#38: No Rush Upon the Road to Heaven
This week: A new report on the future of digital collections // Kate Bush's Little Shrew // Plus a round-up of what's going on where creativity meets technology
Did I say every fortnight? For shame Michaels.
No guilt. The newsletter will happen when it happens. Glossing Dante, there is no need to rush upon the road to heaven.
But this week there are two things I have to tell you about. First is a new report I’ve co-authored on the future of the UK’s digital collections. And the second is a beautiful animation by the great Kate Bush.
Let’s go.
Ideas! // Unlocking the potential of digital collections
I’ve been lucky to work with the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council on and around a sequence of projects which are re-designing the way we do creative and cultural research in a digital age.
One of those projects, which I’ve been involved with one way or other for the last five years, is Towards a National Collection, a coherent attempt to bring together the UK’s cultural heritage collections in a unified digital collection, and make that collection available to research, to industry and to the public.
The work to date is the formative stages of a vast ambition that will take the next decade or more to fulfil, but this week saw the launch of a report I’ve co-authored which marks another - hopefully significant - step along the road.
Unlocking the Potential of Digital Collections. A call to action is a set of ten interconnected recommendations on how collections holders, funders and research organisations should think about digitisation. It looks at how and why to do this both from a human and a technological perspective, and provides guidance not just on how to digitise but on who should do it, on skills, on experimental R&D and more.
I’m proud of it - I think it’s clear and approachable. On the panel that launched it in Manchester this week I felt hopeful for its value when the British Museum’s Research Director said he’d used it to help articulate the approach to digitisation they should take and the Head of Digital Policy at the National Lottery Heritage Fund had felt the same would be true for the many small organisations they help take first steps in digitising their collections. If it is useful to both the biggest and the smallest, then that might really be useful.
But I’m proud of it less as an author than in the way it represents the combined view of over 50 cultural heritage institutions across the UK. From a first skeleton draft I wrote, the arguments, nuances and ideas have been enriched incredibly by the collective feedback of the sector it’s for. The points of view of different organisations, from Creative Commons to Wikimedia to the National Archive and National Gallery, to English Heritage and the BFI, both changed our arguments and gave them a richness no small group of authors’ perspectives could ever have got to.
Collaborative writing is not easy. But I feel this kind of consultative democratic approach is a powerful model for research writing, and a repeatable trick.
I hope you enjoy reading it.
Art! // Kate Bush’s Little Shrew
If you only watch one thing this week, make it this beautiful video by the great Kate Bush.
It’s Kate’s response to the Ukraine war. In her brilliant, considered way, not a new song but an animation she’s made that follows a beautiful, fragile baby shrew through a war-torn landscape.
It reworks a song called Snowflake from her 2011 album 50 Words for Snow - a masterpiece to stand alongside Hounds of Love or Sensual World.
I am in no position to be objective about anything Kate does.
Her work is there amongst the holiest of holies for me - when I’ve not listened to her for a few months and one of her songs comes on in the car, my daughter looks at me and says “Daddy, are you going to have a Kate Bush phase again?” And the usual answer is, yes, yes I am.
I know Kate a little, having helped her out on building a new website for a special edition of Hounds of Love last year. Her total, very personal, private dedication to her work is, I think, unparalleled.
In a world where most of her peers at the very top of the music industry - Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Pink Floyd - are selling the rights to their master recordings or publishing rights for eye-watering amounts of money, Kate’s dedication to direct, hands on curation of her work is powerful and different.
Despite the wild renewed fame Stranger Things brought to Running Up that Hill, there’s a very powerful sense in which Kate’s work doesn’t fit in a digital world.
Her desire for privacy, to work at her own pace, outside the constraints and mechanisms of the music and media industries, and for the music and the work itself to be the only thing that matters, is fundamentally at odds with the always on torrent that digital requires.
Little Shrew is another manifestation of her brilliance.
It might be the last we see of her for another year, another decade or more. In an interview on Radio 4 to announce Little Shrew, she talked about wanting to start on a new album.
But who knows?
Only she does - and to have that level of creative authenticity and control is important, a last stand for a type of artistry we may not see again.
Ideas // Happenings at the digital edge
Two quick things this week.
A month ago, I covered a piece from one of the big VCs about how interactive digital storytelling on platforms like Netflix was the future. Well, that future lasted 4 weeks, as Netflix has shuttered the division responsible for this kind of work. Bandersnatch and its ilk always felt like a dead-end to be honest - not interactive enough to activate the parts of your brain the way a game does, but yet unhelpfully disruptive of the passive act of watching .
Second and last, a big-up for Foom, an AI futures simulator from newsletter reader and old friends Scott Smith and Susan Scott-Smith. Their work explores the different paths which help create the future and the steps that might lead us there. My own short time working with them was a revelation, and this is another brilliant way to explore what tomorrow might look like.
NB NB
“There is no need to rush upon the road to heaven” is a quote from Dante that might not actually exist.
In the 4th Canto of Purgatorio, Dante encounters an old-friend who is sitting lazily on the side of the hill those in Purgatory must climb to reach Heaven. Belacqua will not be hurried to reach the divine.
I’ve had this phrase in my head from him since I first read Dante when I was a teenager. I’m not sure it’s actually real - or if it is it might be a very liberal translation.
But it’s a cry for an approach to life we need more of - an echo of another phrase I think is from Nietzsche: “Whenever I see a busy man, I see a man achieving nothing”.
As a busy man, I know what he means.
All this is a very round about, high-faluting way of saying sorry for another gap between newsletters.
Life gets in the way of pleasure.
Ciao.