Open Objects – Page 30 – 'Every age has its orthodoxy and no orthodoxy is ever right.'

Introducing modern bluestocking

[Update, May 2012: I've tweaked this entry so it makes a little more sense. These other posts from around the same time help put it in context: Some ideas for location-linked cultural heritage projects, Exposing the layers of history in cityscapes, and a more recent approach '…and they all turn on their computers and say 'yay!" (aka, 'mapping for humanists'). I'm also including below some content rescued from the ning site, written by Joanna:

What do historian Catharine Macauley, scientist Ada Lovelace, and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron have in common? All excelled in fields where women’s contributions were thought to be irrelevant. And they did so in ways that pushed the boundaries of those disciplines and created space for other women to succeed. And, sadly, much of their intellectual contribution and artistic intervention has been forgotten.

Inspired by the achievements and exploits of the original bluestockings, Modern Bluestockings aims to celebrate and record the accomplishments not just of women like Macauley, Lovelace and Cameron, but also of women today whose actions within their intellectual or professional fields are inspiring other women. We want to build up an interactive online resource that records these women’s stories. We want to create a feminist space where we can share, discuss, commemorate, and learn.

So if there is a woman whose writing has inspired your own, whose art has challenged the way you think about the world, or whose intellectual contribution you feel has gone unacknowledged for too long, do join us at http://modernbluestocking.ning.com/, and make sure that her story is recorded. You'll find lots of suggestions and ideas there for sharing content, and plenty of willing participants ready to join the discussion about your favourite bluestocking.

And more explanation from modernbluestocking on freebase:

Celebrating the lives of intellectual women from history…

Wikipedia lists bluestocking as 'an obsolete and disparaging term for an educated, intellectual woman'. We'd prefer to celebrate intellectual women, often feminist in intent or action, who have pushed the boundaries in their discipline or field in a way that has created space for other women to succeed within those fields.

The original impetus was a discussion at the National Portrait Gallery in London held during the exhibition 'Brilliant Women, 18th Century Bluestockings' (http://www.npg.org.uk/live/wobrilliantwomen1.asp) where it was embarrassingly obvious that people couldn't name young(ish) intellectual women they admired. We need to find and celebrate the modern bluestockings. Recording and celebrating the lives of women who've gone before us is another way of doing this.

However, at least one of the morals of this story is 'don't get excited about a project, then change jobs and start a part-time Masters degree. On the other hand, my PhD proposal was shaped by the ideas expressed here, particularly the idea of mapping as a tool for public history by e.g using geo-located stories to place links to content in the physical location.

While my PhD has drifted away from early scientific women, I still read around the subject and occasionally adding names to modernbluestocking.freebase.com. If someone's not listed in Wikipedia it's a lot harder to add them, but I've realised that if you want to make a difference to the representation of intellectual women, you need to put content where people look for information – i.e. Wikipedia.

And with the launch of Google's Knowledge Graph, getting history articles into Wikipedia then into Freebase is even more important for the visibility of women's history: "The Knowledge Graph is built using facts and schema from Freebase so everyone who has contributed to Freebase had a part in making this possible. …The Knowledge Graph is built using facts and schema from Freebase soeveryone who has contributed to Freebase had a part in making this possible. (Source: this post to the Freebase list). I'd go so far as to say that if it's worth writing a scholarly article on an intellectual woman, it's worth re-using your references to create or improve their Wikipedia entry.]

Anyway. On with the original post…]

I keep meaning to find the time to write a proper post explaining one of the projects I'm working on, but in the absence of time a copy and paste job and a link will have to do…

I've started a project called 'modern bluestocking' that's about celebrating and commemorating intellectual women activists from the past and present while reclaiming and redefining the term 'bluestocking'. It was inspired by the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, 'Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings'. (See also the review, Not just a pretty face).

It will be a website of some sort, with a community of contributors and it'll also incorporate links to other resources.

~~We've started talking about what it might contain and how it might work at modernbluestocking.ning.com~~ (ning died, so it's at modernbluestocking.freebase.com…)

Museum application (something to make for mashed museum day?): collect feminist histories, stories, artefacts, images, locations, etc; support the creation of new or synthesised content with content embedded and referenced from a variety of sources. Grab something, tag it, display them, share them; comment, integrate, annotate others. Create a collection to inspire, record, commemorate, and build on.
What, who, how should this website look? Join and help us figure it out.

Why modernbluestocking? Because knowing where you've come from helps you know where you're going.

Sources could include online exhibition materials from the NPG (tricky interface to pull records from). How can this be a geek/socially friendly project and still get stuff done? Run a Modernbluestocking, community and museum hack day app to get stuff built and data collated? Have list of names, portraits, objects for query. Build a collection of links to existing content on other sites? Role models and heroes from current life or history. Where is relatedness stored? 'Significance' -thorny issue? Personal stories cf other more mainstream content? Is it like a museum made up of loan objects with new interpretation? How much is attribution of the person who added the link required? Login v not? Vandalism? How do deal with changing location or format of resources? Local copies or links? Eg images. Local don't impact bandwidth, but don't count as visits on originating site. Remote resources might disappear – moved, permissions changed, format change, taken offline, etc, or be replaced with different content. Examine the sources, look at their format, how they could be linked to, how stable they appear to be, whether it's possible to contact the publisher…

Could also be interesting to make explicit, transparent, the processes of validation and canonisation.

How to build a web application in four days

There's been a bit of buzz around 'How To Build A Web App in Four Days For $10,000'. Not everything is applicable to the kinds of projects I'd be involved in, but I really liked these points:

The best boost you can give you or your team is to provide the time to be creative.
You'll come back to your current projects with a new perspective and renewed energy.
It will push your team to learn new skills.
Simplify the site and app as much as possible. Try launching with just 'Home', 'Help' and 'About'.
Make sure to build on a great framework
Be technologically agnostic. If your developers are saying it should be built in a certain language and framework and they have solid reasons, trust them and move on.
Coordinate how your designers and developers are going to work together.
Get your 'Creation Environment' setup correctly. [See the original post for details]

"The coolest thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else"

I discovered this ace quote, "the coolest thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else", on JISC's Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG) site, via the The Repository Challenge. The CRIG was created to "help identify problem spaces in the repository landscape and suggest innovative solutions. The CRIG consists of a core group of technical, policy and development staff with repository interface expertise. It encourages anyone to join who is dedicated and passionate about surfacing scholarly content on the web."

Read 'repository or federated search' for 'repository' (or think of a federated search as a pseudo-repository) and 'scholarly' for 'cultural heritage' content, and it sounds like an awful lot of fun.

It's also the sentiment behind the UK Government's Show Us a Better Way, the Mashed Museum days and a whole bunch of similar projects.

A sort of private joy? User-generated content and museums

I came across this lovely perspective on the content visitors create with museums:

We didn't start out asking people to leave their work, but it always happened. Now, we build it into the consideration of the activities that will be offered in the space. It isn't really like the formal artist-displaying-work model that is in evidence throughout the museum…the work is typically anonymous and individual pieces aren't highlighted.

When you walk into the space during the last month or so of an exhibition you experience the visitor-created artwork as a single, room-sized installation first, and only later do you focus on individual pieces. I think it is closer in some ways to the urge behind street art…the sort of private joy to be had from making something great and then leaving it behind for others to discover. I sometimes see visitors coming back to find something that they left behind a month or two before, not to reclaim it, just to see where it is now.

From the post 'Show your work' at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog.

It's talking about work created during physical visits to a museum rather than virtual visits but I think I noticed it because there's been a spurt of discussion about user-generated content and visitor participation on museum websites on the MCG mailing list following a workshop at the London Museums Hub on 'Understanding collections use and online access across the London Hub'.

A study presented at the event found an apparent lack of interest from museum website visitors in user-generated content, but in discussion at the event it appeared that the findings might have been different if the questions had been asked differently (with examples of some possible outcomes from UGC, perhaps 'would you like museum collections to be more discoverable because other visitors had tagged them with everyday words you'd use' rather than 'would you like opportunities to comment or upload content'), or if the focus groups hadn't been recruited from people who were physically visiting a museum and who were therefore fairly traditional museum-goers.

This lead to some interesting discussion about the differing reactions to the idea of opinions from other visitors versus real-life stories from other visitors; and of the idea that sometimes the value in user-created content lives with the person who contributes rather than those who read their contributions lately. This last idea was also raised at the User-generated content session at Museums and the Web in Montreal, my notes are here. I think the role of authority and trust and the influence of the context (type of museum or collection, user goal) need to be teased out into a more sophisticated model for analysing user-generated content in the cultural heritage sector.

There's a lot of research into user-generated content, participation and social software going on in the UK at the moment, it'd be great if there was somewhere that results, and ideally the raw data too, could be shared. Perhaps the MCG site?

What would you create with public (UK) information?

Show Us a Better Way want to know, and if your idea is good they might give you £20,000 to develop it to the next level.

Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large?

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated.

Importantly, you don't need to be a geek:

You don't have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.

And they've made "gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information" available for the project, including health, crime and education data (but no personal information).

If you are bored…

…you could go and read some of the blogs listed in the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards 08.

If you like this blog, you could vote for it in the Programming and technical blogs category, but given how good some of the other blogs are, I certainly don't expect you to!

On the other hand, if you've really got time to be bored, maybe you could figure out the best way for a one-programmer (i.e. me*) project to store and publish layers of user-generated content on top of data drawn from APIs. KTHXBAI!

* More about that project soon when I report on the mashed museum day – I'd love other programmers to join me.

Responsibility to users?

What responsibility do the providers of a platform have to the communities that use that platform? The example below is slightly different because it was a commercial company, not a cultural heritage organisation, but it raises interesting issues.

Discussing Disney's deletion of their Virtual Magic Kingdom in Considering New Ethics in Virtual Communities and Cultures, radical trust says:

Let's not hide behind the word "virtual". Connections made in online communities are real. When considering the totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns – arts, beliefs, institutions and all other products of human work, thought and emotion – we are well beyond the basic definitions of community and entering the realm of culture. Although Disney owned the virtual-estate, do they have the ethical right to disintegrate the culture within?

As online communities continue to aid and develop human connections, do we need to start considering the ethical responsibilities of the platform controllers to maintain these cultures?

Scripting enabled – accessibility mashup event and random Friday link

Scripting Enabled, "a two day conference and workshop aimed at making the web a more accessible place", is an absolutely brilliant idea, and since it looks like it'll be on September 19 and 20, the weekend after BathCamp, I'm going to do my best to make it down. (It's the weekend before I start my Masters in HCI so it's the perfect way to set the tone for the next two years).

From the site:

The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time – let's not wait, let's make it happen.
…
A lot of companies have data and APIs available for mashups – let’s use these to remove barriers rather than creating another nice visualization.

And on a random Friday night, this is a fascinating post on Facial Recognition in Digital Photo Collections: "Polar Rose, a Firefox toolbar that does facial recognition on photos loaded in your browser."

Lonely Planet launch API

Lonely Planet launched their 'Explore API' and developer network at the BBC Mashed 2008 day. Available content includes 'destination content, including geocoded points of interest reviews, destination profiles, traveller-created "best of" lists and travel photographs' from their image library so as a travel junkie I'm already itching to have a play.

There's more background in this interview with Chris Heilmann and Chris Boden on the Yahoo! Developer blog, 'Lonely Planet starts developer program at mashed08 in London', but I thought it was worth pulling out this quote about the benefit of APIs, particularly as they're an organisation whose business model relies on its reputation and content:

Where do you see the benefit in releasing an API? How do you plan to monetize it or is it a loss-leader for you?

We don't have a funky web app like Twitter or Dopplr at this stage but we do have content – in a sense, that content is our platform. We want to take the Lonely Planet content and community experience onto relevant new platforms and make it accessible to travellers in new ways. We're not going to be able to do all of that on our own so we're looking to tap into external sources of innovation and creativity through open collaboration to help us imagine and execute the next generation of services that might enrich the lives of our community.

In terms of monetization, we'll look to work commercially with those developers who come up with innovations that we believe have the potential to create commercial value.