Category: user experience design and research

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Article: 'From tagging to theorizing: deepening engagement with cultural heritage through crowdsourcing'

Peer-reviewed article 'From tagging to theorizing: deepening engagement with cultural heritage through crowdsourcing' published in Curator journal

Ridge, Mia (2013). From tagging to theorizing: deepening engagement with cultural heritage through crowdsourcing. Curator: The Museum Journal, 56(4) pp. 435–450.

Proof copy available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/39117/.

Abstract: Crowdsourcing, or “obtaining information or services by soliciting input from a large number of people,” is becoming known for the impressive productivity of projects that ask the public to help transcribe, describe, locate, or categorize cultural heritage resources. This essay argues that crowdsourcing projects can also be a powerful platform for audience engagement with museums, offering truly deep and valuable connection with cultural heritage through online collaboration around shared goals or resources. It includes examples of well-designed crowdsourcing projects that provide platforms for deepening involvement with citizen history and citizen science; useful definitions of “engagement”; and evidence for why some activities help audiences interact with heritage and scientific material. It discusses projects with committed participants and considers the role of communities of participants in engaging participants more deeply.

The article was based on my keynote: 'The gift that gives twice: crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage' for 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC' at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

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Guest post 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums' for London Museums Group

I was asked to share some of the lessons I've learnt from building digital participation projects in museums and from my research on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage for the London Museums Group blog following my talk at their “Museums and Social Media” event on 24 May at Tate Britain.

They were published at 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums by Mia Ridge', but as the site doesn't seem to be loading I've re-posted it below. I think most of what I wrote then holds up, but today I'd add a third bonus tip – plan to ingest the results of your crowdsourcing tasks into whatever internal systems are necessary to appropriately integrate and re-share the enhanced or new data.

To pinch from my headings, I discuss the advantages of digital engagement; challenges for museums – new relationships, new authorities, dissolving boundaries; 6 tips for designing digital participation experiences in museums; 2 bonus tips for designing crowdsourcing projects in museums.

There are other event reports at A round up of the LMG Museums and Social Media Event.

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

Continue reading "Guest post 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums' for London Museums Group"

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Card-sorting activity at the Commodity Histories workshop

The AHRC-funded Commodity Histories project aims to produce a 'website that will function as a collaborative space for scholars engaged in commodities-related research'.  The project organised a workshop, 'Designing a collaborative research web space: aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project' in London on 6-7 September 2012.

As part of opening session on the 'aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project and website' I led a card-sorting exercise aimed at finding out how potential scholars in the community of commodity historians would expect to find and interact with content and other scholars in the network.  We prepared print-outs of sample content in advance and asked participants to sort them into groups and then label them.  At the end of the workshop I presented the different headings the groups had come up with and discussed the different ways they'd organised the material.

While some work had been done on the site structure previously, the process was useful for understanding some of the expectations people had about the functionality and sociability of the site as well as checking how they'd expect the site to be organised.  Various other presentations and discussion during the workshop reinforced the idea that the key task of the site is to enable contributors to add content easily and often, and tempered our expectations about how much scholarly networking would be visible as conversations on the site.

has written up some of the workshop at The Boundaries of Commodities.

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Residency: a week of rapid prototyping at the Powerhouse Museum

I spent a week as 'geek-in-residence' with the Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies team at the Powerhouse Museum.  I've written up some of it at Geek for a week: residency at the Powerhouse Museum (though there's a lot more to say about the testing and the idea itself).

Two PDF versions of clickable prototypes tested in the museum:

ConversationsAboutCollections_v1Download
ConversationsAboutCollections_v2Download