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.

The book ‘Museums At Play: Games, Interaction and Learning‘ is edited by freelance strategist Katy Beale and published by MuseumsEtc.  My chapter, ‘Crowdsourcing games: playing with museums’ discusses the power of crowdsourcing games and the participation economy, possible new relationships with audiences and new types of engagement with objects, and the potential for an ecosystem of museum games based around 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

A quick post because I’m excited to see the book come together: ‘Museums Forward: social media, broadcasting and the web‘ is edited by Gregory Chamberlain and will be published in March 2011.  My chapter is called ‘All change please: your museum and audiences online’.

From the blurb: “In this new ground-breaking book leading innovators from both sides of the Atlantic explore how museums can create an effective social media strategy to engage with new and existing audiences.”

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.

Paper: Buzzword or benefit: The possibilities of Web 2.0 for the cultural heritage sector

Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology UK Chapter Meeting, January 24 – 26, 2007, Tudor Merchants Hall, Southampton

Paper: Clay pipe recording at MoLAS and the stamped makers’ mark website

SCPR Annual Conference, September 16, 2006
London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre, Mortimer Wheeler House

The paper discusses the process from initial specification through requirements gathering, database design, development of the database application and website, to publication online.

[Update, December 2011: if you're interested in clay pipes, you may be interested in Locating London's Past. The site also has an article that explains how Museum of London Archaeology (MoLA) Datasets - including clay pipes and glass - have been incorporated into the site.  NB: other than adding these links, I haven't updated the original 2006 paper, so it doesn't include any enhancements made for this new work.  On a personal note, it's lovely to see that the sites, and the backend work behind them, still have value.]