ECHO Blogging Central

Our work to transform the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History into a participatory and community-centered place has been heavily supported by the James Irvine Foundation. I've learned a lot from Irvine Foundation staff and partners directly. But one of my favorite things they do is remarkably unpersonalized: they produce killer reports.

Their newest one, Making Meaningful Connections, was written by Holly Sidford, Alexis Frasz, and Marcy Hinand at Helicon. The report is a slim 12 pages on the common characteristics of arts organizations that successfully and continuously engage diverse audiences. It is paired with a thoughtful infographic (part of which is shown at the top here) that summarizes their findings.

Making Meaningful Connections is not riddled with jargon and academic theory. Nor is it packed with juicy examples and case studies. Instead, it's a tight, inspiring, and reasonably original brief on the strategies that lead to sustained involvement of diverse people with arts organizations. It's the first report in a long time that I am sharing with my board. (The last one was on arts innovation and change, also from Irvine.)

Here are three aspects of Making Meaningful Connections that I like most:

• New participant relationships are like new friendships. They take time, curiosity, respect and the willingness to be changed by the relationship. The report starts with an elegant friendship analogy (see the box on page 4) that breaks down the challenges of genuine arts engagement in a clear, relatable, and motivating way.
• Targeted programming is not enough. The authors name the reality that one-off programs, exhibits, or shows for specific groups do little to change the mix of participants longterm. Interestingly, they argue instead that structural change--including but not exclusively programmatic change--is what makes the difference in participant makeup. They also acknowledge that some organizations are happy with their participant makeup, and that these multi-faceted organizational shifts are voluntary for those who want them.
• The characteristics of successful organizations involve deepening, not adding. So often, these kinds of reports recommend a long list of changes and new things to add to your work. It can feel defeating or downright impossible to integrate them into already-strapped schedules. But this report was developed based on existing organizations and practices, looking for common characteristics as opposed to new directions. The recommendations read less like "thou shalt do this new thing" and more like "deepen and embed in this thing you already have." We all have missions. We all have leaders. We all have business models. We can all shift within our existing worlds. 

And here are two things I wonder about:

• Universalist tone. This report could come from--and go--anywhere. I assume that's intentional, and for the most part, it's a good thing. The report is brief, clear, and open. If you are reading this report in Manchester or Malaysia or Memphis, you will find meaningful and useful content. On the other hand, the Irvine Foundation makes grants specifically in California. When Josephine Ramirez, Program Director for the Arts, introduced the report on the Irvine blog, she did so in the context of a state that is now 55% Latino and Asian. Nowhere in the report itself is there a comparable framing statement about why it is urgent to consider this work now, in California and around the world. Perhaps it's self-evident. But especially for organizations where cultural competency is in its infancy, those starting points and case statements are still necessary. Then again, Irvine made that statement pretty clearly in a previous report. 
• Recommendation to bring practices "into balance." I didn't find it meaningful to imagine an institutional "balance" of the five recommended practices (welcoming spaces, relevant programming, respectful relationships, analysis for improvement, business model). I agree that all are important, and that they are interrelated, but I didn't see a rationale in going for parity. I'd like to understand more about the basis for that recommendation.

What did you get out of Making Meaningful Connections?

Imagine a historic site. It has an incredible story. But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. It is losing funding, attention, and relevance.

What do you do?

Yesterday, I learned about the Silk Mill, a British historic site that is going through a dramatic community-driven reinvention. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums, a public institution of art, history, and natural history. The Mill itself claims fame as the world's oldest factory, a UNESCO world heritage site, and a birthplace of mechanized silk production.

Many people would look at the world's oldest mechanized silk mill and say that the core content of the museum is silk. Or silk production. Or factory life in the 1700s. The Derby Silk Mill folks have a different tack: they define the Silk Mill as being about making.

In the fall of 2013, they launched Re:Make, an ambitious project to redevelop the museum, live, on the floor, with a mix of staff, guest artists, and community members. They see this as directly related to the founding principles of the Mill as a place of experimentation, design, creating, and making. They see it as the future of their museum. And perhaps most ambitiously, they see it as a community-based project.

This means that not only have they turned their museum into an experimental project space, they have opened that space explicitly and intentionally to community co-production. They invite people to participate: in design, prototyping, artifact interpretation, collections preparation, audience development.

They don't just invite participation by opening the doors. They host public co-making events, invite groups to book workshops directly, engage on twitter and tumblr, and encourage drop-in participation. It's clear from the diversity of activities, the professionalism of the scaffolding, and the forms of access that they are serious about inviting meaningful participation in the Re:Make project.

Watch the video at the top of this post, and you'll see the requisite happy people of diverse backgrounds with power tools and post-its. But you'll also hear participants saying things that speak to the intentionality of this process. Things like:
"I was curious about how it would happen. And then I thought, ok, it does seem serious. They do know what they are talking about." or
"I've never had anything quite like it... it's carried on. Everyone in the community helping out. I love the way they've stuck to their guns and said, guys, keep going."These participants are engaged because they've been invited not just to participate once but to be part of something substantive and comprehensive. A strong participatory process is not a loosey-goosey, open the doors and do whatever strategy. It's serious. These guys needed to see that the museum was serious--putting resources, time, and real estate into the process. That investment by the institution helped them commit to making an investment of their own time and energy.

Staff members made some powerful statements as well. My favorite was this one:
"I'm the workshop supervisor, but the workshop belongs to everybody. It's like a swap. I'm a resource for the community, they're a resource for me, and the things we bought, in a public workshop, belongs to the public."This staff member sees community members as partners. Everyone has something they need. Everyone has something to give. It's not a question of the participatory process being unidirectional, something that we are doing for you the community. It's a shared space and process.

Kudos to the Silk Mill for doing the difficult, messy, resource-intensive work of making their participatory process both open and professional. Invested at all levels. It shines through even from across the pond.

And it leaves me with just one question. As I explore how the museum is growing with the community remaking it, I wonder: what will happen when they are done? Is this a participatory process to redevelop a museum, or can it be a participatory product: museum as making space?

Many projects have more energy in the making than in the completion. The people walking into the Silk Mill, being asked for their ideas and help, are living in an era of possibility and opportunity. As the museum project gets completed, the opportunities constrict. While it was amazing to get to make a robot, it may be less amazing to see that robot completed.

One of the things that struck me most about the Silk Mill was the positioning of Re:Make as a natural extension of its historic use as a factory. A factory never stops making things. Its work is never done. Is there a way that the Silk Mill could shift from a project of remaking to a site for continual making? It seems to me that that may be the truest to the original intent of the site--and the most compelling to the community now engaged.

Have you ever picked up an intriguing-looking business book, started to read it, and then realized it's just one five-page article's worth of content spread out over 300 pages?

Maybe I'm unlucky or a bad chooser, but I've encountered whole shelves of one-horse fluff and drivel. It gives the gems a bad name.

But! Here are three great books that have stuck with me. I found each really helpful in navigating an aspect of organizational change and leadership.

• Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity by Susan Kenny Stevens. This slim book provides cogent and insightful analysis of organizational evolution from startup to growth to maturity to decline to turnaround (hopefully). I have used this book in many ways over the past few years: to diagnose and understand an organization that was new to me, to plan for the future, and now, to relearn the needs and abilities of my organization as it moves out of turnaround and into growth. These 130 pages have a magical quality; I keep finding more in them. I didn't know what "capacity building" meant when I first picked up this book. I still don't entirely. But I do know that this book keeps helping me learn and grow... and that's about as good a definition as I've got at this point.
• The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. I've been recommending this book to many friends and colleagues recently as they take on new leadership roles. Unlike the other two books on this list, this book is more about the individual in the organization than the organization itself. I found it to be incredibly helpful when I was preparing for and then taking on an executive director role, but it can be useful for anyone taking on a new role who wants to do so mindfully and successfully. This book uses the classic business book formula--pithy missives mixed with diverse examples--but it does so really, really well. The thing it does best is help you think about how to strategically plan out not just what you will do at work but who you will be, and how you can construct your position, relationships, and roles intentionally instead of having them "happen" to you.
• The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni. I picked up this book on a whim at the beginning of the year based on the fact that Fractured Atlas, an organization I admire, was using it to guide their work. Like The First 90 Days, The Advantage employs a classic business book formula. But instead of focusing on individual leadership, this book focuses on organizational culture. I'm not sure I completely buy Lencioni's big idea, but the content is solid and useful--regardless of what trumps what. For us at the MAH, this book has been helpful as we shift from a startup culture of change and experimentation into a growth culture of strengthening and deepening our work. We are using approaches from The Advantage to write meaningful organizational values, infuse those into our hiring, onboarding and performance review processes, and protect and cultivate the unique aspects of our interpersonal culture that make us thrive. 

Now, I'm hunting for truly great books about moving from startup to growth/mature operations while maintaining energy, collaborative spirit, and creativity. I'm personally struggling with this a bit and would love your recommendations of books that can help in thinking about how to add structure in a way that supports and builds with minimal ossification.

What kinds of books would help you most in your work? What books would you recommend?

When creating the concept for the exhibition Under the Skin, I investigated the use of human tissue in medicine from 19th century pathological museums to today’s biobanks containing small samples of frozen tissue. On the surface the museum and the biobank are very different kinds of places. But on closer inspection? We are easily led by images, metaphors and rhetoric. To start with the imagery, it could hardly be more different. The medical museum with its Victorian display in wooden vitrines and the recognizable body parts carrying a mixed sense of humanity and death. Contrast that with the blue lit, clean surfaces and robotic handling of unrecognizable samples depicted on the websites of the recently founded national biobanks.

Museums and Banks

Also the metaphors of “museum” and “bank” indicate different functions. Museums are associated with the past and their role is to study and conserve old materials. The bank is a place for safeguarding resources for the future, growing them and returning them with interest. This image is supported by the rhetoric surrounding large national biobank projects. For instance, at the opening of the Danish National Biobank the minister of research stated that ‘The currency of this bank is biological samples and the return is research results that will benefit the whole population’. But what happens if we look more closely at the practices in biobanks. During a recent visit to the new Danish National Biobank on entering a top modern lab equipment I saw a group of lab assistants working with a pile of old, black

boxes full of cards and large books with hand-written registrations. They were pulling out staples and registering information on computer. At the same time old blood samples from cardboard boxes were transported in from storage and repacked. The activities looked exactly like repacking and registering historical collections in museums. And indeed this was what was taking place. The Danish National Biobank holds several highly valuable collections of older diagnostic samples, which together with the comprehensive registration of health data in Denmark provides unique possibilities for associating biomarkers and genetic profiles with the disease history of the sampled persons. My claim is thus that the seeming differences between collections in medical museums and those in biobanks are misleading. That although the laboratory revolution has changed medicine immeasurably, it has not changed the fact that medicine is a collection science. And although medicine is not normally regarded as a collection science – in the way of natural history – collecting is a continuous and ongoing part of generating medical knowledge.

Collecting in Pathological and Anatomical Museums

To start with the pathological collections in the medical museums, these were collected with a view to categorizing and thereby understanding disease. With the rise of hospital medicine in the 19th century patients were gathered in wards and it became possible to compare cases. When the outcome was bad patients were often dissected and it was thereby possible to document the lesions in the organs together with the case history containing symptoms of the living patient. The collections thereby served a way to accumulate medical experience in material form, which could be studied away from the chaos of the clinic. The cases from the past could thereby be used to improve and sharpen new diagnoses because both the physical symptoms, the internal lesions and the final diagnosis were known. This materialized experience was carefully registered and stored in pathological collections.

Collecting in Biobanks

As medical interest shifted towards the cellular level and later to molecular biology, the collections contained smaller and smaller samples of tissue. Microscope slides were kept in archives and investigated through microscopes, and samples of blood and other tissue preserved in freezers and analysed biochemically. Starting with small collections of individual researchers, collections grew along the same pattern as the anatomical and pathological collections to large institutional collections. National biobanks took off in the early 21st century with the aim to gather collections capable of representing a whole population. A main aim is to collect samples from citizens and then follow the development of their health and disease. The data and samples collected allow researchers to match diseases with particular biomarkers and thus make diagnostic predictions both earlier and more precise, and to choose the best treatment for patients once diagnosed. In this way it is only when collections becomes “historical” will they become truly useful as the full case history has infolded. One valuable collection of this sort is the collection of blood samples taken at neonatal screeningin Denmark where health data and genetic analyses of blood samples from 1982 and onwards can be matched to develop better diagnostic techniques.

On the surface there appears to be a change from the museum where specimens are investigated with sight and scalpel to the biobank where samples are investigated in the laboratory. This fits well with the story of laboratory revolution that changed biology and medicine into lab sciences. It is, however, possible to nuance this story and show that collection did not disappear in biomedicine.

Medicine as a Collection Science

If we broaden out the notion of scientific methods drawing on John Pickstone’s Ways of Knowing (2010) we can distinguish a number of scientific “ways of knowing” such as reading, collecting, analyzing, experimenting. Pickstone sees a historical development through the different practices, but emphasizes that they can coexist. And this is what I believe is the case in the biobank, where museum-style collection practices coexist with experimental laboratory techniques. The importance of collection practices in laboratory science has also been noted by the historian of modern biology, Bruno Strasser. He has drawn an analogy between collection in natural history museums and various forms of collection in molecular biology such as proteins, serum and genetic data. The connection is, I argu e, even stronger in the case of medicine where we can trace a continuous and ongoing focus on collection in medical research. Neither of these two authors, however, focus on the materiality, but it is exactly the fact that collections contain actual physical samples that is central in collection sciences. Physical specimens and samples contain latent knowledge i.e. it will be possible to uncover new knowledge from the sample as questions and methods change. Physical specimens are, of course, also formed by specific interests at the time of collection, but they are amenable to new questions in the future. To sum up, pathological collections and biobanks resemble each other in the following significant ways.

• They employ of ‘museum’ practices of preservation, registration and storage.
• They use past diagnoses to understand diseases in the present.
• They constitute the material connection between the clinic and medical research by bringing the patient’s body from the hospital to the research collection.

The ongoing importance of collections and collection practices thus means that:

• Medicine should be regarded as a collection science.
• Biobanks may be characterized as medical museums for very small samples.

Comparing the two institutions also bring out important aspects in both. Modern biomedicine is often characterized as disembodied because tissue culture and data crunching seems to be removing it from real bodies. The biobank collections, however, show how the physical samples of particular patients are regarded as essential. As for pathological museum collections, these have been shown in recent years to be less rigid in the categorisations than has previously been assumed. So instead of museums being of the past and biobanks for the future, both may be seen to use the past to answer future questions. This material was presented as a paper at the British Society of History of Science Annual Meeting 2014 in St. Andrews. It will also appear in a slightly different form in the volume: Tybjerg, K. (forthcoming in 2014) “From Bottled Babies to Biobanks: Anatomical Collections in the 21st Century” in The Fate of Anatomical Collections, R. Knoeff & R. Zwijnenberg (eds). Ashgate Press.

While Google has been doing a great job of their front page animations (today's is very nice, illustrating how Brazil and The Netherlands are on their way to Russia for 2018), Bing appears to be far more attentive to actually answering questions about the competition. For example:

Compared to Bing's

Google's answer brings up some interesting news articles, but Bing brings up stats on the teams and even a prediction of who will win (Cortana - which is driving these predictions - has been doing a perfect job of predicting game outcomes).

What if there was a place where we could learn more about the experiences of people who are totally different from us? Where we could hear directly, in their own words, what they love, hate, fear, desire, dream?

There is that place. It is called the Web.

I don't care who you are interested in learning more about--people of a particular race/ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, physical ability, generation, sexual orientation--there is a bubble on the Web populated by them. People often complain that social media can become an echo chamber to reinforce pre-existing beliefs and expectations. It's true. The extreme atomization and diversity of media sources can enable people to burrow into mirrored caves.

But most of the Web is open. Which means you can go into whatever cave you want--including those occupied by people who come from different worlds from you.

Earlier this spring, I decided to go on a mission to use social media to increase my cultural competency around Latino experiences, issues, and interests. At our museum, we're making a big effort to increase our engagement with local Latino families. Alongside work we are doing locally with specific neighborhoods, individuals, and organizations, I wanted to use the Web to learn more about Latino issues generally.

I didn't do anything fancy; I just shifted my informal news diet. I eliminated some blogs and podcasts from my reading list that reinforced information I already knew. I took a break from my regular diet of feminist-tinted news. I used the time I had carved out to tap into new sources related to the Latino experience and people of color.

How did I find these sources? I started by:

• subscribing to some mainstream aggregators, like Huffington Post Latino Voices, Latino USA, Colorlines, Codeswitch. 
• reaching out to Salvador Acevedo, a brilliant marketing strategist who focuses on Latinos. Salvador gave me suggestions of websites and influencers to check out. I spent a few hours hunting around and subscribed to a few that related to my interests.
• following a few hashtags and people associated with these sources on Twitter, checking out the lists of who they follow, and adding more people to my Twitter feed through their networks.

That's it. It's not a complex educational activity. I'm not segmenting or diving into very specific areas. I'm wading in the waters of someone else's media landscape. 
In three months of doing this passively, I've already noticed some specific changes to my work practice. Here are just two examples:

1. It has made us more savvy surveyors. There has been a lot of coverage in the Latino/PoC mediaverse about how Latinos self-identify racially on the US census. Blog posts like this one--which I probably never would have seen in my old news diet--have informed conversations at our museum about how we ask visitors to identify in demographic surveys. We are in a year of developing assessment tools for our programming, so this issue is highly relevant to our work, and these news sources help us address weaknesses in our approach.
2. It has influenced exhibition content. I'm neck-deep in a redevelopment of our permanent history gallery about Santa Cruz County. Reading news from a Latino perspective has helped me consistently encounter non-dominant ways to look at California history. Yes, these narratives are also present in some of the advisory discussions and reference materials we are using in developing exhibition content. But hearing those counter-narratives reinforced daily in my news diet builds confidence in them and makes me more thoughtful about how to frame historical issues of immigration, labor, culture clash, and racism in the exhibition context.

Again, I don't want to suggest that this approach is ground-breaking or intensive. It's not. But it IS easy, and I have found it to be powerful as a context shift.
I spent years immersed in a feminist media landscape. I consumed news, pop culture, and media through that lens. Now, I'm trying out someone else's media landscape. I'm noticing how that lens is showing me things I didn't see before. It's focusing my attention differently. It's turning the Web into a window instead of a mirror.

This is a transcript of the talk I gave at the Collaborative Digitization SIG meeting at the American Library Association annual meeting on June 28, 2014 in Caesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas.  I was preceded by Frederick Zarndt delivering his excellent talk on Crowdsourcing, Family History, and Long Tails for Libraries, which focused particularly on newspaper digitization and crowdsourced OCR correction.  (See Laura McElfresh's notes [below] for a near-transcript of his talk.)
I'd like to thank Frederick for a number of reasons, one of them being that I don't need to define crowdsourcing, which gives me the opportunity to be a little more technical.
Before we start, I'd just like to make a quick note that all of the slides, the audio files in MP3 format, and a full transcript will be posted at my blog.

I can also direct you to the notes taken by Laura McElfresh [see pp. 19-22] over there who does an amazing job at these [conferences].

Finally, if you tweet about this, there's my handle.

Okay, so we've talked about OCR correction. What's the difference between OCR correction and manuscript transcription? Why would people transcribe manuscripts -- isn't OCR good enough?

I'd like to go into that and talk about the [effectiveness] of OCR on printed material versus handwritten materials.


We're going to go into detail on the results of running Tesseract--which is a popular, open-source OCR tool--on this particular herbarium specimen label.

I chose this one because it's got a title in print up here at the top, and then we've got a handwritten portion down here at the bottom.

So how does Tesseract do with these pieces?

With the print, it does a pretty good job, right? I mean, even though this is sort of an antique typeface, really every character is correct except that this period over here--for some reason--is OCRed as a back-tick.

So it's getting one character wrong out of--fifty, perhaps?

So how about the handwritten portion? What do you get when you run the same Tesseract program on that?

So here's the handwritten stuff, and the results are -- I'm actually pretty impressed -- I think it got the "2" right.

So in this case it got one character right out of the whole thing. So this is actually total garbage.

And my argument is that the quantitative difference in accuracy of OCR software between script versus print actually results in a qualitative difference between these two processes.

This has implications.

One of them is on methodology, which is that--as we've demonstrated--we can't use software to automatically transcribe (particularly joined-up, cursive) writing. You have to use humans.

There are a couple of other implications too, that I want to dive into a bit deeper.

One of them is the goal of the process. In the case of OCR correction, we're talking about improving accuracy of something that already exists. In the case of manuscript transcription, we're actually talking about generating a (rough) transcript from scratch.

The second one comes down to workflow, and I'll go into that in a minute.

Let's talk about findability.

Right now, if you put this page online--this manuscript image--no-one's going to find it. No-one's going to read it. Because Google cannot crawl it -- these are not words to Google, these are pixels. And without a transcript, without that findability, you miss out on the amazing serendipity that is a feature of the internet age. We don't have the serendipity of spotting books shelved next to each other anymore, but we do have the serendipity of--in this case--of a retired statistical analyst named Nat Wooding doing a vanity search on his name. And encountering a transcript of this diary--my great-great grandmother's diary--mentioning her mailman, Nat Wooding--and realizing that this is his great uncle.

Having discovered this, he started contributing to the project--not financially, but he went through and transcribed an entire year's worth of diaries. So he's contributing his labor.

Other people who've encountered these have made different kinds of contributions. These diaries were distributed on my great-great grandmother's death among her grandchildren. So they were scattered to the four winds. After putting these online, I received a package in the mail one day containing a diary from someone I'd never met, saying "looks like you'll do more with this than I will. So this element of user engagement in this case is bringing the collection back together.

Let's talk about the implications on workflow.

This is--I'm not going to say a typical--OCR correction workflow. The thing that I want to draw your attention to is that OCR correction of print can be done at a very fine grain. The National Library of Finland's Digital Koot project is asking users to correct a small block of text: a single word, a single character even. This lends itself to gamification. It lends itself to certain kinds of quality control, in which maybe you show the same image to multiple people and compare them to see if they match.

That really doesn't work very well with handwritten text, because readers have to get used to a script. Context is really important! And you find this when you put material online: people will go through and transcribe a couple of pages, then say "Oh, that's a 'W'!" And they go back and [correct earlier pages].

I want to tell the story of Page 19. This was a project that was a collaboration between me (and the FromThePage platform) and the Smith Library Special Collections at Southwestern University in Georgetown (Texas). They put a diary of a Texas volunteer in the Mexican-American War online--his name was Zenas Matthews. They found one volunteer who came online and transcribed the whole thing. He added all these footnotes. He did an amazing job.

But let's look at the edit history of one page, and what he did.

We put the material online in September. Two months later, he discovers it, and transcribes it in one session in the morning. Then he comes back in the afternoon and makes a revision to the transcript.

Time passes. Two weeks go by, and he's going back [over the text]. He makes six more revisions in one sitting on December 8, then he makes two more revisions on the next morning. Then another eight months go past, and he comes back in August in the next year, because he's thought of something -- he's reviewing his work and he improves the transcription again. He ends up with [an edition] that I'd argue is very good.

Well, this is very different from the one-time pass of OCR correction. This is, in my opinion, a qualitative difference. We have this deep, editorial approach with crowdsourced transcription.

I'm a tool maker; I'm a tool reviewer, and I'm here to try to give you some hands-on advice about choosing tools and platforms for crowdsourced transcription projects.

Now, I used to go through and review [all of the] tools. Well, I have some good news, which is that there are a lot of tools out there nowadays. There are at least thirty-seven that I'm aware of. Many of them are open source. The bad news is that there are thirty-seven to choose from, and many of them are pretty rough.

So instead of talking about the actual tools, I'm going to direct you to a spreadsheet -- a Google Doc that I put together that is itself crowdsourced. About twenty people have contributed their own tools, so it's essentially a registry of different software platforms for [crowdsourced transcription].

Instead, I'm going to discuss selection criteria -- things to consider when you're looking at launching a crowdsourced transcription project.

The first selection criterion is to look at the kind of material you're dealing with. And there are two broad divisions in source material for transcription.

This top image is a diary entry from Viscountess Emily Anne Strangford's travels through the Mediterranean in the 1850s. The bottom image is a census entry.

These are very different kinds of material. A plaintext transcript that could be printed out and read in bed is probably the [most appropriate purpose] for a diary entry. Wheras, for a census record, you don't really want plaintext -- you want something that can go into a structured database.

And there are a limited number of tools that nevertheless have been used very effectively to transcribe this kind of structured data. FamilySearch Indexing is one that we're all familiar with, as Frederick mentioned it. There are a few others from the Citizen Science world: PyBossa comes from the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Scribe and Notes From Nature both come out of GalaxyZoo. [The Zooniverse/Citizen Science Alliance.] I'm going to leave those, and concentrate on more traditional textual materials.

One of the things you want to ask is, What is the purpose of this transcript? Is mark-up necessary? These kinds of texts, as we're all aware, are not already edited, finished materials.

Most transcription tools which exist ask users for plain-text transcripts, and that's it. So the overwhelming majority of platforms support no mark-up whatsoever.

However, there are two families of mark-up [support] which do exist. One of them is a subset of TEI markup. It's part of this TEI Toolbar which was developed by Transcribe Bentham for their own platform [the Bentham Transcription Desk] which is a modification of MediaWiki. It then was later repurposed by the 1916 Letters project and used on top of a totally different software stack, the NARA Transcribr Drupal module [actually DIYHistory]. And what it does is give users a mall series of buttons which can be used to mark up features within a text. So this is really useful if you're dealing with marginalia, with additions and deletions within the text, and you want to track all that. Not everybody wants to track all that, but if that's the kind of purpose that you have, you'll want to look at in-page mark-up.

The other form of mark-up is one that I've been using in FromThePage, using wiki-links to do subject identification within the text. [2-3 sentences inaudible: see "Wikilinks in FromThePage" for a detailed presentation given at the iDigBio Original Sources Digitization Workshop.]

What this means is that if users encounter "Irvin Harvey" and it's marked up like this:

The tool will automatically generate an index that shows every time that Irvin Harvey was mentioned within the texts, or read all the pages mentioning Irvin Harvey. You can actually do network analysis and other digital humanities stuff based on [mining the subject mark-up].

So that's a different flavor of mark-up to consider.

Another question to ask is, how open is your project? Right now I know of projects that are using my own FromThePage tool entirely for staff to use internally.

There are others in which they have students working on the transcripts. And in some cases, this is for privacy reasons. For example, Rhodes College Libraries is using FromThePage to transcribe the diaries of Shelby Foote. Well, Shelby Foote only died a few years ago. [His diaries] are private. So this installation is entirely internal. The transcriptions are all done by students. I've never seen it -- I don't have access to it because it's not on the broad Internet.

Then there's the idea of leveraging your own volunteers on-site, with maybe some [ancillary] openness on the Internet. San Diego Natural History Museum is doing this with the people who come in, and ordinarily will volunteer to clean fossils or prepare specimens for photographs. Well, now they're saying Can you transcribe these herpetology field notes?

So these kinds of platforms are not only wide-open crowdsourcing tools; they can be private, and you should consider this. In some cases, the same platform can support both private projects and crowdsourced projects simultaneously, so you can get all of your data in the same place. [One sentence inaudible.]

Branding! Branding may be very important.

Here are a couple of platforms, with screenshots of each.

The first one is is the French-language version of Wikisource. Wikisource is a sister project to Wikipedia that was spun off around 2003 that allows people to transcribe documents and do OCR correction both. This is being used by the Departmental Archives of Alpes-Maritimes to transcribe a set of journals of episcopal visits. The bishop in the sixteenth century would go around and report on all the villages [in his diocese], so there's all this local history, but it's also got some difficult paleography.

So they're using Wikisource, which is a great tool! It has all kinds of version control. It has ways to track proofreading. It does an elegant job of putting together indiviual pages into larger documents. But, do you see "Departmental Archives of Alpes-Maritimes" on this page? No! You have no idea [who the institution is]. Now, if they're using this internally, that may be fine -- it's a powerful tool.

By contrast, look at the Letters of 1916. [Three sentences inaudible.] This is public engagement in a public-facing site.

Most platforms are somewhere between the two.

Integration: Let's say you've just done a lot of work to scan a lot of material, gather item-level metadata, and you've [ingested it] into CONTENTdm or another CMS. Now you want to launch a crowdsourcing project. Often, the first thing you have to do is get it all back out again and put it into your crowdsourcing platform.

So you need to look at integration. You need to ask the questions, How am I going to get data into the transcription platform? How am I going to get data back out? These may be totally different things: I know of one project that's trying to get data from Fedora into FromThePage, then trying to get it out of FromThePage by publishing to Omeka. There's a different project that wants to get data from Omeka into FromThePage. But these are totally different code paths! They have nothing to do with each other, believe it or not. So you really have to ask detailed questions about this.

Here are a few of the tools that exist, with what they support. (Or what they plan to support -- last week I was contacted about Fedora support and CONTENTdm support for FromThePage, one on Wednesday and one on Thursday, so if anyone has any advice on integration with those systems, please let me know.)

Hosting: Do you want to install everything on-site? Do you have sysadmins and servers? Is this actually a requirement? Or do you want this all hosted by someone else?

Right now you have pretty limited options for hosting. Notes from Nature and the GalaxyZoo projects host everything themselves. Wikisource and FromThePage can be either local or hosted. Everything else, you've got to download and get running on your servers.

Finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about asking yourself, what are yardsticks for success?

If you're doing this for volunteer engagement, what does successful engagement look like? I know of one project that launched a trial in which they put some material from 19th century Texas online. One volunteer found this and dove into it. He transcribed a hundred pages in a week, he started adding footnotes -- I mean he just plowed through this. After a couple of weeks, the librarians I was working with cancelled the trial, and I asked them to give me details. One of the things that they said was, We were really disappointed that only one volunteer showed up. Our goal for public engagement was to do a lot of public education and public outreach, and we wanted to reach out [to] a lot of people.

[For them,] a hundred pages transcribed by one volunteer is a failure compared with one page each transcribed by ten volunteers. So what are your goals?

Similarly, if you're using a platform that is a wiki-like platform--an editorial platform--you'll get obsessive users who will go back and revise page 19 over and over again. That may be fine for you. Maybe you want the highest quality transcripts and you don't mind that there's sort of spotty coverage because users come in and only transcribe the things that really interest them.

Other systems try to go for coverage over quality and depth. ProPublica developed the transcribable Ruby on Rails plugin for research on campaign contributions. They intentionally designed their tool with no back button -- there's no way for a user to review what they did. And they wrote a great article about this which is very relevant to this conference venue: it's called "Casino-Driven Design: One Exit, No Windows, Free Drinks". So for them, the page 19 situation would be an absolute failure, while for me I'm thrilled with it. So again there's this trade off of quality versus quantity in product as well as in engagement.
[Audio to follow.]

This post is a hypothesis I'm exploring. Please amplify, poke holes, ask questions, and help me learn.

There are lots of places where we can come together with people we already know. Dinner tables. Coffee shops. School. Church. Ball fields. These places are important. The relationships they support are powerful. These places help us strengthen bonds with the people who matter most.

But those places are tribal places. They are places for people who are already affiliated--whether they have met previously or not.

What about places for strangers? Places where we encounter people who are truly different from us?

Those are places of uncertainty. Places of friction. Places of possibility.

Those are places that build community.

Or rather, those are places with the potential to build community. Sadly, most of these places are not intentionally designed to bring us together. They are built to let us pass each other, to practice "civil inattention." We look, we confirm that there is no imminent threat, we ignore, we walk by. Public space is designed for neutrality.

But what if we designed public space for community? What if we treated interpersonal collision as creative opportunity instead of risk? What if we used art to activate space in a different way? What if we designed spaces and interventions to bring people together?


These are the questions on my mind as I start working more intently on an outdoor plaza project. I've been reflecting a lot recently on our museum's work on "social bridging"--bringing people together across cultural, ethnic, geographic, generational, and socio-economic differences--and how to take it outside.

Recently, we made a conscious strategic decision to prioritize bridging experiences over bonding experiences in our programming. Not that bonding with people we already know is bad, nor that we don't want to support it at the museum. But bonding is easy. Bridging is hard. There are so many places and opportunities to bond, and so few opportunities to bridge.

There's a moral argument that we need more bridging to build strong civic life. But there's also a business differentiation argument. Bonding is crowded. Bridging is wide open.

At our museum, magic happens when we intentionally design opportunities for strangers to interact. Festivals that mash up dozens of seemingly-unrelated creative practices. Collaborations with unorthodox community partners. Exhibits that offer explicit invitations into dialogue with strangers. Pop Up Museums where people share the objects they hold most dear. Moments like the one in the photo, where two strangers made a meaningful connection without words, through art.

Now, our museum has received an ArtPlace grant to redevelop a forgotten plaza into a creative heart for Downtown Santa Cruz. I'm thrilled and finally realizing what this means for our community. I've been reading and thinking a lot about "creative placemaking"--both the possibility and the hype. And I realize that in public space, we have even more opportunity to do bridging work that makes a difference.

Public space has the greatest potential to be community space. Anyone can dwell there. Anyone can activate it. It's open 24 hours a day. And yet, so often one of two things happens:

1. It gets turned into bonding space. It is commercialized, gentrified, or specified for a particular subset of the community. It becomes exclusive, either explicitly or implicitly.
2. It gets neutralized and deadened. Seating gets removed, streets are built for cars, and laws turn lingering into loitering into crime.

These things happen because we are afraid and unsure of what will happen when strangers meet in public space. We don't have a business model for it. We don't have the liability insurance for it.
But I believe there is a business model. I believe the opportunities outweigh the risks. I believe this is the work we need to do to build our communities. Designing infrastructure and interventions that activate and connect us across our differences. Design that brings strangers together.

I look forward to exploring these ideas more with you in the months to come.

The forthcoming exhibition Under the Skin will display the heart blood of the medical museum – the anatomical and pathological specimens – as part of a longer history on the uses of human material in medicine leading up the biopsies and blood samples in biobanks.

The main exhibition principle is simple, instantly graspable and captures essential features of the historical development of medicine. Objects in the exhibition will be ordered according to scale ranging from the whole body to its molecules: Full skeletons and embryos, organs in glasses, biopsies, slices of tissue on slides, blood samples and DNA snips. The principle of scale draws on the materiality of the objects, but at the same time mirrors a shift in medical interest towards smaller and smaller units. Scale is:

• A physical organization principle with basis in the material properties of the exhibited objects
• A principle that captures a central development of medical interest from whole bodies, over the anatomized body to molecular medicine
• A way to understand in the relevant unit for understanding disease

The point of departure of the exhibition is the whole body, which was the main unit of medical investigation up to the 18th century. The whole body is, however, only present in the exhibition in the shape of the bodies of the visitors. The first objects exhibited are skeletons and foetuses. Although they are clearly recognizable to us as individuals, they already show the body as opened and divided.

Next step on the scale are the preserved organs. Anatomizing the body was the prevalent mode of investigation in the expanding pathological collections of the 19th century. Diseased organs were cut out and displayed together to form a new whole. They mapped out a landscape of malady where the individual body disappears. Disease was identified with the lesion and the preparations highlight it by isolating it from the rest of the body.

As microscopes allowed tissue and even cells to be studied we move from visible to invisible structures. Small lumps of tissue are prepared, sliced finely stained and studied through microscopes to show the cells of the body and possibly diseased changes. The exhibition shows both the biopsies and the structures revealed by the microscope thus bridging between the visible and invisible.

Research in the latter half of the 20th and into the 21st century has focused on the molecular level – the next level down the scale. Today large amounts of tissue and blood are gathered and stored in biobanks for investigations into the biochemistry of the body. Tiny blood samples taken from new-borns make it possible to investigate genetic and biochemical processes that make disease likely, and to diagnose before any symptoms appear.

At the end of the exhibition the individual body has been not just anatomized but atomized. Divided into immateriality and stored as information. In the code for DNA our individuality may be seen to re-emerge. The mapping of the genome in 2003 did not, however, provide a single key to understanding the body. Medical science still needs to investigate at the whole scale of the body as well as its interaction with the surrounding world. At the end, the visitor is – together with biomedical science – sent back through the scale in the never-ending process of understanding the human body.

The concept poses important questions:

• Is it meaningful to see medical history through scale – providing a striking simplicity – or too simplistic?
• Can moving away from strictly historical or medical forms of organisation allow us to occupy an interesting middle ground?
• Does a physical principle of organisation make us more attentive to the objects than a principle of organisation based on the contexts of the objects?

 

 

 

 

Being a university museum, Medical Museion combines museum practice with research. But we don’t just conduct research on the specific content of our collections and exhibitions, we also engage in research projects on science communication and exhibition media. That is, research on how we interpret and communicate our objects through exhibition media, events, etc. In connection to the development of our forthcoming exhibition Under the Skin, I contribute to the museum’s research on exhibition media with a PhD project on exhibition design.

My PhD project focuses on the material encounter between exhibition object and museum visitor and how to ‘shape’ this encounter by use of spatial design strategies. In the exhibition Under the Skin the encounter between object and visitor is quite unusual, since it takes place between two bodies: the exhibited, medical body and the visitor’s body. Experimenting with what I call spatial-material design strategies, I investigate this ‘extreme case’ and, in close collaboration with the exhibition architect Mads Kjædegaard, try to develop ideas for displaying the human specimens.

For example I experiment with the idea of creating a ‘negative space’ that communicates both the physical shape of the object (the glass canister) as well as the overall idea of producing medical human specimens by extracting organs and tissue from the human body. By displaying the specimen in front of a plaster mould – the negative space of the object – the idea is to point towards this particular act of ‘excavating’ the body.

Another experiment evolves around the idea of ‘the medical gaze’ – the way the medical scientist uses the human specimen to zoom in on a specific lesion or condition. In this test display the objects have been placed behind a glass plate covered with semi transparent foil and with holes cut through it. The holes function as a sort of ‘framing’ of certain areas of the specimens and thereby direct attention towards specific material ‘attributes’. In this case, the massive blood clot in the heart specimen to the left and the delicate texture of the layer of fat covering the heart specimen to the right. Also, the semi transparent foil in some ways resembles human skin, and the cut outs thereby relate to the concept of medical dissection.

By working very intentionally with these kinds of display techniques we wish to create an exhibition that on one hand communicates the scientific, medical gaze on the human body, while at the same time makes it possible for the visitor to connect to the bodies on display in a very immediate and materially embedded way.

These are just a few notes on the design experiments and test displays intended to inspire and inform the overall design of our forthcoming exhibition. More will follow as the project develops.

 

A man walks into a museum. He shares a story. He creates a visual representation of his story. He puts it on the wall.

How do you measure the value of that experience?

Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. Over three months, about 600 people filled mason jars with personal memories and put them on display. Better yet, the graduate student who led this project, Anna Greco, documented the whole project and did in-depth analysis of the visitor contributions. This post shares some of the highlights from the project and from Anna's research. I strongly recommend checking out her entire thesis [pdf] if you want to know more.
THE BASICSThe Memory Jar project was simple. We filled a small gallery from floor to ceiling with shelves of Mason jars. We invited visitors to "bottle up" a memory in a jar, using craft materials to fill the jar with evocative objects and a hand-written label to tell their story. There were no written instructions, just a mural that suggested what to do and labels that prompted people for their name and memory. The project was linked to a larger exhibition, Santa Cruz Collects, about why local folks collect things. We realized that the most valuable things many of us collect are intangible--our memories--and the Memory Jar project was born.

From the beginning, we observed pretty amazing experiences happening with the Memory Jars. People were spending a long time working on them. Some of the stories were quickies, but others were powerful and personal. We started with 400 jars and assumed we wouldn't fill them all. Instead, we had to do a rush order on more jars halfway through the project.

Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff. There was something special going on in that gallery. What was it?
THE RESEARCHThe challenge, of course, was to figure out how to evaluate the experience in a way that would help us identify the power of the project. We wanted to know whether the project truly had emotional resonance, and if so, how we could identify and document that.

Anna Greco did research in three ways: through in-person interviews with participants, surveys with participants, and observational analysis of the jars themselves. These methods revealed that the majority of participants had a meaningful experience with the memory jars that stuck--even in followup a year after the initial project.

I think most of us are familiar with interview and survey-based evaluation methods. I want to instead highlight the work Anna did to analyze the content of the jars observationally, which got at the question of emotional resonance in a more quantitative way.

Anna did two types of quantitative evaluation of the jars:

• she analyzed the jar contents, looking at how full the jars were. This was used as a proxy for time and creative energy spent on the creation of jars.
• she analyzed the text on the jar labels for length, for emotional content, and for intimacy. This was used to evaluate the amount of emotional energy dedicated to the jar activity.

In each of these analyses, Anna created a coding scheme to categorize the jars.

For the fullness of the jars, Anna created a seven-point scale, going from empty to full to full+ (additional decoration or objects on the outside of the jar) by percentage of jar full. It was fairly simple to identify whether a jar was 1/4 full or 3/4 full or had stuff popping out the top of it. The result here was surprisingly linear, with more than half of the jars full or full+. People used the stuff and they used it to the fullness of their ability. This could also be an argument for larger jars if we repeat the project.

For the content of the labels, Anna used three strategies.

• She counted the number of words in each label. This was an easy (if time-consuming) proxy for engagement. The average label had 17 words, though the maximum was 105. Again, this indicates a high level of engagement, especially given the size of the shipping labels provided.
• She created a numeric scale for the "intimacy" of each label. This was created with the help of Dr. Lauren Shapiro, a psychologist and former museum intern. Lauren and Anna created a scale of one to five where each level had specific elements to indicate intensity of the story shared, using signifiers like specificity of a memory, places, names, direct quotes, or medical information. 70% of the labels were a 3, 4, or 5, with only 4% at a 1. People got intimate, sharing intense stories of loss, special moments, and potent memories.
• She created a coding schema for "emotions" expressed in each label. Lauren helped Anna create a manual for language cues to signify any of nine emotions: happiness, love, gratitude/awe, sadness, pride, anger, fear, confusion, and mixed. 36% of the labels were happy, closely followed by 32% that demonstrated no clear emotion. Labels in the "no emotion" were "reporting" memories without explicit emotional language, as in "I remember going to the beach with my friends." Among the remainder, love, mixed emotions, gratitude, and sadness were the most frequent.

Intimate? Emotional?
Coding is useful but complicated
when the goal is to capture feeling.We learned a few things from this process:

• Creating a coding scheme for text analysis is complicated, but it's worth it. Especially with such a large number of jars, it was really valuable to be able to distill the diversity of stories via a few key axes of intimacy and emotion. Unsurprisingly, developing the coding schemes to be able to be applied fairly consistently by people without a lot of specific training led to imperfections. But just going through the process helped us understand how we COULD quantify this kind of extremely qualitative content. You can check out Anna's coding scheme manuals on pages 67-69 of her thesis.
• Intimacy was the most useful indicator for this project, but still really complicated to measure objectively. If we were doing this again and had time to either code by emotion or intimacy but not both, I would choose intimacy. The intimacy measure was the clearest signifier of how people were using the Memory Jars and what stories they chose to tell. That said, we still had plenty of debate about what qualified as more or less intimate as the schema was being developed. Mention AIDS with no context, and you shot up to a 5 on intimacy. But tell an incredibly detailed story about your childhood, and you were likely to end up somewhere like a 3. When Anna did followup surveys, it became clear that many stories were more intimate to individual jar-makers than their coded labels reflected. It's arguable that the much simpler measure of word count is sufficient as a proxy; high intimacy stories had an average word count of 38, compared to the overall average of 17. If you use more words, you are probably going deeper into your story, which typically involves more commitment, intensity, and maybe--intimacy.   
• There are quantitative ways to measure creative participation. We keep trying to find ways to assign numbers to different kinds of participatory projects at the MAH. None of them are perfect, but all of them are useful in moving towards better design and better yardsticks for our work. The Memory Jar project allowed us to experiment with a more robust approach to quantitative evaluation of participation, and it got us interested in other ways to do it in simpler projects. For example, check out this quantitative method we use for comment boards. 
• Evaluating participatory experiences exposes new questions we actually care about, which are often different from what we thought we wanted to know. In trying to get a grasp of the kind of emotional resonance of the Memory Jars, we started having some interesting discussions about design and the end goals for our work. Would it be "better" if all the jars were a 5 on intimacy? If there were as many sad jars as happy ones? Just having this data opened up new ways of talking about what we are trying to achieve with our work. One of the goals we've stumbled into regarding participatory projects is the diversity of content presented. For some projects, ones that are designed to invite everyone to engage, we want to make sure the project absorbs a diversity of content in terms of language, emotion, intensity/intimacy, and creativity, so that every visitor can find their place in the project. In other projects, we actually want to "gate" the experience so that only people who are willing to devote X amount of time or intention will complete the project. Or we want to make it as simple and breezy as possible. Looking at the mix of what happened with the Memory Jars got us thinking about the ways we design for different kinds of outcomes, when we want diverse outcomes and when we want more focused sets.

What approaches have you used or considered for evaluating participatory projects? Please share your stories in the comments.

It's World Cup time. And for the first time in my adult life as an American, that seems significant. People at work with the games running in the background on their computers. Conversations about the tournament on the street. Constant radio coverage.

If you are reading this outside the United States, this sounds ridiculously basic. Football/soccer is the world's sport. But in the US, it has only recently become something worth watching. For most of my life in America, pro soccer was considered something risible and vaguely deviant, like picking your nose in public.

But now it's everywhere. It's exciting. And it's got me thinking about how we build energy and audience for the arts in this country.

Barry Hessenius recently wrote a blog post questioning the theory that more art into the school day will increase and bolster future adult audiences for art experiences. Like Barry, I feel that more art in schools is always better. I also share Barry's skepticism that there is a direct, premier line between art in schools and adult audiences for art.

I got into museum work because learning happens in many places and many ways. School is just a small part of it. When we talk about what kinds of experiences create pathways to more arts participation as adults, we have to look in AND beyond school. We have to look at what kids are doing after school. What kinds of tools and media they can access. Who their role models are.

Consider soccer. Soccer did not transition into a national phenomenon in the US based solely (or even mostly) on school participation. Soccer isn't just part of school; it's part of life. Millions of youth play in afterschool and weekend leagues. International stars like Pele captured attention on the airwaves. Immigrant families found local leagues where they could participate and feel connected socially. Stronger youth leagues led to stronger college teams led to stronger Olympic and professional performance. And all of that led to more audience--at all levels of the game.

There have been pro soccer leagues in the US on and off for almost a century. But over the past fifty years, soccer has ascended on more levels to a stronger footing overall. Instead of just creating a league for top play and hoping an audience would show up, soccer is developing a constantly-refreshing audience by creating opportunities for kids as young as four to participate in AYSO youth leagues. AYSO goes out of its way to include kids with different abilities, with "everyone plays" as one of its chief tenets. At the same time as it promotes inclusive participation, AYSO is affiliated with the United States Soccer Federation (the pros). AYSO builds both the players and the audiences for soccer's future in this county at all levels.

This isn't just a soccer phenomenon. Across sports, there is a deliberate embrace of practice at all levels to strengthen participation. In basketball, there is street ball and varsity and college play and D-league and the NBA. All of these levels and types of play support a pipeline that accommodates players and audiences at different levels of skill, financial capacity, and enthusiasm.

This pipeline absorbs diversity in quality of play without "dumbing down" the experience or lessening the desire to achieve top levels of excellence. When we talk about embracing participatory experiences at non-professional levels, arts professionals often get worried that the best work will get drowned out in mediocrity. But the diverse world of sports has done an extremely good job of preserving the top levels of play. At the same time, it has cultivated active spectators who understand the subtle differences between the tiers. Imagine if people were as knowledgeable about the specific talents of top symphonic conductors as they are of top athletes.

What would that take? Arts already offer opportunities for participation, grand narrative, and diverse tiers of quality that are needed to make this pipeline a reality. We just have to connect the dots. Imagine if the world's leading symphonies were affiliated with the largest organizations for first-time instrument players. Imagine if every community theater was a development theater for a bigger one. If ballet theaters and ballet schools and dance in the park events were coordinated. If kids were checking out art supplies from the library. If maker fairs were connected to science centers.

To me, this kind of pipeline is necessary to build future audiences and practitioners in the arts. It just requires a few things:

• Mutual respect, coordination, and collaboration among organizations that work at different levels of expertise, budget, and scale. Instead of seeing differences in quality as competitive or embarrassing, we could see different tiers as part of a healthy ecosystem that builds rather than detracts. Enough art already exists to get this going--it just isn't usefully connected yet.
• Emphasis on developing both practitioners and audiences. Why can professional sports leagues charge hundreds of dollars for a ticket? Because they have built demand through hundreds of hours spent playing and watching the game for free or low cost. Sensible tiers lead to sensible discernment when it comes to paying for audience experiences.
• Diversity of opportunities to engage. School is only one of many venues where cultural experiences can happen. If we embrace the abundant diversity of venues and formats rather that declaring some "in" and others "out," we can spend more time building a field and less time parsing out who belongs there.

I dream of a time when we have as much attention and access to creative and cultural activities as we do to athletics. Sure, there will always be non-participants. There will always be audience gaps. There will always be top performers on the bench. But hopefully, there will be a culture of diverse people participating, cheering, and showing up.

If we can do it for soccer, I know we can do it for art.

This post was written by my colleague Nora Grant, Community Programs Coordinator at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. 

“Pop Up” has become an international buzz term to describe ephemeral, experimental projects--from pop up restaurants to pop up boutiques--but a “Pop Up Museum” is still somewhat mystifying. How can you take something as substantial and precious as a museum and add a pop up twist?

There are many different models, including The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, The New York Met, SF Mobile Museum, and even a Pop Up Prison Museum.

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we have been experimenting with a kind of pop up museum that is primarily created by the people who show up to participate. We’ve been popping up around Santa Cruz County for a little over a year and have had over 30 different pop up museums. Our primary goal for pop up museums is to bring people together in conversation through stories, art, history, and objects. Building off of Michelle DelCarlo’s pop up museum model, MAH pop up museums bring different people, perspectives, and projects to one central gathering place, enabling a democratic type of public curation.

What does this look like? Imagine a potluck in which instead of a dish, everyone brings an object and/or story to share with others. We choose themes and venues in collaboration with a community partner. People are invited to bring something on topic to share. When people show up, they write a label for their object and leave it on display. The museum lasts for a few hours on one day, with people coming and going as they please.

We favor this “potluck” approach because it:

• Empowers people to share meaningful stories and objects with one another 
• Enables the museum to step outside physical confines, and collaborate with community partners who wouldn’t ordinarily come to museum programs 
• Opens up conversation as to what it means to be a museum and who can participate in making one 
• Allows us to experiment with themes, content, and collaborations in an intimate yet short-lived, simple way 

In addition to pop up museums we facilitate locally in Santa Cruz, we also want to provide global support for anyone interested in having a pop up museum. We have created a free and downloadable pop up museum organizer’s kit. Check it out if you’re curious about choosing a strong theme, working with a collaborator, designing a portable structure, or tips for implementation.

Designing a pop up museum structure that is replicable by amateurs in diverse venues, appealing enough to attract a variety of participants, and portable is not easy. We continuously iterated our pop up museum format with different set up designs and language to realize a structure that satisfied these objectives. Having a lot of pop up museums and observing what did and didn’t work enabled us to learn more about our community while providing practical, real-life content for the organizer’s kit. 

While the kit offers a step-by-step guide for organizing pop ups, I want to share some of the more unexpected takeaways I’ve learned through this process.
Pop Up Outside the Museum It’s appealing to plan Pop Up Museums in conjunction with exhibits or museum events, but people are rightfully confused about a pop up museum taking place inside a museum. Like a café inside a restaurant, a museum inside a museum feels redundant rather than complementary. When framed by a larger museum, the pop up museum doesn’t embody as much individual vibrancy as it can’t be decontextualized from preexisting notions of said museum institution. When popping up in non-traditional exhibitory spaces, you cannot only prompt unexpected conversation, but also unite location and theme. For example, we had a pop up at an arboretum on Growth.
A Little Frame Goes A Long Way People like picture frames. They make the ordinary look special. They’re eye-catching. When we first started having pop up museums, we displayed objects on tables with black tablecloths, which had a simple yet flat aesthetic. So I bought vintage frames from a nearby thrift store, getting different shapes and sizes to accommodate various objects. The frames not only enhanced the aesthetic, but also visually communicated that the pop up museum serves as an open framework for the participant’s narratives. An empty frame is much more inviting than an empty table. Suddenly, people could pick and choose which frame they wanted, and design their own display within the communal show. Furthermore, open frames enable participants to physically touch exhibited content while demonstrating that the object still deserves special recognition.
Mix and Match Museum and Community Content One of the reasons we started the pop up museum was to challenge the idea that museums have an omnipresent authority over what is and what’s not “valuable.” We were surprised to learn that the pop up museum is actually most compelling when we exhibit objects from the museum’s collection alongside individuals’ objects. This bridges institutional and community-created content. By sharing the same space, you’re illustrating how a personal object can have just as much story value as a museum object. This mixing and matching ties into another conversation around what a “museum” means to people. People certainly have diverse views and relationships to museums, but I found that most of our collaborators were excited to partner with a museum because it validated their project or object. Something about the idea of a museum carries a lot of weight, and the Santa Cruz community has responded well to pop up museum collaborations. This is not to say that everyone loves the MAH or that everyone sees our pop up museum as museums for that matter. But we did notice that participants and collaborators were more attracted to having a pop up museum in partnership with the MAH rather than throwing one on their own.
Serial Pop Up Museums Sustain Interest Pop Up Museums are ephemeral, and because of their brevity, it can be difficult to maintain and sustain momentum for each one. We experimented with serial pop up museums and held six pop up museums thematically tied to an exhibition last fall. Held in collaboration with six different partners, taking place in six different locations, and occurring on consecutive Saturdays, each pop up expanded the overarching theme of the exhibit. Unlike other pop up museums which live for one day, serial pop up museums have the advantage of reaching a larger audience and encouraging repeat participation. 


What’s wonderful about the pop up museum is that it’s a flexible format for sharing. The changeability is part of its charm. We don’t know exactly how, or where, or with whom it will pop up. But like the blank labels or empty frames we leave out on the table, pop up museums will continue to invite and support public conversation, personal empowerment, and open-ended narratives.

Maybe everyone already knows about this, but the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science now has a blog: Auxiliary Hypotheses.  There are multiple thought-provoking posts -- happily, it doesn't only announce tables of contents.

(And I might have my own substantive post up sometime in the near future... I'm wrestling with Quine for the umpteenth time, and hopefully will be able to write something here about it.)

"I hate museums."

Imagine two people saying this.

For one of them, the statement is grounded in disinterest. She's visited museums, she didn't enjoy them, she's more of a sports person, it's not part of her life, it's not her thing.

For the other, the statement is grounded in exclusion. He didn't feel welcome in museums, feels like they aren't for him, he wasn't invited, it isn't comfortable.

How can you tell the difference between these two people?

It's almost impossible to do so. They are likely to use similar language--language of disinterest--in describing what turns them off. It's safer to say "I'm not into it" than "I feel excluded." Sometimes the difference isn't even apparent to the person speaking. People can mask exclusion as disinterest unconsciously as a protective measure against what they are really experiencing.

From the institutional standpoint, this difference matters. It matters when we think about who our organizations are for and what we are willing to do to invite those people to participate. It may be ridiculous for an institution to be "for everyone." But how do we decide who it's ok to disregard?

I think it's ok to strategically disregard people who have disinterest in the content or format of your work. It's not ok to ignore people who have interest but feel excluded.

It's not only politically problematic to ignore them--it's also a bad business practice. Excluded yet interested people are potential participants who can and will be engaged if the organization is more open to them.

I fear that too often, professionals mis-identify exclusion as disinterest. It's easy to do. We mirror what we hear from non-participants about "not liking it." We stick with those who like it and feel included. We perpetuate the exclusion. And then we wonder why some people don't show up.

What's the alternative? We can probe deeper. We can start looking for signs of interest and building on them. We can start identifying the code words that turn "it's not for me" into "I choose to spend my time elsewhere" versus "you made me feel unwelcome." We can be ok with disinterest. We can work on inclusion. We can make a change where it will matter.

Revised notes for remarks I delivered on the topic of “Tools: Encouraging Innovation” at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Digital Platform summit last month at the New York Public Library.

What do we mean when we talk about innovation? To me innovation implies not just the “new” but the “useful.” And not just the “useful” but the “implemented” and the “used.” Used, that is, by others.

If a tool stays in house, in just the one place where it was developed, it may be new and it may be interesting—let’s say “inventive”—but it is not “innovative.” Other terms we use in this context—”ground breaking” and “cutting edge,” for example—share this meaning. Ground is broken for others to build upon. The cutting edge preceeds the rest of the blade.

The IMLS program that has been charged and most generously endowed with encouraging innovation in the digital realm is the National Leadership Grants: Advancing Digital Resources program. The idea that innovation is tied to use is implicit in the title of the program: the word “leadership” implies a “following.” It implies that the digital resources that the program advances will be examples to the field to be followed widely, that the people who receive the grants will become leaders and gain followers, that the projects supported by the program will be implemented and used.

This is going to be difficult to say in present company, because I am a huge admirer of the NLG program and its staff of program officers. I am also an extremely grateful recipeint of its funds. Nevertheless, in my estimation as an observer of the program, a panelist, and an adwardee, the program has too often fallen short in this regard: it has supported a multitude of new and incredibly inventive work, but that work has too rarely been taken up by colleagues outside of the originating institution. The projects the NLG program has spawned have been creative, exciting, and new, but they have too rarely been truly innovative. This is to say that the ratio of “leaders” to “followers” is out of whack. A model that’s not taken up by others is no model at all.

I would suggest two related remedies for the Leadership Grants’ lack of followers:

1. More emphasis on platforms. Surely the NLG program has produced some widely used digital library and museum platforms, including the ones I have worked on. But I think it bears emphasizing that the limited funds available for grants would generate better returns if they went to enabling technologies rather than end prodcuts, to platforms rather than projects. Funding platforms doesn’t just mean funding software—there are also be social and institutional platforms like standards and convening bodies—but IMLS should be funding tools that allow lots of people to do good work, not the good work itself of just a few.
2. More emphasis on outreach. Big business doesn’t launch new products without a sale force. If we want people to use our products, we shouldn’t launch them without people on staff who are dedicated to encouraging their use. This should be refelected in our budgets, a much bigger chunk of which should go to outreach. That also means more flexibility in the guidelines and among panelists and program officers to support travel, advertizing, and other marketing costs.

Sustainability is a red herring

These are anecdotal impressions, but it is my belief that the NLG program could be usefully reformed by a more laser-like focus on these and other uptake and go-to-market strategies in the guidelines and evaluation criteria for proposals. In recent years, a higher and higher premium has been placed on sustainability in the guidelines. I believe the effort we require applicants to spend crafting sustainability plans and grantees to spend implementing them would be better spent on outreach—on sales. The greatest guarantor of sustainiability is use. When things are used they are sustained. When things become so widely implemented that the field can’t do without them, they are sustained. Like the banks, tools and platforms that become too big to fail are sustained. Sustainability is very simply a fuction of use, and we should recognize this in allocating scare energies and resources.

It’s not every day that a science center releases an ebook about wrongful conviction in rape and murder cases. Then again, the New York Hall of Science isn’t just any science center. For a long time, I’ve admired their ambitious work, from exhibitions on complex topics like network science to integration of contemporary art into their galleries to incredible dedication to advancing the careers of diverse youth in Queens. Now, NYSCI is experimenting in a new medium, with a very tough and adult content focus. The result is False Conviction: Innocence, Guilt, and Science. 

I sat down with Eric Siegel, NYSCI’s Director and Chief Content Officer, to learn more about False Conviction. This interview is not really about an ebook. It’s about thinking about science centers and the public understanding of science as a human problem.

How did this project come about? 

I was at a planning meeting for NISE-NET in St. Paul five years ago. NISE-NET is probably the single largest investment that the National Science Foundation has made in informal learning, with the intention of spreading knowledge about nano science. We tried to find ways to make nano science interesting to the public, but it was mostly shiny futuristic potential that seemed to leave people cold. I cut out from the meeting by myself to check out an exhibition called Open House, if These Walls Could Talk at the Minnesota History Center.

I was struck by the mortality, pathos, and sense of loss that pervaded the exhibition. Not that it was sad, but that it was human. Contrasting that rich human narrative with the kind of gleamy tweaky technology narrative that was emerging from the NISE-NET meeting made me realize that generally speaking, science museums ignore many of the aspects of life that are the most resonant--mortality, sex, humor, tragedy, pity, joy. If there was a way to engage these deep emotions in the context of science museums, then there is an opportunity to expand our impact.

Two years later, I met Peter Neufeld, the head of The Innocence Project. Peter started telling me this absolutely fascinating and deep take on the way in which the misunderstanding of science is fundamental to the false convictions that The Innocence Project helps to overturn. On one side is DNA evidence, which was developed through the scientific method, and on the other side are a raft of quasi sciences and unreliable memories. Eyewitness identification is considered the gold standard of evidence to find guilt. And yet the plurality of cases that the Innocence Project has overturned were based upon eyewitness evidence. Even more amazingly, people turn out to be very susceptible to manipulation and frequently confess to crimes they did not commit.

I am listening to Peter go through this litany like the brilliant lawyer he is, and I am thinking that this is an amazing opportunity to put science in a very human context. Like so many chance meetings at conferences, we expressed interest in working together, but unlike most, we actually stuck with it.

I keep in my head a Venn diagram that has three circles--one is passion, the second is funding, and the third is audience. I am always looking for projects in which the intersection of those three circles is substantial. This project had that feel. We engaged with the Sloan Foundation, a leading funder in public understanding of science, who made a first time grant to NYSCI to plan the project. Peter and I brought in two equally passionate partners, Jim Dwyer, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the NY Times; and Geralyn Abinader, the former head of digital media at the American Museum of Natural History. Finally we engaged Theo Grey, one of the first developers for the iPad who had started a British company called Touch Press. So we had the key players.

I always have a strong feel for the passion and funding part of the venn diagram, but I am less confident of my understanding of our audiences. However, I was encouraged by the popularity of forensic science and the widespread and growing awareness of the problem of false convictions in our criminal justice system. I felt, and our partners agreed, that there was a great potential for a large audience for the project.

Is there a target audience for the project? If so, whom? 

It clearly is a book for adults. When Touch Press was doing their planning, they identified the target audience for the book as "educated and lefty." I like that, though I know that libertarians will find a lot to appreciate as well. My hope is that we can find a way to get it into the science and humanities classrooms in colleges and universities, and I am working on that.

It is a bit too sexual for most high schools, though one high school philosophy teacher reported using it to great effect. One of his students reflected:
Using the interactive iPad book to test my own reliability in crime scenes and investigations was really powerful. Feeling involved and somewhat responsible myself made me take the interactions seriously and I was even emotionally invested and ultimately disappointed at my own inaccuracies. Now knowing how difficult it is to put actual evidence together, not circumstantial or through coerced confessions, I feel more strongly than ever that we have to rely as much as possible on science to do this work fairly and justly.Teachers and science conference organizers have been very enthusiastic and the sparse reviews on the iBook store has been positive. Anyone we can get to look at it and devote the time to it really seems to love it. But the key part seems to be getting people’s attention for a sustained engagement of 4-5 hours with a deep, rich, and harrowing set of content.

That’s not easy. I was struck by how this is partly interactive, but within a structured, linear narrative. How did you make decisions about how to structure the story? 

From the beginning, we knew this was fundamentally a book. We want 5 hours of your time to read this book. No website can deliver that kind of sustained attention. Our interactives were carefully designed not to lead one too far or for too long from the narrative. We didn't want people wandering through youtube videos, etc., but rather we wanted the interactive portions to illustrate parts of the narrative. Jim is the author and he is so brilliant and addresses the subject with such clarity and authority that we had a lot of trust in his sense of the structure of the book.

Why are you using the iBooks platform? It seems to limit availability.  

This is our biggest problem right now. When we started the project, we chose to work with Touch Press because of the quality of their work, but also because they had long-standing and deep connections into Apple's digital media group. They felt confident and had some assurances that our project would get a lot of visibility on the Apple iBooks store. It hasn't. Apple has a long history of ambivalence about its forays into education, and right now False Conviction is not getting the kind of exposure we want and need. We have always planned to make a non-interactive version of the book, both for epub/kindle and on paper, so we are working on that right now. Peter, Jim, and I have been doing some science conferences, but we haven't found the right way to get this very compelling project out further. The iBook story is a bit of a mystery and backwater, nothing like the App store, though it seems so similar. So we have learned a lot, and are working on building readership for the iPad version and also creating versions for other platforms.

While the content is really compelling, the audience and format are obviously challenging. This whole project is kind of risky. How do you figure out how to explore a new project like this? 

In the Venn diagram I described above, our certainty about the curatorial passion and funding were strong, but our understanding of the audiences and distribution were more experimental. I have tried to be very transparent with my colleagues and other stakeholders about the benefits of undertaking these experiments, to mixed success.

So it is not so much where I judge to take it, but rather the team's success in demonstrating its value to the goals of the institution. This requires that we be honest about what we have achieved and not assert that something is worth doing solely because we can get funding for it or because one of the program team is hot for the project. We're getting better at this. All that said, man are these brand new approaches invigorating, food for the mind, and great for finding really remarkable and creative staff. I am grateful every day for the opportunity to do this.

How does this project fit into the broader context of NYSCI? 

All of our work is focused on ways of broadening the invitation into science. We want to make projects that have a broad public invitation, that are human and humane, that are brilliantly executed, and that bring new ideas to the table. We want to demonstrate that NYSCI is thinking broadly and energetically about informal STEM learning, and that we continue to be recognized as a laboratory where creative ideas can emerge and be deployed. That is what we are trying to do in all the projects we have been working on, whether Design Lab, Human +, Connected Worlds, or False Conviction.

What are you ultimately hoping to achieve with this project? 

A few things. First I think the power of the image of falsely convicted people spending a couple of decades in prison knowing that they are innocent is a haunting and nightmarish scenario, a kind of Pit and the Pendulum, buried alive horror. Can we leverage the empathy that we have with people who are in that horrific situation to make people think more about how science has a real impact on our lives? Can we re-integrate deeper feelings, more humanity, into how we approach thinking and teaching about science?

There is a 20 minute video--a real video--in False Conviction of a young man confessing that he committed a murder that he *did not* commit. The two detectives interrogating him slowly close the noose on him, and it has the fascination of watching a boa constrictor kill and eat a small mammal. But we are watching a boy ruin his own life, in real time.

I am also really interested in the question of sustained attention, and how we can combine the sustained attention that one gives to a book or a movie with the sense of interactivity and participation that one gets from a good science museum exhibition. This question continues to vex our field as we continue to "design for distraction," piling one experience on top of another.

So from the affect and emotion of the project to the form of the project, I am hoping it helps our field think through some new options.

Ultimately we want to move people with the reality of these stories and the deep way in which science is central to the possibility of preventing or minimizing false convictions. The Innocence Project is a tremendously participatory project, with hundreds of volunteers around the country. Our hope is that this book engenders even more active participation. This is real stuff, with real consequences on real people's lives. More and more cities around this country are re-opening entire classes of cases to look at the possibility of the misapplication of science resulting in the dual tragedy of decades of innocent people’s lives being wasted and real criminals continuing to commit violent crimes. It is as personal and compelling as science gets.


False Conviction can be purchased through the iBook store and read on an iPad or an Apple computer running Mavericks through the iBook program. You can find it here. 

This is the crux of what I planned to say - or hoped to say! at my professorial inaugural lecture at UCL on the 27th May 2014. I'm not one for reading off a script though, so may have deviated, hesitated, or expanded on the night. A video of my talk on the night is now available. No I haven't watched it myself!



I decided to call my inaugural lecture "A Decade in Digital Humanities" for three reasons.
1. The term Digital Humanities has been commonly used to describe the application of computational methods in the arts and humanities for 10 years, since the publication, in 2004, of the Companion to Digital Humanities. "Digital Humanities" was quickly picked up by the academic community as a catch-all, big tent name for a range of activities in computing, the arts, and culture.  A decade on from the publication of this text, I thought it would be useful to reflect on the growth, spread, and changes that had occurred in our discipline, and my place within them.

2. This year sees me in my 10th year of being in an academic post. I joined UCL in August 2003, my first academic post after obtaining my doctorate, and since then have worked my way up the ranks from probationary lecturer, to senior lecturer, to reader, and now full professor. The professorial lecture gives me a rare chance to pause and look behind me to see what the body of work built up over this time represents, and what it means to be undertaking research in this area.

3. You'll have to wait for later in the lecture to see the third reason...

Who here would be comfortable defining what is meant by the term Digital Humanities? In this, the week of UCL Festival of the Arts, celebrating all things to do with the Arts and Humanities, let's go back to first principles. In UCLDH and 4Humanities' award winning infographic "The Humanities Matter" we defined the humanities as "academic disciplines that seek to understand and interpret the human experience, from individuals to entire cultures, engaging in the discovery, preservation, and communication of the past and present record to enable a deeper understanding of contemporary society." It stands to reason, then, that the Digital Humanities are computational methods that are trying to understand what it means to be human, in both our past and present society. But it may be easier if I give some brief examples to demonstrate the kind of work we Digital Humanists get up to.

One of the easiest things we can do with computers is count things. For data to be computationally manipulated, it has to be in numeric form. If we can get text into a computational form, we can easily count and manipulate the language, showing trends across time. For example, if we take a million words of conference abstracts from my discipline from the ALLC/ACH conference across various years, we can easily see how mentions of one technology (XML) becomes more popular, while another (SGML) is in decline. Much of the work in DH is in manipulating and processing and analysing text - our iOS app Textal is just part of that trajectory. Much of my work, though, has been in digital images, starting with developing systems to try and read damaged documents from Hadrian's wall, and more recently working on multispectral and 3D manipulation of damaged texts. We've also worked with museums on large scale 3D capture of cultural and heritage objects. The important thing about all of this is that as well as implementation, we're also interested in use and usage of these technologies, and what impact that they have on those working in culture and heritage, and the ability to study the past and present human record. We often innovate new systems, or adopt concepts and apply them to humanities projects, such as the crowdsourcing of Jeremy Bentham's handwriting by volunteers, or working with visitors to the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL to encourage debate about zoological collections. We build, we test, we reflect back on what using these technologies means for the humanities, giving recommendations which can be useful across the sector. From these projects, its difficult to pin down what Digital Humanities actually is, but that sums up the difficulty of our discpline's title: it encourages thinking about computational methods in the arts and humanities, and then into culture and heritage, in as broad a sense as possible.

What made Digital Humanities spring, fully formed like Athena from the Head of Zeus, as an academic field in 2004? Was it because that was the first time quantifiable methods had been used in the Arts and Humanities? (remember - all computational methods require quantification). Well, of course that is nonsense. When you look back across the history of Humanities scholarship, quantifiable methods were used in the Arts and Humanities since the birth of Universities. If we think of the book as technology, from its inception scholars took it to pieces to see under the hood: concordances and indexes of works were manually created, such as this "Concordance or table made after the order of the alphabet" from 1579 which lists how many times concepts such as "abomination" appear in the New Testament. Or the work of Joseph Scaliger who in the early 1600s plotted the different periods in time in which different civilizations must have existed, through quantifiable methods. Or the work of August Schleicher in the 1850s who showed, by quantifiable methods, that the languages of Europe must have had a common historical root. All of these texts are available from UCL Library, none of which I have to leave my sofa to see because YAY! Digitisation! Changing humanities scholarship! - but the point is that quantifiable methods are part of established methods in the humanities, and have been for as long as the Humanities have existed. So when I undertook my first project at UCL, looking at whether we could use the high performance computing facilities at UCL to analyse historical census data - this is part of an quantifiable humanities academic tradition which harks back 500 years, just at a grander scale.

So what made Digital Humanities spring, fully formed like Athena from the Head of Zeus, as an academic field in 2004? Perhaps in 2004, this was the first time people had used computational techniques in the arts and humanities? But of course, that is nonsense too. When you look back at the history of computing - and not even digital computing, but the very first computer - the very first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, hints at the possibilities for art, music, and understanding human knowledge and culture in her earliest writings. She understood that there was something more to the mathematical calculations afforded by this machine than science, and they called her a madwoman for it. Well, this madwoman has a (yet unproven) theory that if you look at the history of the first 100 electronic programmable computers in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s across the world, you will see humanists eyeing them up and asking "how can I use, or develop this tool for use, in my research"? Its certainly true of Father Busa, working with IBM in the 1950s on the concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas (counting, indexing, and manipulating words, as part of the historical trajectory of humanities methods stretching back 500 years, just a change in scale...) but also of Roy Wisbey, in Cambridge, who set up the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre there in the 1960s. When the first computers arrived at UCL, the artists from the Slade School of Fine Art were over there like a shot to establish the Experimental and Computing Department. We should also mention Susan Hockey, who led various initiatives in text encoding, text analysis, and digital libraries. Susan, incidentally, gave me my first academic job here at UCL in 2003: UCL had included a Digital Resources in the Humanities module course as part of its MA offering for librarians and archivists in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (now the Department of Information Studies) from 2000, under Susan's auspices. But the point is, considering how best to use computing in the arts and humanities is not something which started in the 21st Century,  nor 2004, and Humanists have been looking at available tools, and how best to use them, since computation began. So when we undertook one of the latest projects at UCLDH, which came from looking at an iPhone, thinking "how can I use, or develop this tool for use, in my research in the Humanities" and developed an iOS app for text analysis, this is part of a longer trajectory of considering available computational tools, and how they may be appropriated, adopted, and adapted for our means in the humanities, just at a grander scale, as processing technologies increase in speed.

So why Digital Humanities, in 2004? Firstly, the coalescing of interested scholars into an identifiable field is an understandable academic response to societal changes. The speed of computing rises, the price of computing plummets, the information available on the internet (and the possibility to create new information) increases, use and usage of internet technologies has become commonplace. Remember, its up to Humanities scholars to look at the past and present record to enable a deeper understanding of contemporary society: quite frankly, it would be more alarming if an academic movement hadn't emerged looking at what using computational methods could do for our understanding of human society, both past and present, and how best we can grab the technical opportunities which fly by and appropriate them for our means, to inform both ourselves and others about the prospects of using computing in this area. The discipline of Digital Humanities is inevitable, and would have appeared whatever the title it was given.

Secondly, Digital Humanities is a handy, all inclusive, modern title which rebrands all the various work which has gone before it, such as Humanities Computing, Computing and the Humanities, Cultural Heritage Informatics, Humanities Advanced Technology... DH has a ring to is, and boy, what a rebranding it was. We tend to call it "Big Tent Digital Humanities" meaning: roll up! roll up! everyone using any computational method in any aspects of the arts and humanities is welcome! but really, Big Wave Digital Humanities may be more appropriate, as we countenance the sudden swell, dissipation, and speed of the activities of the discipline. Taking a peek at the mention of Digital Humanities on Google Ngrams we can see its sudden growth, and the fact that it is now used as a proper noun, with Capital Letters (although remember that this, counting words, is part of a long tradition of humanities scholarship, Google simply have more books to include in their count). We can see how DH has trended over time, appearing in headlines in the media. Many, many textbooks in DH appear, some of which I am responsible for myself. Journals appear, such as Digital Humanities Quarterly (of which I'm one of the general editors), and the ALLC/ACH conference renames itself Digital Humanities (this year, for my sins, I'm the Program Chair for DH2014 which will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland. We have seen over 700 proposals from more than 2000 vying for a space to present). There are many more DH conference presentations and workshop slots, worldwide, year on year. In 2010, I gathered together all the available evidence I could on DH in an infographic called Quantifying Digital Humanities, showing that there were 114 DH Centres in 24 countries. Today, not even four full years later, there are 195 DH Centers in 27 Countries. Those knowing how long it takes to set up a research centre know that this is phenomenal growth in the university and GLAM sector, and that institutional support must be strong, behind each and everyone of these.

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is part of those who have joined the recently founded centres. We officially launched four years ago to the week of this lecture, in the same lecture hall where this lecture is being presented. We dont talk about the launch much - its not often I'm part of something at work which ends up featured in the political pages of the newspapers - but you'll have to google that to find out more (YAY! digital media! the internet never forgets!) but in those four years since launch we've undertaken a phenomenal amount of projects, covering many aspects of Humanities and Arts research, and considered Digital Humanities in its broadest sense. This isnt all me - there is an amazing team who are part of the Centre, and we've won various awards for our academic projects and collaborations, published many books, papers, and book chapters, and been part of successful funding bids from research councils worth tens of millions of pounds. One wonders what makes a Digital Humanities Centre attractive to universities that dont have one. Nope, I cant see what makes that level of activity attractive, at all.

So what proportion of Humanities scholars are now digital humanists? Back in 2005, participants in the Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities at the University of Virginia estimated that "only about six percent of humanist scholars go beyond general purpose information technology and use digital resources and more complex digital tools in their scholarship" (p.4 of this PDF). By 2012, N. Katherine Hayles, in her chapter "How we think: transforming power and digital technologies" in David M. Berry's edited text "Understanding Digital Humanities", estimates that 10 per cent of Humanists are now digital humanists (p.59).  Now, in 2014, a forthcoming study from Ithaka S+R (with the working title of Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Institutional Strategies beyond the Start-up Phase) includes surveys of faculty at four American universities. In the departments surveyed at each institution, nearly 50% of faculty members indicated they have "created or managed" digital resources. Granted, the departments were chosen by campus staff (often at the library) who felt there was some significant activity taking     place there. The percentage of these "creators" was consistent across all universities (Brown, Columbia, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University), and most of the creators also felt that their creation was intended for public use (not just their own research aims), and would require ongoing development in the future.

50% of humanists are involved in digital activity, are digital humanists. How can this possibly be? And how can we conceptualise what it means to be a digital humanist, amongst this spread of activity and range of available technology: is creating or managing digital resources the same as being a digital humanist? At a time where (nearly) every library catalogue is digitised and available online, and (nearly) every book manuscript written on a work processor, and many historical documents digitised and available for consulting from your own sofa, does that make everybody working in the humanities a digital humanist? How can I begin to conceptualise my contribution, and my place, and where my work sits within Big Wave Digital Humanities?

I find it useful, here to turn to Roger's Innovation Adoption Curve, a sociological model that looks at how technology spreads through society. This is a bell curve, and right at the start of adoption of technology, are a few innovators, experimenting (and developing) new technology. These innovators sometimes persuade a larger number of early adopters to take up the new technology on offer, and only once a sufficient mass of users are achieved, does the technology "cross the chasm" and become used by the majority of individuals in a society (who are split into an early majority, or late majority). Finally, we have adoption by the "laggards", who are slow in taking up technologies, but do so if they have permeated throughout society. (Hard not to think, here, of my elderly grandmother who recently got her first mobile phone).  Now, this model is useful as we can plot along it some of the technologies which are available to a humanist. Things like word processing, and searching for references online, and even looking up the digitised texts which I showed at the start of this lecture: even the technologically laggard humanists can do it now, and although these technologies are changing scholarship, its a question of scale (better! faster! more!) rather than of approach or technique, for the main. Technically facilitated tasks like updating websites, using and updating wikis, using social media: even the late majority of humanists can do it now. Online tools are available, such as Voyant, which allow you to do text analysis, and manipulate texts to see the underlying patterns: so the early majority of humanists can use these tools should they want to. But the most difficult, intellectual work of applying technology in the humanities still occurs before the chasm has been crossed, in the phase of innovation, and early adoption, where we are looking at the technologies that cross our path and saying "how can I use, or develop this tool for use, in my research?", much like those in the 1950s or 1960s who were coming across university mainframes and asking how best to apply that in the literary and linguistic arena. It's important to note, of course, that this wave of technology keeps on coming at us, and the place of where technology sits along the curve changes: 20 years ago, had you been making a website for your humanities project, you would have been an innovator, rather than a late majority, and the same holds for word processing 40 years ago. The technology keeps coming: we have to respond to this, innovate, adopt, and see what is useful or useable for, or used by, the majority of people in our discpline.

Now (and this is the most contentious thing I'm going to say in my whole lecture, for those attending who are dyed-in-the-wool Digital Humanists) one of the problems that we have as a movement is that we tend to get caught up and fixated upon a certain technological solution. For example, every DH program I've come across teaches XML, that technology which took over from SGML in the conference abstracts - as the best practice way to encode text. And there's no doubt that XML provides the framework with which we can both explore theoretically what is means to describe texts computationally, in such a way they retain the information in their printed or manuscript form, whilst also the means to build and test prototypes. But XML as a technological standard has been around for 16 years, and technology moves on, but DH doesnt seem to be doing so. In many ways, DH's relationship to XML is similar to the AI community's relationship with LISP: the means of computational expression in the language or format suit the questions which need to be asked by the field, so there is no need to use other technologies which come on stream, which may be more efficient from a computational point of view, as we explore what is means to work with our question in this computational way. And that's ok, but we shouldnt be blind to the fact that, hey! technology is advancing all the time and, also, XML is not a technology that crossed the chasm: it may be in use for technical systems, but its not one that you see a lot of the general populace using. This, in turn, means that DH has permanently hitched its wagon to an aging technology, which is hard to explain to others, including other non-XML humanists, whilst other things are happening in the technological world around us. Just something we have to watch out for, when building teaching programs, or looking at the scope of outputs in our field. We dont want to be left behind as the digital in digital humanities rolls on without us.


I find it useful to plot my research on the Innovation Curve, to see where what I am doing sits. So, the work on counting terms across a corpus - very much sits in the early majority, given the availability of tools to do so. But the work on building an iPhone app to do so - very much innovation: it took a lot of pure programming in a relatively new space to achieve it. The work in image processing I do is either innovation (we are publishing here in pure computer/engineering science venues, as well as in humanities venues, which I'm very proud of), or we adopt technologies our academic colleagues in the engineering sciences have generated and roll them out to a humanities or heritage application. Our work on user studies is something completely different though: here we are generally looking at how the majority of people are using an extant text, or (in the case of something like Transcribe Bentham, or QRator) we are conducting reception studies, where we innovate and build a technology, launch it, and study its uptake across the whole cycle. We can see, then a range of DH activity across the innovation cycle, but the majority of the work I do is certainly at the start of the innovation curve. Is this where DH sits? I like to think so, but more to the point, I'm confident its where I sit best, when doing DH.

I need here to show you another curve, though. This time, the Gartner Hype Cycle, which looks at how technologies are launched, mature, and are applied (so people know when to invest). The premise of this is that when technologies are first triggered, everyone thinks they are going to be the Next Big Thing, and so they reach "the peak of inflated expectations", before crashing down into a "trough of disillusionment" when those adopting them realise they aren't that great at all. Its hard work to get technologies up the "slope of enlightenment" where useful, useable applications are found, and few technologies make it to the "plateau of productivity" where they become profitable. Its a useful curve - this year's predictions show Big Data right at the top of the peak, which chimes in with media coverage of how it will solve everything, for example. So where would I put DH, if I had to as a movement, on this curve?

I'd put it at the top. At the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations. We've got a lot of pressure on us to prove our johnny-come-lately benefit to the world of academia, to demonstrate our worth, to show that the investment made in us over the past few years is worth it (whilst also bringing in further investments in research funding, to meet institutional expectations). After a peak, comes a crash, and we have to be prepared for the tide to turn and the backlash to begin, after the years of media hype and raised expectations. So how do we get to the plateau of productivity of Digital Humanities?

First, I would argue that we have to understand our lineage: that the current manifestation of DH is a logical progression of qualitative methods used in the humanities for the past 500 years. That the current manifestation of DH is a logical progression of humans wondering what the potential is for applying computational methods to humanities problems, which has been going on in the digital space for the past 60 years. These combined trajectories aren't going away, and despite what funding cuts and media backlash may come at us, it is the role of the digital humanist to understand and investigate how computers can be used to question what it means to be human, and the human record, in both our past and present society. Secure in our mission, we can carry on whatever the storm throws at us.

Second, I would argue we have to ignore naysayers who are unsure about this new Digital Humanities lark (and believe me, there are plenty, even in my own department) and just do good work. The way to demonstrate our worth is to demonstrate our worth through doing good work. We have to keep asking questions about computational methods, computational processes, and the potentials that they offer humanities scholars, as well as the pitfalls, to explore this changing information environment from the humanities viewpoint. Its not just about building websites, or putting information online, its about innovating and adopting, and questioning while we build about the ramifications of doing this, the impact on the humanities, the issues using technology raises, and the answers it provides that you couldn't otherwise generate, to do good work in Digital Humanities. I realise this is very Calvinist of me - you can take the lass out of Scotland - but I do see that we have to be engaging with theories and questions of what is means to be doing this work in this way, as well as updating a website or creating a digital file. A continuation of what it means to be a humanities scholar, in the digital space.

I'm not one for looking back, and despite the title, I deliberately didn't want this inaugural to be a survey of all the projects I have undertaken over the past ten years - then I did this, then I talked to that person, then I visited there - but when I look back over the variety and range of projects, publications, and outputs that I've worked on, either on my own, or as part of a team (there's a lot of teamwork that has gone on here) I'm firstly surprised at how much of it there is and the range of topics we've covered, and the opportunities we've pounced on. I see a body of work which explores various aspects of what it means to be applying digital technologies in the humanities space, and facilitates both those in engineering science and those in the humanities to explore issues which are important to them. I've learn't things along the way about the nature of interdisciplinary work, the nature of teams, the nature of the academic publishing and peer review process, the nature of the grant funding process, but I've written about that elsewhere. There are things, also, that I am proud of that are physical rather than purely digital: over the last few years I'm most proud of building the UCL Multi-Modal digitisation suite, which is a shared space between the UCL Library Services, UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and UCL Faculty of Engineering Science, contributing to the infrastructure of UCL in a collaborative endeavor. But what I see here, as a common thread, is that the work I do tends to sit right at the beginning of the technology adoption cycle, aiding and abetting the application of technology within the arts, humanities, and heritage, and I'm comfortable with that. There's a strength in knowing your place, and your remit, and what you do best.


So the third reason for calling my talk "A Decade in Digital Humanities" is that I didn't say which decade we were talking about, and it is time also to look towards the future, and what the next ten years holds for both DH, as the field turns into a teenager, and for me, as I go into my next decade here at UCL. I'm not one for crystal balls, so I'll keep my scrying brief. I see an inevitable fragmentation of the DH community and DH focus - it was never conceived of as a homogenous entity anyway, and it is the nature of waves and swells that they will dissipate. We'll see (we are already seeing) more focussed groups of scholarly work around, say, Geographical Information Systems and literature, as people specialise and work on specific technologies and specific methods. The technology will keep coming, and its up to individual humanities scholars to respond to what is appropriate to their research question: the effects of DH scholarship will continue to ripple out across the humanities as technologies go along the adoption cycle, and certain aspects of digital research will just become normal for humanities scholars, as time goes on. But I do see that there will always be a place, right at the start of the technology innovation uptake curve, for specialists in Digital Humanities to sit, watching out for these changing and emerging technologies, setting up pilot projects to experiment with different aspects of these technologies, feeding back recommendations and the potential ramifications for other humanities and engineering scholars and those within the wider cultural and heritage sector, and exploring what is means to be doing humanities research in that area. I'm happy to remain there, and I see that this will remain my place working with other humanists, and engineers and computer scientists, over the next decade. I'm delighted to be a co-investigator on the doctoral training centre for Science and Engineering in the Arts Heritage and Archaeology, which is the EPSRC's largest every investment in Heritage Science, and for the next 8 years we'll be training up a range of doctoral students in this cross section of the arts, heritage, humanities, and engineering and conservation science. (Perhaps what I really do is Heritage Science, but that's another talk entirely, and DH has work to do with the Heritage Science community in future).  That said, we do have work to do, in keeping an eye to making sure people know about the successes, outputs, and impacts of DH work. Given the expectations foisted upon us, we have to learn to be more vocal about our objectives, our remit, and our results. It's our job to be thinking what it means to use digital technologies in humanities research, and just research, full stop. As a result, our insights can benefit a range of other fields, if we communicate them effectively.

Digital technologies are not going away any time soon: and although DH has had a rapid swell, it will remain essential that we investigate, use, and experiment with technologies over the coming decade. There is a new Companion to Digital Humanities coming out in late 2014, showing how the technologies used in humanities research have developed since the first edition (I'm delighted to have written a chapter on our public engagement work for it), and our see our field, as well as knowing where we have come from, has to understand that the technological wave on which we sail is continually on the move. I hope I've shown here that our uptake of technologies in the humanities is, and will continue to be, a moving target, and that as part of a longer trajectory of investigation into humanities methods, DH is a modern but necessary, and even inevitable, part of the Humanities, and even computational, landscape. I look forward to what adventures the next Decade in Digital Humanities holds. There is so much to do!

Now, that is where I'd normally pause and say thank you for your attention, but hey, its my inaugural, so I'll cry if I want to. I have a few brief thanks to make - its quite a lick to go from probationary lecturer to full prof in ten years, and so I have to thank those who have supported me. Thanks go to my family up in Scotland for all their support, and my family of my own: many of you know that in the past few year's I've had three children, so biggest thanks of all go to my husband Os, aka Expert Sleepers, for his forbearance and baby juggling skillz. I've been blessed with an amazing support network of friends, who have supported my enormously over this period. My first academic supervisor was Professor Seamus Ross, who kick started my interest in this area, and his support and interest at the start of my career really set me up for the work I do today. Likewise, my PhD supervisor Professor Alan Bowman remains a fantastic mentor: thank you, Alan. My other PhD supervisor, Professor Sir Mike Brady, made me promise (when I got my doctorate in engineering) not to go near any nuclear power stations or bridges, a promise I have kept - thanks Mike. I've already mentioned that Professor Susan Hockey gave me my first academic job: but her work remains an inspiration on what is possible in computing in the arts and humanities. I work with an amazing team of people at UCLDH and I thank them for their input both for the centre and on our various projects. Special thanks go to Rudolf Ammann, our designer at large, who helped prepare the graphics for this lecture.

But in this week of UCL's Festival of the Arts and Humanities, its good to pause and see how embedded Digital Humanities research is now throughout college, and how much we work, in the Humanities, with those around us. The projects I've shown, albeit briefly, today, are carried out in league with various other faculties (UCLDH reports to both the Arts and Humanities and Engineering Faculties here). Colleagues come from a range of different departments including not only those across the Arts Faculty, but the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (in the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment), and across the UCL Faculty of Engineering (I have joint projects with Medical Physics, Computer Science, and Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering). We are dependent on input from both our colleagues in UCL Library Services, and UCL Museums and Collections, and work very closely with items in all the collections across college. The success of DH at UCL is then dependent on the institutional context we have here. Digital Humanities is now embedded into college life at UCL, and in this week of the Festival of the Arts, my final thanks go to UCL as an community for its institutional support in encouraging us to ride the DH wave: for without being at UCL, my decade in digital humanities would have been completely different.

I recently got in touch with Professor Roy Wisbey, who set up the University of Cambridge's Linguistic Computing Centre in 1960, to invite him to my inaugural lecture. He is not able to attend (but passes on his regards to those who know him!) and he also briefly loaned me this newspaper article, from 24th September 1965, from the Cambridge News. A very early piece of Humanities Computing history! It's in very fragile condition - I've spliced it together here to give the whole piece in one image (and the blog stylesheet is not my friend here - will sort out later - but...) - enjoy!

The use of computers will save the scholar years of mindless drudgery! indeed!

LinkedIn has a new feature where people can congratulate each other on work anniversaries. It has some of the same feel as the disconnected affection of people wishing you a happy birthday on Facebook, with professional reflection baked in. Seeing so many cheerful one-liners in my inbox made me think about how different my work situation is today than the last time I reflected on it in public in 2012, at my one-year anniversary.

I've now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. I arrived in 2011 with the explicit directive to execute a turnaround. Three years later, we're out of turnaround and into growth mode. Over the past three years, we've tripled our attendance, doubled our budget, and, most importantly, established deep and diverse relationships with community members, artists, and organizations across Santa Cruz County. This year was a year of building, challenging, and strengthening.

I'm open to any questions you want to share in the comments. In the meantime, here are some...

THINGS I'M MOST PROUD OF:

• Making space for distributed leadership. When I look back at some recent projects that I'm most excited about (like this teen program), I realize that I had very little to do with their conception or execution. What I did was make space for my brilliant staff members to tackle their dreams. I helped them find funding and partners and time to make amazing work happen. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. I know our organization will keep thriving because we keep expanding who can bring leadership to the table. 
• Building an amazing team. Of course, space-making works when you respect your colleagues and know they can do killer work. We have an incredible group of people working together at the MAH right now. I've never worked in such a supportive, energized, active environment. We work hard to name and build our culture in many ways. Institutional culture is something I never really understood before and I am now completely fascinated by how it can shape work.
• Making co-creation sustainable and powerful. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive. We have prioritized opening up to as many partners as possible through collaborative structures that scale. In a town of 65,000, we're collaborating with over 2,000 residents per year: teen punk bands, professional paper-makers, genealogists, food justice activists, and everyone in-between. We've developed program formats and tools that allow us to slot in and support partners without constantly reinventing the wheel. We're seen as a trusted and desirable partner to diverse cultural practitioners in our community. And now, we're investing in strategic outreach to prospective collaborators who come from backgrounds and communities that aren't already involved.   
• Naming our goals and our culture. We have shifted from a time of explorative chaos to a time of putting down roots. We have a better sense of how we work, what we are trying to achieve, and who we are. A lot of that is institutionalized through naming. We wrote a new mission statement. We wrote engagement goals. We wrote values statements. We're working on a theory of change. These documents help us talk to ourselves and to others about what we are doing and how we can do it better. They aren't intended to force fit our work to aspirational language; instead, they are intended to make transparent that which is existing but ephemeral. When we name what we do and why, we can be more open, authentic, and accountable in our work, especially with community partners.
• Naming fears, too. As we shift from turnaround to growth mode, I have a lot of worries: that we will lose some of our collaborative magic, that getting bigger will mean getting less effective, that maturing will mean losing touch with what is most relevant. I know that all of these are healthy, creative tensions that come with change and growth. I'm trying to operate from a position of hope and not one of fear. And when I'm afraid, I try to be honest and open about it and to invite everyone on our team to help write our collective future in the most positive way possible.

MISTAKES I MADE:

• Taking criticism too personally and letting it impact my emotional health too much. I learned this year that really, truly, not everyone is going to like what we are doing. I can't harbor secret hopes that everyone will like it or that I can change their minds with goodwill. Now, when people tell me they don't like something, I try to have an out-of-body experience where I separate the "it" from "me." I find when I do this, I can more rationally examine their critique and whether it is something I should respond to/act on. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. Either way, it helps me stay focused on the work and not on the emotional stress.
• Letting myself ignore glaring problems that still exist. A donor walked into the museum a few weeks ago, someone who supported me from day one, and she asked me, "why is this lobby still so cold and uninviting?" I jumped in and started talking about how we are designing furniture for it, that we've been focusing on injecting warmth in gallery spaces, that it is energized and peopled during events... She cut in and said, "that's all well and good, but if you are standing outside thinking about whether to come in and you don't KNOW about all that stuff, and all you see is this awful dead lobby, why would you come in?" She is right. We have to change it. In any work environments, there are things that we fix right away, and then there are other things that are just a bit too tricky or unpleasant. And so we wait, and we put them off, and eventually, we pretend they aren't problems. They are still problems. We can't become inured to them. We have to fix them. 

QUESTIONS ON MY MIND:

• As we grow, how can we do as much growing as possible outside the museum's walls? We're investing a lot in a public plaza project outside of the museum. We're exploring ways to become embedded in other parts of the civic landscape, ranging from social service providers to public transit. I firmly believe that a community-engaged museum is a web of interactions. We need a strong core, but we also need beautiful, strong radiations and intersections.
• How do we prioritize social bridging in contexts that privilege bonding? We've pivoted heavily towards a goal of promoting bridging experiences that bring together diverse people and cultural practices across differences. We've gotten pretty good at doing this at museum programs, but it gets more complicated when we are working with a bonded group like a homeless center or a school tour. We want to do the sensitive cultural work of being good guests in others' spaces, but we also want to make sure that our engagement in their spaces creates intersections and bridges across multiple groups. We're going to start doing a lot more rigorous research and experimentation in this area in the months to come.
• How do we share our bifurcated story as both a place to engage with art and history AND a place that builds community? Obviously, these things are interrelated, but they are not identical--especially when it comes to communication. Right now, we have a double life online. One on side are the conversations we have with our visitors, which mostly focus on engagement experiences. On the other side are the conversations with funders, fellow practitioners, and community partners, which mostly focus on larger goals and experiments. It's clear from visitor and member comments that they are also interested in the bigger picture, but it's not obvious how we can share that bigger picture alongside the "come on Friday night for X" kind of messaging. This is more than just a question of email--it's a question of how we can best involve our energized participants in the deep work that underscores everything we do. 

Here's to another amazing year. I feel so lucky to work in my community. To work for my community. To see change happening because of the work we are doing. I can't think of anywhere I'd rather be.