ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ

ΜύA slightly rotund member of the R&D team manages a world record thrashing sprint... but how?

Recently launched on the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Sport London 2012 website is an application developed by ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ R&D that allows you to compare your own performances against professional athletesΜύand puts you in the heart of the action. In this blog post I hope to give an insight into development of the application and explain what’s going on under the bonnet.

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In the sixth and final part of the film about R&D's work in archive technologies we take an in depth look at the advanced work exploring new kinds of metadata.Μύ Essential for finding content in the digital era, metadata is often unavailable or hard to work with for older archive material.Μύ By using advanced digital analysis techniques, and harnessing the capabilities of hundreds of human volunteers, the archive R&D team is developing tools that will keep the treasures of the archive at the fingertips of program makers and, hopefully, the public, for years to come.

To catch up on previous parts of this film go to this page that lists all the posts on the blog with the Opening Up the Archives tag.Μύ Huge thanks to Alex Mansfeild, erstwhile producer of such shows as Material World on Radio 4, for his great work in presenting these films for us.Μύ And thanks again to ourΜύcamera op, director and editor, the estimable David Allen.Μύ Gentlemen, we thank you.

It feels like things are really starting to come together on the two big projects most of the team are working on (ABC-IP and FI-Content). We're re-using code, ideas and learning from a raft of recent work, there's lots of pairing and discussion happening all around and the office walls are crammed with wireframes. Here's a quick round-up of what's been happening on them and our other projects this last week.....

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After a brief hiatus we are returning to our continuing serial- Opening Up the Archives.Μύ In this week's episode Alex Mansfield introduces us to the complexities and challenges of metadata.ΜύΜύ From the writtenΜύarchives come a lifetime's worth of Radio Times back copies, which Bill Thompson explains are in fact crucial repositories of historical information about broadcasting in the UK.Μύ

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Radios Times 9-15th February 1985. Part of the archive of Radio Times that provides a crucial historical metadata store for the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ.

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ΜύAnd back in the archives themselves, Alex waxes lyrical on the nature of one of the finest recordings within the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ's extensive collection.

ΜύOur final episode will be posted next week, and to see previous episodes go to this listing of all the blog posts in this series.

During the summer months the team are concentrating on two main projects, with the unhelpful abbreviations ABC-IP and FI-CONTENT. We'll cover the main developments in those first, and then take a look at what else is happening around the team.

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This week, Andrew N grappled with data models and tried to output the data from the ABC-IP Tagging Experiment into a format for Shauna to analyse. It's mind-bending stuff. He also worked on surfacing more images on the episode pages to help Pete follow some possible design directions on the World Service prototype, while Pete returned the favour by doing UX thinking and wireframing for it. Chris L added user registration and login using the ever-excellent OmniAuth library. Yves spent a lot of time this week preparing things for IBC, including a paper on the automated tagging work in the archive technology session, a booth in the Future Zone, and a panel discussion. He spent some time setting up automated deployment for the prototype, adding tag aggregations and programme brand aggregations, and putting pagination in various places. He also included tags derived from synopsis, titles and associated web pages in the set of tags displayed on episode pages, which were derived using a custom instance of Wikipedia Miner over the last week. And we are almost done automatically generating tags from subtitles for another large archive of ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ programmes.

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This is part two of a series of blog posts on how a small ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ R&D team has been rediscovering the era of Radiophonics at the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ, its sounds and technology, through the contemporary filter of our engagement in the .

After a couple of weeks of exploring articles and books on the matter, we were feeling ready to marry the sounds of the 1960s with our 2012 technology. Alongside the gunshot effects generator, about which I'd written in the first post of the series, we decided we would recreate a few of the Radiophonic Workshop's equipment with the new web audio standards:

• A set of tape decks - the kind you could use to put together a tape loop from a set of stems;
• A "wobbulator" -- a frequency-modulated oscillator, which today would probably be called more prosaically a "sweep generator";
• ... and a ring modulator, the kind of equipment used to create the voice effects for the Dalek and Cybermen characters in the Dr Who series.

Pete had started thinking about the aesthetics of our demos, and within a few days he'd whipped together gorgeous interfaces for the 4 types of equipment, which Chris would later bring to life in HTML and Javascript with a mix of CSS transforms and a rather frustrating amount of scripting to adapt the interactions with knobs and button to the screen-and-mouse paradigm.

Annotated interface sketches.

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TodayΜύΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔΜύR&D launch an experiment into a new editorial format. Breaking Out is an audio play that has been created in a rather novel way.

The drama is set in an apartment block lift, where Harriet (who suffers from agoraphobia) decides to venture outside for the first time since moving in. The lift in which she is travelling gets stuck, and she begins to have second thoughts about going outside.

I am not going to go into much detail about why this is a novel editorial format, I’m being vague intentionally, but in a few weeks I’ll publish a follow up post which will give a bit more detail of how it does what it does, and how we made it. This is because we want the people who listen to the play to provide us with some feedback (there is a link at the end of play).

Until then, plug in your speakers or headphones and head over to to hear it. One thing I will say is the play uses a new audio standard, the Web AudioΜύAPI. This is so new that the only browser to support our implementation fully at the moment is Chrome (FireFox and Opera work a bit). So for the best experience the latest version of Chrome is recommended.

Follow to hear the audio play. Ian Forrester talks more about this type of content here.

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Week 114 started in full swing on our project by looking at the interaction models for authentication on TV that Theo and Joanne developed last week. The team assessed their feasibility and which ones would meet the deliverable requirements. In parallel to this, there was lots of attention on the Chrome extension user trial that ended on Monday and best ways to extract the data. Joanne's been juggling designing data analysis methodology with wireframing initial user experience for the authentication strand. Parallel to all this Barbara's been working with Chris Needham on actions needed following the plenary meeting he attended last week. It's going to be a busy summer on the FI front.

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