Artivity

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See all projects | About this work | Jisc Research Data Spring

Artivity mapped onto the OAIS functional diagram
Artivity logo

Summary

From the project website:

"The project focuses upon capturing input from the user's editing steps, websites looked at and file system events. The focus is upon visual arts researchers for the scope of this project. The aim is to understand how a visual artist creates their work and measure areas such as: speed of creation, number of undo/redo commands, layers created etc."

From Spotlight Data: Jisc RDS Software Projects

"The project focuses upon capturing input from the user's editing steps, websites looked at and file system events. The focus is upon visual arts researchers for the scope of this project. The aim is to understand how a visual artist creates their work and measure areas such as: speed of creation, number of undo/redo commands, layers created etc.”
Key project outputs:
  1. Artivity Daemon, Artivity Explorer (cross-platform)
  2. Artivity deliverables document (includes Artivity data model, Sustainability etc.)
  3. Artivity plugins (Firefox, Chrome, Inkscape, Krita)"

From a synthesis of the projects in the context of the OAIS model, by Jen Mitcham of the Filling the Digital Preservation Gap project

"Another project that sits cleanly outside of the OAIS model but impacts on it in a similar way is ‘Artivity’ from the University of the Arts London. This is again about capturing metadata but with a slightly different angle. This project is looking at metadata to capture the creative process as an artist or designer creates a piece of digital art. They are looking at tools to capture both the context and the methodology so that in the future we can ask questions such as ‘how were the software tools actually used to create this artwork?’. As above, this project is enabling an institution to fulfil the OAIS responsibility of ensuring the independent utility of the data, but the documentation and metadata it captures is quite specific to the artistic process.
For both of these projects we would need to ensure that this rich metadata and documentation was deposited in the digital archive or repository alongside the data itself in a format that could be re-used in the future. As well as thinking about the longevity of file formats used for research data we clearly also need to think about file formats for documentation and metadata. Of course, when incorporating this data and metadata into a data archive or repository, finding a way of ensuring the link between the data and associated documentation is retained is also a key consideration."

Potential to enhance

Is there potential to leverage non-preservation focused developments to enhance preservation capabilities?

The project recognised the challenges of capturing and enabling understanding of data from a number of different sources and applications noting the need for re-use to happen over possibly extended periods (as detailed in the comprehensive deliverables report and here: “An underlying issue when it comes to sharing is that of long-term preservation of Artivity data especially when researchers look into long periods of time (e.g. the development of an artist over a decade).” This has informed choices around the data model which, although remain challenging due to uncertainties around technology and standards adoption and future support, appear to be beneficial from a long term preservation standpoint.

The project has noted the need to streamline deposit of generated Artivity data (in addition to the actual artwork) in data repositories. Rather than focusing on a specific product, a more generic approach to the generation of the key components of a Submission Information Package is recommended. DPC would be very happy to follow up on the detail of possible approaches (and note “Collaboration” below).

Further information

Hyperlinks to further information on the project

Collaboration

Is there potential for collaboration and/or exploiting existing/parallel work beyond the project consortiums?

The EU funded Pericles project is applying similar techniques, albeit with a broader focus (although they do have digital art case studies), and there is likely to be a good potential for collaboration. In particular see the PET tool.

Although only at a proposal stage, the E-ARK’s Project’s work on developing standardised designs for archival packages, including SIPs, may provide some useful steer on generating sufficiently described and easily ingestable packages of data.

Sustainability

An entry for Artivity was added to the COPTR registry.

Project website sustainability checklist

A brief checklist ensuring the project work can be understood and reused by others in the future.

Task Score
Clear project summary on one page, hyperlink heavy 2
Project start/end dates 2
Clear licensing details for reuse 0
Clear contact details 1
Source code online and referenced from website 2

2=present, 1=partial, 0=missing

Key recommendations

  • Suggest non-application specific approach to SIP generation. DPC happy to follow up.
    • E-ARK SIP specification may provide useful guidance.
  • Add licensing details to the project website


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See all projects | About this work | Jisc Research Data Spring