Every age has its orthodoxy and no orthodoxy is ever right.
Way back in 2012 I had a week-long residency at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York. It's interesting reading the post I wrote for the Cooper Hewitt Lab blog again and thinking about which of the challenges I faced would be easier now, and which are fundamental to working with museum data. Continue reading 'what can you learn about 270,000 records in a week?'
thinking about principles for documenting where AI was used to create or enhance metadata records in library, museum and archive catalogues/collections management systems
AI has incredible promise for work in libraries, museums and archives, but it's not a panacea.
Nearly ten years ago I was in Estonia for the 'Community Involvement in Theme Museums' conference where I had the chance to meet and hear from people working in Estonian, Finnish and Lithuanian memory institutions. I was there to talk about 'niche' projects in crowdsourcing, so I had a few conversations about crowdsourcing in the Continue reading Cultures of collective work and crowdsourcing?
I've shared these at work and thought it might be helpful to post my notes from the launch of the Museum Data Service at Bloomberg last week in public too. The MDS aggregates museum (and museum-like) metadata, encouraging use by data scientists, researchers, the public, etc. The MDS doesn't include images, but links to them Continue reading Notes from the Museum Data Service launch
Back in November 2015, Tara Andrews invited me to give a guest lecture on 'digital history' for the Introduction to Digital Humanities course at the University of Bern, where she was then a professor. This is a slightly shortened version of my talk notes, finally posted in 2024 as I go back to thinking about Continue reading 57 Varieties of Digital History? Towards the future of looking at the…
I'm giving a lecture on 'crowdsourcing at the British Library' for students on UCL's MSc Sustainable Heritage taking the course 'Crowd-Sourced and Citizen Data for Cultural Heritage' (BENV0114). As some links at the British Library are still down, I've put the web archive versions into a post, along with other links included in my talk: Continue reading Links for a talk on crowdsourcing at UCL
I’ve been meaning to write this post since May 2022, when I was invited to present at a SCONUL event on ‘AI for libraries’. It’s hard to write anything about AI that doesn’t feel outdated before you hit ‘post’, especially since ChatGPT made generative AI suddenly accessible interesting to ‘ordinary’ people. Some of the content Continue reading Three prompts for ‘AI in libraries’ from SCONUL in May…
Reflections and selected highlights from the Fantastic Futures 2023 conference, held at the Internet Archive Canada's building in Vancouver and Simon Fraser University; full programme; videos will be coming soon. A TL;DR is that it's incredible how many of the projects discussed wouldn't have been possible (or less feasible) a year ago. Whisper and ChatGPT Continue reading Fantastic Futures 2023…
Technology job listings for cultural heritage or the humanities aren't always easy to find. I've recently been helping recruit into various tech roles at the British Library while also answering questions from folk looking for work in the digital heritage / GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) tech / digital humanities (DH)-ish world, so I've collated Continue reading Finding Digital…