 Thank you very much for coming to my talk. If you wish to interrupt at any moment or any time, interrupt at will. And let me just get this started. All right, the talk is going to be on the future of memory. And this is our nice logo which we set up for our GLAMx lab a couple of years ago, which didn't conform to the university's style sheet or brand. And we put an X at the top there just to denote the impossibilities. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. This is a black obsidian mirror. The ancient Aztec priests used to use these sorts of mirrors to gaze into the future and predict things. This one was pilfered during the invasions and made its way into the library of Dr. John Dee, who was an Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. And this is one of these sorts of things which he used along with crystal balls in order to talk to angels. We think that the reason why he wanted to talk to angels is because in November of 1572 a new star appeared in the sky in the constellation of Cassiopeia and it formed a cross. And at that time it was seen as a symbol that God was wanting to basically send a message to people on Earth. So people like John Dee, who stood between science and magic, saw it as a time for maybe if I can start talking to these angels, maybe they can give me some inside knowledge on what God is planning to do to all of humanity. This is, I don't know if you can see very clearly, but that's John Dee staring into a crystal ball with probably his helper, which was Edward Kelly, to get information from the angels. He created these funny little object called the monus hieroglyphica because Elizabethan and Renaissance magicians were obsessed in tapping into unlimited knowledge and they believed that this unlimited knowledge was divine in origin and it gave you the key to the workings of the world. In Italy we had Giordano Bruno who was doing a similar thing with the art of memory and these people were trying to basically create some sort of key to unlock unlimited knowledge through some sort of sigil or some sort of magic that would unlock these sorts of ideas in our mind. There was also Thomas Campanello, he's an Italian who came up with a book called The City of the Sun which was a utopian vision of this wonderful city that had seven walls and on those walls was the entire sum knowledge of everything that humanity had ever created and it was supposed to be there in contact for the people to enjoy knowledge in all its forms. Now one third of the book was dedicated to that utopian vision of knowledge and learning and two thirds of the book were dedicated to defending it. These were my manuscript notes from 1995 when I read the book and I made my own little things. It's now water damaged on that side and it looks like an ancient manuscript but it's only circa 1995. I'm giving you all these funny little things because in order to predict the future we need to understand what's happened in the past. This is the Steganographia which was written by Gianus Trasimius and to me I see the birth of the internet in this book. This was a book of cryptography, masquerading as a book of demonic magic and he wanted to send messages across the world but they didn't have the technologies of today so the way that they did it was that they'd send messages to the angels at the moon and the angels at the moon would communicate the messages to other angels so they had the wish to do these things. What they didn't have is the scientific infrastructure that we have today in order to do it but the dreams were there. So I always see these ancient ideas as being ancient dreams of people wanting this sort of access to universal knowledge, universal communications but not having the scientific gizmos in order to make it occur. The art of memory itself in terms of the ancient art of memory was retraced by this woman, Dame Frances Yates who's probably my favourite academic ever. She wrote this lovely book in 1966 and she retraced the birth of how people used to remember before printing and it was an interesting sort of ancient idea whereby you had to remember things according to places, locations and really exciting sort of bizarre things. The more bizarre you encased what you wanted to remember the more you remembered it and this is how people used to remember things before writing had been invented. The same sort of idea has come recently in a book by Lynn Kelly called The Memory Code which sort of applies some of these ideas on an aboriginal level. So the aborigines were doing the same sort of thing in terms of their landscape that is outlined in that book by Dame Frances Yates. There's a beautiful passage in that book which I've got to read. It's about the god Thoth going to the king of Egypt and letting him know about his wonderful invention of letters. And he said, this invention, oh king, said Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered. But Tharmus replied, that's the king of Egypt, most ingenious Thoth, one man has the ability to beget arts but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to the users belongs to another. And now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing produced by external characters which are not part of themselves will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things when they are not, for the most part, ignorant and hard to get along with since they are not wise but only appear to be wise. So that's the god Thoth going with the invention of letters and the king saying sorry but you've actually invented something it will cause us to forget things and this is why we all sit in the room together today. Now the black obsidian mirror of today is that, our computer screens. You know, when I see my Apple Mac or by itself I see John D's black obsidian mirror and you know what the angels are? The angels to me are Google. You type something into Google and the angels respond with the knowledge of the world. This is a dream. These renaissance magicians were sort of craving the sort of world that we are in now. But that's our black obsidian mirror and this is a scene from Cloud Atlas where the archivist is undertaking an oral history. Ordinarily I begin by asking prisoners to recall their earliest memories to provide the context for corporatic historians of the future. And the slave replies, fabricants have no such memories archivist. So again, coming from Newcastle it was established in Australia which was a prison within a prison. Here are some of my fellow prisoners and without these sorts of memories we can have no freedom. All right, so this is something that's really become an obsession of mine in order to be able to unlock as much of this sort of memory as possible. And the digital world has been that way that we've been doing it and it's been wonderful. In 2016 we established a GLAM-X lab. We took the inspiration from the idea of GLAM being borderless in terms of covering the whole gamut of all things. So we just decided to put an X on the end just so that we'd taken anything else that anyone could think about. We didn't want to put any limits. We wanted to create a space where students could be placed in contact with 50,000 years of human expression and all its archival forms and formats. We wanted a place where our students could actually touch and physically be with the material. Because it worried me that everyone was just too obsessed in the digital and we didn't really know where these things were coming from. And we also wanted to improve their job and their networking. So we wanted them to be able to tangibly connect with the communities that they'd grown up with, the community that had helped create the university, to meet people, to form connections, to be able to put things online that were part of that community and people love it when work like this is done. We also took the challenge of digitising the local TV channel, MBN, television that had been recording news stories and programmes since 1962. So Channel 9, their parent company and them are now not, they couldn't care less about their past. They're too busy trying to survive in the digital world. And so there's about a million foot of footage which these dedicated volunteers, that's Phil up there. Phil Lloyd. He just came with me with a box of black boxes of all the films that he'd already digitised and I just backed him up to the university servers. That broke the university servers and then we just started discussions on how to get more space. So eventually I got Central Station which was about a couple of hundred terabytes of material and we've been digitising as we go. And he's got a collection, it's like a men's shed in there because they're all ex-production, they're all digitalised. They're all ex-production, camera men type of people. But they're fantastic for our students because they come from a world where the evolution of how they had to get broadcast materials over the air changed so much. So the early footage is sort of like black and white silent with scripts. It's all in bits and pieces and we use our digital platform to bring those bits and pieces together. And the students are now involved. We've got a pilot project to try and reconstruct some of these early films. There's an interaction that goes on between the materials of the past and the students now to create something that will last. It's a redundant format. And these are our work integrated learning projects. We've got a room dedicated to 3D digitisation of Aboriginal artefacts. So we've got a site in Newcastle that's six and a half thousand years old. It was an Aboriginal factory site. Three layers, three worlds of human habitation on that site and they decided to build what? What do you think they built over the top of it? A museum, it still works. Shopping centre, close. Car park, no. Oh, sort of, yeah. You're half right. What's the other end of the car park? It's a KFC. That's what they built over the top of it. Anyway, there was a bit of a furor and it caused a bit of angst. It was on the front page of the herald and it triggered a review of the act. So the act governing Aboriginal heritage is now in review across the state of New South Wales. This is the community impact of the stuff that we've been digitising. When we moved over to the servers from about 1996, we've generated 350 million files. So that's digital things and they've just been spread out across, you know, Flickr, YouTube, whatever we can find to spread these things out. The latest has been our living histories at UON digital platform, which is made by a New Zealand company. They've got a stall, forget their name. Anyway, they may recollect is their company and they've been doing a really good job. Yep, yep. That's it, that's it. One of the sponsors and they've been great to work with too because we keep pushing them. We wanted to develop a 3D tool and we developed one so that we could view them. This is the site here. This is where all our stuff goes. This is like our home base. So we've been spread out throughout the internet but it was always good to have a copy at home as well. And this is what we've been sort of bringing everything under the one shed. And it's still a work in progress but it seems to be doing a good job for us. The next phase, that's the digitisation phase. We have become available now that we've been able to digitise things. So the overlay of mapping is wonderful. That's why I love Chris's talk on yesterday when he was talking about all those wonderful maps. But to do that sort of work you've got to digitise, you've got to find and digitise those original maps and then overlay them on Google and this is what we've been doing in terms of acting almost like a time machine. So this one is an 1861 plan of a local area, Maitland and we're superimposed on the Google landscape of 2019. You can use the sliders to see how the landscape has changed and we do that with a whole variety of things so you have layers. Here's another one. We did 600 or so, 700 subdivision plans and we just put them out online. All right, on our Flickr site this fellow, Lachlan Weatherall who is an ex-computing fellow from the university decided in Christmas of 2015 to map them all. So he Google mapped them so we didn't have to search. All these dark areas are areas where our plans are so if you're in that street you just log in to, you know, you just zoom in, click that and up comes the Flickr page with the high resolution plan. So when we're talking yesterday about what to do next at one of those sessions this is the sort of stuff I see as next is seeing what the community does with the material these are other things, photographs having photographs associated with the landscapes that they were created in so these are 1890s images on the 1890s landscape of Newcastle. So it helps connect different types of material to the landscape. So I love this sort of stuff but at the moment it's all very clumsy we're doing it in Google Google Maps. What I'd like is the sort of thing Tom Cruise was doing in Minority Report pushing the IT the coders to do these sorts of things for us do the impossible. This is the KFC that they built over our six and a half thousand year old Aboriginal site. These are the sorts of artifacts that we're scanning. We put the 3D artifacts in recollect. I had to apply archival principles to those artifacts because they were pulled out of the ground in scientific fashion using the grid and the depths for spits and archaeologists brought them out of the ground they divided them up into type and I couldn't understand why they did that but archivists like things in original order so I spent about two weeks putting everything back into original order because I asked someone can you show me the oldest artifact and they couldn't and then all through that process I realised the beauty of GLAM is this that we can communicate to one another so rather than the archaeologists getting museum disease they sort of said to them well how about you put them into original order so we can actually create an evidential record and then we can sort of challenge the National Archives to change the definition of archives and what they mean by a definition of an evidential record. At the moment everything is Eurocentric so there is no way I don't know what it's like in New Zealand where the New Zealand definition of archives includes Maori dance and ritual and stories and artefacts and that sort of thing but in Australia none of that falls none of that is evidential alright so I would like that to be I would like it to be recognised but it would take a bit of a change of mind and this is the this is the VR thing that they did out of it you can't get this at the moment we can get the images but you can you can't get this by our IT innovation team who did a three dimensional version of the dig so because I can't go there anymore no one can visit the site because there's a KFC over the top we can visit it virtually by putting a headset on and then you can go into the trench and you can see each of these artefacts has almost it's got its own Dewey number that's been created out of the out of the where it's been in the depth of the dig so every part of the dig in coordinate A3 and it's at a depth of spit 20 then that becomes its call number and all the metadata associated with it the other project that we were involved with was the 1891 Victoria Theatre this is a theatre that they didn't knock down but it's still there but we found all these wonderful archival records relating to it and these are the innovation team here the people that do the three dimensional stuff for us they created the theatre from descriptions there's no photographs of the inside of the theatre but again this is like a 2D version of it but when you get the headset on it's just wonderful to actually go and visit this theatre and the power of these 3D technologies is such that it doesn't take much to fool us when you're standing on these balconies you feel ill like you're up very very high so the power of the illusion is quite incredible there's a new way of being able to bring historic records to life in a new way the other thing I'd love to do with this which we haven't done but someone we might do is actually have a performance in there so we have a virtual performance inside the recreation of the 1891 I mean these are the sorts of things that can be done if we understand that the sort of material we're generating is not just a finish with us it goes out into the community to work with the material but to do it they've got to get access to the high resolution scans the other thing about this stuff is that this material 30 years of these records were sitting in some guy's garage and I found a footnote dedicated to him that was from 1988 but we were still able to track him down in 2017 that was the power of the Newcastle Network he was holidaying in Queensland and they managed to track him down anyway so that's that alright so then we get to the digital age that we're in and there was a wonderful show called The End of Memory which came out last year which had some pretty shocking stats about what we're actually creating so I said for a regional place like Newcastle we created 350 million digital things okay so the average age of an inscription on stone was expected to last for on parchment a thousand years on film a hundred years on vinyl 50 years on CD-ROM CD-ROM was supposed to be the 500 year solution until some French team in 2003 found a little corrosive problem and all of a sudden that vision of the CD being the Beal and Endor this was going to be the answer to all our memory was was gone so they just became another bit of plastic or aluminium and they started showing these sorts of statistics and this is what really scared me this is data on a planetary scale so per day 145 billion emails a cent 2.5 trillion bytes of data created a byte is 8 bits a single character of text 3 kilobytes, 1 page 1 megabyte, 300 pages 1 gigabyte, 1 library 1 DVD, 5 libraries 1 terabyte, 6 million books 200 DVDs 1 terabyte then they start talking about 1 exabyte which is 1 kilometre of DVDs all the digital data created in 2003 and then they describe a stack of DVDs from the Earth to the Moon which is 1.8 zettabytes which was all the data was created in 2011 and then one Yotabyte which they said was a stack of DVDs from the Sun to Mars which is all the data to 2016 which is 1.5 zettabytes so how are we Alan Watts to the IBM engineers said these lines if I'm going to make a big pitch is that we've run into a cultural situation where we have confused the symbol with the physical reality the money with the wealth and the menu with the dinner and we're starving on eating menus so the moral of the story is don't confuse the menu with the meal as I said there are a few more threads and there are a few clips from movies which in the longer version I could tell you about Plantopia this is what I think we should be moving towards future of memory to me is sharing the only things that have survived from the ancient world in their complete form the complete works of Plato and the bible the only reason they did it of this, of a vision of heaven. And the vision of heaven was this dark polished crater. I only saw it for a glimpse, but it was this dark polished crater. That was heaven. And I asked some Americans who interpreted dreams, what they thought of it. They said, this is almost like, this crater is polished by a billion souls. So all our lives, they just cascade into this thing like meteorites and they polish that crater just little bit by little. Then there's this beautiful, beautiful illusion in one of Plato's works, Alcibiades 1, where he's talking about the metaphor of the soul. And the soul is again, is something, you know how you see the eyes of the mirrors of the soul? And he's asking about the idea of looking into another's eyes. And I just wanted to connect those three ideas for you. The dark obsidian mirror, the John D, wanted to know the future and divine the future that the Aztec priests used. My dream of this gigantic polished crater, black polished crater, and the pupil of the eye. So maybe in answer to Deb's question this morning of how do we get outside of our own heads, maybe we just have to look into one another's eyes. Okay, so we have about three minutes for questions. Please do speak into the mic for accessibility reasons and it will come up on the video. What's the copyright? So you're saying that you've digitized the MBN archives and you're doing that. Is there copyright issues in terms of making those publicly available? No, because they're so happy to have access to their archival footage for shows and programs. And the way that they've been targeting is that they've been doing the year before the anniversary. So at the moment, last year they digitized everything for 2019, which were things dating back to 1989 and 1969 and 1979, and they're doing the same thing each year. So they provide the station with all this material that they can use when they're doing retrospectives. So there's no copyright. Anyway, I strangled the person down to the ground who was the head of marketing at nine because three of the metadata sides of these things were sponsored by a Stockton pensioner who's our benefactor and she's 94. And I said to her, we locked everything down waiting for Channel 9 to give us the okay to release it all because I wanted it all free. And I said, look, she's 94. I don't want Vera to die while, you know, we're waiting for you to twiddle your thumbs and over the phone. She said to me, go ahead and release it all. That's fine. So Channel 9. Yeah. Okay. Maybe they should have a chance to attend to you. So you can guilt them into doing these sorts of things. Yeah. I'm a teacher, so, you know, you've got to wait a little while just to make sure. Okay, cool. Well, thank you everybody. Please join me again in thanking Johnny.