2019: an overview(ish)

A very incomplete page…

Projects: Living with Machines

  • Continued recruiting the project team
  • Set up the project website (graphic identity and WordPress template by an agency, working with the project team)
  • Helped devise the Communications strategy

Publications

Ridge, M. (forthcoming). Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: A practical guide to designing and running successful projects. In K. Schuster & S. Dunn (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities. Routledge.

Talks and teaching

June: I was at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to teach Collections as Data with Thomas Padilla for the HILT digital humanities summer school.

An invited talk on 'Voyages of discovery with digital collections' for the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, June 2019

Blog posts

Other

Peer reviewer, Digital Humanities 2019

2018: an overview

2017-18 was a bit of an odd year and I've subsequently reduced the number of invitations I accept each year.

Projects

2018 finished with a bang, as the press release for the British Library/Alan Turing Institute's Living with Machines project went live. I'd been working on the proposal since early 2017. In this project, we're experimenting with 'radical collaborations' around applying data science methods to historical newspaper collections to advance the potential of digital history.

Talks and teaching

January: a lecture on 'Scholarly crowdsourcing: from public engagement to creating knowledge socially' for the Introduction to Digital Humanities Masters course at King's College London, and an 'Overview of Information Visualisation' for the CHASE Winter School: Introduction to Digital Humanities.

February: a full-day workshop on Information Visualisation for PhD students in the Digital Humanities for CHASE.

March: a talk on 'Crowdsourcing: the British Library experience' for CILIP's Multimedia Information & Technology (MmIT) Group's event on 'The wisdom of the crowd? Crowdsourcing for information professionals'.

April: a talk on 'Challenges and opportunities in digital scholarship' for a British Library Research Collaboration Open House, and took part in a panel for the Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference on ‘Sharing knowledge through online engagement’ around Art UK's Art Detective project at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

May: I was in Rotterdam for a EuropeanaTech panel on User Generated & Institutional Data Transcription projects and gave a talk on 'Open cultural data in the GLAM sector' for a CPD25 workshop on The GLAM sector: what can we learn from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

June: with Thomas Padilla I co-taught 'Collections as data' for the HILT Digital Humanities Summer School, June 4–8, 2018, University of Pennsylvania. I then went onto Oberlin College to give a keynote on 'Digital collections as departure points' at the Academic Art Museums and Libraries Summit.

September: a talk on 'Crowdsourcing at the British Library: lessons learnt and future directions' at the Digital Humanities Congress | University of Sheffield, 6th – 8th September 2018. And a 'provocation' for the Building Library Labs event, 'A modest proposal: crowdsourcing is good for all of us'.

November: I travelled to Bonn to do a keynote on 'Libraries and their Communities: Participation from Town Halls to Mobile Phones' for the 2018 SWIB (Semantic Web in Libraries) conference, and gave a preview talk on Living with Machines for the British Library Labs 2018 Symposium.

Publications

An article on Breathing life into digital collections at the British Library for ACCESS / Journal of the Australian School Library Association, 2018.

A chapter for a Routledge publication on research methods in the Digital Humanities, called 'Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: a practical guide to designing and running successful projects' (in process).

Other

I was a peer reviewer for conference proposals and articles for museum studies and digital humanities events and journals.

I also gave internal talks on IIIF and the Universal Viewer and taught Data Visualisation and Crowdsourcing workshops on the British Library's Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

I wrote a number of blog posts, newsletters and press releases for work. I've collected some of those blog posts and newsletter updates for the British Library at Updates from Digital Scholarship at the British Library.

Blog post 'Notes from ‘AI, Society & the Media: How can we Flourish in the Age of AI’' and 'Cross-post: Seeking researchers to work on an ambitious data science and digital humanities project'

2017: an overview

This page is a work in progress…

2017 was an unexpectedly challenging year, as much of it was taken up with treatment for cancer. (I'm fine now).

In February 2017 I did a workshop in Edinburgh for Dr Anouk Lang's Beyond the Black Box: Building Algorithmic and Statistical Literacy through Digital Humanities Tools and Resources and in Santa Barbara for Always Already Computational: Library Collections as Data. I keynoted at DIGIKULT 2017 in Sweden in March, and in June I was in Sydney for the Future Library Congress at EduTECH. I was in Taiwan in August and in October I spoke at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC and gave a keynote on crowdsourcing in Angers, France.

Workshop: Data visualisation for 'Beyond the Black Box'

Beyond the Black Box is a programme of advanced digital humanities workshops at the University of Edinburgh, designed to foster statistical, algorithmic and quantitative literacy. It is directed by Anouk Lang, administered by Robyn Pritzker and funded by a grant from the British Academy.

I was invited to give a workshop on Data Visualisation. My slides are below, and my exercises are collected in a Google Doc for easier access to links.

I developed a new exercise for this and the CHASE workshop, and have blogged about it at Trying computational data generation and entity extraction.

Discussing positive and negative traits of interactive scholarly visualisations.

2016: an overview

This page is a work in progress…

In December I gave a talk for the Association for Project Management’s Knowledge Management SIG event on ‘What does big data mean for project and knowledge managers?’.

In November 2016 I was in Riga, Latvia to give the closing keynote at the Europeana Network Association AGM 2016. In October I spoke at 'What should be in your digital toolbox', gave a keynote, 'Digital history: evolution or transformation?' at The Science of Evolution and the Evolution of the Sciences conference in Leuven, Belgium around October 12th and 13th, 2016 and at Internet Librarian International then chaired the Museums Computer Group's Museums+Tech conference. In August I was in York for 'Negotiating Expertise' and in Helsinki for Museum Theme Days 2016 in September.

In June 2016 I was in Luxembourg for a workshop on Network Visualisation in the Cultural Heritage Sector. My talk notes for Network visualisations and the ‘so what?’ problem are online. I also keynoted at LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) in Helsinki. My slides are online but may not make much sense without notes.

In March 2016 I was at Rice University in Houston then Austin (at the iSchool in UT Austin then St Edwards), then I was on a panel on 'Build the Crowdsourcing Community of Your Dreams' at SXSWi 2016 with Ben Brumfield, Meghan Ferriter and Siobhan Leachman.

In January 2016 I was back in Oxford for a workshop on 'DIY Digitisation' at the Bodleian Libraries.