Month: September 2024

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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!

In December I'll be at the British School at Athens for a talk on libraries and AI.

Previous activities are listed on '2024, an overview', etc.

Recent books

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

Chapter 5: Analysing the language of mechanisation in nineteenth-century British newspapers by Barbara McGillivray, Nilo Pedrazzini, Arianna Ciula, Jon Lawrence, Tiffany Ong, Mia Ridge, Miguel Vieira is now online for 'early access'.

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. I'm also on bluesky @miaout.bsky.social.

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

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Listening with machines? The challenges of AI for oral history and digital public history in libraries

A photo of the Belval campus of the University of Luxembourg, with a sculpture of a large disk on tripod legs and a conference poster in the foreground

A conference paper I wrote with Charlie Morgan for IFPH2024, the 7th World Conference of the International Federation for Public History, in September 2024.

Abstracts weren't available in the conference programme so I've posted ours below. The abstract was written in November 2023, before we knew how much the ransomware attack in October 2023 was going to make our work with digital and digitised collections difficult-to-impossible for the next year or two.

Listening with machines? The challenges of AI for oral history and digital public history in libraries

Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, British Library; Charlie Morgan, Oral History Archivist, British Library

Almost every aspect of our personal and professional lives has been affected by 'AI' and machine-learning based tools. Digital public history is no exception. How does AI change the types of experiences that libraries, museums and archives can create for the public? How does it change our understanding of participatory history when family and community historians might want to use AI tools with digitised or born digital collections? What does it mean to share authority and co-create ‘knowledge’ with machine learning products, especially AI tools that see the world through the lens of Silicon Valley’s capitalist ‘winner takes all’ attitude?

This presentation shares work at the British Library on an AI Strategy and Ethical Guide for digital scholarship, with a particular focus on the implications of AI for archived oral historians. It will include a case study of the use and applicability of corpus linguistic and digital humanities tools to search interviews, identify themes and select sections of audio for close listening. We will also consider the lessons from this case study for our AI strategy more broadly.

What are the ethical, practical and research implications of using AI to transcribe, summarise or analyse oral histories? What is the Library's role, and that of other professional bodies, in providing guidance for research students and others conducting or analysing interviews on platforms with built-in AI tools (for example, Microsoft Teams / OpenAI's Whisper), or exploring how AI could make oral histories more accessible and discoverable? How might AI tools change processes for quality checking records, and how should AI-generated metadata, transcriptions and descriptions be labelled?

This work builds on previous considerations of the implications of AI for digital public history projects, challenging established models for working with crowdsourcing, user-generated content, and other forms of digital participatory history.