Cultural heritage technologies, user experience design and research, digital humanities
A collection of links for further reading for the British Library's Digital Scholarship course on 'Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions'. Last updated June 2016.
If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage. Continue reading "Resources for ‘Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions’"
A collection of links for further reading for the British Library's Digital Scholarship course on 'Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research'. I update this each time I teach the course, so please leave a comment if you know of any great sources I've missed. Slides and exercises for each version of the workshop are below. Many thanks to workshop participants for their feedback, as it directly helps make the next version more effective. And of course huge thanks to Nora McGregor and the British Library's Digital Scholarship team!
Last updated January 2018. Between course revisions I add interesting visualisations to my Scholarly Vision tumblr and pinboard.
Continue reading "Resources for 'Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research'"
A two-hour workshop for the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, on Neatline. Organised by Anouk Lang, it was their first digital humanities workshop and was designed as an opportunity to learn about Neatline and explore what it could (and couldn't) do.
Neatline workshop notes for the University of Strathclyde (PDF) Neatline workshop slides for the University of Strathclyde (Powerpoint)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I've also written up some of my thoughts after the workshop at Reflections on teaching Neatline.
The AHRC-funded Commodity Histories project aims to produce a 'website that will function as a collaborative space for scholars engaged in commodities-related research'. The project organised a workshop, 'Designing a collaborative research web space: aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project' in London on 6-7 September 2012.
As part of opening session on the 'aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project and website' I led a card-sorting exercise aimed at finding out how potential scholars in the community of commodity historians would expect to find and interact with content and other scholars in the network. We prepared print-outs of sample content in advance and asked participants to sort them into groups and then label them. At the end of the workshop I presented the different headings the groups had come up with and discussed the different ways they'd organised the material.
While some work had been done on the site structure previously, the process was useful for understanding some of the expectations people had about the functionality and sociability of the site as well as checking how they'd expect the site to be organised. Various other presentations and discussion during the workshop reinforced the idea that the key task of the site is to enable contributors to add content easily and often, and tempered our expectations about how much scholarly networking would be visible as conversations on the site.
Ewan Klein has written up some of the workshop at The Boundaries of Commodities.
While in Hamburg for Digital Humanities 2012, I chaired a session on 'Methods' and subsequently co-authored a report, "Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities" (PDF) for the European Science Foundation (with Leif Isaksen, Shawn Day, and Ryan Shaw) for the Second NeDiMAH workshop on Space and Time in the Digital Humanities: "Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities".
From the workshop abstract:
Spatio-temporal concepts are so ubiquitous that it is easy for us to forget that they are essential to everything we do. All expressions of Human culture are related to the dimensions of space and time in the manner of their production and consumption, the nature of their medium and the way in which they express these concepts themselves. This workshop seeks to identify innovative practices among the Digital Humanities community that explore, critique and re-present the spatial and temporal aspects of culture.
Although space and time are closely related, there are significant differences between them which may be exploited when theorizing and researching the Humanities. Among these are the different natures of their dimensionality (three dimensions vs. one), the seemingly static nature of space but enforced 'flow' of time, and the different methods we use to make the communicative leap across spatial and temporal distance. Every medium, whether textual, tactile, illustrative or audible (or some combination of them), exploits space and time differently in order to convey its message. The changes required to express the same concepts in different media (between written and performed music, for example), are often driven by different spatio-temporal requirements. Last of all, the impossibility (and perhaps undesirability) of fully representing a four-dimensional reality (whether real or fictional) mean that authors and artists must decide how to collapse this reality into the spatio-temporal limitations of a chosen medium. The nature of those choices can be as interesting as the expression itself.
This workshop allows those working with digital tools and techniques that manage, analyse and exploit spatial and temporal concepts in the Humanities to present a position paper for the purposes of wider discussion and debate. The position papers will discuss generalized themes related to use of spatio-temporal methods in the Digital Humanities with specific reference to one or more concrete applications or examples. Accepted papers have been divided into three themed sessions: Tools, Methods and Theory. This workshop is part of the ESF-funded NEDIMAH Network and organised by its Working Group on Space and Time. The group will also present its findings from the First NeDiMAH Workshop on Space and Time.