ECHO Blogging Central

Yesterday I gave a talk called “Group and Method: Collaboration in the Digital Humanities” at Case Western Reserve University’s Freedman Center Colloquium on “Exploring Collaboration in Digital Scholarship.” Drawing on my research for “Computing and Communicating Knowledge” and for a series of blog posts, I discussed why collaboration is so common in digital humanities (although of course not all DH work is necessarily collaborative); explored the significance of collaboration in projects to build digital resources, devise new research methods, and promote participatory humanities; and explored challenges to collaboration. I also described how my experiences as a grad student in English convinced me of the value of collaboration–particularly my membership in a dissertation group (I was thrilled that my fellow diss group member Amanda French also gave a talk at the colloquium) and my work at Virginia’s Etext Center.

Here is the pdf of the slides.

In my research on the use of social media in emergency management and communication and my hunt for good case studies, I have come across a knowledge hub, that I thought I’d share with you. I was of course introduced to it by wonderful people on Twitter (thank you Eva Alisic).

The website is called The Australian Emergency Management Knowledge Hub and is still a BETA version of the Knowledge Hub, but a good BETA version. It provides easy access to evidence-based research and other research as wells as news relevant to emergency management, including statistics and information, photos, video and media about past disaster events. You can read more about the rational and the organisations behind the website on their ‘about’ page.

The website has lots of well thought out search tools. You can search for information about specific emergencies through a combined map and timeline. It will provide you with basic data about the event and links to resources related to the event in the research database.

You can also go directly to the research database and search here on the topic you seek information. You can even filter or sort it by the kind of document (case study, website, report, journal article, blog, wiki etc.), date and disaster category.

Although I haven’t yet tried it out, there is also a community forum space where people working with emergency management can register to discuss ideas and issues affecting the emergency sector.

As the name of the knowledge hub implies, the majority of the resources relates to Australia and its closest surrounding countries, but it is no way exclusive. I have mostly been looking at things related to social media and it seems to me that Australia is first-mover country when it comes to integrating social media into emergency management.

The Knowledge Hub also provides access to resources in the Australian Emergency Management Library.

Users of the hub can contribute to the hub’s continuous development, by recommending additional resources, share upcoming events, photos, videos and join in on the discussions.

The Australian Emergency Management Knowledge Hub is of course also on Twitter (@AEMKH), which they use very actively.

I'm starting this post with an annoying, fabulous number: 73.

That's the predicted high temperature today in Santa Cruz. It's the typical temperature here all spring, summer, and fall. It's pretty freaking beautiful.

The weather is hopefully the least of the reasons you should want to come work with us here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History... but it doesn't hurt.

We have a couple of upcoming opportunities with looming deadlines that might interest you:

• Summer Internships. We have five open positions in Community Programs and one in Exhibitions. These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement. Check out the descriptions and how to apply here, and learn more about the MAH intern experience on their blog here. 
• Participatory Performing Artist-in-Residence program. This is a new program we created with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to enable performing artists to develop work at the MAH that invites active audience participation. We are funding four residencies per year at $2,000 apiece so that performing artists can partner with our staff to co-create meaningful, community-centered work. We started this project because of conversations with performing artists who wanted more experience exploring audience participation in a supportive environment. In 2011, at the Wallace Foundation Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference, I was really struck by artists who expressed concern and frustration about being "cut out" of participatory shifts by institutions and consultants... and I have always wanted to find ways to invite them in. We are PSYCHED to have the support from Hewlett to make it happen in a small way with this residency program. You can read more about the program and how to apply here. Priority will be given to applicants from the greater Monterey and San Francisco Bay region.

Applications for both of these opportunities are due at the end of April. So start dreaming about the sun and exciting museum experiences. 

Several years ago I took a group of Mason students to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. Among the things I’d planned for them was a visit to the Klementinum in Prague where the Codex Gigas (the “Devil’s Bible“) was on display. Needless to say, when I told them we were going to a library to look at a book, they were decidedly underwhelmed. Until they saw it up close and personal.

At 90cm x 50cm and weighing in at 75 pounds, it’s quite a book and was unlike anything they had seen or expected. More intriguing to them, though, was the legend surrounding the work. Created sometime between 1200 and 1230 in a monastery in Bohemia, the story that goes with the bible is that the devil himself helped a monk create it in just one night. In exchange, the monk included an image of the devil as part of the text decoration. Despite their earlier reluctance to go look at a book, the students pronounced the whole thing kind of cool.

I was reminded of that trip the other night during a tutorial I’m leading with four of our most talented doctoral students. One of those four, Jeri Wieringa, asked one of those questions students ask us with regularity that makes us think really hard. I’ll paraphrase what she asked: “If we digitize texts and present them to students as just so many pixels, are they losing an essential connection to the text as a historical artifact?”

This question led to an energetic discussion around our table. On the one hand, there are obvious advantages to digitizing texts. At the most obvious, the texts, especially those before the age of the typewriter, become much more legible and so therefore accessible to a wide audience. Anyone who has taught pre-typewriter texts knows just how reluctant students can be when it comes to trying to make sense of handwriting from back in the day. Even excellent tutorials like the one on decoding Martha Ballard’s diary can reinforce the notion that such handwriting is essentially unreadable except by experts or code breakers.

A second obvious advantage is that the text becomes fully searchable in ways that it can’t be when it is just an image of a document. Our Papers of the War Department project here at RRCHNM is a great example of the advantages of having transcribed texts to sort through and analyze using the text analysis algorithm of your choice.

Finally, making the text available in this way opens up any digitized collection to crawling by the various search engines, thereby opening up the collection to a much larger audience.

But, and this was the but that we got stuck on in our discussion, the artifact itself can disappear from the view of the researcher if an image of the original is not also available to the researcher. We really liked the War Department project because that image is there for users to see any time they want. [NB: I edited this paragraph because in the original, my wording made it sound as though images weren't available on the War Department site.]

To put it another way, the coolness of the text as artifact disappears when all the researcher/student sees is black pixels on a white screen. Yes, it’s much more readable and accessible. But there is a bigger potential problem–and this is the one that really troubled Jeri. An essential task of the historian is to assign greater or lesser value to a particular historical source based on his/her growing expertise in a given subject. Some documents are just more important to a given problem or interpretation than others and it’s up to us to help others see that.

But if all documents are reduced to black pixels on a white screen, they start to seem all the same. Given that students/novice historians often have a difficult time placing sources in a hierarchy of importance that they are developing, if all texts look the same, are we making it more difficult for them to develop this skill of prioritizing some sources over others?

We arrived at no answer in our conversation and despite two weeks of ruminating on the issue, I still don’t have one. I’m just going to have to worry about this one for a while longer.

Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?A. Two: The first to change the lightbulb using the available, existing technology. The second to say “You’re not DH unless you make the lightbulb yourself!”.
Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?A. Yay! Lets Crowdsource!
Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?A. One. But they have to have a PhD in Byzantine Sigillography AND at least 4 years experience of XSLT before you are going to let them near that bad boy.
Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?A. As many as you like, but no REAL humanities academic is going to trust that lightsource.
Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?A. It depends. Does the lightbulb count as a “scholarly primitive”?
Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?A. One. But only if they are allowed to include “multimedia experience” in their tenure portfolio.
 Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb? A. These are such IN JOKES only the COOL KIDS on twitter will get them. Pout.
 (I originally came up with these jokes on the DayofDH2011 - reposting them here on the DayofDH2013 to have a copy on my own blog.)

(This is the blog post I've put up on the Day of DH site - where Digital Humanists all over the world are telling people what they are up to on a specific day. Me, I'm working hard in a different way, on holiday). 

This Day of DH sees me not doing much DH at all… but yet. I’m on holiday, on the second week of the school easter break, with my three young boys, in Scotland, staying with family. I wasn’t going to blog anything at all – but then, hey, this is part of my life as a DHer too, right? Its not just about the work, its about what you do elsewhere? But can you actually switch off from DH, from work, when you are away?– at least, it seems not that way if you are an academic.

So what did we get up to today? Not a bad night, up only three times (two night terrors and one sea shanty) and then woken early to a boy shouting “Mummy! Robot! Monkey!” repeatedly. A slow walk to the shop for papers and sweeties, some playing with watering cans, a trip to a garden centre to meet an old friend and her kid for coffee, a visit from my Aunt. The endless cleaning and tidying and management of stuff which comes with having three small people, roll calls to ensure people have their shoes and their stuffed animals from one stop to the next. Highlights included driving alongside a wind farm for a mile or so and the boys shouting “BIG. WINDMILLS! BIG. WINDMILLS!” – lowlights include turning my back for two minutes and seeing Twin Two up 8 feet in the air on something he shouldn’t be climbing on in the garden centre – tuts from other parents in the vicinity very forthcoming.

Its not like I haven’t thought about work. I find it very difficult to switch off when on holiday – it takes me about a week to stop sending myself emails reminding me to do X, Y, and Z when I get back. I’m on the twitters – I find hanging out on twitter gets me through the day when looking after the three weans all day and all night, especially if they are up through the night – and today of all days, it was fascinating to see twitter erupt and turn and shift around a news item. The asynchronous nature suits having a quick shufty at quiet moments – seconds – in the parenting day. But I haven’t been on work email for a week or so, and wont be for another week or so. Usually I’m glued to it, answering emails at all times of the day, but its important for me to step back from it a few times a year. I popped on there a couple of days ago to action something time-limited and laughed at all the emails that had come in setting me deadlines I hadn’t agreed to that I will miss in my absence. Meh – I’m usually quick on the mark but this week? I’m teaching my twins how to do forward rolls instead.

As I do more and more managerial work in my role at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities I wonder really how much of my interaction with computing is through email. (Most of it now). I’m a professional email answerer, really.  Been a while since I implemented something myself.  I wonder, amidst all the arguments about should DHers code, etc, how the whole “can code, but manages coders” fits in. But this week, I’m not even answering email. Oh no.  I’m on holiday. I’m away. And goodness, it is good to step away from email, that harsh, thankless taskmistress. But if I’m not on email…. I am a DHer any more?

But its not like I haven’t thought about work. It’s the blessing/curse of academia: obsessive compulsive behavior is rewarded, and its hard to switch off the obsession. So in the past week or so I’ve been ruminating on next steps, projects I’m undertaking, research I should do next, blog posts that are brewing, in between having cups of tea at my grandparents or visiting my cousins or dandling poorly boys at 3am. Everything you can do when you are not on email. The nice stuff online and offline, without the work email.

It’s not that I haven’t thought about work. Heck, I even blogged for the Day of DH. An example of the blended life style us DHers live: how hard it is to get away, even when you are away, how connected we all are, how it’s all a balancing act.

So I’m not sure that this is a blog post. I’m not sure that this is a holiday.  I don’t know what it is… must be DH, then.

In the latest issue of the European Journal of Public Health, a wish list for what public health training should look like in the 21st century is giving by Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: Seven goals for public health training in the 21st century

Having a bachelor and masters degree in public health sciences from University of Copenhagen, I know for a fact that at least in a Danish context public health science communication has not been part of the curriculum for public health students in the later part of the 20th or the first part of the 21st century. None the less, when I saw the headline of Martin McKee’s article, I was hoping that science communication would be an ambition for modern public health training.

Public health science communication is not mentioned directly as one of the 7 goals. In short that goals Martin McKee lists are:

1. Stimulate curiosity
2. Encourage social entrepreneurs who are willing to take the initiative
3. Make epidemiological connections and understand the biological mechanisms behind
4. Convey the big picture, expanding Koch’s postulates or Bradford Hill’s criteria of causality with mathematical models to provide evidence of links
5. Make public health students literate about what (and who) they are up against
6. Engage with key decision makers at all levels and be confident to speak up.
7. Ground human rights into public health approaches

Unfortunately, I was to be a bit disappointed. The article starts out well, stating the need to “prepare people to engage actively in a complex and changing world in ways that improve the health of the population”. So how do you prepare people to engage actively in ways that improves their health? Well, in my world that will require that you as a public health professional and public health scholar can actually communicate what you are doing, what your theories are and what findings come out of your hard work. And that you can engage into conversation and discussion with the public and subgroups of the public (e.g. policy makers, researchers in other fields). In short, that you can communicate public health sciences.

For all seven goals, science communication plays a key role, but is only partly mentioned under goal 6, articulating the need for public health people to be confident to speak up and share their knowledge. The only other time communication is touched upon is as an encouragement for public health professionals to not just stay updated on public health news but go beyond the scientific literature:

“More than ever, the public health professional needs to read the Economist, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.”

No suggestion is however broad forward about also contributing and communicating public health through these channels. Shouldn’t public health people aim to let their voice, knowledge and opinions be heard outside the ‘traditional’ public health media?

Another element missing in Martin McKee’s list is the IT reality of the 21st century and how Web2.0 already have and is still changing public health research and practice. He mentions the need for public health people to acquire a great deal more self-confidence and points out how:

“with a fast internet connection, most students could do a much better job of understanding the topics they [politicians and social commentators] addressed”.

But the potential for new ways of communicating and engaging with the public broad forward by social media and other technologies is not mentioned at all.

Make public health science communication the 8th goal

Communication is almost a precondition for all other 7 goals, which is why I would argue that it deserves to be a goal in itself. Public health students should be given competences in communicating what they do, why they do it and taught how communication can benefit not only the people they are trying to help but also their own work (which then again will come to the benefit of the public). Public health is, as Martin McKee opens the article, not just a collection of different disciplines or the goals it seeks to attain. It is much more. Exactly this ‘much more’ however requires communication. Public health science cannot (meaningfully) exist in its own little universe. It only comes to life when it steps out of the public health sphere and meets the rest of the world. This, however, requires that we as public health people are dressed to meet the world and to communicate with it. Let’s make public health science communication skills the 8th goal of public health training in the 21st century.

The article by Martin McKee is unfortunately hidden behind a pay wall, but you read an extract here: Seven goals for public health training in the 21st century.

A genius has just created a major body of work. Her work is monumental in her field, but her achievements are somewhat opaque to the general public.

Imagine seeing a museum exhibition related to this person's work. What will you experience?

The answer depends on what kind of museum you are visiting.

If we're talking about an an artist working in the context of an art museum, it's likely that the genius' work will be presented with minimal interpretation. Labels will reference the importance of her work in the context of the art world. The curator and any educators will work around and noticeably behind the artist herself.

If we're talking about a scientist in a science museum or science center, the presentation will be completely different. Museum exhibition designers will distill her achievements into stories, objects, and interactive components that are understandable to lay people at the middle school level. The genius might have a quote, photo, or object on display to give context to the story, but the majority of the content will be developed and produced by the museum, not the scientist.

Both of these approaches have plusses and minuses. Science museums get criticized for "dumbing down" big ideas for a general audience. Art museums struggle with seeming "pretentious" and narrow in their interpretation.

As someone who has worked in both science and art museums, I'm confused as to why there is such a gulf in our perspectives on how and why interpretation fits into the picture. Artists and scientists both work in specific contexts on big, complicated ideas. There are huge opportunities for science and art museums to cross-program with geniuses like Olafur Elliason, James Turrell, and many, many folks working across the art/science spectrum. While a few institutions have capitalized on the intersections between art and science (notably, the Exploratorium, Science Gallery, and the New York Hall of Science), most stay squarely in their own camps.

Why do we think science is impossible to communicate in its "pure" form but that art must be communicated in that way lest it be distorted? Why do we think scientific research is any more or less understandable to the general public than fine art? Considering the emphasis in schools on science and the evisceration of art programs, I wouldn't be surprised if science literacy is higher than art literacy in contemporary American society.

Both types of institutions would be well-served if we examined the expectations underlying our work and whether we are going overboard to disassociate ourselves from them.

In science centers, we try to combat the notion that science is complex work for a limited, rarified few. So we focus on the idea that "you can be a scientist" and that "science is fun." Do these democratizing messages prevent us from pursuing interesting ways to present the extraordinary genius of some scientists and the incredible complexity and repetition of scientific work?

In art museums, we try to combat the notion that art is something your child can do, and if you like it, it's art. So we focus on the idea that "artists are special" and that "art is complicated." Do these elitist messages prevent us from exploring useful ways to honor the creativity in everyone and the simple pleasures of aesthetics?

It's ironic that the stereotypes we're trying to run from lead us to each other.


Thank you to the ISEN listserv for helping spark this post, via the controversy over Richard Dawkins' denigrating remarks about informal science.

In another single-topic Digital Campus, we react to the news that Dan is headed to the Digital Public Library of America as its Executive Director (no tears, no tears) by forcing him to tell us all about it. Special guests on the podcast include Berkman Center and DPLA Technical Workstream member David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know and Everything is Miscellaneous as well as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Big Switch. Issues raised include Internet centralization, the future of public libraries, and Mr. Potato Head.

Links
Nicholas Carr, “The Library of Utopia,” MIT Technology Review, April 25, 2012. Available at http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/427628/the-library-of-utopia/

Running time: 49:45
Download the .mp3

Regular readers of this blog know that in 2008 I created a course called “Lying About the Past” in which my students studied how, over the past several centuries, a variety of people have created false versions of the past, for fun or profit. The goal of the course was to teach my students much greater skepticism about historical sources, especially online historical sources, and I feel very confident in saying that the course, which I taught a second time in 2012, achieved that goal with flying colors.

What made this course controversial, to a small degree in 2008 and to a much wider degree in 2012, was that in each iteration of the course the students created a historical hoax and turned it loose online for ten days to see if they could fool anyone. Because we were not in the business of creating what a colleague calls “zombie facts,” the students exposed their hoaxes after the allotted ten days and then assessed what had and hadn’t worked in their project and why.

Those who disagreed with the notion that my students should turn their (very innocuous) hoaxes loose for a few days felt that I was teaching my students to behave in very unethical ways, that we were somehow polluting the web, or that we had violated something one critic called the implied “academic trust network” that exists online. Of course, my students and I completely understood these criticisms–they were all issues we discussed in great detail in the course. You had to be there each semester to see the care my students took thinking through these and other ethical issues to understand just how central ethical discussions were to the entire course. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that my students spent more time discussing the ethics of the historical profession in this course than in any other history course they have taken or will take.

In 2012 I proposed to my department that Lying About the Past be made a part of the regular curriculum of the department, by which I mean the course would receive its own number and be added to the university catalog as one optional course among dozens that we offer. The undergraduate committee in my department decided that the proposal could go forward only if I agreed to change the central component of the course–make the hoaxes purely classroom presentations rather than turning them loose online. Because the fact that the hoaxes would be placed in front of an unknown audience is the thing that gave the course its energy, its excitement, and made it fun, changing the format in this way would have turned the class project into yet another abstract classroom only exercise and would have sucked the life out of the course. I therefore declined to make the change and the undergraduate committee subsequently rejected my proposal.

What this means is that I won’t be teaching Lying About the Past any longer at George Mason, which I’m sure will make my critics happy, especially Jimmy Wales, who pronounced himself “annoyed” about the whole thing.

But I also think it’s worth considering what the decision of the undergraduate committee means in terms of how we regulate teaching as opposed to research. In essence, my colleagues (who, by the way, I respect very much) decided that it was acceptable to tell a faculty member that he could not teach a course because they disagreed with the teaching methodology. Can you imagine the furor that would ensue if the word “research” were substituted for “teaching” in the previous sentence?

I asked several of my colleagues who had been at Mason for more than 20 years if they could remember a time when a professor had been denied the right to teach a course as he/she saw fit and none could. It’s an interesting and potentially disturbing precedent my colleagues have set, because it says that teaching methods can be regulated in ways we would never allow when it comes to our research.

I have another course up my sleeve that will be almost, but not quite as disruptive to our notions of how history can be taught as Lying About the Past was, and my department chair has signed off on it.  As soon as it is in the schedule of classes, I’ll be sure to post an advance notice here.

[NB: I'm posting this on March 31, not April 1 so that it's clear the entire above message is not a hoax. Trust me, it's not.]

[NB #2:For a recent interview with me about the course, see Aleks Krotoski's piece on DML Central. For how the work of this class fits into a wider framework of mischief making, listen to Aleks's "Digital Human" show on BBC 4 radio from April 1, 2013.]

[NB #3: The Chronicle of Higher Education did a follow story on this post. Read it here if you can get past their paywall.]

[NB#4: This post was republished by the London School of Economics' "Impact of Social Sciences" blog on April 10, 2013.]

Dear Nico,

I had this written two days ago, on time. Then the web host was broken. We can’t win! Except we do, every day, and then I sit down to write these letters and they don’t come out funny like Dooce’s at all. They come out maudlin and sappy. I’m hopelessly in love with you, is what.

You’re beautiful. I think so, the world thinks so, and Molly and her camera think so too. Lucky us, huh?

photo by Molly Tomlinson

A few weeks ago you said your first Russian word. It’s шляпа, shlyapa, which means any kind of brimmed hat. I have no clue where you picked it up, but you clearly knew from the beginning what the word meant, despite there being no brimmed hats around the first couple of times. So I fixed that.

I’ve woken up in the dark morning bedroom to your tiny little voice next to me, whispering with a breathless wonder: shhhhhhhhlyapaaaaaaaa. The first couple of times you might’ve dreamed of it just prior; now, I’m pretty sure you do it partly to make me laugh. In all, not a bad way to wake up.

My belly button with the birthmark perched on its edge has become a weird little comfort object. You never nurse anymore without fidgeting until your hand finds it. Then you go all still (except for the feeding part) and watch my face, or space out.

You’re becoming measured in your old age. More deliberate in your actions. I can see inklings of little kid in the way you ponder flavors. This month was my birthday, and we had a Cheesemas party, which is just what it sounds like, so then there was a ton of cheese left in the house, and man, you love Dubliner. Even more than you love cheddar.

You also love baby broccoli, chicken, rice, teething biscuits, and your babushka’s cooking. And those homeopathic teething pills, which have a faintly sweet nondescript taste and an inexplicable calming effect on you. Mostly I think homeopathy is bunk, but if it’s doing something to relieve your teething pain, who am I to argue?

Speaking of pain: the older you get, the harder it is for you to let go of pain. You’ve begun processing it as deeply unfair. You’re the most pathetic little thing when you’re hurting. On the other hand, the other weekend when you burned your thumb on the oatmeal pot (all my fault), your lip got all trembly for a few seconds and then you forgot about it, even before I was able to see where you’d gotten burned.

Which is ok, because we’re not lacking for big feelings around here. On top of everything else, transitioning to a single nap during the day is an exercise in flexibility and zen.

But who am I kidding, mostly you’re still delighted with the world. You love watching the snow coming down. You turn up your face to feel the snowflakes, and get mad if I put up the car seat hood to “protect” you. You love the car seat, and riding in the car. You love little plastic Easter egg shells, which older kids are only too happy to give you since you ignore the candy stash. You love the Mystic river with its ducks and swans and wind. You love expeditions outside with shoes on, and sometimes march through the apartment right to the front door and demand to be let out. When it gets warmer, I’ll indulge us both.

You continue to charm your now-international audience. Yesterday you met my dear friend Jon, who lives and writes game-stories in that other Cambridge. Predictably, he’s now firmly on team NAZ. Now, if only we could figure out how to see him and his family more often than once every few years. Fancy a trip overseas?

Speaking of tripping: we’re going to Nebraska in July. What do you say we drive?

Love,
-Mama

PS pix

The academic community I’m most heavily involved in – Digital Humanities – are fairly invested in twitter. At all times of the day there are major figures, students, and newbies in the field on there, just hanging out, debating topics, forwarding links to events, job postings, interesting research and cool things they have stumbled upon. People have studied this – graphing and charting the discussions, especially around the DH conference, and heck, even I have co-authored a paper on the subject.
I’m currently working on a book/project called Defining Digital Humanities  and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to get all – and I mean all – the tweets that contain the hashtag #Digitalhumanities – what fun could be had charting the growth of the discipline, the geolocation of tweets, the networks that exist, the sentiments surrounding it – etc etc. Now, hindsight is a grand thing  - I should have thought to start scraping these back in 2006 – but surely it must be possible to get access to this for research? So I asked.
The first approach was to Gnip – who have “full historical access to the twitter firehose available exclusively”.  They were really very helpful, and we got into a conversation about my needs, their licensing, and – of course – costs. The upshot is that if you want a hashtag, you can get it for a price, with the text delivered in JSON format. I was quoted between $15,000 and $25,000 for the full historical set (depending on the exact volume of the data, they are now looking into it to give me the final figure - I and they dont yet know how many tweets there are containing this hashtag).
The second place I asked was Datasift– “the leading platform for building applications with insights derived from the most popular social networks and news sources”.  They do have access to the historical twitter firehose, but they don’t do one off searches, and licensing will start at $3000 per month to get access to it (on a yearly contract). They will be launching a pay as you go service at some point, they tell me. By the way,  you can get $10 worth of free credit for processing if you sign up and play around with some current searches: I set a set for #digitalhumanities and I had run out of credit within a few hours. (I find the user interface very obfuscating  – I’m still wrangling with it to see what that data actually is!).
Now, these costs are very little compared to the costs to access the full firehose and lets face it – a free service like twitter has to make its money somewhere. These were not vexatious enquiries: I’d really like to do this study. But now I have to find $25k down the back of the sofa to get access to this data (and incidentally, if I do, I wont be allowed to quote it, only to show the stats that emerge from the analysis).  $25k is a fair whack of money in academia-land. It will also take around 6 months (at least) to write it into a grant proposal to raise the money – and how to persuade academic funders that buying this dataset is good use of their money? Frankly, I’m not sure that will fly in the arts and humanities, where complete grant costings can come under £100k for a one year project.
Thinking caps are now on to see how we can get funding put together to get access to the data of the community I – goddamit – helped (in some small way) to create. I love twitter with a passion and it continues to inform and aid my teaching and research. But when we invest so much in a free service, we are selling ourselves. It’s interesting to see how much #digitalhumanities is “worth” to others. Anyone got a free $25k?

So I'm reading Otto Neurath's "Universal Jargon and Terminology" (you know, like you do), and I see this on the first page:

"Bertrand Russell presented his classic thesaurus of symbolic tools;"

What text do you think Neurath has in mind?  (I didn't see any helpful/ illuminating context around this bit.)

If Neurath means the Principia, I think that would be hilarious; the last word I would use to describe that book is 'thesaurus'...

There's a constant dialogue in participatory work about how to make peoples' contributions meaningful. I've written about different structures for participatory processes (especially in museums), and recently, I've been interested in how we can apply these structures to the design of public space. Here in Santa Cruz, my museum has embarked on a major project to redevelop the plaza outside our doors into a vibrant, cultural hub for downtown, and we are trying to make the development process as open and useful as possible.

One of the key constituencies for this plaza are families. While we spend plenty of time talking with parents and adults about what makes a place "family-friendly," there's no substitute for kids' unique perspectives. In January, as part of a series of place-making workshops facilitated by the Project for Public Spaces, we worked with a local dad to coordinate a workshop explicitly for kids (full writeup here). Their ideas were delightful, and their contributions shifted the conversation about what family-friendly really looks like.

I came out of the workshop with a mixture of joy and unease. What should we do with the ideas the kids had generated? How does their participation, which is expressed in a somewhat haphazard and spontaneous fashion, integrate with that of adults? I'm not suggesting that the kids are less valuable as participants than their parents--or even less realistic in their impulses and desires--but that our whole adult approach to collaborative processes doesn't easily absorb youthful exuberance.

Kids frequently suffer from tokenism. We given them a gold star for participating and then sweep their drawings under the rug. Children are easy to applaud, and easy to ignore.

This grappling led me to a fascinating "ladder of participation" about kids' engagement in environmental design written by Dr. Roger Hart of Cornell (1992 paper). While Dr. Hart is focused on the design of public gardens, his overall message is broad: there is participation, and there is tokenism. He's explicit about different project structures and their implications, listing five levels of participation and three of non-participation. Here's a synopsis:

Participation 1. Child-initiated, shared decisions with adults:

• Goal isn’t about “kids’ power.”
• Young people feel competent and confident enough in their role as community members to understand the need for collaboration and that in asking adults for their input, the project may be strengthened.
• Lots of trust involved
• Adults serve as listeners, observers and sounding boards (i.e. they don’t jump in with their own designs on the project, or to organize the project). For example, young people may determine that they want to clean up an old wooded hang out area in their community to create a nature trail. They learn about all aspects of creating such a trail, hold meetings to plan it, but check in with a friend’s parent in local government, several parents, and a teacher with an interest in ecology, for their diverse ways of thinking about certain aspects the project.

2. Child-initiated and directed projects:

• Adults notice a youth-led project emerging and allow them to occur in a youth-directed fashion.
• Hart places this second on the ladder because occasionally young people don’t trust adults enough to seek their input. The caution with this rung is in children carrying out their projects in secret because of fear of adults, or being intimidated by them. An example is a literally secret garden/ landscape that adults are not aware of.

3. Adult-initiated, shared decisions with children:

• Adults assume nothing about what children want in the landscape.
• Children are involved to some degree on every part of the process of garden planning, design, and implementation.
• Children understand issues such as fundraising, garden design, or organization and management
• Children understand how and why compromises are made, if they are necessary. They may also begin to cultivate a “language” of talking about this with others.

4. Children are consulted and informed about project:

• Project designed and run by adults, but the children’s views and opinions are taken seriously.
• A good example is with a survey designed to gather young people’s input into a school garden: children are informed of the purpose, they may be asked to volunteer, and afterward, they are fully informed of the results.

5. Assigned but informed:

• Children are assigned to a project and may not initiate the project themselves, but they are fully informed about it (i.e. a school garden project)
• Children may still have a sense of real ownership of the project.
• A key aspect of this rung is the degree to which children are engaged in critical reflection. For example, are children just viewed as a free source of help for the garden project, or do they have a chance to reflect on it, consider it, and learn from it?

Non-Participation 6. Tokenism:

• The most challenging and most common among very well-meaning adults.
• Adults are genuinely concerned about giving children a voice, but haven’t really begun to think carefully about the best approach for this.
• The appearance of children’s involvement is there, but in fact, they have had little choice about planning the garden project, communication around it, and no time in which to critically reflect and form their own opinions.
• An example is that adults select charming, articulate youth to talk about the garden in a public venue, but those youth haven’t had ample opportunity to critically reflect or consult with their peers. The key here is symbolic versus actual engagement and involvement.

7. Decoration:

• Involves, quite literally, decorating children
• For example, they may sport garden T-shirts with no involvement in organizing or understanding the program.
• Adults use children to bolster the program as if the children were understanding participants.
• For example, adults make children sing garden songs at a harvest festival, and it may even appear that they wrote the song, or that they were involved in organizing the garden or the festival, when in fact they were not.

8. Manipulation or Deception:

• Adults consciously use children’s voices to carry their own message about the gardening project.
• For example, they produce a garden poster, advertisement, or publication with drawings by children, when children aren’t involved in the program planning.
• Adults may deny their own detailed involvement in meetings, planning, shaping the project because they think it diminishes the effectiveness or impact of the project – they may say that children are genuinely engaged, when engagement constitutes weeding or planting.
• Adults may design a garden, have kids do a simple planting, then tell the local newspaper that kids designed and built the garden. 

Reading this ladder reminded me how easy it is to fall into the "non-participation" part of the ladder when working with any amateur participants, but especially with children. The explicit nature of the examples on levels six through eight (especially "decoration") may also be helpful in identifying times that we are treating adults as non-participants in more understated ways. We may not dress them up and make them sing songs about our projects, but sometimes, we might as well.

In the case of my project, level four is probably what is appropriate. We are engaged in active collaboration with so many stakeholders for this plaza, and kids are important but secondary contributors to the process. But more broadly, I can look at this and think about what we DON'T want to be doing--with any of our participants. Thank you, Roger Hart, for reminding me of the range of participatory opportunities and non-opportunities a project can provide... and how disastrous it can be when our words and our actions are misaligned. Let's make sure not to decorate our projects with false participation where real collaboration is possible.

Ken Arnold (Wellcome Collection) and I had a joint sesssion titled “Integrating research, acquisitioning, curation, exhibition making and events in museums” at the Danish national museum meeting in Horsens, two weeks ago. Based on this predistributed session abstract:

Drawing on our experiences from the Medical Museion and the Wellcome Collection, respectively, we suggest that a successful and productive in­tegration of these functions of the museum does not involve creating or­ganisational structures, but rather the cultivation of curiosity and a ‘will to inquire’. A research spirit can stimulate exhibitions, events and curator­ship, and vice versa the handling of material objects can give rise to new and interesting research problems.

we gave two short introductory talks followed by a long general discussion. Here’s my (untitled) intro talk.

Ken Arnold and I are running two venues which are in some ways very similar and yet quite different.

Similar in the sense that we address some of the basic questions concerning human existence – questions about life and death, well-being and disease. We’re dealers in the sublime – because we investigate the future prospects of the human body which are simultaneously very frightening and deeply fascinating.

But different in the sense that the Wellcome Collection is extremely well-endowed and situated in one of the busiest roads in a globalised Metropolis with hundreds of thousands of visitors per year, whereas the Medical Museion is placed in a sleepy part of Wonderful Copenhagen with a much smaller budget and one-tenth of their visitor numbers.

However, our venues are also both similar and different with respect to the theme of this conference – in the way we handle the interaction between the activities we mention in the title of this session: research, acquisitioning, curation, exhibition making and events. In this respect, the similarity between is that we see this integration not as a organisational question, but a question of spirit.

The fundamental spirit here is what we call a research attitude. As we say in the abstract, we both think in terms of what we call “the cultivation of curiosity and a ‘will to inquire’”.

This is an attitude that goes both ways. It means making exhibitions, launch events, handle the collections, and bring in new acquisitions in the spirit of curiosity. It means trying to make all such activities inquiry-driven. On the other hand, it also means that the handling of material objects, images and archives, and the making of exhibitions, is a daily generator of interesting research questions.

The slight difference between our venues in this respect is in the way we have moved towards this position. Wellcome Collection started as an exhibition and event venue, and then Ken, very much through his own initiative and his own research background in the history of science and history of museums, brought an attitude of research, curiousity, and playfulness into these public engagement activities.

Medical Museion, on the other hand, grew out of an academic research project, which then gradually broadened to include more and more of the traditional museum activities. I came to Copenhagen a decade ago — to what was then called a medical history museum and basically was a huge collection of medical historical artefacts — as a professor in the history of medicine and with a traditional university mindset, meaning that research and teaching (from undergraduate to PhD level) is the basic rationale for everything one does.

At that time I was still thinking of research exclusively in terms of the publication of scholarly books on serious university presses and research articles in peer-reviewed journals (as most of my university colleagues still do). From the university’s and my own point of view at that time, public engagement, including exhibitions and events, were pretty subordinate activities. Not to speak about collections; they weren’t even mentioned in the university’s strategy documents and in my view they were largely a burden and a nuisance.

But during the last ten years, I have gradually widened and broadened my notion of research. I began to think about collecting (acquisitions) and exhibition making, and even public events, not just as outreach, or at best as raw experiences for writing research publications, but as a form of creative research activity in their own right. And from then on I began to think about everything we do in the museum from the point of view of the researcher and in terms of an experimental mindset.

To be experimental here means that we try, as far as possible, to think about all activities at Medical Museion — exhibition making, event making, acquisitions, collection management, organising seminars, etc. – as ongoing experiments. We continuously try to work out new and interesting activities, which haven’t been tried before, instead of applying already existing ideas. That part of the rationale of being a university museum.

• For example, we’ve experimented with very narrow exhibition formats, e.g. in the Obesity exhibition, which is not a historical exhibition about obesity as a cultural phenomenon, but focuses on a very special kind of surgical operation, called gastric bypass, and other cutting-edge metabolic research projects at the medical faculty. The experimental attitude here was to try transforming some of the basic concepts and aesthetic aspects of the clinic and medical research laboratory into the exhibition space.
• Another example is our current temporary exhibition Biohacking, which is an experiment in bringing do-it-yourself biology activists into the museum, letting them coproduce a combination of working laboratory, exhibition room, event and public conference around the topic of biohacking.
• A third example is that we’re experimenting with the borderlines between research seminar, curatorial workspace and event. Last week we organized an international workshop called It’s Not What You Think, where we gathered some 40 scholars to not only discuss but also to handle and curate objects in our collections.

To have a research attitude in these and other cases means not only to conceive and perform them as experiments, but also allow time to reflect upon the experiments, and write about and publish them – to bring the experiences into the public sphere. So we still publish a lot in traditional research journals, but increasingly we’ve begun to experiment with the publication medium. So we’re putting a lot emphasis on using a variety of social media – our combined blog and website, Facebook, Google+, and especially Twitter as a medium for discussing the experiments.

Summing up, in my view, museum should, to a much larger extent, become ‘museological laboratories’. Actually, I don’t think museology, or museum studies, should be taught in courses in academic departments separated from museum practice. Museology is not a set of dogmas or principles that can be learned from textbooks and lectures and then applied in museums — it is an experimental and research attitude that must permeat the daily museum work from early morning to late evening.

Visit the new online version of Biohacking – Do It Yourself! and explore the open biology lab at Medical Museion through photos, recipes, texts and videos:

In the online exhibition you can look at pictures and videos from events in the open lab, browse through links to hacker spaces around the world as well as loads of photos, read articles about the exhibition or try our basic biohack recipes and Do It Yourself!

This week, the Santa Cruz Weekly's cover story is about my museum (the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History) and the work we have done to make it a more participatory, community-centered place over the past two years. The article captures a lot about our approach, from prototyping to perpetual beta to working with artists to developing successful frameworks for diverse visitors to participate. The author, Georgia Perry, talks about her own participatory reticence and how our programming invited her into active engagement in a safe and exciting way. Perry describes me as the "conductor" of a community-programmed orchestra. I love this image--not controlling everything, just helping steer the way and keep us moving forward.

I feel really lucky and grateful to live in a community that is so supportive of and engaged in experimentation in museums.

Let me know what you think of the article either here or on the Weekly's site. Enjoy!


INNOVATOR DRIVES MUSEUM'S SUCCESS


The three years I spent as the girlfriend of a stand up comedian taught me one very important lesson: You do not, under any circumstances, sit in the front row. I learned my lesson early on, after a knockoff Adam Sandler-type at a chintzy Long Island club spent three of his allotted five minutes commenting on the simple fact that I was eating a sandwich. “She’s got a sandwich! What kind is it? Turkey? Turkey! Everyone, she’s got a turkey sandwich!” I felt like I was on the bus to middle school and a bully had hijacked the driver’s PA system, announcing the contents of my lunch box to all the other kids. After that I stayed far away from the stage, watching from the backs of dimly lit rooms as other sorry audience members got trapped in the horrifying death march that is “participation.” Because of Nina Simon.And yet, if all of what I described above is true—which it is—why then, did I leave the Museum of Art and History (the MAH) in downtown Santa Cruz on a recent Friday evening having (a) willingly contributed to a chalk-written poem on a staircase, (b) posed jauntily for a photograph intended for public display on the museum’s website while (c) holding up a colorful tissue-paper collage I made at some sort of wax art station, standing shoulder to shoulder with a half-dozen strangers? While arts attendance is dwindling across the country, there is one place where Americans still are participating—the Internet. About 1 billion people use Facebook. YouTube has 800 million users. By contrast, the National Endowment for the Arts found that only 51 million people went to an art museum in the U.S. in 2008 (the most recent year for which they have data). But here in Santa Cruz, Simon is convinced that the two worlds can be merged. Called a “museum visionary” by Smithsonian magazine, Nina Simon and her staff—one of whom moved here from Sweden solely for the chance to learn from her—have transformed downtown’s Museum of Art and History (MAH) from a traditional and largely unknown museum into a thriving, active hub for the entire city of Santa Cruz by asking one question: “How do we take what makes participation work on the web and embed it into a physical space?”  Creators vs. Critics In her book, The Participatory Museum, Simon references a study by Forrester Research, which found that online audiences participate in five different ways. There are “creators” who produce content, “critics” who rate and review, “collectors” who organize and aggregate links, “joiners” who maintain accounts on sites like Facebook, and “spectators” who read blogs and watch YouTube videos.  It is no surprise that there are far more “spectators,” “joiners” and “critics” than there are “creators.” Not everyone wants to be front and center, and thankfully that’s not the only way to participate. Take YouTube for example. “While I agree that museums should not focus on showcasing videos of cats doing silly things, as a platform,” Simon writes, “YouTube is an extraordinary service…your participation as a view affects the status of each video in the system. Just by watching, you are an important participant.” With an understanding of what works on the web, Simon has refocused the goals of the MAH and turned it into a warm, interactive place. The success of the museum since she became executive director in May 2011 is staggering. Attendance more than doubled in her first year, rocketing from 17,349 up to 37,361 visitors. “Nationally, 10 percent growth in attendance is considered astronomical growth in a museum,” says Simon, “and so to have 120 percent growth is just totally wild.”  Rocket Science—With Puppets! Lacking an art history background, Simon instead studied engineering and math in college. She began her career at NASA, engineering prototypes for remote sensing of the Earth’s surface. In her spare time she volunteered at a science museum, doing electronics workshops and puppet shows about math. She eventually left the lucrative job at NASA to pursue museum work full time—a scary decision, especially considering her first museum job after NASA paid seven dollars an hour, and Simon was indeed scared. But she didn’t let that stop her. “It’s not that she’s less worried or intimidated than anyone else at the start of a new challenge, but that she is very determined that she’s gonna overcome that,” says her husband Sibley. “If she needs to change then she will change and learn something new. She has a very strong can-do spirit.” Her engineering brain stayed with her through the career change, and today she successfully uses the tools of prototyping, data-driven experimentation and what she calls “the engineering design cycle” to get back-of-the-room people like me to participate at her museum. And participate they do. People are so involved at the MAH that Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Downtown Association Chip says that audiences not only participate at the museum, they create it. “Nina has been brilliant in that she’s not programming [the museum]. She’s got an amazing staff, and they’re not programming it either. The community is programming the museum,” he says. Sweatshirt Storytelling If Santa Cruz is orchestrating the MAH, it’s safe to say that Simon is the conductor. In an afternoon spent at the museum with her—the careful engineering quietly influencing each participatory exercise, each community member contribution—this becomes clearer and clearer. In her office, which features an entire wall covered in comment cards from the MAH’s visitors, she pulls a blue Post-It note off her computer monitor. “Kept her sweatshirt forever,” it reads. A museum attendee wrote that as a contribution to part of an exhibition called “Love Gone Wrong” in spring of 2012. The staff at the MAH painted a broken heart on the wall with a prompt that said, “After the breakup I…” They left a bunch of Post-Its and pencils and let people finish the sentence. After the breakup I kept her sweatshirt forever. “I keep a lot of things people have made, but this is one of my favorites,” says Simon. “We can’t write a label that tells this story.” But the appearance of that poetic Post-It wasn’t just dumb luck. At a staff meeting prior to the event, she and her staff each wrote a question related to breakups on a piece of paper. Then they passed the papers around and answered each other’s questions. “When you look at the answers it becomes pretty obvious that some questions are good, and some questions are shitty,” Simon says. “We think a lot about how we design these prompts. You start to realize pretty quickly that everybody has good stories in them… And it’s my job as the designer of the space and the experience to figure out what kind of framework I can give you so that you can bring your best, most interesting self forward.” One floor below Simon’s office, painter/sculptor Thomas Campbell is working on a behemoth 75-foot long mural, which won’t be finished for several weeks. But that’s precisely the point—his painting is intended to showcase the process of creating art, thereby making it more approachable. (It was part of the museum’s “Work in Progress” exhibit in March.) Since starting the project, Campbell has played host to a number of school groups, and has tried to instill in them the essence of the MAH: “The first thing I say when school groups come in is, ‘Are you guys artists?’ Pretty much they’ll all say, ‘I don’t know!’ Then I say, ‘So do you guys all do art?’ And they say, ‘Yeah, of course.’ And then I say, ‘That means you’re an artist! You’re artists! Making art is being an artist!’ “Everyone’s an artist until they stop being one,” he adds. Simon nods grandly at this. “I feel like what you’re talking about is what we’re trying to do on a big picture. Saying, ‘Yeah, you are creating, you’re not just here to look at stuff.’” On our way out of Campbell’s gallery she points out an arrangement of three couches and a coffee table in the hallway, saying there used to be a “scary desk” there instead. “We are always about incremental progress,” she says. “We had people donate furniture. Is it the most gorgeous thing it could be? No. But people want to sit down and have a social experience, and it’ll keep getting better.” Unfinished Products “A traditional museum approaches exhibits by saying, ‘We’ll design it. We’ll build it. We’ll open it. And then we’ll see at that point if it works.’ That’s not what we do. We say, ‘Let’s figure out a prototype we can make with just cardboard and some printouts, and let’s take it out onto the floor with visitors to test.’ We’re really comfortable bringing out things that are unfinished and not worrying that everything has to be perfect,” Simon says.   The MAH wasn’t always this way, though. Before she came on board, Simon says the museum “was seen as a cold place. It was seen as a place where not a lot was happening. It was seen as a stuffy place. It was seen as a traditional place.” The museum’s board decided they wanted to cultivate more of a welcoming environment for the community to gather and participate. Simon, who was doing consulting at museums across the globe, was the right woman for the job. Hiring Simon was “a really big moment for the museum and community in terms of the role of museums,” says the Downtown Association’s Chip. He calls what she did at the MAH “revolutionary,” and has been pleased to see how the museum’s makeover impacted Santa Cruz’s monthly First Friday events. “When Nina came on board, right away they were open for First Fridays. They started stepping up and really participating and being active…The museum has played a huge role in First Friday’s growth. A lot of people have the idea, ‘It’s First Friday, let’s go start at the museum, and then we can fan out from there to all over town.’ There’s a certain gravity that has been really valuable to First Friday,” he says. First Friday night events are by far the MAH’s most popular, generally drawing crowds of close to 2,000. Regular weekday attendance is rarely more than eight or ten people. In addition, the MAH holds themed Third Friday events and is open late on second and fourth Fridays, too. Third Fridays are organized by the museum’s Director of Community Programs, Stacey Marie Garcia, and usually bring in between 300 and 500 visitors. For every Third Friday event, Garcia works with anywhere from 30 to 150 different organizations that come together to create themed events with dozens of stations for people to participate. Because of the MAH’s growing reputation as a hub for the community, more and more artists and organizations are coming to the MAH, asking how they can get involved in producing a Friday night event. “Last year we had a woman named Anna Pollack come in and say that there’s this issue about the bee population depleting and she would love to raise awareness about that. So she worked with us to design this entire event around the idea. We showed the bee film, we had bee keepers come in—they stayed in a case, so it was good—we did some activities with encaustics using wax,” Garcia says.   Garcia met Simon while in art history graduate school in Sweden. Simon came to lecture the same day she got the job at the MAH. Garcia immediately asked if she needed an intern, and followed her to Santa Cruz. She has since been hired full time. “I came because I knew [Simon] is doing innovative things in the museum world right now and making huge steps. I wanted to learn from that,” she says. “It’s unique to work in an organization where your boss is pushing you to do the wildest and craziest thing you can. I think that’s why we’ve been successful in certain areas—because we take risks.”  Let It Burn The biggest risk they’ve taken, says Garcia, was last spring’s Glow/Fire Festival. Burning Man artists approached the MAH about doing a fire festival. “Go for it,” said Simon, and Garcia set about coordinating with the city, the fire department and, of course, the artists to ensure the event was a success. It was, and they have another one planned for October 2013. Garcia has been consistently impressed by the community’s contributions, dedicating time to participate in and organize events. “It takes a lot of dedication and drive. We’re lucky. We’re really lucky. Nina’s been a big driver in that. She really changed the way the community viewed the museum and the way the museum viewed the community, too.”
Article reposted with permission from Santa Cruz Weekly.

I'm in Milan for the ifbookthen conference. Corriere della Serra (the leading Italian newspaper) asked me for an opinion piece they could publish in La Lettura, their weekly magazine, on the occasion of the meeting. This is what I gave...

Sometimes opportunities presents themselves out of the blue. When I was asked to give a lecture on social media in emergency settings at the Master of Disaster Management at University of Copenhagen, I didn’t quite feel like an expert on the topic (as I wrote about in an earlier post). But it did not take much research to realised that the combination of social media and disaster/emergency management is super interesting and an example of how social media can play a role in saving lives. It doesn’t get much more public health relevant than that.

Both preparing for the lecture and teaching was a good experience, and I feel I managed in the 3×45 minutes available to get around the topic in a comprehensive way – although with that time frame it can only be an introduction. In addition, I got great feedback from the students who, coming from all over the world, had different experiences with dealing with disasters, which they could contribute with in the discussions.

More than communicating a message

Social Media & Crisis Comm: A Whole New Game

In my experience the first (and sometimes only) thing that comes people’s mind when they think of what social media can be used for in emergency settings is dissemination of information and messages to the public. Social media are simply categorized as yet another communication channel equal to radio, tv etc. But as it is well illustrated in the YouTube video on the right (click the picture) it is much more than that.

With this experience it was important for me in my lecture to highlight some of the other key functions of social media in disasters. Below are four broad categories for the potential use of social media in emergency situations. There are surely other ways social media can be used and as said the four below are quite broad and thus covers lots of sub-functions.

1. Disseminate disaster information to the public by governments, emergency management organisations, and disaster responders
2. Share disaster information with the aim of having journalists and others pick it up so that it can be further disseminated to the affected members of the public
3. Communicate and enter into dialogue with the public, other institutions etc.
4. Gather information about the emergency by monitoring the situation, identifying areas of need and picking up rumours and misunderstandings.

Safe & Well

One advantage of teaching (and of blogging) is that you get so much feedback and suggestions for new things to read, websites to visit etc. I thought I’d share two of these tips with you. The first is a website that a student in the class recommended. It is called Safe & Well and is provided by the American Red Cross. The idea is that after a disaster, people in the affected area can through this website let their family and friends know that they are safe and well. By clicking the button “List Myself as Safe and Well” you register on the site. Relatives can then search the list of those who have registered themselves as “safe and well” by clicking on the “Search Registrants” button. The results of a successful search will display a loved one’s first name, last name and a brief message.

Facebook and extreme weather events

My previous post on social media and disaster management was commented by a researcher from Aarhus University, Andreas Birkbak, who had authored an interesting article about the use of Facebook for informal emergency collaboration during a snow blizzard on the Island of Bornholm in Denmark. A very interesting article that I might use next time I teach. Read the article your self: Crystallizations in the Blizzard: Contrasting Informal Emergency Collaboration In Facebook Group. Thanks for sharing it on the blog, Andreas!

Take home messages

As said, I have quickly come to find social media and disaster management is a very interesting topic and I have a feeling I’ll continue digging deeper into it. This will probably result in more posts on the topic here on this blog, so I think I’ll stop for now. As I ended my lecture I will also end this blog post – with four take home messages:

• Social media is there in the world and will be used in disaster situations whether you like it or not – you can’t afford to disregard it!
• Social media can (and should) be used for much more than dissemination – take advantage of its possibilities to monitor and get into dialogue!
• Social media is not just a tool for you – it is also a tool for the people affected by the disaster – victims as well as relatives
• When working with disaster management don’t hold back from social media because you’re afraid of making mistakes, because you will make mistakes – just make sure you learn from them!

Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece
in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! project. It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement... so I was intrigued when I heard about a recent success from Jeffrey Inscho, Web and Digital Media Manager at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. In this guest post, Jeffrey shares the story behind their big hit with a visitor co-created exhibition.

Several months ago, a cross-departmental group of staffers at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh got together to explore ways the museum could become more flexible, nimble and interactive with respect to way we engage audiences, both on-site and online. The result of those meetings and brainstorming sessions recently manifested itself in our Forum Gallery as an experimental photography project called Oh Snap! Your Take on Our Photographs.

Project Background I don't want to get lost in the weeds with respect to the mechanics and back-end details, but I think it's important to include some context about the project so we can effectively explore what's working and what's not. At its core, Oh Snap! is a project that lets real-world and virtual visitors share their work in our gallery. The museum selected and is featuring 13 works recently added to our photography collection. Each work was specifically chosen for its potential to inspire creative responses. We then invited people to submit their own photographic responses (via the web) inspired by one of the 13 works from the project.

Each day, the museum prints out new submitted photographs and hangs them alongside their inspirations in the gallery. When a participant's work is selected, we let them know via email when it will be on view, and send out a free admission pass so they can visit their submission in the museum.
It's a bit complicated to explain in writing, but this video does a good job of summarizing the project.

We're seeing tons of excitement around this project and a huge level of participation, especially for a museum just dipping its toe in the waters of open authority. Since the project launch on February 21, we've received 685 submissions from participants across the United States, Europe and South America.

Here are some reasons why I think Oh Snap! is killing it:

We See Participants as Partners The thesis of Oh Snap! hinges on the ideas experimentation, uncertainty and partnership. We opened the gallery with empty walls (save the 13 collection works) and it could have very well stayed that way until the project closes in April. We took a HUGE risk when we trusted our audience to help us create something cool, not only on the web, but in a museum.

A website can fail softly, however there's no avoiding the awkwardness if we open a gallery and have nothing on the walls for several months. I think participants realize that we're relying on them to make this work.

We Make it Easy Another key to the success of the project is that we lowered the barrier of entry for participants. Graphically, both on-site and online, the project is very inviting. Warm purple tones invite curiosity and modern iconography convey relevance to a younger, digitally-connected demographic.

We built a responsive website that renders elegantly across all devices and capitalizes on user impulse by allowing participants to submit photos instantly from their mobile phone or tablet's camera roll, as well as desktop computers. We also developed the site so each submitted photo had its own URL and threaded comment stream so discussions could take place around the submitted works. Social integrations are important so we infused easy sharing via Facebook and Twitter wherever possible.

When early feedback indicated users were confused about the submission process, we fine-tuned our language and quickly produced a promo video that distills the complete process in a hilarious 2-minute story.

In the gallery, we hung custom-made Post-It note pads on object title cards so visitors could take a reminder to submit an image with them when they left the gallery. We put couches and a coffee table in the room to entice visitors to spend time with the works and create a comfortable environment.

We did all of this to make it as easy as possible for someone to be a part of the project. We don't have control over whether or not a visitor participates, but we can control the participation environment so it is a delightful experience.

We Blur Digital and Real-World Experiences The biggest difference between Oh Snap! and other crowd-sourced photography projects is the physical manifestation of tactile objects in the gallery. Too often, projects like this live exclusively on the web and have no "real-world" presence. We knew from the beginning that this project needed to effectively marry the digital with the real-world, with the goal of blurring lines between the two.

We found humor and fun to be great bridges between the physical and digital environments. From the language used on the website and in automated emails, to the promo video, to the gallery texts and Launch Party, we took every opportunity to infuse fun at every interaction point, be it online or in the gallery. This common thread unifies a multi-platform project like Oh Snap! and creates a consitent experience no matter how or where a user interacts with the project.

We See No Finish Line Finally, and perhaps the most vital component to the success of the project is its unfinished nature. Oh Snap! is truly an "exhibition in beta." It's evolving and living and organic. We can change up the gallery if we need to. We can change the way the website functions or add elements as we need them. We're not locked into a traditional exhibition format and we have the ability to stay nimble.

We've also structured this project so we can maintain an ongoing dialog with participants even after the Oh Snap! gallery closes. When this project is officially over, we'll take what we learned and apply it to the next experiment, hopefully building on the work and insights gained from this project. We're not sure what that next experiment will be, but we're looking forward to trying something new.

If you have a question or comment for Jeffrey and the Oh Snap! team, please share it. Jeffrey will be checking in here over the next couple of weeks to respond.