miaridge

A vaguely updated list of upcoming talks around the world…

In March 2012 I’ll be in Australia for various things – more details to follow…

I’ll be in Canberra in late March for Digital Humanities Australasia 2012: Building, Mapping, Connecting to give a paper called ‘Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Exploring resistance to crowdsourced resources among historians’.

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

Most recent past papers

I was in Atlanta in November 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?‘.

Update: 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.

The subject of centrally managing visitor comments from museum interactives and online spaces keeps coming up on various discussion lists, so I thought I’d start a post about some work I’ve done on this that I can refer people to.  It’s very draft-ish at this stage, in part because I haven’t had time to go back to the original requirements and architecture documents and verify my vague memories.  I have no idea if posts like this would be useful for other people or what I could include to make it more useful – I’d love to know what you think.

Background

When I started at the Science Museum, I discovered there were lots of different systems running the various in-gallery interactives, which meant lots of different usernames and passwords, server addresses and interfaces to master to do things like approve new visitor comments or update content.  The redevelopment of the Wellcome Wing galleries (Antenna and Who Am I?, and the new gallery Atmosphere) was an opportunity to create a centralised backend system that would make it easier to add new content and manage the sometimes huge levels of user-generated content that comes from the galleries.

Sample requirements: Antenna

The updated ‘Antenna’ contemporary science news gallery also had a vision of integrating the in-gallery and online experiences, not only with content flowing seamlessly into different interfaces, but also by bringing responses from visitors in the galleries and online into shared spaces. The system had to be able to manage polls, quizzes, ‘likes’, etc as well as helping manage and publish visitor comments. The galleries are visited by thousands of school children a day, and they can generate an immense number of comments, many of which are unsuitable for publication (i.e. kids will be kids, and they will think it’s funny to swear or be rude about a classmate, and of course there’s a lot of repetition along the lines of ‘I like exhibit x’).

Selecting a platform

After some thought, I settled on WordPress as the backend platform to publish our content and store user-generated content and related activity.  It’s based on PHP so it’s extensible and it’s not too difficult to find developers, it’s widely used so there are lots of decent plugins and themes*, it’s capable of supporting high traffic sites, and it has an API, which meant it would also work with the gallery’s Flash interactives, web and mobile interfaces – anything that can use a web service to push and pull content.  User experience for the content developers and UGC moderators was also important to me, and WordPress was pretty good on that front.

As I posted to the Museums Computer Group list once, ‘As the gallery is about the latest in science news, it had to be easily updateable, and using a customised WordPress system means the same museum content and visitor comments can be shared on the Antenna website and in the gallery.  The system manages content and interaction for the daily (ish) science news stories, the short-term displays, and the in-depth ‘Feature’ exhibitions.  I’m happy to answer questions on the technical architecture and development process (or direct you to the Science Museum/NMSI web team), but questions about the in-gallery kiosk hardware etc are best directed to the New Media team.

Some of the ‘have your say’ applications in the Atmosphere and Who Am I? galleries also run on the same system, which means visitor comments can be moderated via the same central WordPress installation.  I don’t know how often the questions or polls change, but it should help the galleries keep their interpretation up-to-date over the life of the installations.’

* the art of selecting a plugin is a whole different post, and generally I’d say it’s useful to use them for rapid prototyping and early user testing but unless you’re really happy with the way a plugin is written you might want to write any bespoke plugins yourself – this doesn’t have to be difficult process.

Jude Habib from sounddelivery interviewed me at the Museum Computer Group’s UK Museums and the Web 2011 about current issues in museums and technology (link, in case the embed doesn’t work). Oh, and I was elected Chair of the Museums Computer Group – a big responsibility, but I have a great committee of smart, talented people so I’m excited about the challenge.

I ran a three and a half hour pre-conference workshop (abstract below) at MCN2011 on Hacking and mash-ups for beginners at MCN2011 – slides below, and I’m happy to share the exercises on request.

Have you ever wanted to be able to express your ideas for digital collections more clearly, or thought that a hack day sounds like fun but need a way to get started with basic web scripting? In this hands-on workshop you will learn how to use online tools to create interesting visualisations to explore a cultural dataset and create your own simple ‘mash-up’.

The workshop will be a fun, supportive environment where you will learn by playing with small snippets of code. No scripting knowledge is assumed.

On October I was on a panel on the Digital Humanities at the Open University – my talk notes are blogged at Notes on current issues in Digital Humanities.

There’s a paper titled ‘Colloquium: Digital Technologies: Help or Hindrance for the Humanities?’ (with Elton Barker, Chris Bissell, Lorna Hardwick, Allan Jones and John Wolffe) published in the ‘Digital Futures Special Issue Arts and Humanities in HE’ edition of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.

I was interviewed for the Microtask crowdsourcing blog.  Their abstract:

Culture heritage technologist Mia Ridge is a champion of crowdsourced museum gaming. Mia has worked as a developer for several world-class museums and is now writing her PhD on crowdsourcing digital heritage. She describes games as the “participation engine” of crowdsourcing.

Taking time out from her busy speaking schedule, Mia told us how and why museums should be raising their game…

‘Games at the museum: Mia Ridge interview‘.

I was one of two keynotes at Europeana Tech in Vienna in October 2011. I’ve posted my talk notes at My Europeana Tech keynote: Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation. There’s a video of the talk on YouTube (but I haven’t watched it so have no idea if it works as a video).

Some of my other notes from the conference are at Notes from EuropeanaTech 2011.

I was interviewed by Jamillah Knowles for BBC Outriders: Digital relaxation. I think the podcast should be downloadable from their archive.

From the episode blurb:

If you are interested in history anywhere, then you might be interested in LODLAM too. LODLAM is Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums. Imagine the world of history all linked up? Amazing!

I spoke to Mia Ridge who is currently a Phd student in Digital Humanities in the Department of History at the Open University and she explained more about LODLAM, what it can do and how we might be able to help us understand and work with global archives and more.

On 16 September 2011 I chaired a session (including a brief overview of my research, at the request of the organisers) at the Museums Galleries Scotland Conference 2011 Collaborating to Compete in Edinburgh.  My presentation notes and some thoughts on the conference are at ‘Entrepreneurship and Social Media’ and ‘Collaborating to Compete’ and Conference notes: Museums and Galleries Scotland’s ‘Collaborate to Compete’.

Katy Beale and I ran a workshop on ‘hacking culture’ at the V&A Museum on Friday 15 July. I’ve put the photos for ‘Culture (paper) hack at V&A’s Web Weekend‘ but still haven’t written this workshop up properly.  Briefly – we explained what hack days are, the types of hacks people create, how CultureHack started – then we handed over to the participants to ‘create their perfect museum experience’ with paper, markers, scissors, glue and some printouts of objects from the V&A’s collection online. People came up with some wonderfully creative ideas, and it was interesting to see where they overlapped with the kinds of things you see at hack days, and where they were completely different.

From the V&A Web Weekend Programme:

Katy and Mia explore the idea of museums as objects, stories, experiences, people and places. If you could take objects out of the museum, where would you put them? If you could have access to any part of the museum, what would it be? You’ll hear about recent Culture Hacks and then create your own paper prototypes, bringing to life your own simple solutions or seemingly impossible ideas.