Tag: overview

Posted on

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'

Posted on

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.

Posted on

2016: an overview

This page is a work in progress…

In December I gave a talk for the Association for Project Management’s Knowledge Management SIG event on ‘What does big data mean for project and knowledge managers?’.

In November 2016 I was in Riga, Latvia to give the closing keynote at the Europeana Network Association AGM 2016. In October I spoke at 'What should be in your digital toolbox', gave a keynote, 'Digital history: evolution or transformation?' at The Science of Evolution and the Evolution of the Sciences conference in Leuven, Belgium around October 12th and 13th, 2016 and at Internet Librarian International then chaired the Museums Computer Group's Museums+Tech conference. In August I was in York for 'Negotiating Expertise' and in Helsinki for Museum Theme Days 2016 in September.

In June 2016 I was in Luxembourg for a workshop on Network Visualisation in the Cultural Heritage Sector. My talk notes for Network visualisations and the ‘so what?’ problem are online. I also keynoted at LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) in Helsinki. My slides are online but may not make much sense without notes.

In March 2016 I was at Rice University in Houston then Austin (at the iSchool in UT Austin then St Edwards), then I was on a panel on 'Build the Crowdsourcing Community of Your Dreams' at SXSWi 2016 with Ben Brumfield, Meghan Ferriter and Siobhan Leachman.

In January 2016 I was back in Oxford for a workshop on 'DIY Digitisation' at the Bodleian Libraries.

Posted on

2015: an overview

An incomplete list of publications, papers, etc. from 2015.

In December 2015 I was in Glasgow and Berlin to talk about crowdsourcing in history and cultural heritage. I was also invited to give a lecture on ‘Digital History’ for Digital Humanities @ Universität Bern and gave an Introduction to Information Visualisation for the CHASE doctoral training programme.

On October 26 I was at the British Museum for the Museums Computer Group’s annual conference and gave a talk on ‘Crowdsourcing, scholarship and the academy’ for the School of Advanced Studies in London, and another on Choosy crowds and the machine age: challenges for the future of humanities crowdsourcing, KCL. I also started working as a Digital Curator with the British Library.

In early September I was in Estonia for the ‘Community Involvement in Theme Museums‘ conference (2nd – 3rd) and then at Kings College London on ‘Choosy crowds and the machine age: challenges for the future of humanities crowdsourcing‘ for Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 21st Century (9th – 10th).

Over the summer I worked on the Hidden Museum Project with the Oxford University Museums, testing QR codes, beacons and other methods for delivering different kinds of content on mobile devices in the Museum of the History of Science, the Museum of Natural History and the Ashmolean. Ben Brumfield and I consulted and wrote for the Wellcome Library on the Wellcome Library Transcribing Recipes crowdsourcing project.

In July I spoke on ‘Open Data: Trends and Practice within Cultural Heritage. AKA, the good, the bad, and the unstructured…' at Pelagios: Linked Pasts and on ‘Let Your Projects Shine: Lightweight Usability Testing for Digital Humanities Projects’ at Oxford’s Digital Humanities Summer School.

In the last week of July I taught ‘Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage’ with Ben Brumfield at the HILT Summer School (Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching) at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Indianapolis, Indiana.

In late June/early July, I was in Sydney for Digital Humanities 2015, gave a half-day workshop on Linking humanities data geospatially with Pelagios and Recogito with Leif Isaksen, and 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).

In June 2015 I submitted my thesis (!), presented at Connected Life in Oxford and taught a workshop on Information Visualisation for CHASE Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age.

In May 2015 I gave a keynote on Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage at Nordiske Arkivdage 2015 in Copenhagen and taught a workshop on scholarly data visualisation at the University of St Andrews.

Posted on

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.