Open Objects

Does 'slow art day' work online?

2013-04-28T16:07:00.002+01:00

Saturday was 'slow art day', and the Getty Museum (@GettyMuseum) shared a Robert Hughes clip that really resonated with me:

'We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.'

I was tied to my desk writing that day so I wondered how I could have a similar experience: can you 'do' slow art online? Assuming you can switch off all the other distractions of email, social media, flashing ads, etc, and ignore the fact that your house, office or library is full of other tasks and temptations, can you slow down and sit in front of one art work and have a similar experience through an image on a screen, or does being in a gallery add something to the process? On the other hand, high-resolution images and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) mean you can see details you'd never see in a gallery so you can explore the artwork itself more deeply*. And to remove the screen from the equation, would looking at a really good print of a painting be as rewarding as looking at the original? And what of installations and sculpture?

Related to that, I've been wondering how to relate online collections (whether thematic, exhibition-style or old school catalogues) to audience motivations for visiting museums. I've just been reading a great overview of people's motivations for visiting museums in Dimitra Christidou's Re-Introducing Visitors: Thoughts and Discussion on John Falk’s Notion of Visitors’ Identity-Related Visit Motivations. Christidou summarises Falk and Storksdieck's 2005 research on 'museum-specific identities' reflecting visitor motivations:

Explorers are driven by their personal curiosity, their urge to discover new things.
Facilitators visit the museum on behalf of others’ special interests in the exhibition or the subject-matter of the museum.
Experience seekers are these visitors who desire to see and experience a place, such as tourists.
Professional hobbyists are those with specific knowledge in the subject matter of an exhibition and specific goals in mind.
Rechargers seek a contemplative or restorative experience, often to let some steam out of their systems.

Once I'd gotten past the amusing mental image of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's head exploding at the concept of 'big' and 'small' online identities that change according to context, interests, motivations, etc**, I thought the article provided a useful framework for returning to the question of 'what are museum websites for?'. We can safely assume that most gallery sites consider the needs of 'professional hobbyists', but what of the other motivations? Some of these motivations are embedded in social experiences - do art sites enable multi-user experiences online, or do they assume that 'sharing' or facilitation only happens via social media? Does looking at art online go deep enough to count as an 'experience'? And how much of the 'recharging' experience is tied to the act of getting to a particular space at a particular time, or to the affordances of the space itself and its physical separation from most distractions of the world?

What new motivations should be added for online experiences of museum exhibitions and objects? What's enabled by the convenience, accessibility and discoverability of art online? And to return to slow art, how can museums use text and design to cue people to slow down and look at art for minutes at a time without getting in the way of people who want a quick experience? (And is this the same basic question I'd asked earlier about 'enabling punctum' or 'what's the effect of all this aggregation of museum content on the user experience'?)

* Assuming you don't look so closely that you slip into 'inappropriate peering'.
** I'm sure Zuckerberg knows people have different identities in different situations, it's just more convenient for Facebook not to care. Christopher 'moot' Poole opposed this push quite well in a series of talks in 2011.

Notes from 'Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities'

2013-04-17T19:27:00.003+01:00

Last week I attended a one-day conference, 'Digital Impacts: Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities' (#oxcrowd), convened by Kathryn Eccles of Oxford's Internet Institute, and I'm sharing my (sketchy, as always) notes in the hope that they'll help people who couldn't attend.

Stuart Dunn reported on the Humanities Crowdsourcing scoping report (PDF) he wrote with Mark Hedges and noted that if we want humanities crowdsourcing to take off we should move beyond crowdsourcing as a business model and look to form, nurture and connect with communities. Alice Warley and Andrew Greg presented a useful overview of the design decisions behind the Your Paintings Tagger and sparked some discussion on how many people need to view a painting before it's 'completed', and the differences between structured and unstructured tagging. Interestingly, paintings can be 'retired' from the Tagger once enough data has been gathered - I personally think the inherent engagement in tagging is valuable enough to keep paintings taggable forever, even if they're not prioritised in the tagging interface. Kate Lindsay brought a depth of experience to her presentation on 'The Oxford Community Collection Model' (as seen in Europeana 1914-1918 and RunCoCo's 2011 report on 'How to run a community collection online' (PDF)). Some of the questions brought out the importance of planning for sustainability in technology, licences, etc, and the role of existing networks of volunteers with the expertise to help review objects on the community collection days. The role of the community in ensuring the quality of crowdsourced contributions was also discussed in Kimberly Kowal's presentation on the British Library's Georeferencer project. She also reflected on what she'd learnt after the first phase of the Georeferencer project, including that the inherent reward of participating in the activity was a bigger motivator than competitiveness, and the impact on the British Library itself, which has opened up data for wider digital uses and has more crowdsourcing projects planned. I gave a paper which was based on an earlier version, The gift that gives twice: crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage, but pushed my thinking about crowdsourcing as a tool for deep engagement with museums and other memory organisations even further. I also succumbed to the temptation to play with my own definitions of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: 'a form of engagement that contributes towards a shared, significant goal or research question by asking the public to undertake tasks that cannot be done automatically' or 'productive public engagement with the mission and work of memory institutions'.

Chris Lintott of Galaxy Zoo fame shared his definition of success for a crowdsourcing/citizen science project: it has to produce results of value to the research community in less time than could have been done by other means (i.e. it must have been able to achieve something with crowd that couldn't have without them) and discussed how the Ancient Lives project challenged that at first by turning 'a few thousand papyri they didn't have time to transcribe into several thousand data points they didn't have time to read'. While 'serendipitous discovery is a natural consequence of exposing data to large numbers of users' (in the words of the Citizen Science Alliance), they wanted a more sophisticated method for recording potential discoveries experts made while engaging with the material and built a focused 'talk' tool which can programmatically filter out the most interesting unanswered comments and email them to their 30 or 40 expert users. They also have Letters for more structured, journal-style reporting. (I hope I have that right). He also discussed decisions around full text transcriptions (difficult to automatically reconcile) vs 'rich metadata', or more structured indexes of the content of the page, which contain enough information to help historians decide which pages to transcribe in full for themselves.

Some other thoughts that struck me during the day... humanities crowdsourcing has a lot to learn from the application of maths and logic in citizen science - lots of problems (like validating data) that seem intractable can actually be solved algorithmically, and citizen science hypothesis-based approach to testing task and interface design would help humanities projects. Niche projects help solve the problem of putting the right obscure item in front of the right user (which was an issue I wrestled with during my short residency at the Powerhouse Museum last year - in hindsight, building niche projects could have meant a stronger call-to-action and no worries about getting people to navigate to the right range of objects). The variable role of forums and participants' relationship to the project owners and each other came up at various points - in some projects, interactions with a central authority are more valued, in others, community interactions are really important. I wonder how much it depends on the length and size of the project? The potential and dangers of 'gamification' and 'badgeification' and their potentially negative impact on motivation were raised. I agree with Lintott that games require a level of polish that could mean you'd invest more in making them than you'd get back in value, but as a form of engagement that can create deeper relationships with cultural heritage and/or validate some procrastination over a cup of tea, I think they potentially have a wider value that balances that.

I was also asked to chair the panel discussion, which featured Kimberly Kowal, Andrew Greg, Alice Warley, Laura Carletti, Stuart Dunn and Tim Causer. Questions during the panel discussion included:

'what happens if your super-user dies?' (Super-users or super contributors are the tiny percentage of people who do most of the work, as in this Old Weather post) - discussion included mass media as a numbers game, the idea that someone else will respond to the need/challenge, and asking your community how they'd reach someone like them. (This also helped answer the question 'how do you find your crowd?' that came in from twitter)
'have you ever paid anyone?' Answer: no
'can you recruit participants through specialist societies?' From memory, the answer was 'yes but it does depend'.
something like 'have you met participants in real life?' - answer, yes, and it was an opportunity to learn from them, and to align the community, institution, subject and process.
'badgeification?'. Answer: the quality of the reward matters more than the levels (so badges are probably out).
'what happens if you force students to work on crowdsourcing projects?' - one suggestion was to look for entries on Transcribe Bentham in a US English class blog
'what's happened to tagging in art museums, where's the new steve.museum or Brooklyn Museum?' - is it normalised and not written about as much, or has it declined?
'how can you get funding for crowdsourcing projects?'. One answer - put a good application in to the Heritage Lottery Fund. Or start small, prove the value of the project and get a larger sum. Other advice was to be creative or use existing platforms. Speaking of which, last year the Citizen Science Alliance announced 'the first open call for proposals by researchers who wish to develop citizen science projects which take advantage of the experience, tools and community of the Zooniverse. Successful proposals will receive donated effort of the Adler-based team to build and launch a new citizen science project'.
'can you tell in advance which communities will make use of a forum?' - a great question that drew on various discussions of the role of communities of participants in supporting each other and devising new research questions
a question on 'quality control' provoked a range of responses, from the manual quality control in Transcribe Bentham and the high number of Taggers initially required for each painting in Your Paintings which slowed things down, and lead into a discussion of shallow vs deep interactions
the final questioner asked about documenting film with crowdsourcing and was answered by someone else in the audience, which seemed a very fitting way to close the day.

James Murray in his Scriptorium with thousands of word references sent in by members of the public for the first Oxford English Dictionary. Early crowdsourcing?

If you found this post useful, you might also like Frequently Asked Questions about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage or my earlier Museums and the Web paper on Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections.

'An (even briefer) history of open cultural data' at GLAM-Wiki 2013

2013-04-16T00:33:00.000+01:00

These are some of my notes for my invited plenary talk at GLAM-Wiki 2013 (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia, #GLAMWiki), held at the British Library on April 12-13, 2013. I don't think I stuck that closely to them on the day, and in the interests of brevity I've left out the 'timeline' bits (but you can read about some of them in a related MuseumID article, 'Where next for open cultural data in museums?') to focus on the lessons to be learnt from changes so far. There were lots of great talks and discussion at the event, you can view some of the presentations on Wikimedia UK's YouTube channel.

A (now very) brief history of open cultural data

Firstly, thank you for the invitation to speak... This morning I want to highlight some key moments of change in the history of open cultural data - a history not only of licenses and data, but also of conversations, standards, and collaborations, of moments where things changed... I've included key moments from funders, legislative influences and the commercial sector too, as they create the context in which change happens and often have an effect on what's considered possible. I'll close by considering some of the lessons learnt.

[Please help improve this talk]

A caveat - there may well be a bias towards the English-speaking world (and to museums, because of my background). If you know of an open GLAM (gallery, library, archive, museum) data source I've missed, you can add it to the open cultural data/GLAM API wiki... or Lotte's Belice's list of open culture milestones timeline.

Definitions

'open cultural data' is data from cultural institutions that is made available for use in a machine-readable format under an open licence. But each word in open, cultural, data is slightly more complicated so I'll unpack them a little...

Open

Office clerks, FNV. Voorlichting.

While the degree of openness required to be 'open' data can be contentious, at its simplest, 'open' refers to content that is available for use outside the institution that created it, whether for school homework projects, academic monographs or mobile phone apps. 'Open' may refer to licences that clarify the permissions and restrictions placed on data, or to the use of non-proprietary digital technologies, or ideally, to a combination of both open licences and technologies.

Ideally, open data is freely available for use and redistribution by anyone for any purpose, but in reality there are often restrictions. GLAMs may limit commercial use by licensing content for 'non-commercial use only', but as there is no clear definition of 'non-commercial use' in Creative Commons licences, some developers may choose not to risk using a dataset with an unclear licence. GLAMs may also release data for commercial use but still require attribution, either to help retain the provenance of the content, to help people find their way to related content or just because they'd like some credit for their work. GLAMs might also release data under custom licences that deal with their specific circumstances, but they are then difficult to integrate with content from other openly-licensed datasets.

Hybrid licensing models are a pragmatic solution for the current environment. They at least allow some use and may contribute to greater use of open cultural data while other issues are being worked out. For example, some institutions in the UK are making lower resolutions images available for re-use under an open licence while reserving high resolution versions for commercial sales and licensing. Or they may differentiate between scholarly and commercial use, or use more restrictive licences for commercially valuable images and release everything else openly.

I think this type of access is better than nothing, particularly if organisations can learn from the experience and release more data next time. Because these hybrid models are often experimental, their reception is important, and it's helpful for GLAMs to be able to show they've had a positive impact and hopefully helped create relationships with groups like Wikipedia.

Cultural

Cultural data is data about objects, publications (such as books, pamphlets, posters or musical scores), archival material, etc, created and distributed by museums, libraries, archives and other organisations.

Data

It's a useful distinction to discuss early with other cultural heritage staff as it's easy to be talking at cross-purposes: data can refer to different types of content, from metadata or tombstone records (the basic titles, names, dates, places, materials, etc of a catalogue record), to entire collection records (including data such as researched and interpretive descriptions of objects, bibliographic data, related themes and narratives) to full digital surrogates of an object, document or book as images or transcribed text. Some organisations release open metadata, others release all their data including their images. If you can't do open data (full content or 'digital surrogates' like photographs or texts) then at least open up the metadata (data about the content) as e.g. CC0 and the rest with another licence. Releasing data may involve licensing images, offering downloads from catalogue sites; 'content donations', APIs and machine-facing interfaces; term lists, etc. Much of the data that isn't images isn't immediately interesting, and may be designed for inter-collections interoperability or mashups rather than media commons.

Why is open cultural data important?

Before I go on, why do we care? Open cultural data is the foundation on which many projects can be built. It helps achieve organisational goals, mission; can help increase engagement with content; can create 'network effect' with related institutions; can be re-used by people who share your goals around access to knowledge and information – people like Wikipedians.

Some key moments in open cultural data

Events I discussed included the founding of Wikimedia, Europeana and Flickr Commons, previous GLAM-Wiki conferences, changes in licences for art images, library catalogue records and museum content, GLAM APIs and linked data services and the launch of the Digital Public Library of America next week.

Lessons learnt

Many of the changes are the results of years of conversation and collaboration – change is slow but it does happen. GLAMs work through slow iterations – try something, and if no-one dies, they'll try something else. We are all ambassadors, and we are all translators, helping each domain understand the other.

Contradictory things GLAMs are told they must do

Give content away for the benefit of all
Monetise assets; protect against loss of potential income; protect against mis-use of collections; conserve collections in perpetuity; protect the IP of artists; demonstrate ROI on digitisation

It's not easy for GLAMs to release all their data under an entirely open licence, but they don't do it just to be annoying - it's important to understand some of the pressures they're under. For example, GLAMs usually need to be able to track uses of their data and content to show the impact of digitising and publishing content, so they prefer attribution licences.

The issue of potential lost income - imaginary money that could be made one day if circumstances change, or profit that someone else makes off their opened data - is particularly difficult as hard to deal with [and here I ad-libbed, saying that it was like worrying about failing to meet the love of your life because you got on a different tube carriage - you can't live your life chasing ghosts]. Ideally, open data needs to be understood as an input to the creative economy rather than an item on the balance sheet of an individual GLAM.

GLAMs worry about reputational damage, whether appearing on the front page of a tabloid newspaper for the 'wrong' reasons, questions being asked in Parliament, or critique from Wikipedians. Over time, their mindset is changing from keeping 'our data' to being holders, custodians of our shared heritage.

Conversations, communities, collaborations

Conversations matter... we're all working towards the same goal, but we have different types of anxieties and different problems we have to address.

GLAMs are about collections, knowledge, and audiences. Unlike most online work, they are used to seeing the excitement people experience walking through their door - help GLAMs understand what Wikipedians can do for different audiences by making those audience real to them. GLAMs are also used to being wined and dined before you lay the hard word on them. Just because you don't need to ask for permission to use content doesn't mean you shouldn't start a conversation with an organisation. There are lots of people with similar goals inside organisations, so try to find them and work with them. Trust is a currency, don't blow it!

Being truly collaborative sometimes means compromising (or picking your battles) and it definitely means practising empathy. Open data people could stop talking about open data as something you *do* to GLAMs, and GLAMs could stop thinking open data people just want to make your life difficult.

The role of higher powers

Government attitudes to open data make a big difference and they can also change the risks associated with publishing orphan works. Governments can also help GLAMs open up their content by indemnifying them against the chance that someone else will monetise their data – consider it not a failure of the GLAM but a contribution to the creative and digital economy.

Things that are better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

Kittens (and puppies)
Cultural data that's available online but isn't (yet) openly licensed
Cultural data online that is licensed for non-commercial use

Yes, the last two aren't ideal, but they are great deal better than nothing.

Into the future...

GLAMs and Wikipedians may move at different paces, and may have different priorities and different ways of viewing the world, but we're all working towards the same goals. Not everything is as open, but a lot more is open than it used to be. I sensed yesterday [the first day of the conference] that there are still some tensions between Wikimedians and GLAMers, moments when we need to take a deep breath and put empathy before a pithy put down, but I loved that Kat Walsh's welcome yesterday described how Wikipedia used to focus on how different from others but now focuses on reaching out to others and figuring out how we're the same.

GLAMs and Wikipedians have already used open cultural data to make the world a better place. Let's celebrate the progress we've made and keep working on that...

GLAM-WIKI 2013 Friday attendees photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).

Congratulations to everyone who helped make it a great event, but particularly to Daria Cybulska and Andrew Gray (@generalising) for making everything work so smoothly, and Liam Wyatt (@wittylama) for the original invitation to speak.

Notes from THATCamp Feminisms West #tcfw

2013-03-26T21:16:00.001Z

I'm just back from ten days in the US where I attended two events, both closely related to digital history, feminist digital humanities and women's history (whether intellectual, science, education, etc related). I'm posting to mark the moment and to collect some links - I think I'm still digesting the many conversations and moments of insight.

THATCamp Feminisms West #tcfw

A THATCamp is a technology+humanities unconference, a format much loved in the digital humanities world. This one was conceived from a twitter conversation and organised by the wonderful Jacque Wernimont of Scripps College in Claremont, California for March 14-15. Two other THATCamp Feminisms were held simultaneously in the south and east. I was invited over to do a workshop, and thought 'data visualisation as a gateway to programming' would be useful - I prepared two exercises, one of which involved thinking about how to match visualisation types to the structure of the selected content in ManyEyes, while the other was more about learning about how code works by playing with a pre-coded (and heavily, chattily commented) working visualisation that used SIMILE's JavaScript libraries - 'view source' and save the file to your hard drive to get started. It was a good chance to talk about the issues that messy humanities data create for generic visualisation tools, the risks in the 'truthiness' of visualisations, the importance of thinking critically about algorithms and issues around primary sources and women's history, etc, with people who'd thought deeply about some of these issues and could make their own contributions to the workshop.

The day started with the #tooFEW Wikipedia editathon (storify of results), which gave everyone a chance to learn and try out something new before the THATCamp had even officially started. It was a nice way to ease into things and achieve something together before working out the THATCamp programme as a group.

Over the day and a half I went to sessions including Feminist digital pedagogy and Feminist Collaboration. After a week of further travel across the US and another conference, the sessions are blurring into one, but overall they were a great chance to think about what a feminist digital humanities might be like (see for example Transformative Digital Humanities projects or read Toward an Open Digital Humanities from an earlier THATCamp for things to move towards or be careful of), to ask questions like 'what would a feminist Digging into Data look like?', to ask 'does it matter if feminist projects are made with people who don't share their politics'? (Probably not, though academic work might be attractive to people who value work/life balance.) What's the right mix of openness and shared authority, how collaborative can a class be, and how can we help students fail safely in the cause of experimenting (especially when using public technologies like YouTube or Twitter)? It's important to remember that, as Alex Juhasz said, feminism is about process (or praxis), doing and making things, which in turn made me realise that one reason I value teaching coding is that it gives people DIY tools to make things that suit their own research needs and styles (see 'Why learning to code isn’t as important as learning to build something' but please also read Code: Craft and Culture and the comments below it). I also loved Alex's statement that she's 'less interested in feminism that starts from danger than feminism that starts from agency' and being fearless about taking up space.

The value of meeting in person was an underlying theme of the event, and eventually a conversation about Building a DH Regional Hub, and the difficulties in collaborating between institutions and organising in-person meetings with the huge geographic coverage of the Los Angeles area lead to the invention of Mindr: 'Grindr for travelling DHers - who's nearby and what do they want to chat about?', or as @laurenfklein described it, a 'geo-aware interface to DH Answers', an app that lets you know when someone with similar scholarly interests is nearby and might be up for a chat. I would *love* this to actually happen, and who knows, if someone is able to shepherd the enthusiasm for it, it might.

Beyond the value in the discussion, just being surrounded by people who were digitally savvy and were also aware of the effects of implicit biases and tech-as-a-meritocracy, the role of disciplinary gatekeepers, assumptions about gendered work, emotional labour and the pressure to be 'nice' as well as the peculiarities of academia was brilliant. It was also a bit intimidating at first as I don't feel hugely qualified to comment on feminist issues (it's a long time since I've been caught up on theory and 'feminism' online has probably made it sound scarier than it really is) unless conversation moved to 'women in tech' issues or I could contribute observations on my experience of academia and workplaces in the UK. Perhaps that's one reason I was encouraged by discussion about possible models of feminist scholarship and mentoring (including asking male allies for help) - I don't have to figure this out on my own. That said, as Anne Cong-Huyen said:

'At an event like this one, where we come together to address or at least share about gender and sexual equality in dh and the academy it leaves us to ask: Where does the burden of addressing that inequity fall? [...] And how about those of us who are junior faculty, adjuncts, or graduate students (like myself) who have even less power within the academy?'

Or in Amanda Phillips' words:

In this way, THATCamp Feminisms felt a bit different than other THATCamps I’ve attended. The infectious enthusiasm of DH was tempered here by the political, professional, and market realities that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

I think it's important that those realities are widely understood and shared, or some of the promise of the digital humanities will have failed to blossom. Creating space for those hard questions perhaps highlights how positive, supportive and constructive the environment at THATCamp Feminisms West was. I don't have a witty or concise conclusion, except to say that I met a bunch of amazing women and came away encouraged and inspired, and you should definitely go to a THATCamp Feminisms if you ever get a chance. Or run one yourself and see what happens. To quote Alex Juhasz again:

To me it is was less the DH, or even the digital, that made this conversation matter, but the feminist: because we shared values, the will and capacity to be critical as well as intellectual while being supportive and trying to distribute authority and voice around the room all the while working, quick.

New challenges in digital history: sharing women's history on Wikipedia - my talk notes

2013-03-23T15:32:00.000Z

I'm at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women's Education at Bryn Mawr College for the inaugural Women's History in the Digital World Conference. Since I'm about to speak and ask historians to share their research and write history in public, I thought I should also be brave and share my draft talk notes (which I've now updated with formatted references, though Blogger is still re-formatting things slightly oddly).

Introduction: New challenges in digital history: sharing women's history on Wikipedia

[slide – title, my details]
Hi, I'm Mia. I'm actually doing a PhD on scholarly crowdsourcing, or collaboratively creating online resources, and, thinking about the impact of digitality on the practices of historians, so this paper is indirectly related to my research but isn't core to it.
I proposed this paper as a deliberate provocation: 'if we believe the subjects of our research are important, then we should ensure they are represented on freely available encyclopedic sites like Wikipedia'. Just in case you're not familiar with it, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia 'that anyone can edit.' It contains 25 million articles, over 4 million of them in English, but also in 285 other languages, and has 100,000 active contributors[1].

'Brilliant Women' at the National Portrait Gallery

The genesis of this paper was two-fold. The 2008 exhibition 'Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings' at the UK National Portrait Gallery, made the point that 'Despite the fact that 'bluestockings' made a substantial contribution to the creation and definition of national culture their intellectual participation and artistic interventions have largely been forgotten'. As a computer programmer, reinventing the wheel and other inefficient processes drive me crazy, and I began to think about how digital publishing could intervene in the cycle of remembering and forgetting that seemed to be the fate of brilliant women throughout history. How could historians use digital platforms to stop those histories being lost and to make them easy for others to find?

[Screenshot – Caitlin Moran quote from How to be a woman: 'Even the ardent feminist historian, male or female – citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra – can't conceal that women have done basically f*ck-all for the last 100,000 years']
A few years later, by then a brand-new PhD student, I attended the Women's History Network conference in London in 2011 and learnt of so many interesting lives that challenged conventional mainstream historical narratives of gender. I wished that others could hear those stories too. But when I asked if any of these histories were available outside academia on sites like Wikipedia, there was a strong sense that editing Wikipedia was something that other people did. But who better to make a case for better representation of women's histories than the people in that room? Who else has the skills, knowledge and the passion? Some academic battles may have been won regarding the importance of women's histories, but representing women's histories on the sites where ordinary people start their queries is hugely important. The quote on this slide illustrates why – even if it was meant in jest, it represents a certain world view.

WikiWomen's Collaborative

[slide – logos from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiWomen%27s_History_Month http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomen%27s_Collaborative ]
Of course, I'm not the first, and definitely not the most qualified to make this point. I would also like to acknowledge the work of many groups and individuals, particularly within Wikipedia, that's preceded this.[2]

[slide – Scripps editathon, #tooFEW]
Things move fast in the digital world and we're at a different moment than the one when I proposed this paper. Gender issues on Wikipedia had been discussed for a number of years but there's been a recent burst of activity, including the #tooFEW ('Feminists Engage Wikipedia') editathons – 'a scheduled time where people edit Wikipedia together, whether offline, online, or a mix of both' - [3], held online and in person across four physical sites.[4] [5] I was going to be provocative and ask you to create Wikipedia entries about the histories you've invested so much in researching, but some of that is happening already. As a result, this is version 2 of this paper, but my starting question remains the same – assuming we believe that women's history is important, what's wrong with our current methods of research dissemination and dialogue?

The case of the Invisible Scholarship

[slide – outline of section]
Cumulative centuries of archival and theoretical work have been spent recovering women's histories, yet much of this inspiring scholarship might as well not exist when so few people have access to it. Sadly, it's currently the case that scholarship that isn't deliberately made public is invisible outside academia. The open access movement, with all its thorny complications, is one potential solution. Engaging in new forms of open scholarship and disseminating research on sites where the public already goes to learn about history is another.

If it's not Googleable, it doesn't exist.

[slide – screenshot of unsuccessful search for Ina von Grumbkow]
Most content searches start and end online. The content and links available to search engines inform their assumptions about the world, and they in turn shape the world view presented on the results screen. If the name of a historical figure doesn't show up in Google, how else would someone find out about them? While college students might be heavy users of Google's specialist Google Scholar search, it's unlikely that people would come across it accidentally, not least because there's a 'semantic gap' between the language used in academia and the language used in everyday speech. Writing for Wikipedia means writing in everyday language, and the site is heavily indexed by search engines – it doesn't take long for content created on Wikipedia – even on a user's talk page and not the main site – to show up in Google results. So one reason to take history on Wikipedia seriously is that it affects what search engines know about the world.

'Did you mean… hegemony?'

Search for 'Viscountess Ranelagh', Google says 'Did you mean Viscount'. No.

[slide – screenshot of search for 'Viscountess Ranelagh and the Authorisation of Women's Knowledge in the Hartlib Circle', Google says 'Did you mean Viscount'. No.]
Scholarship and sources contained in specialist online archives and repositories are often off-limits to the Google bots that crawl the web looking for content to index. Because search engines normalise certain assumptions about the world, getting more content about women's histories in publically accessible spaces will eventually have an effect in the algorithms that determine suggestions for 'did you mean' etc. Contributions to sites like Wikipedia can eventually become contributions to the 'knowledge graphs' that determine the answers to questions we ask online.

If it's behind a paywall, it only exists for a privileged few

[Slide - Screenshot of blocked attempt to access 'Wives and daughters of early Berlin geoscientists and their work behind the scenes']
Specialist users will be able to find academic research via Google Scholar, but any independent scholars in attendance will be able to speak to the difficulties in gaining access to journal articles without membership of an institutional library. Journal articles obviously have a lot of value within academic communities, but the research they represent is only available to a privileged few.

Why does Wikipedia matter?

[slide: For some, Wikipedia is the font of all wisdom]
Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. As one commentator said, 'people turn to Wikipedia as an objective resource' but ' it's not so objective in many ways.'[6]

However, as the free online encyclopedia 'that anyone can edit', it also provides the ability to take direct action to fix the under-representation of women's history. President of the AHA, William Cronon said, 'Wikipedia provides an online home for people interested in histories long marginalized by the traditional academy'[7] – this may not be entirely true yet, but we can hope.

Wikipedia is not yet encyclopedic

[Slide – Ina screenshot]
The English version of Wikipedia has over 4 million articles but it still has some way to go to become truly encyclopedic. Martha Saxton has noted the absence of women's history content on Wikipedia and was distressed by 'its superficiality and inaccuracies when present [8]'. Just as female assistants, secretaries, collectors, illustrators, correspondents, translators, salonists, cataloguers, text book writers, popularisers, explorers, pioneers and colleagues have been left out of traditional academic histories and gradually reclaimed by historians, they are often still invisible on Wikipedia. This may be partly because not enough women edit Wikipedia – as Wikipedia User Gobonobo says, 'editors often contribute to topics they are familiar with and that concern them [...] This systemic bias has the potential to exacerbate an historical record that already gives undue emphasis to men.' [9]

The under-representation of women's history undermines Wikipedia's claim to be encyclopedic. Issues include missing entries or omissions in coverage for existing topics, entries with inaccurate content, a failure to represent a truly 'neutral point of view', and a representation of 'male' as the default gender.

Many notable women have been buried in pages titled for their husbands, brothers, tutors, etc. In 1908 Ina von Grumbkow undertook an expedition to Iceland. She later made significant contributions to the field of natural history and wrote several books but other than passing references online and a mention on her husband's Wikipedia page, her story is only available to those with access to sources like the ' Earth Sciences History' journal[10][11].

[Slide: 'Main articles: List of Fellows of the Royal Society and List of female Fellows of the Royal Society '.]
Some of the categories used in Wikipedia posit the default gender as male. For example, there's a ' List of Fellows of the Royal Society ' and ' List of female Fellows of the Royal Society'.

Wikipedia and the challenges of digital history

Writing for Wikipedia encapsulates many, but not all, of the challenges of digital history.

New forms of writing

Writing for Wikipedia calls upon historians to write engaging, intellectually accessible, succinct text that still accurately represents its subject. It not only means valuing the work and skills in writing public history, it requires the ability to write history in public.

Writing for a 'neutral point of view' – one of the key values of Wikipedia – is challenging for historians. Many may find difficult to believe that it's even possible, and it's difficult to achieve [12].

Unlike traditional historical scholarship, characterised by 'possessive individualism' [13] and honed to perfection before publication, Wikipedia entries are considered a work in progress, and anyone who spots an issue is asked to fix it themselves or flag it for others to review.

It won't advance your career

While it might have a large public impact, editing Wikipedia is work that isn't credited in academia, and it takes time that could be used for projects that would count for career advancement. More importantly from Wikipedia's point of view, you can't promote your own work on the site, so writing about your own research interests is not straightforward if not many people have published in your area of expertise.

“On the internet, nobody knows you're a professor”

In a comment with 'pointers for academics who would like to contribute to Wikipedia' on a Chronicle article, commentator 'operalala' said, '"On the internet nobody knows you're a professor." If you're used to deferential treatment at your home institution, you'll be treated like everybody else in the Wide Open Internet.'[14] Or in William Cronon's words, you must 'give up the comfort of credentialed expertise'.[15] Anyone can edit, re-shape or even delete your work.

Just like academia, Wikipedia has ways of establishing the credibility and reputation of a contributor, and just like any other community, there are etiquettes and conventions to observe. As newcomers to the community, Claire Potter warns that it's important not to think of Wikipedia as 'another realm for intellectuals to colonize and professionalize'.[16]

The opportunities and challenges of women's history as public history on Wikipedia

Opportunities

#WomenSciWP editathon at the Royal Society

Wikipedia uses red links to represent entries that could be created but don't yet exist. Women's history editathons often create lists of red-linked names as suggested topics that could be created [17] . Projects on and outside Wikipedia, and events at institutions like the Smithsonian and Royal Society and just last weekend at three THATCamps across the United States might be part of a critical mass of people learning how to edit Wikipedia to better include women's history.

Compared to the lengthy process of writing for academic publication, a new Wikipedia entry can be created in a few hours, allowing for time to structure the content and format the references as necessary to pass the first quality bar. An existing entry can be corrected in minutes. Each editathon or personal edit improves the representation of women's history, and there's something very satisfying about turning red links blue.

Ina von Grumbkow's name red-linked on her husband's Wikipedia page

Adding the brackets that turn a piece of text into a red link, suggesting the possibility of an entry to be created is a small but potentially powerful intervention. Red links can render the gaps and silences visible.

Resistance

Creating or editing entries on women's history may be relatively easy, but making sure they stay there is less so. There are countless examples of women having to fight to keep changes in as other editors revert them, argue about their choice of sources, the significance or notability of their topic. Wikipedians are zealous in preventing spammers and crackpots polluting the quality of the site, which explains some of the rapid 'nominations for deletion', but some pockets of the site are also hostile to women's history or to women themselves.

Saxton said editing Wikipedia is 'not for the faint of heart' and 'a lesson in how little women's history has penetrated mainstream culture'. There's work to be done in sharing and normalising an understanding of the historical circumstances and cultural contexts that created difficulties for women. We might know that, as Janet Abbate said, 'The laws and social conventions of a given time and place strongly shape the kinds of technical training available to women and men, the career options open to them, their opportunities for advancement and recognition' [18] but until other Wikipedians understand that, there will continue to be issues around 'notability'. Having those conversations as many times as necessary might be tiring and uncomfortable or even controversial, but it's part of the work of representing women's history on Wikipedia.

Tensions

'Reliable sources'

Wikipedians may have different definitions of 'reliable sources' than scholarly researchers. As one academic discovered:
"Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."' [19]

The same gatekeepers matter

As some academics have found, 'Wikipedia differs from primary-source research, from scholarly writing, and how it privileges existing rather than new knowledge' [20] [21] Wikipedia is not the place to redress fundamental issues with silences in the archives or in the profession overall, not least because on Wikipedia, primary research is bad and secondary sources are good [22] . This puts the onus back on to traditional academic publishing in peer-reviewed journals and books that can be cited in Wikipedia articles, though other published works such as 'credible and authoritative books' and 'reputable media sources' can also be cited.

'Notability'

'A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject. [...] the person who is the topic of a biographical article should be "worthy of notice" – that is, "significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded" within Wikipedia as a written account of that person's life.' [23] 'The common theme in the notability guidelines is that there must be verifiable, objective evidence that the subject has received significant attention from independent sources to support a claim of notability.' [24] This creates obvious difficulties for some women's histories.

It's also difficult to judge where 'notability' should end. When does focusing on exceptional women become counter-productive? When do we risk creating a new canon? When does it stop being remarkable that a woman became prominent in a field and start being more accepted, if still not expected? [25] At what point should writing shift from individual entries to integration into more general topics?

Conclusion

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether Wikipedia lags behind academia's acceptance and general integration of women's history into mainstream history or whether it is representative of the field's more conservative corners. Recent digital history projects are doing a good job in explaining some of the issues with key sources for Wikipedia like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [26] , and I'd hope that this continues. As Martha Saxton said, 'integrating women's experience into broad subjects' is 'both more challenging intellectually and ultimately, more to the point of the overall project of bringing women into our acknowledged history'. [27]

But it's also clearly up to us to make a difference. If it's worth researching the life and achievements of a notable woman, it's worth making sure their contribution to history is available to the world while improving the quality of the world's biggest encyclopaedia. And it doesn't mean going it alone. It's still just Women's History Month so it's not too late to sign up and join one of the women's history projects, or to plan something with your students. [28] [29] [30]

I'd like to close with quotes from two different women. Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Sue Gardner: 'Wikipedia will only contain 'the sum of all human knowledge' if its editors are as diverse as the population itself: you can help make that happen. And I can't think of anything more important to do, than that.' [31]

And to quote Laura Mandell's keynote yesterday: 'Let's write and publish about each other's projects so that future historians will have those sources to write about. ... Nothing changes through thinking alone, only through massive amounts of re-iteration'. [32]

[Update: based on questions afterwards, you may want to get started with Wikipedia:How to run an edit-a-thon, or sign up and say hello at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women's History. You could also join in the Global Women Wikipedia Write-In #GWWI on April 26 (1-3pm, US EST), and they have a handy page on How to Create Wikipedia Entries that Will Stick.

And update April 30, 2013: check out 'Learning to work with Wikipedia - New Pages Patrol and how to create new Wikipedia articles that will stick' by the excellent Adrianne Wadewitz]

References

[1] Various. ‘Wikipedia’. 2013. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.

[2] See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women%27s_History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/DC_30

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_run_an_edit-a-thon

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Feminists_Engage_Wikipedia

[5] Barnett, Fiona. 2013. ‘#tooFEW - Feminists Engage Wikipedia’. HASTAC. March 11. http://hastac.org/blogs/fionab/2013/03/11/toofew-feminists-engage-wikipedia.

[6] Gobry, Pascal-Emmanuel. 2011. ‘Wikipedia Is Hampered By Its Huge Gender Gap’. Business Insider. January 31. http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-is-hampered-by-its-huge-gender-gap-2011-1#.

[7] Cronon, William. 2012. ‘Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World’. Perspectives on History, American Historical Association. February 7. http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1202/Scholarly-Authority-in-a-Wikified-World.cfm.

[8] Saxton, Martha. 2012. ‘Wikipedia and Women’s History: A Classroom Experience’. Writing History in the Digital Age. http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/crowdsourcing/saxton-etal-2012-spring/.

[9] Gobonobo. 2013. ‘User:Gobonobo/Gender Gap Red List’. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gobonobo/Gender_Gap_red_list

[10] Various.. ‘Hans Reck’. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reck

[11] Mohr, B. A. R. 2010. Wives and daughters of early Berlin geoscientists and their work behind the scenes. Earth Sciences History 29 (2): 291–310.

[12] As commenter Operalala suggested, one challenge is recognising ‘the difference between the plurality of academia and the singularity of a Wikipedia article’. Comment http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/#comment-437781354 on Messer-Kruse, Timothy. 2012. ‘The “Undue Weight” of Truth on Wikipedia’. The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 12. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/.

[13] Rosenzweig, Roy. 2006. ‘Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past’. The Journal of American History 93 (1) (June): 117–46. https://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42

[14] Operalala on Messer-Kruse, 2012 [15] Cronon, 2012.

[16] Potter, Claire. 2013. ‘Looking for the Women on Wikipedia: Readers Respond’. The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 14. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2013/03/looking-for-the-women-on-wikipedia-readers-respond/

[17] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gobonobo/Gender_Gap_red_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:T._Anthony/Women_in_Red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dsp13/Redlinks/Women

[18] Janet Abbate, "Guest Editor's Introduction: Women and Gender in the History of Computing," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 4-8, October-December, 2003

[19] Messer-Kruse, 2012.

[20] Anderson, Jill. 2013. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll (Probably) Never Do Again’. True Stories Backward. http://girlhistorian.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/a-supposedly-fun-thing-ill-probably-never-do-again/

[21] Messer-Kruse, 2012.

[22] Various. 2013. ‘Wikipedia:No Original Research’. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

[23] Various. 2013. ‘Wikipedia:Notability (people)’. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)

[24] Various. 2013. ‘Wikipedia:Notability’. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOTE
[25] Or as Christie Aschwanden says when proposing the 'Finkbeiner test' for contemporary journalism about women in science, 'treating female scientists as special cases only perpetuates the idea that there’s something extraordinary about a woman doing science'. Aschwanden, Christie. 2013. ‘The Finkbeiner Test’. Double X Science. March 5. http://www.doublexscience.org/the-finkbeiner-test/

[26] For a recent example, see ‘An Entry of One’s Own, or Why Are There So Few Women In the Early Modern Social Network?’ 2013. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. March 8. http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/post/44879380376/an-entry-of-ones-own-or-why-are-there-so-few-women-in and ‘Gender and Name Recognition’. 2013. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. March 20. http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/post/45833622936/gender-and-name-recognition

[27] Saxton, 2012

[28] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiWomen%27s_History_Month

[29] Potter, Claire. 2013. ‘Prikipedia? Or, Looking for the Women on Wikipedia’. The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 10. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2013/03/prikipedia-looking-for-the-women-on-wikipedia/
[30] For advice, see: Wikimedia Outreach. 2013. ‘Education Portal/Tips and Resources’. Wikipedia Outreach Wiki. http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Tips_and_Resources
[31] A comment on Gardner, Sue. 2010. ‘Unlocking the Clubhouse: Five Ways to Encourage Women to Edit Wikipedia’. Sue Gardner’s Blog. November 14. http://suegardner.org/2010/11/14/unlocking-the-clubhouse-five-ways-to-encourage-women-to-edit-wikipedia/
[32] Mandell, Laura. 2013. "Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities." Keynote presented at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania March 22 2013

If an app is the answer...

2013-03-14T02:35:00.002Z

...what was the question?* And seriously, what questions should museums ask before investing in a mobile or tablet app?

First, some background. In We’re not ‘appy. Not ‘appy at all., Tom Loosemore of the Government Digital Service (GDS) gives examples of the increases in mobile traffic to UK government sites, including up to 60% mobile visits to site with complex transactions like booking driving tests.

For a cultural heritage perspective: as part of the Culture24 Let's Get Real project, I looked at the percentage of mobile visits (and visitors) to 22 cultural websites for Jan 1, 2012 - September 2, 2012 (an extended time to try and reduce the effect of the Olympics) and found that on average, museums and arts organisations were already seeing an average of 20% mobile visits. I also reported the percentage change from the same period last year so that people could get a sense of the velocity of change: on average there was a 170% increase in mobile visits to cultural websites compared to the same period in 2011.

We'll re-run the stats when writing the final report in July, but in the meantime, there's a recent significant increase in web traffic from tablet devices to take into account. In BBC iPlayer: tablet viewing requests nearly double in two months the Guardian reported BBC figures:

"Tablets' share of total iPlayer requests grew from just 6% (TV only: 7%) in January 2012 to 10% (12%) in November and 15% (18%) last month. Smartphone requests have seen similar growth from 6% (TV only: 6%) of the total a year ago to 16% (18%) in January. [... ]A spokesman said it is thought the rise of the "phablet" – smartphones that are almost as big as a tablet, such as the Samsung Note – that have driven the surge."

Some museums are reporting seeing 40-50% increases in tablet traffic in the past few months. So, given all that, are apps the answer? Over to Loosemore:

"Our position is that native apps are rarely justified. [...] Apps may be transforming gaming and social media, but for utility public services, the ‘making your website adapt really effectively to a range of devices’ approach is currently the better strategy. It allows you to iterate your services much more quickly, minimises any market impact and is far cheaper to support."

Obviously there are exceptions for apps that meet particular needs or genres, but this stance is part of their Government Digital Strategy:

"Stand-alone mobile apps will only be considered once the core web service works well on mobile devices, and if specifically agreed with the Cabinet Office."

So if your cultural organisation is considering an app, perhaps you should consider the questions the GDS poses before asking for an exemption to the requirement to just build a responsive website:

Is our web service already designed to be responsive to different screen sizes? If not, why not?
What is the user need that only a native/hybrid app can meet?
Are there existing native/hybrid apps which already meet this user need?
Is our service available to 3rd parties via an API or open data? If not, why not?
Does meeting this need justify the lifetime cost of a native or hybrid app?

What questions should we add for cultural heritage, arts and educational organisations? (My pet hate: are you creating amazing content that's only accessible to people with the right device?) And since I know I'm being deliberately provocative - what exceptions should be allowed? What apps have you seen that could only work as an app with current technology?

* I can't claim credit for the challenge 'if an app is the answer, what was the question', it's been floating around for a while now and possibly originated at a Let's Get Real workshop or conference.

Notes from 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC'

2013-02-01T17:01:00.003Z

I've just spent two days in Leicester for the 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC' conference at the school of Museum Studies, part of the AHRC-funded iSay project focusing on Visitor-Generated Content (VGC) in heritage institutions. There will be lots of posts on the conference blog, so these are just some things that struck me or I've found useful concepts for thinking about my own museum practice.

I tweeted about the event as I headed to Leicester, and that started a conversation about the suitability of the term 'visitor-generated content' that continued through the event itself. I think it was Giasemi who said that one problem with 'visitor-generated content' is that the term puts the emphasis on content and that's not what it's about. Jeremy Ottevanger suggested 'inbound communications' as a possible replacement for VGC.

The first keynote was Angelina Russo, who reminded us of the importance of curiosity and of finding ways to make museum collections central to visitor engagement work. She questioned the value of some comments left on museum collections other than the engagement in the process of leaving the comment. Having spent too much time reviewing visitor comments, I have to agree that not all comments (particularly repetitive ones) have inherently valuable content or help enhance another visitor's experience - a subject that was debated during the conference. A conversation over twitter during the conference with Claire Ross helped me realise that designing interfaces that respect and value the experience of both the commenter and reading is one of the interesting challenges in digital participation.

She then used Bourdieu's ideas around 'restricted cultural production' to characterise the work of curators as producers who create cultural goods for other producers, governed by specific norms and sanctions, within relatively self-contained communities where their self-esteem depends on peers. However, this creates a tension between what curators think their role is and what museums need it to be in an age when museums are sites of large-scale cultural production for 'the public at large', driven by a quest for market share and profits. Visitor-generated content and the related issues of trust, authority, or digitisation highlight the tensions between these models of restricted or large-scale cultural production – we need to find 'a pathway through the sand'. Angelina suggested that a version of Bourdieu's 'gift economies', where products are created and given away in return for recognition might provide a solution, then asked what's required to make that shift within the museum. How can we link the drive for participation with the core work of museums and curatorial scholarship? She presented a model (which I haven't gone into here) for thinking about 'cultural communication', or communication which is collection-led; curiosity-driven; is scholarly; experiential; and offers multi-platform opportunities for active cultural participation, engagement and co-creation.

Carl Hogsden from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and University of Cambridge talked about the Reciprocal Research Network and moving beyond digital feedback to digital reciprocation. This project has been doing innovative work for a long time, so it was good to see it presented again.

Jenny Kidd from Cardiff University posed some useful questions in 'VGC and ethics – what we might learn from the media and journalism' - it's questionable how much VGC (or user-generated content, UGC) has actually changed journalism, despite the promise of increased civic engagement, diversity, more relevant news and a re-framing of the audience as active citizens rather than consumers. One interesting point was the impact of the 'Arab Spring' on UGC - content that couldn't be verified couldn't be shown by traditional media so protesters started including establishing shots and improving the quality of their recordings. This was also the first of several papers that referenced 'Whose cake is it anyway', a key text for conversations about visitor participation and museums and Jenny suggested that sometimes being seen to engage in participatory activity is currently possibly end goal in itself for a museum. She presented questions for further research and debate including: is the museum interested in quality of process or product of VGC and do creators feel the same? How does VGC fit in workflow models of museums?

Giasemi Vavoula's paper on 'The role of VGC in digital transformations in Museum Learning' (slides) was fascinating, particularly as it presented frameworks for audience engagement taken from learning theory that closely matched those I'd found from studies of citizen science and engagement in heritage and sport (e.g. cognitive engagement model - highest is theorising, then applying, relating, explaining, describing, note-taking, memorising... Good visitor experiences get most visitors to use the higher engagement level processes that the more focused visitors use spontaneously). I love learning from Learning people - in museum learning/visitor studies, social interaction facilitates learning; visitors negotiate the meanings of exhibits through conversation with their companions. Giasemi called for museums to weave VGC into the fabric of visitors social contexts; to scaffold and embed it into visiting experience; and to align with visitors and organisations' social agendas.

In 'A Tale of Two Workhouses' Peter Rogers and Juliet Sprake spoke of 'filling in the gaps rather than being recipients of one-way information flow', which tied in nicely with discussion around the role of curiosity in audience participation.

In the afternoon there was a Q&A session with Nina Simon (via skype). A number of the questions were about sustainability, designing for mixed contexts, and the final question was 'where next from here?'. Nina advised designing participatory experiences so that people can observe the activity and decide to take part when they're comfortable with it - this also works for designing things that work as spectator experiences for people who don't want to join in. Nina's response to a question about 'designing better questions' - 'find questions where you have genuine interest in what the visitor has to say about it' - resonated with wider discussion about meaningful visitor participation. Nina talked about the cumulative effect of participatory work on the museum itself, changing not only how the museum sees itself but how others see it - I wonder how many museums in the UK are engaging with visitor participation to the extent that it changes the museum itself? Nina also made the point that you tend to have either highly participatory process to make conventional product, or conventional process to make highly participatory product, and that not everything has to be wholly participatory from start to finish, which is useful for thinking how co-creative projects.

On Friday morning I gave a keynote on 'crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage'. My slides for 'Crowdsourcing as productive engagement with cultural heritage' are now online. I partly wanted to problematise the power relationships in participatory projects - whose voice can affect change? - and to tease out different ways of thinking about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage as productive both in terms of the process (engaging in cultural heritage) and the product (the sheer number of items transcribed, corrected, etc). I've been going back to research on motivations for volunteering in cultural heritage, working on open source projects and reviewing discussions with participants in crowdsourcing projects, and I hope it'll help people design projects that meet those altruistic, extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Thinking about my paper in the context of the other presentations also got me thinking about the role of curiosity in audience engagement and encouraging people to start researching a subject (whether a ship's history, an individual or a general topic) more deeply. On a personal note, this paper was a good chance to reflect on the different types of audience engagement with museum collections or historic sources and on the inherent value of participation in cultural heritage projects that underpin my MSc and PhD research and my work in museums generally.

Areti Galani presented research she'd done with Rachel Clarke (Newcastle University), and asked 'how can accessible technology lead to inaccessible participation paradigms?'. I was really interested in the difference between quality of the visitor contributions in-gallery vs online (though of course 'quality' is a highly subjective term), a question that surfaced through the day. Areti's research might suggest that building in some delay in the process of contributing in-gallery could lead to better quality (i.e. more considered) contributions. The novelty of the technology used might also have an effect - 'pen-happy visitors' who used the technology for the sake of interacting with it but didn't know what to do after picked up the pen.

The paper from Jeremy Ottevanger (Imperial War Museums) on "Social Interpretation" as a catalyst for organisational change generated more discussion on possible reasons why online comments on museum sites tend to be more thoughtful than in-gallery comments, with one possible reason being that online commenters have deliberately sought out the content, so already have a deeper engagement with those specific items, rather than just coming across them while moving through the physical gallery. Jeremy talked about the need for the museum to find an internal workflow that was appropriately responsive to online comments - in my experience, this is one of the most difficult issues in planning for digital projects. Jeremy presented a useful categorisation of online contributions as personal (emotional, opinion, personal information, anecdotes, family history), requests and queries (object info, valuation, family history, digitisation and licencing, offering material, access, history, general/website), and informational (new information, corrections) and looked at which types of contribution were responded to by different departments. He finished with a vision of the IWM harnessing the enthusiasm and knowledge of their audiences to help serve the need of other audiences, of connecting people with expertise with people who have questions.

Jack Ashby talked about finding the right questions for the QRator project at the Grant Museum of Zoology - a turtle is a turtle, and there's not a lot of value in finding out what visitors might want to call it, but asking wider questions could be more useful. Like the wider Social Interpretation project, QRator always raises questions for me about whether museums should actively 'garden' visitor interactives, pruning out less relevant questions to create a better experience for other visitors.

Rolf Steier and Palmyre Pierroux discussed their findings on the role of the affordances of social media and visitor contributions in museums. Rosie Cardiff talked about the Tate's motivations for participatory projects with audiences, and audience motivations for participating in Tate's projects. She presented some considerations for organisations considering participatory projects: who is the audience? What motivations for visitor and for organisation? What platform will you use? How will the content be moderated? (Who will do it?) Where will it sit in relation to organisational space online or in-gallery? How long will it run for? What plans for archiving and maintaining content beyond lifetime of project? How will you measure success? How will you manage audience expectations about what's going to happen to their work? This last point was also picked up in discussions about audience expectations about how long museums will keep their contributions.

The final presentation was Ross Parry's keynote on 'The end of the beginning: Normativity in the postdigital museum. Based on new research into how six UK national (i.e. centrally funded, big, prestigious museums) have started to naturalise 'digital' into their overall museum vision, this paper gave me hope for the future. There's still a long way to go, but Ross articulated a vision of how some museums are integrating digital in the immediate future, and how it will integrated once the necessary stage of highlighting 'digital' in strategies, organisational structures and projects has given way to a more cohesive incorporation of 'digital' into the fabric of museums. It also makes sense in the context of discussions about digital strategies in museums over the past year (e.g. at the Museums Assocation and UK Museums on the Web (themes, my report) conferences).

I had to leave before the final session, so my report ends here, but I expect there'll be more reports on the project blog and I've saved an archive of isayevent_tweets_2013_02_01 (CSV).

I think the organisers, Giasemi Vavoula and Jenny Kidd, did a great job on the conference programme. The papers and audience were a well-balanced combination of academics and practioners - the academic papers gave me interesting frameworks to think with, and the case studies provided material to think about.

Finding museum, digital humanities and public history projects and communities online

2013-01-14T15:26:00.003Z

Every once in a while I see someone asking for sources on digital, participatory, social media projects around museums, public history, social history, etc but I don't always have a moment to reply. To make it easier to help people, here's a quick collection of good places to get started.

I think the best source for museums and digital/social media projects is the site and community around the Museums and the Web conference, including 'Best of the Web' nominations and awards (2012-1997) and conference proceedings: 2012, 2011, 2010-1987.

Other projects might be listed at the new Digital Humanities Awards (nominations closed on the 11th so presumably they'll publish the list of nominees soon) or the (US) National Council on Public History Awards. The Digital Humanities conferences also include some social history, public history and participatory projects e.g. DH2012, as did the first Digital Humanities Australasia conference and the MCG's UK Museums on the Web conference reports.

To start finding online communities, look for people tweeting with #dhist, #digitalhumanities, #lodlam, #drinkingaboutmuseums, #musetech (and variations) or join the Museums Computer Group or the Museum Computer Network lists (or check their archives).

I'd like to add a list of museum bloggers (whether they focus on social media, technology, education, exhibition design, audience research, etc) but don't know of any comprehensive, up-to-date lists (or delicious etc tags). (Though since I originally posted @gretchjenn pointed me to the new 'Meet a museum blogger' series and @alexandrematos told me about Cultural blogging in Europe which includes a map of the European cultural blogging scene.) Where do you look for museum bloggers?

This is only a start, so please chip in! Add any resources I'm missing in the comments below, or tweet @mia_out.

Keeping corridors clear of dragons (on agency and digital humanities tools)

2013-01-05T15:47:00.003Z

A while ago I posted 'Reflections on teaching Neatline', which was really about growing pains in the digital humanities. I closed by asking 'how do you balance the need for fast-moving innovative work-in-progress to be a bit hacky and untidy around the edges with the desires of a wider group of digital humanities-curious scholars [for stable, easy-to-use software]? Is it ok to say 'here be dragons, enter at your own risk'?' Looking back, I started thinking about this in terms of museum technologists (in Museum technologists redux: it's not about us) but there I was largely thinking of audiences, and slightly less of colleagues within museums or academia. I'm still not sure if this is a blog post or just an extended comment on those post, but either way, this is an instance of posting-as-thinking.

Bethany Nowviskie has problematised and contextualised some of these issues in the digital humanities far more elegantly for an invited talk at the MLA 2013 conference. You should go read the whole thing at resistance in the materials, but I want to quickly highlight some of her points here.

She quotes William Morris: '...you can’t have art without resistance in the material. No! The very slowness with which the pen or the brush moves over the paper, or the graver goes through the wood, has its value. And it seems to me, too, that with a machine, one’s mind would be apt to be taken off the work at whiles by the machine sticking or what not' and discusses her realisation that:

"Morris’s final, throwaway complaint is not about that positive, inherent resistance—the friction that makes art—which we happily seek within the humanities material we practice upon. It’s about resistance unhealthily and inaccessibly located in a toolset. ... precisely this kind of disenfranchising resistance is the one most felt by scholars and students new to the digital humanities. Evidence of friction in the means, rather than the materials, of digital humanities inquiry is everywhere evident."

And she includes an important call to action for digital humanities technologists: "we diminish our responsibility to address this frustration by naming it the inevitable “learning curve” of the digital humanities. Instead, we might confess that among the chief barriers to entry are poorly engineered and ineptly designed research tools and social systems". Her paper is also a call for a more nuanced understanding and greater empathy from tool-builders toward those who are disenfranchised by tools they didn't create and can't hack to fit their needs. It's too easy to forget that an application or toolset that looks like something I can happily pick up and play with to make it my own may well look as unfathomable and un-interrogable as the case of a mobile phone to someone else.

Digital humanities is no longer a cosy clubhouse, which can be uncomfortable for people who'd finally found an academic space where they felt at home. But DH is also causing discomfort for other scholars as it encroaches on the wider humanities, whether it's as a funding buzzword, as a generator of tools and theory, or as a mode of dialogue. This discomfort can only be exacerbated by the speed of change, but I suspect that fear of the unknown demands of DH methods or anxiety about the mental capabilities required are even more powerful*. (And some of it is no doubt a reaction to the looming sense of yet another thing to somehow find time to figure out.) As Sharon Leon points out in 'Digital Methods for Mid-Career Avoiders?', digital historians are generally 'at home with the sense of uncomfortableness and risk of learning new methods and approaches' and can cope with 'a feeling of being at sea while figuring out something completely new', while conversely 'this kind of discomfort is simply to overwhelming for historians who are defined by being the expert in their field, being the most knowledgable, being the person who critiques the shortfalls of the work of others'.

In reflecting on March 2012's Digital Humanities Australasia and the events and conversations I've been part of over the last year, it seems that we need ways of characterising the difference between scholars using digital methods and materials to increase their productivity (swapping card catalogues for online libraries, or type-writers for Word) without fundamentally interrogating their new working practices, and those who charge ahead, inventing tools and methods to meet their needs. It should go without saying that any characterisations should not unfairly or pejoratively label either group (and those in-between).

Going beyond the tricky 'on-boarding' moments I talked about in 'Reflections on teaching Neatline', digital humanities must consider the effect of personal agency in relation to technology, issues in wider society that affect access to 'hack' skills and what should be done to make the tools, or the means, of DH scholarship more accessible and transparent. Growing pains are one thing, and we can probably all sympathise with an awkward teenage phase, but as digital humanities matures as a field, it's time to accept our responsibility for the environment we're creating for other scholars. Dragons are fine in the far reaches of the map where the adventurous are expecting them, but they shouldn't be encountered in the office corridor by someone who only wanted to get some work done.

* Since posting this, I've read Stephen Ramsey's 'The Hot Thing', which expresses more anxieties about DH than I've glanced at here: 'Digital humanities is the hottest thing in the humanities. ... So it is meet and good that we talk about this hot thing. But the question is this: Are you hot?'. But even here, do technologists and the like have an advantage? I'm used to (if not reconciled to) the idea that every few years I'll have to learn another programming language and new design paradigms just to keep up; but even I'm glad I don't have to keep up with the number of frameworks that front-end web developers have to, so perhaps not?

Clash of the models? Object-centred and object-driven approaches in online collections

2013-01-04T15:10:00.001Z

While re-visiting the world of museum collections online for some writing on 'crowdsourcing as participation and engagement with cultural heritage', I came across a description of Bernard Herman's object-centred and object-driven models that could be useful for thinking about mental models designing better online collections sites.

(I often talk about mental models, so here's a widely quoted good definition, attributed to Susan Carey’s 1986 journal article, Cognitive science and science education:

'A mental model represents a person’s thought process for how something works (i.e., a person’s understanding of the surrounding world). Mental models are based on incomplete facts, past experiences, and even intuitive perceptions. They help shape actions and behavior, influence what people pay attention to in complicated situations, and define how people approach and solve problems.'

To illustrate a clash in models, when you read 'model' you might have thought of lots of different mental pictures of a 'model', including model buildings or catwork models, and they'd both be right and yet not quite what I meant:

And now, back to museums...)

To quote from the material culture site I was reading, which references Herman 1992 'The Stolen House', in an object-centred approach the object itself is the focus of study:

"Here, we need to pay attention to the specific physical attributes of the object. The ability to describe the object – to engage, that is, with a list of descriptive criteria – is at the forefront of this approach. A typical checklist of the kinds of questions we might ask about an object include: how, and with what materials, was the object made? what is its shape, size, texture, weight and colour? how might one describe its design, style and/or decorative status? when was it made, and for what purpose?"

In object-driven material culture:

"the focus shifts toward an emphasis on understanding how objects relate to the peoples and cultures that make and use them. In particular, ideas about contextualisation and function become all important. As we have already noted, what objects mean may change through time and space. As products of a particular time and place, objects can tell us a great deal about the societies that gave birth to them. That is, they often help to reflect, or speak to us, of the values and beliefs of those who created them. At the same time, it is also important to remember that objects are not simply ‘passive’ in this way, but that they can also take on a more ‘active’ role, helping to create meaning rather than simply reflect it."

It seems to me that the object-centred approach includes much of the information recorded in museum catalogues, while the object-driven approach is closer to an exhibition. Online museum collections often re-use content from catalogues and therefore tend to be object-centred by default as catalogues generally don't contain the information necessary to explain how each object relates 'to the peoples and cultures that make and use them' required for an object-driven approach. If that contextual information is available, the object might be sequestered off in an 'online exhibition' not discoverable from the main collections site.

A complicating factor is the intersection of Herman's approaches with questions about the ways audiences think about objects in museums and other memory institutions (as raised in Rockets, Lockets and Sprockets - towards audience models about collections?). The object-centred approach seems more easily applicable to individual objects but the object-driven approach possibly works better for classes of objects. I'm still not sure how different audiences think about the differences between individual objects and classes of objects, so it's even harder to know which approach works best in different contexts, let alone how you would determine which model best suits a visitor when their interaction is online and therefore mostly contextless. (If you know of research on this, I'd love to hear about it!)

I'd asked on twitter: 'Can mixed models make online collections confusing?' John Coburn suggested that modes of enquiry online might be different, and that the object-driven attributes might be less important. This was a useful point, not least because it helped me crystallise one reason I find the de-materialisation of objects online disconcerting - attributes like size, weight, texture, etc, all help me relate to and understand objects. Or as Janet E Davis said, 'I automatically try to 'translate' into the original medium in my head'. John answered with another question: 'So do we present objects via resonant ideas/themes/wider narrative, rather than jpg+title being "end points"?', which personally seems like a good goal for online collections, but I'm not the audience.

So my overall question remains: is there a potential mismatch between the object-driven approach that exhibitions have trained museum audiences to expect and the object-centred approach they encounter in museum collections online? And if so, what should be done about it?

Some personal highlights from UKMW12: Strategically Digital

2012-12-05T23:42:00.000Z

#UKMW12 trended above Christmas!

There are a few reports about UKMW12, the Museums Computer Group's Museums on the Web 2012 conference out there already and I've already written about the themes for UKMW12, but as I wanted to note some things I wanted to remember or follow up on later, I might as well share them. But be warned, these notes are very sketchy because I was keeping an eye on lots of other things on the day (and preparing for my first ever AGM as Chair). It's amazing how quickly one day can go by when you've spent so long preparing for it.

The keynotes
Andy Dobson talked about the incredible new energy that 'creative technology' is bringing to digital work. He remember going to a show on London's South Bank and seeing Mosaic, Myst on a mac and Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, all for the first time. My first experiences with the potential of the web were different, but I remember that sense of exciting things being in the very near future, and of the web being something you could do as well as something you used.

I loved that he turned the proliferation of web technologies and the number of acronyms in the standard developer's toolkit into a positive - 'it's exciting, it's like the early days again'. His broader description of 'hackers' as people who apply technology to the creative process was inspiring, and perhaps particularly apt for museums. They're people who circumvent standard practices, and while hack days can be technology-led they can also be about hacking internal processes.

He emphasised that digital is inherently multi-disciplinary work, encompassing technology, user experience design, sociology, etc and that it doesn't work if any one discipline hogs the process. If I were to pull out one thread from the day, it might be the idea that 'digital' is too big to stay in technology departments while also being too important to deliver without taking seriously the expertise of technologists and related disciplines. As Tate's John Stack put it, 'digital doesn't respect organisational boundaries', a theme that was echoed by the V&A's Rich Barrett-Small who called on developers to 'flex within the scope of the museum' and not just be 'grumpy developers in the basement' while pointing out they also need to be 'a strong and credible voice' within the museum. Perhaps as Andrew said, 'organisational hacking' is the answer, though 'change management' and new forms of collaboration might be a less scary description to use within a museum.
Speaking of 'makers', Andrew gave some great examples of artworks and the migration of the web ethos into the physical world. The thought that a Maker Faire can draw in 100,000 people is mind-blowing. I loved his description of the 'creative gene pool', partly because museums can play that role in others lives, but sometimes we need a reminder to go and hang out and be inspired by our collections. And to close, a tweet from @Sarah_Fellows that brought Andy's points right into the sector: '#ukmw12 Access, community, sharing, collaboration, learning; interesting that the words which describe digital creatives = heritage ideals'. There was a great question from the audience about 'how do you get inspiration when recommendation systems are geared at giving you things you already like?', which doubles as a great challenge for online collections sites.

Paul Rowe introduced us to the 'online collection hamburger' in which metrics and content surround channels, engagement, re-use and transparency. He pointed out that 'Collection content is internet gold - it's unique, interesting, has an emotional connection with people, places and times' but also that a museum website is 'no longer the final destination for publishing online content'. I loved his solution to the fact that a single museum can't always answer a user's query: 'show related content from other museums if you don't have an object for a search term'. His statement that 'We shouldn't be leading people into a dead end just for the sake of keeping them on our website' should be made into t-shirts and sold outside digital project planning meetings, and his advocacy for 'wonder' and surfacing interesting things from your collections made me wish I was working on a museum website again. Paul provided examples from museums across the world, and was a brilliant advocate for both collections and audiences.

Mobile
One of the surprising highlights of the day was the general realisation of the importance of mobile traffic to museum websites. As Andrew Lewis said of the V&A's digital strategy: ''If it doesn't work on mobile it's probably not going to happen'. I suppose I've been immersed in research on mobile devices and behaviours (not least for the Culture24-led action research project 'Let's Get Real') so I forget that not everyone is aware of how many of their visitors are on mobile devices. One figure quoted on the day on an 'increase of 170% in mobile access in last 12 months' came from some analysis I did for the Let's Get Real project, so I thought I'd share some more information about that. I was reviewing analytics from the partner websites to see how many had reached the 'tipping point' of 20% or more visits on mobiles, and thought I'd compare that to the same period for the previous year (Jan-Aug 2011 and Jan-Aug 2012) to see how fast mobile visits were increasing. It turns out that in general there was a 170% increase in mobile visits to cultural websites. So even if you're getting less than 20% mobile visits now, it won't be long before mobile is important for you too. But a caveat - there's a lot of variation across different organisations (and regions) so as ever, your milage may vary. The project report will contain lots more detail, but at least now there's some context for that stat.

Put visitors at the heart of what you do
Whether it's through data analytics or digital R&D, this was a theme of Tom Grinsted's talk on making data-based decisions, and lay behind Nick Poole asking how and why museums are sharing their content online (and asking for help in building on his research into different options for sharing collections online) and Katy Beale asking us to prioritise people over products. Claire Ross and Jane Audas talked about the impact of stakeholder management on agile, iterative projects but looked beyond organisational issues to focus on their key positive finding about trusting audiences when moderating social media.

The lesson of the day may be that the whole point of a digital strategy is to help balance the internal needs of a large, often conservative organisation like a museum with the changing needs of our audiences. It's clear that the best strategies are a framework for decision-making rather than a static document, but perhaps they're also a reminder of why we're doing it in the first place: to connect audiences with knowledge and collections.

And just in case that's not enough UKMW12 for you, I've made a storify of the day:

Request for research participants: academic historians and historical geographers

2012-11-23T12:56:00.000Z

(For those who don't know me or who mostly know me through digital heritage work, some background to support my call for PhD research participants...)

I am a PhD student in the Department of History at the Open University. I am conducting interviews to understand how online resources have (or have not) altered historians' patterns of work, and I would particularly like to interview academic historians or historical geographers who are researching people and places in British history from the 1600s-1900. I would like to talk to a range of participants, including those who are not clued up on online resources, those who are enthusiastic advocates of all things digital and people at all stages in-between. I would really love to hear from people researching women's histories or the history of science, but I'm interested in any kind of history.

Interviews are carried out on the phone, Skype, or in person if you prefer and can meet within reasonable distance from London or Oxford. Interviews take 40 - 120 minutes and will be carried out in December and January. Many previous participants have said they enjoyed the interview and benefitted from the opportunity to reflect on their work.

To volunteer to take part in an interview, or for more information, please email me at mia.ridge@gmail.com.

For more information visit Information for potential research participants and for background about my PhD visit My PhD research. Please feel free to pass this on to anyone who might be interested in being interviewed.

Reflections on teaching Neatline

2012-11-12T18:38:00.001Z

I've called this post 'Reflections on teaching Neatline' but I could also have called it 'when new digital humanists meet new software'. Or perhaps even 'growing pains in the digital humanities?'.

A few months ago, Anouk Lang at the University of Strathclyde asked me to lead a workshop on Neatline, software from the Scholar's Lab that plots 'archives, objects, and concepts in space and time'. It's a really exciting project, designed especially for humanists - the interfaces and processes are designed to express complexity and nuance through handcrafted exhibits that link historical materials, maps and timelines.

The workshop was on Thursday, and looking at the evaluation forms, most people found it useful but a few really struggled and teaching it was also slightly tough going. I've been thinking a lot about the possible reasons for that and I'm sharing them both as a request for others to share their experiences in similar circumstances and also in the hope that they'll help others.

The basic outline of the workshop was an intros round (who I am, who they are and what they want to learn); information on what Neatline is and what it can do; time to explore Neatline and explore what the software can and can't do (e.g. login, follow the steps at neatline.org/plugins/neatline to create an item based on a series of correspondence Anouk had been working on, deciding whether you want to transcribe or describe the letter, tweaking its appearance or linking it to other items); and a short period for reflection and discussion (e.g. 'What kinds of interpretive decisions did you find yourself making? What delighted you? What frustrated you?') to finish. If you're curious, you can follow along with my slides and notes or try out the Neatline sandbox site.

The first half was fine but some people really struggled with the hands-on section. Some of it was to do with the software itself - as a workshop, it was a brilliant usability test of the admin interfaces of the software for audiences outside the original set of users. Neatline was only launched in July this year and isn't even in version 2 yet so it's entirely understandable that it appears to have a few functional or UX bugs. The documentation isn't integrated into the interface yet (and sometimes lacks information that is probably part of the shared tacit knowledge of people working on the project) but they have a very comprehensive page about working with Neatline items. Overall, the process of handcrafting timelines and maps for a Neatline exhibit is still closer to 'first, catch your rabbit' than making a batch of ready-mix cupcakes. Neatline is also designed for a particular view of the world, and as it's built on top of other software (Omeka) with another very particular view of the world (and hello, Dublin Core), there's a strong underlying mental model that informs the processes for creating content that is foreign to many of its potential users, including some at the workshop.

But it was also partly because I set the bar too high for the exercises and didn't provide enough structure for some of the group. If I'd designed it so they created a simple Neatline item by closely following detailed instructions (as I have done for other, more consciously tech-for-beginners workshops), at least everyone would have achieved a nice quick win and have something they could admire on the screen. From there some could have tried customising the appearance of their items in small ways, and the more adventurous could have tried a few of the potential ways to present the sample correspondence they were working with to explore the effects of their digitisation decisions. An even more pragmatic but potentially divisive solution might have been to start with the background and demonstration as I did, but then do the hands-on activity with a smaller group of people who were up for exploring uncharted waters. On a purely practical level, I also should have uploaded the images of the letters used in the exercise to my own host so that they didn't have to faff with Dropbox and Omeka records to get an online version of the image to use in Neatline.

And finally it was also because the group had really mixed ICT skills. Most were fine (bar the occasional bug), but some were not. It's always hard teaching technical subjects when participants have varying levels of skill and aptitude, but when does it go beyond aptitude into your attitude about being pushed out of your comfort zone? I'd warned everyone at the start that it was new software, but if you haven't experienced beta software before I guess you don't have the context for understanding what that actually means.

I should make it clear here that I think the participants' achievements outshine any shortcomings - Neatline is a great tool for people working with messy humanities data who want to go beyond plonking markers on Google Maps, and I think everyone got that, and most people enjoyed the chance to play with Neatline.

But more generally, I also wonder if it has to do with changing demographics in the digital humanities - increasingly, not everyone interested in DH is an early, or even a late adopter, and someone interested in DH for the funding possibilities and cool factor might not naturally enjoy unstructured exploration of new software, or be intrigued by trying out different combinations of content and functionality just 'to see what happens'.

Practically, more information for people thinking of attending would be useful - 'if you know x already, you'll be fine; if you know y already, you'll be bored' would be useful in future. Describing an event as 'if you like trying new software, this is for you' would probably help, but it looks like the digital humanities might also now be attracting people who don't particularly like working things out as they go along - are they to be excluded? If using software like this is the onboarding experience for people new to the digital humanities, they're not getting the best first impression, but how do you balance the need for fast-moving innovative work-in-progress to be a bit hacky and untidy around the edges with the desires of a wider group of digital humanities-curious scholars? Is it ok to say 'here be dragons, enter at your own risk'?

'Go digital' at Museums Association 2012 Conference

2012-11-11T19:21:00.000Z

Some people who couldn't make the Museums Association conference (or #museums2012) asked for more information on the session on digital strategies, so here are my introductory remarks and some scribbled highlights of the speakers' papers and discussion with the audience.

The speakers were Carolyn Royston (@caro_ft), Head of New Media at Imperial War Museum; Hugh Wallace (@tumshie), Head of Digital Media at National Museums Scotland; Michael Woodward (@michael1665), Commercial Director at York Museums Trust, and I chaired the session in my role as Chair of the Museums Computer Group. From the conference programme: 'This session explores the importance of developing a digital strategy. It will provide insight into how organisations can incorporate digital into a holistic approach that meets wider organisational and public engagement objectives and look at how to use digital engagement as a catalyst to drive organisational change.'

After various conversations about digital and museums with people who were interested in the session, I updated my introduction so that overall the challenge of embracing the impact of digital technologies, platforms and audiences on museums was put in a positive light. The edited title that appeared in the programme had a different emphasis ('Go digital' rather than the 'Getting strategic about digital' we submitted) so I wanted it to be clear that we weren't pushing a digital agenda for the sake of technology itself. Or as I apparently said at the time, "it's not about making everything digital, it's about dealing with the fact that digital is everywhere".

I started by asking people to raise their hands if their museum had a digital strategy, and I'd say well over half the room responded, which surprised me. Perhaps a third were in the process of planning for a digital strategy and just a few were yet to start at all.

My notes were something like this: "we probably all know by now that digital technologies bring wonderful opportunities for museums and their audiences, but you might also be worried about the impact of technology on audiences and your museum. ‘Digital’ varies in organisations – it might encompass social media, collections, mobile, marketing, in-gallery interactives, broadcast and content production. It touches every public-facing output of the museum as well as back-office functions and infrastructure.

You can’t avoid the impact of digital on your organisation, so it’s about how you deal with it, how you integrate it into the fabric of your museum. As you’ll hear in the case studies, implementing digital strategy itself changes the organisation, so from the moment you start talking to people about devising a digital strategy, you'll be making progress. For some of our presenters, their digital strategy ultimately took the form of a digital vision document – the strategy itself is embedded in the process and in the resulting framework for working across the organisation. A digital strategy framework allows you to explore options in conversation with the whole organisation, it’s not about making everything digital.

Our case studies come from three very different organisations working with different collections in different contexts. Mike, Commercial Director at York Museums Trust will talk about planning the journey, moving from ad hoc work to making digital integral to how the organisation works; Hugh, Head of Digital Media at National Museums Scotland will discuss the process they went through to develop digital strategy, what’s worked and what hasn’t’; Carolyn Royston, Head of Digital Media at Imperial War Museums, who comes from a learning background, will talk from IWM’s digital adventure, from where they started to where they are now. They’re each at different stages of the process of implementing and living with a digital strategy.

Based on our discussions as we planned this session, the life cycle of a digital strategy in a museum seems to be: aspiration, design, education and internal outreach, integration with other strategies (particularly public engagement) and sign off... then take a deep breath, look at what the ripple effect has been and start updating your strategies as everything will have changed since you started. And with that, over to Mike..."

Mike talked about working out when digital delivery really makes sense, whether for inaccessible objects (like a rock on Mars) or a delicate book; the major role that outreach and communication play in the process of creating a digital strategy; appointing the staff that would deliver it based on eagerness, enthusiasm and teamwork rather than pure tech skills; where digital teams should sit in the organisation; and about the possibility of using digital volunteers (or 'armchair experts') to get content online.

Hugh went for 'frameworks, not fireworks', pointing out that what happens after the strategy is written is important so you need to create a flexible framework to manage the inevitable change. He discussed the importance of asking the right-sized question (as in one case, where 'we didn't know at the start that an app would be the answer') and working on getting digital into 'business as usual' rather than an add-on team with specialist skills. Or as one tweeter summarised, 'work across depts, don't get hung up on the latest tech, define users realistically and keep it simple'.

Carolyn covered the different forms of digital engagement and social media the IWM have been trying and the role of creating their digital vision in helping overcome their fears; the benefits of partnerships with other organisations for piggybacking on their technology, networks and audiences, and the fact that their collections sales have gone up as a result of opening up their collections. In the questions, someone described intellectual property restrictions to try to monetise collections as 'fool's gold' - great term! I think we should have a whole conference session on this sometime soon.

When reviewing our discussions beforehand I'd found a note from a planning call which summed up how much the process should change the organisation: 'if you're not embarrassed by your digital strategy six months after sign-off you probably haven't done it right', and on the day the speakers reinforced my impression that ultimately, devising and implementing a digital strategy is (probably) a necessary process to go through but it's not a goal in its own right. The IWM and NMS examples show that the internal education and conversations can both create a bigger appetite for digital engagement and change organisational expectations around digital to the point where it has to be more widely integrated. The best place for a digital strategy is within a public engagement strategy that integrates the use of digital platforms and working methods into the overall public-facing work of the museum.

Listening to the speakers, a new metaphor occurred to me: is implementing a digital strategy like gardening? It needs constant care and feeding after the big job of sowing seeds is over. And much like gardening for pleasure (in the UK, anyway), the process may have more impact than the product.

And something I didn't articulate at the time - if the whole museum is going to be doing some digital work, we technologists are going to have to be patient and generous in sharing our knowledge and helping everyone learn how to make sensible decisions about digital content and experiences. If we don't, we risk being a bottleneck or forcing people to proceed based on guesswork and neither are good for museums or their audiences.

So much awesomeness! #GODIGITAL #Museums2012 twitter.com/dannybirchall/…
— Danny Birchall (@dannybirchall) November 9, 2012

Huge thanks for Carolyn, Hugh and Michael for making the whole thing such a pleasure and to the Museum Association conference organisers for the opportunity to share our thoughts and experiences.

And finally, if you're interested in digital strategies in heritage organisations, the Museums Computer Groups annual Museums on the Web conference is all about being 'strategically digital' (which as you might have guessed from the above, sometimes might mean not using technology at all) but UKMW12 tickets are selling out fast, so don't delay.

The ever-morphing PhD

2012-11-05T14:26:00.000Z

I wrote this for the NEH/Polis Summer Institute on deep mapping back in June but I'm repurposing it as a quick PhD update as I review my call for interview participants. I'm in the middle of interviews at the moment (and if you're an academic historian working on British history 1600-1900 who might be willing to be interviewed I'd love to hear from you) and after that I'll no doubt be taking stock of the research landscape, the findings from my interviews and project analyses, and updating the shape of my project as we go into the new year. So it doesn't quite reflect where I'm at now, but at the very least it's an insight into the difficulties of research into digital history methodologies when everything is changing so quickly:

"Originally I was going to build a tool to support something like crowdsourced deep mapping through a web application that would let people store and geolocate documents and images they were digitising. The questions that are particularly relevant for this workshop are: what happens when crowdsourcing or citizen history meet deep mapping? Can a deep map created by multiple people for their own research purposes support scholarly work? Can a synthetic, ad hoc collection of information be used to support an argument or would it be just for the discovery of spatio-temporarily relevant material? How would a spatial narrative layer work?

I planned to test this by mapping the lives and intellectual networks of early scientific women. But after conducting a big review of related projects I eventually realised that there's too much similar work going on in the field and that inevitably something similar would have been created by someone with more resources by the time I was writing up. So I had to rethink my question and my methods.

So now my PhD research seeks to answer 'how do academic and family/local historians evaluate, use and contribute to crowdsourced resources, especially geo-located historical materials?', with the goal of providing some insight into the impact of digitality on research practices and scholarship in the humanities. ... How do trained and self-taught historians cope with changes in place names and boundaries over time, and the many variations and similarities in place names. Does it matter if you've never been to the place and don't know that it might be that messy and complex?

I'm interested how living in a digital culture affects how researchers work. What does it mean to generate as well as consume digital data in the course of research? How does user-created content affect questions of authorship, authority and trust for amateur historians and scholarly practice? What are the characteristics of a well-designed digital resource, and how can resources and tools for researchers be improved? It's a very Human-Computer Interaction/Infomatics view of the digital humanities but it addresses the issues around discoverability and usability that are so important for people building projects.

I'm currently interviewing academic, family and local historians, focusing on those working on research on people or places in early modern England - very loosely defined, as I'll go 1600-1900. I'm asking them about the tools do they currently use in their research; how they assess new resources; if or when they might you use a resource created through crowdsourcing or user contributions? (e.g. Wikipedia or ancestry.com); how do you work out which online records to trust? How they use place names or geographic locations in your research?

So far I've mostly analysed the interviews for how people think about crowdsourcing, I'll be focusing on the responses to place when I get back.

More generally, I'm interested in the idea of 'chorography 2.0' - what would it look like now? The abundance of information is as much of a problem as an opportunity: how to manage that?"

Why museums matter: 'Museum Ideas 2012 - Museums in the Era of Participatory Culture'

2012-11-04T19:45:00.001Z

In early October I attended Museum/iD's conference, Museum Ideas 2012 - Museums in the Era of Participatory Culture. I've posted the first part of my notes at 'War, Plague and Fire' and 'Bootstrapping Innovation in Museums' at 'Museum Ideas 2012 - Museums in the Era of Participatory Culture'.

I'll start this with a 'too long; didn't read' version: overall, the themes of the day seemed to be a version of Tim O'Reilly's 'work on stuff that matters', whether it's improving economic or social justice or helping museums cope with the need for constant evolution in a time of change. Museums matter, and the work people do in museums matters, whether they're reaching new audiences by reconsidering technology or marketing campaigns. There was also a thread around challenging dominant versions of history and confronting stereotypes, whether challenging YouTube viewers with performance art or democratising the process of documenting history. Many of the projects we heard about were also strongly tied to the mission of their museum or team (and none of them were about technology in its own right).

The final speaker before lunch was Tate Media's Jane Burton, who spoke on Radical art experiences for the online space. She tied their work in creating 'radical content' for existing online spaces where their audiences are (i.e. not expecting them to come to your museum or your website) to Tate's mission to increase the publics' understanding and enjoyment of art. Their Tate Shots reach an audience of 3 million people a year directly, and more through syndication to the Guardian, Huffington Post, etc. The videos are about 3 minutes long and capture the artists visiting the galleries, working on exhibitions, etc; they're relatively unformated and don't have a presenter - the ease of being able to create them means they have a living archive of films that can exist online for free forever. They refuse to pay annual rights charges to show art in the films so they work with living artists they can get permissions from.

Tate has a small team with limited resources so they collaborate with others to reach audiences. Burton discussed a project with BMW on YouTube ('people weren't expecting to see performance art when looking for pandas' but some of the people who happened upon it stayed, particularly as they were engaged in conversation with art-loving audience members); Tate Kids film project; the Gallery of Lost Art (which turns the gradual release of archival material into an asset: posts to social media keep audiences coming back); Exquisite Forest. She also talked about mobile - 10% of traffic to their website is on mobile devices (which seems low, mobile traffic for a multi-museum project I'm working with averages about 17-20%) - and 'playful apps'. Advice on risk-taking: 'don't ask the directors, just do it'. They did three apps that might not have gotten permission to go ahead if they'd asked. Tate Trumps (updated after getting flack in the iTunes store about not being able to play outside the gallery); Race Against Time - play as a chameleon restoring colour to the world, 'activate the game at Tate Modern for special powers'; Magic Tate Ball shows artwork from Tate's datavase selected by time of day, weather, ambient sound, location of the device. They've had over 100,000 downloads across those platforms. Magic Tate Ball was received really well in India on Nokia phones, highligting that you need to think about your role in the world, not just the UK.

The next speaker was Louise Shannon from the VA's Contemporary Programmes team on Strategies for engagement: contemporary programmes at the V&A. Their goal is to support creative design, engage diverse audiences, be open and engaged, and have a global point of view. They have two exhibitions a year in a dedicated contemporary space; exhibitions that are popular and accessible, agenda-setting and responsive (critical) and creative, spectacular, risk-taking. Their projects include an experiment with an 'open source marketing campaign' for Decode - people could take the animation code, re-work it and re-publish it on the V&A website; through a partnership with a media placement company it might also be projected in tube stations or end up on posters. [Partnerships for broader reach was a theme in Jane Burton's talk about Tate, too, but it's only now that I've thought to ask about advice on partnerships for museums that aren't super-brands in their own right.]. Shannon also discussed the V&A's Friday Lates, part of their programme since 1999: 'the two staples are a DJ and a bar, everything else changes'.

Francesca Rosenberg, Director of Community and Access, MoMA spoke on Advanced Style: Why Museums Ought to Respect Their Elders, pointing out that 'we are all apprentice older people. We can do this right, or we can do this wrong'. Like any accessibility issue, 'when we make changes for older visitors we make the museum better for all'. Her talk was inspired by the book and blog, 'Advanced Style', though that's only one model - there's more variety among older people than any other age group. Rosenberg pointed out that older people have time to devote to civil engagement, so design projects so they can participate, or re-market the programmes you already have. MoMA did a study with NYU to evaluate the impact of the programme - less depression, more social connectedness, new appreciation of their loved one. Personally, this was one of the most inspiring talks of the day, partly because it reminded us why museums do this work. The next speaker started by saying that MoMA's work inspired a project that his parents participate in, which just reinforced that.

Adam Rozan spoke on SURVIVAL: The Case for Evolutionary Adaptation In Museums. His
metaphor of 'evolutionary adaptation' echoed Sharon Ament's keynote in calling change 'the new normal'. He talked about 'five ways Starbucks are changing the game (even though they are already doing well)', (an unfortunate choice as many people in the room didn't seem to like Starbucks), then asked why do museums do the things they do? Are museums thriving? Attendance is up but there are lot of museums that aren't doing that well. He added together the museums that increased and decreased visits to get a 'stagnancy' figure. Overall museums aren't doing that well, the US is seeing stagnancy across the board. Our populations are changing, we can't keep doing the same things and expect the same outcomes. Rozan pointed out that lots of people are competing with museum-like experiences, whether MOOCs or Starbucks and called for people to re-imagine the museum - museums as living spaces; as content creators; as education centres.

The tone changed after the break as Lisa Junkin from the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago talked about Report to the Public: dangerous histories, public history and community development and an exhibition about the 'Conservative Vice Lords'. They're interested in how museums contribute to the growth and development of local communities, particularly of under-served communities. The CVL exibition was a co-curated pilot exhibit, taken on by their nineteenth century historic house museum because their museum is dedicated to dangerous ideas, encouraing discourse not as 'superficial consensus building but fostering dissent'. The house is dedicated to Jane Addams, the first woman to be given a Nobel Peace Prize, also called the 'most dangerous woman in America'. But it turned out that the exhibition was so controversial that they struggled to bring it into the neighbourhood because of fear of vandalism from other gangs. They ultimately displayed the original artefacts outside the area itself and put panels in local shop windows instead. The panels had numbers to call to hear audio content or to leave their own memories of the CVL. The exhibition closes by asking 'what next?'. Junkin also pointed out that museums have unique role to play with counterpublics, but museums are still often complicit in marginalising the publics they're meant to serve. In sharing the museum's authority and social capital with community groups, they can amplify their marginalised voices.

Jennifer Scott of the Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn spoke on Normalcy as Innovation: Radical Dignity and the Right to Historical Inclusion. Weeksville marks a history that was erased from the books, but luckily for them both its nineteeth century and 1960s histories were victories. They work hard for historical inclusion: 'everything that we do is to democratise the documentation process of history', and participation is 'never a choice for us'. It was created by the community so they do everything they can to support the needs of the community. They interpret the everyday lives of ordinary people ('what was it like to be a free black New Yorker in 1838?'), normalising them in contrast to the 'histories of deviance' and traumatic events like slavery and civil rights-related violence that usually attends black history in America. The Weeksville site is an answer to assumptions and stereotypes about black history. They've created historical interpretive narratives that they've noticed visitors respond to then translated them into core values that are reflected in their tours, events and programmes. They include everything from 'girls night out' film nights with wine and cheese or a farmers market to cutting-edge art. Like Junkin's talk, this was a powerful reflection on the ways in which museums can work towards greater social justice, and like Rosenberg's talk, it left me feeling inspired by the good that museums can do.

The final presentation was from Tony Butler of the Museum of East Anglian Life, Everybody's Happy Nowadays: How museums can create conditions for well-being without costing the earth. He talked about the need to address 'bigger than self' issues and the challenge of making them relevant to everyday lives of people. People not only beneficiaries but also co-curators of the space at MEAL; they're not just a knowledge-based institution but also part of an active citizenry. He quoted Polly Toynbee on 'the most unequal societies are the least happy' and discussed alternatives to economic orthodoxy - 'one where planet and people matter' like Bhutan's 'gross domestic happiness'. MEAL's principles are: stewardship; participation; social enterprise; mindfulness, and a study has shown that for every £1 invested with them, they have generated £4 of social value. He said 'participation' is not just asking visitors what they think of the museum, and asked museums to get beyond 'participation-lite'.

Disclosure: my ticket was provided by Museum/iD. Many thanks to the speakers for their excellent presentations. Some of the speakers on twitter include @ljunkin @tonybutler1 @adamrozan @francescatime @sebchan @rjstein.

'War, Plague and Fire' and 'Bootstrapping Innovation in Museums' at 'Museum Ideas 2012 - Museums in the Era of Participatory Culture'

2012-11-03T17:49:00.000Z

I've finally had a moment to catch up and post the first part of my notes from Museum/iD's conference, Museum Ideas 2012 - Museums in the Era of Participatory Culture. Overall it was a great conference that left me with a lot of things to think about for how museums can adapt and thrive in the current international context, and reminded me why museums should survive: they matter. I've posted my thoughts from the later sessions at Why museums matter: 'Museum Ideas 2012 - Museums in the Era of Participatory Culture' with a short summary of the whole event at the start.

Sharon Ament's keynote at Museum of London Docklands

The day was chaired by Ben Gammon who began by pointing out that innovation is no longer a luxury, it's now critical for survival.

The keynote speaker was the new Director of the Museum of London, Sharon Ament, who spoke on War, Plague and Fire: museums and libraries in the era of participatory culture. Previously Ament was director of public engagement at the Natural History Museum, and she drew on that background in her talk while also relating it to the collections of the Museum of London and the docklands location of the conference. She called for museums to look at what participatory culture means to the people they serve, especially when the individual has the capacity to be heard more loudly than ever before. The international context in which we're living - with civil unrest, economic crises and global warming - is a time of change and fear means that adaptation to the external environment is an important concept for museums today. Her talk, and some of the discussion afterwards, focused on the role of museums and libraries as venues for independent discovery; accessible to many because entry was free. She suggested that creative responses - small things that can happen spontaneously, like the 'pop-up' concept - might be useful for reaching people.

One final quote to close, from the Salzburg Global Seminar and the Institute of Museum and Library Services report on 'Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture': 'technology is a tool, not an objective, and that the creation of increased public value is the end goal. Identifying stakeholders’ needs means addressing human relationships, a sense of organization, and an intellectual construct to shape information and access'.

The next session was a 'fireside chat' with Rob Stein (Dallas Museum of Art) and Seb Chan (Cooper-Hewitt Museum) reflecting on 'Bootstrapping Innovation in Museums' and their experiences in changing museums. They discussed collaboration (Stein noted that everything he's built that's had a modicum of success has been a collaboration with lots of people), the pace of change in different museums (including the need to build a risk-tolerant culture), and the risk of assuming that technology is an inherent part of innovation (Stein observed that the change that needs to happen at DAM is cultural, about shifting ambition). How do you create a culture of innovation? Chan mentioned Elaine Heumann Gurian's Wanting to be the Third on your Block and said that the first thing he did when he started at the Cooper-Hewitt was create a space that gave people permission to change. He set up 'labs' as a space for people to talk about stuff, which also gave his immediate team a public voice for the first time. He pushed fast to get quick results on some straightforward things to start to set an expectation of speed and accelerate culture: 'right now, doing things fast matters more than doing things well'. He talked about cultivating rogues and tricksters in the museum to accelerate change and get a paradigm shift and suggested tackling root problems rather than symptoms for issues like copyright. They also discussed how to play up the fun of museum jobs to make them more attractive in a competitive tech jobs market, and the importance of putting some money into innovation where possible. Stein suggested that it's possible to support innovation without a budget, e.g. museums can hold 'research forums' where people share what they're working on.

Chan also said museums have turned themselves into 'exhibition farms', letting them suck huge amounts of resource; together with the obsession with 'finish' this slows innovation that could come from re-thinking how exhibitions and public programmes work together. Stein observed 'museums seem to like gargantuan problems, things that take five years to get out the door [like] exhibitions, publications, buildings.'

They discussed the mismatch between museum exhibition launch models and software models: 'people want to feel that something's finished when it launches, they want the party and the holiday'. But in software development, no-one takes a holiday straight after launch because they're watching what people do with the new software. [I was really interested in this section as it's something I've thought about a lot (e.g. does a museum's obsession with polish hinder innovation?) - I suspect museum technologists have two clashing mental models about how to work: one is the web agency model, based around cycles of 'launch, observe, iterate, update'; the other is the 'long slog to an unmovable launch date then onto the next project' of museums. When the rest of the world moves on the agile, iterative model, it's frustrating being tied to the museum model, particularly when it seems to have more flaws than benefits for modern audiences.] In closing they talked about the effectiveness of various models of innovation, whether attempts at top-down innovation, departments of innovation or more integrated models of innovation.

This post is already quite long, so I might hit publish now and come back to the other talks later.

Disclosure: my ticket was provided by Museum/iD.

Is it time for museums to go public about the impact of funding cuts?

2012-11-02T12:55:00.004Z

Back in December last year I posted asking 'Why do people rally to save libraries but not museums?'. Many of the reasons revolved around the different relationships people have with their local library compared to their local museum, the types of services they offer, and especially the idea that part of using a library involves visiting it regularly: libraries are simply more embedded in people's daily lives than museums. But a few other responses addressed the perception that libraries were under threat, but museums weren't because 'the immediate threat to museums isn't highlighted'. Libraries took to social and traditional media, asking both famous and ordinary library users to speak up on their behalf (e.g. Voices for the Library, Speak up for libraries, and sample press coverage on the BBC 'Library closure threats spark campaigns across England' and Guardian 'The campaign to save libraries continues'), but museums were largely silent as they quietly said goodbye to staff, reduced their services or simply closed.

Some reasons why museums might not be taking their fight to survive against cuts to the public are highlighted in this piece from the Museums Association's Museums Journal: Head to Head, with David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool and Simon Wallis, director of the Hepworth Wakefield. It's a really important conversation for the UK's museum sector, so I'd encourage you to go read it yourself, but to pick up some important points, David Fleming says:

'I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would think it’s useful to the museum sector for us to keep quiet about the funding cuts that are affecting so many of us. ... our sector, unlike many other sectors, appears to be reluctant to talk about the impact that cuts are having, and I don’t know why.'

The reason for silence seems to be (from Simon Wallis):

'I think we do need to be very wary of how what we are communicating can be seen by the public. I frequently encounter derision and anger from some people over receiving what they see as a “public subsidy” taking money from taxpayers’ pockets for non-essential elitist services.'

I suspect there are other reasons that contribute to the silence, like gagging orders about cuts and redundancies at councils, and if you haven't already read Nick Poole's The Ties that Bind, go read it now. One quote that's relevant to museums' silence over cuts is: 'The National Museums will broker a deal under which the cuts to baseline budgets are maintained at 3-5% per annum for the next 2 years, in return for which they may be fairly quiescent on the question of overall public subsidy of culture and the arts.'

I don't think a fear of comments about 'elitism' should be enough to stop museums taking their fight to the public, especially when, as another Museums Journal article points out, thirty museums and heritage sites have shut in the past two years. Maybe it's time to get over that fear and ask the public if they want to lose their museums?

'Behind-the-themes' at the UK Museums on the Web conference - UKMW12 'Strategically Digital'

2012-10-29T16:39:00.001Z

Full disclosure: I'm the Chair of the Museums Computer Group, and in this case I also chaired the Programme Committee, but I think we've put together a really strong programme. I thought I'd provide some background here about where the themes came from. (Also, I'll take any excuse for a punning title.)

When putting together the themes, I reviewed reports from a number of international conferences and went through the archives of the MCG's mailing list to get a sense of the issues that were both bugging our members on a daily basis and having an impact on museums more generally. I've also spent time talking to staff in museums in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, the US and (of course) the UK and those conversations also informed the themes. I also referred back to the MCG Committee's discussions about our vision for 'MCG@30', which included supporting our members by advocating for their work at higher levels of the museum sector. Hopefully this event is part of this process, as is a session on 'digital strategy' at the Museums Association conference.

For me, being 'strategically digital' means the best solution for a project might not involve technology. Being 'strategically digital' offers some solutions to the organisational change issues raised by the mismatch between web speed and museum speed, and it means technology decisions should always refer back to a museum's public engagement strategy (or infrastructure plans for background ICT services).

Like our 'Engaging digital audiences in museums' Spring meeting that aimed to get museum technologists and educators talking and learning from each other, UKMW12 is about breaking out of our comfortable technology-focused bubble and making sure the goals and language of web and digital teams relate to the rest of the organisation; it's also about helping the rest of the museum understand your work. We've seen a range of people sign up for tickets so far, so hopefully the day will provide a chance for staff to understand more about the workings of their own museum as well as the museums presenting on the day. The conference is grounded in reality: our speakers address both successes and failures in digital strategies and organisational change. You can get a sneak preview of the range of discussion on the day at Andrew Dobson's post on '10 things I have learned working for Sky', Tate's Online Strategy or Caper on Happenstance, Simon Tanner's 'Balanced Value Impact Model' and of course through the talk abstracts in the programme. Some of our best Museums on the Web conferences have featured a similar mix of fresh voices from outside the sector and hard-won wisdom from within the sector, so I have high hopes for this event.

After some thought, a call for papers and the input of the wonderful 2012 Programme Committee (Ross Parry, Melissa Terras, Carolyn Royston and Stuart Dunn), this is the result:

The Museums Computer Group's annual Museums on the Web conference – UKMW12 – will be held at the Wellcome Collection in London on 30 November 2012.

UKMW12 is about being ‘strategically digital’. Responding to the issues faced by museums today, it's an opportunity to take a step back from the everyday and think strategically about the impact of the digital revolution on your museum and on the sector as a whole, including themes such as: digitally enabling the modern museum and its staff; sustaining the digital agenda and the realities of digital strategies and organisational change; and the complexities of digital engagement and the impact of social media on audience expectations.

UKMW12 brings together speakers from organisations including the Tate, the V&A, UCL, King's College, the Guardian, Strategic Content Alliance, Collections Trust and Caper.

As always, UK Museums on the Web is a day for being inspired by the latest ideas, for learning from case studies grounded in organisations like yours, and for networking with other technologists, curators, managers, academics, learning and marketing specialists in the museum and heritage sector.

Don't miss out! Book your ticket now at http://ukmw12.eventbrite.co.uk
Find out more about the conference at http://bit.ly/ukmw12.

If you've never been (or haven't been for a while) to an MCG event, these posts link to several event reports from attendees and should give you an idea of who goes and what's discussed: Your blog posts and tweets about ‘Engaging digital audiences in museums’ (Spring 2012); UKMW11 Blog Posts (theme: The innovative museum: creating a brighter future); UK Museums on the Web 2010.

On a personal note, this event will mark 30 years since the first ever Museums Computer Group event, and eight years since the first UK Museums on the Web conference - a milestone worth celebrating! If you'd like to be an active part of the MCG's future, we'll be electing new committee members in the lunchtime AGM on November 30. Get in touch if you're curious about how you could contribute...

Confluence on digital channels; technologists and organisational change?

2012-09-29T11:43:00.000+01:00

I suspect this is a few posts in one, but bear with me as I think aloud...

There can be only one...

I'm fascinated with the idea that digital channels are the point where the various functions of a museum – marketing, research, collections, outreach, education, fundraising, etc – meet. (If you've worked in a museum for a while you've probably witnessed heated internal discussions about which departments can have prominent spots on the front page of a museum website, or about who runs the $MuseumName Twitter or Facebook accounts.) This confluence in digital channels hopefully encourages organisations to think about what content (and who) best represents them to the world - but I suspect that often it's less about the public engagement strategy and more about organisational history and politics.

Similarly, building websites, apps and social media entails a series of decisions that operationalise a museum's big 'vision' statements; but as these decisions are made on the fly, they're often again less strategic and more subject to the vagaries of the organisation. For technologists, there's often also a tension between wanting to ensure sensible digital decisions are made and not wanting to be a bottleneck in the long line of sign-off documents and meetings involved in museum projects (and I'm still not sure how best to resolve that, especially when it's easy to make the wrong choice but technology changes more quickly than most museums can train staff).

Museums seem to struggle when the quality of those decisions, and therefore the quality of the final product, rests in part on whether audience-focused experts in technology, content, and graphic and experience design are present and heard at critical points, even when their recommendations contradict those of more established voices.

Why websites suck (or suck more than they should)

Building digital products means challenging 'the way things have always been done', and while museums-as-organisations are notoriously resistant to change, these definitional issues around the role of a digital team - technical delivery, content strategy, experience design, or some combination of the three - aren't unique to heritage organisations. Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik wrote: "I believe most websites suck because HiPPOs create them. HiPPO is an acronym for the 'Highest Paid Person's Opinion'. ... The HiPPO is a poor stand-in for what customers want". That's possibly putting it too strongly, but it seems that potentially interesting digital projects do fail to deliver on that potential more often than they should, and it's not only because museums are generally a long way from thinking 'digital first'.

So who can stand up to 'the way things have always been done' and inter-departmental bun fights and represent the needs of our audiences in technology projects? In museums there's often a perception that digital teams are a service department (perhaps because of their roots in IT departments) while digital teams see themselves as creative departments, commissioning content and design, producing innovative experiences and consulting within the museum on digital projects and audience needs as well as delivering technical solutions. Coming down on the side of web teams in 'Web teams need real authority' Paul Boag pronounced: "web teams should have the final say about what appears on the website. They should have the authority to reject content, remove out of date content and maintain editorial control". His post got such a huge response that he expanded on this in another article, 'Paul Boag: give web teams more authority', where he called for organisations to break out of entrenched working methods and "establish a separate web strategy that defines who owns the website, how it will be operated and how editorial decisions are made". He noted that successful websites aren't just about code, "it's also about helping bring about cultural change to allow better management of sites". While Claire Ross' experience with digital R&D in museums might be more intense than the usual museum digital project, it bears out my experience that (in the words of one senior digital manager) 'organisational change is one of the most important things about what we do' and that this changes needs to be supported by senior management to be truly effective.

The call for strategic decision-making about organisational websites (and by extension, other digital channels) isn't new but it might be getting to the point where we can't ignore it. In 2011 Jonathan Kahn wrote A List Apart article on 'Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change, noting that the "the website is now the digital manifestation of the organization" but that "the user experiences we deliver don’t meet our expectations [because] when it comes to the web, organizations are broken". The article proposes 'web governance' as a combination of web strategy, web governance, web execution, and web measurement. And it's not all doom and gloom – many organisations (museums included) are resolving issues around web governance and thriving in a digital environment. But what happens to museums that rely on old models and don't sort out web governance until it's too late?

As Kahn says:

"The internet revolution has created huge social change: it’s changed the way people relate to organizations and it’s already destroyed several once-mighty industries, like newspapers, travel agents, and music publishing. Although we’re comfortable with the idea that the web is critical to organizations, we often miss the corollary: the web has changed the way organizations operate, and in many cases it’s changed their business models, too. When executives can’t see that, it causes a crisis. Welcome to your daily web-making reality."

Sound familiar?

[Edit to add: the Museums Computer Group has a call for papers for UK Museums on the Web 2012 on the theme of 'strategically digital' and you might want to submit a proposal soon if you've been working on these kinds of issues. Disclosure: I'm the MCG's Chair.]

And therefore, museum technologists need to step up...

A while ago, I had one of those epiphanies that occur in random conversations when I realised that my views as a technologists are informed more by my experience as a business analyst and user experience researcher than my time as a programmer: for me, being a technologist is not (only) about knowing how to cut code, it's about years of sitting in a room listening to people describe their problems, abstracting and analysing them to understand the problem space and thinking about how technology-driven change fits in that particular context.

I'm wondering if a better definition of museum technologist is someone who can appropriately apply a range of digital solutions to help meet the goals of a particular museum project. Even better, a museum technologist should be able to empathise with stakeholders enough to explain the implications of their technology choices for established internal work patterns and to contextualise them in relation to audience expectations. I guess this is also a reflection of the social changes the internet has brought - we geeks aren't immune from the need to change and adapt.

[Update, April 2013: I wonder what the answer would be if we asked other museum staff what they think a technologist should be? The role of 'translator' is valued by some project teams, but is the technologist always the best person for the job? If you're reading this before April 12 2013, you might want to take the survey 'What is a Museum Technologist anyway?' that Rob Stein and Rich Cherry have put together.]

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If you liked this post, you may also be interested in Museums and iterative agility: do your ideas get oxygen? (21 November 2010) and A call for agile museum projects (a lunchtime manifesto) (10 March 2009).

Museums, Libraries, Archives and the Digital Humanities - get involved!

2012-08-14T20:41:00.000+01:00

The short version: if you've got ideas on how museums, libraries and archives (i.e. GLAM) and the digital humanities can inspire and learn from each other, it's your lucky day! Go add your ideas about concrete actions the Association for Computers and the Humanities can take to bring the two communities together or suggestions for a top ten 'get started in museums and the digital humanities' list (whether conference papers, journal articles, blogs or blog posts, videos, etc) to: 'GLAM and Digital Humanities together FTW'.

Update, August 23, 2012: the document is shaping up to be largely about ‘what can be done’ - which issues are shared by GLAMs and DH, how can we reach people in each field, what kinds of activities and conversations would be beneficial, how do we explain the core concepts and benefits of each field to the other? This suggests there’d be a useful second stage in focusing on filling in the detail around each of the issues and ideas raised in this initial creative phase. In the meantime, keep adding suggestions and sharing issues at the intersection of digital humanities and memory institutions.

A note on nomenclature: the genesis of this particular conversation was among museumy people so the original title of the document reflects that; it also reflects the desire to be practical and start with a field we knew well. The acronym GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) neatly covers the field of cultural heritage and the arts, but I'm never quite sure how effective it is as a recognisable call-to-action. There's also a lot we could learn from the field of public history, so if that's you, consider yourself invited to the party!

The longer version: in an earlier post from July's Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg I mentioned that a conversation over twitter about museums and digital humanities lead to a lunch with @ericdmj, @clairey_ross, @briancroxall, @amyeetx where we discussed simple ways to help digital humanists get a sense of what can be learnt from museums on topics like digital projects, audience outreach, education and public participation. It turns out the Digital Humanities community is also interested in working more closely with museums, as demonstrated by the votes for point 3 of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)'s 'Next Steps' document, "to explore relationships w/ DH-sympathetic orgs operating beyond the academy (Museum Computer Network, Nat'l Council on Public History, etc)". At the request of ACH's Bethany Nowviskie (@nowviskie) and Stéfan Sinclair (@sgsinclair), Eric D. M. Johnson and I had been tossing around some ideas for concrete next steps and working up to asking people working at the intersection of GLAM and DH for their input.

However, last night a conversation on twitter about DH and museums (prompted by Miriam Posner's tweet asking for input on a post 'What are some challenges to doing DH in the library?') suddenly took off so I seized the moment by throwing the outline of the document Eric and I had been tinkering with onto Google docs. It was getting late in the UK so I tweeted the link and left it so anyone could edit it. I came back the next morning to find lots of useful and interesting comments and additions and a whole list of people who are interested in continuing the conversation. Even better, people have continued to add to it today and it's already a good resource. If you weren't online at that particular time it's easy to miss it, so this post is partly to act as a more findable marker for the conversation about museums, libraries, archives and the digital humanities.

Explaining the digital humanities to GLAMs

This definition was added to the document overnight. If you're a GLAM person, does it resonate with you or does it need tweaking?

"The broadest definition would be 1) using digital technologies to answer humanities research questions, 2) studying born digital objects as a humanist would have studied physical objects, and or 3) using digital tools to transform what scholarship is by making it more accessible on the open web."

How can you get involved?

Off the top of my head...

Add your name to the list of people interested in keeping up with the conversation
Read through the suggestions already posted; if you love an idea that's already there, say so!
Read and share the links already added to the document
Suggest specific events where GLAM and DH people can mingle and share ideas/presentations
Suggest specific events where a small travel bursary might help get conversations started
Offer to present on GLAMs and DH at an event
Add examples of digital projects that bridge the various worlds
Add examples of issues that bridge the various worlds
Write case studies that address some of the issues shared by GLAMs and DH
Spread the word via specialist mailing lists or personal contacts
Share links to conference papers, journal articles, videos, podcasts, books, blog posts, etc, that summarise some of the best ideas in ways that will resonate with other fields
Consider attending or starting something like Decoding Digital Humanities to discuss issues in DH. (If you're in or near Oxford and want to help me get one started, let me know!)
Something else I haven't thought of...

I'm super-excited about this because everyone wins when we have better links between museums and digital humanities. Personally, I've spent a decade working in various museums (and their associated libraries and archives) and my PhD is in Digital Humanities (or more realistically, Digital History), and my inner geek itches to find an efficient solution when I see each field asking some of the same questions, or asking questions the other field has been working to answer for a while. This conversation has already started to help me discover useful synergies between GLAMs and DH, so I hope it helps you too.

Update, November 2012: as a result of discussions around this document/topic, the Museums Computer Group (MCG) and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) worked together to create 5 bursaries from the ACH for tickets to the MCG's UK Museums on the Web conference.

Messiness, museums and methods: thoughts from #DH2012 so far...

2012-07-18T14:49:00.001+01:00

I'm in Hamburg for the 2012 Digital Humanities conference. The conference only officially started last night, but after two days of workshops and conversations I already feel like my brain is full, so this post is partly a brain dump to free up some space for new ideas.

The first workshop was one I ran on ‘Learning to play like a programmer: Web mash-ups and scripting for beginners’ - I've shared my slides and notes at that link, as well as links for people to find out more about starting with basic code and computational thinking and to keep learning.

The second workshop, Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities, was almost a mini-conference in itself. The wiki for the NeDIMAH - Space Time Working Group includes links to abstracts for papers presented at the workshop, which are also worth a look for pointers to interesting projects in the spatial humanities. The day also include break-out sessions on Theory, Methods, Tools and Infrastructure.

The session I chaired on Methods was a chance to think about the ways in which tools are instantiations of methods. If the methods underlying tools aren't those of humanists, or aren't designed suitably for glorious but messy humanities data, are they suitable for humanities work? If they're not suitable, then what? And if they're used anyway, how do humanists learn when to read a visualisation 'with a grain of salt' and distinguish the 'truthiness' of something that appears on a screen from the complex process of selecting and tidying sources that underlies it? What are the implications of this new type of digital literacy for peer reviews of DH work (whether work that explicitly considers impact of digitality on scholarly practice, or work that uses digital content within more traditional academic frameworks)? How can humanists learn to critique tool choice in the same way they critique choice of sources? Humanists must be able to explain the methods behind the tools they've used, as they have such a critical impact on the outcomes.

[Update: 'FairCite' is an attempt to create 'clear citation guidelines for digital projects that acknowledge the collaborative reality of these undertakings' for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.]
We also discussed the notion of academic publications designed so that participation and interaction is necessary to unlock the argument or narrative they represent, so that the reader is made aware of the methods behind the tools by participating in their own interpretive process. How do we get to have 'interactive scholarly works' in academia - what needs to change to enable them? How are they reviewed, credited, sustained? And what can we learn from educators and museum people about active reading, participation and engagement?

Our group also came up with the idea of methods as a bridge between different experts (technologists, etc) and humanists, a place for common understanding (generated through the process of making tools?), and I got to use the phrase 'the siren's lure of the shiny tool', which was fun. We finished on a positive note with mention of the DH Commons as a place to find a technologist or a humanist to collaborate with, but also to find reviewers for digital projects.

Having spent a few days thinking about messy data, tweets about a post on The inevitable messiness of digital metadata were perfectly timed. The post quotes Neil Jeffries from the Bodleian Library, who points out:

we need to capture additional metadata that qualifies the data, including who made the assertion, links to differences of scholarly opinion, omissions from the collection, and the quality of the evidence. "Rather than always aiming for objective statements of truth we need to realise that a large amount of knowledge is derived via inference from a limited and imperfect evidence base, especially in the humanities," he says. "Thus we should aim to accurately represent the state of knowledge about a topic, including omissions, uncertainty and differences of opinion."

and concludes "messiness is not only the price we pay for scaling knowledge aggressively and collaboratively, it is a property of networked knowledge itself". Hoorah!

What can the digital humanities learn from museums?

After a conversation over twitter, a few of us (@ericdmj, @clairey_ross, @briancroxall, @amyeetx) went for a chat over lunch. Our conversation was wide-ranging, but one practical outcomes was the idea of a 'top ten' list of articles, blog posts and other resources that would help digital humanists get a sense of what can be learnt from museums on topics like digital projects, audience outreach, education and public participation. Museum practitioners are creating spaces for conversations about failures, which popped up in the #DH2012 twitter stream.

So which conference papers, journal articles, blogs or blog posts, etc, would you suggest for a top ten 'get started in museums and the digital humanities' list?

[For further context, the Digital Humanities community is interested in working more closely with museums: see point 3 of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)'s 'Next Steps' document.

Both technologist and humanist in the academic digital humanities?

2012-07-14T17:15:00.001+01:00

I've been reading Andrew Prescott's excellent Making the Digital Human: Anxieties, Possibilities, Challenges:

...in Britain the problem is I think that the digital humanities has failed to develop its own distinctive intellectual agendas and is still to all intents and purposes a support service. The digital humanities in Britain has generally emerged from information service units and has never fully escaped these origins. Even in units which are defined as academic departments, such as my own in King’s, the assumption generally is that the leading light in the project will be an academic in a conventional academic department. The role of the digital humanities specialists in constructing this project is always at root a support one. We try and suggest that we are collaborating in new ways, but at the end of the day a unit like that at King’s is simply an XML factory for projects led by other researchers.

Beyond the question of how and why digital people are pushed into support roles in digital humanities projects, I've also been wondering whether the academic world actually allows one to simultaneously be a technologist and a humanist. This is partly because I'm still mulling over the interactions between different disciplines at a recent research institute and partly because of a comment about a recently advertised 'digital historian' job that called it "'Digital Historian' as slave to real thing - no tenure, no topic, no future".

The statement 'no topic' particularly stood out. I'm not asking whether it's possible for someone to be a good historian and a good programmer (for example) because clearly some people are both, but rather whether hiring, funding, training and academic structures allow one to be both technologist and humanist. Can one propose both a data architecture and a research question?

It may simply be that people with specialist skills are leant on heavily in a project because their skills are vital for its success, but does this mean an individual is corralled into one type of work to the exclusion of others? If you are the only programmer-historian in a group of historians, do you only get to be a programmer, and vice versa? Are there academic roles that truly make the most of both aspects of the humanist technologist?

And does this mean, as Prescott says, that 'intellectually, the digital humanities is always reactive'?

'Engaging digital audiences in museums' conference

2012-07-13T20:21:00.000+01:00

A quick report and Storify summary from Wednesday's joint Museums Computer Group (MCG) and Digital Learning Network (DLNet) conference, 'Engaging digital audiences in museums', which was held on 11 July 2012 at the University of Manchester. I'm the Chair of the MCG and was on the Programming Committee for this event so I make absolutely no claim to impartiality, but I thought it went really well - great speakers and workshop leaders, enthusiastic and friendly participants and a variety of formats that kept energy levels up during the day.

My notes are sketchier than usual as I was co-chairing some of the sessions and keeping an eye on the running of the event, so this is more of an impressionistic overview than a detailed report. There are already a number of other posts out there, and we'll have the post from our official event blogger and illustrator up soon for more comprehensive accounts.

For the MCG, this event was experimental in a number of ways - in running an event with another practitioner organisation, in the venue, in running parallel workshops, buying in commercial wifi, and in devoting part of the day to an unconference - and I'm curious to know what response we get in the evaluation from the day. (If you were there, our short feedback form is online.)

The event was designed to bring museum learning and technology staff together because we felt we were missing opportunities to benefit from each others skills and experience. I know technologists are grappling with measuring impact, and learning people with reaching new audiences in different ways - hopefully each group would have something to offer and something to learn, though it might mean seeing past each others jargon and understanding different views of the world. (This 'Interloper Report' and comments from MW2012 provide some insight into the potential.) We planned the day as a mixture of inspiring talks and opportunities to get stuck into conversation about topical issues. It was also a day for making connections so we'd included coffee breaks, lunch and the unconference so that people could find others interested in similar things or to put faces to names from the MCG and DLNet lists and social media.
The various tweets I've added to storify do a reasonable job of covering the day, but I've left out things like the QR code discussion. Other conversations about generic learning outcomes have taken on a life of their own - for example, Rhiannon's post 'Generic Learning Outcomes - friend or foe?' seeks to understand why non-learning people don't seem to like them.

I thought Nick Winterbotham's presentation of the Group for Education in Museums (GEM) 'self-evident truths' was interesting, and some of his points were picked up and retweeted widely:

Our heritage is not about things it is about people
Everyone has a right to know about and be at ease with heritage
Heritage embraces the past and present of all cultures
Heritage is essential as the cradle of everyone's tomorrow
Heritage encompasses all literature, science, technology, environments and arts
The multiple narratives of heritage deserve respect
Learning is an entitled journey, not a destination
Heritage learning is an entitlement for everyone
The development of heritage learning skills must be a perpetual excellence
Learning is not simply a justification for cultural spending, it is THE justification for cultural spending

Nick advocated for a world where no-one hesitates at taking a risk in learning, and said that we love art, digital culture because of how we feel about it, not what we know about it. He urged us to focus on how your audiences live, learn and love your subject matter; to acknowledge the intellectual generosity needed; and find the big idea that will transform your organisation.

Matthew Cock talked about the challenges of audiences, particularly around mobile. The three-pronged model for audiences in museums: attract -> engage -> impact. He asked, when you see someone in a museum with a phone, what space are they in? Are they engaged, distracted, focused? Is it a sign of disrespect and disengagement or a sign of bonding with the group they're with? And how do you know?

He talked about the work Morris Hargreaves McIntyre had done to understand their audiences and their varying motivations for visiting: social - museums as enjoyable place to spend time with friends and family; intellectual - interested in knowledge; emotional - experience what the past was like; spiritual - creative stimulation, quiet contemplation, etc. (See also MHM's Culture Segments report). How does this connect to using mobiles to engage people? People have different activities - chat, read, recording audio or photo, playing media back, share something via social media etc. Each fulfills a different need. The challenge is to match specific things you can do on a mobile with your motivations for visiting. He referred to Maslow's hierarchy of needs to think about the needs a museum satisfies in our lives and the experience economy.

People are seeking venues and events that engage them in a memorable (and authentic?) ways - we're shifting from buying lots of stuff to seeking unique and engaging experiences. The visitor wants to walk away with the engagement having effected a transformation (the impact point of the three-pronged model). Measuring that impact is really hard. Evaluation can look at lots of things but it's hard to understand the needs of our visitors and what works for them in this space.

Later I asked what Learning people like Nick could tell us technologists about measuring impact, but it seems like it's the holy grail for their field too. Nick did mention that we go from a stage of cognitive to affective impact over time after an experience, which is a good start for thinking about this. Judging from the response on twitter, I'm not the only one who thinks that measuring the impact of a museum experience and understanding whether it's ephemeral or lifelong is one of the big tasks for museums right now.

John Coburn's presentation on the Hidden Newcastle app harked back to the buzz around storytelling
a few years ago, but it also resonated with conversations about the different types and purposes of museum websites - an app that's not about sharing collections or objects but about sharing compelling stories fits firmly in the 'messy middle'. In this case, 'it's the story that creates the impact, not the object. The value of the object is as the source for the story'. I love that they wanted to create intrigue about the people and the times in which they lived and compel exploration.

It was a difficult choice but I popped into the 'tech on a budget' workshop where Shona Carnall and Greg Povey presented some interesting ways to use existing, readily available technologies to create interactive experiences.

I'll leave the detail of the other presentations to the storify below and other people's posts and skip to the unconference. Because time was short we asked for session ideas and votes from the podium, rather than letting people write ideas and put their votes up on a shared board. After the unconference we all gathered again to hear what had been discussed in each group. The summaries were:

Commercial side of commissioning cool things: reluctant to put a price on it, but UK has cultural expectations around free museums which makes it harder to charge. Digital is received as god given right, something that should be free. But how come the West End theatre is able to charge so much for a ticket? Museums providing paid-for entertainment not just a browsing experience. We pay for entertainment but we don't expect to be entertained in museums.
Learning outcomes: friends or foe? Attitude is sometimes that learning outcomes are rubbish - decided generic learning outcomes (GLOs) are a really good thing. It's not about shoe-horning facts into everything or pure knowledge transfer - it's also about inspiration, experience, skills, wonderment. The wondrous Romans! Trying to change the stigma about what learning actually is, it's an experience as much as formal education. Maybe 'aims and objectives' a better term than 'learning outcomes'.
How do you evaluate wonderment - with difficulty. What is it? Element of surprise, something being visceral, physiological responses. Are adults too cynical for wonderment? 'Smiling Victorians' - challenge expectations. Imagine writing a budget to get iris recognition to measure wonder! Hard to measure or evaluate it but should always aspire to it.
Coherent experience, call to action in gallery to online with mobile in gallery: talked about pressure museums are under to introduce next tech, be whizzy, or is it addressing a real need? Can you piggyback on software that's already out there?
Reaching different audiences: particularly teenagers: find out what inspires them, tap into that. What are the barriers to engaging them? They're creative, maybe we should work with them to create digital offers, empower them. Apps for apps sake - under pressure to deliver them.
Big ideas: intellectual generosity. (Goodness! There was a long list of the characteristics MCG and DLNet would have if they were an animal or a tool...) We are intricate explosions. Intricate - all the stuff we're talking about is detailed and a little fragile but explosive because the world will catch fire with what we're doing.
Failure confessionals: web content management systems - maybe simple is the way to go. Failure is a good thing, and at least we didn't screw up like the bankers.
Social media audiences: does it make sense just to have one FB, twitter, etc account per org? Keeping a brand together is good but it doesn't always make sense to lump all audience conversations into one channel.

And with the final thanks to the student volunteers, programme committee, unconference organisers and speakers (and particularly to Ade as local contact and Rhiannon as the tireless organiser that made it all happen), it was over.

We're already looking ahead to the MCG's Spring 2013 meeting, which may be an experimental 'distributed' meeting held in the same week or evening in different regional locations. If you're interested in hosting a small-scale event with us somewhere in the UK, get in touch! We're also thinking about themes for UK Museums on the Web 2012, so again, let us know if you have any ideas.

Drinking about museums: the Manchester edition, July 10

2012-07-03T14:53:00.003+01:00

A few years ago the Museums Computer Group committee started inviting people attending our events to join us for drinks the night before. For locals and people who've travelled up the night before an event, it's a nice way to start to catch up with or meet people who are interested in technology in museums. These days people around the world are organising events under the #drinkingaboutmuseums label, so we thought we'd combine the two and have a #drinkingaboutmuseums in Manchester on Tuesday July 10, 2012. Come join us from 6:30pm at the Sandbar, 120 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HL.

And of course, the reason we're gathering - on Wednesday July 11, 2012, the MCG (@ukmcg) are running an event with the Digital Learning Network (@DLNet) on 'Engaging digital audiences in museums' in Manchester (tickets possibly still available at http://mcg-dlnet.eventbrite.com/ or follow the hashtag #EngageM on twitter) so we'll have a mixed crowd of museum technologists and educators. You're welcome to attend even if you're not going to the conference.

If you've got any questions, just leave a comment or @-mention me (@mia_out) on twitter. We'll also keep an eye on the #drinkingaboutmuseums tag. You can find out more about #drinkingaboutmuseums in my post about the June New York edition which saw 20-ish museum professionals gather to chat over drinks.