banbins

solar powered internet

2006-10-04T13:11:00.000+09:30

satellite internet

solar power

other sites

ideas

links

internet video conferencing software

i-chat mac to mac mostly but can be used between mac and pc by using a client called triton on pc, also neeeds .mac account (50 dollars per year or more) or aim acc (free)
i-visit not free software but allows for different resolutions and speeds so it may be more stable on satelllite and wireless systems.
skype audio works great.
SKYPE video, we are trialling a beta version of skype video (1.0.61)for mac, which enables us to use pc to mac cponnection and mac to mac, however at this stage it is not quite as good as the pc version, but almost.

Skype for Mac with Video is a Preview version, you should be aware of the following known issues which you may encounter when using it. __1. CPU Load is very high when in a Video call. __2. If Skype is running and a WebCam is removed, Skype will need to be restarted to detect the Camera.__3. Problems when video preferences are loaded whilst in a Video call.__4. Some delays in video feed enabling.__5. When a video call is unpaused, it will restart the video feed and there is a minor delay. __6. When in full screen mode, video will return to windowed mode when unpaused.__7. If Video is stopped in a video call with another user on Skype for Windows the call will need to be started again for the Windows user to see the video feed again.

skype conferencing

skype conferencing allows 5 people to conference simultaneously for free, not so lomng ago we were paying about 80 dollars and hour for that, s0 ….
how does skype make it’s money?
A. 1 making phone calls out out of skype to mobile or landline
B. people from n ormal numbers calling skype ( skypein number are given out if needed)
C. voicemail
D. selling gadgetd to make skype workbetter, (eg usb wireless phoner attachements maybe)
E. selling business speeches (skylook, …

so this might mean that the free computer to computer video conferencing aspect may remain free as it is effectively the advertisemant fro their other products.

ichat, ivisit, questions include mostly nthe samr things are they going to remain free and how good are they between mac/pc and over diffe4rent bandwidths

MULTI person video, ie conferencing , this is not available with video skype however ity is with

remote access

remote access
apple remote desktop and timbuktu trials

being able to observe and interact with anbother computer remotely is possible using software which allows this, knowing the ip address of the other computer and having the ports and settings set up to allow this to happen. one of the problems we are going to encounter with this is that ip addresses do not necessarily remain fixed, and therefore we will be unable to find the computer we are hoping to interact with without first contacting some one who can give us the current ip address of the computer.. or..
finding a piece of software which will know how to contaact the other computer automativcally through user name or skype to or something and give the ip address to them or..
arrange for the ip address to remain fixed througg the service provider
ip observer software
ip observer 0.8.3
observe your assigned IP adress also behind a internet router and give a new adress to people by email. Also check for open ports outside your IP adress.
Mac OS X 10.3 or higher. Works on Intel Macs. OS 9 or Classic Mode. Also a Win and Linux Version available.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/29538

we need yto lookm intpo whether routers interfere too much with ip connectivity . it seems that wireless routers may be particularly troublr=esome.

according clear networks, it is possible to set up a system which allows remote access to happen more easily, however this is not a standard system and doesn’t come under guidelines for the internet connect subsidies availabe for remote communities, (however we could change plans later once the sytem is in place

porrt 58, naTTED ip addrees, mac address, handshaking, ftp
port forwarding on the modem (range is a pain) Maybe USE DMZ to find the pathway or maybe not. set up dim dns a/c

databasing software etc

filebrowse1.0
i-view media pro
spotlight
i-life suite
tami

so this program could be set up on computers that we need to contact and it will tell us the ip address by e-mail, I’ll see how good it works.

timbuktu pro

Product Description:
For nearly twenty years, Timbuktu Pro for Mac OS has been the standard for remote control on the Mac OS. With its simple setup, intuitive, user-friendly interface, and multiple security options, Timbuktu Pro for Macintosh is the best remote control choice for your home, classroom or small business.

With Timbuktu Pro, you can view the screen of a remote computer, or share your screen with one or many remote computers to collaborate, teach or provide technical support. Use your mouse and keyboard to operate distant computers as if you were sitting right in front of them, send large files without tying up email, and communicate by intercom, text chat or instant message.

What's new in this version:

# Timbuktu Pro 8.6 is now a Universal Binary, and will run natively on both Intel and PowerPC Macintoshes.

# Timbuktu Pro 8.6 features integration with the popular Skype internet telephony application. You can now browse your Skype contacts from the Timbuktu interface and initiate Skype calls and chats from Timbuktu. Furthermore, if your Skype contact has Timbuktu installed, you can make Timbuktu connections to them via Skype across many NAT routers without any additional configuration.

# The Don’t Allow Messages to Fill field on the Messages Received tab in the Preferences dialog box is now set in gigabytes, not megabytes. If you access this preference with Applescript, it is specified in bytes.

# The mouse pointer is now more accurate when you control a second computer through a computer that you are already controlling. (This is also known as "chaining" Control sessions.)

# Incoming Control sessions no longer cause rare crashes in the Timbuktu Host process. This crash caused Timbuktu Pro to stop accepting incoming connections.

# Drop Sender creation is now more reliable.

# Timbuktu Pro no longer occasionally stalls when exchanging a large number of small files.

# Recording Quicktime movies of Control sessions is now smoother and more reliable.

8.6 is a free upgrade for anyone who owns any 8.x version of Timbuktu Pro for MacOS.
Product Requirements:

* Mac OS 10.3.9 or higher
* For users running MacOS 8.6 through 10.3.9, previous versions of Timbuktu are included in the 8.6 package.

Check out the MacIntel Resource Center for Complete MacIntel Coverage
Screenshots:
Timbuktu Pro
A Mac controlling a PC Timbuktu Pro
Timbuktu 8.0's new Push Install Window

See More: View Slideshow (new window)

satellite internet

View As Web Page

http://www.satellite-provider.pl/Australia/vsat.html

here is a company who does 12V standa alone internet

solar power

idl react software http://www.ict.schools.nt.gov.au/idl/manuals.shtml

http://www.consensus.com.au/SoftwareAwards/CSAarchive/CSA2006/REACT.htm

interesting sites for ideas on sharing

drawball - site which allows you to draw and add to drawings.drawinfgs can become protected by the administator

flash-gear add a chatsite to your website whaich can incorporate dra wing

whayt software does drawball use . and can you doe something similar on your own computer to store images and documents, push and shuffle them around to group together

Tech gloss
Blog sites

Blogger.com
over-blog http://www.over-blog.com/
this one s pretty good but all instructions are in French.

Pop
(Point of Presence) The point at which a line from a long distance carrier (IXC) connects to the line of the local telephone company or to the user if the local company is not involved. For online services and Internet providers, the POP is the local exchange users dial into via modem

POP3

(Post Office Protocol 3) A standard interface between an e-mail client program and the mail server. POP3 and IMAP4 are the two common access protocols used for Internet e-mail. POP3 provides a message store that holds incoming e-mail until users log on and download it.

e-mail clients and web sharing software.

g-mail (google mail)
-need to be invited in order to be able to use it
-2,500 megabytes of free
storage
-mail search functions
-every time you get a new e-mail from the same person, all previous correspondence is attached to the bottom of it, ie the entire converstion you’ve been having with this person is contained in the latest e-mail

links

weblogs
http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm

http://www.xanga.com

http://www.multiply.com

indigenous sites

http://www.alga.asn.au/policy/indigenous/nativeTitle/agreementsDatabase/
http://www.isx.org.au/
http://unicorn.aiatsis.gov.au/
http://www.ausanthrop.net/

Test post

2006-09-19T11:46:00.000+09:30

this is a wee experiment to add to a blog by someone else

august 05 notes for garma

2006-07-06T10:39:00.000+09:30

August

Gikc

So murayana at garma has set a certain stage completion as far as the gupapuy\u constituents of gikc are concenrned, not so much that it is now someone elses turn, but that gupapuynu think they are ready for somewhere else ..

Sounds like funding is limited at this stage as well.
We had a meeting today with gandhawuy, baltha, .. , jessica and me , this is all recorded and attached.
We started to draft a document which outlines current and completed projects that have used the centre, proposed projects, training requirements, some good stories, an outline of the process for currently documented cultural events and toward having a public resource of each for the database.,

Gandhawuy is proposing two new buildings. One as an administration house and anoher in the old missionarry house overlooking the bay. There is a need for more especially if work is to be displayed in physical form to accompany the computers.

Wulumdhuna, gandhawuy and I had a meeting about both her project and his. The knowledge center involvement should include both resource support and in particular looking after the information about dhambalinya, djirrkarri and guluwurrnur as gandhuway holds the dju\guwurr and \arra (sacred clapsticks) for these as well as a mari reletionship with bararrparr, barr\u and gubirryi.

The original copies of djilliwiiri recorded by kakadu studios is in my possession as it is on beta cam and there are no facilities here to convert them..

We have delivered the terabyte drive to knowledge center and freed up the computer hard drives as an interim solution. The next thing they need is two lockable cabinets to contain dvd copies of new footage and photos and a falcon station wagon to transfer files to milingimbi.

We made a draft proposal of how what projects are invoved with gkc and what processes are to be taken for the documentation of these projects based on discussions with yiniya through me and baltha gaykamaynu (gkc manager)

This is partly to present to ntlis when david murtaugh and cate ? come to galiwin’ku early september. I feel like I have to be there for that and we need to talk about my role here and taking them to dhanbula, gawa and djuranalpi.

Murayana at garma and other footage

logging and editing the footage of yiniyas from garma toward preparing the initial batch of dvd’s for consultation of elders.
The original dv diles will have to stay on the new external drive at gikc as it needs about 330 Gb of space. However I have made several movie files which contain all the information needed to produce the original dvd’s and put them on our lacie until I get back to town.
looking into dvd cameras as a more appropriate source footage as people want to be able to see footage asap.

Wulumdhuna

We have made a good recording of the project outline (need to sub-title), consulted elders, some of which have provided wulumdhuna with a good video file already (narraku malu mala), consulted gandhuwuy at gkc about resource support, management affiliations and direct information. ( he has also agreed to painting two paintings to help get things off the ground but will need to be paid for this as it is outside of gkc dj^ma)

gandhuwuy wants to start working on his own stuff, talked about doing a walk and boat around with video camera and talking to start. Hard to get him to be more precise at this stage., however he is really keen to have someone help do things like attaching songs to pictures correctly.

met with david wilson who works at the school as an IT manager. He already has assosiations with djuranalpi school and has agreed to help with getting an e-mac from the school up there which is looking possible due to one of theirs being replaced by a pc it. He is very interested in helping even as extra work to himself but it would be nice if it was somehow made as part of his job. Wulumdhuna is keen top work wioth him as well .
Talked to bernie (homelands position) about homelands camera. If I can tick off a list of competancies with wulumdhuna she should have access to it over the next few months.
Also, in order for her to get study leave she needs to be enrolled in something or a least we need to write down a proposed enrollment (john?)

I think that we can set this projrct up with the current version of the datebase as the initial way of uploading the resources that wulumdhuna can use for her collections.

Will apply to aiatsis for a few dollars for things that we can’t provide. Some wages? Camera/ recorder, transport costs.

Wulumdhuna has been putting together a sketchbook of family tree schemas which she presented to gandhuwuy and myself as part of the initial project proposal, the following one is rraku mala. Various colours relate to mothers line in some cases.

Art center

Interested in database example to trial for their needs. More next time,

Notes

Knowledge center shouldn’t be a knowledge centre but a knowledge resource centre, ultimately people want to each have their own computers databases of resources for their clan. Administrator (balanda?) could be employed.

I feel unconfortable about writing my thoughts into this to people out of the context, can I send sound and video files.

Dvd cameras?

Interesting story about joe doing painting referenced from old photo after seeing the contempory version being painted by ..

Talked about the story of doing family trees in .. with waky waku (where the mode a conflict resolution was lost) she’s thinking about that.

Garma only databases. Information provided

april 05 djurranalpi baapuru

2006-07-06T10:38:00.000+09:30

I’m working on two othe r I-vmp fidos at the moment, which are informing these notes, as I write there will be reflections on the functionality of this program as a base to our fidos.

One of them is part of the continueing work I am doing with wulundhuna and her late father, and the other is based on a report and on-going documentation of a project known as ‘sharing the true stories’which was crc funded project looking into the work of proffesional health workers, indigenous health workers and translator

s,

I spent the last week out at djuranalpi for the funeral of old man , my role at the ceremony being to film certain parts when possible, I filmed around 30-40 percent and did miss
one day which was quite important to wd as we had a water shortage problem,

all the trees were stripped of their leaves from cyclone ingrid and a lot were laying down. Fires had been lit from galiwin’ku to g^wa, painting the trees brown in wd’s words. I was asked to try and film the trees from gawa to djuranalpi and include it with the ceremony footage in the editing process, didn’t get the chance to go that way , but I did get a lot of background which to give a visual clue to this aspect of the ceremonial context.

Rather than editing the footage into a single dvd, I have digitised all of the tapes into short 3-4 min sections based around differnent clan groups and individual dances and are putting them into a ivmp fido without any metadata other than a file number which relates to the original tapes and where to find the original footage if needs be. By the time I go back in a few weeks time this will be completed and hopefully the process of adding metadata and including other digital resources that wd has already made will lend us some useful insights into the practicalities and impracticalities of this software.

The alternating swirls of hair on a babies back may well be a totem, as is the north wind and I think it’s going to be interesting to consider the limits of computers, and alternative impressions this cataloging may produce.

One night a series of dhuwa totems were performed, including widitj (python), blue tongue lizard, north wind, freshwater,and dhuwa sunset, the video was primarily focused on the dancers, however wd was using the digital still camera on occasions to take portraits of individual family members, in fact, inside the room where the coffin was being kept, the wall was decorated with printed images of other now deceased family .

Over 1000 people attended the ceremony, making conditions a bit tough, particularly as the cyclone had destroyed the solar water pumps, and the telephone hasn’t been working for some time now, alpa put up an account at the supermarket in town, so there was a fair amount of easy to prepare food around with most family groups looking after themselves .
A large clearing had been made for the helicopters to land, one for om and another for galurrwuy, and shelters had been made in stategic locations around the house.

Permission to film had been sought from the various clan leaders before my arrival, and I was made welcome and given a place behind the singers to sit, in most cases.

Part of this story was told to me but not recorded, it goes a bit like this,

Om got asthma about a week before the cyclone while in town and decided not to go back to djuranalpi with the others that day. By Friday he was sick enough to end up at the clinic where they promptly ordered a plane (nomad) to take him to gove hospital. Once on the plane with drip and oxygen connected, the plane was started up which caused om to arouse somewhat and ask wd what the noise was, when wd explained that he was on his way to gove he asked her to tell the pilot to turn off the engine immediately or he would pull everthing out.
He then commenced to free himself from the equipment and plane and walk away. He was installed in a house somewhere , where wd told him about the impending cyclone, and that the clinic was considered to be safer. He just laughed at her , but ended up back at the clinic that night anyway somehow, where he passed away some time during the windy night. Baru (the dog) was one of the first visitors.

A whole sequence of dances were perfomed in one session, dances that contained a chronological history sequence as well as a geographical journey. There were the swords and knives of macassans, drinking and fighting of the first western collaborations, surveying and flag planting of ther miners as well as bats and octopi and plenty of other references that I have no idea of.

We have this issue of not really being able to link lots of items together without going through a metadata category. In fact a metadatsa category is a link named, a metadata category is a named relationship however various aspects of this relationship may need to be described by other relation ships, (kinships, colur coded clans) and making this link may have to be done using more words in the caption box, I still think it can work, certainly for small groups of individuals with their own computer, and different people having their own metadata sets, we will see, but this is a constant theme in my thoughts at the moment

I guess what I am trying to point out here is that if a group of dances are grouped together under , for example, ‘gumatj dhuwa totems’, a number of these dances may belong specifically together as a set, this is difficult to display within the larger group ,( I have been experimenting with colour coding for sub sets, rather than heading down a file tree path) except by selecting that group together and seeing which other metadata catagories they collectivly belong to, interestingly, the least amount of catagories a selected group belongs to , the more closely they may be related (the more metadata is put in the more this is the case)

Unfortunately while tring (sound of a lightbulb sponsered by microsoft) to think about this, I accidently made my tea in a cup containing a mullet head, trying to do things in the dark so as not to disturb the people sleeping on the kitchen floor, but certainly having the wrong item (mullet head) in a set creates a different relationship to that set ie; tea, sugar ,cup hot water,- infusion and relaxing catagory, add dead mullet to set and the relationship becomes entirely different and less attractive. I’ve sort of lost this train of thought but it’s all about how in western scientific classification systems, one ‘wrong’ item in a set upsets the metacatagory like platypuses did, as well as that other thing about the least amount of metadata a particular group needs the more closely that group is related as mentioned a second ago.

The old blind lady is getting her instuctions from out of the darkness somewhere and makes her way across to her blanket and pillow, holding her skirt to remain modest and keeping good track on the progress of her handbag trailing alonside of her. Her infusion set was fine, someone who knew the kitchen more intimately than me made it for her,

There has been some political power stuff going on garlkier tonight, someone apparently brought a “mm” dangerous item along and special ceremonial songs have had to be performed under the cover of darkness

L collapsed bringing up the sacred dilly bag but a pretty good effort dancing up the stairs for someone that docdoers gave up on a few months ago, he seems to be recovering alright with a bit of a rub and a cigarette.,and keeping a pretty attentive ear on the singing .

Djuwarr’tmi\, barra\u , ganda\ur, gunbiri, gayamirrilili, and track 4 on the christian cd, are represented in force.

Although each clan has a certain relationship to om, there has been the use of the phrase ‘especially in this case’ crop up a bit. Do we have a “especially” button any where, sound file- deep voice annotation, ‘..…especially in this case…’ it’s good to remember that in the scenarios we assume , humans who know what is going on will only be using particular groups of resources to show each especially case when it needs to be shown.

I had a look into the nt archives the other day , and at their database, really hard to find things that you know are in there. The most effective part of it was the screen saver which ran through a selection of photographic images, I am also conscious? of how my own way of looking at the world is being affected by this research project.

’ intergenerational transmission of indigenous knowledge using digital technologies’, hides another existance of the work I seem to be doing.

The way that yol\u begin the process of raising balanda into their notions of the world, firstly by adoption and then using schooling techniques of re-performance and song in conjunction with objects such as maps (or at least reference to a map way of looking at the world) and biblical metaphors, situates new balanda in a similar location to yol\u children in some cases and particularly with returning yol\u . In this way, there is sometimes little difference in the type of digital resource objects required for cross-cultural assertions as those required for yol\u children who have had to spend much of their time performing learning tasks through the government schooling system, or simply spending a lot of time experiencing a western objectifying view of the world and becoming familier with these structures.
It’s interesting how balanda technologies tend to reflect an understanding of displacement from environment in their workings, always struggling with time and space parameters, and wanting to reference them. One of the first functions included on a consumer level digital camera is the option of a time and date print out on each image.

One of the men performing at the funeral had just come back from playing footy down south for the last 6 years,

There were conflicting stories about who was going to stay at djuranalpi after the funeral, maybe old joe from yirrkala was going to stay for a couple of months, maybe reverned alfred and family, maybe everybody leaves for a while. I am planning to go back in a few weeks with all the footage digitised and leave with the computer there on an external hard drive. If alfreds family is there it means that the school may kick into gear again,

Wd finally received a letter from her ‘sharing australia’s stories’ grant application informing her that they had at least received it. I have since spoken briefly to the manager of that deptament and he assures me that everything is going as slowly as possible and that there are many applicants and the chances of success are slim. There will be a chance to let them know of any changes if we are successful, so I didn’t mention that part of the team may have difficulty working on the project,

A lot of recording is going on anyway. Most yidaki players were carrying a little tape recorder around with them and pausing them in between song groups. I imagine that the quality of these recordings will be enough to make about the rhythms, tones and lyrics, however allan merrits national recording project would be horrified. Several still images from the videos taken may be more useful than the videos in their entirety, even though there are probably too many sublties and variations in dances. still images would offer more oppurtunities to dance, in the same way that people telling stories are more animated than people playing stories back on dvd.

, is this the new face of the lpc. Am I a lackluster missionary?

Sometimes more than one clan is dancing/ singing at the same time in different locations, makes it hard to make two separate film segments with one camera, certainly as far as sound goes, the big difference to the film and this reality is that generally there are a thousand things going on at once. this performance genre left london stages a long time ago.

Other technical problems include the voracity of clapsticks on the sound strip of digital tapes. Most claps are so loud that the digital imprint of the sound onto the tape can eat into the image part, creating strange problems. I haven’t had this problem too much, but it is difficult to have settings which correspond to both capturing voices and not heading off the scale on every 2 second clapstick.

For this reason radio mikes are not to good as they will generally be to close to the singer, and running cable mikes is a problem because singers move and dancers rip them out of the ground. The mike attached to camera has been the most successful, especially a directional mike facing away from the clapsticks and toward the dancers.

Roles change, and sometimes recording is not the most important one.

My sleeping location is next to henry, malu to me and seemingly everybody even though he was never a reverend or anything as far as I know. From here I can watch bula\ getting through a bucket of kava by himself to the tune of ‘give it all up for jesus.’ Not sure that jesus would want any but if he turned it into spicy fish loaf and a glass of cab sav I’d be happy.

Then the storm hit, I save my swag first and put it on the veranda (camera and stuff has been stowed earlier), and then try to rescue malu who wasn’t heavy enough to hold his tent down from the inside. A somewhat worried face being pelted by raindrops pressed up against the flyscreen as I try to hold the tent down with one arm and try to open the fly with the other . under one arm is his blanket and soon he’s on the veranda as well. In fact everbody is on the veranda about three deep on top of my swag, the tents gone for the moment and by tommorrow the tent pegs are in all sorts of useful places.

All the rules obout who should be near each other seem to have gone with the wind and I sleep the rest of the night with my gurrungs and hope no-one minds. Generally tolerence is so great that it’s hard to know the rules. A handful of people seem to be interested in doing useful things like filling the generator or making tea but the majority seem quite content to do very little and I can see why trudgen says people have fear of doing anything in case it’s done wrong. This thought came later with the truck story.

The only time there was a lot of action other than dancing in the camp was when a couple of women had a bit of a blue and evryone pretended they were busy, raking, emtying rubbish, fixing up shelters, particularily those near the scene.

Being directed by malu henry is one of the more pleasant experiences, tries to tell me whats coming up and where I should be, what not to film etc.

Guess I’m writing down that stuff because I’m constantly surprised where council/ government money goes as compared to where people go.

I wonder a lot about keeping the recordings simple and obviously incomplete in order to maintain the possibility of flexible narrative making around them. It can be hard to exaggerate the quality and excitement of certain performances when the video evidence shows a few tired unfit men sweating through their best efforts, which may only assist in negative identifying characterstics to a wider audience. I think its reasonable for me to assume some knowledge of audience reaction in other parts of the country and in other countries for that matter should any of this stuff be shown one day, am I responsible?

I wonder about a catalogue of stylish ceremonial items, like thrones and exotic materials from south east asia, special hardwood clapsticks and outsourcing yidaki manufacture to bali.

Why does it always have to be text grouping metadata, why is it so hard to link thinks in databases without a heading. I can do it through colour coding, 3 items of 7 in a set might have a different coloured border, a different shaped border. , a visual marker of some kind is the only way I can think of, and this is even more difficult for audio files, or am I too concerned, maybe it’s only importatn to have few resources in the organiser/ displayer as possible at any one time, which doesn’t help looking for something else hidden away in files and folders on the hard drive somewhere.

Once again all these concerns disappear if the right people are involvrd in the presentation of their resources and I don’t need to worry.

Another thing I can do is make different folder icons from images, this would work well for tami. In fact come someone remind me about this sometime.

I’m starting to go off the idea of columns in tami, but may warm to it again some time. There was a case the other day where someone was looking at video. Video. Video and then the next one was a still image and they wer temporarily frustrated trying toi get it to play.

Iview makes a thumbnail image from the first frame of the first movie in any set, seems difficult to make this thumb big enough to see though, but it does mean that if there is a painting or something to which group of resources relate, then an image of this painting could be used as the firrst imaghge and therefi-p[ore the thumb, reducing the need for text in the metadata catagories.

What about that green turtle on the black floor of the bush out the back, where does he fit in?

The truck’s empty by Sunday, the last remaining solar pump down the road isn’t really working and there’s a thousand people here. I am chosen to drive it back to town to fill up, first 10k’s down the road in 1st gear till the gearbox warms up enough to unsieze, one b;lown tyre from the trip up flapping around and trying to see the holes in the road through the bulllet holes in the shattered windscreen. The hardest bit was gear changes allow faster speeds and a different focal point on the road , every 10km difference in speed requiring a different bullet hole to look out of. Don’t want to smash the windscreen cause it stops the mud from splashing in, and it’s not mine to smash.

Ironically it’s raining now and the roads getting deeper and I’m getting colder and wetter and still an hour or so to go at this rate. By the time I do get to the water filling bore, the tank on the back of the truck has shifted just enough to push the tap all the way on. Find a backhoe with man in it who comes and pushes the tank back., park it under the overhead outlet and gho to turn on the water, no tap. Can’t turn the truck off, key and removing fuses and shorting things out gets me knowwhere, so I leave it running, (knowing that most of the diesel has been syphened out for the generator back at djuranalpi to keep the refrigerated coiffin going) i head off in search of a shifter. 1/2 hour later and many unhelpful meetings later I have a shifter, turn it on, -no water. Council mike happens to drive past at this point so I stop him and he organises someone else form council to arrive about half hour later (truck still running) to tell me that the taps been broken for a couple of days.

Someone else turns up and shows me how the truck can be turned off. He goes again . council man reckons I could use the fire hose at the council, truck won’t start again,,,,

Needless to say this story goes on for sometime, I did eventually get a full tank of water back to djuranalpi, minus another tyre on the truck, just on dusk with no lights and ears stinging from power tripping yol\u council boss blasting me for bringing the truck down without his permission- where’s the telephone?, anyway it was his boss who gave me the keys, but not a pleasant experience, half a chicken in my belly
And the knowledge of a dry shirt in my bag.

Returning, obviously not entirely content. I was given hot tea and vegetables, and a couple of cigarettes and told that I should have been there as I missed some important pieces. This is where I became trudgenite for a moment, but the tea really was good and being pissed off while holding a sleeping baby who is your new nephew is hard really. So I just enjoyed the show and listened to the babbling brook running past me from the tap not quite being turned off after each 1 inch diameter bottle was filled from the 5 inch diameter tap on the back of the truck.

One does wonder what the council and marthakal are doing with their money, but the issue for us is that without proper support everything will soon be like that.

i-view media pro is not an ideal solution but it’s the best I have seen so far for at least a few reasons,
-multiple metadata catagoroes, relative db
-multiple file types, film, image, audio, text
-cross platform
-continuing to be developed at a rate of knots that we can never afford.
-free reader
-drag and drop
-can take maps
-can produce cds and html pages.

I think getting into the habit of reducing video media to mp4s to conserve space is a good habit. Maybe cameras of the near future will record in mp4 mode, national recording project willl hate that too, as the quality is about 10 percent of broadcast, but so is the file size.

Delete files can be done in two ways, one which only deletes it’s reference and place in the database and one which deletes the file from the drive entirely.

sample
Someone has a map in there ivmpfido, they want to add some place n ames to it, or mark some lines on it. Go to’ open with photoshop’ map opens is editable, save as back into right folder or drag and drop it back onto database. Actually it;’s not that hard, if you know also about photoshop. Want to edit some vodeo, open it in final cut or I-movie,

What I am saying here is that it’s about someone knowing about the other software raher than on pi=edce of software knowing everything, and spaces between differents softwares is just one way of catagorising things.

Interestingly, links can be made on separate photshop layes which can be invisible until opened in photoshop, need to think about layers more and linking.. someone remind of this…

At anotherr level is all the softwar which allow accasss to other computers on-line, like at the uni where some one else can see your screen and take over your mouse, this can be done online as well which is useful for on-line hepland training, this can be combined with webcam etc. www.cuseeme.com for example.

Also I am happy no-has except trudgen has mentioned file trees lately.

There is an increasing number of photo mosaic information and imagery on the web, and a rumour that a photomosaic of the entire nt is being produced at the moment, like that one of paris in the zoomify site.

all this will be overtaken by collaborations between google and keyhole in the near future.

some rough noted about sub titling

2006-07-06T10:28:00.000+09:30

sous text notes,

some people translat e yow as yes others as ok, fitting the speaker into two different social sectors,

timing , just after to give priority to voice, just before allows the words to be followed and more complexity to pass through?

when someone does the initial translations, they will try to puit in english grammar lioke commas where there should be a pause , not necessarily where there is apuse , and vice versa., the sub titles have to correspond to the voice on the film.

ways of subtitling are influenced by making products suitable for the deaf, therefore we transalate and write things that already in english otr the languaJE OF COICE AND INCLUDE ALL WORDS LIKE YES AND NO, AND EVEN THE UMS AND ARES, INTERESTINGLY, THE YOLKNU UMS ARE QUITE ELABORATE SOME TIMES, nhakun nulu,,,

grammer teacher hated it when I started new lines with and m but in subbing this happens all the time., and when words are spelt all wrong even if it’s not you languyage of choise.

loitoral and repititions method, over supplying the meaning in it’s new lingual context, is this closer to the meaning more often I think so

using microsoft word , it is increasingly difficult to take out the capital leeters of the firsr word which ameriacans seem to think is absoliutly nesserary to their survival and maybe it is, very frusrtating to have to take them all out again why?

annnoyung habit of having the sound before the visual sask mick about example? this comes from the human thing of hearing someone first aand then directing your visual attention to them.

september report

2006-07-06T10:22:00.000+09:30

september report; bryce

first meeting with ntlis and gikc

Gikc and database develo;pment

who is it for

Technology

Metadata

Iconoclash

Yiniya

Djuranalpi

ntlis

first meeting with ntlis and gikc top

our first meeting began with the showing of a video about the djankawa sisters, ancestral spirit story and joe and gandhuwuy stared saying a few things about the structure of yol\u knowledge and databases. this is a rough transcript of what was said as the film was playing..

track 2 6/9/08 9;30 Showing a film made about the djankawa? sisters.

Joe; This is basically a documentary about two ancestral sisters how they travelled from the east to the west so east/west, probably arnhem land, 15 mins of footage, documentin? People around people north east arnhem land…/

Gandhuwuy; this is the where the stories begin or came from, where people come from ga naming the lands, parrticular clan groups, waterholes, everything, so all the libraries plans, documenting that you wanted to do, and then do it properly, not just a made up one, madeup, nhawiyu, like a concentraction all the doctors, professors anthropologist collection, that’s not the real nhakun, you have to reveal discovery and putting the meanings there, so the kids nh^wi .. and behavour towards the land properties ownership, origin ga resect other people properties, respect one another, dhuwa ga yirritja, i just wanted to show that the bunguwa .. bunguwa ..where the knowledge came from, especially for dhuwa i don’t know about the yirritja, still young one for that one,

3;37
joe; we ’re talking about ah. .. i think you will see the nature of itself (it for yourself?), about the libraries , that there are actually two setups, (..unclear..)
there are two sets of libraries , two ways libraries work?

now these other libraries where peoples just come in and have a look, and paperworks anything to do with (art?) just look and read the other just studying some of the images to the locals to getting nh^wi, so that’s what we are in , you know, selling some of the products we want to do to the libriaries and i think this is up to every individual clan groups have to do there part. and for the information centre as well for keepinf (the secrets?) of yol\u people as well in the garma particular like in that dh^wa of the clan groups

jessica; joes talking about makling dvd’s of particular locations..

joe .. how will this, how to set up this libraries to..
like what’s happenning now we’re getting most of the properties and all this for the council to be using now.. ..to keep this, business nhawi. it’s a project people are looking at, another way of getting money too maybe a few of the people maybe later on go to do the lecture for nh^wi education reason they can probably get from local schools involvement or community..?..or any interesting people coming here to nh^wi and it’s the same structure
but we’ll see how it goes , how the libraries set ups here so we just want to play with those two models by time set up hope to get a few dollars on this nh^wi machines and all that,

.. family requested whether ther’s a public performance for a group like from pass away, they want us to get an image of dancing while they’re having separate ceremonies

7;00
(structure fulfils your acknowledgement, accepts your dec. um footages.)

i suppose all the structures that we are looking at.. richard has just drawn a structure and i’ve drawn a structure how actually the yol\u peoples the structure of pattern work or dance work you know , that’s a structure there that abides by the yol\u law, how you perform

(joe has a three tier structure which denotes separate levels of understanding and is divide in two to acknowledge dhuwa and yirritja,)

basically what you are looking at here is garma level and ther’s another two levels that are restricted
C B A .. so those are the restricted things we are looking at there . very caution about that, but the other one we’ll talks about that.. we won’t understand what we’re talking about, this is something we’ll put in the database later on...

Gikc and database develo;pment top

Hardware

Currently, the gikc has macintosh computers for all of the resources work and one oc which is used for internet banking and administration.
although using only macintosh limits the amount of software options, this can be an advantqge as each and every mac comes with the same in-built software which allows technical support services and training to be streamed toward known software

Software

Macintosh software is designesd with multimedia in mind which happens to be what the majorty of yolngu cultural and botanical? Resource managers have in mind

Training and hardware/software advising should extent to the outstations to alow some sort of communal conformity and training facilitators to have a chance of being useful.

Auxillary programs to allow for mapping file location and search browser such dstc database model could be very useful if it integrates into these systems.

Separate software for accoounting administration etc, maybe the lagant (latest attempt at government administration in the northern territory) for that

Human resources,

Not out of order to consider balanda in administrative / secretarial and even technical support roles currently,

Process.
There is a general production line model which comes up when people use digital media technology which is something like this;

Video to dvd to either compressed video or edited video; then to compressed edited video resources and possible uploading to a database. There is something about database which are looking for ‘finished’ pieces rather than working copies.

Photos run themselves through a similar process.

Option 1 for gikc

Currently, there are two laptops that belong to the knowledge centre. Joe gumbula has one of them and richard ganhdhuwuy has the other one. They use these to collate resources of their own family information and history.

Should another group decide to use the knowledge centre it is unlikely that they would have access to these laptops.

Other projects using the knowledge centre should have their own home laptops that they can use; both to be able to maintain the security of particular arrangements of information, and to be able to take them for presentations locally and further away.

the knowledge centre becomes a resource base and administration body, rather the holding place of everyone’s arrangements/ presentations etc.

(the constant re-arrangement of the resources is more in line with life than making arrrangements and storing them for long times)

Option two

Having a super funky piece of software that takes care of some of this process; ie developing an interface to a system that allows video uploading and provides a dvd copy, a compressed copy (that is automatically uploaded to database with a minimal amount of metadata.) and then goes about deleting all unecessary files created in the process to conserve hard drive space.

Who is it for,

Decentralisation and technology top

Take this arrow of irritja and use it as a trial;

ntlis (northern territory libraries) is insisting on placing their latest daTABase software in gikc, which means two things, ; that they are trying to get rid of the ‘entity one’ one and that they feel like having an outcome to jot down from their visit here this week.

This database software is in it’s final stages of completion and appears to function quite well in the way it is meant to. Whether it is useful or not is different, but certainly the arangement of repatriated items into some sort of database could be useful.

As mentioned in previous reports, the original entity one database has never functioned properly or been used, although it is still installed somewhere and incorporates a maintainance charge which is being regularly paid.

The idea of having a centralised place for every different clans stuff continues, at least from the point of view of government bodies.

The idea of having separate databases and items of technology in separate places continues, mostly from people like ganhdhuwuy and joe, although they too see merits of having everybodies information in a centralised location.

if west (government) side want all the collected indigenous stuff to be visible, given back or whatever, then we come across all the problems of who has access to what, especially if they don’t know where things came from (such as photographs taken by anthros and missionaries).

if technology is being used by people to create their own stuff, then it’s already in the right place and being seen by the right person.

If people are employing collected artifacts in the making of these new resources, then the gikc becomes resource/ research centre, but also they need to find it first, maybe in the database.

Joe gumbala talks about the space; the space he refers to is that of a generation who have not kept up the knowledge as they could have, the space is a real one and one that technology may be able to bridge, eg if joe can find a picture and a sound recording maybe even a movie of his great grandfathers time and reconstruct some sort of synchronous experience complete with gentle mockery, it will be enough to get the ball rolling again, wherever hark the uncertainties , no matter, because then it can go again. (I am hoping to coerce joe into talking about this some more for a recording when he gets back to darwin )

the space is one that is real. technology is a string, or a spear, or some sort of attempted link from here and now through that space from mind to the mind’s desired devolutionary point, elastic bands returning us to earth or each other or whatever state we find equalibrium. Telephones would not be invented if all the people you knew lived in your kitchen. Spears would not be used if every animal you wanted to know lived in your kitchen fridge.

(catabases won’t be used if they are drap.)

Extra speed makes extra spaces, time equals distance. If I need to get there tommorrow it is a long way. If I need to get there when i get there it’s not so far if I start walking now.

People who know each other these days further away from both the country and people they know than before, the reduction of these spaces and giving context a physical reachability is desire.

information from another context pronounces an uncertain amount of space, which is always extra.

Having the sites of technology, ie computers etc in ‘missionary centres’ (now called towns or administration centres) is fine, as gandhuwuy would say, but ultimately being able to use the technology to work from home(land) is better, as joe and gandhuwuy would say.

Constant intervention by government bodies and strategies of centralising resources onto land that belongs to someone else consistantly appears within the continued operations of colonization. Create more spaces to concentr.. con quer.

Technologies are becoming more and more transportable, last years main frame computer is today’s laptop, work from home with the family.

Metadata top

Indigenous ways of learning from the soles on up means having someone as your guide. You don’t get a fridge full of fish and then learn how to make a spear, or a barramundi farm.

You don’t get a fridge full of fish and then put one back in the river and another on the end of a fishing line and a few more 3’7km out to sea in a spirit canoe.

You don’t get a database full of fish and then arrange it, you get the fish and put it with chips and get a bit of lemon and cut it with knife and put it on plate and place in the dataoven to stay warm till the kids cover the space between there and their home.

Luckilly, metadada is still awake practicing his singing and can show the kids where dinner is.

So much metadata is stored in the operator, there’s always going to be one. In this context, metadada usually a very live one, maybe less metadata is needed in the software.

Metadata exists in the type of equipment used, digital camera makes photos (data-photo), gives a date (data-date), knows which photos were taken together (data- group) etc. the person who took the photos has a whole lot more metadata about place and time and relationships of the photographed.

Iconoclash top

At mission beach on elcho island there is a site of the .. ceremony which involved many clans coming together (in the ‘50’s?) with sacred objects and placing them together to create an ephemeral symbol of unity.
Members of the balanda community raised the funds to raise an adelaide fabricated construction over top the site a few years ago., we now have a sculptural image of what?

Todas el mondo ist spitle mit chocolateladezeus/nur.

Yiniya top

Where’s my computeer that john promuised me? Feeling a bit embarressada about turning up here just for one day and wasn’t able to have much useful time with yiniya. We had a bit of a chat during the card game he was involved in after I finally found him. I had tried to ring several time the few days before to let him know what time I would arrive, but his phone is not working, left messsages at the school and also spoke to ross at the council who assured me someone would pick me up at the airport. Neither option seemed to have any fruit however yiniya wasn’t really surprised to see me wandering up to him. Had already got a room at the guest house so.. he said he would meet me there later.

Anyway, he’s right , who wants to be an experiment, and rightly suggested that I should be staying for at least a week so we could round every body up and talk about the footage from garma. (I had sent the dvds a few days before) everybody wasnts a copy and at least one disk of the six isn’t working anymore. Can I have another copy, sure I’ll just see if I have spare one in my thong.

Seems like everyone is happy to have the chance to watch the dvds but. Yiniya says we have to edit out both bad quality footage (like too much camera movement and out of focus; seemingly even if it contains good anthropologically voracious material) and bits that (people like joe; unquote) got put in “that were wrong”. will be interesting to see where the limits are in these partitions.

I suspect that the influence of good television reception and hollywood moobies adds an extra stress to that one.

Certainly I learn over and over again the importance of being able to keep going once the balls start rolling and it’s unfortunate to be operating directly under a western construct of time.

The editing ie arranging of original film footage ultimately would be done in a semi-public environment (or a space accessable to people concerned or interested).
the reworking/retelling of narratives is an event itself.
Unfortunately, a desktop computer environment is more than likely going to be an enclosed space free of odd dogs and ticks and even sandflies and dust.

The scenario at djuranalpi is that the computer has been put in the school building which is sort of off limits to bupalo and bula\ (his son) because of some school tradition that I don’t understand.
We got around this by transferring things to my laptop and taking it to the veranda (and I got instant approval in the form of two day old turtle bum).

Another thought is that while it’s difficult to be involved with these sub-projects without thinking toward databasing (both from past experiences of people with computers here and the influence of ntt1, as well as our own concentration on database development), the amount of readily available footage and material for begginning a documentary or some type of multimedia presentation seems more useful.

Keywords, reproduction

Certainly there is still talk about adding voice overs and extra footage when possible.

The very idea of producing a finished object may always be in jeopardy I reckon, unlesss this object is motivation toward developing markets of controversy, a positive narrative structure itself.

Also, while tools of documentary making are at hand, opportunisim could, should, would be rife and relevant. Eg, when the third suicide of the season occurs 20 meters from your back door (galiwin’ku sept 2?) and joe suggests trying to establish some sort of documentation for the mainstream media, it is hard to argue the importance of continued working on what was happening two decades ago for theoretical solutions for a theoretical future. (and with preconcieved ideas of knowledge production and critiquing theories of representation.)

Djuranalpi top

So I managed to swindle an e-mac from the school, (government is now supplanting fixed hardware categories of cheap crap for every man woman and child and therefore have no further use for it ) and have installed software such as photoshop, (my copy) and ms word (shepherdson) and configured I-photo and I-tunes and the desktop to the way I think is the most suitable.

Unfortunately, due to education dept. paranoia, it is the first e-mac I have seen without an internal modem, so no internet access is available at the moment. Ntlis kindly donated some extra ram so it is all fitted out to go.

We have a preview copy of dipes (dept. of infrastucture planning and environment?) supplied maps in the form of one we bought, so I have separated an area around elcho from the map of australia constucting the boundaries using a combination of the region desired and manageble size. This can be opened in photoshop, and, after hunting for maypal, gukul, mapu guya and marandjalk, feeding all the kids and ourselves, several buckets of tea, a couple of hundred winnie blues and a few slugs of kava, we set about the task of learning how to use the software to zoom, unzoom and scroll around the place. By around midnight wulumdhuna was happily adding layers of names.

The map is a satellite image and has a resolution of around 50m per pixel. This means that a large shed can be located visually, but anything as small as a house is difficult to locate.

galiwin’ku by satellite with airstrip and roads clearly visible

These images are about the best one can get outside of photomosaics from airplanes (where planes take photos at regular intervals as they pass over tracts of land).

Even so, it soon became apparent that the number of placenames (paricularly along the coast) requires even more resolution. (maybe 1;1 as simon would say)
However, wulumdhuna seems happy enough and looking forward to the lesson about the opaic layers we can use to identify connective narratives of ancestral figures.

(personal notes; I love the way everything has more than one name, and how it led to thoughts about the way objects resist classification in order to remain intriguing and then how a twisted contempory germanic entymological view of the word classification would be ‘from class ficking’ which then led back to thoughts about how by giving indigenous people, ie people who have a strong relationship to the natural landscape etc, databases is effectively asking then to help classify things both percieved and not yet percieved by an uncertain western gaze. Maybe if we want indigenous people to be our librarians, we could pay them as such instead of pretending othersarewise)

keywords; identity through difference- any bloody difference so long as it’s not classifiable.
objects from a technological western gaze, such as photographs of things, need to be arranged because we don’t really understand where they belong.

Back to the matter at hand, a significant technological stumbling block is the nature of the matter in hand. My little digital still camera is proving to be much more satisfactory as a documenting tool than the video camera. This is for four reaseons that I can see
1. it’s small and can be taken hunting etc in a pocket and pulled out with a flash between axe blows or harpoonings
2. it’s much simpler to learn to use and to use
3. photos are easier to upload to the computer and to arrange (edit)
4. somehow a series of photos contains more truths in that they are able to withstand the many different narratives of the viewer(s)

wulumdhuna is arranging the photos both in folders marking the seasons and folders containing elements of certain stories, within these folders the photos may be arranged according to what signifies what, eg pandanus nuts go with turtle eggs, and those september orange flowers go with baby shark fat (getting that photo took a few hours but it was delicious)

given the observations above, I have tried to organise the use of a digital still camera from shepherdson college by promising a few things to a few people, like sending them some cables and things. They have a couple that they got for free when ordering printer cartridges that aren’t very good but might be alright until wulumdhuna can buy her own as she is threatning to do or until we can arrange some funding.

David wilson is the techy there and also interested in assisting in times of technical stress at djuranalpi as mentioned in the august report.

The video side of things may become more important during events such as ceremonies and story telling.

It had been planned that my arrival with paints and canvas (see august rep) would coincide with painting on canvas and some filming of stories about the paintings on the canvas. Due to the funeral dj^ma this was cancelled until next time, but (malu) was making every effort to attend to both until I assured him absolutely that I could return in a few weeks or so.

(personal notes; tangent here is to talk about the influence of me on everything, both as technical support and future olive python caretaker and maybe as ongoing subjugation to the queen; debt/ exchange management etc.)

yalu

‘The yalu women’s centre grew out of a research project exploring the connections between education and wealth. Within the initial stages of the project, the yolngu women involved provided evidence that while better education may lead to healthier lifestyles, it was yolngu education that was required rather than western education.

There are now at least half a dozen women connected to different yolngu clans who have become instrumental as ‘go-betweens’ for government health practitioners and project coordinators on and around elcho island.
They maintain a small center in the town of galiwin’ku which houses several computers and other resources for the continuing education of their people’ MC

I spent a few hours doing a lesson on video cameras here this time and was provided with a list of names should we consider offering a more official course in the near future, certainly there are ten people I know of who desire training on an individual or groups of two arrangement which is sort of the best way if not a bit tiring…)

Ten people have put their names down for a training course in macintosh software and video editing should the university be able to provide it, I hate making what appears to be promises about this knowing the difficulty of organising such an event and being paid for it at the moment. I am negotiating with the art school at cdu to collaborate in the making of a suitable unit for next year under the vet system.

Ntlis top

Spent way too much time with these guys (david and cate ) trying to get them to see the common element of places such as yalu and the art center and djuranalpi project and the knowledge centre and we talked a lot a about hardware and software and funding etc. I’ll write about all this later as I am also trying to write something about the advantages of macintosh systems etc. which relates to my interaction with ntlis)

wulumdhuna's project transcript

2006-07-06T10:17:00.000+09:30

0;00Dh^wa rraku dhu lakaram reading project dj^ma
0;05 nhawi nurr, dhula\ur yol\u wala/p birrid yurru bu\ul
dhiyak mala/ra bapurru ga nh^wi

0;15 marayhun dhiyalyun bala ga dhiyal b^y dhu ga dj^ma

0;20lakala\ malawal mala ga yalala ? back standingdja linksdja mala lakalakara
0;26 ga yol\u matha? dharwat yun? dhuwal ga linksdja mala dhu yalala dh^manar (share?) napurru?

00;31 wala wirripu\ \ayi .. bapurrulil, bapurrulil mala

00;39 \ayiku rraku nha\al wawaundji?.. djumarrkuli future yalala dhu mirri dhu
w^rrkannha? mur’muryun(sick) mira? narrapan minitja? dharrayundja (take care?) ga n^n dhuwanya bulu mar\githirr djumarrkuli yalala nhu\u walala\

00;53.. ga nor? \ura documents walal bala\ya nhundja nh^wi nur mala, cd nur or nunha walal videonur walal documents dhu ga \urran (stay?)

01;05 nh^wi pundja, bapurruwuy, nh^ \ayi bapurru yol\u ga yothu nayi mala buma unhi yothu\ djumarrkili\, yol nha\u wala?bal, liya nha\u ga nh^thil nhi\an , ga yolku nayi malapulu nh^wi

1;29 balanya rrarak?? Djumarrkuwu bukmaku djamarrkuluwu dhiyal nhakun bala gali lu\gurrma nurr

1;35 ga yalala nayi dhu dhipunur gali lu\gurrmanur martji bala\y links nayi dj^ma
winipu\wal dja ? mala bapurrulil dhiyana bala gala dhil’tjikundja

1:47 ?? dhiya\a bala rrunurruru/ starttja bu\gul wur’iyun (become) ga project dj^ma
1;56 nh^wiku rraku dj^lk’thirri walthu nhu\un rrakala ? \arrapamirri dhuwala\ dj^ma birrirr’yurr (start up?) dhula\ wa\apuy

2:09 yan balay nh^kun yolthu bumara nhu\i wa\a nh^\ura \ayi martjin

2;21 ga bala\a mala, nh^nur \ayi martjin nhalil nayi buma \hu\i wa\a

2’29 dhula\, mala dhu dhula\ ga dh^wu, nayi ga darwin martji rramba\i (bring together) m^nda

2:37 dh^wu dhu bu\gul ga dhapmaram?, ga dhula\; birrirriyurranawuy wa\alil mala ga g^na

2:51 ga dh^wu nayi dhu \ora nhu\i \uli dhula\,. Dhula\ nhu\u nayi dhu dh^wu \ora

3;02 mar\githinaray djumarrkuliwuy ga manapan dhi \upan(follow) Nukan? Nayi dhu nunhi dh^wu bungulyu ga manikayyu

3:16 wanhami \ayi dhu wa\anur ga manikay m^rrtji ga wanha nayi dhu bu\gul mala ga dharrwa=thun(walking purposefully) nhuni wa\anur, bala\yow

3:25 ga yalala\u? mirrintja bala linktja mala dj^ma mala yalapula? bala\ya nh^kun example \arra dhu `akaram

3:38 dhiyal, djuranalpi, dhuwantja djuranalpin wa\a nunhi \ayi ???? ga buma dhuwal wa\a warrawkuy (bird/ seagull?) ,

3:53 ga linknha ga \ora? dharrawa mirithirri wiripu\nha b^purrulil

3:59 dhuwal wa\a burruthir (burrutji? Python?) dhuwal g^wala wirrmumu wani nunhi \ayi buma dhiya\i b^pi wa\a

4:09 ga yalala nhumirri \ayi dhu link dhuwali m^rtji bu\gun? Manda nay\an? wurthana? Lin? Nha\??? Li\gan nhanan

4;23 lipurnur ga madakan wa\anar’min nunhi bala b^pi ga dhiyal

4:30 ga bala\ayi mala nunhi yalala\ , \arra dhu dhiyal bala gali `u\gurrma\u starttja ga

4;35 yalala\ buwarra? Link ga nh^wi dj^ma, bayi dhu nh^ma dhawa=’yurr bu\un maplil \arra dhu ? r^li
4:42 wanhami wa\anur mala dhu map nur ga lakaram wanha wa\a nunhiyi

4:47 ga nh^ nha\u bu\gul ga yol, yol.. nh^ nhulayi\? m^rrtjin, nhuni \ula dhu`a\ura ga dh^wu, dhu`a\ ga dh^wu

5:00 \ayi dhu lakaram nur ru\i? Or dhula\ rrark mirri\u dh^wu lakaram, \ayi dhu m^rtjinur rramba\ian nhuni dhula\ ga dh^wu nha\u balayi maplil ga yolthu bumaru nhu\i wa\a

5:14 ga yol \ayi m^rtjin ya bala\ya walalupu dh^win djumarrkuliwu mak ga \oram walala\ yalala\u mirriwu

5;25 ga bulu dhu buklulun marra\ yol\u walalan ga bu\gulwu dj^ma ga wanhamidja manikay m^rtji ga nh^thu bu\gul dhawarrthun

5;38 warrpan \ayi thu nh^wi ga final nhnidja? W^rrpan bu\gul dhuwali maplil martjin ga bulun dhu yalala\gu mirrintja bala dhu links da? mala dj^ma wanhal wanhal wa\alil

5:50 yalala\u mirrintja b^rthu? dh^warryurr? Map bala linknha

5;56 dj^ma malay dhu yalala nhudha? Mitj..markay? mar\gi, wanha nha\u wiripu\ linksdja\ura, ya bala\ya mala

6:04 \ayipu dhu yothu dh^\anmirr nh^mamirr wanha \ayi, wanha \ayi ga \ura? rramini? Wamini? Or wayirri? Or yapa mirri\u nha\u wa\a or wirripu wirripu mala

6:22 ga bala\ya, \ayipunu? Maladja ga nhu\i yothundja,l yaka rraku purpose ga dhuwal dj^ma .. yalala nhuni mar\githirr, yalala dhu limuru nh^panmirr dh^warr’yun bala dhu\apan walal ga mar\gikum, djumarrkuli nhuniyi

6:36 dhiyaka rraka nhu\i dj^man, dhuwali rraku projectdja, dhiyaka nhakun warra’wan?dja yalalan djumarrkuliwu, ga lingun dhuwal

older stuff about map interfaces

2006-07-06T10:14:00.001+09:30

map interfaces

earlier this year, as a part of my involvement with researching notions of collective memory and databases in a cross cultural context, i found myself exploring the idea of using map interfaces to facilitate locating information to territory with a friend from djuranalpi on elcho island.

wulumdhuna (who works as a teacher’s assistant) and i had recently persuaded the school at galiwin’ku allow her to have an e-mac that hadn’t been used for some months to be delivered to the outstation and i had in my possession several digital satellite images of northern australia and a copy of photoshop 7.
and so after finishing off various shellfish, making enough tea for any stranded US warships (or tourist liners) and then drinking all as none turned up, picking the last bits of dried turtle egg yolk out of my beard and topping up the generator, we settled into an exploration of the sea and islands surrounding elcho.

although wulumdhuna wasn’t familiar with photoshop, she had used macintosh computers before it wasn’t long before we were flying around the islands, zooming in and out, putting in a few place names and scrolling over virtual seas.

she was most interested in exploring the places we had been together during my past visits, places that we should try to go in the future and places that were relevant to stories we had at times been talking about.

on occasion i would say something like, ‘ wow, look at the the way that estuary comes almost back to such and such, yet her responses didn’t seem to share in my amazement of these ‘new’ discoveries.

in fact it was quite clear that she not only knew how it all went somehow, but was clearly under the impression that this complicated mosaic of imagery made using some of the most expensive technology available today had only one real purpose, and that was to help me to understand some of the things that she knew, and if we had to use this sparsely populated, un-undulating version of the world to do it then that's o’.k, and maybe it’s o’k for the next generations of disassociated yolngu and babalanda as well.

we went about tracing journeys of both ourselves and ancestors, playing with sprays of stars and fallen leaves (two ‘brushes’ available in photoshop), and typing in all the names along one stretch of beach near where we were on a separate digital ‘layer’ until there was no more room for words either on the coastline or between us.

that the computer was neither of us created a space where we sat together.

certainly, the use of these maps to aid in the organisation of digital media resources within east arnhem indigenous contexts will respond to the same sort of spacial relationship to territory from which each of the images/ films and other digital media objects belong. ways of describing this might be;

1.yolngu knowledge of objects are often understood to run alongside manifestations of ancestral beings and the way in which these ‘objects’ are located in the world relates to particular narratives that in turn are ordered into journeys across landscape. although these narratives are often recorded with their territorial attributes onto objects of ceremony (ie painting), until recently it hasn’t been necessary to use representations of the ground that are restricted to a ‘external eye’ point of view.

2. the significance of map interfaces being incorporated into digital media organisational systems (ie databases) appears to be not that maps provide an increased understanding of a local environment from an ‘external eye’ (third satellite) point of view, but that maps provide an intermediary layer between the internal coherence of indigenous narratives and an acceptable format for the anticipation of the co-inhabitors of this land to themselves have the opportunity to anticipate and incorporate indigenous systems into relationships to land and law.

(a specific example of this technique being used is the recent land/ sea ... claim around blue mud bay where gps readings had been taken over a period of a year to record the locations of various hunting expeditions. were these then recorded onto a map and produced in a court case about ?? land/ resource rights??)

at the same time, i think we have to remain conscious of our political responsibilities when being in the position of ‘researching’ and expressing ideas which may define mapping use within indigenous contexts. the following is an extract from Alvin Warren’s keynote paper summary at the 2004 AIATSIS conference.

‘As indigenous peoples, we have had no choice but to map. Faced with dominant cultures that continue to use Western cartography to dispossess and exclude us, we have rightly focused in recent decades on learning to wield their weapon of choice. This "external" use of "counter-mapping" by indigenous peoples has yielded crucial victories in title recognition and gaining management control of traditional territories. However, Western cartographic maps are embedded with restrictions and assumptions that are incompatible with many indigenous ways of knowing about, and relationships to, place. Though powerful when used externally against governments and corporations, these maps may also become another means of indigenous peoples negotiating against ourselves by having to force our relationships to our territories into the narrow frame of the map. Used internally, the risk can be even greater. In North America, as in other parts of the world, indigenous peoples are beginning to bring maps from the courtroom to the classroom. Justly aimed at reversing the rapid loss of traditional geographic knowledge among many indigenous youth, this use of Western cartographic maps -- particularly as rendered by Geographic Information Systems software - may threaten to undermine our recent victories. The very tool that can enable us to regain title and management, used improperly, may also estrange us from our ancient relationships to our lands.’

while the production of map objects with fixed locations of place and place names may not reflect the shimmering, ever changeable constructs of traditional indigenous narrative, they do provide a notion of translation, and a pause for referential reflection to entertain the possibilities of gently restructuring and accommodating a wider australian narrative.

when wulumdhuna and i are sitting looking at the maps she will constantly make reference to objects and stories in the vicinity. pointing to a place on the map she may say something like ‘ this is where the ‘such and such’ sits, he comes through here and here from over there’ and then point out the same thing in a painting which is on the wall or remind me of one that she knows i have seen, or some sort of cultural artefact like a small sculpture, “see that one, you can hear them at night just over there” (i don’t want to make the reference more precise because i’ll probably get it all wrong)

i am certainly made to feel like l using the maps are a bit boring when i’m living inside of one that is much more fun and accessible, and using the paintings and memories of performances starts to look more reasonable the more one learns.

however, as a way of sharing metaviews and creating an experience of place together, these maps provided some sort of artefact for that interaction to take place.

today, satellite imagery of the planet is reasonably accessible the committed and diligent colonial practices of the last few hundred years have also provided us with an impressive range of topographical maps.

we don’t have to go to far around and about in history or space to see that forms of mapping are relative to the particular perspectives of the cultures that produce them. as an australian, i have always been intrigued by the north south orientation of maps. we use the reason of magnetism and compasses for that one i think but i can’t remember why, what i do remember is that moslem maps sometimes put mecca at the top whether it be north south, east or west and that early american maps had the direction of europe to the top (west). if the orientation we use has been so shaky, what's to say that the scale is any less likely to be significantly more ‘objective’, and does it mean that santa is god?

it is recognised that there is a danger in providing such map structures for theoretical interpretation from other domains, however if the map and information featured in it are dependent upon and restricted to relevant collaborators for their elaboration, this danger may be reduced, and we can continue to believe in their objective authenticity which is has been validated by institutional power.

topographical forms of representation are useful in terms of being able to locate particular sites by tracking across maps the route one may take physically form a known location, ie following the road from darwin to gunbalunya to locate the east alligator river crossing.

using a gps (global positioning shaabaloola) is becoming more common in remote indigenous communities, often attached to a researcher, mining representative or other government employee.

so if we do accept that these two forms of western mapping technology can be used in a useful way as interfaces for communication between people and other people via computers ie- topographical maps with known roads and tracks marked on them and
-satellite imagery which incorporate reasonably natural colour coding (as opposed to infra red colours that well officed cartographers seem to be more than happy with), what are we going to do with them?

we have been working on making animatable combinations of these two map forms for use on computers and DVD players, with the view of incorporating them into a digital media organisation program (DMOP ) or a searchable database.

double click on film icon to play

both satellite imagery and topographical maps are obtainable in ecw format (e.. compressed wavelet) which is a format used to make large image files a manageable size as well as embedding geo-referencing data such as latitude and longitude). for using software such as arcview and er mapper.
selections from these two image types can be exported into file formats that can be used by animation programs such as flash or image editing programs such as photoshop.

as long as the projections used are consistent in each case, it is possible to create maps of different types with the same size, same location and similar resolution (clarity).

these in turn can be layered upon each other and variations of opacity will allow one form or the other to be dominant and a dissolves (mixtures) between them created as well. (sort of like a time lapse photographic series of a hamburger left in the rain)

extra manipulations allow other effects such as reinforced combinations of the maps.

multiple dissolve of topographical and satellite imagery
150.675e12897s

using geo referencing data in some sort of database situation, where digital media resources are to be stored by location is important for three reasons

1. because they will help to locate places in the landscape according to gps information
and
2. because a feature which allows the storage of media resources to locations on the map may be programmed so that it is the geo referencing data which provides the metadata which maintains this location.( i imagine tolerance ranges of around 100m)
3 previously collated data from government organisation can be ‘repatriated to the maps as this is how they store it in organisations such as dipe (department of infrastucture and planning and environment) and nlc (northern land council)

in fact this is the main reason why we are looking at map interfaces in our research with ikrma and hope to incorporate the idea of a map interface as part of the TAMI database proof of concept.

basically, the infrastucture provided by this type of map interface will not only facilitate visual searching for known places, but will provide enough information for media objects to effectively stored in locations on the map and in turn searchable/ ie findable by navigating to the place where you stored it. (imagine being able to drag and drop a folder of your photos from a particular location onto the equivalent map location and having an alias/copy of them stored there.

the map program fugawi incorporates a clunky version of this idea.

it is also possible to incorporate the the ecw/ gps functionality via other methods, and i can imagine being able to use any form of image, for example a painting or photograph as the map interface.

.

the future of web formats (including html 3.0) will allow both scrolling and zooming and various companies are already working on similar technology for other reasons.

http://www.emory.edu/CRL/abb/WindowLevel.2/hand1.html

direction of technology

the processing power of contemporary consumer level computers limits the functionality of these types maps for ‘exploring’ with the desired resolution and area coverage without using a compressed wavelet format or something similar.

as yet no ecw plug in for mac osx is available but this could only be a matter of days in waiting.

that technology is reshaping itself toward allowing perspectives which can produce representations that are increasungly accessible and significant for indigenous people around the world may be more than a superficial coincidence.

as post- colonial groups spend more time labouring in their chosen environments, their perspectives display this changing bias.

moving from gridded topographical mapping drawn through external to mathematics through to satellite imagery and vegetational imagery of the landscape, to photo mosaics follow a similar perspective trajectory as that of a man landing from space and illustrate this change.(see paul carter or read his book, the road to botany bay)

there may be everything to be gained by pursuing such an avenue in order to provide the backbone of an interface less disorientated by text and more responsive to relationships.

recent attempts to imply? western educational resources upon indigenous people using indigenous money has seen the use of helicopotors to film from even lesser heights to provide images of landscape. although still entirely compatible with the oppressive and exploitative systems of a western objective overview, as is this text, some of the multimedia resources produced are allowing an indigenous voice to stretch into political and social fields that are often distanced by unnecessary barriers.

lately we have been using google earth, at least when we have good internet access, however it is ofter more practical to have a map of the relevant areas in either zoomifier or photoshop.

a little bit about macs

2006-07-06T10:14:00.000+09:30

Just to shed some light on observations for current IT desires around sub-projects of ikrma.

Film/ video

In a beginning, to edit and produce film required fairly serious commitment to the tasks of understanding processess, having time and specialised space availiable and having the financial means required to play with such equipment . processes involved included physically developing, cutting and splicing and redeveloping for special effects etc. (much in the same way as still photography for those who know about darkrooms)

Although digital techno;ogy has increased the accessability of this process, much of it remains and is based upon previous techniques, especially the te3rminology which quite often has only an etymological connection with the way video may be produced now.

Today there are desktop and laptop computers which work together with digital cameras which are capable of capturing and editing short movies and producing low quality (in terms of resolution) versions of these for storage and distribution using cd’s, dvd’s and portable drives, as well as internet possiblities.

The important point being that film has only recently become possible within the consumer digital world, and that while there are many rules and behaviours that come with it in terms of both form configurations and size limitations, there is a now a window of access to this technology which people of this part of the world are finding useful.

Our experience so far within the IT component of our project shows that the desire for video and other image type representations are a priority, the reasons for this having a lot to do with their ability to bypass other forms of text.

And so while the the thousands of noisy years that have gone into the development of this feature and it’s current mode of operation in the computer world, and that any interaction incorporates the possibility of being enslaved to a myriad of pre-defined prioritizations, the possibility of having representations of (moving) images and being able to transfer them to new spacial sites in a short time is a desired feature within top-end indigenous communities.

(the most recent example is having footage of the gupapuynu involvement in the august garma festival being prepared for burning to dvds in order both to show it to people who were unable to attend the ceremony and to create resources for future educational purposes.)

which is why working with equipment additional impositions other that those mentioned aboved needs to be avoided.

The people responsible for the development of macintosh computers have been concentrating on graphics and video technology since the early 90’s, and many artists, designers and even anthropoligists, linguists and scientists working around arnhemland are using macintosh systems.

This is not to open up a general debate around mac verses pc, but to be aware of the current context and computer usage in arnhemland and surrounds, and the desire for video technology as observed by the ikrma project.

It would seem reasonable to make every effort to reduce the number of constraints imposed by technology in the area of film reproduction.

(a good (ugly) example of this is the government initiative which provided gapuwiak school with several pc’s and a digital video camera but no software or hardware to connect the two for about a year)

sound and video functionality is always automatically included and configured on macintosh, including transfer ports capable of high speed information transfer (firewire), reasonable quality video cards and drivers for most brands of video and still cameras. (which means plugging your camera in and it can be read by the computer without seaching on the net for additional software)

last week when I was working with gandhuwuy at dhambala. He has an I-book (mac) from the knowledge centre which contains a lot of photographs and some video as well as his own computer at home which he uses for the internet and some documents as far as I know. The way that he refers to them sometimes is ‘the easy one’ and ‘the hard one’.
Whether he is only talking about portability or something I don’t know, however I suspect it runs deeper than that.

The current problems with using a mac platform may include things like current government policy and teaching in schools, this seems to change quite regularly from mac promotion to mac tolerence to non-support or teaching. This also adds the problem of technitions being available in the community even though the amount of technical problems with macs is a smidge compared to pc.s.

Macs are much less likely to be infected by viruses, partly to do with the operating system but mainly to do with hackers being seemingly uninterested in developing bugs to devour them.

Part 2

Every balanda wants their own yol\u and every yol\u wants their own balanda.

At the level of data creation ie videos/photos, often there is a balanda taking or at least being involved in the role.

I would like to suggest that this may in some part be because it is the desire of community members that this be the case in order to form some sort of incurred cooperation.

In a similar way that the indigenous art movement of the top-end involves a functional acceptance of of both conforming to western formats for the gallery context, and the collaboration of balanda printmakers producing editions of indigenous designs for the duel purposes of economics and on going (re)creation.

Having these balanda roles imbued in the process provides an opportunity for co-operation and learning as well as allowing the artists to concentrate the narrative components (and transmission) which occur at the time of painting/ design preparation with the community.
The boring technical processes of reproduction can be left to balanda to take care of.

Similarely, the creation of digital objects of representation aligns itself more closely with editioning than creating and is it worth considering the collaboration of balanda technitions in this field as the desire of indigenous people and one of the reaons why it is often the case at the moment.

Certainly our project is more interested in how these various resources are arranged together , but we are becoming more aware of the production level of the ‘data’ being an area of mutually beneficial social relationships within a cross-culture.

I have been called to film or photgraph cultural events on occasion where there have been indigenous people around with the same technical ability as me, but possibly because they have other roles to fulfil in the event, it is preferred that I film…(it also allows me a more comfortable position within the event than one of observer.)

Notes;

Power relationships; size of organisations,

Secretaries.

other notes for kapulwarnamyo

2006-07-06T10:10:00.000+09:30

notes for kupulwarnamyo

clearly from our talks with peter et al, a read only type multimedia document to be made at various stages of their project is desirable.

in order for this to be made easy to do and therefore plausable and possible i have been considering the following option for at least one part of the kupilwarnamyo stuff.

- given that the majority of photographs, video and some audio and text items will often have relationship to place, and that maps are being used to observe fire changes etc, i have been looking into open source software that will allow people at the site to development a map interface with placenames or references as one of the opening pages for some sort of multimedia presentation.

- the easiest way to do this is to use a program like photoshop or illustrator (looking into a freeware one called gimp) to locate the various places and areas being documented. having the full range of tools like scrollability, zoom tools, opaic pantbrushes for drawing shapes or lines over country etc, hundres of colour options for coding things seems to be useful in ways maybe not yet thought of.

-the procedure would be as follows

-peter sends us the co-ordinates or map reference numbers that cover the area he is working in/ around/ through as well as the fire map site information he uses.

- i will make up a jpeg images of satellite images, topo maps and fire maps which cover this area and can be loaded into gimp/ photoshop as separate layers and record the gis coordinates of the corners for future reference or embed the ecw stuff into them. (around 50Mg)

-this can then be either sent up there or taken up there by someone and some time spent marking locations on a separate layer. having the three map versions behind each other on different layer should make it pretty easy to locate things. (using 1;50 000 topos and the 50m per pixel resolution satellite images we can make)

- then some organising of the other resources in terms of location needs to be done, ie place name files can be made in i-photo and organised accordingly, as well as in i-tunes, including some notes in the comments section about other documents which may relate to these items

- things that arn’t practically able to be classified by placenames, such as presentations etc might like to be classified into people names as a second level interface later on, ie when you click on the campsite location, individuals folders might come up as well as the location one.

-( this will give us the basic constituents of a standard director type multimedia disk using the map as one of several contents pages

-either once this map document is made and other items of documentation are organised a bit, or in order to help with this, someone can go up there for a few weekst or so and create the first simple collection as a multimedia disk, and make a backup of the resources in this format.

-then it should be relatively easy for someone like rohan or me and whoever wishes to learn how to do it up there to create an updated version every six months

-this type of thing would benifit our research by allowing time for other yet unconsidered ways of storing things to rear their lovely heads in the process and be able to be incorporated into future versions as well as our database models.

this is what i have started to do at djuranalpi with wulumdhuna and so far it’s going great.
for example, she will put a place name on the rock that is part of the turtle story, and then have a folder which contains things like photos of the rock, turtle photos, pjotos of plants which relate through various naratives, a video of someone talking about the place and maybe a relative painting.

the advantage of using things like i-photo and -i-tunes at the start is that particular photos etc can be referenced multiple times and be relevant to any number of places.

let me know what you think.

kapulwarnamyo

2006-07-06T10:09:00.000+09:30

Kupilwarnamyo 'Lofty' Bardayal Nadjamerrek

Things went as well as could be accepted.

General macintosh environment, with a pc laptop for fugawi, fire hotspots checked daily via sat. internet, super good canon video/film camera, kim has great digital still camera, all balanda have mac laptops, no computer accessable to indigines, kim has been doing some editing/ film training with two of lofty’s nepheews? Not many women around, loftiy’s wife mary turned up before we left. Plenty of people down the road at manmoy? Bi-lingual liguistic experts? Solar power , inverters, new shed being built to house technology, three small external hard drives, peter is pretty up to date with mac software and functionality, murry has new I-book, kim works on power book. Dvd player, video player big tele for watching stuff, dat recorder to be replaced by I-pod/griffin mike or similar,spike reducers, battery backups, e-mac on the way, portable printer, I-repeat, general macintosh environment, also, video players , dvd players, cd players, spekers, megaphone!
Software used include, I-photo, I-tunes, filemaker pro, fugawi, mail, opera (browser specialising in geoscince type web stuff) explorer, powerpoint, quicktime pro. I-movie, final cut pro, murry is off shoebox now,

Murray- was impressed by ‘learn gupapuyu’ cd , especially the functions of voice to text, he has given us a few things to look at of his (eco-zones wordlist, bininj dictionary, plant loists..)
we spoke about prefixing languauges and the difficulties of alaphabeticakl catagorisation.. for his botanical stuff ther 4 e exists photos . he plans to be around kubalone arm yow for about a month, the first part will be spent with wendy wallaby going around peeling people 4 stories. He hopes to be molding his various dictionaries towards a 1st completion through next year.
Has some funding for that

'Lofty' Bardayal Nadjamerrek, maintains the reality of sitting down and talkin as best practice techniquiques of intergenerational knowledge transmision, breaking away from most guristic theologies by chain smoking but no inscence.
Promotes the idea of further discusion into the credentials of a system revolving the upload of resources from digital cameras etc for display in a nearby (to the camp) setting in order to combine images of places and objects with discussion…

Seems happy to have balanda around and made an enormous effort to guide us through ancestral populus and their country.

Roxy – decides to stay with the old people, they are a strong part of the infrastructure, undeterred by concretors, carpenters and computers

These latter points are specific to the kupilwarrnamyo project but also helpful in the formation of our ‘general product’ specifications.

peter cook

seems preoccupied by the fire control/land management agenda , and his work in this field is impressive. The way that our project can maintain it’s philosphical agenda may be to point toward the development of ranger projects.

Outside of this may require working with other individuals and organizations such as the art centers promoting lofty (andrew blake) and murry’s strident loinguistic forays. His presence at the site may dwindle in the future, however there are scheduled culminations of his work as mentioned above…

kim mac- talking about associating his unit at anu with us, what is this unit? Filmaker, interested in thinking aboout this stuff, hobby photographer, lots of clips not to be used for specific projects as yet but could be incorporated into a db. Makes me try to think of a way to keep full quality footage and references compressed files of these clips…

Immanual/ bulany. 20yr old, enthusiastic, likes being on camera , likes hearing his own voice, confident, quick learner, doesn’t mind technology, helpful, born diplomat.

Place, becoming a settler site for researchers, from wallabies hunters and bee searchers to philanthropic funding groups from the fair flung US.

Notes;

The amount of traditional knowledge been given freely by lofty is high and possibly instrumental in keeping the culture here strong. Diverse range of rock art, differnent megafaunas to other areas around anhem land,

be nice to have a map where you can drag and drop those resources ie photos etc which are lined up in a box like selecting songs from I-tunes panel in idvd bed onto nthe map and then choosing sound files or movies or whqtever and dragging them on as well. This might rfequire preset folders covering the area of the maop each having an area of 1oo square meters or so pre prepared in the program. In effect when one selects a location on the map it will open tghisd folder with previously attached resources, the mapshouild als have the ability to slide between different map types. Ie topo to satellite and the ability to accept both ecws from various organizatrions such as the fire mapping stuff on the net and other governmental departments/ this could have similar onterface to I-life package programs/ maconsequence?
These latter points are specific to the kupilwarrnamyo project but also helpful in the formation of our ‘general product’ specifications.
I have spoken to both david murtagh and bevan kopman about this and they asure me it not too difficult to achieve should we find the reight persons..

Extra;

Spent time with peter,-
-wrote a short document on how to HAVE SEVERAL I-photo libraries available.
-installed quicktime pro for simple editing of q/time movies
-suggested a lisy of standars file formata to staRT USING. MPEG4/ uncompressed dv
and wav for sound files.
-it would be good to know if tapes or dvds were the best medum for storage in the tropics, standard library suggestions presume air conditionin etc
-he gave me a presentation of otto’s about using maps for us to look at
(on server), and a copy of his photo library to back up for him (confidentialish)
-we looked at current mac gis options on the net
-looked at various harddrive recorders on the net (like I-pod)
this thing about not using a phallic object to record …

what did I do with immanuel?
Shared videoing, epecially on our field trips where he spent time filming us as ell as some rocks, after I gave him the headphones so that you can hear the sound levels as you are reccording he started to add explanations to the footage as he took it quite confidently, after two days we edited all his footage together and I burnt a copy onto a cd, unfortunately I couldn’t get my dvd burner to work yet,
This process inspired another field trip as immanuel wanted top go and record two more sites on the camera.

-

letter to peter cook

2006-07-06T10:06:00.000+09:30

dear peter,

firstly i have to apologise for not getting back to you sooner with some of our thoughts since visiting kupalwarnamyo earlier this year and thank all concerned for the hospitality we recieved during that visit.

the experience has greatly aided our research and i hope that the following can be of assistance.

it was made fairly clear from our talks at the time that a series of ‘read only’ multimedia objects should be made at various stages at kupulwarnamyo.

this is due to the the importance of having type of database which can display media resources (ie photos, maps, fire sites/ transitions, videos and texts) in a useful way, and a way that local bininj people could work with easily in order to see what type of new documentation would be needed for successive versions.

in order for this to be made easy to achieve and therefore plausable in the current situation we have been considering the following option for at least a part of the kupilwarnamyo media resources.

the majority of photographs, video and some audio and text items will often have relationship to place, and that maps are being used to observe fire changes etc, we have been looking into both open source software and proprietry software that will allow people at the site to development a map interface with place names or references as one of the opening pages for some sort of multimedia presentation, ultimately on DVD which would be playable on any standard DVD player.

the easiest way to do this is to use a program like photoshop or illustrator (looking into a freeware one called gimp) to locate the various places and areas being documented. having the full range of tools like scrollability, zoom tools, opaic paintbrushes for drawing shapes or lines over country etc, hundreds of colour options for coding things seems to be useful in ways maybe not yet thought of.

previously we had been talking about using programs which were capable of combining the resources at the time of locating placenames such as fugawi or arc explorer, however the limitations of these peograms and that their features are ultimately designed for other purposes than what is desired in this circumstance means we should leave aside these options for the moment.

-the suggested procedure would be as follows

-we decide upon the co-ordinates or map reference numbers that cover the area being worked in/ around/ through as well as the fire map site information that is used.

- we will make up a jpeg images combining satellite images, topographic maps and fire maps which cover this area and can be loaded into gimp/ photoshop; each map type as a separate layer and we will either record the gis coordinates of the corners for future reference or embed the ecw information into them. (map sizes will be around 50Megabyte/ ecw stands for ERmapper compress wavelets and is a file type for embedding georeferencing information ie navigational coordinates)

-this can then be either sent up to you or taken up there by someone and some time spent marking locations (areas/ placenames) on a separate layer. having the three map versions behind each other on different layer should make it pretty easy to locate things. (using 1;50 000 topos and the 50m per pixel resolution satellite images we can make)

- then some organising of the other resources in terms of location needs to be done, ie place name files can be made in i-photo and organised accordingly, as well as in i-tunes for audio content, including some notes in the comments sections of these programs about other related documents.

- things that aren’t practically able to be classified by place names, such as presentations etc might like to be classified using authors/ speakers names as a second level interface later on, ie when you click on the campsite location, individuals folders might come up as well as the location one.

this will provide us or whoever is involved with the resources organised into the basic constituents of a ‘director’ type multimedia disk using the map as one of several ‘contents pages’

the DVD can be constructed to maximise the text free searchability- ie thumbnails of images, audio samples and thumbnail video, however some sort of text search function could be wired in as well.

-either once this map document is made and other items of documentation are organised a bit, or in order to help with this, someone from our team could spend a few weeks in kupilwarnamyo and create the first simple collection as a multimedia disk, and make a backup of the resources in in a copyable format on a separate partition of the same disk.

-from then on it should become relatively easy for someone to work there with whoever wishes to learn how to do it in order to create an updated version every six months or so.

-this type of process would benefit our research by allowing time for other yet unconsidered ways of storing things to rear their lovely heads in the process and be able to be incorporated into future versions as well as our database models.

i have instigated a similar process in a place called djuranalpi on elcho island working with a woman called wulumdhuna and so far it’s going well.

for example, she will put a place name on the rock that is part of a turtle story, and then have a folder which contains things like photos of the rock, turtle photos, photos of plants which relate through various narratives in i-photo, and then a video of someone talking about the place and maybe a relative painting will be labelled in such a way that it will relate to one of these folders.

the key feature of this process is that the organisation of the various resource types are kept separate and simple which then allows the more complicated process of their integration to relatively pain free.

the advantage of using things like i-photo and -i-tunes at the start is that particular photos etc can be referenced multiple times and be relevant to any number of places, and that these are the programs you are already using and familier with at kupilwarnamyo.

(also might be of interest to work on a animation putting together all the fire maps for the last few years)

june 2004 report

2006-07-06T10:05:00.000+09:30

rough draft report of meetings in elcho/ june 2004/ banbeans/ arc lg/saiks/cdu
how are computers/ change/the.u /way/thingsrdone.?

1 @djurranalpi

spent a few days with wulumdhuna using digital still camera around the community, she decided to start documenting some of the fruits of this season and i showed her how i-photo worked ,
having little computer experience didn't seem to be a problem for her
this is documented in the footage labelled wulumdhuna i-photo ?

considerations

interface was clearly understood, including naming of photos , creation of files, yol\u font can be used in some areas, images can have lengthy titles and therefore include many names, images can be imported easily from camera, and full size images easily produced (double click) which allowed bapalu whose eyesite is restricted could recognize images, also titles can be lengthy and allow many names as a list

two improvements could be made for this type of scenario

- naming of an image in the library/ resource collection renames that same resource where ever it exists, ie in another folder/ album so doesn't effectively allow multiple perspectives

- and having yol\u font available throughout computer and programs.

- not sure if i-photo exists for OS9?

we also did some filming of ganguri (yams) to use as part of this story, i think it was because the leaves are used as a flavouring agent when cooking turtles which was what the bushfruits in season presumed as important due to their engagement with this seasons botanical decorations stress on the likliness of turtle fat eating, both green and yellow. this also inspired reports of kinship sovereignty and transfer from bapulu and some breaking into song, therefore another improvement would be to have a video references in i-photo folders♣

the school has just received an older i-mac and wulumdhuna is thinking about study leave next year to look into making a "family tree", djurranalpi is looking like a good place for product development and testing.

2 miyapunu project

couldn't contact yi\iya or wa\gurru (telephone disconnected, no answer at school), however discussed plans to start making some sort of video resource about this story with bapalu and wulumdhuna and all are keen , started to do some recording with them and have permission to show yi\iya i think? i was approached by henry dhal\anda in town, g^lpu man who is my b^pa? he is very keen to be part of this. unfortunately it was about an hour before i had to be at the airport.. will do my best to get back for a short time soon.
Bapulu’s memory is starting to fade and his children are keen to get things happening , wulumdhuna is talking about study leave next year in order to work on this.

3 g^wa

g^wa school has some pc's coming and balanda leaders there are interested in documenting the area in terms of their own recent history and the promotion of various ideals
unfortunately, the people i was asked to film up weren't around and gotha was unprepared for a camera and there had been little thought about the structure of the 'history of gawa school' video
it seems to be more about recent years and building construction from the balanda end which is the end more keen for a video.
i did record audio of gotha telling the school history and put some images to that from around the grounds to help them develop a model at their own pace.

m asked me to film bapulu telling story about making of the road however when i suggested payment of a box of shogun cartridges for him she was gloriously unforthcoming.

good chance of politics with this one, as i can be assured of having with even the most tactical involvement anywhere around here.
(some interesting variations of older stories in these parts, effecting different levels of rights to this land for gotha)

4 ma\ay

john g has supplied me with a rough idea of the map area for ma\ay project.
i will incorporate this into a dvd for the moment and send one off to yiniya or ma\ay. not sure how the translations are going

5 knowledge centre

spent a few days at gkc, people have given up on the database, why,
- even after graham was here on 4th june, it was difficult to find the server
and impossible the way he left it set up..
- there is a review of interactions with the database up until it was disconnected some months ago, compiled by phd candy j de healy largy UoM which is not fully public yet, however it would be fair to say that difficulties arose due to poor design for a yol\u context, as well as the expected technical problems.

- also some pictures and plans from t. redston which aren't very impressive.

- i spent time showing current staff/ what editing was using i-movie and about making dvds
-did some more recordings for them and us which you can view on the attached cd rom

as the database was not connected , our thoughts and energy went into the production of resources at the community level, this includes the printing of photographs, simple video editing towards either cd roms, for display on the gkc computers/ and laptops taken into the community, and creating dvds of recent bu\guls which are viewable throughout the community, (the local supermarket sells dvd players at an over inflated price however they the primary means of film watching after television)

my own interactions suggested that producing objects for the community, even if people had to pay ,say. 15 dollars for a dvd , was critical to the success of such a place in the very near future, worries are around about what is going on in the gkc as they haven’t seen anything come out.
this includes the database which i managed to find through entity's,
there has been virtually no resources uploaded from either end at this stage,

we talked about repatriation , using the donald thomson collection as the first example,ä see footage.
it still seems like a bit unclear what the gkc wants , i am not sure what the understanding of digital copies resembles,
. joe wants to have access to the full collection in order to choose which objects/images are right for his clan to 'have' and also seems to want to sort things out for others a bit but at least also to see which other clan leaders need to go down to melbourne to audit their own interests in the collection. ♦

joe was happy about translation, not that he looked at it and wants sub-titles put in and a cd made to be used as a resource for his future work...
all management present seemed keen to work with the uni

i have left a copy of everything i made there in the centre as well as some footage from \^rra ceremony a couple of years age and a copy of the m^rr cd
i also did a voice over of the translation so that they could hear what it may sound like in english.

it was a particularly hectic weak for the community and given this the amount of time devoted to me was impressive, particularly from gandhuwuy, who may want a personal assistant in the way that jessica is to joe. -any honours students?

there is limited room inside the building and nowhere for people to sit around talking,

6 garma

murayana is coming to garma this year, gupapuy\u clan plan power performing and forumic forays for 2004.
see recording of joe (garma) and m gaykamangu (murayana)

rraku waku is keen to work with me this year,

other notes

is a reason for having a separate software for yol\u due to power shifting (rather than being behind" on proprietary software) and if so is the same power given by having proprietary software companies improve their own product by allowing yol\u persuasions.

narratives beside everything rather than overviewing narrative (eg map) relationships between resources may best be served by voice files of stories or small movies with keywords providing links

each group has their own wants and sharing resources is difficult
separation of computers in each group to dhuwa /yirritja

order of photographs in the resource base was important to ganhdhuwuy

wulumdhuna wants to help me at garma and what about new media arts development workshop coming up.

look at all the ways multi media cds have beeen put together for communities in the past and research 'merits' and responses in terms of structure
eg, trepang, french one (barbara?) yeundemu, Milingimbi one,

good idea to have a second person around to take the kids away sometimes, as stories won't be told in the presence of certain other clan members.

7 art centre

spoke to jeanie who is leaving, rumour has it that steve/ brenda are coming back , also there is a well-loved girl rachael who is working there,
there would be plenty to do in terms of documenting the collection, taking very good photographs, and gathering more information about the artists, maybe recording stories to go with the paintings and doing translations etc,

as the management future is unclear, some contact in a few weeks time will be necessary. possible to link into the knowledge center but may be difficult as different clan groups involved

accommodation could be a problem, spoke to mike newton (council) about this, he would make something available if it were possible. maybe. need to have project outlined better first and he also talked about ankaa money for the website but think is story is a bit old and money has already been spent, however digitisation of collection and new objects could be attached to future website development and a possible trial space for cdu database...

8 yalu

yalu nest is a joy compared to gkc, women are pretty keen for more training, particularly for the new macs and for working with audio and vidoe recording

they are happy with translation and suggested the title 'yol\u longrassers in larrakia land' as a preference.

i have a photo of the centre and one of garnggulkpuy and lawurrpa inside and one of a nice flower from their garden

(carolyne phd anthro candy is going well and the women are very pleased to have her around.)

9 renal / cycad video

see separate report..
some points;
- showing a video is pretty ineffective on its own
- no trust without spending some time in the community, even if it's just a week rather than a few days.
-need to go to outstations

walking

2006-06-16T11:18:00.000+09:30

how to set up your dialup account

2006-06-16T11:07:00.000+09:30

anthea,

how to set up your dialup account on a pc,

go to…start menu….settings….network connections..make new connection or some variation on this

a wizrd window assistant thing will open .. click next…

a window will open, on the left near the top under network tasks click new connection or dial to internet….next

choose internal modem if that choice comes up or

choose ‘set up connection manually’…next

enter the service provider’s phone number (for iinet it is 0198379000)

choose “for all useers” and name the connection if necessary

make sure to click the box which says ‘add a short cut to my desktop’ so you can use it to dial up each time, if you don’t you will have to work out how to do it later.

either once you have finished this part you will then be asked for user name and password or you may have already been prompted in the set up, enter these. user name for our account is inc and the password is *********, make sure to save it so you don’t have to ring me up all the time, good idead to back up all these numbers and passwords somewhere alse too…

connect your phone line and hit dial, sometimes if there is a message on the teleohoine it won’t dial up properly so clear youor message bank first, once it ois connect it will let you know in the bottom right hand corner of the comouter screen, and then you can iopen your internet browseer, ie IE (internet explorer)

I have already set up the tablet redy to go with an icon on the desktop, next time you have to do it yourself. all the best, b

cdma wireless modems

2006-06-16T11:03:00.000+09:30

minimax

minimax is a small usb device which dials into the cdma mobile phone network and allows broadband speed internet access from your computer. using the minimax is effectively like tapping into a big wireless network. interestingly, cdma networks are down in arnhemland as I write this a cause de monica, but usually they are available in rammingining, yirrkala, sometimes millingimbi a little bit, oenpeli, lots of desert places, and maybe manigrida as well as darwin, katherine, tennant creek, borroloola, groote and tiwi islands.

so this is a story of trying the cdma wireless minimax machine,

I go to the telstra shop and sign up for mm, only $50? dollars a month as long as you don’t use it, but straight into telstra trickery if you do. theoretically you gete 20 hrs free, however this is in 15min blocks, which means that if you go over 15 mins you start getting charged at $3.50 per hour or per 15mins or something, somehow it will cost you a lot more than you think, and anyway 20hrs per month is not very much. now I can safely say thhis is a telstra trick as in the us, a similar device is charged out at around $80 per month but includes unlimited everything, ie 800hrs free and unlimited downloads, and given previous experience with telstronopoly and telstanomicalness, we need to consider firstly being able to arrange special deals in order for us to start using them for internetworking communities in remote nt.

so I talk to the people at the telstra shop and they tell me that it doesn’t work on mac, so I sign up anyway, (tried to do it through the uni but it’s too difficult and will transfer it later) and go back to work wher I find over the internet that it does work on mac osx if you use the password telstra with the following in network preferences.

so I go apply now and the connect and it connects, and it’s reallly fast to connect and the download speed is really fast as well and I think we’ve found a solution to having individuals on-line in remote commmunities without adding to existing infrastructure and without having to sort out previous telephone bills with telstra.

although I haven’t tried it, there seems to be no reason why we can’t use skype to have ‘free’ telephone using the minimax, and the software that comes with minimax allows you to ring mobile phones (add headphones and microphone) and send sms messages too. not sure if people can ring your computer or not but they can sms you at least.

the reason why I haven’t tried it as yet is because it’s all went downhill after that. after a few days of every thing working wonderfully, the internet connection started to freeze up and then dropped out all together. so (using a landline) I searched the internet for references to these problems and discovered that maxon (the sydney based copmpany that makes minimax- www.maxon.com) advertises the minimax for mac osx and technical desk supports mac osx. so I ring them up and get a very helpful girl called quincy who directs me how to set up the proper software for the minimax for mac osx.

fortunately I have a landline in order to download the required software which automatically sets up your preferences and gives a little interface window which says connect, I try installing and using the software but it fails miserably. quincy tells me to turn off all other internet connecting bits, especially airport, which she says often interferes with max. I ask her whether there has been much trouble with max and she gives a nice company employee answer which suggests that she is quite busy with her trouble shooting tech job. I find myself thinking once again about the user point of entry to technology, where the technology not only works but works well enough that it doesn’t take all day to do something that is less important than what you normally should do that day to survive reasonably cheerfully.

quincy suggests I should try the minmax on my pc to see if there is a problem with it there. I tell her I don’t have one at my disposal at the moment although of course if I were a better human being I would carry one at all times, but decide to drop into the next telstra shop and see if I can’t get a replacement minimax.

which I did, after lining up in the telstra shop in frankston victoria , (about as remote as I ever want to be) and observing the geniune friendliness and helpfulness of the staff, I finally lucked upon possibly one of the grumpiest, most negative sales woman I have come across for a while ‘nut, can’t do anything here, ya gotta contact bigpond, anyway I think we’ve run out of ‘em and anyway don’t have a technician here anyway anyway.’ fortunately the manager intervened at this point and convinced my saleswoman that she could help me and offered a replacement providing I could remember my name and address. (which I could, and I wonder which inventive approaches yolngu have decided to use to make sure they can fill all the gaps in a telstra database. (which reminds me of big frank’s answer to what’s your favourite past-time; the sixties)

so armed with a new minimax, I sit here on the steps to see if it works, and it does sort of, as long as I don’t use the software which comes from maxon. it still drops out a bit though and I’m thinking it could be a few things, there’s rumour that the minimax burns out usb plugs, theres another (that comes from maxon itself) that says you need to plug it into two usb ports at once so that it gets enough power and it could be that reception is too intermittent here.

(while I think about it , I am still unclear on the different coloured flashing lights and if any of them tell yopu oif cdma network is even available, although I suspect green means it is and red means it isn’t, apparently the software which comes with minimax is suypposed to show you how much reception you’ve got but as I can get it to work yet I don’t know) here’s aqmap of places where you should get reception, as you can see allthough telstra claim to have coverage for 98% of the population, it does seem to be the other 2% that we are working with.

useful links

http://www.maxon.com.au

http://www.maxon.com.au/products/consumers/-minimax-faq.asp

http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/networks/info/index.htm

cdma networks are down as in arnhem land as I write this, a cause to cyclone monica, .., using the minimax is effectively like tapping into a big wireless network, using infrastructure which was initially set up for mobile phone users.

putting it on the tablet requires having an internet connetion already to download the software as there is no cd drive or having the software on a memory stick, cdma is available almost everywhere that there is people in australia except for most remote communities with exceptions.

conclusion,

this really is wonderful device, however it’s not really good enough for our purposes yet. there seems to be some inconsistancy at the manufacture level and I couldn’t get the supplied software to work for me initially. unless the cdma signal is strong it keeps dropping out of course, and although while it’s working it’s fantastic the amount of troubleshooting required to keep it going was probably too much for inexperiences computer users. on top of this it is cost prohibitive at this stage, but worth keeping an eye on and we should try to get some sponsorship from telstra for our project, how to go about that?

remote desktop tracking

2006-06-15T22:30:00.000+09:30

mish, i am currently looking into a software product for mac called 'apple remote desktop' which has a reletaviely easy interface to work with and seems to be able to do all the things that you want. once i am better rehearsed with it i will demonstrate. some of the issues i can see already are things like having good enough internet connections available, and trying to have ip addresses remain unchanged in remote locations so that we can find the computers and the computers can find each other when they want to. this need sto be done on the telstra side of things i think, but maybe someone can let me know another way, either that or we will have to ring people each time and let them know what there current ip address is. (they get allocated a new ip address each time they connect to the net, here at the uni, it has a certain amount of ip address that they keep thingds like printers especially need to keepm the same address so they can be found... barb, correct me if i am wrong). anyway apple remote should do all this but i do still want to experiment more with webcams on sticks (so they stay still) because they will be far more versatile.

dear everyone,
I’m just thinking and writing about web-based communication software for one of our new research projects (called e-learning for remote microbusinesses or something like that) . (Bryce has already started to talk to you about this). At a meeting with Greg Williams the other day where he showed us learnline, it became clear that the software we are looking for is theoretically quite simple, but probably doesn’t actually exist (or is illegal) For teaching Yolngu about computers through computers, (with Lorna in the ICT studio here and they at their computers in Arnhemland) we want software which allows:

them to see what Lorna has on her screen
Lorna to see what they have on their screen (preferably more than one of them at a time)
everyone to be able to talk together (but not necessarily to see each other)

When something goes wrong with my computer and I don’t have the language to explain to the boys at ITMS what is wrong, they hack in and move around on my screen while talking to me on the phone. That’s the sort of software we are talking about but with no phone. The alternative of course is to set everyone up with a video camera pointing at their screen but our fumbling trials with that system have been unpromising.