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Upcoming talks and travel

Poster for a talk at Trinity College Dublin with illustrations of a man working in a factory and a soldier in a trench with sandbags and barbed wire
Trinity lecture poster

Get in touch if you'd like to meet for a chat about crowdsourcing / digital participation, digital scholarship, digital humanities or AI / machine learning in libraries, archives and museums!

I'll be in Kraków for "Converging Realms: Law, Technology, and Society in the Age of Ethical and Multi-Agent AI" 26-27 September, 2024 then travelling overland across Poland and Sweden to Göteborg for DigiKult on 1 – 3 October.

On November 5th I'm convening a panel on 'AI in Libraries: Beyond the Hype' for Libraries in Leeds.

Recent books

I'm currently working on chapters for the final Living with Machines book.

In January 2023, Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Project by Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, me and Giorgia Tolfo was published by Cambridge University Press.

In 2021 I wrote another book with 15 or so brilliant co-authors: The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage

My edited volume on 'Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage' for Ashgate, featuring chapters from some of the most amazing people working in the field was published in October 2014 and reprinted a few times subsequently. You can read my introduction on the OU repository: Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage: Introduction.

By day, I usually at work at home at the British Library, so drop me a line if you'd like to meet for coffee and a chat. My availability for events is limited, but you can drop me a line if you'd like to book me for an event.

Some recent papers

Some publications are listed or accessible at my ORCID page, my Open University repository page, Humanities Commons page, Zenodo, and my Zotero page.

This page is rarely up-to-date or complete, but here's a summary of talks, fellowships, writing, etc in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011. You can also follow me on twitter (@mia_out) mastodon @mia@hcommons.social / https://hcommons.social/@mia for updates.

Previous papers are generally listed at miaridge.com or on my blog, Open Objects.

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'AI and the Digital Humanities' session at CILIP's 2024 conference

I was invited to chair a session on 'AI and the digital humanities' at CILIP's 2024 conference with Ciaran Talbot (Associate Director AI & Ideas Adoption, University of Manchester Library) and Glen Robson (IIIF Technical Co-ordinator, International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium) at CILIP's 2024 conference. CILIP is 'the UK library and information association'.

I wrote a blog post about it for the British Library's Digital Scholarship blog and CILIP also featured it on their AI Hub: AI and the Digital Humanities at CILIP Conference 2024.

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'Community Engagement and Special Collections' talk

In April 2024 I was one of four presenters at the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections (AMARC)'s Spring Meeting on 'Community Engagement and Special Collections', sharing our work on 'successful projects and strategies for engaging public audiences in meaningful ways through in-person events and digital outreach activities'

I presented on 'Living with Machines: Crowdsourcing transcriptions for digitised historical collections of the British industrial revolution'. The video from the seminar is below.

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Quoted in Museums Association article on 'Getting to grips with artificial intelligence'

Screenshot from the Museums Association website. Text says: 'AI is set to disrupt all aspects of museum work. But what is it, what does it do and how can we reap the benefits?'

I'm excited to see the Museums Association Museums Journal article on 'Getting to grips with artificial intelligence' by Julie Nightingale go live, as I'm quoted a few times. It feels like months since I talked to the author – a long time in AI, but a relatively short time in digital heritage.

Here's some of what I had to say: 'The British Library’s Ridge suggests people play around with AI to understand what might be coming.

“AI literacy is an important part of good governance,” she says. “People need a solid understanding of where biases are likely to appear, how to review and contest decisions made by algorithms and where sharing data might have privacy or legal implications, so that they can make good decisions about the products they buy or implement. It also helps people plan so that AI tools enhance jobs, rather than attempting to replace them.”'

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New data paper and datasets from crowdsourcing on Living with Machines

After lots of hard work by me, Nilo Pedrazzini, Miguel V., Arianna Ciula and Barbara McGillivray, we have a data paper in the Journal of Open Humanities Data: Language of Mechanisation Crowdsourcing Datasets from the Living with Machines Project.

And huge thanks to the thousands of Zooniverse volunteers who annotated 19th century newspaper articles to create the datasets we've published alongside the data paper!

Abstract: We present the ‘Language of Mechanisation’ datasets with examples of re-use in visualisations and analysis. These reusable CSV files, published on the British Library’s Research Repository, contain automatically-transcribed text from 19th century British newspaper articles. Volunteers on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform took part in tasks that asked ‘How did the word x change over time and place?’ They annotated articles with pre-selected meanings (senses) for the words coach, car, trolley and bike.

The datasets can support scholarship on a range of historical and linguistic research areas, including research on crowdsourcing and online volunteering behaviours, data processing and data visualisations methodologies.

The two datasets described are at: