Open Objects

It's Backup Saturday!

2012-01-21T12:17:00.001Z

Or for the archivally-minded, Digital Preservation Saturday, and more generally 'digital housekeeping is a lifesaver'. This post is an attempt to reduce the number of sad status updates or requests for help I see when people have lost years of personal photos, contacts or calendars when their laptop or phone died or was stolen, or when people can't recover that vital document for their research or tax return... There's never a perfect time to do it, so just back up your files this weekend.

If you don't have an external hard drive order one online and in the meantime, burn to a CD or DVD. There's no harm in having lots of copies (barring confusion over different versions of docs), so if you want to be really careful, swap external drives with a friend so you've each got an off-site copy of your most important files. Use online services like Dropbox (my referral link, non-referral link) or SugarSync (my referral link, non-referral link) to keep files on your computer backup up online, but don't rely on them alone. (The referral links give us each extra storage, which is nice.)

Backup email
Things change all the time so always check for more recent advice (this goes for everything on the page), but this article covers some good options for backing up Gmail and here's information on backing up Thunderbird, and try this if you're stuck on Outlook. I download an old Yahoo account to Thunderbird via POP mail, which might be the easiest way to deal with YMail and Hotmail.

While you're at it, back up your profile or preferences for your web browser - it's amazing how much information is stored in your browser history, bookmarks, etc.

Backup social media
'Turbulence' seems to be the IT trend for this decade (and maybe every decade), so it's a good idea to regularly back up whatever social media sites you rely on. I haven't tried services like Backupify - if you've got experience with them, let me know in the comments. Check back over your registration emails to remind yourself which services you've signed up for and use that as a checklist.

Services that backup tweets and other social media come and go (like Twapperkeeper and Twitoaster), so it's a good idea to not only choose services that let you easily export your archive, but also to put a monthly note in your calender to go in and actually run the export. Saved copies of web pages might not work later, so a really low-tech solution is to copy all the text in a page and dump it into a text file or e.g Word document. I use SearchHash to archive hashtags, but you have to get in quickly as the Twitter API often only provides access to the past few days' tweets. You can also archive tweets via Google spreadsheets.

You can download your data from Facebook via the 'Download a copy of your Facebook data' on your settings page - it's not perfect, but again, it's better than nothing. While Flickr is a good option for backing up images, you might also want to save the tags and comments that live on Flickr. There are a number of tools for backing up Flickr, try these or these to start with.

Backup websites
Most blogs will let you export your posts, but the exported file isn't usually 'human-readable' until you've imported it into another blog, and there's always a chance that you'll lose some information.

An option that works well on all kinds of websites is HTTrack - I've used it for archiving sites and the results are good - it creates a locally-browseable static version of your site, preserving content and layouts. This isn't the same as backing up your code or databases, but if you're at that point I assume you know how to backup these yourself. Bonus points if you've tested restoring from backups to check that the process actually works!

Backup devices
You can back up Apple products like iPods, iPhones, iPads with iTunes, but it doesn't hurt to download photos etc into other folders too - both MacOS and Windows have system apps that will download photos when you plug in the device - 'Image Capture' on my Mac and an Explorer window on my PC.

Nokia phones can be backup with Nokia PC Suite on Windows or iSync on MacOS (can be tricky).

I have no experience with Android or Blackberry, so share any tips you've got in the comments and I'll update this.

More digital housekeeping...
If you've made it this far, why not check that your anti-virus software is up-to-date, and run a deep scan? If you haven't got anti-virus software, get some now! MoneySavingExpert has a useful guide to Free Antivirus Software.

And if you've already done all that, why not offer to help a friend get their backup and anti-virus sorted?

Can ugly babies save museums?

2011-12-23T12:19:00.000Z

Since coming across Ugly Renaissance Babies, I've been wondering: is Tumblr* the best thing to happen to broad public engagement with art history**? They're dead simple posts - an image and a short comment, but they spread widely (as you can see from the number of re-posts), and arguably make renaissance art more interesting to people who wouldn't normally view it. Can sites that curate content from across different collections like this create serendipity through decontextualisation, and bring art history to the masses?

Like image macros, they can bring history and popular culture together in amusing ways (e.g. Joseph Ducreux, the Bayeux Tapestry and song lyrics), but is this irreverent commentary and re-contextualisation exactly the kind of thing that skeptical curators worried about when we were all getting excited about online collections? So I also have an entirely different question - does it matter to museums, galleries if (like the V&A) your painting appears in Ugly Renaissance Babies?

Attributed to Master of the Kress Epiphany, The Expulsion of the Money-Changers (detail), around 1480-1500

'We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious.'

Is it ok to point out 'bad' art like this? Visitors often make rude comments about the ugly babies or whatever as they pass through museum galleries, but unless someone is there to hear them their comments are ephemeral.

And does it matter if the site author doesn't link back to the holding collection or image source? [I think it does - for context and finding related items more than ownership, but I've been told that's a museum-y way of looking at it.]

I posted the tumblr link and asked some of these questions a while ago on Twitter, but frustratingly, I can't get back as far as the original post in the @-mentions page so I'm missing any comments I didn't reply directly to at the time. (The reliability of free social media services is a whole other post...) The one set of comments I can retrieve was from Erika Taylor (@erikajoy), who said, 'surely you would be proud as punch having an original renaissance ugly baby in your collection? May change the significance perhaps' ... 'an interesting additional social significance to add to whatever the existing significance is' and best of all,

'also, how cool would it be if museums collected memes of their paintings back into their collection.'

Finally, since this is presumably my last post for the year, I'd like to thank you for reading and commenting, and for inspiring conversations at conferences and on twitter - may your 2012 bring wondrous things to you and yours.

* insert your favourite social media service here.
** I suspect artistic objects are more 'portable' than social history or science objects, as they make visual sense without a story explaining what they are or why they're important.

Why do people rally to save libraries but not museums?

2011-12-08T11:29:00.001Z

An experiment capturing a conversation with Storify...

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed and let me share their comments. P.S. You know your sector is loved when there's a Ryan Gosling 'hey girl' tumblr about you...

On releasing museum data and the importance of licenses

2011-11-13T15:06:00.000Z

I've been preparing for the workshop on 'Hacking and mash-ups for beginners' I'm running at the Museum Computer Network conference (MCN2011) this year, which as always means poking around the GLAM APIs, linked and open data services page for some nice datasets to use in exercises. Meanwhile, people have been using NMSI data at Culture Hack North this weekend, and a question from that event made me realised I never blogged here about the collections data released by NMSI (i.e. the UK Science Museum, National Media Museum and National Railway Museum) back in March 2011.

There's more in the post I wrote on the museum developers blog at the time, Collections data published, but in summary:

We’ve released the files [218,822 object records, 40,596 media records and 173 event records] as a lightweight experiment – we’d like to understand whether, and if so, how, people would use our data. We’d also like to explore the benefits for the museum and for programmers using our data – your feedback will inform decisions about future investment in more structured data as well as helping shape our understanding of the requirements of those users. The files are in CSV format – because it’s a really simple format, viewable in a text editor, we hope that it will be usable by most people.

And since someone asked for some background on how I dealt with the organisational issues, the short answer is - I was pragmatic, figured any reasonable data was better than none, and kept it simple. Or, as I wrote at the time in Update on collections data and geocoded NRM data:

A few people have commented on the licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, CC BY-NC-SA) and on the format (CSV). As tomorrow is my last day, I can’t really speak for the museum but the intention is to learn from how people use the data – the things they make, the barriers they face, etc – and iterate (as resources allow) until we get to an optimal solution (or solutions). So please get in touch if you’ve got requests or think you can help clear up some of the issues these kinds of projects face, because there’s a good chance you’ll help make a difference.

The licence is a pragmatic solution – it’s clarification of existing terms rather than a change to our terms, because this avoided a need for legal advice, policy review, etc, that would have added several months to the process.

And yes, I know CSV is quick and dirty, but it’s effective. The museum sector is still working out how to match the resources available with the needs of mash-up type developers who work best with JSON and those who are aiming for linked open data; my hope is that your feedback on this will help museums figure out how to support people using open data in various forms. A simple solution like this also means it’s easy for the museum to re-run the export to update the data as time goes on, and that anyone, geek or not, can open the files without being startled by angle brackets and acronyms. Also, did I mention it was quick?

In some ways, 2011 has been the year I really understood how much of a barrier a 'non-commercial' license is to re-use ('Wired releases images via Creative Commons, but reopens a debate on what “noncommercial” means' is quite a useful article for understanding the confusion though the LOD-LAM Summit was really where it came together for me). Even I've struggled with questions like 'does a non-commercial license mean I can or can't upload the data to Google Fusion Tables to clean it?', let alone 'can a widget made with non-commercial data be displayed on an ad-supported blog site?'.

Most people who want to play with heritage data want to do the right thing, so an ambiguous 'non-commercial' license effectively prevents them using it (people who want to do bad things with it would probably just scrape the data anyway). I get the sense that museums (and other GLAM orgs) are strongly loss averse, so a full 'commercial use ok' statement might be a bit much, but maybe we can do more to define exactly what's reasonable 'commercial' use and what's not? The Wired article provides some useful starting questions, as does Europeana's discussion of their Data Exchange Agreement. Maybe 2012 will be the year we start to provide answers...

My Europeana Tech keynote: Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation

2011-11-07T00:46:00.000Z

This is a slightly abridged version of my notes for my keynote, 'Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation' at EuropeanaTech (#etech11) in Vienna in October 2011.

Introduction
I'm really excited about being here to talk about some of my favourite things with you. I think helping people appreciate cultural heritage is one of the best jobs in the world so I feel lucky to be here with people working toward the same goal.

This is a chance to remind ourselves why we should get audiences participating digitally – how does it benefit both GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and their audiences? I'm going to take you through some examples of digital participation and explain why I think they're useful case studies. I'll finish by summarising what we can learn from those case studies, looking for tips you can take back to your organisations. Hopefully we'll have time for a few questions or some discussion.

Why enable participation?
Isn't it easier to just keep doing what we're already doing? Maybe not – here are some problems your GLAM organisation might be facing...

You need to think digitally to enable participation at scale – to reach not tens or hundreds, but thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. As cultural heritage organisations, we have lots of experience with access and participation at reference desks and in galleries. We are good at creating experiences to engage, delight, and educate in person, but these are limited by the number of staff required, the materiality of the objects or documents, the size of a venue, its location and opening hours. We're still learning how to translate those brilliant participative experiences into the digital domain...

Collections are big, resources are small. In most cases we're still digitising catalogue records, let alone taking images and writing beautiful contextualised interpretative material for our collections. We'll be at it for centuries if we try to do it alone...

What's more, it's not enough for content to be online – it has to be findable. Our digitised content is still not very discoverable in search engines – which means it's effectively invisible to most potential audiences. We need better content to help search engines find the stuff we've put so much work into putting online. For example, I wanted to use Europeana images to illustrate my slides, but I had trouble finding images to match my ideas – but if other people had tagged them with words like 'happiness', 'excitement', 'crowds', I might have been able to find what I needed.

User-contributed content can help bridge the 'semantic gap' between the language used in catalogues and the language that most people would use to look for content.

Even when our content is found by our audiences, it's not always very accessible without information about the significance, and cultural and historical context of the item. Further, in Europeana's case, there's a gap between the many languages of the user community and the catalogue metadata; as well as gaps between historical and contemporary language. Sadly, at the moment, many records lack enough context for a non-expert to have a meaningful experience with them.

Why support participation?
So, those are some of the problems we're looking for solve... what are the benefits of digital participation?
Firstly, the benefits to organisations...

Engagement and participation is often part of your core mission.

inspire, passion, educate, enhance, promote preserve, record, access, learn, discover, use, memory, culture, conservation, innovation

I had a look at some mission statements from various museums, libraries, and archives, and these are the words that frequently occurred. The benefits of audience participation are both tangible and intangible, and exactly how they relate to your mission (and can be measured in relation to it) depends on the organisation. And don't forget that access may not be enough if your content isn't also discoverable and engaging.

Participation can increase traffic. It's pretty simple - if content is more discoverable, more people will discover it. If audiences can actively participate, they'll engage with your collections for longer, and return more often. They may even turn into physical visitors or buy something online...

Turn audiences into advocates - there are many people who forget that GLAMs even exist once they've left school – but these are often the people we can reach with digital projects. When people directly benefit from your resources, they know why your organisation is important. You're no longer dusty old stuff in boxes, you're their history, part of the story of how their lives came to be and how their future is formed. When people have a great experience with you, they become fans. When you encourage people to participate in meaningful work, they gain a sense of ownership and pride. These intangible outcomes can be as important as the content created through audience participation. It's a chance to let people see the full complexity of what you do, how much work goes into providing access and interpretation; understand that what they see on the shelves or in the galleries is the tip of the iceberg..

There are more experts outside your GLAM than within. Participatory projects let you access external knowledge. This knowledge can include the experience of using, repairing or building an object; memories of the events or places you've recorded; or it may be specialist knowledge they've built through their own research. Let them share their knowledge with you, and through you, with your audiences.

Finally, the rest of the world is moving from broadcast to dialogue and interaction. If you spend time around kids, you may have seen them interact with old-fashioned screens – for them, an interface you can only look at is broken.

Benefits to audience

It's all very well saying participation creates deeper engagement, but rather than tell you again, I'd rather show you with a quick thought experiment.

First I want you to imagine taking a photo of an object in a museum. Ok – so, how many times do you really go back and look at that photo? How much do you remember about that object? Do you find yourself thinking about it later? Do you ever have a conversation with friends about it?

Now I want you to imagine sketching the object, perhaps at this handy sketching station in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon.

As you draw, you'll find yourself engaging with the particular materiality of the object - the details of its construction, the way time has affected it. You may start wondering about the intention of the creators, what it was like to use it or encounter it in everyday life. In having an active relationship with that object, you've engaged more deeply, perhaps even changed a little as a result. New questions have been raised that you may find yourself pondering, and may even decide to find out more, and start your own research, or share your feelings with others.

Perhaps surprisingly, even the act of tagging an object has a similar effect, because you have to pay it some attention to say something about it...

A big benefit for audiences is that participation is rewarding. There are many reasons why, but these are some I think are relevant to participation. Games researcher Jane McGonigal (Gaming the future of museums) says people crave:

1. satisfying work to do
2. the experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

Participation in digital cultural heritage projects can meet all those needs.

Types of participation

The Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education came up with these forms of public participation in science research. Nina Simon of the Museum 2.0 blog mapped them to museums and added 'co-option'; I've included 'platform'.

Contributory - Most GLAM user-generated content projects. Designed by the organisation, the public contributes data.
Collaborative – the public may be active partners in some decisions, but the project is lead by the organisation
Co-creative – all partners define goals and make decisions together
Platform – organisation as venue or host for other activity.

It's also important to remember that there are some types of participation where the value lies mostly in the effect of the act of creation for the individual – for example, most commenting doesn't add much to my experience of the thing commented on. However, sometimes there's also value more widely – for example, when someone comments and includes a new fact or interesting personal story. Taking this further, participatory projects can be designed so that each contribution helps meet a defined goal. Crowdsourcing involves designing carefully scaffolded tasks so that the general public can contribute to a shared goal. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is probably most often contributory rather than collaborative or co-creative.

Case studies
I've chosen two established examples and two experimental ones to demonstrate how established digital participation is, and also where it's going...

Flickr Commons - I'm sure you've all probably heard of this, but it's a great reminder of how effective simply sharing content in places where people hang out can be. The first tip: go fishing where the fish are biting. Find the digital spaces where people are already engaging with similar content.

Example page: [Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass.]. You can see from the number of views, comments, tags, favourites and notes that organisations are still finding much higher levels of discoverability, traffic and user contributions on the Commons than they'd ever get on their own, individual sites. It's also a nice example of the public identifying a location, and there are wonderful personal recollections and family histories in the comments below.

Trove - crowdsourcing OCR correction. Tasks like OCR correction that require judgement or complicated visual processing are perfect for crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing can solve real problems – helping scientists identify galaxies and proteins that could save lives, or providing data about climate change through history. In this example, crowdsourcing is helping correct optical character recognition (OCR) errors. In the example here, the correction is subtle, but as someone from the location described, I can tell you that the transcription now makes a lot more sense... And making that correction felt good.

According to the National Library of Australia, by February 2011 they had '20,000+ people helping out and 30 million lines of text had been corrected during the last 2 years'. This is a well-designed interface. Their clear 'call to action' – 'fix this text' – is simple and located right where it needs to be. Another tip: you don't need to register, but you can if you want to track your progress. Registration isn't a barrier, and it's presented as a benefit to the audience, not the organisation. They've also got a forum as a platform for conversation between participants.

So, crowdsourcing is great. But as crowdsourcing gets more popular, you will be competing for 'participation bandwidth' with other participatory and crowdsourcing projects – people will be deciding whether to work with your site or something else that meets their needs... What to do?

Well, it turns out that crowdsourcing games can act as 'participation engines'...

[I then talked about 'a small tagging game I researched, designed and made in my evenings and weekends, so that you can see the potential for crowdsourcing games even for GLAMs that don't have a lot of resources' - if you're curious, it's probably easiest to check out the slides at http://www.slideshare.net/miaridge/everyone-wins-crowdsourcing-games-and-museums alongside the video at http://vimeo.com/26858316].

Because crowdsourcing games can be more accessible to the general public, they can also increase the number of overall contributors, as well as encouraging each contributor to stay for longer, do more work, engage more deeply. Crowdsourcing games can be much more productive than a non-game interface by encouraging people to spend more time and play with more content. If games not suitable for your audience, you can adopt some of the characteristics of games – clear initial tasks to start with and a sense of the rules of the game, good feedback on the results of player actions towards a goal, mastering new skills and providing interesting problems to solve...

Continuing the [Europeana Tech] theme of openness, this project was only possible because the Science Museum (UK) and the Powerhouse Museum had APIs into their object records - I was able to create a game that united their astronomy objects without ever having to negotiate a partnership or licensing agreement.

Oramics - co-creation (and GLAM as platform). My final example is something I worked on just before I left the Science Museum but I make the caveat that I can't claim any credit for all the work done since, and I haven't seen any internal evaluation on the project.

The Oramics project was a conscious experiment in co-curation and public history, part of a wider programme of research. This is the Oramics machine. It's a difficult object to interpret – it's a hand-built synthesiser, and not much to look at - it's all about how it sounded, but it's too fragile to restore to working order. So the museum needed help interpreting the object, in understanding how to explain its significance and market it to new audiences. They tried a few different things in this project... They worked with young people from the National Youth Theatre who met museum staff to learn about the people who invented and built the machine, and they visited the object store to see the machine. They worked with developers to make an app to recreate the sounds of the synthesiser so that people could make new music with it. They also worked with a group of co-curators recruited online to help make it interesting to general visitors as well as music fans – the original call to action was something like 'we have an amazing object we need to bring to life, and six empty cases – help us fill them!'.

While the main outputs of all this activity are pretty traditional – a performance event, an exhibition – it's also been the catalyst for the creation of an ad hoc online community and conversations on Facebook and blogs.

As Clay Shirky told the Smithsonian 2.0 workshop in 2009, it's possible that "the artefact itself has created the surface to which the people adhere. ... Every artefact is a latent community". It's nice to think we're finally getting to that point.

Best practice tips
So what do you need to think about to design a participatory project?

Have an answer to 'Why would someone spend precious time on your project?'
Be inspired by things people love
Design for the audience you want
Make participating pleasurable
Don't add unnecessary friction, barriers
Show how much you value contributions
Validate procrastination - offer the opportunity to make a difference, and show, don't tell, how it's making a difference
Make it easy to start participating, design scaffolded tasks to keep people going
Let audiences help manage problems
Test with users; iterate; polish
Empower audience to keep the place tidy – let them know what's acceptable and what's discouraged and how they can help.

Best practice within your GLAM
How can your organisation make the most of the opportunities digital participation provides?

Have a clear objective
Know how to measure success
Allow for community management resources
Realistically assess fears, decide acceptable risk
Put the audience's needs first. You need a balance between the task want to achieve, the skills and knowledge of audience and the content you have to work with.
Fish where the fish are - find the spaces where people are already engaging with similar content and see how you can slot in, don't expect people to find their way to you.
Decide where it's ok to lose control - let go... you may find audiences you didn't expect, or people may make use your content in ways you never imagined. Watch and learn – another reason to iterate and go into public beta earlier rather than later.
Open data – let people make new things with your content. Bad people will do it anyway, but by not having open data, you're preventing exactly the people you want to work with from doing anything with your data. Unclear or closed licenses are the biggest barrier that friendly hackers and developers raise with me when I ask about cultural heritage data...

In a 2008 post about museum-as-platform, Nina Simon says it's about moving from controlling everything to providing expertise; learning to change from content provider to platform. [More recently, Rob Stein posted about participatory culture and the subtle differences between authoritarian and authoritative approaches.]

Conclusion
Perhaps most important of all - enjoy experiencing your collections through new eyes!

Notes on current issues in Digital Humanities

2011-10-16T20:43:00.000+01:00

In July 2011, the Open University held a colloquium called ‘Digital technologies: help or hindrance for the humanities?’, in part to celebrate the launch of the Thematic Research Network for Digital Humanities at the OU. A full multi-author report about the colloquium (titled 'Colloquium: Digital Technologies: Help or Hindrance for the Humanities?') will be coming out in the 'Digital Futures Special Issue Arts and Humanities in HE' edition of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education soon, but a workshop was also held at the OU's Milton Keynes campus on Thursday to discuss some of the key ideas that came from the colloquium and to consider the agenda for the thematic research network. I was invited to present in the workshop, and I've shared my notes and some comments below (though of course the spoken version varied slightly).

To help focus the presentations, Professor John Wolffe (who was chairing) suggested we address the following points:

What, for you, were the two most important insights arising from last July’s colloquium?
What should be the two key priorities for the OU’s DH thematic research network over the next year, and why?

Notes on the colloquium and current issues in the Digital Humanities

Introduction - who I am as context for how I saw the colloquium
Before I started my PhD, I was a digital practitioner – a programmer, analyst, bearer of Zeitgeisty made-up modern job titles - situated in an online community of technologists loosely based in academia, broadcasting, libraries, archives, and particularly, in public history and museums. That's really only interesting in the context of this workshop because my digital community is constituted by the very things that challenge traditional academia - ad hoc collaboration, open data, publicly sharing and debating thoughts in progress.

For people who happily swim in this sea, it's hard to realise how new and scary it can be, but just yesterday I was reminded how challenging the idea of a public identity on social media is for some academics, let alone the thought of finding time to learn and understand yet another tool. As a humanist-turned-technologist-turned-humanist, I have sympathy for the perspective of both worlds.

The two most important insights arising from last July’s colloquium?
John Corrigan's introduction made it clear that the answer to the question 'what is digital humanities' is still very open, and has perhaps as many different answers as there are humanists. That's both exciting and challenging – it leaves room for the adaptation (and adoption) of DH by different humanities disciplines, but it also makes it difficult to develop a shared language for collaboration, for critiquing and peer reviewing DH projects and outputs... [I've also been wondering whether 'digital humanities' would eventually devolve into the practices of disciplines - digital history, etc - and how much digital humanities really works across different humanities disciplines in a meaningful way, but that's a question for another day.]

In my notes, it was the discussion around Chris Bissel's paper on 'Reality and authenticity', Google Earth and archaeology that also stood out – the questions about what's lost and gained in the digital context are important, but, as a technologist, I ask us to be wary of false dichotomies. There's a danger in conflating the materiality of a resource, the seductive aura of an original document, the difficulties in accessing it, in getting past the gatekeepers, with the quality of the time spent with it; with the intrinsic complexity of access, context, interpretation... The sometimes difficult physical journey to an archive, or the smell of old books is not the same as earned access to knowledge.

What should be the two key priorities for the OU’s DH thematic research network over the next year?
[I don't think I did a very good job answering this, perhaps because I still feel too new to know what's already going on and what could be added. Also, I'm apparently unable to limit myself to two.]
I tend to believe that the digital humanities will eventually become normalised as just part of how humanities work, but we need to be careful about how that actually happens.

The early adopters have blazed their trails and lit the way, but in their wake, they've left the non-early adopters – the ordinary humanist – blinking and wondering how to thrive in this new world. I have a sense that digital humanities is established enough, or at least the impact of digitisation projects has been broad enough, that the average humanist is expected to take on the methods of the digital humanist in their grant and research proposals and in their teaching – but has the ordinary humanist been equipped with the skills and training and the access to technologists and collaborators to thrive? Do we need to give everyone access to DH101?

We need to deal with the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly publication models, peer review and the inescapable REF. We need to understand how to judge the processes as well as the products of research projects, and to find better ways to recognise new forms of publication, particularly as technology is also disrupting the publication models that early career researchers used to rely on to get started.

Much of the critique of digital working was about what it let people get away with, or how it risks misleading the innocent researcher. As with anything on a screen, there's an illusion of accuracy, completeness, neatness. We need shared practices to critique visualisations and discuss what's really available in database searches, the representativeness of digital repositories, the quality of transcriptions and metadata, the context in which data was created and knowledge produced... Translating the slipperiness of humanities data and research questions into a digital world is a juicy challenge but it's necessary if the potential of DH is to be exploited, whether by humanities scholars or the wider public who have new access to humanities content. 'natural order of things'.

Digitality is no excuse to let students (or other researchers) get away with sloppy practice. The ability to search across millions of records is important, but you should treat the documents you find as rigorously as you'd treat something uncovered deep in the archives. Slow, deep reading, considering the pages or documents adjacent to the one that interests you, the serendipitous find – these are all still important. But we also need to help scholars find ways to cope with the sheer volume of data now available and the probably unrealistic expectations of complete coverage of all potential sources this may create. So my other key priority is working out and teaching the scholarly practices we need to ensure we survive the transition from traditional to digital humanities.

In conclusion, the same issues – trust, authority, the context of knowledge production – are important for my digital and my humanities communities, but these concepts are expressed very differently in each. We need to work together to build bridges between the practices of traditional academia and those of the digital humanities.

Notes from EuropeanaTech 2011

2011-10-06T17:57:00.001+01:00

Some very scrappy notes from the EuropeanaTech conference held in Vienna this week as I prepare a short talk for the Open data in cultural heritage (LODLAM-London) event tonight... For a different perspective there's an overview post at EuropeanaTech – är det här framtidens kulturarv? and I'll link to any others I find. I've also put up some photos of ten questions attendees asked about Europeana, with written answers from the break-out exercise. I'll tidy up and post my keynote notes in a few days, and I'll probably summarise things a bit more then.

Max Kaiser: Europeana is like a cruise ship with limited room to move, hackathons inject Europeana with a bit more agility... Build real stuff for real people with real business requirements - different to building prototypes and proofs of concept - requires different project culture.

Bill Thompson: pulling the analogue past into the digital future... We don't live in a digital world and never will - the physical world is not going to vanish. We'll remain embodied minds; will have co-existing analogue and digital worlds.Digital technologies shaping the possibilities we decide to embrace. ... Can't have a paradigm shift in humanities because no basic set of beliefs to argue with... But maybe the shift to digital is so fundamental that it could be called a paradigm shift. ... Even if you don't engage online, you'll still live in a world shaped by the digital. Those who are online will come to define the norms. ... Revolutionary vanguard in our midst - hope lies with the programmers, the coders - the only weapon that matters is running code. Have to build on technologies that are open, only way to build diverse online culture that allows all voices to be heard. ... Means open data in a usable form - properly formulated so can be interpreted by anyone or any program that wants it; integrate them into the broader cultural space. Otherwise just disconnected islands.

Two good reasons to endorse open linked data. We're the first generation that's capable of doing this - have the tools, network, storage, processes. Within our power to digitise everything and make it findable. We may also be the only generation that wants to do it - later generations will not value things that aren't visible on the screen in the same way - they'll forget the importance of the non-digital. So we'd better get on with it, and do it properly. LOD is a foundation that allows us to build in the future.

Panel discussion...

Qu: how does open theme fit with orgs with budget cuts and need to make more money?
BT: when need to make money from assets, openness is a real challenge. There are ways of making assets available to people that are unlikely to have commercial impact but could raise awareness e.g. low-res for public access, high-res for commercial use [a model adopted by many UK museums].

Jill Cousins: there's a reputational need to put decent resolution images online to counter poor quality versions online.

Max: be clever - don't make an exclusive contract with digitisation partners - make sure you can also give free access to it.

Jill Cousins: User always been central to Europeana though got slightly lost along the way as busy getting data. ... Big stumbling block - licenses. Not just commercial reasons, also about reputational risk, loss of future earnings, fear of giving away something that's valuable in future. Without CC licence, can't publish as linked open data. Without it, commercial providers like INA can't take the API. Can't use blogs that have advertising on them. Couldn't put it on Wikipedia. Or ArtFinder. ... New [UK?] Renaissance report - metadata related to the digitised objects by cultural heritage orgs should be widely and freely available for re-use.

Workshops with content holders: Risks - loss of quality, loss of control, attribution, brand value, potential income ('phantom income'), unwanted spillover effects - misuse/juxtaposition of data. Rwards: increasing relevance, increasing channels to end users, data enrichment, brand value, specific funding opportunties, discoverability, new customers, public mission, building expertise, desired spillover effects. ... You are reliant on user doing the right thing with attribution....

Main risks: unwanted spillover effects, loss of attribution, loss of potential income. Main rewards: new customers, increasing relevance, public mission. But the risks diminshed as the rewards gain more prominence - overall outweighed the risks. But address those 3 areas of risk.

What next? Operationalise some of the applications developed. Yellow Kitchen Maid paper on the business of open data. Working together on difficulties faced by institutions and licensing open data.

[notes from day 2 to follow!]

Ten questions about Europeana...

10 questions (and one general question)

The general question was, what can the community building with domain experts, developers and researchers/R&D/innovation work package in Europeana 2.0 do? (Something like that anyway, it was all a bit confusing by that point)

You had to pick a question and go into a group to try and answer it - I've uploaded photos of the answer sheets.

1 Open source - if Europeana using open source software and is open software, should it also become a community-driven development project?

2 Open source - are doubts about whether OSS provides quality services justified? What should be done to ensure quality?

3 Aggregation and metadata quality - what will be the role of aggregators, and what is role of Europeana in LOD future?

4 What can Europeana do which search engines can't that justifies the extra effort of creating and managing structured metadata?

5 Is EDM [Europeana Data Model] still too complicated? If yes, what to simplify.

6 What is the actual value of semantic contexualisation, and could that not be produced by search engines?

7 enhance experience of exploring, discovering [see photo - it was too long to type in time!]

8 How important is multilingual access for discovery in Europeana? Which elements are the most important?

9 Can Europeana drive end-user engagement on the distributed sites and services of contributing archives?

10 How can we benefit from existing (local, international) communities in enriching the user experience on Europeana?

The key that unlocks geeky goodness

2011-10-01T10:22:00.005+01:00

This is a quick pointer to three posts about some usability work I did for the JISC-funded Pelagios project, and a reflection on the process. Pelagios aims to 'help introduce Linked Open Data goodness into online resources that refer to places in the Ancient World'. The project has already done lots of great work with the various partners to bring lots of different data sources together, but they wanted to find out whether the various visualisations (particularly the graph explorer) let users discover the full potential of the linked data sets.

I posted on the project blog about how I worked out a testing plan to encourage user-centred design and set up the usability sessions in Evaluating Pelagios' usability, set out how a test session runs (with sample scripts and tasks) in Evaluating usability: what happens in a user testing session? and finally I posted some early Pelagios usability testing results. The results are from a very small sample of potential users but they were consistent in the issues and positive results uncovered.

The wider lesson for LOD-LAM (linked open data in library, archives, museums) projects is that user testing (and/or a strong user-centred design process) helps general audiences (including subject specialists) appreciate the full potential of a technically-led project - without thoughtful design, the results of all those hours of code may go unloved by the people they were written for. In other words, user experience design is the key that unlocks the geeky goodness that drives these projects. It's old news, but the joy of user testing is that it reminds you of what's really important...

Conference notes: Museums and Galleries Scotland's 'Collaborate to Compete'

2011-09-25T23:46:00.000+01:00

My really quite rough-and-ready notes from Museums and Galleries Scotland's 'Collaborate to Compete' conference. I've already posted my introductory notes for the session on 'Entrepreneurship and Social Media', so these notes are about the keynotes and the other sessions I attended.

The first speaker was Jeremy Johnson from Australia's Sovereign Hill, on 'Engaging with China: the new horizon for cultural and heritage tourism'. He talked about their research-led marketing program aimed at getting Chinese visitors to Sovereign Hill, which included marketing work in China, hiring Chinese-speaking staff, and developing tailored tours and experiences. They've also hosted Chinese student[?] teachers in their education department and organised touring exhibitions. They also had to deal with talking about racism in the past treatment of Chinese Australians in Sovereign Hill - their technique is apparently to 'tell it how it was', but because Chinese Australians were 'extraordinary contributors to society' it was easy to focus on the many success stories. In general, they've developed some experiences to meet the expectations of Chinese visitors, but still, 'the museum product has to be respected'.

Top quotes included:

'you must be able to answer the question "what would make someone visit your museum?"' - there must be a compelling reason to visit
China is like 56 countries wrapped up into one. 'Saying you're going to China is like saying you're going to Europe'
'Develop a market strategy to deliver visitor experiences at the right price'. The best marketing strategy can be undone if visitor experience does not meet the promise. Cultural awareness training essential for all staff and volunteers.

I then went to the first 'New Partnerships' seminar, where I heard lessons from the 'Curious' project at Glasgow Museums, including the possibility that 'sustainability can be about working with different people at different stages rather than the one group of people working with the museum during the whole process', and that 'people put together objects in ways that curators never would' (e.g. a ceramist put together objects from different parts of the world based on the presence of finger marks in the clay); partnership successes: mutual benefits, increased understanding, new opportunities, positive feedback; partnership challenges: managing expectations (also finding the right people to talk to), organisational structures, a draw on resources, tracking increases in visits.

In the same session, people from the 'Smart Collaborations' project talked about conceptual frameworks for collaboration, with a focus on attracting and retaining visitors within an area - it was hard to see the slides, but it seemed to be about designing experiences for tourists. The top tip was: don't be afraid to use offers, vouchers, or other deals to attract customers; and capture data when getting people in.

The plenary talk before lunch was Stuart Dempster (JISC's Strategic Content Alliance) on 'Sustaining Digital Resources' [earlier report at Business modelling and sustainability, new one will go live there next month ?]. If the digital age is a game-changer for institutions, how can bricks-and-mortar organisations not only be on the web, but of the web. What skills, licensing need to be in place? They've been looking at business models, including the effects of economic downturn and government cuts. Funded projects must deliver value to users, not just driven by curatorial concerns; a key concern is how to generate new forms of income with integrity.

Tips for communicating value to adminstrators: have a seat at the table whenever decisions are made about digital resources; engage administrators early to develop shared sense of responsibility for the project; have an advocacy campaign with users outside the institution so you've got voices of support when needed; identify different types of stakeholders and work appropriately with each - identify champions if you can. Sustainable projects: empower leadership to define the mission and take action; create a strong value proposition; creatively manage costs; cultivate diverse sources of revenue; have a system of accountability. Collaborations need consensus, communication, capacity, trust, metrics...

After lunch, Alphonse Umulisa, Director General of The Institute of National Museums of Rwanda spoke on 'Repositioning Cultural Tourism'. Previously at the Museum of London, his job is to raise awareness about Rwanda's history and heritage sites - difficult when Rwanda's history is so painful. They're trying to look forward to the future, and forget the past, but even knowing where to start was hard. He said you can't learn history in schools in Rwanda - it's not taught - but you can learn Rwandan history in museums. The museums had to change from research institutions to learn how to attract tourists, and they had to get Rwandans visiting museums again. His talk was both utterly humbling - the Rwandan government's vision for 2020 is for every family to have a cow - and inspiring - his motto is: 'discover your museums, cherish your heritage'.

Tony Butler has posted his own notes from his inspiring talk on how the Museum of East Anglian Life transformed itself from a failing organisation to a thriving enterprise, and about his aim to make it a participative institution, a space for co-creation or to help people look at the world differently and to place the museum in the rhythm of daily life.

After my session on 'Entrepreneurship and Social Media', I went to a workshop on 'Smarter Museums' with Anne Murch (who prefers the concepts of resilience or entrepreneurship to 'sustainability'). The workshop covered the principles of a 'thinking environment': appreciation, attention, equality, incisive questions. We did a really interesting (and at first, challenging) exercise in pairs, where you had to either just listen, or just talk, for three minutes, before swapping with your partner. It's hard - if you're meant to be listening, you want to encourage the person talking, or if you're talking, you want to stop and let the other person have a go. We did it again later, and it was much easier. We were also asked to consider "if we knew that together we can have a thriving museum that provides the very best experience for our visitors, what would the org look and feel like? What is the shift we need to make to deliver this?", and the importance of diversity as both the identity of the people that are shaping the future plans and the ideas that are generated. A team that takes a 'diagonal slice' across and down through the museum can be effective - the people with least power are often most creative and least encumbered. Another suggestion for better meetings was to frame each agenda item as a question.

The event closed with the launch of the National Strategy Consultation by Fiona Hyslop, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Cultural & External Affairs National Strategy Consultation, with a speech that was a lovely celebration of the contribution of museums and cultural heritage to Scottish life. The document itself outlines the context, guiding principles, vision, themes and objectives of the proposed sector consultation process, which will lead to the national strategy for Scotland’s Museums and Galleries. (Interestingly, Australia is also running a 'Digital Culture Public Sphere' consultation for input into National Cultural Policy.)

'Entrepreneurship and Social Media' and 'Collaborating to Compete'

2011-09-16T14:48:00.000+01:00

[Update: I hope the presentations from the speakers are posted, as they were all inspiring in their different ways. Bristol City Council's civic crowdsourcing projects had impressive participation rates, and Phil Higgins identified the critical success factors as: choose the right platform, use it at the right stage, issue must be presented clearly. Joanne Orr talked about museum contexts that are encapsulating the intangible including language and practices (and recording intangible cultural heritage in a wiki) and I could sense the audience's excitement about Andrew Ellis' presentation on 'Your Paintings' and the crowdsourcing tagger developed for the Public Catalogue Foundation.]

I'm in Edinburgh for the Museums Galleries Scotland conference 'Collaborating to Compete'. I'm chairing a session on 'Entrepreneurship and Social Media'. In this context, the organisers defined entrepreneurship as 'doing things innovatively and differently', including new and effective ways of working. This session is all about working in partnerships and collaborating with the public. The organisers asked me to talk about my own research as well as introducing the session. I'm posting my notes in advance to save people having to scribble down notes, and I'll try to post back with notes from the session presentations.

Anyway, on with my notes...

Welcome to this session on entrepreneurship and social media. Our speakers are going to share their exciting work with museum collections and cultural heritage. Their projects demonstrate the benefits of community participation, of opening up to encourage external experts to share their knowledge, and of engaging the general public with the task of improving access to cultural heritage for all. The speakers have explored innovative ways of working, including organisational partnerships and low-cost digital platforms like social media. Our speakers will discuss the opportunities and challenges of collaborating with audiences, the issues around authority, identity and trust in user-generated content, and they'll reflect on the challenges of negotiating partnerships with other organisations or with 'the crowd'.

You'll hear about two different approaches to crowdsourcing from Phil Higgins and Andy Ellis, and about how the 'Intangible Cultural Heritage' project helps a diverse range of people collaborate to create knowledge for all.

I'll also briefly discuss my own research into crowdsourcing through games as an example of innovative forms of participation and engagement.

If you're not familiar with the term, crowdsourcing generally means sharing tasks with the public that are traditionally performed in-house.

Until I left to start my PhD, I worked at the Science Museum in London, where I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the history of science and technology more engaging, and the objects related to it more accessible. This inspired me when I was looking for a dissertation project for my MSc, so I researched and developed 'Museum Metadata Games' to explore how crowdsourcing games could get people to have fun while improving the content around 'difficult' museum objects.

Unfortunately (most) collections sites are not that interesting to the general public. There's a 'semantic gap' between the everyday language of the public and the language of catalogues.

Projects like steve.museum showed crowdsourcing helps, but it can be difficult to get people to participate in large numbers or over a long period of time. Museums can be intimidating, and marketing your project to audiences can be expensive. But what if you made a crowdsourcing interface that made people want to use it, and to tell their friends to use it? Something like... a game?

A lot of people play games… 20 million people in the UK play casual games. And a lot of people play museum games. Games like the Science Museum's Launchball and the Wellcome Collection's High Tea have had millions of plays.

Crowdsourcing games are great at creating engaging experiences. They support low barriers to participation, and the ability to keep people playing. As an example, within one month of launching, DigitalKoot, a game for National Library of Finland, had 25,000 visitors complete over 2 million individual tasks.

Casual game genres include puzzles, card games or trivia games. You've probably heard of Angry Birds and Solitaire, even if you don’t think of yourself as a 'gamer'.

Casual games are perfect for public participation because they're designed for instant gameplay, and can be enjoyed in a few minutes or played for hours.

Easy, feel-good tasks will help people get started. Strong game mechanics, tested throughout development with your target audience, will motivate on-going play and keep people coming back.

Here’s a screenshot of the games I made.

In the tagging game 'Dora's lost data', the player meets Dora, a junior curator who needs their help replacing some lost data. Dora asks the player to add words that would help someone find the object shown in Google.

When audiences can immediately identify an activity as a game – in this the use of characters and a minimal narrative really helped - their usual reservations about contributing content to a museum site disappear.

The brilliant thing about game design is that you can tailor tasks and rewards to your data needs, and build tutorials into gameplay to match the player’s skills and the games’ challenges.

Fun is personal - design for the skills, abilities and motivations of your audience.

People like helping out - show them how their data is used so they can feel good about playing for a few minutes over a cup of tea.

You can make a virtue of the randomness of your content - if people can have fun with 100 historical astronomy objects, they can have fun with anything.

To conclude, crowdsourcing games can be fun and useful for the public and for museums. And now we're going to hear more about working with the public... [the end!]

How to get published - Interface 2011 conference notes

2011-08-18T17:13:00.001+01:00

These are my notes from the 'how to get published' session at InterFace 2011 - I've summarised some of the advice here in case it may help others, with the usual caveat that any mistakes are mine, etc.

Charlotte Frost spoke (slides) about 'PhD2Published', a site with advice, support and discussion about getting academic work published. As the site says, "Don’t underestimate how much of getting published comes down to knowing: A) How publishing works and what’s expected of you as a writer. B) Being professional, adaptable and easy to work with". She made the excellent point that if the jobs aren't out there, you could pour your energies into getting your book pitched and written. You also need to work out whether a book, journal articles or a mixture would work best for you (especially, I'd imagine, as publishers are taking on fewer books in this financial environment). Thinking of academic publishing as part of the incremental progression of your career is useful - you don't need to cram everything into one book.

Specific tips included:

make the book what you wish your thesis had been
thinking about the book you wish you'd had available as an undergraduate also helps make your book marketable
collect a list of courses that would put your book on their reading list (and why)
consider the way that your book contributes to the identity of the publishing house and could make it a covetable feature
bear the current financial situation in mind and include as much solid sales evidence as you can
look at how publishing is changing and think about appropriate formats for your work
think about where audiences for your work might be
find out how publishers would like you to pitch and stick to their guidelines
the tone of your pitch should be about why your book is a must-read (not a must-write)
look for series or lists with publishers and tell them how your book would fit in that strand
nail the very short text-only description right from the start
find out if there are grants or awards that could support the publication of your book and let the publisher know
line up a well-known and relevant academic to write a foreword for your book
build and promote an expertise that's tangential and helps bring other people to your work.

The next speaker was Ashgate's Dymphna Evans with lots of useful and realistic advice on 'Publishing your Monograph' (slides). She started with the importance of choosing the right publisher - find someone who peer reviews, talk to colleagues about their experiences, and find publishers with lists or series in your field. Interestingly, she said it's ok to choose more than one publisher (it will speed up the process, and you'll get more feedback on your proposals), unless of course a publisher contacted you first.

Following the guidelines on a publisher's website is vital - and check your proposal once you've completed it. You can send sample chapters but she doesn't recommend you write the whole thing upfront in this current financial environment. Don't send stuff you feel will need more work - publishers don't have time to deal with it. Be aware of commercial considerations (most publishers require a minimum sale (maybe 300 books) but it doesn't have to be a best seller). Be prepared to re-write your thesis. It helps to have published journal articles based on parts of your thesis if they can be re-written for the book. Ashgate have a guide on 'transforming your thesis into a book' (PDF) on their website, and they also have general Proposal Guidelines for Humanities and Social Science authors.

Tips for your book proposal - choose a good title and prepare a thorough synopsis of each chapter. Be realistic about the deliery date. Think about illustrations (e.g. copyright). Don't undersell yourself as an author. Consider the audience for your book (e.g. in Digital Humanities, don't underestimate the professional audience for your book... draw out the practical applications of your research for professionals.). Ensure the proposal covers everything.

When making decisions, publishers consider factors including whether your book may fit in a series and whether it will meet sales expectations, and your proposal is peer-reviewed. Peer reviews are subjective, so don't be discouraged if they're negative.

If you get a publishing contract - read through it, check clauses with publisher if you're not happy or don't understand them. Check delivery date and conditions of delivery. Check which rights you are transferring (don't need copyright, just publication rights). Is an e-book planned?

Read the publishers guidelines before preparing your final manuscript; clear all your copyright permissions and think about illustrations. [Which is useful advice even if you're just writing a book chapter]. The editorial process includes a peer review of the final text (allow 8-10 weeks); marketing; editorial work; then finally the book is published (5-6 months after submitting)!

The final presentation in this session was Julianne Nyhan on 'Book reviewing and the post-graduate' (slides). Despite the title, she included websites, exhibitions, emerging technologies as well as books in her tips. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews publishes traditional reviews of about 2,500 words, and 'review articles' of about 7,000 words. Review articles are a a synthesis of existing works with the aim of reaching new conclusion or interpretations.

At the simplest level, reviewing books is a way to expand your library. Reviews aren't peer reviewed in the strictest sense (though there is a quality bar), but review articles consistently appear among most cited papers in a given field, and it's a way for post-graduate students to use stuff they can't include in their thesis while getting their name and expertise known out there. It also gives you experience working with editors and publishers.

How to go about publishing book reviews:

Identify appropriate journals, establish their scope and mission, and review their reviews.
Write a short email to Book Reviews Editor including: research area; details of previous reviews or publications; books requested/suggested (or types if nothing currently listed). Make a reasonable impression in your cover note.
Agree on a realistic date for submission and keep to it. Iterate with editor about corrections and finally proof copies of work.

There's lots of information online on the hallmarks of a good review - it's not simply a summary but a contextualisation of research - how does it relate to others in the field? Does it advance knowledge in some way? Discussion of the work in the wider intellectual context is an opportunity for you to make interesting connections and bring your personal viewpoint to the review. Be fair and balanced with well-justified and accurate criticisms/points of approval. Never use a big word where a small word will do; never use two words when one will do. Be careful of jargon - ask a colleague in another field to read.

You should look at journal ranking when identifying journals, but maybe rank is less important than whether the journal is open access (and is therefore likely to have higher impact).

Quick PhD update from InterFace 2011

2011-07-28T10:15:00.004+01:00

It feels like ages since I've posted, so since I've had to put together a 2 minute lightning talk for the Interface 2011 conference at UCL (for people working in the intersection of humanities and technology), I thought I'd post it here as an update. I'm a few months into the PhD but am still very much working out the details of the shape of my project and I expect that how my core questions around crowdsourcing, digitisation, geolocation, researchers and historical materials fit together will change as I get further into my research. [Basically I'm acknowledging that I may look back at this and cringe.]

Notes for 2 minute lightning talk, Interface 2011

'Crowdsourcing the geolocation of historical materials through participant digitisation'

Hi, I'm Mia, I'm working on a PhD in Digital Humanities in the History department at the Open University.

I'm working on issues around crowdsourcing the digitisation and geolocation of historical materials. I'm looking at 'participant digitisation' so I'll be conducting research and building tools to support various types of researchers in digitising, transcribing and geolocating primary and secondary sources.

I'll also create a spatial interface that brings together the digitised content from all participant digitisers. The interface will support the management of sources based on what I've learned about how historians evaluate potential sources.

The overall process has three main stages: research and observation that leads to iterative cycles of designing, building and testing the interfaces, and finally evaluation and analysis on the tools and the impact of geolocated (ad hoc) collections on the practice of historical research.

The rise of the non-museum (and death by aggregation)

2011-06-23T20:57:00.004+01:00

A bit of an art museum/gallery-focussed post... And when I say 'post', I mean 'vaguely related series of random thoughts'... but these ideas have been building up and I might as well get them out to help get them out of 'draft'.

Following on from various recent discussions (especially the brilliantly thought-provoking MCG's Spring meeting 'Go Collaborate') and the launches over the past few months of the Google Art Project, Artfinder and today's 'Your Paintings' from the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation, I've been wondering what space is left for galleries online. (I've also been thinking about Aaron's "you are about to be eaten by robots" and the image of Google and Facebook 'nipping at your heels' to become 'the arbiter of truth for ideas' and the general need for museums to make a case for their special place in society.) Between funding cuts on the one hand, and projects from giants like Google and the BBC and even Europeana on the other, what can galleries do online that no-one else can?

So I asked on twitter, wondering if the space that was left was in creating/curating specialist interest and/or local experiences... @bridgetmck responded "Maybe the space for museums to work online now is meaning-making, intellectual context, using content to solve problems?" The idea of that the USP of an museum is based on knowledge and community rather than collections is interesting and something I need to think about more.

The twitter conversation also branched off into a direction I've been thinking about over the past few months - while it's great that we're getting more and more open content [seriously, this is an amazing problem to have], what's the effect of all this aggregation on the user experience? @rachelcoldicutt had also been looking at 'Your Paintings' and her response was to my 'space' question was: "I think the space left is for curation. I feel totally overwhelmed by ALL THOSE paintings. It's like a storage space not a museum". She'd also just tweeted "are such enormous sites needed when you can search and aggregate? Phaps yes for data structure/API, but surely not for *ppl*" which I'm quoting because I've been thinking the same thing.

[Update 2, July 14: Or, as Vannevar Bush said in 'As We May Think' in 1945: "There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record."]

Have we reached a state of 'death by aggregation'? Even the guys at Artfinder haven't found a way to make endless lists of search results or artists feel more like fun than work.

Big aggregated collections are great one-stop shops for particular types of researchers, and they're brilliant for people building services based on content, but is there a Dunbar number for the number of objects you can view in one sitting? To borrow the phrase Hugh Wallace used at MuseumNext, 'snackable' or bite-sized content seems to fit better into the lives of museum audiences, but how do we make collections and the knowledge around them 'snackable'? Which of the many ways to curate that content into smaller sets - tours, slideshows, personal galleries, recommender systems, storytelling - works in different contexts? And how much and what type of contextual content is best, and what is that Dunbar number? @benosteen suggested small 'community sets' or "personal 'threads'" - "interesting people picking 6->12 related items (in their opinion) and discussing them?". [And as @LSpurdle pointed out, what about serendipity, or the 'surprising beauty' Rachel mentioned?]

I'm still thinking it all through, and will probably come back and update as I work it out. In the meantime, what do you think?

[Update: I've only just remembered that I'd written about an earlier attempt to get to grips with the effects of aggregation and mental models of collections that might help museums serve both casual and specialist audiences in Rockets, Lockets and Sprockets - towards audience models about collections? - it still needs a lot of thought and testing with actual users, I'd love to hear your thoughts or get pointers to similar work.]

Notes from a preview of the updated Historypin

2011-06-23T16:49:00.001+01:00

The tl;dr version: inspiring project, great enhancements; yay!

Longer version: last night I went to the offices of We Are What We Do for a preview of the new version of HistoryPin. Nick Poole has already written up his notes, so I'm just supplementing them with my own notes from the event (and a bit from conversations with people there and the reading I'd already done for my PhD).

Screenshot with photo near WAWWD office (current site)

Historypin is about bridging the intergenerational divide, about mass participation and access to history, about creating social capital in neighbourhoods, conserving and opening up global archival resources (at this stage that's photographs, not other types of records). There's a focus on events and activities in local communities. [It'd be great to get kids to do quick oral history interviews as they worked with older people, though I think they're doing something like it already.]

New features will include a lovely augmented reality-style view in streetview; the ability to upload and explore video as well as images; a focus on telling stories - 'tours' let you bring a series of photos together into a narrative (the example was 'the arches of New York', most of which don't exist anymore). You can also create 'collections', which will be useful for institutions. They'll also be available in the mobile apps (and yes, I did ask about the possibility of working with the TourML spec for mobile tours).

The mobile apps let you explore your location, explore the map and contribute directly from your phone. You can use the augmented reality view to overlap old photos onto your camera view so that you can take a modern version of an old photo. This means they can crowdsource better modern images than those available in streetview as well as getting indoors shots. This could be a great treasure hunt activity for local communities or tourists. You can also explore collections (as slideshows?) in the app.

They're looking to work with more museums and archives and have been working on a community history project with Reading Museum. Their focus on inclusion is inspiring, and I'll be interested to see how they work to get those images out into the community. While there are quite a few 'then and now' projects focused on geo-locating old images around I think that just shows that it's an accessible way of helping people make connections between their lives and those in the past.

A quick correction to Nick's comments - the Historypin API doesn't exist yet, so if you have ideas for what it should do, it's probably a good time to get in touch. I'll be thinking hard about how it all relates to my PhD, especially if they're making some of the functionality available.

'Share What You See' at hack4europe London

2011-06-11T19:11:00.000+01:00

A quick report from hack4europe London, one of four hackathons organised by Europeana to 'showcase the potential of the API usage for data providers, partners and end-users'.

I have to confess that when I arrived I wasn't feeling terribly inspired - it's been a long month and I wasn't sure what I could get done at a one-day hack. I was intrigued by the idea of 'stealth culture' - putting cultural content out there for people to find, whether or not they were intentionally looking for 'a cultural experience' - but I couldn't think of a hack about it I could finish in about six hours. But I happened to walk past Owen Stephen's (@ostephens) screen and noticed that he was googling something about WordPress, and since I've done quite a lot of work in WordPress, I asked what his plans were. After a chat we decided to work together on a WordPress plugin to help people blog about cool things they found on museum visits. I'd met Owen at OpenCulture 2011 the day before (though we'd already been following each other on twitter) but without the hackday it's unlikely we would have ever worked together.

So what did we make? 'Share What You See' is a plugin designed to make a museum and gallery visit more personal, memorable and sociable. There's always that one object that made you laugh, reminded you of friends or family, or was just really striking. The plugin lets you search for the object in the Europeana collection (by title, and hopefully by venue or accession number), and instantly create a blog post about it (screenshot below) to share it with others.

Screenshot: post pre-populated with information about the object.

Once you've found your object, the plugin automatically inserts an image of it, plus the title, description and venue name.

You can then add your own text and whatever other media you like. The plugin stores the originally retrieved information in custom fields so it's always there for reference if it's updated in the post. Once an image or other media item is added, you can use all the usual WordPress tools to edit it.

If you're in a gallery with wifi, you could create a post and share an object then and there, because WordPress is optimised for mobile devices. This help makes collection objects into 'social objects', embedding them in the lives of museum and gallery visitors. The plugin could also be used by teachers or community groups to elicit personal memories or creative stories before or after museum visits.

The code is at https://github.com/mialondon/Share-what-you-see and there's a sample blog post at http://www.museumgames.org.uk/jug/. There's still lots of tweaks we could have made, particularly around dealing with some of the data inconsistencies, and I'd love a search by city (in case you can't quite remember the name of the museum), etc, but it's not bad for a couple of hours work and it was a lot of fun. Thanks to the British Library for hosting the day (and the drinks afterwards), the Collections Trust/Culture Grid for organising, and Europeana for setting it up, and of course to Owen for working with me. Oh, and we won the prize for "developer's choice" so thank you to all the other developers!

Notes from Gamecamp 4, London

2011-05-16T16:16:00.003+01:00

Here are my thoughts from Gamecamp 4 (#gc4), an unconference held at London South Bank University on Saturday, May 14. Overall I had a great time, and managed to put some faces to names as well as catching up with people I knew. I don't think I learnt anything startling, but some of the sessions were great for helping me rediscover bits I already knew and clarify thoughts on other things. That might be a sign that I've been spending too much time thinking about games lately, or that the field is so huge and diverse that the chances of any session being on a topic that interests me and having the same approach (e.g. not video games) is smaller.

I also ran a session on 'hacking museum games' with Katy Beale to try to find out whether the excellent people at the event thought it was possible to run a hack event to produce new games with museums, get a sense of who'd be interested and hopefully learn from other people's experience with hack-type events with people new to games. I've written up the notes I took at the time, but would also love to hear from people who have more thoughts. It wasn't in that session but based on other activities going on at the unconference I decided my new dream is to have a museum zombie larp.

So, onto notes from other sessions... They're really rough, sorry! I haven't got the names or twitter IDs of the speakers, so please let me know if you know them.

5 tips to improve your game run by Graham McAllister
1 comparing controls (before building) - e.g. do a heuristic comparison of control methods like direct manipulation, d pads with requirements eg small controlled movements, big movements
2 tutorials - the art of integrated game tutorial design - make a list of everything you want the player to be able to do. Think of the ideal player (probably you cos you'll really know your game). Is there a safe space to practice the skills you want people to learn? Integrate tutorials into gameplay - how? Use characters to deliver instructions. Can show them, tell them (text or audio) or get them to practice it.
3 involve users - but if you're play testing, don't ask them what they think. Ask people to draw their experience at the end - they remember the initial experience and the end, maybe something big in the middle. They won't remember the details afterwards. So how? Record it then walkthrough. Biometrics or observe the video and take them back to the moment afterwards and ask them, you'll get much better detail. [I nearly asked if anyone else did usability test-style think aloud testing but figured probably not as most people seemed to be video game developers]
4 recruit users - demographics; psychographics (internal motivations etc)
5 ux acceptance - define success tests. Write success tests for game ux acceptance - things the player should experience, not technical stuff; gives you something to keep working towards.

Suggestion from discussion - get a mirror and play through it, use your foot on the mouse to replicate experience of playing your game for the first time. [Great idea for empathy with newbie players]

[Update: I've come across some really detailed notes from this session, so go read Five tips to improve your game if you're interested in usability testing for games. Also, I didn't go to this session but there are some good notes on Can User Centered Design help games? (GameCamp report), and it's encouraging to hear that it had a good turn-out. For some reason I thought there was resistance to user-centred design in games, presumably from the same school of 'it makes boring, safe products' (which is only true if you're doing it wrong, as the notes point out), but maybe there's not.]

The failure of the fail state.
This was a quite interesting discussion, partly because people seem to have inherently different preferences, as well as variations dependent on your preferred game genres. Posited it's better if you can die and then carry on... When is a fail state too much fail - balance between tension, high stakes and too harsh a penalty? Or too binary - do you need to reload the game, can you recover from errors, what consequences do you need to live with? Discussion of the difference between creating tension because the stakes are high vs when game is completely over unless you re-start it's not good.

Other random notes from tweets:

@naomialderman pointed out 'moral choices in games are mostly shit' - yes! Crap moral scenarios put me off otherwise interesting games

Themes across sessions: 'all narrative is interactive'; we narrativise* experiences when we remember or reconstruct games *made-up word [actually, I can't really remember what inspired this, I must have had a sugar rush.]

It's always amazing the difference room setup makes in an unconference - a circle feels collaborative, desks facing the front can be 'us v them' [Owen Stephens pointed out that the circle setup is called 'cabaret' style - lovely!]

Define your purpose or others will define you (and you may not like the results)

2011-05-15T20:38:00.002+01:00

[A re-post, as the blogger outage seems to have eaten the first version. I'm incredibly grateful to Ben W. Brumfield @benwbrum for sending me a copy of the post from his RSS reader. I've set blogger up to email me a copy of posts in future so I won't have to go diving into my Safari cache to try and retrieve a post again!]

There's a lot of this going around as the arts and cultural heritage face on-going cuts: define yourself, or be defined, a search for a new business model that doesn't injure the unbusinesslike values at the core of public cultural institutions. Mark Ravenhill in the Guardian, Global art: nice canapes, shame about the show:

Many of our UK institutions operate under a strange contradiction: most of the signals we give out suggest that we offer the international glamour, the pampering loveliness, the partnerships with banks and brands... But at the same time, we agonise about access: we want everyone to be let into the business lounge.
...
In a modern world that buys and sells information and luxury, the arts deal in something very different: wisdom, a complex, challenging, lifelong search that can make you happy and furious, discontented and questioning, elated or bored.
...
What we need now, more than ever, is a clear message about what we do and why we do it. The government has opted for swift deficit reduction and a good hack at the arts: it's up to us to set the long-term agenda for the role of the arts in public life over the next decade and beyond if we're not going to be cut, cut and cut again. Boom and bust are here to stay: capitalism will always be in a permanent state of crisis.

Nick Poole has also written on A New Way Forward for Museums, saying:

It is entirely possible to be commercially savvy, operate sharply and make sophisticated uses of licensing as an artefact of control all in the name of serving a public cultural purpose. Equally, it is possible to throw open the doors and make content universally accessible in the name of driving commercial value to the bottom-line. The cultural and commercial imperatives are not in opposition, but coexist along a spectrum of activity which runs from non-commercial, through non-transactional (things like brand equity and audience engagement) to strictly financially transactional.
...
If the financial future of museums lies in becoming commercially acute, then a key part of true sustainability will lie in recognising our place in the supply-chain of culture to consumers, and in truly understanding and embracing our core competence and their value.

...we need to recognise that focussing on our core competencies and using them to create cultural assets and experiences which we can monetise (and therefore sustain) in partnership with the private sector is a story of success and advantage, not failure or loss.

His post has some interesting suggestions, so do go read it (and comment).

Nick also describes a vision "of a world in which museums have renegotiated the social contract with the public so that people everywhere understand that museums are places where culture is made and celebrated, rather than preserved and hidden from view" - it's easy, in my happy little bubble, to forget that many people don't see the point of museums. Some I've talked to might make an allowance for the big national institutions, but won't have any time for smaller or local museums. Working out how to deal with this might mean changing the public offer of these museums - or is it too late? There's a silent cull of museums happening in the UK right now, and yet I don't hear about big campaigns to save them. What do you think?

Thoughts towards the future of museums for #kulturwebb

2011-05-15T20:02:00.004+01:00

Last week I was in Stockholm to give a talk on 'Museum Crowdsourcing Games: Improving Collections Through Play (and some thoughts on re-inventing museums)'. Again, my thanks to @kajsahartig and @nordiskamuseet for the invitation to speak, and to all the lovely people I met for sharing their own stories with me, and for listening to a talk in English. The quote of the day came from @charlotteshj during a panel discussion on museums and innovation at the end of the day: digital museum collections should be 'shareable, spreadable and nerd-friendly'.

Based on what I learnt about the audience I ended up including more explanatory material on museum crowdsourcing games and didn't really have time for the 're-inventing museums' bits, so I thought I'd share those notes here. It's still very much a work-in-progress but since there are so many smart people thinking about the same subject, it's worth sharing for comment... (Also because Jasper Visser, who is also thinking about the future of museums, asked me what I was going to say. Btw, Jasper's #kulturwebb talk inspired the whole room, watch the video on his post about it.)

I know the future of museums lies in fitting into people's lives as well as being a destination; being the cathedral and being in the bazaar. Cultural heritage needs to be 'out there' to help people value and make time for visits the physical place. It's about new types of engagement and outreach. It's not all digital, but as the world is networked and mobile and social, we should be too.

I was thinking about new metaphors for museums – what if we were Amazon? A local newspaper? A specialist version of Wikipedia? A local pub? A student blog? A festival, a series of lectures, or a film group? A pub quiz? Should a museum be at the heart of village life, a meeting place for art snobs, a drop-in centre, a café, a study space, a mobile showroom?

But I realised that the answer to the question of the future of museums is deeply personal to any museum, because museums exist in the intersection of their collections, their fans and their local audiences. This is good, because it means you can apply your existing knowledge about what your audiences love about you. The answer to the question 'what would your museum be if it was invented in 2011?' is up to you...

Every time I approach the question of the future of museums, or of how the future of museums will be informed by what's happening the world today, I seem to come at it from a different angle. Today I'm wondering about the implications of the fact that there are no (g-rated) offline activities anymore - people will do almost anything with their mobile in one hand, and could be doing anything from googling to find out more about the museum object in front of them to looking up the lyrics of that one-hit wonder from that summer they went camping with friends. Their head could be in any space as well as in your space.

I'm also thinking about outreach, whether improving wikipedia articles, snippets of local history on the back of pub toilet doors or putting a museum exhibition in a truck and taking it to kids in the outer suburbs. Tomorrow I'll wake up with some new 'what if?' in my head. And I'm curious - what are you thinking about the future of museums?

Thinking aloud: does a museum's obsession with polish hinder innovation?

2011-05-06T13:20:00.002+01:00

I'm blogging several conversations on twitter around the subject of innovation and experimentation that I thought were worth saving, not least because I'm still thinking about their implications.

To start with, Lynda Kelly (@lyndakelly61) quoted @sebchan at the Hot Science conference on climate change and museums:

'Museums want everything to be slick and polished for mass audience, we lose capacity to be experimental and rapid'

which lead me to tweet:

'does big museum obsession with polish hinder innovation? ('innovation' = keeping up with digital world outside)'.

which lead to a really interesting series of conversations. Erin Blasco responded (over several tweets):

We can't pilot if it's not perfect. ... Need to pilot 15 quick/dirty QR codes but we can't put ANY up unless there are 50 & perfectly, expensively designed & impressive. ... So basically not allowed to fail and learn = not allowed to pilot = we spend a bunch of $ and fail anyway? ... To clarify: it's a cross-dept project. One dept ok with post-it notes & golf pencils. Two others are not. Kinda deadlock.

I think this perfectly illustrates the point. But kudos to Erin for gettings things this far! (An interesting discussion followed with Erin and @artlust about possible solutions, including holding stakeholder evaluations of the prototypes so they could see how the process worked, and 'making the pilot-ness of it a selling point in the design, letting audiences feel they're part of something special', which made me realise that turning challenges into positives is one of my core design techniques.)

For Linda Spurdle, the barriers are more basic:

Innovation costs, even my plans to try things cheap/free get scuppered by lack of time. For me less about risk more about resources

Which also rings perfectly true - many potential museum innovators were in this position before the museum funding cuts took hold, so innovating your way out of funding-related crises must be even more difficult now.

On the topic of innovation, Lindsey Green said there's a 'definite reluctance to pilot and fail impacts innovation'. Rachel Coldicutt had just blogged about 'digital innovation in the arts' in Making Things New, pointing out that the question 'privileges the means of delivery over the thing that’s being delivered', and tweeting that 'innovating a system and innovating art aren't the same thing and perhaps there's more impact from innovating the system'.

If the quest is to, as Rachel problematises in her post, 'use digital technologies to remake the Arts Establishment', then (IMO) it's doomed to failure. You can't introduce new technologies and expect that the people and processes within a cultural organisation will magically upgrade themselves to match. More realistically, people will work around any technology that doesn't suit them (for entirely understandable reasons). If you want to change an organisation, change the metrics. Or, as Rachel says, '[r]ather than change for change’s sake, perhaps we should be identifying required outcomes'. Handily, Bridget McKenzie pointed out that 'The Museums for the Future toolkit includes new eval framework (GEOs = Generic Environmental Outcomes)', so there's hope on the horizon.

The caveats: it's not that I'm against polish, and I think high production values really help our audiences value museum content. But - I think investing in a high level of polish is a waste of resources during prototyping or pilot stages, and a focus on high production values is incompatible with rapid prototyping - 'fail faster' becomes impossible. Usability researchers would also say polished prototypes get less useful feedback because people think the design is set (see also debates around the appearance of wireframes).

It's also worth pointing out my 'scare quotes' around the term 'innovation' above - sadly, things that are regarded as amazing innovations in the museum world are often delayed enough that they're regarded as pretty normal, even expected, by our more digitally-savvy audiences. But that's a whole other conversation...

So, what do you think: does a museum's obsession with polish hinder innovation?

Emergent themes from (my) MW2011

2011-05-05T15:07:00.010+01:00

I'm never going to have time to tidy these up, so here they are as they were scribbled on a post-it note closer to the Museums and the Web 2011 conference:

Stand on the shoulders of giants - so much great work is better because it's based on the experience and work of others. There's a sea change in attitudes about making the most of existing work, and maybe it's just cos I was hanging out with cool people, but the 'not invented here' syndrome seems to be dead.
The cool kids share failures and mistakes - people's wonderful honesty about things that went wrong is amazing and can be so powerful
Twitter went from back channel to summarising, sending quotable quotes flying out from the conference, and to socialising - finding the hang outs was so much easier because there were lots of open invitations to explore places.
Processes and people over tech - tech is now generally the easy part, and the less interesting part.
Lots of anecdotal evidence about how much audiences love 'behind the scenes' content.
I kept noticing things about the power of storytelling but that could just be because I'm really interested in it.
I've only just figured this one out, but a lot of the conference was about engagement, whether through games, interactions with mobile devices, participatory projects, whatever. Access is dead, long live engagement.

Hopefully I'll grab some time to reflect more on specific sessions and talks, but an imperfect post is more use than a polished draft, so here you go!

Sharing hard-won wisdom about museum games - introducing 'Lift your (museum) game'

2011-05-02T13:28:00.004+01:00

One outcome from MW2011 was the creation of 'Lift your (museum) game', a site for people who make museum games to share their hard-earned wisdom - project evaluation, research, references, methods, rants, lessons learnt from real projects - about making museum games. Inspired by a question from Martha Henson about whether any sites already existed to gather resources like those discussed during the panel discussion after the Games session at Museums and the Web 2011 (with Dave Schaller, Elizabeth Goins and Coline Aunis), I created the wiki during the closing plenary and watched in awe as Kate Haley Goldman immediately started populating it with links.

Museum games have to compete in a highly competitive market, especially for casual and social games, and I suspect 'worthy' will only take us so far these days. I'm hoping the dialogue around this site will help people avoid the pitfalls of 'death by museum committee' when designing games and push for excellent gameplay in museum games. There are some great museum game projects and research going on, and pooling resources could help multiply the benefits of that work and provide a resource for people just starting out. Also, if you're a games agency or designer, this could be a great place to pass on any tips or links (or warnings) you'd like potential museum clients to know about. I've got a few papers on crowdsourcing games for museums coming up, so I'll be adding links and resources as I go - it's easy to add your resources or questions, just sign up at http://museumgames.pbworks.com.

One of the key themes of MW2011 for me was 'standing on the shoulders of giants' - there's so much good work going on in the museum digital sector, and so many amazing people are willing to share what they've learnt along the way, and hopefully this museum games wiki is a contribution to helping us all see further and do better.

Founding visions (and learning from the past for the future of museums)

2011-04-28T12:40:00.002+01:00

I've got a few presentations coming up that explore a re-imagining of museums, so I've been thinking about the original founding visions of specific museums (based on e.g. What would a digital museum be like if there was never a physical museum?), and whether there's dissonance between mission statements based in institutional history and those you might write if we were inventing museums today.

For an example of where my thoughts are wondering, check this out (from the excellent 'Museums should not fear the art snobs'):

...it was only with the emergence of aestheticism and competition from universities in the late 19th century that curators started making exhibitions for each other and for people of their class. Most earlier Victorian museums were educational institutions (not just institutions with education departments). In Britain, both the Liberal Henry Cole (founding Director of the V&A) and the Tory John Ruskin created museums that aimed to achieve the widest possible audience in the name of public education. The Met was founded “for the purpose…of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufacture and practical life…and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction.” In 1920, the Met’s president Robert de Forest wrote that it was “a public gallery for the use of all people, high and low, and even more for the low than for the high, for the high can find artistic inspiration in their own homes”.

So I'm curious, and if you're up for it, I have a little task for you (yes, you, over there) - what was the founding statement for your museum, and what is your current mission statement? And if you're feeling creative, what would you like your favourite museum's mission statement to be?

Some leads on game design in the UK

2011-03-25T18:21:00.000Z

Today I passed on a query from @fayenicole: '...know anybody who could run a retro-style game design workshop for teenagers at the British Museum?' on twitter and got a bunch of responses. Since people were so generous with their time, I thought I'd take a few minutes to collate them so they're available the next time someone has a similar query. Feel free to add further suggestions in the comments, particularly for people or agencies who are keen to work with museums and cultural heritage organisations.

@guylevans: 'Gameduino' looks interesting, its an Arduino shield which allows for 8 bit gaming experiments http://gameduino.com
Billy Abbott @cowfish: Not sure on the general design but @Pixelh8 is king of beepy tunes and also might know some people.
Nicholas Butler @loudmouthman: I might point you to @MrPointyHead, @Cowfish and possibly @DigitalMaverick for additional thoughts .
Ben Vost BeeVee23: I do, but he's not on Twitter. Simon Goodwin has worked on games since the Spectrum days and currently works for CodeMasters
Simon Bennett PsiBennett: Possibly www.gamerzevents.com
Sebastian Deterding @dingstweets suggested @hidingseeking.
Thanks also to @philmarston for suggestions.
@re6smith: ask @AndrewRilstone a game designer friend of mine
James Kemp @greencoatboy: I know a whole load of game designers http://www.clwg.org/
Carl Huber wetwebwork: @PlayerthreeUK , maybe? http://bit.ly/eSI1oT
Nate Cochrane @natecochrane: Is Braybrook available or the Yak?
And of course thanks to @doctorow for retweeting my message so that other people saw it.

In other news, I learned this week that 'MT' means 'modified tweet' and signifies when someone's shortened or otherwise changed something they're retweeting. Mmm, learning.

Rockets, Lockets and Sprockets - towards audience models about collections?

2011-03-21T14:47:00.003Z

This is something I wrote for my MSc dissertation ('Playing with difficult objects: game designs for crowdsourcing museum metadata', view the games I built for it at http://museumgam.es/ or check out the paper (Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections) I wrote for Museums and the Web 2011) about the role of 'distinctiveness' in mental models about collections, that's potentially relevant to discussions around telling stories with and collecting metadata about museum collections. I'm posting it here for reference in the conversation about instances vs classes of objects that arose on the UKMCG list after the release of NMSI (Science Museum, National Media Museum, National Railway Museum) data as CSV. One reason I've been thinking about 'distinctiveness' is because I'm wondering how we help people find the interesting records - the iconic objects, the intriguing stories - in a collection of 240,000 objects.

I'm interested in audiences' mental models about when a record refers to the type of object vs the individual object - my sense is that 'rockets', in the model below, are generally thought of as the individual object, and that 'sprockets' are thought of as the type of object, but that it varies for 'lockets', depending how distinctive they are in relation to the person.

I'm also generally curious about the utility of the model, and would love to know of references that might relate to it (whether supporting or otherwise) - if you can think of any, let me know in the comments.

Not all objects are created equal
Both museum objects and the records about them vary in quality. Just as the physical characteristics of one object - its condition, rarity, etc - differ from another, the strength of its associations with important people, events or concepts will also vary. To complicate things further, as the Collections Council of Australia (2009) states, this 'significance' is 'relative, contingent and dynamic'.

When faced with hundreds of thousands of objects, a museum will digitise and describe objects prioritised by 'technical criteria (physical condition of the original material), content criteria (representativeness, uniqueness), and use criteria (demand)' (Karvonen, 2010). In theory, all objects are registered by the collecting institution, so a basic record exists for each. Hopefully, each has been catalogued and the information transcribed or digitised to some extent, but this is often not the case. Records are often missing descriptions, and most lack the contextual histories that would help the general visitor understand its significance. Some objects may only have an accession number and a one word label, while those on display in a museum generally have well-researched metadata, detailed descriptions and related narratives or contextualised histories. Variable image quality (or lack of images) is an issue in collections in general. This project excludes object records without images but does include many poor-quality images as a result of importing records from a bulk catalogue.

This project posits that objects can be placed on a scale of 'distinctiveness' based on their visual attributes and the amount and quality of information about them. Within this project, bulk collections with minimal metadata and distinctiveness have been labelled 'sprockets', the smaller set of catalogued objects with some distinctiveness have been labelled 'lockets', and the unique, iconic objects with a full contextual history have been labelled 'rockets'. This concept also references the English Heritage 'building grades' model (DCMS, 2010). During the project, the labels 'heroic', 'semi-heroic' and 'bulk' objects were also used.

These labels are not concerned with actual 'significance' or other valuation or priority placed on the object, but relate only to the potential mental models around them and data related to them - the potential for players to discover something interesting about them as objects, or whether they can just tag them on visual characteristics.

In theory there is a correlation between the significance of an object and the amount of information available about it; there may be particular opportunities for games where this is not the case.

Project label

Information type

Amount of information

Proportion of collection

Rockets
Subjective
Contextual history ('background, events, processes and influences')
Tiny minority

Lockets
Mostly objective, may be contextual to collection purpose
Catalogued (some description)
Minority

Sprockets
Objective
Registered (minimal) Majority

Table 1 Objects grouped by distinctiveness

This can also be represented visually as a pyramid model:

Figure 2 A figurative illustration of the relative numbers of different levels of objects in a typical history museum.

References
Department of Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) (2010) Principles of Selection for Listing Buildings [Online] Available from: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/imported-docs/p-t/principles-of-selection-for-listing-buildings-2010.pdf

Karvonen, M. (2010). "Digitising Museum Materials - Towards Visibility and Impact". In Pettersson, S., Hagedorn-Saupe, M., Jyrkkiö, T., Weij, A. (Eds) Encouraging Collections Mobility In Europe. Collections Mobility. [Online] Available from: http://www.lending-for-europe.eu/index.php?id=167

Russell, R., and Winkworth, K. (2009). Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collections. Collections Council of Australia. [Online] Available from: http://significance.collectionscouncil.com.au/

My PhD proposal (Provisional title: Participatory digitisation of spatially indexed historical data)

2011-02-27T12:26:00.001Z

[Update: I'm working on a shorter version with fewer long words. Something like crowdsourcing geolocated historial materials/artefacts with specialist users/academic contributors/citizen historians.]

A few people have asked me about my PhD* topic, and while I was going to wait until I'd started and had a chance to review it in light of the things I'm already starting to learn about what else is going on in the field, I figured I should take advantage of having some pre-written material to cover the gap in blogging while I try to finish various things (like, um, my MSc dissertation) that were hijacked by a broken wrist. So, to keep you entertained in the meantime, here it is.

Please bear in mind that it's already out-of-date in terms of my thinking and sense of what's already happening in the field - I'm really looking forward to diving into it but my plan to spend some time thinking about the project before I started has been derailed by what felt like a year of having an arm in a cast.

* I never got around to posting about this because my disastrous slip on the ice happened just two days after I resigned, but I'm leaving my job at the Science Museum to take up the offer of a full-time PhD in Digital Humanities at the Open University in mid-March.

Provisional title: Participatory digitisation of spatially indexed historical data

This project aims to investigate 'participatory digitisation' models for geo-located historical material.

This project begins with the assumption that researchers are already digitising and geo-locating materials and asks whether it is possible to create systems to capture and share this data. Could the digital records and knowledge generated when researchers access primary materials be captured at the point of creation and published for future re-use? Could the links between materials, and between materials and locations, created when researchers use aggregated or mass-digitised resources, be 'mined' for re-use?

Through the use of a case study based around discovering, collating, transforming and publishing geo-located resources related to early scientific women, the project aims to discover:

how geo-located materials are currently used and understood by researchers,
what types of tools can be designed to encourage researchers to share records digitised for their own personal use
whether tools can be designed to allow non-geospatial specialists to accurately record and discover geo-spatial references
the viability of using online geo-coding and text mining services on existing digitised resources

Possible outcomes include an evaluation of spatially-oriented approaches to digital heritage resource discovery and use; mental models of geographical concepts in relation to different types of historical material and research methods; contributions to research on crowdsourcing digital heritage resources (particularly the tensions between competition and co-operation, between the urge to hoard or share resources) and prototype interfaces or applications based on the case study.

The project also provides opportunities to reflect on what it means to generate as well as consume digital data in the course of research, and on the changes digital opportunities have created for the arts and humanities researcher.

** This case study is informed by my thinking around the possibilities of re-populating the landscape with references to the lives, events, objects, etc, held by museums and other cultural heritage institutions, e.g. outside museum walls and by an experimental, collaborative project around 'modern bluestockings', that aimed to locate and re-display the forgotten stories around unconventional and pioneering women in science, technology and academia.

Project label	Information type	Amount of information	Proportion of collection
Rockets	Subjective	Contextual history ('background, events, processes and influences')	Tiny minority
Lockets	Mostly objective, may be contextual to collection purpose	Catalogued (some description)	Minority
Sprockets	Objective	Registered (minimal)	Majority