), still describe with startling prescience, our 21st century mandate, and of necessity, left out much of the middle.

Several colleagues at the ASIST 75 event raised their own questions, and we were collectively convinced that a publication drawing together the national origins, similarities and points of departure for information science would make a good read – let’s hope it happens. For now, with respect to the origins of information science then, there is always more to add to the story.