Cultural heritage technologies, user experience design and research, digital humanities
I was invited to Auckland Museum to give a lecture on 'Inspiring connections with collections'.
Discussions with staff and the process of preparing for the talks inspired two blog posts: 'Designing for participatory projects: emergent best practice, getting discussion started' and 'What are the right questions about museum websites?'.
In April I was invited to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, in Wellington, New Zealand, to talk about the role of museum websites in the relationships between museums and their audiences.
Preparing for the talk, the discussion afterwards and another talk I did in Auckland inspired two blog posts: 'Designing for participatory projects: emergent best practice, getting discussion started' and 'What are the right questions about museum websites?'.
I ran a 45 minute workshop on 'lightweight usability testing' at dev8D, an event for (IT) developers in the UK's higher education sector. From the abstract:
"Usability doesn't have to be a drag, and user testing doesn't have to take months and a cast of thousands. Following the principle that 'any user testing is better than no user testing', lightweight usability is based on the idea that all you need to produce useful test results to improve your software is a bit of planning and a couple of hours.
In this session you will learn to plan and run a lightweight usability test based on a project you've worked on. At the end of the workshop we'll run a live usability test based on participant's examples from the workshop."
During the Museum Computer Network conference (MCN2011) I was part of a panel discussing 'What's the point of a museum website?' with Koven Smith, Eric Johnson, Nate Solas and Suse Cairns.
I've written a report of the session at Report from 'What's the point of a museum website' at MCN2011 and blogged some of my thinking about the point of museum websites in Brochureware, aggregators and the messy middle: what's the point of a museum website?.
On October I was on a panel on the Digital Humanities at the Open University – my talk notes are blogged at Notes on current issues in Digital Humanities.
I co-authored a paper titled ‘Colloquium: Digital Technologies: Help or Hindrance for the Humanities?’ (with Elton Barker, Chris Bissell, Lorna Hardwick, Allan Jones and John Wolffe), published in the ‘Digital Futures Special Issue Arts and Humanities in HE’ edition of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.