The Pararchive Project

Interesting interview with Ken Levine head of the studio Irrational Games (makers of the BioShock series). Here he is talking of how to push the art of storytelling forward in video games: “I think it’s an interesting topic,” he said. “I’ve been working on a concept I call narrative LEGOs which is how do you take…

“Work is under way to develop a distributed national collection of Scotland’s sound heritage.   The Scottish Sound Archive will bring together the sound collections relating to Scotland held in a variety of organisations including museums, libraries and archives into a searchable single online resource.   A further online resource allowing members of the public…

“Harnessing the power of digital technologies to enable researchers and communities to work more effectively together to explore community creativity, cultures and heritage is the driver behind eleven new research projects announced today. The projects are designed to develop digital resources that will be of enduring value for both communities and for future research such…

Alongside EU-based search engines, digital storytellers (and, thus, Pararchive) can breathe easy following the EU Court of Justice’s recent ruling that sharing links and embedding content that is already publicly accessible does not breach copyright.  The ruling stated that: “It must be observed that making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link, such as…

Jonathan Harris is one of the foremost artists of the digital era, exploring technology, data, stats, storytelling and visual art at personal and planetary scales. My own interest in storytelling platforms emerged from one of his most recent works, Cowbird, described as a witness to life. Cowbird is notable in that the motivation is not…

The Library of Congress recently acquired an extensive collection of celebrated astronomer Carl Sagan’s personal archives. Items from The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive are beginning to be catalogued and digitised to be made available by the Library online. Items include maps, photos, sound recordings, manuscripts, music and periodicals, broadly divided into three…

To date, it has been challenging for researchers outside the company who are tackling big questions to collaborate with us to access our public, historical data. Our Data Grants program aims to change that by connecting research institutions and academics with the data they need. engineering.twitter.com/research/data-grants Though the timeframes of both our Bute and Stoke community…

On 20 January this year, the Wellcome Library released a large cache of digitised images into the public domain via Wellcome Images (hereafter, ‘WI’).  Drawn from its celebrated collection, these 100, 000 historical images are free to download, copy and adapt (including for commercial purposes), thanks to a Creative Commons Attribution-only license (CC-BY 2.0) (all you…