Upcoming talks and travel

Poster for a talk at Trinity College Dublin with illustrations of a man working in a factory and a soldier in a trench with sandbags and barbed wire
Trinity lecture poster

Get in touch if you'd like to meet for a chat about crowdsourcing / digital participation, digital scholarship, digital humanities or AI / machine learning in libraries, archives and museums!

In December I'll be at the British School at Athens for a talk on libraries and AI.

Previous activities are listed on '2024, an overview', etc.

Recent books

I'm currently working on chapters for the final Living with Machines book.

Chapter 5: Analysing the language of mechanisation in nineteenth-century British newspapers by Barbara McGillivray, Nilo Pedrazzini, Arianna Ciula, Jon Lawrence, Tiffany Ong, Mia Ridge, Miguel Vieira is now online for 'early access'.

In January 2023, Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Project by Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, me and Giorgia Tolfo was published by Cambridge University Press.

In 2021 I wrote another book with 15 or so brilliant co-authors: The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage

My edited volume on 'Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage' for Ashgate, featuring chapters from some of the most amazing people working in the field was published in October 2014 and reprinted a few times subsequently. You can read my introduction on the OU repository: Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage: Introduction.

By day, I usually at work at home at the British Library, so drop me a line if you'd like to meet for coffee and a chat. My availability for events is limited, but you can drop me a line if you'd like to book me for an event.

Some recent papers

Some publications are listed or accessible at my ORCID page, my Open University repository page, Humanities Commons page, Zenodo, and my Zotero page.

This page is rarely up-to-date or complete, but here's a summary of talks, fellowships, writing, etc in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011. You can also follow me on twitter (@mia_out) mastodon @mia@hcommons.social / https://hcommons.social/@mia for updates. I'm also on bluesky @miaout.bsky.social.

Previous papers are generally listed at miaridge.com or on my blog, Open Objects.

'AI and the Digital Humanities' session at CILIP's 2024 conference

I was invited to chair a session on 'AI and the digital humanities' at CILIP's 2024 conference with Ciaran Talbot (Associate Director AI & Ideas Adoption, University of Manchester Library) and Glen Robson (IIIF Technical Co-ordinator, International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium) at CILIP's 2024 conference. CILIP is 'the UK library and information association'.

I wrote a blog post about it for the British Library's Digital Scholarship blog and CILIP also featured it on their AI Hub: AI and the Digital Humanities at CILIP Conference 2024.

'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.

My work on crowdsourcing for Living with Machines was a 'Research Highlight of the year' for the Alan Turing Institute.

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

Also in November, I took part in a panel on 'International Infrastructures for the Digital Humanities' – video below – for the Building Infrastructures event. The panel was chaired by Paul Arthur and the other panellists were Toma Tasovac, Alexandra Pretrulevich, Langa Khumalo, Juan Steyn and Ruth Ahnert.

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