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2019: an overview(ish)

A very incomplete page…

Projects: Living with Machines

  • Continued recruiting the project team
  • Set up the project website (graphic identity and WordPress template by an agency, working with the project team)
  • Helped devise the Communications strategy

Publications

Ridge, M. (forthcoming). Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: A practical guide to designing and running successful projects. In K. Schuster & S. Dunn (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities. Routledge.

Talks and teaching

June: I was at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to teach Collections as Data with Thomas Padilla for the HILT digital humanities summer school.

An invited talk on 'Voyages of discovery with digital collections' for the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, June 2019

Blog posts

Other

Peer reviewer, Digital Humanities 2019

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2018: an overview

2017-18 was a bit of an odd year and I've subsequently reduced the number of invitations I accept each year.

Projects

2018 finished with a bang, as the press release for the British Library/Alan Turing Institute's Living with Machines project went live. I'd been working on the proposal since early 2017. In this project, we're experimenting with 'radical collaborations' around applying data science methods to historical newspaper collections to advance the potential of digital history.

Talks and teaching

January: a lecture on 'Scholarly crowdsourcing: from public engagement to creating knowledge socially' for the Introduction to Digital Humanities Masters course at King's College London, and an 'Overview of Information Visualisation' for the CHASE Winter School: Introduction to Digital Humanities.

February: a full-day workshop on Information Visualisation for PhD students in the Digital Humanities for CHASE.

March: a talk on 'Crowdsourcing: the British Library experience' for CILIP's Multimedia Information & Technology (MmIT) Group's event on 'The wisdom of the crowd? Crowdsourcing for information professionals'.

April: a talk on 'Challenges and opportunities in digital scholarship' for a British Library Research Collaboration Open House, and took part in a panel for the Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference on ‘Sharing knowledge through online engagement’ around Art UK's Art Detective project at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

May: I was in Rotterdam for a EuropeanaTech panel on User Generated & Institutional Data Transcription projects and gave a talk on 'Open cultural data in the GLAM sector' for a CPD25 workshop on The GLAM sector: what can we learn from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

June: with Thomas Padilla I co-taught 'Collections as data' for the HILT Digital Humanities Summer School, June 4–8, 2018, University of Pennsylvania. I then went onto Oberlin College to give a keynote on 'Digital collections as departure points' at the Academic Art Museums and Libraries Summit.

September: a talk on 'Crowdsourcing at the British Library: lessons learnt and future directions' at the Digital Humanities Congress | University of Sheffield, 6th – 8th September 2018. And a 'provocation' for the Building Library Labs event, 'A modest proposal: crowdsourcing is good for all of us'.

November: I travelled to Bonn to do a keynote on 'Libraries and their Communities: Participation from Town Halls to Mobile Phones' for the 2018 SWIB (Semantic Web in Libraries) conference, and gave a preview talk on Living with Machines for the British Library Labs 2018 Symposium.

Publications

An article on Breathing life into digital collections at the British Library for ACCESS / Journal of the Australian School Library Association, 2018.

A chapter for a Routledge publication on research methods in the Digital Humanities, called 'Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: a practical guide to designing and running successful projects' (in process).

Other

I was a peer reviewer for conference proposals and articles for museum studies and digital humanities events and journals.

I also gave internal talks on IIIF and the Universal Viewer and taught Data Visualisation and Crowdsourcing workshops on the British Library's Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

I wrote a number of blog posts, newsletters and press releases for work. I've collected some of those blog posts and newsletter updates for the British Library at Updates from Digital Scholarship at the British Library.

Blog post 'Notes from ‘AI, Society & the Media: How can we Flourish in the Age of AI’' and 'Cross-post: Seeking researchers to work on an ambitious data science and digital humanities project'

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2017: an overview

This page is a work in progress…

2017 was an unexpectedly challenging year, as much of it was taken up with treatment for cancer. (I'm fine now).

In February 2017 I did a workshop in Edinburgh for Dr Anouk Lang's Beyond the Black Box: Building Algorithmic and Statistical Literacy through Digital Humanities Tools and Resources and went to Santa Barbara for Always Already Computational: Library Collections as Data.

I keynoted at DIGIKULT 2017 in Sweden in March, 'Wishing Upon a Star: Making Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage a Reality' (video link): The success of crowdsourcing projects that have transcribed, categorized, linked and researched millions of cultural heritage and scientific records has inspired others to try it their own organisations. We can look to ‘star’ projects for ideas, but what is it really like to run a crowdsourcing project?

In June I was in Sydney for the Future Library Congress at EduTECH. I was in Taiwan in August and in October I spoke at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC and gave a keynote on crowdsourcing in Angers, France.

I was interviewed by Thomas Padilla on Engaging Open Cultural Data for the DH+Lib 'data praxis' series.

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Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: balancing productivity and engagement

In October 2017 I went to Université d’Angers, France, for a conference on Le crowdsourcing pour partager, enrichir et publier des sources patrimoniales / Crowdsourcing as a means to share, enrich and public heritage sources.

My abstract: Ideally, cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects enable participants to explore new interests that arise as they encounter historical and scientific collections, but they must also be able to justify the resources required to run projects designed to enhance collections. This can put pressure on projects to focus on productivity at the expense of enjoyment. Beginning with an overview of successful crowdsourcing projects that introduces typical tasks and project types, this talk will discuss the tensions between designing for productivity – the number of items processed and rate of data production – and public engagement.

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Historical thinking in crowdsourcing and citizen history projects

In October 2017 I went to DC for a conference 'Creating Historical Knowledge Socially: New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Undertaking Research with Citizen Scholars' at the German Historical Institute.

Two conference reports, one by Patrick Manning and the other by Matthew Hiebert for the GHI provide more information about the discussions there.

My abstract: This 20-minute presentation examines the extent to which crowdsourcing and 'citizen history' projects and discussion platforms enable and encourage the practice of historical thinking. It takes the definitions of historical thinking set out by scholars and institutional bodies and the American Historical Association's 'core competencies' for students in history courses and degree programs as cues for an extensive trace-ethnographic analysis of participant discourse on crowdsourcing and digital community history platforms. This analysis found evidence for the development of historical thinking, situated learning and collective knowledge creation through participation in online communities of practice. Crowdsourcing project forums support many of the behaviours considered typical of communities of practice, including problem solving, requests for information, seeking the experience of past behaviours, coordinating actions, documenting shared knowledge and experiences, and discussing developments. This paper draws on research undertaken for my 2015 PhD, Making digital history: The impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research, in which I explored the ways in which some crowdsourcing projects encourage deeper engagement with history or science, and the role of communities of practice in citizen history.