Cultural heritage technologies, user experience design and research, digital humanities
I was invited to give an hour-long talk for the Association for Project Management's Knowledge Management SIG event on 'What does big data mean for project and knowledge managers?'. I shared lessons from work in cultural heritage, including the British Library and Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, on 'Planning for Big Data'.
I presented a paper, 'Small ontologies, loosely joined': linked open data for the First World War, in a panel on Linked Open Data and the First World War at Digital Humanities 2015 (based on my experiences as a Fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on histories of World War One with the CENDARI project).
I've been asked to give a workshop on Information Visualisation for the CHASE Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age training programme in June 2015.
The workshop will introduce students to the use of visualisations for understanding, analysing and presenting large-scale datasets in the Humanities, enabling scholars to ask increasingly complex research questions.
Slides, sample data and instructions for exercises are downloadable here: CHASE InfoVis Handouts 2015.
Links for the various exercises are collected below for ease of access.
Books
Newspapers
Google Fusion Tables: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/data?dsrcid=implicit
An Excel version of this exercise is available at https://www.openobjects.org.uk/2015/03/creating-simple-graphs-with-excels-pivot-tables-and-tates-artist-data/
Google Fusion Tables: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/data?dsrcid=implicit
Explore more visualisations:
Sketch ideas for visualisations:
Try visualising data in different tools:
Try visualising existing data
As part of my Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin's Long Room Hub I gave a lecture on 'A pilot with public participation in historical research: linking lived experiences of the First World War'.
The abstract and podcast are below, and there's further information about my CENDARI Fellowship here.
Abstract: The centenary of World War One and the digitisation of records from a range of museums, libraries and archives has inspired many members of the public to research the lives of WWI soldiers. But it is not always easy to find or interpret military records. What was it like to be in a particular battalion or regiment at a particular time. Can a 'collaborative collection' help provide context for individual soldiers' experience of the war by linking personal diaries, letters and memoirs to places, people and events? What kinds of digital infrastructure are needed to support research on soldiers in the Great War? This lecture explores the potential for collaborating with members of the general public and academic or amateur historians to transcribe and link disparate online collections of World War One material. What are the challenges and opportunities for participatory digital history?
A lecture by Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Mia Ridge (The Open University). Mia is a Transnational Access fellow, funded by the CENDARI project (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure).
I was delighted to be invited to present at New Zealand's 2014 National Digital Forum conference in Wellington. I was asked to speak on my work on the 'participatory commons'. As a focus for explaining the need for a participatory commons, I asked, 'What could we create if museums, libraries and archives pooled their collections and invited specialists and enthusiasts to help link and enhance their records?'.
As a conceptual framework rather than a literal technical architecture, every bit of clearly licensed content with (ideally) structured data published around it makes a contribution to 'the commons'. In my keynote I explored some reasons why building tightly-focused projects on top of that content can help motivate participation in crowdsourcing and citizen history, and some reasons why it's still hard (hint: it needs great content supported by relevant structured data), using my TCD/CENDARI research project on 'lived experiences of World War One' as an example.
Slide one from @mia_out talk. Solid gold. #NDF2014 pic.twitter.com/BuTkSFHBVc
— Chris McDowall (@fogonwater) November 25, 2014
The video is now online.