Cultural heritage technologies, user experience design and research, digital humanities
On October I was on a panel on the Digital Humanities at the Open University – my talk notes are blogged at Notes on current issues in Digital Humanities.
I co-authored a paper titled ‘Colloquium: Digital Technologies: Help or Hindrance for the Humanities?’ (with Elton Barker, Chris Bissell, Lorna Hardwick, Allan Jones and John Wolffe), published in the ‘Digital Futures Special Issue Arts and Humanities in HE’ edition of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.
My paper for Museums and the Web 2011, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections, is online and is also available in the printed proceedings.
Abstract: Crowdsourcing the creation, correction or enhancement of data about objects through games is an attractive proposition for museums looking to maximize use of their collections online without committing intensive curatorial resources to enhancing catalogue records. This paper investigates the optimum game designs to encourage participation and the generation of useful data through a case study of the project Museum Metadata Games that successfully designed games that created improved metadata for 'difficult' objects from two science and history museum collections.
Keywords: collections, games, crowdsourcing, objects, metadata, tagging
I gave a talk at OpenTech 2010 on 'Museums meet the 21st century' – I've blogged my slides and notes.
A paper for Museums and the Web conference in Denver, April 2010.
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.
Keywords: experiment, collaboration, mashup, API, social media, exhibition, collections
My slides are also available on Slideshare and below. As in 2009, I helped facilitate the Museums and the Web 2010 Unconference.
An incomplete, retrospective list of work, talks and more in 2009…
February – I did a talk: "Happy developers + happy museums = happy punters" at JISC's Dev8D; I blogged a transcript.
At some point in early 2009 I started the Museum API wiki, which still exists at http://museum-api.pbworks.com.
In April I was inspired by the Museums and the Web international conference to setup 'the MW2009 challenge' – 'take something from all the conversation at Museums and the Web 2009 and do something with them. So – pick one task. To keep the momentum going, you should do it while it's still April 2009.'
In June I gave a talk Bubbles and Easter eggs – Museum Pecha Kucha at the British Museum in London. In July I repeated Bubbles, icebergs and Easter eggs at the Melbourne Museum Pecha Kucha.
September – I had an article published on the Museum-iD website, Learning lessons from a decade of museum websites. It was based on a paper I gave at the Museum-iD seminar on "Museum as Media Company: Social Media, Broadcasting & The Web” about ‘the role of the web at the Science Museum’.
November – the 'Cosmic Collections' crowdsourced web mashup competition I ran got some press on two web developer sites! Yahoo Developer Network: A new API and hack competition – this time not from a tech company but by a museum! Programmable Web: Science Museum Opens API and Challenges Developers to Mashup the Cosmos
December – I was invited to Oslo to give a lecture on Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: Opportunities and Challenges and curated a session at the UK Museums on the Web conference on ‘Sensory’. I also spoke with Elizabeth Lomas and Benjamin Ellis on Continued Communication: maximising your communications in a Web 2.0 world at the Online Information 2009 conference. The paper I wrote with Elizabeth and Ben is online at Continued communication – maximising the business potential of communications through Web 2.0.