I was invited to give a talk on '' for the School of Advanced Study, University of London 'Social Scholar' seminar series in October 2015.
Talk: Choosy crowds and the machine age: challenges for the future of humanities crowdsourcing, KCL
I gave a presentation on 'Choosy crowds and the machine age: challenges for the future of humanities crowdsourcing' at Kings College London for Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 21st Century (9th – 10th). This lead to a co-authored publication, Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 21st Century Event Summary.
Some of the points I raised are discussed in 'How an ecosystem of machine learning and crowdsourcing could help you' and 'Helping us fly? Machine learning and crowdsourcing'.
HILT Summer School 2015: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'
Resources for the course on Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage at HILT 2015 I'm teaching with Ben Brumfield.
Course Google Doc for collaborative note-taking, links, etc.
Flickr Group for HILT 2015 Crowdsourcing photos
Mia's storify of the week and the class presentation for the HILT Show and Tell.
Projects made in the class
- Ryan's Letters (Nancy Brown)
- College Radio Archive (Elizabeth Hansen)
- Bernier Archive (Elaine Paul)
- Ancient Aztecs (Virginia Cole)
- Tagging the Caribbean (Krystal Thomas)
- I Love Your Funny Face! (Nancy Stephenson)
- Blast from the Past (Wendy Johnson)
- Teach Robots to Read (Jim Salmons & Timlynn Babitsky)
- Loray Digital Archive (Julie Davis)
- NovelMapper (Cathy DeRose)
Well done @cmderose_wisc @nebrown63 @ElizHansen @ESPaul @vac11 @kmthomas06 @WendyJ1226 @HistorianOnFire @Jim_Salmons @TimlynnBabitsky + Nancy!
Monday: overview, speed dating
HILT Crowdsourcing Slides and Exercises for Monday
Session 2: links to find a project you love! For non-English language projects, try Crowdsourcing the world's heritage.
Prompts for thinking about projects:
- How clear was the purpose of the site? How well was it reflected in the 'call to action' and other text?
- How easy was it to get started?
- Were the steps to complete the task clear?
- How enjoyable was the task?
- Did the reward (if any) feel appropriate?
- Looking at the site overall, does the project appear to be effective?
- What is the input content? What is the output content?
- What validation methods appear to have been used?
- Who is the probable audience and what motivates them to participate?
- How does the project let participants know they're making a difference?
- Does the site support communication between participants?
- How was the site marketed to potential participants?
- Did the site anticipate your questions about the tasks?
HILT Crowdsourcing Slides and Exercises Tuesday
http://tinyurl.com/EminentScotsmen
HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Wednesday
HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Thursday
HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Friday
Continue reading "HILT Summer School 2015: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'"
Keynote: Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage, Nordiske Arkivdage 2015
I was invited to give a keynote on 'Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage' at Nordiske Arkivdage 2015 (#NordiskArkiv), a triennial gathering of archivists from Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland in Copenhagen on May 8, 2015. I greatly enjoyed hearing about various crowdsourcing projects that state and city archives in those countries have worked on over the years (and would still love to hear more). My slides are below.
From my introduction:
Today I want to talk about why crowdsourcing creates opportunities for productive, meaningful public engagement with cultural heritage. This isn't a sales pitch – crowdsourcing is not a 'magic bullet' – but I think an investment in crowdsourcing can be repaid with impressive results in the amount of material processed, and in new relationships with our shared cultural heritage in museums, libraries, universities, community groups and archives.
So in the next twenty minutes I will briefly explain what crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is, give you a glimpse of some projects where crowdsourcing has been incredibly productive, and discuss how it can help make collections more accessible while engaging people more deeply in thinking about those collections…
Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage asks the public to help with tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge. As a voluntary activity, the tasks and/or goals should be inherently rewarding.
If you're interested in engagement through crowdsourcing, you might also like From tagging to theorizing: deepening engagement with cultural heritage through crowdsourcing. Curator: The Museum Journal, 56(4) pp. 435–450. If you're interested in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage generally, try the book! My Introduction to Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage is online.
Lecture: 'A pilot with public participation in historical research: linking lived experiences of the First World War', Trinity College Dublin
As part of my Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin's Long Room Hub I gave a lecture on 'A pilot with public participation in historical research: linking lived experiences of the First World War'.
The abstract and podcast are below, and there's further information about my CENDARI Fellowship here.
Abstract: The centenary of World War One and the digitisation of records from a range of museums, libraries and archives has inspired many members of the public to research the lives of WWI soldiers. But it is not always easy to find or interpret military records. What was it like to be in a particular battalion or regiment at a particular time. Can a 'collaborative collection' help provide context for individual soldiers' experience of the war by linking personal diaries, letters and memoirs to places, people and events? What kinds of digital infrastructure are needed to support research on soldiers in the Great War? This lecture explores the potential for collaborating with members of the general public and academic or amateur historians to transcribe and link disparate online collections of World War One material. What are the challenges and opportunities for participatory digital history?
Thursday, 04 December 2014 | 13:00 | Trinity Long Room Hub
A lecture by Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Mia Ridge (The Open University). Mia is a Transnational Access fellow, funded by the CENDARI project (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure).