Panel: ASPIRE Digital Roundtable: “Horizon Scanning: Living in the Digital World”

Posted on November 13, 2012 by mia

I was invited to be a panellist for Oxford ASPIRE’s first knowledge sharing event on 13th November 2012, Living in the Digital World: Horizon Scanning for Museums (PDF).  Oxford ASPIRE is a consortium of Oxford University Museums (the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, History of Science, Natural History Museums) and the Oxfordshire County Museums Service.

As they say in their post, ASPIRE Digital Roundtable: “Horizon Scanning: Living in the Digital World”, ‘This roundtable event brought together a small number of museum professionals to discuss how museums could thrive in the increasingly digital landscape by exploring innovations, opportunities for collaboration and funding sources.

Our 16 delegates gathered at the Pitt Rivers Museum and questions and ideas began bubbling immediately over coffee.  The event officially began with thoughts and provocations from our four expert panelists who gave their over-view of the key digital issues facing museums. Delegates and panelists then entered into a lively and illuminating conversation.’ They’ve linked to podcasts and transcripts of the introductions in their post.

Posted in event, museums | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Workshop: exploring Neatline

Posted on November 8, 2012 by mia

A two-hour workshop for the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, on Neatline.  Organised by Anouk Lang, it was their first digital humanities workshop and was designed as an opportunity to learn about Neatline and explore what it could (and couldn’t) do.

Neatline workshop notes for the University of Strathclyde (PDF) Neatline workshop slides for the University of Strathclyde (Powerpoint)

Creative Commons Licence This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I’ve also written up some of my thoughts after the workshop at Reflections on teaching Neatline.

Posted in workshop | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Guest post: Center for the Future of Museums blog

Posted on October 16, 2012 by mia

I co-wrote a post with Suse Cairns in reply to a post from Jasper Visser on Opportunities and Challenges with Reproductions for the American Alliance of Museums’ blog.

As the introduction to A Reply to “On the Opportunities and Challenges of Reproductions” says, Jasper’s post and our response came out of a conversation on twitter about the launch of the exhibition.  Many thanks to Elizabeth Merritt and the Center for the Future of Museums for hosting our discussion.

Posted in museums, review | Tagged | Leave a comment

Keynote: Global communities and open cultural data: movements towards linked open data in libraries, archives and museums

Posted on October 13, 2012 by mia

I was invited to Taipei, Taiwan for the ‘eCulture & Open Cultural Data Forum’ by TELDAP (Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Programs), MCN Taiwan and Culturemondo Asia Pacific.  Many thanks to my hosts and organisers for their hospitality, for the meetings they organised with various national museums and for the opportunity to discuss open cultural data with staff from Taiwanese museums, libraries and archives.

As well as my keynote on ‘Global communities and open cultural data: movements towards linked open data in libraries, archives and museums’, I lead a further day and a half of seminars with Shih-Chieh Ilya Li at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan on:

  • eCulture, Data Immersion & Open Cultural Data
  • Why Open Cultural Data?
  • What is Linked Open Data (LOD) ?
  • Strategy and Planning Open Cultural Data
  • Technologies, standards and licenses for Linked Open Data
  • How to open your cultural Data
  • Group exercise: planning LOD projects
Posted in conference, museums, open cultural data, presentation, seminar | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Card-sorting activity at the Commodity Histories workshop

Posted on September 6, 2012 by mia

The AHRC-funded Commodity Histories project aims to produce a ‘website that will function as a collaborative space for scholars engaged in commodities-related research’.  The project organised a workshop, ‘Designing a collaborative research web space: aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project‘ in London on 6-7 September 2012.

As part of opening session on the ‘aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project and website’ I led a card-sorting exercise aimed at finding out how potential scholars in the community of commodity historians would expect to find and interact with content and other scholars in the network.  We prepared print-outs of sample content in advance and asked participants to sort them into groups and then label them.  At the end of the workshop I presented the different headings the groups had come up with and discussed the different ways they’d organised the material.

While some work had been done on the site structure previously, the process was useful for understanding some of the expectations people had about the functionality and sociability of the site as well as checking how they’d expect the site to be organised.  Various other presentations and discussion during the workshop reinforced the idea that the key task of the site is to enable contributors to add content easily and often, and tempered our expectations about how much scholarly networking would be visible as conversations on the site.

has written up some of the workshop at The Boundaries of Commodities.

Posted in digital humanities, event, project, workshop | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Interview in Museum Identity magazine on open linked data and digital audiences

Posted on July 23, 2012 by mia

I was interviewed for Museum ID magazine as part of a series of interviews with the ‘alternative museum establishment’.  The online version is accessible at Interview: Mia Ridge – open linked data and digital audiences.

Posted in interview, museums, open cultural data | Tagged | Leave a comment

Links and slides for ‘Learning to play like a programmer: Web mash-ups and scripting for beginners’

Posted on July 16, 2012 by mia

Workshop abstract: Learning to play like a programmer: web mash-ups and scripting for beginners.

Slides (pdf): Play Like A Programmer workshop DH2012

Links for the Digital Humanities pre-conference workshop ‘Learning to play like a programmer: Web mash-ups and scripting for beginners’

My contact details

Twitter: @mia_out, blog http://openobjects.blogspot.com, homepage http://www.miaridge.com

Text editors

Online javascript console

Data to play with

Visualisation tools

Resources to keep learning

About learning to code

On hack days

Going further with debugging

Posted in class, conference, digital humanities, workshop | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Workshop: Learning to play like a programmer: web mash-ups and scripting for beginners

Posted on July 15, 2012 by mia

Half day tutorial for the pre-conference workshops for Digital Humanities 2012: Learning to play like a programmer: web mash-ups and scripting for beginners.

Abstract:

Have you ever wanted to be able to express your ideas for digital humanities data-based projects more clearly, or wanted to know more about hack days and coding but been too afraid to ask?

In this hands-on tutorial led by an experienced web programmer, attendees will learn how to use online tools to create visualisations to explore humanities data sets while learning how computer scripts interact with data in digital applications.

Attendees will learn the basic principles of programming by playing with small snippets of code in a fun and supportive environment. The instructor will use accessible analogies to help participants understand and remember technical concepts. Working in pairs, participants will undertake short exercises and put into practice the scripting concepts they are learning about. The tutorial structure encourages attendees to reflect on their experiences and consolidate what they have learned from the exercises with the goal of providing deeper insight into computational thinking.

The tutorial aims to help humanists without a technical background understand more about the creation and delivery of digital humanities data resources. In doing so, this tutorial is designed to support greater diversity in the ‘digital’ part of the digital humanities community.

This tutorial is aimed at people who want to learn enough to get started playing with simple code to manipulate data, or gain an insight into how programming works. No technical knowledge is assumed. Attendees are asked to bring their own laptops or net books.

The tutorial will include:

  • what a humanities data set is and how to access one
  • how web scripting languages work (using JavaScript as an example)
  • how to sketch out your ideas in pseudo-code
  • the value of visualisation tools in understanding the shape of a data set
  • prepared exercises: ‘hello world’, using script libraries for mash-ups, creating your first mash-up using a live cultural dataset (e.g. a timeline or map),
  • how to find further resources and keep learning

Related link: Links and slides for ‘Learning to play like a programmer: Web mash-ups and scripting for beginners’

Posted in class, conference, digital humanities, presentation, workshop | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Review: QRator at the Grant Museum of Zoology

Posted on July 13, 2012 by mia

I was invited to review the QRator project at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology for the Journal of Digital Humanities Vol. 1, No. 2 Spring 2012: QRator at the Grant Museum of Zoology.

Posted in digital humanities, museums, review | Tagged | Leave a comment

NEH Fellowship for the Polis Center Institute on ‘Spatial Narrative and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities’

Posted on June 30, 2012 by mia

I was awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Fellowship for the Polis Center‘s Institute on ‘‘Spatial Narrative and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities’. In their words, “this two-week intensive institute brings leading scholars from around the world to explore how deep maps can support relevant issues in spatial humanities”.

A sneak preview of some of our prototyping work is available at Interface designs for deep maps: a presentation from #PolisNEH to #UCLADH.  Some of the discussions about deep maps were captured in a post I wrote on Open Objects after the first week, ‘Halfway through ‘deep maps and spatial narratives’…‘ and a post on the project blog for the last day of the Institute, Catch the wind.

Other posts written by participants include:

Posted in digital humanities, fellowship, workshop | Tagged , | 1 Comment