Friday, July 18, 2014

[Yasmin_discussions] Test your knowledge of new media preservation with this fun quiz

OK, maybe it's not fun, but here's an informal quiz inspired by examples cited in Re-collection. My answers at bottom--dissent welcome ;)

jon
________________

New Media Preservation quiz
Based on the book Re-collection (http://re-collection.net)

* From "The Lost and the Saved" (chapter 1):

1. Which of the following is the shortest-term preservation strategy for digital media?
a. Storage
b. Migration
c. Emulation
d. Reinterpretation

* From "New Media and Social Memory" (chapter 2):

2. What does Pixar consider the most important version of Toy Story to preserve?
a. The celluloid print
b. The 3d data
c. The negative
d. The written script

*From "Death by Technology" (chapter 3):

3. Which of the following is *least* vulnerable to the obsolescence of locative media?
a. Manifest.AR, Not Here (augmented reality)
b. Richard Serra, Tilted Arc (site-specific sculpture)
c. Janet Cardiff, The Telephone Call (recorded museum tour)
d. Jodi.org, GeoGoo (Google Maps hack)

4. Which was the shortest lifespan of a genre of new media art due to obsolescence?
a. 25 years (movies on VHS)
b. 20 years (VR on Silicon Graphics)
c. 12 years (interfaces in Macromedia/Adobe Flash)
d. 11 months (HTML animation in Netscape 1.1s)

5. What technological upgrade in 2009 drove the biggest nail in the coffin of 20th-century installations based on broadcast television, such as Nam June Paik's TV Crown?
a. The Blu-ray disc
b. 1080p displays
c. The digital TV signal
d. Netflix

* From "Variability Machines" (chapter 4):

6. Which critic argued that art should not be variable but "at all times wholly manifest"?
a. Walter Benjamin
b. Michael Fried
c. Rosalind Krauss
d. Steve Ballmer

* From "Metadata and the Historic Record" (chapter 5):

7. Which preservation standard is the metadata schema MANS (Media Art Notation System) is based on?
a. CMCM (Capturing Unstable Media Conceptual Model)
b. Matters in Media Art
c. PANIC (Preservation Architecture for New media and Interactive Collections)
d. VMQ (Variable Media Questionnaire)

* From "Death by Institution" (chapter 6):

8. Which is the best search engine for searching across database-driven collections online?
a. Google
b. Yahoo
c. Bing
d. There isn't one.

* From "The Open Museum" (chapter 7):

9. When recording an analog source to digital audio in CD quality, what frequencies will be contained in this recording, according to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem?
a. Up to half the sample rate (up to 22.05 kHz)
b. Up to the sample rate (up to 44.1 kHz)
c. Up to double the sample rate (up to 88.2 kHz)
d. You can't create digital audio from samples

* From "Generation Emulation" (chapter 8):

10. What can a chip-level emulator like Virtual PC for Windows run?
a. Operating systems, like Windows 95
b. Applications, like Microsoft Word or Photoshop
c. Handmade code, like an artist's website
d. Anything that originally ran on the Intel x86 chip.

11. Which of the following environments was *not* a case study of the multi-institutional initiative "Preserving Virtual Worlds"?
a. Spacewar
b. Civilization
c. Second Life
d. Flappy Bird

* From "Death by Law" (chapter 9):

12. Which US law makes it illegal to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM), even if there is no company left holding the rights?
a. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
b. Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA)
c. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
d. Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA)

* From "Unreliable Archivists" (chapter 10):

13. Why do Amazon stories of human encounters with the Mapinguary demonstrate that oral culture can outlive stone records?
a. The Mapinguary is a timeless fictional character.
b. The Mapinguary has been extinct for tens of thousands of years.
c. Drawings of the Mapinguary have been found on prehistoric animal skins.
d. Drawings of the Mapinguary inscribed in stone were lost when the Lima museum burned down.

* From "Variable Organisms" (chapter 11):

14. Which of these can store 700 terabytes?
a. 10,000 Blu-ray discs
b. One gram of DNA
c. The print collection of the Library of Congress
d. Yahoo! Groups

* From "Checking In" (chapter 12):

15. Which exhibition represented a preservation "Turing Test" to see if re-created works conveyed the same experience as their originals?
a. Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, 2001
b. Seeing Double, Guggenheim Museum, 2004
c. Collection in Context, Studio Museum of Harlem, 2002
d. Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002

________________
ANSWERS
1. a
2. b
3. a
4. d
5. c
6. b
7. d
8. d
9. a
10. d
11. d
12. c
13. b
14. b
15. b

(Thanks to Dragan Espenschied for helping to word the Nyquist-Shannon question!)


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