Upcoming talks and travel

A vaguely updated list of upcoming events around the world… NB: I’ve started writing up my PhD, so I’m being very careful about saying ‘yes’ to invitations and focussing on talks and publications related to my PhD.

I’m giving a short paper on ‘Digital participation and public engagement’ at the London Museums Group‘s ‘Museums and Social Media’ at Tate Britain on May 24. I’ll also be in Belfast for the Museums Computer Group’s Spring meeting, ‘Engaging Visitors Through Play‘ on May 30 and then Venice for a quick keynote (with Helen Weinstein) for the We Curate kick-off seminar.

I’m currently working on an edited volume on ‘Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage’ for Ashgate, featuring chapters from some of the most amazing people working in the field. (I know I’m biased, but seriously.)

You can also follow me on twitter (@mia_out) for updates.

Some recent papers

In May 2013 I gave an online seminar on crowdsourcing (with a focus on how it might be used in teaching undergraduates wider skills) for the NITLE Shared Academics series.

In April 2013 I gave a paper on my PhD research at Digital Impacts: Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities, and a keynote on ‘A Brief History of Open Cultural Data’ at GLAM-WIKI 2013 and did another workshop on ‘Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research‘ for the British Library’s Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

In March 2013 I was in the US for THATCamp Feminisms to do a workshop on Data visualisation as a gateway to programming and gave a paper on ‘New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia‘ at ‘Women’s History in the Digital World‘ at Bryn Mawr.  My talk notes are posted on my blog as ‘New challenges in digital history: sharing women’s history on Wikipedia – my draft talk notes’.

In February 2013 I gave a keynote on ‘Crowd-sourcing as participation’ at iSay: Visitor-Generated Content in Heritage Institutions in Leicester and ran a workshop on ‘Data visualisation for humanities researchers’ with Dr. Elton Barker for the CHASE ‘Going Digital‘ doctoral training programme.

In January 2013 I taught all-day workshops on ‘Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research’ and ‘Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions’ for the British Library’s Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

In November 2012 I chaired a session on ‘digital strategy’ at the Museums Association conference in Edinburgh and chaired the Museums Computer Group’s annual Museums on the Web conference at the Wellcome Collection on November 30.

In October I was in London for the Museum Ideas conference, Brighton for a Culture24 workshop on museums and web analytics then I headed off to Taiwan to give a keynote about open cultural data at the ‘eCulture & Open Cultural Data Forum’ then lead a day and a half of seminars.

In September I was in London for the AHRC Commodity Histories Project Networking Workshop 1, running a rather experimental session to come up with and verify the information architecture for the Commodity Histories site.

In July I was at Engaging digital audiences in museums, 11 July 2012, University of Manchester then in Hamburg for Digital Humanities 2012, where I ran a workshop on ‘Learning to play like a programmer: web mash-ups and scripting for beginners‘, chaired the ‘Methods’ session at another pre-conference workshop ‘Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities‘ and presented a short paper, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a historian: exploring resistance to crowdsourced resources among historians‘ based on some early results from my PhD research.

In June I spent a week as ‘Scholar-in-residence’ at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, then two weeks as a Fellow at the NEH Summer Institute on Deep Mapping and Spatial Narratives in Indianapolis.

In April I gave a Keynote: ‘From Strings to Things’ at the Victorian Cultural Network Capacity Building LOD-LAM workshop in Melbourne, and was invited to give talks in Wellington (Te Papa) and Auckland (Auckland Museum) on ‘What’s the point of a museum website?’ and ‘Inspiring connections with collections’.

In March 2012 I was in Australia for various things… I spent a week as geek-in-residence at the Powerhouse Museum, and I was in Canberra in late March for Digital Humanities Australasia 2012: Building, Mapping, Connecting to give a paper based on my PhD, called ‘Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Exploring resistance to crowdsourced resources among historians’.  I’ve posted summaries of the conference at Quick and dirty Digital Humanities Australasia notes: day 1, Quick and dirty Digital Humanities Australasia notes: day 2, Slow and still dirty Digital Humanities Australasia notes: day 3.

I was in Atlanta in November 2011 for MCN2011 (my ‘Hacking and mash-ups for beginners’ workshop is a highlight, woo!) and a panel discussion on ‘What’s the Point of a Museum Website?‘.   I also debated the question “There are too many museums” in the ‘Great Debate‘ for MCN’s closing plenary. Then it was back to London where I chaired a session at the MCG ‘Museums on the Web’ UKMW11 conference.

October 2011 – I was one of two keynotes at Europeana Tech in Vienna, with a paper titled ‘Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation’. The next day I was back in London for LODLAM-London October 6 (with the Open Knowledge Foundation). A few days later I was on a panel on the Digital Humanities at the Open University – my talk notes are at Notes on current issues in Digital Humanities. I was also interviewed for the Microtask crowdsourcing blog, ‘Games at the museum: Mia Ridge interview‘.

Previous papers are generally listed at miaridge.com or on my blog, Open Objects.

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NITLE ‘Crowdsourcing’ seminar

Discussion Guide for NITLE Crowdsourcing seminar

Wednesday, May 8, 2013, 1-2 pm EDT, online via NITLE’s desktop videoconferencing platform

Slides (8mb PDF).

Discussion Questions

  1. Have you ever participated in a crowdsourced project? What did you enjoy about it? Were you motivated to continue? Why/why not?
  2. How well do the tasks presented in the seminar and represented in the ‘Suggested Projects’ below match your students’ interests, knowledge and skills? Can you find projects that are a closer match?
  3. What else is required for undergraduate participation in crowdsourced projects to help meet liberal education learning outcomes?
  4. If crowdsourced projects are designed to meet intrinsic or altruistic motivations for voluntary participation, what are the ethical and practical implications of asking students to participate?
  5. What are some of the challenges of collaboration, credit and attribution in scholarly crowdsourcing, and how might you start to resolve them in your work with students?

Suggested Projects

Suggested Reading

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Keynote: ‘A Brief History of Open Cultural Data’

I was invited to give a talk (which seemed to turn into a plenary then a keynote along the way) for the GLAM-Wiki 2013 conference. I thought it might be useful to put current discussions around opening cultural data for use on Wikipedia and other projects that require content to be licensed for re-use in context (for the museum, library and archive professionals in the audience) and some of the contradictory instructions issued to institutions with cultural, scientific or historical content (for the Wikipedians in the audience, though of course there was a huge overlap between those groups).

I’ve blogged my talk notes as ‘An (even briefer) history of open cultural data‘ at GLAM-Wiki 2013 at Open Objects or there’s a video of my talk.

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Paper: ‘A thousand readers are wanted, and confidently asked for’: public participation as engagement in the arts and humanities

I was invited to give a paper on my research at Digital Impacts: Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities, convened by Kathryn Eccles and the Oxford Internet Institute.

I’ve also posted Notes from ‘Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities’ on Open Objects.

(My title comes from the Oxford English Dictionary’s 1879 call for contributors to help them get through their backlog of words that needed sources and definitions. Yes, I do spend a bit too much time thinking about Victorian precursors to modern crowdsourcing.)

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Workshop: Data visualisation as a gateway to programming

I was invited to run a workshop at THATCamp Feminisms West at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and thought ‘Data visualisations as gateway to programming’ would be a good way to provide a gentle introduction to ‘computational thinking’ by working through the effects different data structures have on potential visualisations in ManyEyes, the online visualisation tool. I also prepared some material on basic concepts in programming and put together a page of ‘Inspiring women through history’ mapped across time and space that contained heavily commented code that suggested various things to try to get a sense of how code (in this case, JavaScript, HTML, CSS) works. My slides are below, you can play with content prepared for ManyEyes, or ‘view source’ at the ‘inspiring women’ link above, save the file to your hard drive and have a play.

 

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Conference paper: New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia

I’ll be presenting ‘New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia’ in the ‘Developments in Digital Women’s History’ strand of the Women’s History in the Digital World conference at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education at Bryn Mawr on March 23, 2013.

Abstract:

In 1908 Ina von Grumbkow undertook an expedition to Iceland. She later made significant contributions to the field of natural history and wrote several books but other than passing references online and a mention on her husband’s Wikipedia page, her story is only available to those with access to sources like the ‘Earth Sciences History’ journal.

Cumulative centuries of archival and theoretical work have been spent recovering women’s histories, yet much of this inspiring scholarship is invisible outside academia. Inspired by research into the use and creation of digital resources and the wider impact of these resources on historians and their scholarship, this paper is a deliberate provocation: if we believe the subjects of our research are important, then we should ensure they are represented on freely available encyclopaedic sites like Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world and the first port of call for most students and the public, yet women’s history is poorly represented. This paper discusses how the difficulties of adding women’s histories to Wikipedia exemplify some of the new challenges and opportunities of digital history and the ways in which it blurs the line between public history and purely academic research.

Update: I’ve posted my talk notes at New challenges in digital history: sharing women’s history on Wikipedia – my draft talk notes.

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Paper: Where next for open cultural data in museums?

My latest article for Museum Identity magazine, Where next for open cultural data in museums?, is now live online and in the current print issue of Museum-iD 13.

Site abstract: “Museums have increasingly been joining the global movement for open data by opening up their databases, sharing their images and releasing their knowledge. Mia Ridge presents a brief history of open cultural data projects, explores some reasons why some data is relatively under-used and looks to the future of open cultural data”.

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Keynote: ‘The gift that gives twice: crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage’

I was invited to give a keynote at ‘The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC‘ at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.  This was the first event for the AHRC-funded iSay: Visitor-Generated Content in Heritage Institutions project.

My slides are below and I’ve blogged Notes from ‘The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC’. I’ve also saved an archive of isayevent_tweets_2013_02_01 (CSV).

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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 ‘Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions’.

Crowdsourcing projects discussed

Useful blogs

References

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Resources for ‘Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research’

Woodcut of the statue described by the prophet Daniel, from Lorenz Faust’s Anatomia statuae Danielis (“An anatomy of Daniel’s statue”), 1585.

Woodcut, An anatomy of Daniel’s statue, 1585.

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 4 May 2013. Image: Woodcut of the statue described by the prophet Daniel, from Lorenz Faust’s Anatomia statuae Danielis (“An anatomy of Daniel’s statue”), 1585. In Alan Jacobs, History as wall art.

Sources cited and references to find out more

Histories of data visualisation

Definitions of data visualisation

Types of visualisations

Planning and designing good data visualisations

Data visualisation for scholarly research

See also the projects listed in the Exercises section below.

Critiquing visualisations

General references

  • Data Visualization Talks Online, 2010 post from Alark Joshi listing various videos
  • Data and visualization blogs worth following (early 2012 post by Nathan Yau)
  • Few, Stephen. 2009. Now I See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis. Analytics Press.
  • Lima, Manuel. 2011. Visual complexity: mapping patterns of information. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.
  • Rosenberg, Daniel, and Grafton, Anthony. 2010. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline. Princeton Architectural Press
  • Tufte, Edward R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press.
  • Tufte, Edward R. 2007. Beautiful evidence. Cheshire, Conn: Graphics press.
  • Ware, Colin. 2008. Visual Thinking for Design. Morgan Kaufmann.
  • Yau, Nathan. 2011. Visualize this: the FlowingData guide to design, visualization, and statistics. Indianapolis, Ind: Wiley Pub.

Links for exercises

January 2013 versions: Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research slides and Datasets for playing

April 2013: Exercises for Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research (PDF), Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research_April2013_slideshandout (PDF), Inspiring Women through History_April2013 (Excel dataset).

My bio as a sample timeline and map in Neatline

Scholarly visualisations to explore and discuss

Trying entity recognition and data enhancement

I’ve suggested a few tools as they each have different strengths and weaknesses. If you don’t have any of your own text to hand, try a paragraph or two of text from a news website.

Cleaning data as preparation for visualisation

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ACH Election Results Announced

I am proud to share that I was elected to serve on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) for the 2013-2016 term, alongside Brian Croxall, Jennifer Guiliano, and Ernesto Priego (2013).

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