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Wednesday, 3 December 2008

Reflective Journal Entry: Nine

I am starting to think a lot now about using a DVD as a gateway ‘into’ the world that my thesis will represent. It will be like a house like that lady at the europeana.com portal mentioned… as Viviane Reding, the European Information Minister responsible for its launch, said - '...it's like going into a culture like you go into a house - you enter the door, then go through the corridor and then you have a choice between different rooms with a different, organised way of understanding what you are looking for.' It was originally a French idea, spearheaded by them as an antidote to American dominance culturally, which is spread by Yahoo (when it's working!) and especially Google with its project to put millions of books online after digitising them. I guess that's why they called it europeana. It had to be shut down the same day because of 10 millions hits in an hour! Should be re-opened soon according to the site...

‘We launched the Europeana.eu site on 20 November and huge use - 10 million hits an hour - meant it slowed to a crawl. We are doing our best to reopen Europeana.eu in a more robust version. Meanwhile, the site you're in now is the project development site, with a video to give you a taste of what's on the real Europeana site.’(http://dev.europeana.eu/)

Anyway, I am now thinking of finishing the written forms e.g. the exegesis and artefact, then inscribing them into a DVD along with an architecture that might resemble some idea, metaphor, or symbol of the research outcome? Something in the shape of a house would be too obvious and simple and wouldn’t ‘add value’ to the project like businessmen like to say on the Lion’s Den! Rather I need something connected to the idea of art or education or something new and novel in itself? Perhaps each click on the DVD could help them navigate their way around Guantanamo or Abu Graib prisons? This needs to be developed.

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