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2014: an overview

A properly incomplete list of what I got up to in 2014…

My edited volume, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage, was published, with a book launch at UCL.

From September – December 2014 I was a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin / CENDARI project.

In December I presented on ‘Linking lived experiences of the First World War: a pilot with WWI collections‘ at the Trinity College Long Room Hub.

In November 2014 I presented on Citizen History and its discontents for the IHR Digital History seminar series, launched my book, Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage at UCL then keynoted at New Zealand’s National Digital Forum with ‘Collaborative collections through a participatory commons’ (talking about the Participatory Commons). I was also in London for the Museums Computer Group’s UKMW14: Museums Beyond the Web.

In October 2014 I gave a paper asking Where is the revolution in citizen history? The place of crowdsourcing in public history at the Public History in a Digital World: The Revolution Reconsidered conference in Amsterdam, ran a workshop on visualising collections at the Geffrye Museum and presented in an online seminar on ‘Crowdsourcing 101: Fundamentals and Case Studies’.

In August 2014 I taught ‘Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage’ with Ben Brumfield at the HILT Summer School (Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching) at MITH in Maryland.

In July I presented “Lightweight usability testing for digital humanities projects (AKA, ‘testing doesn’t have to be taxing’)” in the Introduction to Digital Humanities strand of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2014 then I went to Lausanne to present ‘Play as Process and Product: On Making Serendip-o-matic’ at Digital Humanities 2014 with fellow alumni of 2013’s One Week One Tool.

In May I was in Bristol for the Museums Computer Group’s Museums Get Mobile and in Boston for THATCamp NE.

In April 2014 I was a keynote speaker at the 3rd international Sharing is Caring seminar. I spoke on ‘Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons’.

In Feburary I was invited to Melbourne to give a keynote on ‘GLAM making’ at VALA2014 (VALA – Libraries, Technology and the Future), and spoke on ‘Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations’.

In January I wrote a guest post for the Museums Association site: Digital myth: Museums need to explode the myth they are technologically backward.

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Lecture: 'A pilot with public participation in historical research: linking lived experiences of the First World War', Trinity College Dublin

Trinity lecture poster
Trinity lecture poster

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).

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Keynote: 'Collaborative collections through a participatory commons', 2014 National Digital Forum conference

I was delighted to be invited to present at New Zealand's 2014 National Digital Forum conference in Wellington. I was asked to speak on my work on the 'participatory commons'. As a focus for explaining the need for a participatory commons, I asked, 'What could we create if museums, libraries and archives pooled their collections and invited specialists and enthusiasts to help link and enhance their records?'.

As a conceptual framework rather than a literal technical architecture, every bit of clearly licensed content with (ideally) structured data published around it makes a contribution to 'the commons'. In my keynote I explored some reasons why building tightly-focused projects on top of that content can help motivate participation in crowdsourcing and citizen history, and some reasons why it's still hard (hint: it needs great content supported by relevant structured data), using my TCD/CENDARI research project on 'lived experiences of World War One' as an example.

The video is now online.

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Seminar: 'Citizen History and its discontents', Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar

I was invited to give a talk on my work in the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) Seminar in Digital History series.  I talked about 'Citizen History and its discontents':

'An increasing number of crowdsourcing projects are making claims about ‘citizen history’ – but are they really helping people become historians, or are they overstating their contribution? Can citizen history projects succeed without communities of experts and peers to nurture sparks of historical curiosity and support novice historians in learning the skills of the discipline? Through a series of case studies this paper offers a critical examination of claims around citizen history.'

The video and slides are linked from the IHR Seminar in Digital History site.

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Seminar: 'Crowdsourcing 101: Fundamentals and Case Studies'

The Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives (CCLA) organised an online seminar on Crowdsourcing 101: Fundamentals and Case Studies. I was invited to present an overview of 'fundamentals' in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, including examples of successful projects, typical data input and output types, common tasks, and ways to think motivations for participation and levels of engagement. From the OCLC's page:

'This webinar will explore crowdsourcing techniques used increasingly by organizations and institutions seeking to gather vast amounts of new knowledge and participation from online contributors.

Crowdsourcing techniques are increasingly being utilized by organizations and institutions—including libraries and museums—seeking to gather vast amounts of new knowledge and participation from online contributors. In this fast-paced hour-long introduction, you'll get a handle on "Crowdsourcing Fundamentals" from leading voice in the field Mia Ridge, along with first-person accounts from two exemplar crowdsourcing projects (NYPL, Zooniverse). Learn the basics about implementing crowdsourcing techniques, securing funding, engaging users, and assessing the quality of crowdsourced data, as well as the advantages and challenges of utilizing crowdsourcing.

This webinar is part of the newly formed Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives (CCLA). Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the goal of CCLA is to forge national/international partnerships to advance the use of crowdsourcing technologies, tools, user experiences, and platforms to help libraries, museums, archives, and more.'

Slides, video and chat notes are available on the OCLC's page.

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.