Master of the Fogg Pieta art researcher collaboration site (Austin Nevin)
Intro
The MFPMFP project is devoted to art research of a particular master (see project goals). It's coordinated by Austin Nevin who's a RS Advisor.
The site is at http://www.mfpmfp.org/~john/mfpmfp06/. Austin was kind enough to make us a login: "Ontotext". Ask Vlado for the password. If we want Admin access, we can also get that.
Lessons to be Learned
This site is a very good example of how art researchers actually do what RS sets out to do.
It's built with string and duct tape (Joomla, a few image tools, FTS), but it's full of interesting substantial discussions: it's alive.
I think that it teaches us something extremely important:
 | The rich variety of research discourse, and that if we try to structure and straight-jacket all of it, we'll fail |
MFPMFP participants do want to put some more structure in:
- Caroline: concerned about meta data - what categories we are using - and its consistency betweeen the partners. Are we going to set protocols for this?
- Austin: an important aspect of the files will be keywords and file names as well as file folders - I have tried to set up a tree for <painting> which effectively separate files - X-rays, IR, details, context. In order to facilitate the use of key words, I am starting a list of words for keywords which we can use
But still, looking at all the discussions, I think that the free-flowing stuff may be more important than the structured stuff.
Site Features
Breadcrumb
It's easy for a user to get lost, especially after a FTS. The breadcrumb helps, eg:
Home > Index > Technique - Ground and preparation > Question on the geometrical planning ..
"Random" images
I thought images would always be linked to a cultural object. Not necessarily.
People take pictures of the team, setting, a business trip, etc: it's all part of the social aspect of collaboration
Site Updates
- Nice 2-column layout.
- Each item includes its important images
- Not sure if this is completely automatic, or there was some manual adjustment.
- Comments are considered less substantive than Pages, so they are on a separte list (Recent comments vs Recent additions)
News
Something trivial that we may have forgot: news.
These are comments (not about specific objects) that are of importance for the project as a whole.
They should appear on a separate page, sorted by date (date sorting is missing in the MFPMFP news)
Structured data
- plenty of metadata we can look at, in order to expand our horizons about possible future data we need to accommodate
- eg "Height- left-hand side-37.5cm, right-hand side-36.5cm" can be expressed as "Height 36.5-37.5 cm", but we lose a bit of info regarding which number was measured where
- eg "Technique/Media: Egg tempera on poplar panel (untested)" shows that often art researchers express Technique/material and Support in one sentence, and a type/status "untested" to
- detail: The painting is on a poplar wood panel made up of a single plank of flatsawn wood that appears to be the original primary support. The grain of the wood runs horizontally across the painting’s width...
- This clearly maps to E14 Condition Assessment@crm, E3 Condition State@crm. See condition@crmg for a diagram. But to structure it fully is a lot of work. Eg one could use P5 consists of@crm to break the condition state of the overall painting to its constituents (condition of support, condition of paint, etc).
Screenshots
- Investigations:
- Images and Resources
- Albums - each folder with paintings is called Album. Under albums are kept also any referential materials and software for downloads, as it is seen in the screenshot
- Albums could be organized in Sub-albums. Actions in both albums and sub-albums are the same.
– Photos in albums
- Discussions
