War Photographs from Samoa 1899

U.S. Marines with naval gun, Upolu, Samoa, 1899, published by Kerry and Co

Tradition in Samoa dictated that leadership of the islands was to be invested in a hereditary chief, but in the 1880s these claims to power were anything but certain. Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in Samoa during this period of turmoil, commented that Europeans, used to a history of kings and queens, tended to leap to the conclusion that the office of high chief is absolute. In fact the office in Samoa was elective and held in many ways on condition of the holder's behaviour and attendance to his many obligations. This confusion was to have ongoing ramifications in the late nineteenth century as European powers asserted their claims to land and political power across the three major islands of Samoa.

In 1881, Laupepa was annointed king on the basis of his holding of three of the five names (Malietoa, Natoaitele, and Tamasoalii) which covered the principality of Samoa. However the two other chiefs who had claims to these highly significant titles, Tamasese who held the name Tuiaana and Mata'afa who held Tuiatua, were not completely satisfied with the arrangement. In an effort to maintain the peace each was given the role of 'vice-king' to be held for two year periods.

This situation provided the seeds of discord amongst the Samoans, but a greater threat to the peace of the island was the German, British and American settlers pursuing their commercial interests (particularly the German interests of the firm of Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft fur Sud-See Inseln zu Hamburg ( DH&PG.)) alongside these traditional relationships.

The centre of all this activity was on the island of Upolu at the port of Apia where Samoans, Germans, Americans and Englishmen all resided. Perhaps the best description of the state of these interests is to be found at the beginning of Stevenson's book, A Footnote to History,

Here, then, is a singular state of affairs: all the money, luxury, and business of the kingdom centred in one place; that place excepted from the native government and administered by whites for whites; and the whites themselves holding it not in common but in hostile camps, so that it lies between them like a bone between two dogs, each growling, each clutching his own end.

European intrigue exacerbated existing tensions which erupted in 1885 and led to civil war amongst the Samoans and fighting between the Germans on one side and the Americans and the British on the other. The German Counsel Dr. Stuebel entered into an agreement with Malietoa and then advocated the deposing of the existing Samoan government. However Malietoa and Tamasese secretly approached the English offering them the islands as a Protectorate. When the Germans found out they sought to replace Malietoa and, overlooking the obvious choice of Mata'afa, selected Malietoa's accomplice Tamasese as their man.

Tamasese, supplied with weapons by Germans and Americans, raised his flag on January the 28th 1886, Malietoa was forced from Mulinuu, the seat of his royalty and raised his flag in Apia. Here he was confronted by the German Consel Dr. Stuebel who, with the aid of ten men from the German cruiser Albatross forcibly took down his flag. Europe and America sent a delegation to sort out the mess and a lull in hostilities ensued which lasted for nearly a year. But by August 1887 tensions had increased again and no less than five German warships were stationed in the harbour at Apia. On the 25 August 700 Germans came ashore and hoisted the German flag above the Government House in Apia.

In September 1888 a large group of Samoans revolted against Tamasese and the German Government. By December 1888 skirmishes were erupting across the islands and tensions between the European warships in Apia harbour were at their height. On the 21st the German ship the Olga shelled and burned the village of Vailele. By March 1889 the harbour was crowded with three American ships in Apia bay, the Nipsic; the Vandalia and the Trenton, three German ships, the Adler; the Eber and the Olga; and one British, the Calliope. In addition there were six merchant-men, ranging from twenty-five to five-hundred tons, and a number of small craft which further encumbered the anchorage. On the 15 March a hurricane struck and the Eber went down on the reef with nearly 80 drowned, the Nipsce was beached on the sand escaping with a few lives lost, the Adler was lifted onto the reef which broke her back and twenty lives were lost, the Vandalia also went down in the storm after colliding with the Olga losing 43 lives, while the Trenton only lost one life.

The Germans in the wake of this disaster agreed again to talks with the British and the Americans. This allowed tensions to quieten down and a treaty document was signed in which Malietoa was recognised as king by the European forces.

However this was against the wishes of many Samoans who saw another chief, Mata'afa, as the real hero of the conflict. The agreement also established an accord for the tripartite supervision of the islands but, unfortunately for all involved, it appears to have been constructed in haste and the resulting document led to squabbles and by 1892 the island '… still lacked any form of peace, order and effective administration'.

Tamasese had died in 1891 and in 1893 another civil war broke out between Mata'afa and Malietoa, the upshot of which was the capture and deportation of Mata'afa. In 1894 fresh conflict broke out between Tamasese's son and Malietoa which was put down by German forces.

But in August 1898 Samoa's King Malietoa Laupepa died and his long-time rival Mata'afa returned from exile supported by the German forces. This act was strongly opposed by the British and Americans who backed Laupepa's son, Tanu, and in January 1899 a war, similar to the one ten yeas previously, erupted in Apia. In an astounding turn of events the American heavy cruiser U.S.S. Philadelphia shelled Apia on 14 March almost ten years to the day of the anniversary of the hurricane which ended the first conflict.

This shelling was done in an attempt to dissolve a provisional government set up by Mata'afa and Germany and re-establish the tripartite solution. Instead it inflamed the hostilities and Mata'afa's forces attacked houses in Apia, particularly the Tivoli Hotel where three American sailors were killed. Tanu's forces were outnumbered by Mata'afa's on Upolu and so British and American ships picked up hundred of supporters from the Samoan Islands of Savai'i and Tutuila and brought them back to Apia where they were armed and trained. On 30 March a British and American force under Commander Sturdee, along with about one hundred Samoans under Lieutenant Gaunt, made their way along the coast driving small numbers of Mata'afa's men before them. 

Malietoa supporters and marines on the streets of Apia, 1899, published by Kerry and Co.

On the first of April, and no doubt feeling full of confidence at the ease with which they were forcing Mata'afa's forces off the coast, they pursued him inland. This tactic was foolhardy in the extreme as they were no longer covered by the fire of the warships and were attacked by thousands of Mata'afa's men. While only seven were killed, the historian Paul Kennedy considered these were, 'remarkably light considering the circumstances'. The upshot of all this activity was the establishment of Samoan, American and British forces along the coast while Mata'afa's Samoan forces and the Germans were firmly entrenched in the interior.

The inevitable deadlock was broken by a ceasefire announced on 25 April and in May 1899 a specially set up commission of British, American, and German representatives arrived. Soon after a treaty was agreed to by all parties. This document recognised the independence of the Samoan Government and divided European interests so that Germany received the western Samoan islands with Savaii and Upolu, the United States received the eastern islands with its capital at Pago Pago on Tutuila and Britain withdrew from the area for recognition of rights on Tonga and the Solomon Islands.

These images are two of the 26 images relating to the 1899 conflict held by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

Geoff Barker

References

Paul M. Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle; a Study in Anglo-German-American Relations, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1974

Robert Louis Stevenson, A Footnote to History; Eight years of Trouble in Samoa, 1892, transcribed from the 1912 Swanston edition by David Price, 2005, Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/536/536.txt

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity - how it was finally proved on the 1922 solar eclipse expedition

P3549-193 Photographic print, Wollal eclipse expedition unloading boat, Wollal, Australia, 1922 

In late August 1922 a group of astronomers, naval men, and Aboriginal stockmen began the arduous task of unloading their complicated scientific equipment and stores from boats onto a deserted beach on the coast of Western Australia. The shallow nature of the approach meant the boats were anchored three or four miles from the high-water line and the stores, after being brought to shore, were then transported by donkey wagons to the observation site at Wollal. This was no ordinary expedition and its members knew the eyes of the world were on them waiting to see if they would be the ones to finally prove Einstein’s controversial ‘Theory of General Relativity‘.

To do this they would have to photograph the light from stars bending around the sun and then measure their placement extremely accurately. At stake was the whole concept of universe as envisaged by Sir Isaac Newton over 250 years before. Everyone involved in the project was well aware of how difficult this task was and that they were only one of eight other astronomical expeditions who were also setting up their equipment at sites across Australia. The largest group of observers, based near the Wollal post and telegraph station consisted of three international parties, the Lick Observatory party, under the direction of W. W. Campbell, a group from the University of Toronto, under C. A. Chant and the Indian expedition supervised by J. Evershed. In addition Australia provided a fourth group from the Perth Observatory. They were directed Mr. Nossiter and included Mr. Nunn, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Dwyer and Mr. Yates. On top of this were four others set up on the east coast under the direction of the Sydney Observatory and W. E.Cooke.

All this preparation was for the solar eclipse predicted on 22 September 1922 and the hope they would be the ones to resolve the scientific problem Einstein had set in train 17 years previously. In 1905 Einstein (then an unknown patent clerk) had published four groundbreaking scientific papers in what is commonly referred to as his ‘miracle year’. While these included his famous equation E=Mc2 which determined how energy became matter and matter in turn became energy, it also included a mind-blowing paper describing how the fabric of space and time are woven together; this paper he titled ‘The Special Theory of Relativity’.

This radical new concept had come to him in Berne while he was riding in a bus and looking back at the local town clock. As he describes it a ‘storm broke in my mind’ as he imagined what would happen if the bus was travelling at the speed of light. If this was the case then the light from the clock couldn't catch up with the bus and thus time would appear to stop. For Einstein this implied that space and time were one and the same and were in fact a flexible fabric he labelled space/time.

There was no instant acclaim for his theories but he did have an important supporter, Max Planck, one of the foremost physicists of the day. As a result of discussions with other scientists Einstein started to write a new article on special relativity in 1907 but realised his original concept was limited as it only dealt with objects moving in one direction and at one speed. Clearly this was not the way things work in the real world and so he rewrote his paper taking into account gravity calling this one the Theory of General Relativity.

The problem Einstein was addressing was this, if an apple falls we traditionally say a mysterious force, which Newton called gravity, is pulling it down. But Einstein knew from his working with physics that objects usually moved if they were pushed and instead he posited the idea that there was no such thing as gravitational pull. Instead he suggested that the earth has curved space around it and it is this that is keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground by pushing on the atmosphere and all the objects on the earth. In the case of the earth going around the sun most people would say it was the gravitational force of the sun pulling the earth around it. Instead Einstein suggested it was the gravitation of the sun distorting the space around the earth and that this was the force pushing the earth around the sun.

But while Einstein could propose this new theory of the universe and of gravity using maths and physics it was another thing to prove it by experiment. Thus his ‘General Theory of Relativity’, unlike his photon, energy and mass equations, remained an interesting but unproven theory in the eyes of the scientific community. He needed to find a way to measure the effects of gravity on the straight beams thrown from a light source. If he could show this he could also prove his theory that space/time was flexible. But where could he possibly find something with enough gravity to bend light.

It was then that he came up with a great idea, what about using light from distant stars and the sun which has around 300,000 times more mass than the earth. Einstein hypothesised that if his theory was correct light from a star would bend as it passed through the sun’s gravitational field. The problem was that the sun was too bright to see this happen – UNLESS THERE WERE A SOLAR ECLIPSE!

When the sun’s rays are blocked out by the moon during a solar eclipse we can see the stars around it. And if his theory was correct these should appear to be slightly out of place from their actual positions as measured in the night sky because the light they emitted was bent as it went past the sun.

Of course to do this Einstein needed someone to photograph the event. So in 1912 he published his thoughts on this experiment and appealed to astrophysicists to take up his challenge. Instead of a chorus of willing voices his challenge was initially met with silence. Except for an assistant astronomer at the Berlin Observatory Erwin Finlay-Freundlich who although still in his early 20s saw Einstein’s call as an opportunity to make his name. A total solar eclipse is only visible over a small area of the earth and the next one was on the 21 of August 1914, and would be best seen from the Crimea in Russia.

After being refused by his boss Freundlich wrote to William Wallace Campbell, a pioneer in solar eclipse photography, at the Lick Observatory in USA. He asked him to come to Russia and prove or disprove Einstein’s theory. As a result Freundlich and Campbell both made their way to Russia in 1914 with Freundlich setting up his instruments in the Crimea while Campbell sets his up near to Kiev. Unfortunately for everyone major political events unfolding in the background and bad weather destroyed their chances for capturing the event.

On June 28 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated and Germany declared war on Russia. As a result Russian officers seize Freundlich’s equipment, (in fact he and his assistants are held as POWs for a number of months afterwards). Campbell as an American is allowed to continue his project but unfortunately clouds obscure the eclipse and he not able to good photographs of the event.

Einstein is initially devastated by the failure but it turns out that these particular clouds had a silver lining. In the wake of the eclipse fiasco and while locked down in Germany by the war Einstein begins going over his initial calculations and finds he has made some fundamental errors. He now recognises that if the 1914 eclipse expedition had been a success they would have used these calculations, and they would have been wrong and discredited his theory. So Einstein sets about redoing his calculations and finally on 25 November 1915 he presents his General Theory of Relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In 1916 he finally submits his paper, with correct calculations, and a completely different view of the universe. But while many accept to work the scientific community remains divided, particularly given the theory had yet to be proven.

Help came in the form of an Englishman, Arthur Stanley Eddington. He was not only an astronomer at Cambridge University, he was also a conscientious objector and saw in Einstein a fellow scientist opposed to the war. In February 1916 he received a package from a friend in Holland which contained a copy of Einstein’s theory translated into English. Eddington was astounded, and decided to see if they could prove, or disprove, Einstein’s theory by making observations at the next solar eclipse, on 8 June, 1918.

The limited viewing window for this eclipse made the United States a prime site for setting up his equipment but unfortunately the war made it difficult for Eddington to travel there. Instead he also decided to contact Campbell at the Lick Observatory and ask if he would be able to try one more time to photograph the eclipse. Campbell agrees but his equipment had been confiscated by the Russians in 1914 and this forced him to improvise from existing equipment lying around at the Lick Observatory. Thus it turned out that although Campbell had the solar eclipse observations all to himself he was forced to take his photographs using sub-standard equipment, and this was to have some serious implications for this story.

On Saturday June the 8 the clouds parted in time to allow Campbell to take some photographic plates which he gave to Heber Curtis to make the measurements from. So after doing his measurements Curtis gives Campbell the news that he believes the stars are actually in the same position and thus Einstein is wrong. However this is a momentous decision and Campbell, realising his reputation could be at stake holds off announcing the results as he is worried his sub-standard equipment may have affected the results. Instead he asks Curtis to re-do his measurements.

On the 11 November 1918 World War One ended. This took away the restrictions on travel which had been holding back astronomers and as a result tEddington was free to travel to observe the next solar eclipse. The event happened on May 29 1919 and this time Eddington carved his way through the jungle of island of Principe (off the west coast of Africa) to set up his equipment. He spent a month there building the telescope but as luck would have it on the day clouds affected the view forcing Eddington to take his photographs in quick succession hoping all the time they caught the moment of full eclipse when the stars would be most visible.

Eddington was so concerned about the results that he started measuring the plates then and there while still in the middle of the jungle. Many proved worthless but a few showed enough stars visible for him to make some preliminary results. And unlike Campbell’s his confirmed Einstein’s theory.

In a strange twist of fate Eddington’s cable confirming Einstein’s theory arrives in London at the same time as Campbell physically arrives to present his results, disproving the theory. As a result Campbell gets nervous again about the quality of the equipment and Curtis’s measurements and decides to again delay the presentation of his negative results to London’s Royal Astronomical Society. Instead it is Eddington who on 6 November 1919 presents his positive results and word of this momentous decision spreads quickly spreads around the world. Very quickly Einstein becomes the face of genius and a world renown scientist – BUT still there many sceptics in the scientific community who questioned Eddington’s results and a backlash began, helped in part by anti-German sentiment in the wake of War.

It quickly becomes clear that another expedition needed to be organised to settle the issue once and for all. The next scheduled solar eclipse was on the 21 September 1922, and would be visible over the continent of Australia. By now Einstein was 42 years old, a household name, and yet his theory of relativity published eight years previously had yet be confirmed to the satisfaction of the scientific community. It seemed that Australia would be the place where the controversy would be settled once and for all and so it is no surprise to find the event generated huge media and scientific interest.

P3549-194 Photographic print, Wollal eclipse expedition unloading equipment, Wollal, Western Australia, 30 August – 1 September, 1922

So we come full circle back to the astronomers loading their donkeys on a remote beach in Western Australia with the world’s gaze upon them as they prepared their equipment to photograph the solar eclipse.

P3549-201 Photographic print, Lick Observatory eclipse expedition, the polar axis with spectrographs and Floyd telescope, photographer unknown, Wollal, Western Australia, 1922

This time the weather and the equipment would provide optimal conditions for Campbell and his group at Wollal. In this photograph we can see the polar axis set up to hold the spectrographs, the Floyd telescope and the two short focus camera. The woman on the left is probably the wife of W. W. Campbell as during the eclipse she was responsible for the exposures of the solar corona by means of the Floyd camera.

P3549-203 Photographic print, Lick Observatory eclipse expedition, 1.52 metre (5 foot) Einstein camera, Wollal, Western Australia, 1922 

Also in Campbell’s arsenal was a specially made 1.52 metre (5 foot) solar telescope camera named fittingly the ‘Einstein camera’. campbell himself directed this camera but looking after the changing of the glass plates was left to two Australian naval men, Messers. Rhoades and Kenny, under Commander Quick. It is quite possible that these are the two men seen here.

P3549-36 Photographic positive, solar eclipse, photograph by Lick Observatory, Australia, 21 September 1922.

Finally amongst the Lick Observatory’s 35 tons of stores and equipment was a forty foot coronal camera which required supporting towers 36 feet high. This photograph of the eclipse during total phase was taken by Dr. Adams using this astrograph and it was the measurements from these plates that finally led to H. Spencer Jones of Greenwich Observatory announcing in May 1923, … as a result of the observations secured last September, together with the two previous confirmations from the 1919 eclipse, leave little room for doubting that the deflection deduced from Einstein’s theory is the correct one.

After years of controversy, a World War, and several failed eclipse expeditions, Einstein’s Theory of General relativity was finally proved, and science’s understanding of how the world around us worked was completely overturned.

Post by Geoff Barker, 2012

References
Campbell, W. W., ‘The Total Eclipse of the Sun, September 21, 1922′, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data Sy
stem, May 2008
Evershed, J., ‘Report of the Indian Eclipse Expedition to Wollal, West Australia’, Kodaikanal Observatory, Bulletin, number LXI
Spencer Jones, H., ‘The Total Solar Eclipse of 1922 September 21′, The Observatory, May 1923
Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin
Walter Isaacson, Einstein; his life and his Universe 
Amir D Aczel, God’s Equation 
Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible

Weekly Twitter Update - Turing Arduino Bass Culture Creatives Manifesto

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Call for Proposals - Museums and the Web 2013: 17-20 April 2013 Oregon USA 

As part of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth, Google decides to back the release of a special Monopoly edition to honor one of its most famed players.

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Collections Trust CEO Nick Poole reflects on two days working with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC on their Digitization programs - " ... as far as I know, the Smithsonian is pretty unique in having access to a team of internal specialists dedicated to bringing research and statistical analysis to bear on the strategic challenges faced by the Institution. I was able to speak with them about the strengths and weaknesses of our research (The Cost of Digitising Europe's Heritage) and the challenges of defining scope (ie. what gets included in the cost model) and the benefits of internal capacity-building over external outsourcing." The material already digitized can be accessed online

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How Google Builds Its Maps & What It Means for the Future of Everything. Alexis Madrigal's article in The Atlantic. "Where you're searching from has become almost as important as what you're searching for. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple's iOS. And for good reason. If Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, the most important challenge -- far larger than indexing the web -- is to take the world's physical information and make it accessible and useful. ... read more"

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Pleased you've persevered and made it to the bottom cause this was kept me up very late one night - Sound on Sound magazine's "Classic Tracks" series providing technical and personal details behind the recording of classic tracks. eg Tricky - "Black Steel", The Undertones - "Teenage Kicks", Aerosmith - "Walk This Way", 10cc - "I'm Not In Love", Frankie Goes To Hollywood - "Relax", The Four Tops - "Reach Out I'll Be There" and so on ...

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Mendeley & Publishing for Museums,Libraries Archives Collection Research

These thoughts were initiated after coming across the new start-up PEERJ – which presented a new model for peer reviewed contributions relating to science and medicine.

In response to what it saw as a narrowing of publishing options and increasing number of problematic monetising models of peer review  PEERJ set up a new model - one which allows contributors to subscribe once and publish many times. As a museum curator I thought the PEERJ model looked like a really interesting solution to some of the problems I faced when I set about submitting museum based research to peer reviewed journals.

Unfortunately when I got in contact with Peter Binfield at PeerJ he informed me that they were not ready to expand into broader areas relating to Social Sciences and the Arts. Instead they were focussing on the physical sciences and medicine as a first point from which to start. He did list some other options I might follow up but they all required a down-payment to the journal before they would review it. In the Public Service, where many museum professionals are employed the paperwork and justifications needed to get this money for a ‘perhaps it might be published’  is always a difficult pathway to negotiate. On the other side some free options require the signing of rights to publishing houses that are in direct conflict the openness and sharing of public information that is fundamental to the modern museum.

But it all got me thinking that perhaps we could manufacture our own solution. Museums employ professionals whose expertise covers a wide range of the sciences and arts. What if we came up with a shared Museum based publication model that utilised this workforce as both contributors and reviewers of their peers?

Nice idea but making it work in practice - not so easy.

While I will go into a bit more detail about current publication structures and some of the options for where museums, libraries and archive professionals can place their research I’d like to suggest getting involved in an experiment to see if we can globally kick off something using an existing online site - Mendeley - where I have set up a group Museum, Library and Archive Research and Collections which I thought could be used to add collections based research including: papers, journal articles, and web based material.

Importantly we could also try adding drafts to this group and then send a request  out to other members to ask for peer review. I was thinking that given the range of expertise in our cultural institutions we should be able to cover most subject areas if we get enough members on board.  So feel free to send me a request to join or pass on the link and my email to anyone you think may be interested.

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

Reference Manager - Generate citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and LaTeX.

Read and Annotate - Open PDFs and capture your thoughts through sticky notes and highlights.
Add and Organize - Import and organize PDFs from your computer, EndNote™, Papers or Zotero.
Collaborate - Connect with colleagues and securely share your papers, notes and annotations.
Backup, Sync and Mobile - Access your papers on the web, iPhone or iPad.
Network and Discover - Discover papers, people and public groups.

Anyway I thought I would clear up my primary motivation for this blog before we got into any more detail.

Sot let’s start with a basic question. If museums want to publish research papers on museology and their collections could a peer reviewed, online and freely accessed option be something Museum institutions globally would want to participate in?

For the sake of this argument I’m going to presume the answer yes and lay out the following steps needed to work toward a workable model

Peter Murray-Rust has produced a series of posts about his issues with the current peer review model which he believes has been seriously broken by forces which have nothing to do with science. In Peter’s words … Unless the process of scientific publication is rapidly and effectively revised there will be a catastrophic crash. It will be unpredictable in both its timing, speed and nature. It will destroy some of the current participants. It will change parts of the scientific process and will change academia. … The academic system (in which I include public funders) has, by default, given away a significant part of its decision-making to the publishing industry. 1

Jonathan M. Gitlin in  July 19 2011 clearly outlined some of the issues in his post Do we need an alternative to peer-reviewed journals? Here he cites Stuart Lyman's letter to Nature Biotech on how the price of access has become a problem for private sector research and how for small or even medium-size companies, the costs of institutional subscriptions to journals quickly adds up. Gitlin also alerts us to the fact that a single journal can cost a library six-figure sums while non-institutional users can expect to be charged around $30 for a single article, as can academic users whose library doesn't subscribe to the Journal of Obscure Factoids. … If you've spent your life in well-funded research institutes, this might not seem like an issue. But, for those at smaller schools or from less-affluent countries, this can be a substantial barrier to being able to participate in the exchange and dissemination of scientific ideas. These paywalls also stand between taxpayers and the research they've supported.

On the other hand Gitlin also says there are a number of open-access journals where the publication costs are met by the authors, not the readers (authors had been paying fees to publish in some journals anyway) have also been started up. This effort to make publicly funded discoveries publicly available has also been gaining ground. From 2008 onwards, recipients of NIH funding have been subject to NIH's Public Access Policy, which requires that any publications that arise from its funds appear in either open-access journals or be placed in PubMed Central within 12 months. Similar policies have been implemented by other national funding bodies and private foundations, as well as individual institutions.

Paying for peer review is another vexed issue covered by Gitlin. Part of the price of a journal covers the process of peer review, which not only costs but can lead to extended delays between submitting a paper and having it accepted. A common criticism is that peer review is biased towards well-established research groups and they are unwilling to reject papers from big names in their fields out of fear, and they can be hostile to ideas that challenge their own, even if the supporting data is good. 2

Giltin also believes journals act as gatekeepers as they screen submissions for interest or importance as well as just the veracity of the work. The open access journal PLoS ONE attempts to address this by taking the first part out of the equation and rather than submitting to what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them). 3

The problem with this is the sheer volume of publications already makes this almost impossible to manage so there's … always going to be a place for highly selective publishing outlets for work deemed "important"—that's just human nature. 4

A new model.

Peter Murray-Rust has constructed a set of axioms which look pretty reasonable and which should apply to the creation of a museum model as well as a science journals. They are:

Science and scientists have a need and a duty to publish their work.
Funders rightly and increasingly require this in a formal manner.
This work should be available to everyone on the planet. Ideally the costs incurred in doing so should be invisible to the reader.
The purpose of publication in whatever degree of formality is:

To establish priority of the work
To communicate the work to any who wishes to consume it
To offer the work for formal and informal peer-review and to respond to discourse
To allow the work to be repeated, especially for falsifiability
To allow the work to be built on by others
To preserve the work

Apart from PeerJ there are a number of other new publishing models listed in The Future of Scientific Publishing : Is Here, Now by Luis Ibanez which attempt to address these points. But unfortunately none of these as yet work exclusively for museums and many are linked to more formal Scientific and Medical publications.

Personally I think a museums model should be able to ingest a range of contributor styles from formal academic articles to more informal posts and reviews and Mendeley is one platform able to do much of this right now. While publishing is currently spread across so many different parts of the web, from blog posts, journal, e-publications, linkedin discussions groups and the list goes on  and on much of this material can be aggregated in Mendeley.

However it would be interesting to get some feedback on whether it would be worth developing a specific site to act as a repository where research based work could be made freely accessible under a cc license. The more formal peer-reviewed articles could exist quite happily within the same space and once reviewed by professionals and published in this museum specific space could then be open to re-publication in other spaces as well. In fact publishers could be encouraged to visit the site to enquire about the re-publishing of these and other articles rather than museum professionals seeking out individual publications.

Currently the open access journal PLoS ONE manages what it refers to as an editorial board and this is the kind of model that could work within the museum sector as well. This is an A-Z list of people who are able to do reviews and lists their area of expertise and their institution.# It is also a member of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) which is a forum for editors and publishers of peer-reviewed journals to discuss all aspects of publication ethics. It also advises editors on how to handle cases of research and publication. 5

A final problem area is the way journals feed metrics, impact, and tracking within the scientific community. While this currently has a greater impact on the physical and medical sciences than perhaps in the social sciences and arts arena where museums reside, it is something which can influence and affect careers within the Museum sector as well. As Gitlin puts it
.. for better or worse (and I think there's a very strong case for it being worse), academic career progression and research funding are explicitly tied to where a scientist publishes their work. This is done through the use of impact factors …  they're a very imperfect measure. Journals that publish reviews as well as research articles can increase their impact factor, and publishing retractions or corrections does so as well. We have the tools to do a better job now, thanks to the move online. There have been experiments with algorithms like PageRank, and one could easily see something that works like Facebook's "like" or Google's "+1" being used. But as a researcher's funding success and promotion remain tied to their publications, what's to stop them from gaming the system? (I envision researchers organizing teams of undergrads to +1 their bibliography.

Although publishing will remain critical, it's hard to escape the sense that it's increasingly trailing behind the scientific community. Twitter, FriendFeed, Mendeley, and now Google+ have become venues where serious discussion about scientific work takes place. We're already seeing friction at some conferences; not everyone is happy having their talk live-tweeted, and the backchannel can be cruel to speakers at times. But social media isn't going anywhere, and neither is academic blogging. 6

One interesting approach I came across is evolutionary pharmacologist, and Fellow at Princeton University, Ethan O. Perlstein’s online research lab which utilises a variety of social media to publish ongoing research. The home page is made up from feeds from his twitter account @eperlste and synopsis of posts from the blogs. When you visit these pages we can see comments by others on the research and links to papers and definitions relating to the discussion. This is essentially a blog site but Perlstein has chosen to upload real scientific research, rather than wait until it is complete and then publish in a traditional academic journal.

Certainly within the museum sector this model would be easy enough to be modified to put people who are researching similar areas, (such as Sevres porcelain, or astronomical instruments to name some I’ve worked on recently) in contact with each other and this happens already on numerous blogs, wiki-spaces and sites around the globe.

Ethan’s model allows for researchers on the project to join as members of the Lab team while those that have worked on the project in the past are also listed. Certainly technologically there is nothing complicated or even terribly innovate going on - instead Perlstein is doing what I like most, recycling existing technology to resolve practical problems and at the same time opening up new opportunities for others to rethink the way they use existing models.

Another interesting model which may be more appropriate for educational resources in museums rather than for collection research publishing in the TakeControl ebook model. On July 20 2012 Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor and Forge, announced that all of their ebooks would now be available DRM-free (Digital Rights Management-free) from Amazon, B&N, Apple, Kobo, Google, and most other major ebook retailers. The Publishers stated .. It’s clear to us that this is what our customers want. … We see it in the success of SF publishers like Baen and Angry Robot that have preceded us in going DRM-free. To the best of our knowledge we’re the first division of a Big Six publishing conglomerate to go down this road, but we doubt very much that we’ll be the last.7

Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, universal digital formats taxidermy pataphysics

Loved this video - Twiggy used in video for psychedelic band The Chocolate Watchband's 'Sweet Young Thing'.

Art - An interesting interview with Mega-Patron Simon Mordant on Remaking Sydney's MCA & taking Charge of Australia's Venice Biennale Pavilion.

Nice resource - Review of and sort-of guide to the Universal DIgital Format Registry which was intended as a single, comprehensive source for information about file formats, with particular attention to requirements for archiving and preservation. It draws on the well-regarded PRONOM from the UK’s National Archives and the ill-fated Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) from a number of institutions, including OCLC and Harvard.

Global Innovation‬ Index 2012 full report pdf

http://www.museepata.org/oracle.html

A fantastic coincidence this week was stumbling into Alfred Jarry's mad world of pataphysics for the first time in many years. The first was an exhibition of the works of 5 patamechanical practitioners at Musee Patamechanique - amazing stuff - the second was a listening again to'Dub Housing' by Pere Ubu which I had last owned about 20 years ago - again simply amazing


Book- Open-Source Everything Manifesto Robert David Steele. "What all this boils down to is that normal average human beings, when they share information openly with one another and engage in respectful deliberative dialog, always, without exception, arrive at better conclusions than experts or elites who rely on “secret” information and generally have hidden agenda enabled by secrecy combined with public ignorance and apathy." Robert David Steele.

Book - Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting, by William T. Hornaday and W. J. Holland, 1894. A Project Gutenberg EBook. "The rapid and alarming destruction of all forms of wild animal life which is now going on furiously throughout the entire world, renders it imperatively necessary for those who would build up great zoological collections to be up and doing before any more of the leading species are exterminated. It is already too late to collect wild specimens of the American bison, Californian elephant seal, West Indian seal, great auk, and Labrador duck. Very soon it will also be too late to collect walrus, manatee, fur seal, prong-horn antelope, elk, moose, mountain sheep, and mountain goat..."

This was kinda nice - Small Business Uses Crowdfunding; jellybeans to spread tolerence message.Diversity Jellybeans look like ordinary jellybeans, but they have a secret “You can’t determine what is on the inside by simply looking at the outside.” A red jellybean might taste like licorice and a black jellybean might taste like coconut. It’s always a surprise with thirty-six flavor and color combinations. “Many schools use them as part of their anti-bullying and teaching tolerance curriculum,” said Tracy.

This week I went to the Social Media Day event here in Sydney organised as a global event by Mashable. It proved to be an interesting day and I enjoyed the @TimNoonan talk about Fleksy a text input system designed for people with visual impairments ‪and also his comments about the importance of implementing web and media design for those with visual and hearing impairment now but also because there is a vested intrest for all of us as we are also rapidly growing old and may need to access these features to continue using the web and social media in the ways we have become accustomed.

http://www.gizmag.com/case-of-bass-upcycled-luggage-sound-systems/23134/

I thought these were a really good example of re-design - brothers Ezra and Alex Cimino-Hurt up-cycle old suitcases into stylish and powerful Case of Bass boomboxes.

Paper - Urban Planning - Addressing concentrations of disadvantage: policy, practice and literature review - Australia. Looks at the processes that lead to concentrations of disadvantage, particularly the roles played by housing market processes and by government policy or programs (‘causes’). Secondly The processes that contribute to spatial disadvantage—that is, the negative consequences for residents of living in an area of concentrated disadvantage (‘consequences’). lastly urban policy responses to concentrations of disadvantage.

Post - Urban Planning - The History of Adventure playground and its arrival in 70s & 80s by James Trainor

Post - Education - Gaming - While game-based learning is gaining market share in discussing educational change there is still some confusion about how we define the different terms associated with the use of games and game principles in the classroom. This post by Lucas outlines some of the main points of discussion while the older blogs cover plenty of other areas related to gaming and learning. see more

Japan has found a large deposit of rare earth minerals in its Pacific seabed, enough to supply its hi-tech industries for more than 200 years, a scientist said. see more 

I thought this was a really nice design solution to a problem - the lack of bone marrow donations, particularly given the need to match types exactly for transplant - Graham Douglas comes up with placing a sign-up kit in Band-Aid box so when cut your finger you dab blood on swab drop it in envelope and post it off to be tested for donation possibilities at a centralised agency ... see article

Australia’s Digital Future Museum Apps and Uncanny Valley

Voyager has departed solar system with a map to where we are & an anatomical chart of our meaty bodies.Wait! Maybe not such a good idea? Howard Rheingold - @hrheingold

A Snapshot of Australia’s Digital Future to 2050 report.
A world-first, the report reveals information and communications technology (ICT) enhanced with ubiquitous high-speed broadband is becoming Australia’s new utility – as historic and game changing as electricity or telephony.

Written by Phil Ruthven, Founder and Chairman, IBISWorld, and commissioned by IBM, the report looks ahead of existing research to examine how Australia can harness this new utility to transform our lives, our cities and the way we interact.

The report rates all Australia’s industry classes (509) against the impact of the new utility. Ruthven and his extended Industry Impact Panel assessed the prospects of the 509 classes of industry in the Australian economy over the next 40-50 years.

The report predicts that 10 per cent of Australia’s 509 industries, accounting for 23 per cent of the nation’s revenue, will not function without this new utility. A further 23 per cent of industry revenue will use it to drive step-changes in their business. 15 industry classes are likely to demise if they do not reinvent themselves to embrace the digital future; and some may simply be unable to do so.

The report finds that Australia will no longer be known for its dependency on the export of natural resources over the next half century. It will become known as much an exporter of services such as tourism, business services, health and education services. The export of tourism alone could match the 2012 mineral exports totalling around $175 billion by 2030.


John Hodgman, comedian and resident expert, "explains" the design of three iconic modern objects.

Museum app - Exploring old Sydney: The Rocks (Free)
This week Nico, Einar and I finished another museum walking tour app for android and IPhone. Exploring old Sydney: The Rocks is a self-guided walking tour of The Rocks features a selection of historic images and maps from the Powerhouse Museum collection.

A really nice idea - PeerJ - lifetime Peer review Publishing Model
PeerJ provides academics with two Open Access publication venues: PeerJ (a peer-reviewed academic journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (a 'pre-print server'). Both are focused on the Biological and Medical Sciences, and together they provide an integrated solution for your publishing needs. Submissions open late Summer.

An Uncanny Mind: Masahiro Mori on the Uncanny Valley and Beyond. A post in which Norri Kageki interviews Masahiro Mori, who, as a professor of engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology in the 1970s, proposed the now-famous concept of the uncanny valley. [Read the first authorized translation of his seminal article here.] Mori's insight was that people would react with revulsion to humanlike robots, whose appearance resembled, but did not quite replicate, that of a real human. He called this phenomenon bukimi no tani (the term "uncanny valley" first appeared in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, written by Jasia Reichardt.

Do we need specialist curators?
Commented on Giles Miller's post on Do we need specialist curators where he makes a case for the continued employment of specialised curators to manage museum collections.As a curator I agree with his sentiments but I do think that there is no one size fits all solution - different museum collections are curated in different ways and perhaps a range of curatorial styles is a better approach for some of these. I also think resourcing is an issue for large diverse collections like the ones here at the Powerhouse and as a result specialised curators in one area can also lead to no curators in other areas. While I would love to think just employing more specialised curators to cover all collection areas would solve some of the problems museums face I think the solution may be a little more complicated.

David S. Linthicum CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs slideshare on Redefining cloud computing again - what cloud computing is, and what it should be. The way it’s defined today, and how should be defined tomorrow.


Immediately thought there could be all kinds of uses for this great idea - Evian introduces smart fridge magnet, schedules deliveries of water.


My post on Photographing the 1874 Transit of Venus looks at the 1874 transit and how it led to some major advances in the use of photography for astronomical observations.

Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, Social-Media Bell Labs etc - open source zombie gnomes

"We've evolved from being a pack of monkeys to being a pack of monkeys with a dream" Terence McKenna

Nikola Tesla comments in 1926 on wireless "the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain connected by instruments carried in vest pockets."



'Lawn of the Dead' - Zombie garden gnomes chow down on a pink flamingo - being sold on Etsy - great idea wonder why no one has done this this earlier




An interview with Jon Gertner on Bell Laboratories which from the 1920s to the 1980s was the most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. These ingenious, often eccentric men would were responsible for some of the major innovations of the twentieth century and Jon talks about how they aided in the development of radar, lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more.

Australian Heritage Strategy is nearing its closing time for public consultation - given this is the first review in 20 years you have until next Friday to put in a submission.

A Free Mandelbrot Fractal Generator Application for iphone and PC's

The opportunity to make a submission to the UK consultation on open standards has closed. But Glyn Moody's introduction entitled Open Season on Open Standards is still well worth a read - "In the face of the continuing move to such open standards, there has been a rearguard action by traditional proprietary software companies to push FRAND - Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory - as an acceptable default for "open" standards. Except that it is not, as I have discussed at length before ...."



My favourite album this week has been Electric Moon's Inferno. Melkezedek's review pretty much sums it up ".... Chock full of the prime spaced out explorations you expect from the trio, Lunatics Revenge is a perfect bridge to Inferno, where things get even meatier and a shade darker, and deeper..."

A new macrowikinomics video animation featuring some of the world's brightest innovators.

What To Do When Attacked by Pirates - The music industry fought the future and created a black market; book publishers tried another tack - an article on ebook publishing and responses to Piracy by Rob Reid.

A nice guide on how to chemically develop your own photographic film

Another nice pdf guide to Digital Archiving in the 21st century put out by Zotero

Post by Science Insider - Horizon 2020: A €80 Billion Battlefield for Open Access
by Jop de Vrieze on how the next installment of Europe's gargantuan research funding programs called Horizon 2020 will be on Open Access. Hopes ... the program will have "dedicated support to dissemination (including through open access to research results), communication and dialogue actions" and that "open access shall apply under the terms and conditions laid down in the grant agreement." read more

A nice post on the new features of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6)

Jean Burgess posted her slides for her presentation on the role of social media in crises and risk management during the Queensland floods at the 6th Annual Enterprise Risk Management for Government conference in Sydney.