Tag: United Kingdom

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'Community Engagement and Special Collections' talk

In April 2024 I was one of four presenters at the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections (AMARC)'s Spring Meeting on 'Community Engagement and Special Collections', sharing our work on 'successful projects and strategies for engaging public audiences in meaningful ways through in-person events and digital outreach activities'

I presented on 'Living with Machines: Crowdsourcing transcriptions for digitised historical collections of the British industrial revolution'. The video from the seminar is below.

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Quoted in Museums Association article on 'Getting to grips with artificial intelligence'

Screenshot from the Museums Association website. Text says: 'AI is set to disrupt all aspects of museum work. But what is it, what does it do and how can we reap the benefits?'

I'm excited to see the Museums Association Museums Journal article on 'Getting to grips with artificial intelligence' by Julie Nightingale go live, as I'm quoted a few times. It feels like months since I talked to the author – a long time in AI, but a relatively short time in digital heritage.

Here's some of what I had to say: 'The British Library’s Ridge suggests people play around with AI to understand what might be coming.

“AI literacy is an important part of good governance,” she says. “People need a solid understanding of where biases are likely to appear, how to review and contest decisions made by algorithms and where sharing data might have privacy or legal implications, so that they can make good decisions about the products they buy or implement. It also helps people plan so that AI tools enhance jobs, rather than attempting to replace them.”'

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New data paper and datasets from crowdsourcing on Living with Machines

After lots of hard work by me, Nilo Pedrazzini, Miguel V., Arianna Ciula and Barbara McGillivray, we have a data paper in the Journal of Open Humanities Data: Language of Mechanisation Crowdsourcing Datasets from the Living with Machines Project.

And huge thanks to the thousands of Zooniverse volunteers who annotated 19th century newspaper articles to create the datasets we've published alongside the data paper!

Abstract: We present the ‘Language of Mechanisation’ datasets with examples of re-use in visualisations and analysis. These reusable CSV files, published on the British Library’s Research Repository, contain automatically-transcribed text from 19th century British newspaper articles. Volunteers on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform took part in tasks that asked ‘How did the word x change over time and place?’ They annotated articles with pre-selected meanings (senses) for the words coach, car, trolley and bike.

The datasets can support scholarship on a range of historical and linguistic research areas, including research on crowdsourcing and online volunteering behaviours, data processing and data visualisations methodologies.

The two datasets described are at:

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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.