The Pararchive Project

Pararchive was offered a conference bursary by the AHRC Connected Communities Programme to attend this year’s Community-University Engagement Conference (CUVIC 2014) entitled Beyond Engagement: Creating Innovation, Integration and Impact in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia (BC), situated to the South of Vancouver Island off Canada’s pacific coast. I had the privilege of representing…

The New York Times’ experimental Snow Fall story has long been a reference point in our work on Pararchive, largely to avoid producing an application or experience that was loaded with gimmicks which eclipsed the underlying narrative. However, in the year or so since Snow Fall was first revealed, it’s influence and impact on web design…

As I’ve discussed on a couple of occasions already with Daniel and Imran, it’s becoming clear that a parallel process of Pararchive is to record our stories of exploration, development, and community discussion. As well as blogging about our community research process and progress, I’m generating the documentation required to rebuild my project in the…

From the very beginning of the project, the Pararchive team has toyed with the notion of digitising archival artefacts as 3D objects, though we’ve also had mixed opinions on whether this would be useful or indeed desirable. Recently, however, researchers at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen experimenting with laser scanning of heritage sites, 3D visualisations and…

For an unknown face, the system searches through a database of 146m images, culled from 50,000 BBC News programmes in around 30 seconds. Once a face has been learnt by the system future searches will only take a few seconds. Oxford’s research suggests that faster performance on much bigger databases would be straightforward, so we’re…

We are proud to announce Eastside Community Heritage (ECH) as a partner on Pararchive. ECH was established in May 1993 as a joint venture between Stratford City Challenge and Newham Leisure Services. It became an independent charity in 1998 and has since then sought to build, service and enable partnerships which record, document and preserve the…

In considering archives and collections, we’ve generally been exploring digital simulcra of real artefacts and those that are ‘born digital’. However, some artefacts are not only intrinsically digital, but also inhabit a intersection of shapeshifting networks and adaptive interpretations. Software artefacts in particular can only be considered in relation to hardware platforms, programming languages and notably versions and iterations.…