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Panel: ASPIRE Digital Roundtable: "Horizon Scanning: Living in the Digital World"

I was invited to be a panellist for Oxford ASPIRE's first knowledge sharing event on 13th November 2012, Living in the Digital World: Horizon Scanning for Museums (PDF).  Oxford ASPIRE is a consortium of Oxford University Museums (the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, History of Science, Natural History Museums) and the Oxfordshire County Museums Service.

As they say in their post, ASPIRE Digital Roundtable: "Horizon Scanning: Living in the Digital World", 'This roundtable event brought together a small number of museum professionals to discuss how museums could thrive in the increasingly digital landscape by exploring innovations, opportunities for collaboration and funding sources.

Our 16 delegates gathered at the Pitt Rivers Museum and questions and ideas began bubbling immediately over coffee.  The event officially began with thoughts and provocations from our four expert panelists who gave their over-view of the key digital issues facing museums. Delegates and panelists then entered into a lively and illuminating conversation.' They've linked to podcasts and transcripts of the introductions in their post.

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Workshop: exploring Neatline

A two-hour workshop for the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, on Neatline.  Organised by Anouk Lang, it was their first digital humanities workshop and was designed as an opportunity to learn about Neatline and explore what it could (and couldn't) do.

Neatline workshop notes for the University of Strathclyde (PDF) Neatline workshop slides for the University of Strathclyde (Powerpoint)

Creative Commons Licence This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I've also written up some of my thoughts after the workshop at Reflections on teaching Neatline.

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Guest post: Center for the Future of Museums blog

I co-wrote a post with Suse Cairns in reply to a post from Jasper Visser on Opportunities and Challenges with Reproductions for the American Alliance of Museums' blog.

As the introduction to A Reply to “On the Opportunities and Challenges of Reproductions” says, Jasper's post and our response came out of a conversation on twitter about the launch of the exhibition.  Many thanks to Elizabeth Merritt and the Center for the Future of Museums for hosting our discussion.

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Keynote: Global communities and open cultural data: movements towards linked open data in libraries, archives and museums

I was invited to Taipei, Taiwan for the 'eCulture & Open Cultural Data Forum' by TELDAP (Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Programs), MCN Taiwan and Culturemondo Asia Pacific.  Many thanks to my hosts and organisers for their hospitality, for the meetings they organised with various national museums and for the opportunity to discuss open cultural data with staff from Taiwanese museums, libraries and archives.

As well as my keynote on 'Global communities and open cultural data: movements towards linked open data in libraries, archives and museums', I lead a further day and a half of seminars with Shih-Chieh Ilya Li at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan on:

  • eCulture, Data Immersion & Open Cultural Data
  • Why Open Cultural Data?
  • What is Linked Open Data (LOD) ?
  • Strategy and Planning Open Cultural Data
  • Technologies, standards and licenses for Linked Open Data
  • How to open your cultural Data
  • Group exercise: planning LOD projects
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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.