miaridge

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.

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.

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’.

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.

A presentation on ‘The future of museums and learning to live with love change’ for OpenCulture 2011 in Birmingham, UK, on June 8, 2011.

Owen Stephens live-blogged my talk, his notes are at
Open Culture 2011 – Looking to the Future.

A presentation called ‘Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums’ for MuseumNext in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 26, 27th. The link to my slides was retweeted so much the slides made it onto the front page of slideshare, which was especially nice as I’d had a lot of fun making the presentation interesting enough to combat the post-lunch slot and to help non-tech/game people stay engaged for the whole talk.

A presentation on ‘Museum Games and UGC: Improving Collections Through Play’ for ‘UGC4GLAM – Joint Workshop on User-Generated Content for Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums‘, Vienna, Austria, May 16-17, 2011.

A presentation for the Inspiration Seminar on Digital Communications and Heritage (Inspirationsseminarium Digital kommunikation & kulturarv, #kulturwebb) at the Nordic Museum, organised by the Nordic Museum’s New Media department in collaboration with Mabb and IdeK lab.

I’ve saved my slides and speaker notes as a PDF (7mb): Museum Crowdsourcing Games: Improving Collections Through Play (and some thoughts on the future of museums) and the video is at http://bambuser.com/channel/nordiskamuseet/broadcast/1646762 (though I’m not sure how long it’ll be there).

You can also find related posts on my blog, Open Objects, at http://openobjects.blogspot.com/search/label/crowdsourcing and http://openobjects.blogspot.com/search/label/games.

My slides for ‘Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections’ for Museums and the Web, 2011 in Philadelphia, USA. They cover the material in my MW2011 paper, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections.

My paper for Museums and the Web 2011, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections, is online and is also available in the printed proceedings.

Abstract: Crowdsourcing the creation, correction or enhancement of data about objects through games is an attractive proposition for museums looking to maximize use of their collections online without committing intensive curatorial resources to enhancing catalogue records. This paper investigates the optimum game designs to encourage participation and the generation of useful data through a case study of the project Museum Metadata Games that successfully designed games that created improved metadata for ‘difficult’ objects from two science and history museum collections.

Keywords: collections, games, crowdsourcing, objects, metadata, tagging