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In the period that witnessed the rise of communism and its transformation into Stalinism, the emergence of fascism, and two momentous "interwar wars," numerous African American intellectuals met their counterparts in Europe. Encounters include: Counte Cullen and Claire Goll (Paris), Claude McKay, Alain Locke, and George Grosz (Paris, Berlin, Moscow), McKay, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Leon Trotsky (Soviet Union), Horace Cayton and Nancy Cunard (Paris and Hamburg),Alain Locke and the "Black Watch on the Rhine" (French-occupied Rhineland), Langston Hughes, James Yates, and the Spanish Civil War,and W.E.B. Du Bois in Nazi Germany. Common human misunderstandings create a comedy of intellectuals against the climate of political violence in interwar Europe.
Indiana University announced the Media Digitization Preservation Initiative (MDPI) in October 2013 with the goal of digitally preserving and providing access to all significant audio, video, and film recordings on all IU campuses by the IU Bicentennial in 2020. Digitization began in mid-2015 and has now digitized more than 320,000 objects using more than 10 petabytes of storage. After digitization, every object in MDPI has to be verified to be stored correctly, checked for format conformance, processed into derivatives, and finally, distributed to a streaming video server. Conceptually, the process is straightforward, but like many things, the devil is in the details. The post-digitization processing has continually evolved since its inception in early 2015. Initially implemented to handle a couple of audio formats and processing a few terabytes of data per day, over the last few years it has been enhanced to handle peak transfers of more than 35 terabytes daily with more than 20 formats across audio, video, and film. This presentation details how some of the implementation decisions have held up over time, such as using a tape library as primary storage and using an object state machine for object tracking, as well as some of the growing pains encountered as the system was scaled up. In addition, there is a discussion covering some of the surprises that have been encountered along the way.
The MDPI project posed a tremendous technical challenge: digitize and process around 280,000 audio and video assets by the University’s bicentennial. The first objects began processing in June 2015 and by the summer of 2016, the major problems had been worked out and the processing was proceeding smoothly.
Then the discussions of film processing began.
In theory, processing film is the same as audio and video. On paper, it seems easier: even though the time allotted is less than A/V, there are only 25,000 reels to process.
In reality, however, it is a very different beast. An hour of film scanned at 2K resolution is 20x larger than an hour of video. When a film is scanned at 4K, it is 80x larger than video. Additionally, the film preservation master consists of not just a few files, like we see in audio or video, but thousands of files: a picture for every frame. Like all preservation masters, these files must be validated.
This session will address the challenges and solutions that were needed for the back end processing to be able to process film efficiently.
The process of converting the digitized MDPI media into something that can be used for web delivery is conceptually simple: transcode each one into derivatives and transfer them to the delivery system. However, like most things, the devil is in the details. Data corruption, tape latency, and managing large amounts of data are just a few of the problems which must be overcome.
This session will follow the steps that MDPI digital objects take during processing and explore the solutions used to create a system which must reliably process hundreds of hours of audio and video content daily.
On Good Morning's SKNs Connections, Jamie and Kortensia connect with Willa Liburd Tavernier. Willa hails from our twin-island Federation. She is currently a Research Impact & Open Scholarship Librarian at Indiana University. Recently, Willa spearheaded the launch of an open-source digital resource collection called “Land, Wealth, Liberation,” She speaks more about it and her experiences with racism in this powerful and insightful interview.
To a remarkable extent, our understanding of the natural world is built from a small set of very deep ideas. I’ll try to give some sense for the nature of these ideas, for their power and scope. I will also try to explain what we mean by “understanding” in several different contexts, and why these successes give us (measured) confidence that more complex problems may yet yield to our search for understanding. Finally, I’ll say a few words about the cultural gaps that separate scientists who have mastery of these theoretical ideas from other scientists, from the generally educated public, and from the polity as a whole. It is not too much to claim that our future quality of life will depend, crucially, on our ability to bridge these gaps by teaching.
Experiments have uncovered many of the mechanisms at work in the machinery of life, but there still is no theoretical framework that ties these discoveries together. A hint about how to construct such a theory comes from the fact that many biological systems operate very near the limits of what the laws of physics allow: from bacteria navigating toward a source of food to the optics of an insect’s eye, from decision-making by cells in a developing embryo to aspects of human perception, important aspects of life’s mechanisms are nearly as good they can be, in a sense that physics makes precise. This proximity to perfection provides us with the ingredients for a theoretical physics of life, and I will explore this idea, hopefully providing an appreciation for some of life’s most striking and surprising phenomena.