11th International Seminar

Forum UNESCO - University and Heritage

University of Florence, Italy
September 2006

Beyond the archives: Reading, writing and mapping São Paulo's heritage

Documentation is moving beyond the archives. Heritage can be tagged, commented and
rewritten through new layers of participation and visualisation. Fundap – the Foundation for
Administrative Development – is building a website for the continuous open documentation
of heritage authored both by researchers and by the public. It is a move towards creating
open and accessible records of public heritage.

Historical records, buildings and artefacts can exist a connected living dialogue. We see
four routes to this and are actively incorporating them into our work - both behind the
scenes and within the users' experience.

Electronic access, requiring a digital version or summary for every asset

Dimensional access, offering a spatial and visual experience

Taxonomic access, allowing arrangements of information from different angles that are
guided by tags, categories and metadata

Participative access, offering a public stake in tagging, annotating, sorting, prioritising
and connecting

Electronic access and accessibility

When heritage is recorded by multimedia or electronically it is immediately shareable over
electronic networks. When it is on paper it is more likely to be stuck in an archive. However
if information can be put online it doesn't mean it is universally accessible and we are well
aware that the internet represents this paradox of access and accessibility in Brasil.
Statistics show that 15% of the population are counted as internet users and around 10%
have computers at home. With this poor access to the online world – through modems and
creaky telephone lines – multimedia resources can be as inaccessible as a dusty book in
the archives. However digital resources are have more reach and are more easily shared by
making hitherto inaccessible documentation searchable, saveable and manipulatable. This
growth in accessibility is fuelled by the widening availability of free and easy-to-use content
management and an expectation that information should be available and present rather
than overpresented and impenetrable. This means delivering the maximum content with
the minimum dressing, lifting barriers, dropping procedures and beginning to trust the
public to start to do some of our work for us.

Outsiders are acutely aware of information that is locked away or worse, information that is
locked away in a number of different locations. Heritage documentation in cities is very
much a victim of this distribution of unshared resources and it often follows that the richer
the information, the harder it is to locate, triangulate and assimilate. A large number of
repositories also makes for a larger number of gatekeepers and of 'outsiders' to the
information. In São Paulo, our fully accredited research team has to negotiate four heritage
organisations, eight federal, state and city ministries together with three document
repositories and nine libraries. Each of these requires some form of introductory letter or
permit in order to access resources and things don't happen very quickly.

This experience of badly connected document archives perfectly matches the concept of the
information silo. Wikipedia defines this as 'a management system incapable of reciprocal
operation with other, related management systems'. The gatekeepers, procedures, formats
and different classifications all conspire against connecting information or constructing
more definitive resources. In order to reach beyond these barriers we have to declare
independence for heritage documentation. In order to free documentation, we need to take
lessons from the new information architecture and the experiences of digital collections and
to look at the examples of free online services and free software.

Open documentation seems like an alien concept to the locked-up world of paid
publications, passworded intranets and stored paper records. Information is separated
from its network of references and sometimes it is 'buried' which is a larger issue than any
of the institutional transactions, imagined security threats or privacy claims that currently
justify closed records. There are few truly confidential documents and with little of the
graded access available electronically - such as read, copy and write permissions. There are
real world parallels here such as museums and exhibitions that also use similar graded
access - 'look but don't touch', 'no photographs'. At the same time they hide 90% of their
collection and curators are the filters, the gatekeepers to the scarce resource of floorspace.
In an electronic world these digitised records, documents and exhibits are free of space
constraints and must be independent. It is time to bare all.

Fundap – visualising the document

Fundap is responsible for developing a new platform to provide public and administrative
access to records of city properties that are under the protection of federal, state and
municipal laws. Time delay, inefficiency and paperwork can mount up for even mundane
public or internal requests while processes are opaque and institutions are protective of
their materials and their remit while no single methodology exists for handling records,
plans, judgements and assessments. A preoccupation with the collection of proofs,
evidence and detail for the purpose of enforcement has closed opportunities for sharing and
co-operation. We are well aware that ultimate ownership of all these resources is with the
public, the voters and the taxpayers. It is better that this information, these details and
data exist beyond the information silos – it is better out than in.

There is a strong demand for accessible documentation and our approach has been to
research resources in order to assemble histories, plans and images of São Paulo's built
heritage and this first step is creating the basis for an open and updateable online
repository. We are also thinking of modularity and allowing for the future docking of other
organisations and agencies who can either contribute to the information directly or run
parallel systems, possible using a duplicate of our system. The construction, production
and hosting has been performed with free and open source software alone. All investment
has been directed to the human resources required to provide the research and design
rather than as a payment to a closed and proprietary software system. We have been able
to customised the website and can be the system can be shared, lent, duplicated or passed
on to other organisations to use as a basis of their own information dissemination
initiatives.

Our documentation now exists out of the archives and in the browser, and this is now the
only interface required to interact with data. Downloaded viewing applications sometimes
hit the mark but are now much less attractive and cumbersome plugins are also surpassed
by ajax and web2.0 refinements. These ease the viewing, reading and even the authoring of
resources, all online and away from the quicksand of directories and the hell of email. With
our ultralow budget we can still deliver full histories, property blueprints, digital maps, a
real estate database, photo gallery, online updating and access control for sensitive
information. This operationalises hitherto dead information and leverages our other three
mantras of information access: dimension through maps and images; taxonomy guiding
the pivoted views of categories; Participation by users to both read the resources and to
write, interact and upload.

Dimensional access through images and maps

Maps and images continually direct us and inform us when we navigate cities and heritage
while they have become vastly easier to produce, store and share. We are taking advantage
of this growing simplicity of serving maps and photos to add to the user experience and to
cross-fertilisation between media. A simple architectural feature, highlight or point of
interest can be presented either in a paragraph of text or through photos and from a
number of different angles while presenting a fuller context. This dimension of
documentation has previously deserved especial attention, extra budgets and special
application whereas now it can be included without specialist skills and without massive
editing or programming. Panoramas and video clips are also easier to assemble but we feel
that there are enough free services that if these are needed they can be linked rather than
hosted. The utility to low bandwidth modem users is outweighed by the burden of opening
or transferring files and clips on our servers.

Maps offer a lot to heritage. They are used to visualise distance between threats and
opportunities for protection and conservation, monitoring the encroachment of illegal
developments and revealing the most vulnerable boundaries. They can also locate
possibilities for the extension of protected areas, registrations or the consolidation of
historical clusters. Google maps and Google Earth have opened up great expectations of the
demure art of supplying maps. Google Earth represents the state of the art but is a huge
file that needs a recent PC. Yet, based on breakthrough standards of time-to-load,
navigability and usability, there are fewer barriers for users of newer online maps and fewer
inhibitions for using digital map tools as historical documentation. Online maps alone can
offer a great level of interactivity, the ability to show many layers of information plus a
spatial search and match. It is now possible to navigate historical areas, adding layers of
history and annotating space backed up with as good as free satellite images. In our version
we use municipal data and this will extend to maps supplied by the water company and
much of the functionality will develop over time with gathering contributions and by-
products of our own work.

Worldwide user communities and the accumulation of comments and additions have
created a massive resource with great implications for heritage. Many of the possibilities
for our map and new initiatives are informed by the mashups of recent years. A mashup is
the hybrid use of maps with conventional data sources and publicly contributed data for
instance the Early Gothic Structures in France site, UNESCO World Heritage Site and the
famous Chicago Crime Map plots daily crime reports onto a Google Map of the city. From
the perspective of the mashup, new layers can be added from pre-prepared external
sources: visitor data, traffic conditions, architectural history. We are also able to enrich
maps by plotting additional data 'on the go': trails, panoramic viewpoints, 'how to get
there' info. These require a cheap GPS unit to record the frequent visits that the
researchers conduct and save the trails and waypoints for future use.

Maps represent locality and are spatial indexes to conventional documentation. The Fundap
site allows users to access information through properties plotted onto maps which are
hyperlinked to the records of the individual properties and plotted by the focuses shown
below. They can show the focuses of category - integrity, proximity – spread, relativity –
context and layers - parallels.
Category – integrity
Proximity – spread
Relativity – context
Layer - parallels
Searches - combinations
Common properties such as by era, governor
By zoom level and focus
Other buildings, features
Emergent maps of history, geology, culture
All of the above, in a search result

Taxonomic access – inside out

In the digital age we're creating new principles free of the old limitations. This is
changing the basic shape of knowledge, from (typically) trees to miscellanized piles.
This has consequences for the nature of topics, the role of metadata, and, crucially,
the authority of knowledge. In short, the change in the shape of knowledge is also
changing its place. (Weinberger 2006)

We have learned from looking at similar examples to the content we are producing. A
record of a heritage property contains similar elements to that of a book and so we can
rightly be informed by the Amazon website. A visit to a record page there shows a growing
clutter of added, excavated and implied categorisation and connection. The guts, intestines
and skeletons of publications and collections have been promoted from nowhere to the
middle of the landing page and above the reviews. It is the Richard Rogers effect on the
repository with the new information architecture creating Pompidou Centres and Lloyd's
Buildings with the pipes, whistles and metadata extended beyond the archives and wound
around the exterior.

The open record

 Automatic analysis and entrées

Folksonomy and Tagsonomy

In the cobweb world of the library or the physical bookshop there was a single location for
each resource – HA281, G156, Heritage tourism, Culture, Cultural Property, Antiquities,
Oversized, Database, CD – and electronic holdings have been moving away from this for a
number of years. In the post-Google world of tagging and folksonomies everything is
miscellaneous with knowledge existing in the piles that David Weinberger describes above.
This extra categorisation and metadata also represent navigational pivots and facts – users
can view records according to these categorisations. It is as possible to generate a list of
ruined educational properties that are from the architect Ramos de Azevedo and in the
bairro of Luz as it is to show properties that lie close to the Tucuruvi-Jabaquara metro line,
have more than two reviews and a user rating of more than four out of five. It is also easy
to find all properties that users have labeled with a personal or cultural tag like 'GilbertoGil'.

These views represent an escape from Dewey-decimal, alphabetical and departmental

categories that can bury resources and releases them. Our job then is to present an
architecture that allows people to navigate many categories, to show them where they are
within the information and what other properties are closely related and to give them the
possibility to contribute or move to a different information level or focus.

Participation architecture
Tagging is the stage door to participation. It takes a large effort to research a contribution.
It takes a small effort to add a comment or extra information. It takes a tiny effort to add an
extra keyword or tag to a document. With a small and dedicated user group these
contributions can be generated in a more focused and intense way to share work among a
number of experts or to gather meaning over time. With a larger public then the focus
accuracy and relevance of keywording is less but layers of meaning develop with a tagging
average. Content is found, content is used, people interact with content to make it more
findable. Interconnection through unimposing metadata to allow the Great Pyramid of
Cholula and the Pyramid of Cestius to share the same visualisation as the Great Pyramid of
Giza or even the ziggurat at Khorsabad. Something is added. The documentation assumes
another form.

Participation future
Participation starts with team members and widens to the professional community before
the general public become involved. These initial expert contributors will offer sharper,
more fundamental tags, additions, comments and lay the foundation for the participation of
a greater number of users. According to Charles Arthur, “It's an emerging rule of thumb that
suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will
"interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”
(Arthur 2006) The expectation of contributions can therefore be overstated but it requires
patience to make a system of documentation open enough to allow a wider reading and
writing of content. Success is more certain if the technical barriers to entry are lowered to
provide safe spaces for contributions and the means of lifting information free of databases.
The work is continual and punctuated while there can be little obsession for the final
product when the product is continuously produced and rewritten. Another obsession - with
security – can harm contributions when it cannot distinguish between possible
collaborators and possible threats.

The ultimate objective is a documentation system open for the public to add their images,
memories, detailed comments and to tag items with keywords to enrich the context, depth
and findability of materials. The resulting metadata and keywords are relationships that can
be mapped and make up layers of different types of information – photos, comments,
heritage tagging – that reveal new combinations and configurations of heritage.

Next connections
The connection between conventional heritage documentation and Oral History has been
neither cemented nor properly explored. At first it appears that there is a huge distance
between the expert and the witness, and between the database and the interview. The four
means of producing accessible documentation diminish this distance and sound can be
connected to video to carbon dating and anthropological analysis through simple
information architecture. Likewise, photos can be contributed and integrated. Camera
phones and cameras on mp3 players and pendrives are providing many more opportunities
to capture heritage at any time of day and at any time of year. This can provide new detail,
extra context and generate an insight.

A further integration with cellphones is the ability to connect location with information and
already it is possible to navigate and map using tower triangulation and services such as
GeoVector, YellowArrow and FoundCity which are annotating cities and sharing stories that
are attached to a location. An emerging geoweb of heritage data not only relies on the
architecture and participation we have already described but would require closer
collaboration and overcoming institutional barriers. Digital access is already reducing these
barriers and offering shared interfaces to incorporate and synthesise information sources
and to begin to exchange layers of heritage. This too is a means to reduce spam and
information overload and to prioritise expert information for expert use.

Bibliography

Charles Arthur (2006) What is the 1% rule? The Guardian , Thursday July 20, 2006

DigiCult (2004) Preparing for the ambient intelligence landscape, The Future Digital Heritage
Space: An Expedition Report, December 2004

Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, Jo Walsh (2005) Mapping Hacks: Tips & Tools for Electronic
Cartography, O'Reilly Media

Ian Gilfoyle and Peter Thorpe (2004) Geographic Information Management in Local
Government, CRC Press

Milorad Tošić, Valentina Milićević and Miomir Stanković (2005) Intelligent Information
Systems: A contribution to the next generation national heritage infrastructure, Review of
the National Center for Digitization Vol. 7 2005, University of Belgrade
David Weinberger (2006) What's Happening to Knowledge? Wikimania 2006

Ivan Zdravković, Svetislav Momčilović, Marjan Panić (2005) Presenting national heritage with
web geographical information system "Mobile city guide", Review of the National Center for
Digitization Vol. 7 2005, University of Belgrade

Rupert Brown and Neide Farran

Fundação do Desenvolvimento Administrativo – Fundap
Rua Cristiano Viana, 428 – 3 º andar
CEP 05411 – 900 – São Paulo – Brazil