British Library Intranet article, Interview with Aleks Krotoski

Thursday 21 Oct 2010

Aleks Krotoski is the British Library’s Researcher in Residence for the newly opened exhibition, Growing Knowledge.

A respected digital media commentator and presenter of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution, Aleks has brought her experience and knowledge of technology to the Library, helping the exhibition pose the right questions to the research community.

Internal Communications assistant, Evie Jeffreys, met up with Aleks to discuss the novel role of Researcher in Residence and her thoughts on Growing Knowledge.

How did you get involved with the exhibition?

I have stalked the British Library for a long time – I always found it a place of solace during my PhD. So when I was approached for my thoughts on the future of digital research I jumped at the chance to be involved.

I was already looking at how the web interacts with social sciences but was keenly aware of issues we hadn’t thought about when it came to technology and research.

What does the role of Researcher in Residence entail?

I worked closely with Matthew Shaw, the lead curator of the exhibition, and Clive Izard, Project Director, to identify which tools we can showcase in the exhibition and with UCL and JISC to evaluate the tools. I also worked to establish the event schedule – compiling panel discussions and workshops.

I did a lot of thinking and writing with Times Higher - we are constantly asking the question ‘is this relevant to researchers?’ It’s really important to get an understanding of what is useful to the people potentially using the tools.

How do you think the exhibition will contribute to the research community in general?

Just having access to the tools in the exhibition is exciting. They will provoke new research questions and hands-on collaborative work. We want to inspire discussion and debate.

However, the exhibition is not just informing the research community, but wants to know the researchers’ opinions and needs.

It will keep evolving and internal reports in January and March will give us feedback on how the research community feels about new research tools and methods.

On a more personal level, when and how did you become interested in technology?

As a child I had an IBM PC and my mother was adamant that I start using it to prepare me for whatever technology and tools were to come.

I found the whole concept of self-publishing fascinating.
I developed an ability to use technology and as I evolved professionally I took for granted that I was not scared of it and wanted to work with it and learn more.

Last week’s launch of Growing Knowledge, kicked off by speeches from Aleks, Lynne Brindley and Andrew Miller MP, was a great success.

You can watch a YouTube video of Aleks, among others, speaking about Growing Knowledge here.

The Media Society, Protecting the Media?

IBC Legal’s Protecting the Media 2010 conference provided a timely update on the uncertain state of freedom of expression in the media industry

Gathering a varied audience, from top media lawyers and in-house newspaper lawyers to legal advisors for MTV, the conference highlighted the challenges and changes faced by all areas of the media in Britain, not least those enhanced by new technologies.

The specific areas covered throughout the day were privacy, Conditional Fee Agreements (CFAs) and cost issues, investigative journalism, advertising boundaries, defamation, online publishing and contempt of court.

Each speaker brought vibrancy to their own subject and most expressed a personal stance on the developments in media law, some more controversial than others.

While half the speakers favoured information-heavy approaches, providing delegates with pages of written examples, others chose to speak with only minimal PowerPoint presentations as support. Both approaches proved equally engaging and informative.

Many subjects overlapped, highlighting that each branch of the media shares the challenges of another.

Privacy

Many could not resist mentioning privacy, and the John Terry case proved the most popular example to use. Antony White, QC of Matrix Chambers, who delivered the talk ‘Reconsidering Privacy and the Media’, highlighted many interesting debates, but also shone a light on how supportive, if controversial, some judges have been of the media in recent years.

Among his examples was a judgement made by Lord Woolf suggesting that a celebrity or public figure, whether a voluntary role model or not, must accept that his or her actions will be of greater interest to the public and therefore, the media.

More controversially, Woolf’s judgement also said that the Courts must recognise that ‘if papers do not publish information which the public are interested in, there will be fewer newspapers published, which will not be in the public interest.’

White went on to provide recent instances where judges have granted freedom to the media to reveal an individual’s identity, particularly if it will render a story in the public interest more newsworthy, quoting one judge who commented that a story without a protagonist would be very much disembodied.

He ended provocatively, suggesting that the media have, in fact, not been singled out in this respect.

Investigative journalism and documentaries

Introducing a very different tone, Dominic Harrison, a lawyer from Channel 4, delivered a passionate presentation about the way in which investigative journalism, particularly television documentaries, is stunted by endless legal barriers, often before an investigation even begins.

One of the main points was not just that broadcast and documentary journalism is forced to show so much of its hand early on, but that audio-visual material on the Internet is virtually unregulated in comparison.

The Internet and technology have led many areas of journalism into unknown territories and the law often finds itself dragging behind.

Claiming that the laws are neither practicable nor accessible, clear nor predictable, Harrison painted a bleak picture of investigative journalism’s limited freedoms.

Advertising

Another area largely affected by the growth of the Internet and technology is advertising.

Marina Palomba, Partner at Reed Smith LLP, described the Internet as having been a ‘wild west’ for a long time.

Discussing the newest forms of advertising, such as location-based social networking, Foursquare and Facebook Places for example, and augmented reality applications, like Lonely Planet and the Museum of London’s ‘Street Museum’ application, Palomba made it obvious that the possibilities for advertising, in this respect, are becoming boundless.

However, at the beginning of the month it was agreed that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is to have their digital remit extended significantly to enhance consumer protection online.

The Internet has blurred the line between what is promotional and what is editorial advertising – an already difficult distinction. For example, on ITV’s Facebook pages the television company writes enthusiastically about future shows on their channels – is this editorial or promotional? Online viral videos – are they considered purely promotional?

As the ASA has always said it will not interfere with editorial content, from next year, with the stricter rules in practice, the difference between editorial and promotional will be considerably more important to distinguish.

The conference, while providing the latest updates on cases and practice, also raised many debates and interesting questions.

All the answers, however, could not possibly be given. As areas such as CFAs remain in a state of uncertainty, according to speaker Louis Charalambous, Partner at Simons Muirhead & Burton, and future developments in defamation law cannot be predicted, we can only prepare ourselves for all the possibilities.

Evie Jeffreys

http://www.themediasociety.com/news/PROTECTING+THE+MEDIA%3F/144/

Nothing Bad Magazine, Ditto Press

In the north of Dalston hangs the studio that is home to Ditto Press. The printing and publishing company was, until recently, the only one in the country to offer a Risograph printing service and is now one of only two to do so.

The company, which also publishes work printed in and out of house, was founded by Lynsey Atkin and Ben Freeman. Both were previously freelancers working in print design and discovered that there was no Risograph printing service available in Britain, so decided to be the first with Ditto Press.

Risograph printing is a rarely used commercially, not because it is disliked, but because it is, in Lynsey’s words, a “faff”.

“It's not an accurate science. You have to really persevere with it. It's a huge lot of trial and error. Anybody that wanted to make quick money out of printing, this is not the way to do it. You've got to want to do it and you've got to get satisfaction out of doing it.”

While many may believe printing to be an easy, automated process, Ben and Lynsey certainly prove otherwise. Risograph printing, though using digital images sent to the machine, is a finely tuned skill.

“It's a technique”, says Ben, “like screen-printing and lithography and etching, engraving, foil blocking. Our favourite clients are people who think about it as a technique that they like, rather than something just economical or something cool.”

The pair joke that the venture is the ‘artisan dream’, but it certainly appears to be a skilled trade rather than a factory production line.

“Some people's attitude to print is that you just send a printer an e-mail and they bang it out and give it to you, which is unfortunate because that's not how it used to be” explains Ben. “50 or 100 years ago nobody thought of printing in that way, but because we now have ink jet printers and laser printers people think you just press a button and it prints. That's never true at all, with any print process.”

One of the main benefits of Riso-printing is that it is possible to produce short runs of books. While with most other types of printing, such as offset lithography which is responsible for the printing of most books, it is easy and only financially feasible to take on a job that will produce hundreds of thousands of copies, Risography lends itself to jobs producing, say, 50 copies and is economically accessible. The cost is similar to that of digital printing, but the end product looks as nice as screen-printing.

On the whole, the only reason Ditto Press would turn away a print client would be if their job were too big. “If someone was to come to us and say we want 500 page books, full of colour photos, we could do it theoretically but it would take maybe a year and it would cost them about the same as a flat in Kensington, so we tend to be honest with people and say this isn't the right process. You get that with any printers. It's just about what's suitable,” says Ben.

A number of features of Risography reel in predominantly arty clients: the ability to produce a small number of copies at a low cost, the care that goes into the work, but also the way it looks.

“That's when we get the best results”, explains Ben, “when clients specifically want the look that we give. I think the reason why we get the customers we do is because we've got a background in design. So we know how things are supposed to look and what people want things to look like and we really care about what things are supposed to look like. The best thing for us is when we have that dialogue with people. We get that a lot, it's good.”

The relationship with a client is important to both Ben and Lynsey. The way the two parties work together resembles the way in which a tattoo artist and their customer work to achieve the perfect image.

“Not everyone is going to want the look we produce,” accepts Lynsey. “But it's great because we don't want to print for everybody, we care about our work and it's great to have clients that care about it as well, without trying to sound too much like a cliché.”

Aside from the print side of the business and the relationship with their clients, the element that really inspires the pair is publishing. A mutual desire to run a publishing company was one of the main driving forces behind the venture.

“We are so swamped with print that we don't really get as much time as we would like to put into the publishing business, but that's what we get really excited about and what we want to do.”

There are roughly five publishing projects coming up over the next few months, for which the two seem in anticipation.

To some, printing may be no more than the flip of a switch or a click of a mouse, but at Ditto Press that is certainly not the case. The process sounds excruciatingly tricky to pin down, but here it has been met with a genuine passion, infectious to those that come across it.

Photos and words - Evie Jeffreys

http://nothingbadmag.com/ (Issue 2)