miaridge

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.

I co-authored 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.

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

I gave a talk at OpenTech 2010 on ‘Museums meet the 21st century‘ – I’ve blogged my slides and notes.

A paper for Museums and the Web conference in Denver, April 2010.

Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang

Abstract

‘Cosmic collections’ was a Web site mashup competition held by the Science Museum in late 2009 to encourage members of the public to create new interfaces with newly accessible collections data prepared for the Cosmos & Culture exhibition. The paper reports on the lessons learned during the process of developing and running the competition, including the organisational challenges and technical context. It discusses how to create room for experimentation within institutional boundaries, the tools available to organise and publicise such an event on a limited budget, the process of designing a competition, and the impact of the competition. It also investigates the demand for museum APIs.

Keywords: experiment, collaboration, mashup, API, social media, exhibition, collections

My slides are also available on Slideshare and below. As in 2009, I helped facilitate the Museums and the Web 2010 Unconference.

In December 2009 I was invited to Oslo to give a lecture on social media and museums, libraries and archives to the The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM-utvikling) . The Opportunities and Challenges slides are online and below.

I spoke on ‘Continued Communication: maximising your communications in a Web 2.0 world’ at the Online Information 2009 conference in London, December 1, 2009, presenting some of the research of the ‘Continued Communication’ research group with Elizabeth Lomas and Benjamin Ellis. Our paper is available in the published proceedings.

The article ‘Learning lessons from a decade of museum websites’ was published in Issue 3 of Museum Identity magazine and is also available online at Learning lessons from a decade of museum websites.

Site abstract: “Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum, on learning the lessons from a decade of museum websites and the opportunity to look at the organisational changes museums might face as both the expectations of their audiences and their own working practices have been influenced by their interactions online”.

I reported on The 2008 Mashed Museum Day and UK Museums on the Web Conference for Issue 56 of Ariadne.  Mashed Museum was held at the University of Leicester on July 18, 2008 (and is the first museum hack day I know of).  The Museums Computer Group UK Museums on the Web Conference was also held at the University of Leicester the next day.

As the Çatalhöyük Archive Report 2007 is online as a large PDF, I’ve copied my report below. In 2007 I’d worked with the team during the off-season (i.e. when people aren’t on site digging) and on-site. Being on site meant providing general IT and network support (and dealing with occasional oddities like a spontaneously combusting monitor) while working on requirements analysis and database development in the lab. I also contributed to the Çatalhöyük blog during the 2007 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Paper: Sharing authorship and authority: user generated content and the cultural heritage sector

Web Adept: UK Museums and the Web 2007, Leicester, June 22, 2007.