A presentation called 'Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums' for MuseumNext in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 26, 27th. The link to my slides was retweeted so much the slides made it onto the front page of slideshare, which was especially nice as I'd had a lot of fun making the presentation interesting enough to combat the post-lunch slot and to help non-tech/game people stay engaged for the whole talk.
Screenshot of adding an object to a blog post with 'Share What You See'
Owen Stephens and I won the 'Audience Award' for our 'Share What You See' hack at Europeana's Hack4Europe! UK held at the British Library in June 2011. Not bad, considering we'd met for the first time the day before and managed to make a new WordPress plugin in about six hours.
'Share What You See' is a WordPress plugin designed to make a museum and gallery visit more personal, memorable and sociable. There's always that one object that made you laugh, reminded you of friends or family, or was just really striking. The plugin lets you search for the object in the Europeana collection (by title, and hopefully by venue or accession number), and instantly create a blog post about it (screenshot below) to share it with others. Once you've found your object, the plugin automatically inserts an image of it, plus the title, description and venue name. You can then add your own text and whatever other media you like.
An incomplete, retrospective list of work, talks and more in 2010…
In April I gave a talk and wrote a long paper Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang at Museums and the Web in Denver (then got stuck in the US while the Icelandic volcano dust kept flights to Europe grounded). My abstract: "Cosmic collections' was a Web site mashup competition held by the Science Museum in late 2009 to encourage members of the public to create new interfaces with newly accessible collections data prepared for the Cosmos & Culture exhibition. The paper reports on the lessons learned during the process of developing and running the competition, including the organisational challenges and technical context. It discusses how to create room for experimentation within institutional boundaries, the tools available to organise and publicise such an event on a limited budget, the process of designing a competition, and the impact of the competition. It also investigates the demand for museum APIs.'
