e-Science and the Performing Arts and Media

Angela PicciniRCUK Academic Fellow

Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television

University of Bristola.a.piccini@bristol.ac.uk

Overview of e-Science and Grid technologies

E-science in the Arts and Humanities

E-science and the Performing Arts and Media

Challenges and Futures

Grid/ e-Science/ Cyberinfrastructure

Vision: e-Science

Researchers working in all disciplines are faced daily with a wide variety of tasks necessary to sustain and progress their research activity.

These involve the analytical aspects of their work, access to resources, collaboration with fellow researchers, and project management and admin.

These tasks rapidly increase in scale and complexity as collaborations grow larger, become more geographically distributed and involve a wider range of disciplines.

JISC VRE

Grid Computing

Roots in high performance computing and specialised scientific problem-solving

Grid computing has emerged as a powerful general purpose infrastructure to enable new research and learning

Its contemporary definition by Foster & Kesselman is

A Grid brings together core grid computing infrastructure services, applications and users

Coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations

Common characteristics

Co-ordinated problem solving Distributed computing

Resource sharing Computers, data, networks, processing power

Virtual Organisations Multi-institutional Large or small, static or dynamic

Transparency User doesn’t know (or care) how their task

is processed Pervasive, dependable, cost effective,

efficient

Types of Grid (1)

Computational Grids CPU resources from

different platforms are utilised to address a single problem parallel workloads distribution of

serial workloads across a pool of systems

Two main types server grids desktop scavenging

Example: SETI

Data Grids Sharing of Data across

multiple platforms Distributed

filesystems Federated

databases (DBMS) Data replication

Examples: Memetic SRB P2P?

Types of Grid (2)

Connecting people Access Grid ensemble of resources

including multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to Grid middleware and to visualization environments.

Used to support group-to-group interactions across the Grid. large-scale distributed

meetings collaborative work

sessions seminars, lectures,

tutorials, and training Photos: Rob Bristow

e-Science recap

Distributed, networked environments for collaborative research

When is something not e-Science?

What does e-Science mean for the creative and performing arts and media?

Shift in understanding from what technology is to what it does.

Social Sciences

http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference/ Entangled Data- Knowledge and Community

Making in E-Social Science Chimera, University of Essex Looking at how users use IT and may use grid

systems and services to undertake research MiMeG and Memetic Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and

Social Sciences American Council of Learned Societies Integration of cultural heritage through

networked environment

Arts and Humanities

eSSS is stage one – identifying what can be done for the arts and humanities

We need to embrace development of software and articulate our needs to the wider community to ensure that standards and protocols developed suit us too But how to talk the same language? How can we articulate something we don’t

know about? Small amount of projects funded by AHRC

and EPSRC

Our sector and the Grid

How will we use such technologies? Access Physically Theoretically

What type of data do we want analysed, processed, or delivered…or constructed? Is this a solution in search of an application? Are these

technologies suited to us at all? Is it data retrieval or knowledge production that is our defining characteristic?

What solutions are we missing at the moment, that can be addressed by e-Science technologies? Data mining? Processing large volumes of information? Visualisations? Automatic generation of ontologies and metadata?

How to shape e-Science agenda? Where will the money come from? Where will staff who understand both sides come

from?

Worldwide Universities Network: WUN University of Bergen University of Bristol University of California, San Diego University of Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign University of Leeds University of Manchester Nanjing University University of Oslo Pennsylvania State University University of Sheffield University of Southampton Universiteit Utrecht University of Washington, Seattle University of Wisconsin, Madison University of York Zhejiang University

WUN Grid

WUNgrid aims to ensure that these important resources are available to researchers across the Worldwide Universities Network.

Recreating Medieval Gardens

International project to enable the visualisation of the medieval garden. The project draws together a multidisciplinary team of specialists from the communities that study the medieval period and from those concerned with the cutting-edge computational and data techniques necessary to deliver high-quality interactive (and ultimately immersive) experiences simultaneously at sites across WUN and elsewhere.

This project involves the Universities of Bristol and York in the UK and Penn State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US.

Seedbed

THE SEEDBED INITIATIVE FOR TRANSDOMAIN CREATIVITYE x p a n d i n g H u m a n E x p e r i e n c eUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaignwww.uiuc.edu/initiatives/artsintech.html

Scenario from Seedbed

You enter a CAVE environment. Merely by speaking and gesturing, you create moving

images, sounds, or text. Side by side with students, faculty, and artists, you manipulate those tools, adding your own interpretations and perspectives, through commentary, selection, and juxtaposition.

To check on a detail, you communicate instantly with an expert halfway around the world, part of a community of artists, scientists, and scholars, in this case connected by a visually extended instant messenger. But we might think of AGNs

These paths can then become interactively accessible to anyone, or can be immediately shared with collaborating performers—musicians, dancers, actors or an interacting public—to create new work.

The ARTGRID: A Distributed Collaboratory for Artists and Scholars

ARTGRID seeks to empower artists and scholars with new technologies. In this case, the emphasis is on using technology to enhance collaboration across great distances by establishing a high-performance network to connect key technology-and-arts clusters nationally and internationally.

Collaborators will be able to access ‘natural’ computing, performance and digital presentation creation tools to ‘observe’ and ‘invent’ using the high tech, high-bandwidth, distributable technologies.

Performing Presence

AHRC-funded research project; 4 years from September 2005

www.projects.ex.ac.uk/performing-presence/index.php Exeter (Nick Kaye, Gabriella Giannachi), UCL (Mel

Slater) and Stanford University (Michael Shanks) In other disciplines where 'presence' is a key

concept, including Archaeology and Computer Science, performance theory and practice has become highly relevant.

Effectiveness of representations not simply a matter of rendering accuracy, but of understanding how specific aspects of behaviour, postures, gestures, glances, head-turns, and expressions impact on real human participants: how the signs of performance effect a sense of 'presence'.

Origins of the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. It is the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used for more effective discovery, automation, integration and reuse across various applications. The Web can reach its full potential if it becomes a place where data can be processed by automated tools as well as people.

W3C Activity Statement

PARIP Explorer

Home pages typically say:

My name is... I work for... I'm interested in... I live near... My blog is... I write in this weblog... You can see me in this

picture...

FOAF

FOAF is a way to say all those things, but so that computers can interpret it.

Questions that computers can answer using FOAF data: Show me pictures of practitioners interested in telematic choreography who live near me.

Show me recent articles written by practitioners in the midlands group.

Does this practitioner use access grid?

Technical Details

Implemented in SWI Prolog Database exposed through web service running as multi-threaded SWI Prolog server and runs under Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS-X

As webservice accepting SeRQL queries and returning RDF, it exists as freestanding resource

Graphical client interface is Flash, as the open source alternative (SVG) does not support word-wrapped text.

PARIP Explorer

Rich data Excessive, dense material Problematizing taxonomy Facilitating collaboration and networking Making infrastructures visible and

available Polyphony, translation, fields of practice

http://parip.ilrt.org

Performativity, Place, Space: Locating Grid Technologies

AHRC-funded under their e-Science Workshop scheme

3 workshops exploring uses of Access Grid, Semantic Web and Data Grid (everything from Storage Resource Broker to Memetic)

Hands-on to explore ‘real world’ uses of e-Science within the creative and performing arts and media

Challenges What is the really innovative use of

this technology? How do we push the boundaries of what is

possible? Access to technologies Funding Liaison with Computer and Engineering Science Content

What does it mean to share IT infrastructures? How do I get a “fair share” of the grid?

procurement metrics

What will be the effect of turning around responses to users faster sharing data seamlessly across institutions

will it reveal other holes elsewhere?

Challenges and the way ahead Disavow ourselves of the notion that e-science is a

“solution” to our research problems Main problem – amount and quality of data

Promoting digitization standards in order to enable processing and reuse of digital media between projects and organizations

Liaising with Computer Science in the development of protocols to search through massive datasets intuitively and efficiently

Only at the start of the journey a long term fundamental change in computing

infrastructure and utilisation, efficiency and opportunity

Remind ourselves that Grid computing generally involves large amounts of data Most projects have a poor idea of how to store or

manage their data effectively Performing Arts specialists can offer expertise to

Grid computing. Not only are we intensive users of computing technologies with significant interest in collaboration and distributed practice but potential we have large amounts of data (audio-video)

And also… Validation of digital scholarship in the arts as

academic research, in tandem with established practice-led research

Engagement with Computing and Engineering Science Training of interdisciplinary scholars who

understand technical infrastructure and design issues

Engaging in the debate on copyright and access to digital data – intellectual property and privacy rights

Considering theoretical implications of the grid – engaging in what the grid means from a creative standpoint.

These are not transparent or neutral technologies

In Conclusion e-Science technologies are emergent

Lots of research, development and implementation required before they will become useful or usable – opportunities for creative and performing arts.

The Arts and Humanities are relatively late to the table e-Science is no longer flavour of the month, but we

continue to use these technologies despite what they may be called.

Our sector can benefit e-Science, and should be part of the dialogue regarding protocols and futures

There are considerable barriers to becoming part of that dialogue

We have to engage with e-Science on a theoretical as well as practical level, to develop understanding of the technologies involved – and make ourselves indispensable

We have to encourage a dialogue to understand what we need from future technologies

We should not adopt e-Science technologies just because they are there – they should fit our goals and purpose as creative scholars