Author: mia

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2024 – an overview

In January 2024 I presented with Kaspar Beelen at a virtual Research Colloquium on Digital History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I also gave a talk online for the Home Office's Data & Information Week with Karen Tingay (Head of Data and Methods, Office for Statistics Regulation).

I was in Australia (Melbourne, Ballina, Brisbane) in February-March. In February 2024 I took part in a panel on 'The Machines looking back at us' at the Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium (FACT 2024) at ACMI, in Melbourne, Australia.

The videos from ACMI's FACT symposium are up on their website, with automatic transcripts for each session. My presentation is here in the longer panel session; you can also watch Jessamy Gee's graphic notation from the session being created in real time.

Graphical notation drawn during a conference session by Jessamy Gee. Points include 'our role is to help people answer questions'

I presented at the State Library of Victoria for a 'Digital Salon' on 'Technology & Experimentation: From the Lab to the Library’ on February 19.

On Feb 27 I spoke online at AI4LAM’s Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand chapter webinar on ’Models for Collaboration – GLAM and ML/AI Technologies’.

The video of my keynote, 'Evolutionary Innovations: Collections as Data in the AI era' for Making Meaning 2024 at the State Library of Queensland in March is now online.

Straight into work when I got back to the UK for our British Library / Guardian collaboration on 'Safeguarding Tomorrow: The impact of AI in media & information industries'. I was on a panel on 'messy data in the age of “intelligent” machines' at Jisc DigiFest (online) the same week.

In April I gave a keynote on 'Machine Learning for Collections' at the University of Cambridge Cultural Heritage Data School, and had a great time talking to the students and staff there. I'll also spoke at an event for the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections (AMARC).

In early June I travelled to Dundee, Scotland as one of the CILIPS Annual Conference 2024 keynotes. A brief immersion in the world of Scottish libraries was a refreshing diversion from the ongoing issues at work. My keynote, 'Playing with boundaries: collections, crowdsourcing and machines' is now online.

Keynote 1- Playing with boundaries: collections, crowdsourcing and machines, Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, The British Library

I was in DC / Virginia in early August for Digital Humanities 2024 (DH2024). On Tuesday I participated in a pre-conference workshop 'Teaching Machine Learning in the Digital Humanities'; on Thursday I was on a panel 'Reinventions and Responsibilities in the Age of AI' and did a poster: 'Treasures on an island? Challenges for integrating volunteer and AI-enriched metadata into GLAM systems' on the Friday.

I was in Luxembourg September 3 – 6 for the International Federation of Public History (IFPH)'s annual conference, presenting with Charlie Morgan on oral histories and AI in libraries.

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

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

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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.

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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.