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Talk: Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage, iSchool, UT Austin

As part of my trip to Texas for SXSW, I was invited to present on 'Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage' at a colloquium at a School of Information Research Event at UT Austin on March 8, 2016.

My thanks to the organisers for their excellent hospitality, and to the attendees for their thoughtful and probing questions!

My abstract: Why and how are museums, libraries, archives and academic projects creating crowdsourcing projects to help digitize collections or enhance their knowledge about them? Based on a review of hundreds of heritage crowdsourcing projects, this talk will highlight examples of successful projects, discuss why members of the public volunteer their time, and consider the different outcomes possible.

Austin's Capitol building
Austin's Capitol building
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Workshop: Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage, Rice University

Photo of campus gate

As part of my trip to Texas for SXSW, I was invited to give a workshop on 'Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage' in the Fondren Library at Rice University's Humanities Research Center Sawyer Seminar series on March 7, 2016. My slides are below. My visit was a great chance to find out more about the teaching and projects at the Research Center, and my thanks go to the organisers for their excellent hospitality.

Abstract: This workshop will provide an overview of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and consider the ethics and motivations for participation. International case studies will be discussed to provide real life illustrations of design tips and to inspire creative thinking.

Photo of campus gate
Rice University
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2015: an overview

An incomplete list of publications, papers, etc. from 2015.

In December 2015 I was in Glasgow and Berlin to talk about crowdsourcing in history and cultural heritage. I was also invited to give a lecture on ‘Digital History’ for Digital Humanities @ Universität Bern and gave an Introduction to Information Visualisation for the CHASE doctoral training programme.

On October 26 I was at the British Museum for the Museums Computer Group’s annual conference and gave a talk on ‘Crowdsourcing, scholarship and the academy’ for the School of Advanced Studies in London, and another on Choosy crowds and the machine age: challenges for the future of humanities crowdsourcing, KCL. I also started working as a Digital Curator with the British Library.

In early September I was in Estonia for the ‘Community Involvement in Theme Museums‘ conference (2nd – 3rd) and then at Kings College London on ‘Choosy crowds and the machine age: challenges for the future of humanities crowdsourcing‘ for Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 21st Century (9th – 10th).

Over the summer I worked on the Hidden Museum Project with the Oxford University Museums, testing QR codes, beacons and other methods for delivering different kinds of content on mobile devices in the Museum of the History of Science, the Museum of Natural History and the Ashmolean. Ben Brumfield and I consulted and wrote for the Wellcome Library on the Wellcome Library Transcribing Recipes crowdsourcing project.

In July I spoke on ‘Open Data: Trends and Practice within Cultural Heritage. AKA, the good, the bad, and the unstructured…' at Pelagios: Linked Pasts and on ‘Let Your Projects Shine: Lightweight Usability Testing for Digital Humanities Projects’ at Oxford’s Digital Humanities Summer School.

In the last week of July I taught ‘Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage’ with Ben Brumfield at the HILT Summer School (Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching) at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Indianapolis, Indiana.

In late June/early July, I was in Sydney for Digital Humanities 2015, gave a half-day workshop on Linking humanities data geospatially with Pelagios and Recogito with Leif Isaksen, and presented a paper (‘Small ontologies, loosely joined’: linked open data for the First World War) in a panel on Linked Open Data and the First World War at Digital Humanities 2015 (based on my experiences as a Fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on histories of World War One with the CENDARI project).

In June 2015 I submitted my thesis (!), presented at Connected Life in Oxford and taught a workshop on Information Visualisation for CHASE Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age.

In May 2015 I gave a keynote on Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage at Nordiske Arkivdage 2015 in Copenhagen and taught a workshop on scholarly data visualisation at the University of St Andrews.

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Exercises for CHASE's Introduction to Information Visualisation

These exercises were prepared for the CHASE Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age event's workshop on Information Visualisation but they're also useful for people who want to learn more about data visualisations in cultural heritage and the humanities.

Exercise 1: compare simple text tools

Time: c. 5 minutes.

Goal: compare the ability of two different tools to help you understand a new text corpus

1.     Load the word cloud site

2.     Then, grab some text:

  • Open another browser tab
  • Go to http://pastebin.com/Nd0a86tm
  • Select and copy the 8 lines of text. The easiest way is to click into the box under 'RAW Paste Data'
  • Paste them into the text box on the Wordle site and hit 'go'
  • You can customise your visualisation using the menu. Which options create a more informative visualisation?

3.     Load the word tree site

  • Go to http://www.jasondavies.com/wordtree/
  • Paste the text into the 'Paste Text' box and hit 'Generate WordTree!' (Grab the text again from Step 2 if necessary)
  • You can click on words on the screen – which words produce the most options?

4.     Discuss

Bearing in mind that this is an unusual corpus, which tool gave you a better sense of its content? Why?

Are these tools better for exploring or explaining data? Why?

If tidying up the data provided – removing punctuation, making spelling consistent, etc – would improve the visualisation, then try editing the text and re-running the visualisation. Did it help? What else could you do?

Exercise 2: exploring scholarly data visualisations

Time: c. 10-15 minutes.

Goal: get hands-on experience and practice critical analysis.

Pair up with your neighbour to explore and discuss one of the visualisations listed on the following page.

Instructions

  1. In your browser, go to one of the sites below
  2. Take a few minutes to explore the visualisation
  3. Then discuss with your neighbour:
    • What do you think is being presented here?
    • Can you easily see where to start and how to use it?
    • What stories or trends can you start to see?
    • Does it work better at one scale over another?
    • Do you find it more effective at aggregate or detail level?
    • Does it present an argument or provide a space for you to explore and develop one?
    • What arguments (statements about the data) does the site present?
    • What have you learned from visualisation that you might not have learned from looking at the data or reading a description of it?
  4. Be prepared to report back to the group. e.g. summarise the site's purpose, visualisation formats and data types, or share unresolved questions or the most interesting parts of your discussion

 

University of Richmond, 'Visualizing Emancipation'

http://www.americanpast.org/emancipation/

Further information: http://dirt.terrypbrock.com/2012/04/visualizing-emancipation-examining-its-process-through-digital-tools/

Stanford 'Mapping the Republic of Letters'

http://www.stanford.edu/group/toolingup/rplviz/rplviz.swf

Further information: http://openglam.org/2012/03/21/mapping-the-republic-of-letters/, http://danbri.org/words/2010/11/22/603

Locating London's Past

http://www.locatinglondon.org/

GAPVis Ancient Places

http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#index

Further information: http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/

Digital Harlem :: Everyday Life 1915-1930

http://digitalharlem.org/

Further information: http://digitalharlemblog.wordpress.com/ http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/evidence/robertson-2012-spring/

Digital Public Library of America's timeline, map, bookshelf

http://dp.la/

Further information: https://dp.la/about and http://dp.la/info/news/blog/

Orbis

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

Further information: http://hestia.open.ac.uk/updating-orbis/

Lost Change

http://tracemedia.co.uk/lostchange/

Further information: http://blog.britishmuseum.org/2014/02/19/lost-change-mapping-coins-from-the-portable-antiquities-scheme/

The State of the Union in Context

http://benschmidt.org/poli/2015-SOTU

Further exercises

Learn more: explore and analyse more visualisations

Sketch out ideas for a visualisation

  • Work out what data you need and the best way to prepare and present it. http://www.dear-data.com has some lovely examples of creative sketches.

Create your own visualisations

These sites can be used with your own or public data:

If you have sensitive data you must check whether any data you load will be made public.

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Talk: Designing Successful Heritage Crowdsourcing Projects, Berlin

I was invited to Berlin to give a public lecture on 'Designing Heritage Crowdsourcing Projects' at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute of the Free University of Berlin on 7 December 2015.

Abstract: Based on a review of the most successful international crowdsourcing projects, this talk will look at the attributes of successful crowdsourcing projects in cultural heritage, including interface and interaction design, participation in community discussion, and understanding participant motivations.