Category: open cultural data

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'Cosmic Collections' in the tech press

The 'Cosmic Collections' crowdsourced web mashup competition I ran was picked up by two very cool web developer sites, the Yahoo Developer Network and the Programmable Web.

Yahoo Developer Network: A new API and hack competition – this time not from a tech company but by a museum!

Programmable Web: Science Museum Opens API and Challenges Developers to Mashup the Cosmos

Two favourite quotes: a "crusade to bring museums out into the open as places of innovation rather than preservation" (Yahoo) and, "with the rollout of a new API to provide access to information about some of its exhibits, the museum itself has become an example of technological innovation" (Programmable Web).

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Museum API wiki

I've been maintaining a publicly-editable wiki, museum-api.pbwiki.com since early 2009.  The impetus was the development of an API for a subset of the Science Museum's collections.  I introduced it with a post on Open Objects, Get thee to a wiki – the great API challenge in action, saying:

Help us work on an informal, lightweight way of devising shared data, API standards for museum and cultural heritage organisations – museum-api.pbwiki.com is open for business.

These days, the focus is on collating a list of cultural heritage APIs and open and/or linked datasets from museums, libraries, galleries, archives etc and collecting examples of things made with cultural and historical data, with the core goal of cultural heritage organisations make content re-usable and helping programmers access cultural and historic content.

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2006: an overview

An incomplete, retrospective list of work, talks and more in 2006…

I gave a talk on the Design and development of the Dyson Archive of medieval London property transactions (Powerpoint slides) at a seminar on 'The Dyson Archive of medieval London property transactions: a seminar to discuss future work', June 12, 2006, London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre. I also published on The Tony Dyson Archive Project, with Nathalie Cohen and Nick Holder: a 'report of a pilot study investigating the creation of a digital archive of medieval property transactions along the City waterfront'.

Photo of a figurine of a bear in a museum display
Bear figurine at Catalhoyuk Exhibition, Istanbul

I worked at Çatalhöyük in Turkey over the summer and in the off-season, some of which is documented in Archive report: Çatalhöyük Archive Report 2006; there's an excerpt of my main bits at https://doi.org/10.17613/2shn-2v07.

Çatalhöyük blog posts, 2006:

I gave a paper: Clay pipe recording at MoLAS and the stamped makers' mark website at the SCPR Annual Conference, September 16, 2006, London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre, Mortimer Wheeler House: 'The paper discusses the process from initial specification through requirements gathering, database design, development of the database application and website, to publication online'.

I gave a seminar paper on 'The IT Strategy for Exploring 20th Century London' for the Exploring 20th Century London Project, September 25, 2006, at the Museum in Docklands, London.

After working in Turkey I travelled through Romania, Moldova, Transdniestr, and Ukraine.