Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections

Posted on April 9, 2011 by mia

My slides for ‘Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections’ for Museums and the Web, 2011 in Philadelphia, USA. They cover the material in my MW2011 paper, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections.

Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections
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Class: The possibilities of Web 2.0 for cultural heritage institutions

Posted on March 28, 2011 by mia

I taught a class on ‘The possibilities of Web 2.0 for cultural heritage institutions’ for the course Arch6056: Multimedia Methods in Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

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Paper: Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections

Posted on February 28, 2011 by mia

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

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Forthcoming chapter ‘All change please: your museum and audiences online’

Posted on November 17, 2010 by mia

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.”

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‘Museums meet the 21st century’ – OpenTech 2010 talk

Posted on September 11, 2010 by mia

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

Museums meet the 21st century

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New site!

Posted on August 14, 2010 by mia

In a moment of constructive procrastination, I’ve migrated my site over from custom PHP pages to WordPress.  Lots of bits still to tidy up and move over, but it’s been a smooth process generally. It’s even been fun, and I think I can see potential for using blogging software as a kind of ‘living CV’ – I haven’t really updated my CV since 2005, but the occasional post about papers or project milestones should give the casual visitor an idea of my current interests and work.

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Linking Museums meetup

Posted on July 7, 2010 by mia

Somehow I ended up organising a meetup about ‘Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage‘.  I’ve written about it for the UK MCG blog and there’s a write-up of ‘linking museums’ from various people on the ‘Museums and the machine-processable web’ wiki.  If you’re interested in ‘helping museums make content re-usable; helping programmers access museum content’, the wiki is a good place to join in.

I’ve also shared some thoughts on publishing re-usable object data and subject authorities from the Science Museum on the wiki.

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Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang

Posted on April 17, 2010 by mia

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.

Cosmic Collections: creating a big bang?

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Career highlight

Posted on April 17, 2010 by mia

On April 17, 2010, I was appointed Director of Science for the Spinny Bar Historical Society.

The Certificate of Orbit

Image courtesy brownwindsor.

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Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: Opportunities and Challenges

Posted on December 6, 2009 by mia

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.

Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: opportunities and challenges

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