Cultural heritage technologies, user experience design and research, digital humanities
In August 2014 I taught 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage' with Ben Brumfield at HILT (Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching) at MITH in Maryland. Thanks to all the participants for making it such a great workshop!
The Course Syllabus and Slide Decks are available for download below.
If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.
Continue reading "HILT Summer School: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'"
I've been awarded a CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin for a project called 'Bridging collections with a participatory Commons: a pilot with World War One archives'. Here's Trinity's page about my Fellowship, which runs until mid-December. I've decided to be brave and share my thoughts and actions throughout the process, so I thought I'd start as I mean to go on and post my proposal (1500 words, below). CENDARI is a 'research infrastructure project aimed at integrating digital archives for the medieval and World War One eras' which 'aims to leverage innovative technologies to provide historians with the tools by which to contextualise, customise and share their research' (source) so this research fellowship very neatly complements my PhD research.
You can contact me by leaving a comment below, or via my contact page. If you'd like to follow my progress, you can sign up for (very infrequent) updates at MailChimp: http://eepurl.com/VUXEL or keep an eye out for posts tagged 'CENDARI Fellowship' on my blog, Open Objects.
Updates so far:
I was invited to Copenhagen to talk about my research on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage at the 3rd international Sharing is Caring seminar on April 1. I've posted my notes on Open Objects: Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons platform: a provocation about collaborating with users.
Much of this comes from my PhD research and my previous work in museums, and I'm grateful to everyone who's commented in person or on twitter so far, particularly as it helps me understand the best ways to explain the Participatory Commons and the research underlying it for different audiences.
I was awarded a travel grant to attend the Herrenhausen Conference: "(Digital) Humanities Revisited – Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age" in Hannover, Germany, over December 5-7, 2013. I'd like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) for funding travel for 37 early career scholars and for the opportunity to present there.
My lightning talk notes, further information and references for 'Peer production models for academic and amateur historians: challenges and opportunities' are below. Obviously the full reference list for my PhD would be huge so below I've selected items that relate specifically to my poster and talk. PDF of my poster on 'Creating a Digital History Commons through crowdsourcing and participant digitisation'.
Continue reading "'Creating a Digital History Commons through crowdsourcing and participant digitisation' at Herrenhausen DH Conference"
Peer-reviewed article 'From tagging to theorizing: deepening engagement with cultural heritage through crowdsourcing' published in Curator journal
Proof copy available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/39117/.
Abstract: Crowdsourcing, or “obtaining information or services by soliciting input from a large number of people,” is becoming known for the impressive productivity of projects that ask the public to help transcribe, describe, locate, or categorize cultural heritage resources. This essay argues that crowdsourcing projects can also be a powerful platform for audience engagement with museums, offering truly deep and valuable connection with cultural heritage through online collaboration around shared goals or resources. It includes examples of well-designed crowdsourcing projects that provide platforms for deepening involvement with citizen history and citizen science; useful definitions of “engagement”; and evidence for why some activities help audiences interact with heritage and scientific material. It discusses projects with committed participants and considers the role of communities of participants in engaging participants more deeply.
The article was based on my keynote: 'The gift that gives twice: crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage' for 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC' at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.
If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.