Category: conference

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Conference paper: New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women's History on Wikipedia

I'll be presenting 'New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women's History on Wikipedia' in the 'Developments in Digital Women's History' strand of the Women’s History in the Digital World conference at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women's Education at Bryn Mawr on March 23, 2013.

Abstract:

In 1908 Ina von Grumbkow undertook an expedition to Iceland. She later made significant contributions to the field of natural history and wrote several books but other than passing references online and a mention on her husband's Wikipedia page, her story is only available to those with access to sources like the 'Earth Sciences History' journal.

Cumulative centuries of archival and theoretical work have been spent recovering women's histories, yet much of this inspiring scholarship is invisible outside academia. Inspired by research into the use and creation of digital resources and the wider impact of these resources on historians and their scholarship, this paper is a deliberate provocation: if we believe the subjects of our research are important, then we should ensure they are represented on freely available encyclopaedic sites like Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world and the first port of call for most students and the public, yet women's history is poorly represented. This paper discusses how the difficulties of adding women's histories to Wikipedia exemplify some of the new challenges and opportunities of digital history and the ways in which it blurs the line between public history and purely academic research.

Update: I've posted my talk notes at New challenges in digital history: sharing women's history on Wikipedia – my draft talk notes.

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Keynote: 'The gift that gives twice: crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage'

I was invited to give a keynote at 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC' at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.  This was the first event for the AHRC-funded iSay: Visitor-Generated Content in Heritage Institutions project.

I wrote up my research for this lecture into an article for Curator Journal, From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing. If you have don't have access to the journal through your library, the pre-print is available from the Open University repository here.

My slides are below and I've blogged Notes from 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC'. I've also saved an archive of isayevent_tweets_2013_02_01 (CSV).

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

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

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
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Paper: 'On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a historian: exploring resistance to crowdsourced resources among historians' at DH2012

I presented a short paper 'On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a historian: exploring resistance to crowdsourced resources among historians'  (abstract, video) at Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg, Germany.

I've posted a version of my research as it was at that stage as a post on Open Objects: Early PhD findings: Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources.

My abstract (written a long time previously) is below:

Crowdsourcing, the act of taking work once performed within an organisation and outsourcing it to the general public in an open call (Howe 2006), is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data, as projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Old Weather (Romeo & Blaser 2011), Transcribe Bentham (Terras 2010) and the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (Holley 2010) have shown. However, the very openness that allows large numbers of experts and amateurs to participate in the process of building crowdsourced resources also raises issues of authority, reliability and trust in those resources. Can we rely on content created by pseudonymous peers or members of the public? And why do academics often feel that they can’t? This paper explores some of the causes and forms of resistance to creating and using crowdsourced resources among historians.

‘Participant digitisation’ is a specialised form of crowdsourcing in which the digital records and knowledge generated when researchers access primary materials are captured at the point of creation and potentially made available for future re-use. Through interviews with academic and family/local historians, this paper examines the following: the commonalities and differences in how these two groups assess the provenance, reliability and probable accuracy of digital resources; how crowdsourcing tools might support their working practices with historical materials; the motivations of historians for sharing their transcriptions and images in a public repository; the barriers that would prevent them from participating in a project that required them to share their personally-digitised archives; and the circumstances under which they would selectively restrict content sharing. From this preliminary investigation, the paper will go on to consider implications for the creation of digital humanities resources for academic and amateur users.

References

Holley, R. (2010). Crowdsourcing: How and Why Should Libraries Do It? D-Lib Magazine 16(3/4).

Howe, J. (2006). The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired 14.06. [Online] Available from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

Romeo, F., and L. Blaser (2011). Bringing Citizen Scientists and Historians Together. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds), Museums and the Web 2011: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics.

Terras, M. (2010). Digital curiosities: resource creation via amateur digitization. Literary and Linguistic Computing 25(4), 425-438.

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Second NeDiMAH workshop on Space and Time in the Digital Humanities: "Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities"

While in Hamburg for Digital Humanities 2012, I chaired a session on 'Methods' and subsequently co-authored a report, "Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities" (PDF) for the European Science Foundation (with Leif Isaksen, Shawn Day, and Ryan Shaw) for the Second NeDiMAH workshop on Space and Time in the Digital Humanities: "Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities".

From the workshop abstract:

Spatio-temporal concepts are so ubiquitous that it is easy for us to forget that they are essential to everything we do. All expressions of Human culture are related to the dimensions of space and time in the manner of their production and consumption, the nature of their medium and the way in which they express these concepts themselves. This workshop seeks to identify innovative practices among the Digital Humanities community that explore, critique and re-present the spatial and temporal aspects of culture.

Although space and time are closely related, there are significant differences between them which may be exploited when theorizing and researching the Humanities. Among these are the different natures of their dimensionality (three dimensions vs. one), the seemingly static nature of space but enforced 'flow' of time, and the different methods we use to make the communicative leap across spatial and temporal distance. Every medium, whether textual, tactile, illustrative or audible (or some combination of them), exploits space and time differently in order to convey its message. The changes required to express the same concepts in different media (between written and performed music, for example), are often driven by different spatio-temporal requirements. Last of all, the impossibility (and perhaps undesirability) of fully representing a four-dimensional reality (whether real or fictional) mean that authors and artists must decide how to collapse this reality into the spatio-temporal limitations of a chosen medium. The nature of those choices can be as interesting as the expression itself.

This workshop allows those working with digital tools and techniques that manage, analyse and exploit spatial and temporal concepts in the Humanities to present a position paper for the purposes of wider discussion and debate. The position papers will discuss generalized themes related to use of spatio-temporal methods in the Digital Humanities with specific reference to one or more concrete applications or examples. Accepted papers have been divided into three themed sessions: Tools, Methods and Theory. This workshop is part of the ESF-funded NEDIMAH Network and organised by its Working Group on Space and Time. The group will also present its findings from the First NeDiMAH Workshop on Space and Time.