The book 'Museums At Play: Games, Interaction and Learning' is edited by freelance strategist Katy Beale and published by MuseumsEtc. My chapter, 'Crowdsourcing games: playing with museums' discusses the power of crowdsourcing games and the participation economy, possible new relationships with audiences and new types of engagement with objects, and the potential for an ecosystem of museum games based around collections.
Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections
My slides for 'Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections' for Museums and the Web, 2011 in Philadelphia, USA. They cover the material in my MW2011 paper, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections.
Paper: Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections
My paper for Museums and the Web 2011, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections, is online and is also available in the printed proceedings.
Abstract: Crowdsourcing the creation, correction or enhancement of data about objects through games is an attractive proposition for museums looking to maximize use of their collections online without committing intensive curatorial resources to enhancing catalogue records. This paper investigates the optimum game designs to encourage participation and the generation of useful data through a case study of the project Museum Metadata Games that successfully designed games that created improved metadata for 'difficult' objects from two science and history museum collections.
Keywords: collections, games, crowdsourcing, objects, metadata, tagging
2010: an overview
An incomplete, retrospective list of work, talks and more in 2010…
In April I gave a talk and wrote a long paper Cosmic Collections: Creating a Big Bang at Museums and the Web in Denver (then got stuck in the US while the Icelandic volcano dust kept flights to Europe grounded). My abstract: "Cosmic collections' was a Web site mashup competition held by the Science Museum in late 2009 to encourage members of the public to create new interfaces with newly accessible collections data prepared for the Cosmos & Culture exhibition. The paper reports on the lessons learned during the process of developing and running the competition, including the organisational challenges and technical context. It discusses how to create room for experimentation within institutional boundaries, the tools available to organise and publicise such an event on a limited budget, the process of designing a competition, and the impact of the competition. It also investigates the demand for museum APIs.'
In June 2010 I went to Science Hack Day at the Guardian and worked on 'The Revolutionaries' with Premasagar Rose, Ian Wooten, Tom Morris, Inayaili de León, Andy McMillan and Richard Boulton – and it won a prize for the hack most useful in education! Prem wrote a blog post about it: Science Hack Day and The Revolutionaries.
In July I organised a meetup about 'Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage
In September I gave a talk at OpenTech 2010 on 'Museums meet the 21st century'.
I wrote a chapter called 'All change please: your museum and audiences online' for the book Museums Forward: social media and the web, edited by Gregory Chamberlain.
In late 2010 I was madly working on my MSc dissertation on crowdsourcing games for museums, which included a lot of research, design and code: metadata crowdsourcing games for museums.
Research, design and code: metadata crowdsourcing games for museums
For more information, see the page about my MSc Dissertation: crowdsourcing games for museums. The beta games I made are hosted at Museum Metadata Games (and have recently been updated to include some of the million images the British Library have released on Flickr Commons). The initial data was loaded from APIs from the Science Museum and Powerhouse Museum.
