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HILT Summer School 2015: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'

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Resources for the course on Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage at HILT 2015 I'm teaching with Ben Brumfield.

Course Google Doc for collaborative note-taking, links, etc.

Flickr Group for HILT 2015 Crowdsourcing photos

Mia's storify of the week and the class presentation for the HILT Show and Tell.

Projects made in the class

Well done @cmderose_wisc @nebrown63 @ElizHansen @ESPaul @vac11 @kmthomas06 @WendyJ1226 @HistorianOnFire @Jim_Salmons @TimlynnBabitsky + Nancy!

Monday: overview, speed dating

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides and Exercises for Monday

Session 2: links to find a project you love! For non-English language projects, try Crowdsourcing the world's heritage.

Prompts for thinking about projects:

  • How clear was the purpose of the site? How well was it reflected in the 'call to action' and other text?
  • How easy was it to get started?
  • Were the steps to complete the task clear?
  • How enjoyable was the task?
  • Did the reward (if any) feel appropriate?
  • Looking at the site overall, does the project appear to be effective?
  • What is the input content? What is the output content?
  • What validation methods appear to have been used?
  • Who is the probable audience and what motivates them to participate?
  • How does the project let participants know they're making a difference?
  • Does the site support communication between participants?
  • How was the site marketed to potential participants?
  • Did the site anticipate your questions about the tasks?

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides and Exercises Tuesday

http://tinyurl.com/EminentScotsmen

http://tinyurl.com/Graves1845

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Wednesday

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Thursday

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Friday

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HILT 2015 Crowdsourcing class

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Talk: 'Small ontologies, loosely joined': linked open data for the First World War, DH2015

I presented a paper, 'Small ontologies, loosely joined': linked open data for the First World War, in a panel on Linked Open Data and the First World War at Digital Humanities 2015 (based on my experiences as a Fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on histories of World War One with the CENDARI project).

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Workshop: Information Visualisation, CHASE Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age

I've been asked to give a workshop on Information Visualisation for the CHASE Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age training programme in June 2015.

The workshop will introduce students to the use of visualisations for understanding, analysing and presenting large-scale datasets in the Humanities, enabling scholars to ask increasingly complex research questions.

Slides, sample data and instructions for exercises are downloadable here: CHASE InfoVis Handouts 2015.

Links for the various exercises are collected below for ease of access.

Exercise 1: Exploring network visualisations

Exercise 2: Comparing N-gram tools

Books

Newspapers

Exercise 3: Trying entity recognition

Exercise 4: Exploring scholarly data visualisations

Exercise 5: create a chart using Google Fusion Tables

Google Fusion Tables: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/data?dsrcid=implicit

An Excel version of this exercise is available at https://www.openobjects.org.uk/2015/03/creating-simple-graphs-with-excels-pivot-tables-and-tates-artist-data/

Exercise 6: Geocoding data and creating a map using Google Fusion Tables

Google Fusion Tables: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/data?dsrcid=implicit

Exercise 7: Applying data visualisation to your own work

Explore more visualisations:

Sketch ideas for visualisations:

Try visualising data in different tools:

Try visualising existing data

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Keynote: Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage, Nordiske Arkivdage 2015

Photo of the audience arriving at Nordiske Arkivdage 2015
The audience arriving at Nordiske Arkivdage 2015

I was invited to give a keynote on 'Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage' at Nordiske Arkivdage 2015 (#NordiskArkiv), a triennial gathering of archivists from Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland in Copenhagen on May 8, 2015. I greatly enjoyed hearing about various crowdsourcing projects that state and city archives in those countries have worked on over the years (and would still love to hear more). My slides are below.

From my introduction:

Today I want to talk about why crowdsourcing creates opportunities for productive, meaningful public engagement with cultural heritage. This isn't a sales pitch – crowdsourcing is not a 'magic bullet' – but I think an investment in crowdsourcing can be repaid with impressive results in the amount of material processed, and in new relationships with our shared cultural heritage in museums, libraries, universities, community groups and archives.

So in the next twenty minutes I will briefly explain what crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is, give you a glimpse of some projects where crowdsourcing has been incredibly productive, and discuss how it can help make collections more accessible while engaging people more deeply in thinking about those collections…

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage asks the public to help with tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge. As a voluntary activity, the tasks and/or goals should be inherently rewarding.

If you're interested in engagement through crowdsourcing, you might also like From tagging to theorizing: deepening engagement with cultural heritage through crowdsourcing. Curator: The Museum Journal, 56(4) pp. 435–450. If you're interested in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage generally, try the book! My Introduction to Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage is online.