Keynote 'Evolutionary Innovations: Collections as Data in the AI era' for Making Meaning 2024

My slides for #SLQMakingMeaning #CollectionsAsData, 'Evolutionary Innovations: Collections as Data in the AI era', are online at https://zenodo.org/records/10795641

‘Collections as data’ describes the movement to publish open data from museum, library and archive collections that began in the noughties. The benefits of machine learning for better discoverability and research with digitised/born digital collections are alluring. And the popularity of generative AI – and an increased awareness of the biases it reinscribes – has focused attention on responsible computational access to collections – but what does this mean in practical terms? Mia will share examples from the British Library and the Living with Machines data science project.

'Enriching lives: connecting communities and culture with the help of machines': my EuropeanaTech 2023 keynote

Panorama lit by natural light of a seaside town
The video for my opening keynote on 'Enriching lives: connecting communities and culture with the help of machines' for the EuropeanaTech 2023 conference is now online.

The EuropeanaTech 2023 conference was held in The Hague, the Netherlands and online from 10 – 12 October 2023. My slides are online.

My abstract: I’ll begin with an overview of current developments in AI and machine learning, then present work with crowdsourcing from the Living with Machines project to think about what AI means for online volunteers and communities around digital cultural heritage. I’ll share new thinking on ‘volunteer enrichment’ – participation in crowdsourcing that not only enriches and enhances collections records, but also enriches the lives of volunteers. How can we embed GLAM values when we apply AI and machine learning tools in our work?

In preparing my keynote I revisited my keynote for EuropeanaTech 2011, and reflected on work on crowdsourcing, data science and AI at the British Library, the Collective Wisdom project and Living with Machines since then.

2022: an overview(ish)

A work-in-progress post about what I got up to last year.

The biggest thing I did in 2022 was co-curate an exhibition at Leeds City Museum for the British Library and Living with Machines project.

November: I was invited to the Archives nationales de France conference 'Crowdsourcing et patrimoine culturel écrit', where I spoke on Crowdsourcing as connection: a constant star over a sea of change / Établir des connexions : un invariant des projets de crowdsourcing par Mia Ridge, British Library, Royaume-Uni

In December I gave an online keynote on 'Citizen Science as Public History?' for the conference 'When publics co-produce history in museums: skills, methodologies and impact of participation' at The Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg.

2019: an overview(ish)

A very incomplete page…

Projects: Living with Machines

  • Continued recruiting the project team
  • Set up the project website (graphic identity and WordPress template by an agency, working with the project team)
  • Helped devise the Communications strategy

Publications

Ridge, M. (forthcoming). Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: A practical guide to designing and running successful projects. In K. Schuster & S. Dunn (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities. Routledge.

Talks and teaching

June: I was at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to teach Collections as Data with Thomas Padilla for the HILT digital humanities summer school.

An invited talk on 'Voyages of discovery with digital collections' for the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, June 2019

Blog posts

Other

Peer reviewer, Digital Humanities 2019

2018: an overview

2017-18 was a bit of an odd year and I've subsequently reduced the number of invitations I accept each year.

Projects

2018 finished with a bang, as the press release for the British Library/Alan Turing Institute's Living with Machines project went live. I'd been working on the proposal since early 2017. In this project, we're experimenting with 'radical collaborations' around applying data science methods to historical newspaper collections to advance the potential of digital history.

Talks and teaching

January: a lecture on 'Scholarly crowdsourcing: from public engagement to creating knowledge socially' for the Introduction to Digital Humanities Masters course at King's College London, and an 'Overview of Information Visualisation' for the CHASE Winter School: Introduction to Digital Humanities.

February: a full-day workshop on Information Visualisation for PhD students in the Digital Humanities for CHASE.

March: a talk on 'Crowdsourcing: the British Library experience' for CILIP's Multimedia Information & Technology (MmIT) Group's event on 'The wisdom of the crowd? Crowdsourcing for information professionals'.

April: a talk on 'Challenges and opportunities in digital scholarship' for a British Library Research Collaboration Open House, and took part in a panel for the Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference on ‘Sharing knowledge through online engagement’ around Art UK's Art Detective project at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

May: I was in Rotterdam for a EuropeanaTech panel on User Generated & Institutional Data Transcription projects and gave a talk on 'Open cultural data in the GLAM sector' for a CPD25 workshop on The GLAM sector: what can we learn from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

June: with Thomas Padilla I co-taught 'Collections as data' for the HILT Digital Humanities Summer School, June 4–8, 2018, University of Pennsylvania. I then went onto Oberlin College to give a keynote on 'Digital collections as departure points' at the Academic Art Museums and Libraries Summit.

September: a talk on 'Crowdsourcing at the British Library: lessons learnt and future directions' at the Digital Humanities Congress | University of Sheffield, 6th – 8th September 2018. And a 'provocation' for the Building Library Labs event, 'A modest proposal: crowdsourcing is good for all of us'.

November: I travelled to Bonn to do a keynote on 'Libraries and their Communities: Participation from Town Halls to Mobile Phones' for the 2018 SWIB (Semantic Web in Libraries) conference, and gave a preview talk on Living with Machines for the British Library Labs 2018 Symposium.

Publications

An article on Breathing life into digital collections at the British Library for ACCESS / Journal of the Australian School Library Association, 2018.

A chapter for a Routledge publication on research methods in the Digital Humanities, called 'Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: a practical guide to designing and running successful projects' (in process).

Other

I was a peer reviewer for conference proposals and articles for museum studies and digital humanities events and journals.

I also gave internal talks on IIIF and the Universal Viewer and taught Data Visualisation and Crowdsourcing workshops on the British Library's Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

I wrote a number of blog posts, newsletters and press releases for work. I've collected some of those blog posts and newsletter updates for the British Library at Updates from Digital Scholarship at the British Library.

Blog post 'Notes from ‘AI, Society & the Media: How can we Flourish in the Age of AI’' and 'Cross-post: Seeking researchers to work on an ambitious data science and digital humanities project'