Category: open cultural data

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Conference paper: Play as Process and Product: On Making Serendip-o-matic

The abstract for our Digital Humanities 2014 conference paper is below. Scott's posted his notes from the first part, my notes for the middle part How did 'play' shape the design and experience of creating Serendip-o-matic? are on Open Objects and Brian's are to follow.

Play as Process and Product: On Making Serendip-o-matic

Amy Papaelias, State University of New York at New Paltz

Brian Croxall, Emory University

Mia Ridge, The Open University

Scott Kleinman, California State University, Northridge

Summary

Animated gif of a green cartoon hippopotamus with a speech bubble saying 'feeding the machine'

Who says scholarship can't be playful? Serendip-o-matic is a "serendipity engine" that was created in less than a week by twelve digital humanities scholars, developers, and librarians. Designed to replicate the surprising experience of discovering an unexpected source while browsing library stacks or working in an archive, the visual and algorithmic design of Serendip-o-matic emphasizes playfulness. And since the tool was built by a group of people who were embarking on a difficult task but weren't yet sure of one another's names, the process of building Serendip-o-matic was also rather playful, encouraging participants to take risks, make mistakes, and learn something new. In this presentation, we report on how play shaped the creation, design, and marketing of Serendip-o-matic. We conclude by arguing for the benefits of more playful work in academic research and scholarship, as well as considering how such "play" can be evaluated in an academic context.

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CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowship: 'Bridging collections with a participatory Commons: a pilot with World War One archives'

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:

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Keynote 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons' at Sharing is Caring

Photo of glider plane against blue sky
Image: Library of Congress

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.

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Keynote: 'A Brief History of Open Cultural Data'

I was invited to give a talk (which seemed to turn into a plenary then a keynote along the way) for the GLAM-Wiki 2013 conference. I thought it might be useful to put current discussions around opening cultural data for use on Wikipedia and other projects that require content to be licensed for re-use in context (for the museum, library and archive professionals in the audience) and some of the contradictory instructions issued to institutions with cultural, scientific or historical content (for the Wikipedians in the audience, though of course there was a huge overlap between those groups).

I've blogged my talk notes as 'An (even briefer) history of open cultural data' at GLAM-Wiki 2013 at Open Objects or there's a video of my talk.

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Paper: Where next for open cultural data in museums?

My latest article for Museum Identity magazine, Where next for open cultural data in museums?, is now live online and in the current print issue of Museum-iD 13.

Site abstract: "Museums have increasingly been joining the global movement for open data by opening up their databases, sharing their images and releasing their knowledge. Mia Ridge presents a brief history of open cultural data projects, explores some reasons why some data is relatively under-used and looks to the future of open cultural data".