'Behind-the-themes' at the UK Museums on the Web conference – UKMW12 'Strategica​lly Digital'

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:

Logo that says: 'museums computer group: connect me, support me, inspire me'

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?

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.]


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!

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…

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.

'Engaging digital audiences in museums' conference

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

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.

Drinking about museums: the New York edition, June 15

Inspired by Koven J. Smith and Kathleen Tinworth's 'Drinking About Museums' in Denver and Ed Rodley's version in Boston, we're drinking about museums (and libraries and archives) in New York this Friday (June 15, 2012), and you're invited!  Since I'm only in NYC for a week and still get confused about whether I'm heading uptown or downtown at any given time, Neal Stimler @nealstimler has kindly taken care of organising things.  If you're interested in coming, let him know so you can grab his contact details and we know to keep an eye out for you.
We're heading to k2 Friday night at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 W. 17 St., NYC 10011.  We'll be there from 6:30 until closing at 10pm.  The table is booked for Mia Ridge, and we should have enough room that you can just turn up and grab a seat.  It's free entry to the gallery from 6-10:00 p.m and the K2 Lounge serves food.

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.

Well, gosh.

If you see this post it means… I'm on a bus to Heathrow.  I'm on my way to New York for a week's residency at the Cooper-Hewitt  then onto Indianapolis for an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities on 'Spatial Narrative and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities', and since I'm not sure when I'll next have time to post, I thought I'd leave you with this little provocation:

Museums should stick to what they do best – to preserve, display, study and where possible collect the treasures of civilisation and of nature. They are not fit to do anything else. It is this single rationale for the museum that makes each one unique, which gives each its own distinctive character. It is the hard work of scholars and curators in their own areas of expertise that attracts visitors. Everybody knows that the harder you try to win friends and ingratiate yourself with people, the more repel you them. It would seem however that those running our new museums need to learn afresh this simple human lesson.

Source: Josie Appleton, "Museums for 'The People'?" in 'Museums and their Communities', edited by Sheila Watson (2007).

If that polemic has depressed you too much, you can read this inspiring article instead, 'The wide open future of the art museum: Q&A with William Noel':

We just think that Creative Commons data is real data. It’s data that people can really use. It’s all about access, and access is about several things: licensing and publishing the raw data. Any data that you capture should be available to be the public. … The other important thing is to put the data in places where people can find it… The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. … The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original…

…people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. Digitization is a way to address that issue, in a way that with medieval manuscripts, it simply wasn’t possible before. People go to museums because they go and see what they already know, so you’ve got to make your collections known. Frankly, you can write about it, but the best thing you can do is to put out free images of it. This is not something you do out of generosity, this is something you do because it makes branding sense, and it even makes business sense. So that’s what’s in it for the institution.

The other main reason to do it is to increase the knowledge of and research on your collection by the people, which has to be part of your mission at least, even in the most conservative of institutions. 

Btw, if you're in New York and fancy meeting up for a coffee before June 17, drop me a line in the comments or @mia_out.  (Or ditto for Indianapolis June 17-30).

Frequently Asked Questions about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage

Over time I've noticed the repetition of various misconceptions and apprehensions about crowdsourcing for cultural heritage and digital history, so since this is a large part of my PhD topic I thought I'd collect various resources together as I work to answer some FAQs. I'll update this post over time in response to changes in the field, my research and comments from readers. While this is partly based on some writing for my PhD, I've tried not to be too academic and where possible I've gone for publicly accessible sources like blog posts rather than send you to a journal paywall.

If you'd rather watch a video than read, check out the Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives (CCLA)'s 'Crowdsourcing 101: Fundamentals and Case Studies' online seminar.

[Last updated: February 2016, to address 'crowdsourcing steals jobs'. Previous updates added a link to CCLA events, crowdsourcing projects to explore and a post on machine learning+crowdsourcing.]

What is crowdsourcing?

Definitions are tricky. Even Jeff Howe, the author of 'Crowdsourcing' has two definitions:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

For many reasons, the term 'crowdsourcing' isn't appropriate for many cultural heritage projects but the term is such neat shorthand that it'll stick until something better comes along. Trevor Owens (@tjowens) has neatly problematised this in The Crowd and The Library:

'Many of the projects that end up falling under the heading of crowdsourcing in libraries, archives and museums have not involved large and massive crowds and they have very little to do with outsourcing labor. … They are about inviting participation from interested and engaged members of the public [and] continue a long standing tradition of volunteerism and involvement of citizens in the creation and continued development of public goods'

Defining crowdsourcing in cultural heritage

To summarise my own thinking and the related literature, I'd define crowdsourcing in cultural heritage as an emerging form of engagement with cultural heritage that contributes towards a shared, significant goal or research area by asking the public to undertake tasks that cannot be done automatically, in an environment where the tasks, goals (or both) provide inherent rewards for participation.

Screenshot from 'Letters of 1916' project.

Who is 'the crowd'?

Good question!  One tension underlying the 'openness' of the call to participate in cultural heritage is the fact that there's often a difference between the theoretical reach of a project (i.e. everybody) and the practical reach, the subset of 'everybody' with access to the materials needed (like a computer and an internet connection), the skills, experience and time…  While 'the crowd' may carry connotations of 'the mob', in 'Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation', Melissa Terras (@melissaterras) points out that many 'amateur' content creators are 'extremely self motivated, enthusiastic, and dedicated' and test the boundaries between 'between definitions of amateur and professional, work and hobby, independent and institutional' and quotes Leadbeater and Miller's 'The Pro-Am Revolution' on people who pursue an activity 'as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a professional standard'.

There's more and more talk of 'community-sourcing' in cultural heritage, and it's a useful distinction but it also masks the fact that nearly all crowdsourcing projects in cultural heritage involve a community rather than a crowd, whether they're the traditional 'enthusiasts' or 'volunteers', citizen historians, engaged audiences, whatever.  That said, Amy Sample Ward has a diagram that's quite useful for planning how to work with different groups. It puts the 'crowd' (people you don't know), 'network' (the community of your community) and 'community' (people with a relationship to your organisation) in different rings based on their closeness to you.

'The crowd' is differentiated not just by their relationship to your organisation, or by their skills and abilities, but their motivation for participating is also important – some people participate in crowdsourcing projects for altruistic reasons, others because doing so furthers their own goals.

I'm worried about about crowdsourcing because…

…isn't letting the public in like that just asking for trouble?

@lottebelice said she'd heard people worry that 'people are highly likely to troll and put in bad data/content/etc on purpose' – but this rarely happens. People worried about this with user-generated content, too, and while kids in galleries delight in leaving rude messages about each other, it's rare online.

It's much more likely that people will mistakenly add bad data, but a good crowdsourcing project should build any necessary data validation into the project. Besides, there are generally much more interesting places to troll than a cultural heritage site.

And as Matt Popke pointed out in a comment, 'When you have thousands of people contributing to an entry you have that many more pairs of eyes watching it. It's like having several hundred editors and fact-checkers. Not all of them are experts, but not all of them have to be. The crowd is effectively self-policing because when someone trolls an entry, somebody else is sure to notice it, and they're just as likely to fix it or report the issue'.  If you're really worried about this, an earlier post on Designing for participatory projects: emergent best practice' has some other tips.

 …doesn't crowdsourcing take advantage of people?

XKCD on the ethics of commercial crowdsourcing

Sadly, yes, some of the activities that are labelled 'crowdsourcing' do. Design competitions that expect lots of people to produce full designs and pay a pittance (if anything) to the winner are rightly hated. (See antispec.com for more and a good list of links).

But in cultural heritage, no. Museums, galleries, libraries, archives and academic projects are in the fortunate position of having interesting work that involves an element of social good, and they also have hugely varied work, from microtasks to co-curated research projects. Crowdsourcing is part of a long tradition of volunteering and altruistic participation, and to quote Owens again, 'Crowdsourcing is a concept that was invented and defined in the business world and it is important that we recast it and think through what changes when we bring it into cultural heritage.'

[Update, May 2013: it turns out museums aren't immune from the dangers of design competitions and spec work: I've written On the trickiness of crowdsourcing competitions to draw some lessons from the Sydney Design competition kerfuffle.]

Anyway, crowdsourcing won't usually work if it's not done right. From A Crowd Without Community – Be Wary of the Mob:

"when you treat a crowd as disposable and anonymous, you prevent them from achieving their maximum ability. Disposable crowds create disposable output. Simply put: crowds need a sense of identity and community to achieve their potential."

…crowdsourcing can't be used for academic work

Reasons given include 'humanists don't like to share their knowledge' with just anyone. And it's possible that they don't, but as projects like Transcribe Bentham and Trove show, academics and other researchers will share the work that helps produce that knowledge. (This is also something I'm examining in my PhD. I'll post some early findings after the Digital Humanities 2012 conference in July).

Looking beyond transcription and other forms of digitisation, it's worth checking out Prism, 'a digital tool for generating crowd-sourced interpretations of texts'.

…it steals jobs

Once upon a time, people starting a career in academia or cultural heritage could get jobs as digitisation assistants, or they could work on a scholarly edition. Sadly, that's not the case now, but that's probably more to do with year upon year of funding cuts. Blame the bankers, not the crowdsourcers.

The good news? Crowdsourcing projects can create jobs – participatory projects need someone to act as community liaison, to write the updates that demonstrate the impact of crowdsourced contributions, to explain the research value of the project, to help people integrate it into teaching, to organise challenges and editathons and more.

What isn't crowdsourcing?

…'the wisdom of the crowds'?

Which is not just another way of saying 'crowd psychology', either (another common furphy). As Wikipedia puts it, 'the wisdom of the crowds' is based on 'diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals'. Handily, Trevor Owens has just written a post addressing the topic: Human Computation and Wisdom of Crowds in Cultural Heritage.

…user-generated content

So what's the difference between crowdsourcing and user-generated content? The lines are blurry, but crowdsourcing is inherently productive – the point is to get a job done, whether that's identifying people or things, creating content or digitising material.

Conversely, the value of user-generated content lies in the act of creating it rather than in the content itself – for example, museums might value the engagement in a visitor thinking about a subject or object and forming a response to it in order to comment on it. Once posted it might be displayed as a comment or counted as a statistic somewhere but usually that's as far as it goes.

And @sherah1918 pointed out, there's a difference between asking for assistance with tasks and asking for feedback or comments: 'A comment book or a blog w/comments isn't crowdsourcing to me … nor is asking ppl to share a story on a web form. That is a diff appr to collecting & saving personal histories, oral histories'.

…other things that aren't crowdsourcing:

[Heading inspired by Sheila Brennan @sherah1918]

  • Crowdfunding (it's often just asking for micro-donations, though it seems that successful crowdfunding projects have a significant public engagement component, which brings them closer to the concerns of cultural heritage organisations. It's also not that new. See Seventeenth-century crowd funding for one example.)
  • Data-mining social media and other content (though I've heard this called 'passive' or 'implict' crowdsourcing)
  • Human computation (though it might be combined with crowdsourcing)
  • Collective intelligence (though it might also be combined with crowdsourcing)
  • General calls for content, help or participation (see 'user-generated content') or vaguely asking people what they think about an idea. Asking for feedback is not crowdsourcing. Asking for help with your homework isn't crowdsourcing, as it only benefits you.
  • Buzzwords applied to marketing online. And as @emmclean said, "I think many (esp mkting) see "crowdsourcing" as they do "viral" – just happens if you throw money at it. NO!!! Must be great idea" – it must make sense as a crowdsourced task.

Ok, so what's different about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage?

For a start, the process is as valuable as the result. Owens has a great post on this, Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside Down, where he says:

'The process of crowdsourcing projects fulfills the mission of digital collections better than the resulting searches… Far better than being an instrument for generating data that we can use to get our collections more used it is actually the single greatest advancement in getting people using and interacting with our collections. … At its best, crowdsourcing is not about getting someone to do work for you, it is about offering your users the opportunity to participate in public memory … it is about providing meaningful ways for the public to enhance collections while more deeply engaging and exploring them'.

And as I've said elsewhere, ' playing [crowdsourcing] games with museum objects can create deeper engagement with collections while providing fun experiences for a range of audiences'. (For definitions of 'engagement' see The Culture and Sport Evidence (CASE) programme. (2011). Evidence of what works: evaluated projects to drive up engagement (PDF).)

What about cultural heritage and citizen science?

[This was written in 2012. I've kept it for historical reasons but think differently now.]

First, another definition. As Fiona Romeo writes, 'Citizen science projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of amateurs to analyse scientific data. In doing so, such projects further both science itself and the public understanding of science'. As Romeo points out in a different post, 'All citizen science projects start with well-defined tasks that answer a real research question', while citizen history projects rarely if ever seem to be based around specific research questions but are aimed more generally at providing data for exploration. Process vs product?

I'm still thinking through the differences between citizen science and citizen history, particularly where they meet in historical projects like Old Weather. Both citizen science and citizen history achieve some sort of engagement with the mindset and work of the equivalent professional occupations, but are the traditional differences between scientific and humanistic enquiry apparent in crowdsourcing projects? Are tools developed for citizen science suitable for citizen history? Does it make a difference that it's easier to take a new interest in history further without a big investment in learning and access to equipment?

I have a feeling that 'citizen science' projects are often more focused on the production of data as accurately and efficiently as possible, and 'citizen history' projects end up being as much about engaging people with the content as it is about content production. But I'm very open to challenges on this…

What kind of cultural heritage stuff can be crowdsourced?

I wrote this list of 'Activity types and data generated' over a year ago for my Masters dissertation on crowdsourcing games for museums and a subsequent paper for Museums and the Web 2011, Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections (which also lists validation types and requirements).  This version should be read in the light of discussion about the difference between crowdsourcing and user-generated content and in the context of things people can do with museums and with games, but it'll do for now:

Activity Data generated
Tagging (e.g. steve.museum, Brooklyn Museum Tag! You're It; variations include two-player 'tag agreement' games like Waisda?, extensions such as guessing games e.g. GWAP ESP Game, Verbosity, Tiltfactor Guess What?; structured tagging/categorisation e.g. GWAP Verbosity, Tiltfactor Cattegory) Tags; folksonomies; multilingual term equivalents; structured tags (e.g. 'looks like', 'is used for', 'is a type of').
Debunking (e.g. flagging content for review and/or researching and providing corrections). Flagged dubious content; corrected data.
Recording a personal story Oral histories; contextualising detail; eyewitness accounts.
Linking (e.g. linking objects with other objects, objects to subject authorities, objects to related media or websites; e.g. MMG Donald). Relationship data; contextualising detail; information on history, workings and use of objects; illustrative examples.
Stating preferences (e.g. choosing between two objects e.g. GWAP Matchin; voting on or 'liking' content). Preference data; subsets of 'highlight' objects; 'interestingness' values for content or objects for different audiences. May also provide information on reason for choice.
Categorising (e.g. applying structured labels to a group of objects, collecting sets of objects or guessing the label for or relationship between presented set of objects). Relationship data; preference data; insight into audience mental models; group labels.
Creative responses (e.g. write an interesting fake history for a known object or purpose of a mystery object.) Relevance; interestingness; ability to act as social object; insight into common misconceptions.

You can also divide crowdsourcing projects into 'macro' and 'micro' tasks – giving people a goal and letting them solve it as they prefer, vs small, well-defined pieces of work, as in the 'Umbrella of Crowdsourcing' at The Daily Crowdsource and there's a fair bit of academic literature on other ways of categorising and describing crowdsourcing.

Using crowdsourcing to manage crowdsourcing

There's also a growing body of literature on ecosystems of crowdsourcing activities, where different tasks and platforms target different stages of the process.  A great example is Brooklyn Museum’s ‘Freeze Tag!’, a game that cleans up data added in their tagging game. An ecosystem of linked activities (or games) can maximise the benefits of a diverse audience by providing a range of activities designed for different types of participant skills, knowledge, experience and motivations; and can encompass different levels of participation from liking, to tagging, finding facts and links.

A participatory ecosystem can also resolve some of the difficulties around validating specialist tags or long-form, more subjective content by circulating content between activities for validation and ranking for correctness, 'interestingness' (etc) by other players (see for example the 'Contributed data lifecycle' diagram on my MW2011 paper or the 'Digital Content Life Cycle' for crowdsourcing in Oomen and Aroyo's paper below). As Nina Simon said in The Participatory Museum, 'By making it easy to create content but impossible to sort or prioritize it, many cultural institutions end up with what they fear most: a jumbled mass of low-quality content'.  Crowdsourcing the improvement of cultural heritage data would also make possible non-crowdsourcing engagement projects that need better content to be viable.

See also Raddick, MJ, and Georgia Bracey. 2009. “Citizen Science: Status and Research Directions for the Coming Decade” on bridging between old and new citizen science projects to aid volunteer retention, and Nov, Oded, Ofer Arazy, and David Anderson. 2011. “Dusting for Science: Motivation and Participation of Digital Citizen Science Volunteers” on creating 'dynamic contribution environments that allow volunteers to start contributing at lower-level granularity tasks, and gradually progress to more demanding tasks and responsibilities'.

What does the future of crowdsourcing hold?

Platforms aimed at bootstrapping projects – that is, getting new projects up and running as quickly and as painlessly as possible – seem to be the next big thing. Designing tasks and interfaces suitable for mobile and tablets will allow even more of us to help out while killing time. There's also a lot of work on the integration of machine learning and human computation; my post 'Helping us fly? Machine learning and crowdsourcing' has more on this.

Find out how crowdsourcing in cultural heritage works by exploring projects

Spend a few minutes with some of the projects listed in Looking for (crowdsourcing) love in all the right places to really understand how and why people participate in cultural heritage crowdsourcing.

Where can I find out more? (AKA, a reading list in disguise)

There's a lot of academic literature on all kinds of aspects of crowdsourcing, but I've gone for sources that are accessible both intellectually and in terms of licensing. If a key reference isn't there, it might be because I can't find a pre-print or whatever outside a paywall – let me know if you know of one!

9781472410221Liked this post? Buy the book! 'Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage' is available through Ashgate or your favourite bookseller…

Thanks, and over to you!

Thanks to everyone who responded to my call for their favourite 'misconceptions and apprehensions about crowdsourcing (esp in history and cultural heritage)', and to those who inspired this post in the first place by asking questions in various places about the negative side of crowdsourcing.  I'll update the post as I hear of more, so let me know your favourites.  I'll also keep adding links and resources as I hear of them.

You might also be interested in: Notes from 'Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities' and various crowdsourcing classes and workshops I've run over the past few years.

Museums and the audience comments paradox

I was at the Imperial War Museum for an advisory board meeting for the Social Interpretation project recently, and had a chance to reflect on my experiences with previous audience participation projects.  As Claire Ross summarised it, the Social Interpretation project is asking: does applying social media models to collections successfully increase engagement and reach?  And what forms of moderation work in that environment – can the audience be trusted to behave appropriately?

One topic for discussion yesterday was whether the museum should do some 'gardening' on the comments.  Participation rates are relatively high but some of the comments are nonsense ('asdf'), repetitive (thousands of variants of 'Cool' or 'sad') or off-topic ('I like the museum') – a pattern probably common to many museum 'have your say' kiosks.  Gardening could involve 'pruning' out comments that were not directly relevant to the question asked in the interactive, or finding ways to surface the interesting comments.  While there are models available in other sectors (e.g. newspapers), I'm excited by the possibility that the Social Interpretation project might have a chance to address this issue for museums.

A big design challenge for high-traffic 'have your say' interactives is providing a quality experience for the audience who is reading comments – they shouldn't have to wade through screens of repeated, vacuous or rude comments to find the gems – while appropriately respecting the contribution and personal engagement of the person who left the comment.

In the spirit of 'have your say', what do you think the solution might be?  What have you tried (successfully or not) in your own projects, or seen working well elsewhere?

Update: the Social Interpretation have posted I iz in ur xhibition trolling ur comments:

"One of the most discussed issues was about what we have termed ‘gardening comments’ but to put it bluntly it’s more a case of should we be ‘curating the visitor voice’ in order to improve the visitor experience? It’s a difficult question to deal with… 

We are at the stage where we really do want to respect the commenter, but also want to give other readers a high value experience. It’s a question of how we do that, and will it significantly change the project?"

If you found this post, you might also be interested in Notes from 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC'.

Update, March 2014: I've just been reading a journal article on 'Normative Influences on Thoughtful Online Participation'. The authors set out to test this hypothesis:

'Individuals exposed to highly thoughtful behavior from others will be more thoughtful in their own online comment contributions than individuals exposed to behavior exhibiting a low degree of thoughtfulness.' 

Thoughtful comments were defined by the number of words, how many seconds it took to write them, and how much of the content was relevant to the issue discussed in the original post. And the results? 'We found significant effects of social norm on all three measures related to participants’ commenting behavior. Relative to the low thoughtfulness condition, participants in the high thoughtfulness condition contributed longer comments, spent more time writing them, and presented more issue-relevant thoughts.' To me, this suggests that it's worth finding ways to highlight the more thoughtful comments (and keeping pulling out those 'asdf' weeds) in an interactive as this may encourage other thoughtful comments in turn.

Reference: Sukumaran, Abhay, Stephanie Vezich, Melanie McHugh, and Clifford Nass. “Normative Influences on Thoughtful Online Participation.” In Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3401–10. Vancouver, BC, Canada: ACM, 2011. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979450.