Keynote: Participatory Practices: Inclusion, Dialogue and Trust

Pavillion 0 at the Sigma Foundation's palazzo on Campo San Paolo, VeniceI was invited to present with Helen Weinstein at the We Curate kick-off seminar at the Pavillion 0 at the Sigma Foundation's palazzo on the opening weekend of the Venice Biennale. Our slides for Participatory practices: inclusion, dialogue and trust in museums and academia are online, and I blogged about our talk and the event for Historyworkstv: Participatory Practice Presentation at the Venice Biennale.

Talk: 'Digital challenges, digital opportunities' at MCG Play

MCG Play logoAs Chair of the Museums Computer Group, it was a pleasure to attend the MCG's Spring meeting, 'Engaging Visitors Through Play', at the University of Ulster's Centre for Media Research in Belfast on May 30.

I spoke on 'Digital challenges, digital opportunities', and my aim was to introduce the Museums Computer Group, discuss some of the challenges museums and their staff are facing and think about how to create opportunities from those challenges.  I've posted my notes at 'Digital challenges, digital opportunities' at MCGPlay, Belfast.

I blogged about the event at 'Engaging Visitors Through Play' – the Museums Computer Group in Belfast and my post was picked up and re-posted as a guest post, 'Game on', for the Museums Association blog.

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in the audience) and some of the contradictory instructions issued to institutions with cultural, scientific or historical content (for the Wikipedians in the audience, though of course there was a huge overlap between those groups).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.

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.)