2022: an overview(ish)

A work-in-progress post about what I got up to last year.

The biggest thing I did in 2022 was co-curate an exhibition at Leeds City Museum for the British Library and Living with Machines project.

November: I was invited to the Archives nationales de France conference 'Crowdsourcing et patrimoine culturel écrit', where I spoke on Crowdsourcing as connection: a constant star over a sea of change / Établir des connexions : un invariant des projets de crowdsourcing par Mia Ridge, British Library, Royaume-Uni

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'

Conference presentation: How should Cultural Institutions Open and Connect Data?

I was invited to Taichung, Taiwan to present at Link and Linkage: 2017 International Digital Culture Forum on 'Connected heritage: How should Cultural Institutions Open and Connect Data?'.

From my opening note: 'I will approach the question by describing the mechanisms organisations have used to open and connect data, then I will look at some of the positive outcomes that resulted from their actions. This is not a technical talk about different acronyms, it's about connecting people to our shared heritage.'

As I had to prepare speaker notes for the translators, I'm able to share my notes with you: Connected heritage: How should Cultural Institutions Open and Connect Data?

Taichung City Government CIO, Ching-Teng Hsiao's closing remarks

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Conference presentation: Crowdsourcing in libraries and museums: Challenges, opportunities and digital impacts

I was invited to do a presentation for a conference organised by the Chinese Association of Museums in Taipei, Taiwan. I gave a version of 'Crowdsourcing in libraries and museums: Challenges, opportunities and digital impacts' tailored for their audience.

Abstract:

Crowdsourcing in museums and libraries involves asking the public to help with tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge. This talk will introduce some key examples of successful crowdsourcing projects that have transcribed, categorised, linked and researched millions of cultural heritage and scientific records, and discuss some of the reasons for their success. Digital technologies have enabled exciting new forms of public participation in cultural heritage and the sciences, but they can also challenge museums, libraries and archives to manage the changes that these new opportunities bring. Audience expectations have changed as social media and digital technologies have encouraged greater organisational transparency, and more flexible digitisation and information management practices. How can museums and libraries work with the public to make collections more accessible while making room for people to explore and enjoy collections in new ways?