ChB:PhD

Two things in the past 24 hours struck me as worth speaking up about. First of all, the Waste Land app launched yesterday by Faber. I’ve only tried it for a short time, but I’m itching to see more of the same. You can, of course, read the text of the poem; you can listen to a number of recordings of the poems – two versions by Eliot, Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes and so on. You can follow the equivalent of ‘the bouncing ball’ through the text as they read, and you can switch between readers without losing your place in the text. Clever stuff.

More than that, you can see the original draft with handwritten changes, worked on by Ezra Pound and in the typeset text each line is linked to detailed annotations a la Coles Notes style. Finally, and most dramatic of all, there is an HD movie of Fiona Shaw performing the complete poem. Watch it in portrait mode on the iPad and have the bouncing ball text visible. Watch landscape and you get movie full screen. Add to that a gallery of images associated with Eliot and the poem and you have a unique guide that could not have been created without a) the technology and b) the walled-garden environment (iTunes) in which such a product might be controlled. How will libraries and educational institutions deal with multimedia assets in the future I wonder?

Aside from the Shaw movie you probably can find all of the material on the web somewhere if you dig hard enough – British Library for the sound archive possibly, iTunesU for commentaries maybe – but the app demonstrates the systems adage that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. For anyone interested in Eliot it is a must buy (£7.99) and I hope that the barriers of IPR (Faber, of course, owns much of the copyright in this case) do not stop others producing similar products. The approach does what all good learning resources should do, inform, inspire, entertain and be simple to use and understand. I’m seeing the future here.

The second ‘revelation’ is something others may already be aware of, but I cannot resist commenting on it. This is the news that Wikipedia will be put forward to be recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. This from an article posted by The Atlantic last week:

“Spurred on by a German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the encyclopedia launched a petition this week to have the website listed on the UN Educational Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s world heritage lists. If accepted, Wikipedia would be afforded the international protection and preservation afforded to man made monuments and natural wonders. The first digital entity to vie for recognition as cultural treasure, Wikipedia argues that the site meets the first and foremost of UNESCO’s criteria: “to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius.”

Heaven knows where they would stick the metal plaque, but this, like the Waste Land app, indicates how quickly our expectations and perceptions of the digital landscape can be challenged and changed.