The Ecosystem of Digital Assets : Crowds and Clouds

183 Pages·2014·1.037 MB·English

by  Tobias Blanke

Digital Asset Ecosystems
Chandos
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Digital Asset Ecosystems
Rethinking crowds and clouds
T b
obias lanke
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First published in 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84334-716-3 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-78063-382-4 (online)
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934496
© T. Blanke, 2014
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List of figures
2.1 AWS infrastructure based on Kalakota (2012) 14
2.2 From biological to digital ecosystems based on Briscoe
et al. (2011) 24
vii
About the author
Tobias Blanke is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for e-Research,
Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is
the director of the MA in Digital Asset and Media Management. His
academic background is in philosophy and computer science.
Tobias’s principal research interests lie in the development and
research of digital libraries and archives, as well as infrastructures
for research, particularly in the arts and humanities. Currently, he is
working and leading on several projects in the field, from open-source
optical character recognition, open linked data and scholarly primitives
to document mining and information extraction for research.
Tobias works on several international projects and committees. Most
notably, he is one of the directors of the Digital Research Infrastructure
for Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), a European initiative to create
an integrated research infrastructure for arts, humanities and cultural
heritage data. He also leads the joint research work for EHRI, a
pan-European consortium to build a European Holocaust Research
Infrastructure.
ix
1
Introduction
The idea of digital ecosystems has recently proliferated as a catchphrase
in public discussions about concepts such as big data and social media.
Big data seems to be everywhere right now. Social media, too, appears
as the golden answer of more and more applications and discourses.
Both are intrinsically linked and part of the digital ecosystems. As we
shall discuss in this book, big data only becomes big if the same action
is repeated time and again. It has received so much attention because
everyone in the digital public space can experience it on a daily basis
in the ever-growing number of tweets, Facebook friends, etc. in social
media applications. At the same time, much of the commercial promise
of social media and the excitement it generates in outside observers,
from sociologists (who want access to free information about people) to
marketers (who want to sell products better), is linked to social media
generating big data.
According to a Financial Times special report (Financial Times,
2012a), big data is empowering individuals, as the analytical techniques
that come with it allow them to get a better overview of the distributed
knowledge out there, hidden in social media worlds and elsewhere.
Businesses are, however, struggling to decode all this data and they are
starting to drown in it – ‘Businesses are doing their best to store and use
that information’ (Financial Times, 2012b) – and it seems unclear yet
whether they will succeed. What is lacking, according to the FT analysis,
is the equivalent of a librarian in a library for the corporate world to
exploit all the information they need. ‘Masters of big data’ (Financial
Times, 2012b) will be able to connect with the user and able to navigate
the big data space to support this connection. With such masters, users
and businesses gain control over the data tsunami they are faced with.
This book will discuss how digital ecosystems are created to exploit the
economic and societal potential of social media and to master big data.
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Digital Asset Ecosystems
One example that we shall come back to again and again is Facebook,
which has long grown out of its existence as a single web application and
become a big data organisation. Recently, the UK’s Guardian comment
section discussed the Facebook Home App, the latest evolution of social
media (Poole, 2013). Facebook promises a ‘great, living, social phone’
so that in those moments when we are not totally occupied with the
activities around us, we can escape to its world. But it is not just the real
world that Facebook Home protects us from. The online world is also
filtered:
Facebook’s use of the word Home for the app does reflect, though,
the site’s attraction to many of its billion users: that it is the digital
world’s equivalent of a gated community, or perhaps a padded cell.
Facebook is nice because it’s comfortingly insulated from the flame
wars, gadget reviews, and paedophile rings that make up 99% of
the rest of the internet.
(Poole, 2013)
This view of Facebook as a gated community represents the negative
idea of what digital ecosystems might be about, as we shall find out
in this book. But we can be saved from being enclosed in these gated
communities by taking control of our own data as our own curators:
‘You too can perfectly well continue to use Facebook… as long as
you make sure to curate your data trail with appropriate misdirection’
(Poole, 2013). Open ecosystems are the consequence.
Whether we consider ourselves as masters of our own data universe
or as enclosed in an online gated community, without doubt we are
witnessing a major change in how the World Wide Web is reorganised
around us. This will affect all applications on the web, but also what we
are mainly interested in here: all the digital content. Both big data and
social media are key drivers in this change. This book has been written
as we wanted to understand the role of digital assets and digital media
in this evolution of the online environment.
If digital assets are, at the most generic level, digital objects with a
value that can be economic, social or cultural, plus the correct rights to
realise these values, there will be an obvious link to big data and social
media. Big data is about extracting all three kinds of value from the
large seas of content, while social media is about realising social value
online. But digital assets are still connected to social media and big data
in another way. They are all parts of the development to separate out the
web into larger digital ecosystems; these in turn are the centrepiece of a
2
Introduction
development to evolve the open digital public space of the World Wide
Web into a better value-creating and value-realising entity.
If digital assets are difficult to define, digital ecosystems will be even
more so. When researching for this book, it quickly became clear that it
would not be productive to advance on an understanding of their impact
by giving a fixed definition first. They seem to be such a productive idea,
as they are often used with varying meanings in different contexts. In
all these meanings, digital ecosystems are considered key to the debate
about how best to ensure the productive future of the web – not just in
the sense that new business models need to develop, but also in terms
of how the web can at the same time keep its original promise to be a
neutral platform, available to all.
Digital ecosystems help us understand how the digital value creation
and digital asset production evolve on the web because of the synthesis
of its two core forces that have helped the web mature. The first one is
the development of the web into a digital platform for applications and
content. We can use the term ‘cloud’ for this, as it is more commonly
understood. While most encounter the cloud as a dark archive for some
of their content, or as a means to shift content between devices, it is
much more than that, as we shall see. The second force that has enabled
the digital ecosystem revolution is the crowd or the collaboration of large
numbers of humans on a common task. Social media as in the Facebook
world is one instantiation of the crowd, but there are many others. This
includes work for money in what some fear might develop into a global
culture of online sweatshops (Horton, 2011), and others hail as the next
big thing in the global labour relationships (Scholz, 2012). Common to
all these crowd activities is that the task they work on will benefit from
many cooks preparing it. Crowds are about collaboration, whatever
motivates it.
When investigating the relationship of crowds and clouds in digital
ecosystems, it soon became clear that their work is complementary
and that they must not be regarded as two separate forces. This book
investigates how they are employed together as two sides of the same
coin. In this division of work, computers do what they are good at, such
as the analysis of large amounts of data, where the data is mined for
content, clustered around themes and in general squeezed for anything
valuable in it. Crowds do the rest and go where the computers cannot
reach at the moment, either because the data is too complex when, for
example, handwritten records need to be OCRed, or because deeper
meaning needs to be extracted. Crowds also cluster together in groups
of friends and colleagues in social media applications, which computers
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Digital Asset Ecosystems
in turn can exploit to recommend them things that these groups like as
a whole.
This book will present how crowds and clouds inhabit the digital
ecosystem to deliver digital assets into consumption or to understand
the consumer of the digital assets better. We see a digital economy
developing that is quickly transforming the role of digital assets and
making them the centrepiece of the activities within a digital ecosystem.
Economists have always known how important the division of labour
between humans and machines is for the success in the value production.
The same applies to the digital economy; the differences are that here we
produce digital assets and the division of labour is one between human
crowds and computer machines.
We shall discuss case studies of industries, which can be considered at
the forefront of the crowd and cloud division of work, from publishing
to media. New publishing models develop right in front of our eyes,
and digital media has been for a long time traded on large-scale digital
platforms with the active participation of the consumers. In this digital
environment, boundaries between producers and consumers of digital
assets are often nothing more than temporary arrangements, useful only
to understand a digital asset workflow, but not to mark clear and lasting
distinctions.
This book aims to reposition digital assets and media in the global
workflows and divisions of labour. We are trying to understand the
emergence of new digital asset practices and how digital ecosystems
and their crowds and clouds are instrumental for the production and
consumption of digital assets. To this end, we start our book with a
background chapter that at first has to explore what digital assets are.
This is far from obvious, and various definitions do not exactly compete
with each other, but they can at least be seen as alternatives. We ask
what it means to be a digital object with value, and how this value
changes when digital assets are taken out of their archives and moved
into the global digital networks. Nowadays, it is not enough any more
to just think of digital asset management (DAM) as delivering order to
an otherwise unorganised heap of digital objects in an organisation. The
new emerging, interconnected global workflows of the digital economy
need to be considered. This is the reason why we introduced crowds and
clouds, as they help us understand these workflows, which for digital
asset management in particular mean that we can describe how digital
assets and digital media are prepared for production and consumption.
In Chapter 2, we continue to explain why we consider crowds, as
a form of global human ubiquitous computing, to be so important to
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