Cultural heritage technologies, user experience design and research, digital humanities
A quick post because I'm excited to see the book come together: 'Museums Forward: social media, broadcasting and the web' is edited by Gregory Chamberlain and will be published in March 2011. My chapter is called 'All change please: your museum and audiences online'.
From the blurb: "In this new ground-breaking book leading innovators from both sides of the Atlantic explore how museums can create an effective social media strategy to engage with new and existing audiences."
I gave a talk at OpenTech 2010 on 'Museums meet the 21st century' – I've blogged my slides and notes.
In a moment of constructive procrastination, I've migrated my site over from custom PHP pages to WordPress. Lots of bits still to tidy up and move over, but it's been a smooth process generally. It's even been fun, and I think I can see potential for using blogging software as a kind of 'living CV' – I haven't really updated my CV since 2005, but the occasional post about papers or project milestones should give the casual visitor an idea of my current interests and work.
Somehow I ended up organising a meetup about 'Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage'. I've written about it for the UK MCG blog and there's a write-up of 'linking museums' from various people on the 'Museums and the machine-processable web' wiki. If you're interested in 'helping museums make content re-usable; helping programmers access museum content', the wiki is a good place to join in.
I've also shared some thoughts on publishing re-usable object data and subject authorities from the Science Museum on the wiki.
A paper for Museums and the Web conference in Denver, April 2010.
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.
Keywords: experiment, collaboration, mashup, API, social media, exhibition, collections
My slides are also available on Slideshare and below. As in 2009, I helped facilitate the Museums and the Web 2010 Unconference.