ECHO Blogging Central

‘An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists‘. I have wanted to mention this article published in PLOS Biology ever since it came out in April 2013, but somehow never got around to it. But as I reread it earlier this week, I was reminded how this article must be mentioned on a blog like mine.

An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists is written by Holly M. Bik and Miriam C. Goldstein from University of California Davis and University of California San Diego and is an excellent place to start for researchers considering trying out social media or for enthusiasts of social media for science communication who are in search of good arguments they can use to persuade others of why they must set up a Twitter account, start blogging or establish some other form of online presence.

Research Benefits and flowcharts

Supported by lots of examples (with links provided to many of them!) the authors list a number of ways in which social media can benefit both the scientist and the scientific work. In short form these are:

• How online tools can help improve research efficiency;
• How being visible on social media helps track and improve scientific metrics;
• How social media enhances professional networking; and
• How online interactions have the potential to enhance ‘‘broader impacts’’ by improving communication between scientists and the general public.

They go on to address different kinds of social media and how they can be used, and provide advice to new users on how to get started. A useful (and fun) feature of the article is a flowchart that can help newcomers find out which media might be most relevant for them to try out and solution to common online communication fears.

Acknowledging the stigma

Throughout the article the authors mention the stigma which is often attached to online activities. They acknowledge how many researchers are skeptical towards the media and regards it as a waste of time and a distraction from true scientific work. In a response to this the authors have set out to address some of the many misconceptions and misinterpretations of what social media can contribute with. And in my opinion it works. One could argue that they don’t spend much energy on the risks or disadvantages of social media for science communication (of which there are of course several), but they are plenty to be found elsewhere.

Need for formal training

Social media among scientists is quickly growing and will eventually become more and more natural for scientists to use (if not sooner than as the younger generation whom have grown up with social media enter the research arena). But until then there is a need to train on researchers and scholars on the potential of social media in academic work. Both to address the many misconception and skepticism but also to avoid researchers use it inefficiently or inappropriately. I could therefore not agree more with the authors:

“Social media and internet-based resources are increasingly ubiquitous. Thus, there is a pressing need for scientific institutions to offer formalized training opportunities for graduate students and tenured faculty alike to learn how to effectively use this new technology”.

Most people working with science communication will probably have heard about Britain’s Science Media Centre (SMC) and perhaps also about its front woman Fiona Fox. In case you’ve never heard of it or can’t really remember what it is about the scientific journal ‘Nature’ recently published a news feature on SMC and Fiona Fox which gives a good overview of the centre, its concept and the critic it faces.

Science Media Centre (SMC) is an independent press office that works to get scientific voices into media coverage and policy debates. By doing so the aim is to improve the accuracy with which science is presented to the public. The Centre works with:

• journalists by providing them with information about science and its related disciplines; and putting them in contact with relevant scientists
• scientists, engineers and other experts by supporting them in engaging with the media and by creating more opportunities for them to get their voices.
• Press officers by supporting them when they are working on complex science, health and environment stories.

In addition, the SMC provides expert advice and evidence on issues relating to science in the media.

I won’t repeat the background or work of SMC further on this blog but instead refer to the Nature article or their Science Media Centre website. 

Social media and SMC?

Reading the Nature article with the interview with Fiona Fox and looking at SMC’s website it strikes me how reflections on the use of social media for science communication seems completely absent. It is not mentioned once in the article and on the website they link to their own Twitter account and Fiona Fox’s blog, but other than that there is no reference to social media as a tool or as medium for science communication.

Even in their Top tips for media work to help scientists to work with the media social media is not mentioned with a word, despite the fact that social media provides an excellent opportunity for scientists to communicate their research. Neither is it mentioned in their 10 best practice guidelines for reporting science & health stories. Of course these two guidelines are meant to be a tool on how to prepare for meeting the scientist/journalist and interpret correctly what information they are looking for or sit with, but none the less social media is only growing in influence also among scientists, so advice on checking out if the researcher is blogging about his or her field or using other social media could be worth including. As could advice to scientists on using social media to communicate themselves and use this communication channel as a resource to guide journalists too.

In the Nature article, Fiona Fox says that the part of her job in which she takes the most pride, is convincing once-timid scientists to join the SMC database and speak out. “A real triumph for us is getting a scientist who has worked for 30 years on a really controversial issue and has never spoken to the media,” she says. I wonder if she also encourages them to take communication into their own hands and start communicating through social media as well or if she mainly thinks of them talking to journalists who then do the communication or sign up on the SMC scientist roster….. All in all, I guess I’m quite unclear about what SMC and Fiona Fox thinks of social media for science communication.

I spent the weekend queuing up posts for my forthcoming blog-cation--nine weeks of guest posts and reruns from the Museum 2.0 vaults that will commence next week. It feels like a real gift to myself (and hopefully, to you) to schedule all this content now and not have to worry about it when my baby is born. Thank you to everyone who recommended a favorite post from the past or who helped out with a guest post. You're in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more.

I've never taken a break from blogging before. Every week for almost seven years, I've made sure to get new content up on the blog. And as I leafed through the back-catalog, corresponded with brilliant guest posters, and watched my blog-related stress float away, I found myself wondering: what the heck took me this long?

And that got me thinking about why I blog in the first place. I blog for four main reasons:

1. I'm a self-directed learner who likes to write. Blogging gave me a way to formalize out-of-work learning in a format I enjoy. I didn't want to write about something I was an expert on; I wanted to write to explore new ideas, share my questions and ideas, and learn from the experience.
2. I'm sufficiently externally-driven to realize that having a public place for my learning helps me stay focused and keep producing. Whether I had three readers or 3,000, I feel accountable to those folks to keep writing and sharing. Sometimes, this has led to an unreasonable amount of stress for an entirely extra-curricular activity. But for the most part, you keep me going.
3. Reflective time is important, especially when your work is hectic. Especially over the past two years, while I've been working as the executive director of a small museum in transition, there have been many, many late nights when I cursed the blog and wished I could just call it quits. But I know that even in times of chaos--especially in those times--it's important to take time to reflect on what you are doing and making and learning. Blogging forces me to have a reflective part of my practice on a weekly basis, even when I feel about as reflective as a black carpet.
4. I crave community, but I am not naturally outgoing in large group settings like conferences. I went to several big museum conferences in 2004-2006 where I identified and started admiring heroes in the field. I had no idea how to reasonably approach them or talk to them in the cocktail party milieu of big conferences. So I started writing, and sharing, and using the blog as a tool that gave me the courage to reach out to heroes and learn from them. Over time, the blog has itself become a hub of community that has significantly transformed my professional work and social life. It has been a catalyst for speaking and consulting gigs, and the laboratory for a book. But I never really saw the blog explicitly as a business development vehicle. It is these other aspects--learning, reflection, community--that keep me going.

It is this community--you--that I want to reflect a bit more on. 

I have always approached blogging as an open invitation to "wander along with me" in a learning space driven by curiosity. At the same time, I'm aware that only a tiny percentage of readers have actively pursued relationships with me and other Museum 2.0 folk through comments, emails to me, and hallway conversations. As the readership for Museum 2.0 has grown, I've struggled to feel the same tight-knitted-ness that characterized the early years. 
The total readership from 2010-2012 was more than double that of 2007-2009 (and has been flat since 2011). I've struggled with some of the "celebrity" aspects of having a big audience. It's overwhelming to go from being that person who felt anonymous at conferences to being mobbed by strangers who want to meet you. At the same time, the blog continues to introduce me to extraordinary people who enrich my life and work in many ways. Particularly in the last two years, the blog's readership appears to have expanded in two unexpected and delightful directions: out of the museum field and into the broader arts sector, and locally here in Santa Cruz, where "participatory" has become a familiar word because of the work we are doing at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). I'm equally amazed when a comment comes in from a MAH member as I am when one comes in from an Australian opera director. And I feel incredibly grateful that the reach of the blog makes it possible to launch projects like Hack the Museum Camp and feel confident that people will want to participate.
To me, Museum 2.0 is most successful when it allows me to pursue my original goals: to learn, to reflect, and to do so in an engaged community space. Sometimes, I commit the sin of presuming what the audience expects or wants from me. It's an incredible gift to realize that, for the most part, it's OK for me to keep focusing on the questions and ideas that keep me up at night--even as those shift with my personal and professional growth.
So I want to close out this long season of blogging with a note of gratitude. THANK YOU for pushing me to keep thinking, learning, and writing. Thank you for sharing your ideas and case studies and comments and questions. Thank you for emailing me to tell me about a post that really helped your team. Thank you for inviting me to come to your museum/conference/art center/home. Thank you for making me feel like I am part of a community, even as we acknowledge the transactional and anonymous aspects of this kind of relationship.
Please feel free to share any thoughts you have on what does/doesn't work for you about Museum 2.0. The greatest gift you can give me is your thoughtful comments. Enjoy these next two months of posts from diverse perspectives, times, and places. I'll see you on the other side.

This post was originally published on the official blog of the International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, held in Manchester 22-28 July, as an appetiser for the paper “Understanding social media in STEM museums: the lessons from establishing a bio-hacking laboratory” that I co-authored with Karin Tybjerg and which Karin presented in the session Using the Web and social media to extend the traditional aims of museums.

There are still lots of skeptical attitudes towards social media among historians and curators of science, technology and medicine. They mainly contain superficial personal conversations and gossip. They may perhaps be useful for public dissemination and institutional branding, but not for serious intellectual exchange. And most importantly, being on social media takes time away from what really matters: research, curatorship, publication, and exhibition making.

These are some of the most common prejudices. However, if you have been immersed in social media for some years, as I have, such opinions are not quite representing what these media can do. In my opinion, it is increasingly difficult to imagine how historians and curators of science, technology and medicine can manage without them.

I started blogging in late 2004 and have produced some 1500 blog posts over the last nine years, on a wide array of themes relating to the representation of contemporary biomedicine in museums (Biomedicine on Display blog and Medical Museion blog).

Since 2010 I have also used Twitter and posted some 4600 tweets under the handle @Museionist, primarily about the historical, philosophical, social (and biographical) aspects of medical science and technology, and about STEM museum exhibitions, collections, and acquisitioning.

Many of these blog posts and tweets have been written in response to postings from other historians/curators and professionals from other relevant fields, and over the years, I have made the same experience as a growing number of people in our field, namely that it is a mistake to think of social media as superficial branding, dissemination or public engagement channels only.

They can of course be used for these purposes. But a sustained presence on social media is, in my experience, first and foremost a very rewarding way of intensifying and widening one’s creative social space, opening up for discussions with a wide range of interlocutors, both inside and outside of one’s narrow professional field.

To illustrate how social media can used for enhancing creative interaction in our field, I will relay my last Twitter exchange with a group of historians of science/medicine and museum curators, on last Saturday.

When I browsed my Twitter stream in the late afternoon (I usually take a quick look three times a day: morning, late afternoon and late evening), I stumbled on this short one by British political cartoonist Adrian Teal (@adeteal), a industrious twitterer with more than 43,000 tweets behind him:

I didn’t know about, even less follow, Adrian Teal, but historian of medicine Jaipreet Virdi — a PhD candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Toronto whom I follow (@jaivirdi) — apparently did, because it was she who retweeted it.

Yet, her retweet would probably have passed under my radar if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’m currently quite interested in synaesthetics of museum objects and exhibition museum environments. (PhD student Anette Stenslund, @stenslund, here at Medical Museion works on the phenomenology of smell, particularly how hospital smellscapes can be transferred to / reproduced in museum spaces, and we are also discussing the possibility of an art-science installation on hospital smell.) So Jaipreet’s retweet of Teal’s musing triggered my critical acumen:

Jaipreet retweeted this to her 824 followers (thanks!) and then replied:

The physiology of smell is something I’ve read up in order to be able to supervise Anette, so I rapidly sent off a tweet about the use of gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy (not mass spectrography, as I wrote in haste) for recording smell:

which Jaipreet immediately retweeted (thanks again!), thus further enhancing my reputation as a sometime chemist — which encouraged me to send off yet another tweet about an alleged new Japanese method for smell recording (which I found in the meantime by googling ‘smell recording’):

followed by third tweet, in which I took issue with the vision-centric assumptions behind Adrian Teal’s original, i.e., why does he assume we would use photography instead of odorography?:

A few minutes later another twitterer and historian of science/medicine chimed in. Nathaniel Comfort of the Johns Hopkins’ Institute for the History of Medicine (@nccomfort) told us he had recently visited a new exhibit at the trendy Parisian experimental art and design center Le Laboratoire:

Being a long-time fan (see here) of  Le Laboratoire’s founder and director David Edwards, a Harvard professor in biomedical engineering with an interest in aerosols, molecular gastronomy, and other smell-generating stuff (we’re working together in the Studiolabscience-art consortium), I quickly replied (still with Jaipreet and Adrian in the loop, of course):

As a good historian of science/medicine, Nathanael was a bit skeptical, however:

After a quick glance at the Ophone website, I had to admit Nathaniel’s skepticism was sound: David Edwards tells us the OPHONET “allows you to send olfactory messages instantaneously around the world.” (I would probably call that a teleodoron rather than ophone, but that’s a linguistic detail). If it works, if only with coffee flavours, it would indeed be revolutionary.

In the meantime, our conversation had been put on track by a real museum curator, David Pantalony (@SciTechCurator), who didn’t let himself be carried away by any futuristic scenarios:
A curator of physical sciences and medicine at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, David has 701 followers on Twitter and has produced more than 2400 tweets over the last years covering a wide range of topics relating to collection and exhibition curating. (A retweet by David means you reach some 500 curators in the sci and tech museum world!)

David apparently also thought an odorograph of smell would be more interesting than a photographic image, but qualified the discussion by making an analogy between audography and photography:

And Jaipreet seemed to agree that I had been too harsh on Adrian:

Anyway — there’s where we ended a few minutes after eight in the evening.  And Jaipreet summed up:
And I got the idea to use this Saturday evening chat as an example of how Twitter can be used to enhance the interactions between researchers and curators.

I’m not suggesting that this short exchange of tweets is particularly unique or mindbreaking. We didn’t go deep into the subject and we stopped after short number of turns. But it is typical of how social media can be used for professional purposes. In fact, over the last couple of years, I have had several conversations of this kind each month with a wide range of Twitter users, both researchers and curators and other kinds of professionals — some shorter, some longer. Discussions with Rebekah Higgitt(@beckyfh) sometimes extend over 15-25 turns with up to a handfull of interlocutors.

But even if the chat relayed above is pretty mundane, it illustrates some of the experiences a growing number of users of social media for academic and curatorial purposes have made:

• Social media allow for instant discussion: Within a few minutes Jaipreet, Nathaniel, David and I were engaged in a conversation about a neglected topic (the representation of smell) in the history of STM and STM museums.

• Social media increase the chances of contacts between researchers and curators considerably: The four of us have never met before, and chances are low we would have had this discussion in a coffee break between conference sessions.

• You don’t need to travel to meet: You can discuss at length with many people without any travel costs and minimal carbon footprint.

• It’s informal: You can have a beer or take a bath while discussing serious matters.

• Twitter breaks down hierarchies: It doesn’t matter who’s a senior professor and who’s a PhD candidate –the best argument creates responses, generates discussion, and increases the number of followers. It also makes turn-taking easier, and breaks down the all too common male domination in seminar discussions.

• Social media nivellate cultural and linguistic barriers: It doesn’t matter if you speak with a strong accent or master the intricacies of English grammar.

• Twitter isn’t built for bullshit: The 140 character limit forces you to sharpen and focus your argument.

I don’t suggest Twitter and other social media are substitutes for conference presentations or academic publishing. But they are a most useful complement to these traditional channels for intellectual exchange. That’s the reason why I think Twitter combined with other social media is the best tool we have these days for extending the traditional aims of  science, technology and medical museums.

A few months ago, I gave a small talk at an internal seminar here at Museion where I presented some thoughts about how to further our engagement with objects and how to take materiality more seriously. Here is the talk:

Not just a museum with things, but a museum about thingness – possible strategies for a deepened engagement with materiality

At the “It’s Not What You Think”-workshop, we sat an eclectic mix of 40 museum professionals, philosophers, artists, historians, STS scholars, social scientists, science communicators and much more, down at 4 tables with 4 groups of objects – a collection of human remains, the Carlsberg collection, a group of various metal objects and selected objects from the blind historical collections. We gave them only the most minimal of prompts: What would you do with these objects?

Practically before we had stopped talking, they converged on the objects. They talked and laughed and were frightened and took the things apart and played with them and came up with innovative exhibition design ideas and wild science fiction plans for future exhibitions and talked about digital labels that would change in front of the visitors and about surgical exhibitions that you could only see while carrying either a scalpel in your hand or a delicate flesh-like object and they talked about the origins and uses of the objects, where they were designed, who used them, their ethical implications, they talked about how to make the visitor feel what it would be like to use them and have them used upon oneself, they wondered if they were dangerous and what they tasted like, they tasted some of them, they got saddened by them, they shared personal stories, they took pictures of them; and many more reactions, thoughts, affects, emotions, all stirred up by engaging the objects.

 

 

 

A lot of them work with things often, even every day; they still got absorbed by them. Some knew almost all of the things uses and histories, others had no clue about most of them; they all engaged with them. They all shared an experience. The session did not have a specific end to it – the groups did not have to present anything, they did not have to work anything out in particular. But they all, I believe, felt something, something they will probably remember more clearly than any of the academic talks that were given during the two days.

Why do I say this? What is the point of it? The point is that objects are powerful. Engaging with them has the potential of opening up our emotions, our imaginations and our ideas. They open up parts of us that are otherwise difficult to tap into. Their effects upon us are unruly and we respond to them in unexpected and opaque ways. They have presence. At Museion, we already have experience with this particular agenda:

Our exhibitions are of high quality, intellectually refined and have a high sensibility towards aesthetics and the use of objects in exhibition design.

Our web activities are outstanding and are strengthened by the continual focus on and use of objects.

Our events have a strong material emphasis and we have done enough experimentation to know that the more things we give to people, the better they work.

Our academic research gives us a vantage point from which to tackle questions about objects and materiality from philosophical, historical, science communication and many other academic contexts.

From this starting point, I think there is a foundation for pushing the material envelope even further; for developing a museum that takes the surprising, evocative, imagination stirring and affective qualities of objects as the core of its activities, in all stages of the design and execution of its various projects. For thinking things first and representations second in everything that takes place under its roof. This is not a way of excising stories, narratives and representations; quite the contrary – it is a way of opening up them up in unexpected ways, of providing them with an affective push that museums sometimes lack. It is taking seriously that things stir our imagination, particularly if we get close to them. It is taking seriously that the cabinet is a powerfully neutralizing force and that this force needs to be counterbalanced in new ways.

What might such a pushing of the material envelope mean in the context of our various activities?

Exhibitions:

All exhibitions could experiment with multi-sensory stimulation and give the visitor things to touch and experiment with. Put straight jackets in the psychiatry exhibition and scarificators in Balance and Metabolism – that click sound brings home the reality of blood letting in extremely visceral ways, deepening the texts. Invite the visitors to swallow pills while hearing about the chemical body. Let visitors bite down on a rubber mouth piece while hearing about electroshock therapy. Give them gene chips and laboratory equipment. Take seriously that medicine is performed on the body and experienced by it. This might only be possible with guides, in smaller groups – but lets develop these things alongside a more traditional exhibition structure.

Events:

All speakers should bring objects or use objects from the museum. All events should taste, smell and touch of something; they should have a particular feel, literally and atmospherically. Objects change the dynamics of events, they change the relationship between the audience members individually and between the speakers/presenters and the audience; this should be utilized pervasively.

Online:

Continue what we already do: Work with and experiment on how to transmit material effects online – take things apart, detail them, take pictures, show them off. But also experiment with non-representational digital communication – use poetry, distorted images, case files, music, to invoke affect and the black noise of objects even when they are not materially present.

Academic research:

All research should ideally not just be about materiality in the abstract; rather it should feature objects; descriptions of them, images, uses, contexts. No things, no paper, so to speak – in the sense of a form of attention to material aspects whatever tradition you work in and whatever the specific details of the research project. It is not a way of standardizing a particular set of theories or a specific normative agenda; rather, it envokes a particular sensibility towards stuff and embodiement. It should take material dimensions seriously and experiment with formats and ways of writing. It should work to develop a vocabulary and a set of tools for becoming better at writing and talking about things and materiality; we are good with stories and discourses, less so with stuff – but often the best writing is that which gets closest to things.

A dual agenda:

In the end, such a possible material medical museum should have a dual agenda: It should be about medicine, past, present and future; but it should also be about the materiality of the world around and our embeddedness in it. It should be about medical things, their histories and uses; but it should also be about how things affect us; it should explore and bring into the light how we relate to objects around us. Daniel Miller writes of the “…unexpected capacity of objects to fade out of focus and remain peripheral to our vision and yet determinant of our behaviour and identity…” – this is what the museum would be: an intervention and bringing into the light the exterior medical environment that habituates and prompts us. And this requires letting people feel some thing.

Dear Nico,

The other day you turned a year and a half old. We celebrated by decompressing at home from our three-week road trip to Nebraska. You screamed with and without reason.

Holy hell, it’s the season of big feelings with lungs to match. The feelings have been there for a few months, but now you can and do communicate them on your loudest, shrillest setting. I’m trying to minimize the perceived (by you) effectiveness of this method of communication, but damn, child, I’m here to tell you: it gets my attention every time. Especially when we’re in the car.

That said, I’m happy to report that you’re a fantastic road trip companion. We drove a total of 3,823 miles to the DH2013 conference in Lincoln, Nebraska and back. We took a week to go each way, and stayed in Lincoln for another week. On the westward leg, we were joined by your cousin Tesher. It was a great vacation.

On the way west, we went to Reptiland, where you quite enjoyed the komodo dragons and animatronic dinosaurs. We drove up and down Pennsylvania along state routes, and eventually you figured out how to make your ears stop hurting from all the driving up and down mountains. We went to Indian Echo Caverns, which you liked ok but only as long as your cousin was carrying you. None of this mama nonsense. (Tesher held up well, but come on, man, that was bordering on cruelty to teenagers!) We also went to Fallingwater, which you mostly didn’t see because they don’t allow the under-six crowd on tours—but I’ll take you there again. That place is something special.

Somewhere in there I got strep throat. Surprise! Cousin T hung out with you while I went to get antibiotics. I was terrified that one of you would get it too, but you remained healthy and ate like small horses. Since an easy way to tell a toddler has strep is that they’re not eating or drinking because it hurts to do so, for once I felt my genetically informed impulse to feed you because you’re too thin was justified for health reasons.

We spent a day and a half in Chicago, where we swam in a huge clean lake and you got to try your first Italian ices—and your first carousel and Ferris wheel. You approached all of these with the usual basic-research mindset, and got so engrossed in the carousel motion that you didn’t notice the music stop. You usually notice whether there’s music (and, to my delight, love having it on).

Then we drove on to Omaha, where we exchanged Tesher for our friends Molly and Natalie at the airport. These two joined us for the Lincoln portion of the adventure, and hung out with you while I conferenced. It worked! You visited the Lincoln Children’s Museum, like, five times; I think you might’ve gone to the zoo; you swam in the pool. Several times a day you breathlessly looked out the glass back wall of the elevator and lightly bounced, chanting “up… dow… up… dow….” while most of the adults witnessing this cracked up. I assume those who didn’t, don’t have souls.

Meanwhile, I ran around like crazy from session to meeting to super important atrium chat every day of the conference, morning to early evening, and some later evenings too. This used to be my every day, and things have only picked up since I became an only-occasional digital humanist.

Someday, I’ll be delighted if you find work that thrills and inspires you like this stuff thrills and inspires me.

Then the conference was over, and on the way back it was just the two of us with no particular plans and a week to get back. You road warrior, you. Held up like a pro. Oh, sure, there was some screaming, but I could see the gears in your head whirring and clicking: you actually exercised patience when necessary. You’re a year and a half old; you aren’t supposed to have any patience yet. But you do.

We had rest area picnics. You ate an ungodly amount of fruit and watched ants do their thing. You insisted on playing the on-off-on-off game with light switches in about a dozen hotel and motel rooms. You discovered the power button on a CRT TV.

Swimming! You LOVE swimming. We did it in the Hudson River at the beginning of our trip, and you were beside yourself with joy. We did it again in Lake Michigan, and you squirmed like a happy little pollywog. We went to a hotel pool together, and you actually tried swimming on your belly like a big kid. I may have to get over my extreme dislike of chlorinated pools just to do swimming lessons with you, fish boy.

We visited your great-uncle and great-aunt in Saint Louis, and you saw your aunt and some other relatives too. Never having seen these people in your life, five minutes into the visit you were clearly at home, demanding that Aunt Liza play clapping games with you and turning lights on and off with Uncle Roman. It was a lovely visit, and I missed your grandfather so.

We visited our New York family again, too. And your babushka on the very last leg homeward. And then we were home.

Since we came back, you’ve become that toddler. You’ve leveled up in the scary direction, my friend. Every other word is a carefully considered no. Sometimes it’s “no no no no NO. no.” The screaming has subsided, though, so maybe we have some hope of productive negotiation. Yes? Let’s try for that. In the meantime, I’ll be over there with a glass of wine in my hand, reminding myself that at least now you have the attention span to sit through an entire movie, and that you bring me books to read, and that you invent games, and that all told life with you is full of laughter.

Love you madly,
-Mama

p.s. Boo.

p.p.s. More pictures still and moving, as usual.

I recently wrote about the changes observed in Google's local search product on the web over the course of a year. This year, Google has rolled out some changes to their web based experience that indicate some healthy experimentation with the local search UX.

The carousel presentation of local results brings a different dimension to the usual approach which is to integrate the local structured listings into the web page rankings.

A while back, Google converted their details pages for local entities into Google+ pages, and here there have been some design changes which incorporate an innovative approach to integrating the map with the other information about the entity. The map is used in the header as a background which hints and additional detail. The user can then scroll the page up (it is initially presented partially scrolled down) to reveal the full map. This is a nice solution to the problem of maps generally being square while document layout prefers to minimize vertical space.

Finally, on the map itself, Google has incorporated a number of presentation changes including using the map as the canvas with information layered on top (rather than side by side panes) and introducing a carousel at the bottom which, when moused over, shoots out a line to indicate the location mentioned. This latter feature I don't believe will survive - but is an indication of experimentation.

As an observer of Google's web based local search product, it appears that last year they were heads down on getting this fresh and coordinated set of features together.

Related articles Local Search - How Hard Can It Be? Google's Year in Local Search

Since my earlier post today, the debate over what the Twitterverse is now calling #ahagate has heated up rather than cooled down. Former American Historical Association president William Cronon has weighed in, as has the Harvard University Press. I’ve spent a good part of my Friday afternoon reading through the various responses on both sides of the debate about the AHA’s statement on embargoing dissertations and feel as though I’ve gained a much clearer understanding of the issues at play.

Having said that, I stand by my criticism of the AHA statement in my previous post. In fact, I feel even more strongly about that criticism, having read back through the history of the AHA’s position on open access scholarship. Before I explain why my feelings have gotten stronger rather than more forgiving, I want to stipulate one thing: I agree with the AHA that authors ought to have control over the ways in which their work is published, and so I agree that PhD students should be able to decide how their dissertations are published, with one caveat.

First, my caveat on authorial control. There is a reasonable question to be asked whether or not universities, especially state universities that are funded by the taxpayers, have the right to decide how doctoral dissertations will be published and disseminated. I can make a strong argument for the fact that dissertations written at state-funded universities can be considered public property, given that the university (i.e., the taxpayers) provides a venue, a faculty, a library, an Internet connection, and in many, many cases, multiple years of scholarship funding to doctoral students. With all of that financial investment in the dissertation, why should dissertation authors be able to lock their work away for some number of years? [For a dissent from this position, see Adam Crymble's blog post from July 23.]

If a state legislature were to mandate digital publication of dissertations, prospective doctoral students would of course need full disclosure prior to enrollment that their work would be published online upon completion. Then they could decide, in advance, whether to enroll at a university imposing such a requirement. Don’t agree with that requirement? Enroll somewhere else. While some might see this as in infringement on academic freedom, I do not, just as I do not see it as an infringement on academic freedom when the NIH demands that federally funded medical research be made available to the public.

Now to my strong disagreement with the gist of the AHA statement that launched so many tweets and blog posts. As I wrote earlier today, I see that AHA position on this issue as part of a continuum of opinion on open access scholarship that has ranged from temporizing to outright opposition. Implying, as the statement on dissertation access does, that making one’s dissertation available online risks ultimate failure in the race to tenure and promotion, the AHA statement on this issue fits nicely into that tradition of opposition to open access. After all, if enough PhD students can be frightened into embargoing their work, then academic presses won’t have to worry that potential readers might have already read the dissertation and so will take a pass on the book. But, as Rebecca Rosen writes at TheAtlantic.com, it’s not at all clear that academic press editors are worried about the digital publication of dissertations.

Given that academic journal editors are, as a group, not that worried about digital dissertations, and that the entire issue as framed by the AHA is only relevant to those few PhD students who get tenure track jobs at R1 universities, what’s really going on here?

The answer, it seems to me, is that for the past eight years the AHA has vacillated between temporizing over and outright opposition to open access scholarship. Last September, the AHA offered a statement on open access journal publishing in which the association expressed significant concern about the implications of open access for the field and for scholarly associations like the AHA. Dan Cohen’s thoughtful response to that AHA statement offers a succinct summary of the AHA’s shifting back and forth on the issue. Similarly, in his last article for Perspectives, Rob Townsend explains, with data, what the financial impact of the AHA’s experiments with open access has been.

As Dan points out, the main concern in both the AHA statement and in Townsend’s essay  was on the economics of the American Historical Review. As Townsend put it, “the AHA has yet to find a happy balance between our revenue needs and our desire to reach the widest possible audience.” And so we get to the nub of the problem. As a membership organization, the AHA derives most of its operating income from two sources — individual and institutional memberships and the revenue (subscriptions and advertising) from AHR. Without that journal revenue, the association might just be in serious financial trouble.

So, yes, I think it’s true that the AHA Council was trying to do the right thing. And yes, I think that, with my one possible caveat, PhD students ought to be able to decide when and how to publish their dissertations. But, yes, I also think this statement on dissertation publication, like so many others from the AHA over the years, is both a defense of a financial model that the association can’t find alternatives to and a defense of a way of life that is fast fading from the academic earth.

As AHR editor Robert Schneider put it in a panel discussion on the future of the academic journal at this year’s annual meeting in New Orleans, peer reviewed journals are “the embodiment of tradition.” If that doesn’t sum it up, I don’t know what does.

[For more on this issue, see this web collection.]

For a long, long time, The Bone People was my favourite work of fiction. I haven’t been back to it for a long while, but found a battered copy again recently and have started it again. As I started it I was wondering whether it’d fit into that “I enjoyed it when I was a teenager but I’ve grown up now” thing – but instead I’m being reminded what a blindingly original, beautifully deep roller-coaster of a story it is.

I did a quick Google search for the author, Keri Hulme – and landed on this page which describes in some detail the astonishing journey behind the novel. Hulme won the Booker Prize with The Bone People in 1985, and also published a selection of short stories which I’ve also read (and recommend) but apart from that her literary career has been somewhat sparse. It seems amazing in some ways that an author who writes with the extraordinary scope and creativity represented in The Bone People hasn’t been more prolific, but this is explained perhaps by the obsession which obviously drove her to write it in the first place. According to the piece on the New Zealand Book Council site, one of the three characters of the novel, Simon Peter, a mute boy of unknown age and origin, began haunting Hulme’s dreams an incredible 17 years before she wrote and found success with the novel. The article describes the journey she took – and in particular how this character kept appearing in some form in her short stories, being slowly moulded into the person he is in the final work. It also explains how Hulme had to fight to keep the original text as various editors and publishers tried to cull it.

I found this stuff very interesting from a budding writers’ perspective – not only does it make me feel better about the long time it seems to be taking me to pull together a chunky piece of fiction, but also that this strange, ongoing, intimate relationship with the characters you’re writing about seems to be quite common amongst those of us trying to write a novel. I think a lot about my main protagonist, Palmer while I’m out and about – and find I’m very often coming back to ask: “what would he do here? how would he react now? can I use this somehow?”. Hulme’s obsession with this lost boy character was obviously hugely intense and drove her through nearly two decades of writing before arriving at some kind of end-point. I don’t dream about my characters (yet..!) but find it fascinating that they occupy large chunks of my thinking time. As a reasonably new arrival in the land of fiction writing, I also find it reassuring that this process of writing can go on over a long period of time and still reach some kind of satisfying and rounding conclusion.

Having been in the mountains and off the grid for a few days I missed the publication of this statement by the American Historical Association when it first came out on July 22. Now that I’m catching up on what I’ve missed, all I can do is avert my gaze from yet another rear guard action by the AHA.

Over the years I’ve watched the AHA and many of its members struggle to come to grips with the realities of the digital revolution. Way back in 2008 (almost a century in Internet years), I wrote a series of posts I called “The Future of the AHA” in which I castigated the Association for making this assertion in a report on the future of the AHA:

“Thus it is incumbent on the AHA to both understand and utilize all the cutting-edge possibilities of these new technologies, while transferring its traditional role as gatekeeper and authority for the discipline to this new medium.”

At the time I argued that for the AHA to claim some sort of gatekeeper role on the Internet was evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of how the open exchange of information works online. This new report by the AHA Council urging universities to embargo the digital publication of new history dissertations unless the author chooses otherwise is, to my mind, of a piece with that earlier position, because it is but one more attempt to hold onto a series of past practices that are increasingly irrelevant in the modern scholarly landscape.

That portion of the Internet that is about the exchange of ideas and information functions best when access to that information is free, open access, and timely. Urging universities to embargo the digital publication of dissertations — and through such urging helping to frighten PhD students into keeping their dissertations behind a wall of silence — undermines all three of these pillars of scholarly exchange in the world we live in, not the idealized past described in the AHA statement, where dissertations were circulated by hand. Were I a doctoral student today, this bit of the larger statement might send chills down my spine:

“Presumably, online readers will become familiar with an author’s particular argument, methodology, and archival sources, and will feel no need to buy the book once it is available.  As a result, students who must post their dissertations online immediately after they receive their degree can find themselves at a serious disadvantage in their effort to get their first book published…”

If those chills I feel turn into actual fear, I might just follow the implied advice here, despite the vagueness and the evidence-thin assertions, and embargo my dissertation so that no one out there in Internet-land will have any access to my ideas for, say, six years — another whole century in Internet years. By the time my books comes out, I’ll be largely irrelevant to the discussion on my topic of interest, but so what? I’ll have a book from a scholarly press and will have a shot at tenure!

Imagine a biologist taking such a position? Or a physicist? Or a nuclear engineer? Or an economist?

Has the AHA heard, perhaps of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), whose mission is to “accelerate progress in science and medicine” through the rapid and open access publication of new findings? Or, perhaps, the Social Science Research Network, whose 179,000 authors have uploaded more than 380,000 papers, which have been downloaded more than 50 million times, mostly for free?

This latest salvo by the AHA’s rear guard can only be seen as another example of what is an essential hostility to open access scholarship.

All I can say is, good luck with that.

[For more on this issue, see this web collection.]

Following my last blog post about a 1yr research job in Leiden looking into relations between bio-art and science communication, more exciting scholarship news… Our neighbours the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication at the University of Copenhagen are currently advertising a PhD scholarship in science communication with a focus on synthetic biology:

The student will work alongside Maja Horst, Sarah Davies, and Sune Holm to carry out and analyse experiments in public engagement with synthetic biology. The role would therefore be suitable for those with backgrounds in STS, science communication practice, art and design, or media studies.

Full details can be found here: http://phd.humanities.ku.dk/how_to_apply/calls/science-communication-with-a-focus-on-synthetic-biology/. The application deadline is 20th August. Those with questions about the position should contact Sarah Davies (*protected email*).

I’m excited to have another scicom researcher in Copenhagen, and to follow the project. Science communication around synthetic biology powerfully invokes the field’s origin myth of a transition from top-down dissemination (often described in terms of Public Understanding of Science or ‘PUS’) to reciprocal public engagement (aka Public Engagement with Science and Technology or ‘PEST’)*, via an imagined ancestral line from responses to BSE, then to GM crops, and through nanoscience to synbio – at each stage, aiming (and then not quite managing) to do ‘better engagement’.

Yet, as came up in the Biohacking: Do It Yourself project here at Museion, this  linear story obscures enduring and parallel motives: public communication around synthetic biology includes knowledge dissemination, DIY interventions, PR and prospective damage limitation, artistic engagements, cartoons, jokes and so on. The PhD project sounds like a great opportunity to combine research and practice, and get involved in producing a richer picture of synbio scicomm as it happens.

* See Alice Bell’s blog for a great re-telling of this story and its (acronymical) discontents

Over the last few months, the University of Delaware and the Cecil County Historical Society have been using FromThePage to transcribe the diary of a minister serving in the American Civil War.  They're using the project to expose undergraduates to primary sources while also improving access to an important local history document.

The county has documented the process with an extensive post on the Cecil County Historical Society Blog, which was picked up by the Cecil Daily.

The university also put together a lovely video providing background on the project and interviewing students and faculty members involved in the project:



One of the things I find most interesting about the project is the collaboration between digital humanities-focused university faculty and the county historical society:
Kasey Grier, director of the Museum Studies Program and the History Media Center at the university, says the transcription will be done by students in a process called “crowd sourcing.”
“Crowd sourcing,” according to Grier, “is when students in remote locations, review the handwritten text and try their hand at transcribing it. They then submit their contributions which are reviewed and put up online. Eventually, all of the diary entires will be available for anyone to access and read.” Historical Society of Cecil County President Paul Newton says the society welcomes this collaboration with the University of Delaware and hopes to strengthen it because it broadens the society’s horizons and reach. “The university’s focus is in the area of the digital humanities, which allows us to take largely unused and un-accessed collections and get the material out to a broader audience for study. It is also a preservation method as it reduces handling and makes interpretation much easier,” Grier said.  You can see the Joseph Brown Diary and the students' work on it at the project site on FromThePage.com.

In fact, as the ever-spot-on Oatmeal says: Printers were sent from Hell to make us miserable.

I own a printer. I’d rather not, and I run a mostly paper-free life, but there are still occasions when I need to print stuff – end of year stuff, the odd invoice, a letter or two.

Every single time I dust off my printer, these things happen:

• The ink runs out. I go to Smiths, spend half an hour looking at a vast wall of different cartridges for printers with slightly different model numbers before realising that my exact model isn’t represented here and so I apparently need to order online instead
• I go to Amazon and find an incredible array of possible inks – the official ones come in at about half the price of my printer. Let’s consider that again: my printer costs £45 new. The ink costs £25. This is like filling up a £5,000 car with £2,500 of petrol every time you want to use it.
• I inevitably choose a dodgy non-HP ink and then suffer a deeply irritating “non compatible HP ink will DESTROY YOUR LIFE” message until that ink runs out too (normally only about 3 minutes, I grant you, but hey)
• The printer crunks 15 sheets of paper with every print
• The printer requires a 100 Tb driver download every time I’m in a hurry
• If something breaks, I have absolutely no option but to bin the printer. I believe as an individual I have owned at least 5 inkjet printers in the last 10 years.

We all just accept this as the norm, and it’s obscene.

I refuse to believe that printers are SO complicated they need official inks, or can’t have replacement parts. I refuse to believe that in this year of our lord 2013, we can’t build a device that’ll print out one page of text without performing complicated origami techniques on the next 14 pages in the tray. I refuse to believe that I absolutely MUST download that fucking printer application, edit suite, Chrome toolbar, desktop helper and new OS in order to PRINT A FUCKING LETTER.

I’d much rather pay £100 upfront for a decent, open-sourced printer. One where I could buy spare parts and £5 replacement cartridges.

If it were on Kickstarter, I’d fund that shit.

This post finds me jetlagged and happily worn out after my trip over the pond to the Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing conference in Saskatoon, followed in quick succession by Digital Humanities 2013 in Lincoln, Nebraska. 10 days, 6 flights, 2 countries, 2 conferences, 2 papers, 1 panel session, 2 chaired meetings and 3 posters later, I made my way home yesterday and decided not to work on the plane home (shock! horror!) but to treat myself to a nice novel. I picked up "Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffenegger, and happily battered through it whilst airbourne - laughing to myself when the following paragraphs emerged...

Martin shook his head... "I used to work at the British Museum, translating ancient and classical languages. But now I work from home".

Julia smiled. "So they bring the Rosetta Stone and all that here to you?"...

"No, no. I don't often need the actual objects. They take photographs and make drawings - I use those. It's all become so much easier now everything is digital. I suppose someday they'll just wave the objects over the computer and it will sing the translation in Gregorian chant.  But in the meantime they still need somebody like me to work it out." Martin paused, then said, rather shyly, "Do you like crossword puzzles?"  (Niffenegger, A.  (2009). Her Fearful Symmetry, p. 129.  Scribner, New York.)
Later on in the book - set in and around Highgate Cemetry in London - the following is also said:

 "Perhaps we ought to make another sign to post at the gate," said James. "All uncertain grave owners please present yourselves during office hours when the staff can attend to your very time-consuming requests".

"We want to help them," said Jessica. "But they must call ahead. These people who pitch up on the cemetery's doorstep wanting us to do a grave search while they wait - it's beyond anything."

"They think the records are digitised," Robert said.

Jessica laughed.  "Ten years from now, perhaps. Evelyn and Paul are typing in the burial records as fast as their fingers can fly, but with one hundred and sixty-nine thousand entries -"

"I know."Its not the first time I've seen digital humanities/ digitisation creep into fiction - I remember some ludicrous database in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code* - but it did make me think, people are starting to notice the kind of things we've been working on for (in my case) over a decade. It's great to see something that so relates to my doctoral work and published texts pop up in a work of fiction. Heck, the people at US immigration who ask you what you do when you say you are going to a conference might even understand what "Digital Humanities" means next! Maybe not.

Anyone else stumble across mentions of computing, culture, humanities and heritage in fiction? If so, I might feel another Tumblr coming on. Uh-oh...

* I dont have a copy of the Da Vinci Code, but the internet has provided an illegal online version, I copy the scene here. First one to send me a cease and desist and ask me to take it down wins.

She glanced at her guests. "What is this? Some kind of Harvard scavenger hunt?" Langdon's laugh sounded forced. "Yeah, something like that." Gettum paused, feeling she was not getting the whole story. Nonetheless, she felt intrigued and found herself pondering the verse carefully. "According to this rhyme, a knight did something that incurred displeasure with God, and yet a Pope was kind enough to bury him in London."

Langdon nodded. "Does it ring any bells?"

Gettum moved toward one of the workstations. "Not offhand, but let's see what we can pull up in the database."

Over the past two decades, King's College Research Institute in Systematic Theology had used optical character recognition software in unison with linguistic translation devices to digitize and catalog an enormous collection of texts – encyclopedias of religion, religious biographies, sacred scriptures in dozens of languages, histories, Vatican letters, diaries of clerics, anything at all that qualified as writings on human spirituality. Because the massive collection was now in the form of bits and bytes rather than physical pages, the data was infinitely more accessible.

Settling into one of the workstations, Gettum eyed the slip of paper and began typing. "To begin, we'll run a straight Boolean with a few obvious keywords and see what happens."

"Thank you."

Gettum typed in a few words:

LONDON, KNIGHT, POPE

As she clicked the SEARCH button, she could feel the hum of the massive mainframe downstairs scanning data at a rate of 500 MB/sec. "I'm asking the system to show us any documents whose complete text contains all three of these keywords. We'll get more hits than we want, but it's a good place to start."

The screen was already showing the first of the hits now.

Painting the Pope. The Collected Portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. London University Press.



Gettum shook her head. "Obviously not what you're looking for." She scrolled to the next hit.

The London Writings of Alexander Pope by G. Wilson Knight.

Again she shook her head.

As the system churned on, the hits came up more quickly than usual. Dozens of texts appeared, many of them referencing the eighteenth-century British writer Alexander Pope, whose counter religious, mock-epic poetry apparently contained plenty of references to knights and London.

Gettum shot a quick glance to the numeric field at the bottom of the screen. This computer, by calculating the current number of hits and multiplying by the percentage of the database left to search, provided a rough guess of how much information would be found. This particular search looked like it was going to return an obscenely large amount of data.

Estimated number of total hits: 2, 692

"We need to refine the parameters further," Gettum said, stopping the search. "Is this all the information you have regarding the tomb? There's nothing else to go on?"

Langdon glanced at Sophie Neveu, looking uncertain.

This is no scavenger hunt, Gettum sensed. She had heard the whisperings of Robert Langdon's experience in Rome last year. This American had been granted access to the most secure library on earth – the Vatican Secret Archives. She wondered what kinds of secrets Langdon might have learned inside and if his current desperate hunt for a mysterious London tomb might relate to information he had gained within the Vatican. Gettum had been a librarian long enough to know the most common reason people came to London to look for knights. The Grail.

Gettum smiled and adjusted her glasses. "You are friends with Leigh Teabing, you are in England, and you are looking for a knight." She folded her hands. "I can only assume you are on a Grail quest."

Langdon and Sophie exchanged startled looks.

Gettum laughed. "My friends, this library is a base camp for Grail seekers. Leigh Teabing among them. I wish I had a shilling for every time I'd run searches for the Rose, Mary Magdalene, Sangreal, Merovingian, Priory of Sion, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone loves a conspiracy." She took off her glasses and eyed them. "I need more information."

In the silence, Gettum sensed her guests' desire for discretion was quickly being outweighed by their eagerness for a fast result.

"Here," Sophie Neveu blurted. "This is everything we know." Borrowing a pen from Langdon, she wrote two more lines on the slip of paper and handed it to Gettum.

You seek the orb that ought be on his tomb. It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.

Gettum gave an inward smile. The Grail indeed, she thought, noting the references to the Rose and her seeded womb. "I can help you," she said, looking up from the slip of paper. "Might I ask where this verse came from? And why you are seeking an orb?"

"You might ask," Langdon said, with a friendly smile," but it's a long story and we have very little time."

"Sounds like a polite way of saying “mind your own business.”"

"We would be forever in your debt, Pamela," Langdon said, "if you could find out who this knight is and where he is buried."

"Very well," Gettum said, typing again. "I'll play along. If this is a Grail-related issue, we should cross-reference against Grail keywords. I'll add a proximity parameter and remove the title weighting. That will limit our hits only to those instances of textual keywords that occur near aGrail-related word."

Search for: KNIGHT, LONDON, POPE, TOMB

Within 100 word proximity of: GRAIL, ROSE, SANGREAL, CHALICE

"How long will this take?" Sophie asked.

"A few hundred terabytes with multiple cross-referencing fields?" Gettum's eyes glimmered as she clicked the SEARCH key. "A mere fifteen minutes."

Langdon and Sophie said nothing, but Gettum sensed this sounded like an eternity to them.

"Tea?" Gettum asked, standing and walking toward the pot she had made earlier. "Leigh always loves my tea."

I know, I know. Any job with the word “coordinator” in it sounds like you might spend your time sorting socks into pairs. But this job is really important to the future of our museum, and I’m hoping that you or someone you know might be a great fit for it.

We are hiring for a School Programs Coordinator to wrangle the 3,500+ students and their teachers who come to the museum every year for a tour and hands-on experience in our art and history exhibitions. While we used to have a Director of Education who managed this, we’ve recently restructured our Community Programs department to have a Youth Programs Manager (the brilliant Emily Hope Dobkin), who oversees all experiences that visitors 2-18 have with the museum. School programs fall within this landscape, and our goal is not to see them as completely separate from the other work we do with youth—Kid Happy Hour, family festivals, teen program—but on a continuum. In this role, you will be the thoughtful, creative, detail-oriented lead who thinks about how school groups fit into the bigger ecosystem of youth experiences at the MAH and develops and implements them accordingly.

This job involves administrative management of all things school tours as well as collaboration with a diverse group of volunteer docents and education interns. Because 30% of the students in our school district are English language learners (and the majority of those, Latino), we are seeking someone who is bilingual and able to communicate comfortably with kids and adults in Spanish.

We see this job as a starting point for someone who is cheerfully obsessed with the future of museum education. Like most museums, we’re facing some big questions when it comes to the future of school programs:

• Buses aren’t cheap, and teachers are increasingly stressed about “proving” the value of expensive field trips away from the classroom. Our school visit numbers have risen over the past few years, but we also hear a lot from teachers about this tension, especially when the teacher is trying to justify an art tour. How should we think about the role of onsite museum experiences in future educational partnerships? 
• Many families in our area have opted into non-traditional school and educational formats, especially homeschooling. What kinds of programs should we consider providing for these groups? 
• Not all learning happens in school. How should we think about the balance between formal programs for school groups and youth-centered programs that happen after or outside of school? 
• We are an interdisciplinary institution that focuses on igniting “unexpected connections.” How can we create school tours that reflect the diversity and interconnectedness of creativity and culture without completely confusing teachers? 
• We are an institution that focuses on “shared experiences” and social bridging amongst diverse groups. Most school tours are for intact groups—a single class or grade. How can we develop programming that encourages students to make connections with kids of other ages or from other parts of our County? 
• We care deeply about participatory experiences in which visitors have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to large-scale collaborative projects. How can we invite students to collaborate with us the way we do with community partners and visitors? 
• We are transforming our history gallery to be a more dynamic platform for civic engagement. How will this affect our school programs and our work with teachers? 

If these questions excite you, I hope you will consider applying. The application period closes on Monday, July 29.

We did it. Last week, my museum hosted Hack the Museum Camp, a 2.5 day adventure in which teams of adults--75 people, of whom about half are museum professionals, half creative folks of various stripes--developed an experimental exhibition around our permanent collection in our largest gallery.

We now have a painting hanging from the ceiling that you can lie under and experience in 3D. We have a gravestone with a Ouija board in front of it so you can commune with its owner. We have a sculpture in its crate/prison cell, unwrapped and unexhibited since its acquisition thirty years ago.

We also have 75 new friends, slightly bleary from the experience, which felt like one part intense work project, one part marathon, one part hallucinogenic love-in.

I'm not going to write too much about the process here--please check out Paul Orselli's blog post for his perspective as a counselor, Sarah Margusen's Pinterest board for her perspective as a camper, or Georgia Perry's article for the Santa Cruz Weekly, which provides an outsider's view on the process. You can also see a ton of photos on Instagram, and I highly recommend the Confessional Tent videos for sheer silliness (more on those below).
Here's what I got out of Hack the Museum Camp. It is amazing to actually DO things with colleagues in professional development situations instead of just talking. In 2009, after we hosted the Creativity and Collaboration retreat, I wrote a post about ditching "conferences" for "camp" experiences. Four years later, my appetite for these kinds of experiences hasn't changed. It felt great to once again be working with people--brainstorming exhibit challenges, editing label text, even just messing around on the player piano together. As a floating camp director, I got the best of this (interaction with all the campers) and the worst (no intense team time). I felt lucky to be able to dip into the various project teams, though that also gave me a completely aberrant perspective on camp. I was impressed by the extent to which the teams seemed to gel and people appeared, for the most part, to be happy spending the majority of their time here with a small group of teammates. There's always a balancing act between team project time and everybody time. If we do this again, I think we will swing towards a bit more everybody time so people could learn from more of the diverse and fabulous campers who were here.

I was surprised by the extent to which reality TV culture imprinted on the experience. People talked about the camp as Project Runway for museums. I'd give a team feedback and they said it was like Tim Gunn had blessed their project. As a forest-dwelling hippie, I know very little about reality TV, but it's clear that the model of "do an ambitious, wacky project really fast" is now tied closely to a slew of shows about everything from cooking to art-making. There were some ways we deliberately played with this--MAH staff member Elise Granata created an ingenious Confessional Tent where campers could make hilarious first-person videos about their experience--but there were other ways it really surprised me. Teams were more intense than I anticipated. Every team completed an exhibit in the time allotted. I assumed that at least one team would fizzle out, erupt, or just decide not to fully engage. Instead, everyone was focused and intent on creating something fabulous. I'm not sure how much reality TV affected this, but it was clear that people had internalized the "rules" of camp and were ready to play, and play hard. This mindset also impacted perception of everyone's roles in the camp. While it was completely hilarious to hear that "this is not Nina Simon best friend camp," it was also a little sad to realize that in the framework of something like reality TV, the camp director doesn't get to really jump in in an authentic, casual way with campers--I was expected to play the host role.

Diversity isn't just nice to have--it's fabulous. We selected our campers from a fairly large pool of applicants; about 1/3 of those who applied were invited to attend. During the selection process, we prioritized diversity--of experience, of geography, of gender, of perspective. Then, when we put together teams, we again tried to break people up such that every team would have a blend of individuals across several axes. Several campers commented to me that their favorite part of camp was the diversity of the campers' backgrounds and frameworks. If we were to do this again, I would ask one additional question of applicants: age. We had a good mix of people in their 20s-50s with a smattering of outliers, but it was clear that the most effective teams had age diversity within a team itself. Many of the oldest campers were "counselors"--seasoned exhibit designers I've known and respected for a long time--and we didn't have enough counselors for every team to have one. I'm not sure how important it is for every team to have a designated counselor--interestingly, in early feedback, many campers wanted leadership whereas counselors wished there had been a more even playing field. I do think that no matter what, it is valuable for every team to have a mix of ages and experiences.

The idea of "risk" is often a red herring. This was probably the biggest surprise for me - yet it shouldn't have been. We framed this entire experience around "creative risk-taking." Throughout the camp, I pushed teams to make sure that their projects truly challenged traditional museum practice. While this probably did inspire some teams to do some weird and wonderful things, it was also problematic for two reasons:

• For campers who are not in the museum field, it was confusing. Everyone's definition of risk is different, and while museum professionals may share a common language around the topic, that commonality breaks down when you involve artists and technologists and game designers and performers. The whole point of bringing in non-museum professionals was to expand the dialogue around what is possible, and in some ways, the "risk" framing limited those possibilities.
• More importantly, I've discovered again and again that when you are actually doing what others categorize as risky, it doesn't feel like risk at all. When I hosted a panel on risk-taking at AAM in 2011, all of the panelists agreed that we don't see our work as "risky"--we just see it as the work we are compelled to do (scroll down to the second part of this post). Once each team got into their projects, they were just cranking to make it happen. Sure, they might have decided to present an art object in a confrontational and opinionated way. Or they might have chosen to make up a fictitious narrative around history artifacts. Those are risky decisions in the broader museum context. But in the context of Hack the Museum Camp, they were just the starting points for projects. I wish we had focused more on a theme like "make an exhibit that is completely delightful and surprising" and less on "make an exhibit that takes a risk."

On the other hand, it was also empowering for some campers to experience how doing things that are "against the rules" can generate really wonderful levels of creative output. I know that our staff and members are really excited and energized by the exhibition that this camp created. We'll open the exhibition formally to the public this Friday, but already, we've had great response from donors and visitors who have wandered through. Yes, the exhibition is chaotic. But it is also full of surprises and vitality, and it showcases a very wide palate of approaches to collection objects. While the timing isn't great given my upcoming maternity/blog leave, I'll try to write a post at the end of the exhibition run sharing some of the reactions to the exhibition itself from visitors.

What questions do you have about camp? What would (or wouldn't) make you want to participate in something like this? I also encourage campers and counselors to share comments here, though I know that you represent a tiny subset of the folks reading this.

In closing, a quote from one camper's evaluation of the experience:
I like to say that if I am not afraid every day, then it is time to move on to another job. There were several moments during camp when I was felt a surge of anxiety, trepidiation, self-doubt. What is amazing about being with such a great group of people, is that they carry you through it. ... By the end of this week I will probably forget the sound of the player piano, the feel of the hard floor, or the carpal tunnel setting in my fingers. But I won't forget the many individuals who were so generous and tenacious; so honest and proud. Thanks for all the memories.

Inspired by the beautiful flat seas round here at the moment.

Written and produced on the amazing NanoStudio.

This is the transcript of my talk at Social Digital Scholarly Editing at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon on July 11 2013.
I'm Ben Brumfield.  I'm not a scholarly editor, I'm an amateur editor and professional software developer.  Most of the talks that I give talk about crowdsourcing, and crowdsourcing manuscript transcription, and how to get people involved. I'm not talking about that today -- I'm here to talk about amateur editions.

So let's talk about the state of amateur editions as it was, as it is now, as it may be, and how that relates to the people in this room.
Let's start with a quote from the past.  This was written in 1996, representing what I think may be a familiar sort of consensus [scholarly] opinion about the quality of amateur editions, which can be summed up in the word "ewww!"
So what's going on now?  Before I start looking at individual examples of amateur editions, let's define--for the purpose of this talk--what an amateur edition is.

Ordinarily people will be talking about three different things:

• They can be talking about projects like Paul's, in which you have an institution who is organizing and running the project, but all the transcription, editing, and annotation is done by members of the public.
• Or, they can be talking about organizations like FreeREG, a client of mine which is a genealogy organization in the UK which is transcribing all the parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials from the reformation up to 1837.  In that case, all the material--all the documents--are held at local records offices and and archives, who in many cases are quite hostile to the volunteer attempt to  put these things online.  Nevertheless, over the last fifteen years, they've managed to transcribe twenty-four million of these records, and are still going strong.
• Finally, amateur run editions of amateur-held documents.  These are cases like me working on my great-great grandmother's diaries, which is what got me into this world [of editing].

I'm going to limit that [definition] slightly and get rid of crowdsourcing.  That's not what I want to talk about right now.  I don't want to talk about projects that have the guiding hand of an institutional authority, whether that's an archive or a [scholarly] editor.
So let's take a look at amateur editions.  Here's a site called Soldier Studies.  Soldier Studies is entirely amateur-run.  It's organized by a high-school history teacher who got really involved in trying to rescue documents from the ephemera trade.
The sources of the transcripts of correspondence from the American Civil War are documents that are being sold on E-Bay.  He sees the documents that are passing through--and many of them he recognizes as important, as an amateur military historian--and he says, I can't purchase all of these, and I don't belong to an institution that can purchase them. Furthermore, I'm not sure that it's ethical to deal in this ephemera trade--there is some correlation to the antiquities trade--but wouldn't it be great if we could transcribe the documents themselves and just save those, so that as they pass from a vendor to a collector, some of the rest of us can read what's on these documents?
So he set up this site in which users who have access to these transcripts can upload letters.  They upload these transcripts, and there's some basic metadata about locations and subjects that makes the whole thing searchable.  
But the things that I think people in here--and I myself--will be critical about are the transcription conventions that he chose, which are essentially none.  He says, correspondence can be entered as-is--so maybe you want to do a verbatim transcript, but maybe not--and the search engines will be able to handle it.

A little bit more shocking is that -- you know, he's dealing with people who have scans--they have facsimile images--so he says, we're going to use that.  Send us the first page, so that we know that you're not making this piece of correspondence up completely, fabricating it out of whole cloth. 
So that's not a facsimile edition, and we don't have transcription conventions.  He has this caveat, in which he explains that this [site] is reliable because we have "the first page of the document attached to the text transcription as verification that it was transcribed from that source."  So you'll be able to read one page of facsimile from this transcript you have.  We do our best, we're confident, so use them with confidence, but we can't guarantee that things are going to be transcribed validly.

Okay, so how much use is that to a researcher? 
This puts me in the mind of Peter Shillingsburg's "Dank Cellar of Electronic Texts", in which he talks about the world "being overwhelmed by texts of unknown provenance, with unknown corruptions, representing unidentified or misidentified versions."

He's talking about things like Project Gutenberg, but that's pretty much what we're dealing with right here.  How much confidence could a historian place in the material on this site?  I'm not sure.

Here's an example of an amateur edition which is in a noble cause, but which is really more ammunition for the earlier quote.
So what about amateur editions that are done well?  This is the Papa's Diary Project, which is a 1924 diary of a Jewish immigrant to New York, transcribed by his grandson.

What's interesting about this -- he's just using Blogger, but he's doing a very effective job of communicating to his reader:
So here is a six-word entry.  We have the facsimile--we can compare and tell [the transcript] is right: "At Kessler's Theater.  Enjoyed Kreuzer Sonata."

So the amateur who's putting this up goes through and explains what Kessler's theater is, who Kessler was.
Later on down in that entry, he explains that Kessler himself died, and the Kreuzer Sonata is what he died listening to.  Further down the page you can listen to the Kreuzer Sonata yourself.

So he's taken this six-word diary entry and turned it into something that's fascinating, compelling reading.  It was picked up by the New York Times at one point, because people got really excited about this.
Another thing that amateurs do well is collaborate.  Again: Papa's Diary Project.  Here is an entry in which the diarist transcribed a poem called "Light". 
Here in the comments to that entry, we see that Jerroleen Sorrensen has volunteered: Here's where you can find [the poem] in this [contemporary] anthology, and, by the way, the title of the poem is not "Light", but "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes".

So we have people in the comments who are going off and doing research and contributing.
I've seen this myself.  When I first started work on FromThePage, my own crowdsourced transcription tool, I invited friends of mine to do beta testing.

I started off with an edition that I was creating based on an amateur print edition of the same diary from fifteen years previously.

If you look at this note here, what you see is Bryan Galloway looking over the facsimile and seeing this strange "Miss Smith sent the drugg... something" and correcting the transcript--which originally said "drugs"--saying, Well actually that word might be "drugget", and "drugget" is, if you look on Wikipedia, is a coarse woolen fabric.  Which--since it's January and they're working with [tobacco] plant-beds--that's probably what it is.

Well, I had no idea--nobody who's read this had any idea--but here's somebody who's going through and doing this proofreading, and he's doing research and correcting the transcription and annotating at the same time.
Another thing that volunteers do well is translate.  This is the Kriegstagebuch von Dieter Finzen, who was a soldier in World War I, and then was drafted in World War II.  This is being run by a group of volunteers, primarily in Germany.

What I want to point out is, that here is the entry for New Year's Day, 1916.  They originally post the German, and then they have volunteers who go online and translate the entry into English, French, and Italian.

So now, even though my German is not so hot, I can tell that they were stuck drinking grenade water.
So, what's the difference?

What's the difference between things that amateurs seem to be doing poorly, and things that they're doing well?

I think that it comes down to something that Gavin Robinson identified in a blog post that he wrote about six years ago about the difference between professional historians/academic historians and amateur historians.  What he essentially says is that professionals--particularly academics, but most professionals--are particularly concerned with theory.  They're concerned with their methodologies and with documenting their methodologies.

This is something that amateurs, in many cases, are not concerned with -- don't know exist -- maybe have never even been exposed to.
So, based on that, let's talk about the future.

How can we get amateurs--doing amateur editions on their own--to move from the things that they're doing well and poorly to being able to do everything well that's relevant to researchers' needs?

I see three major challenges to high-quality amateur editions.

The first one is one which I really want to involve this community in, which is ignorance of standards.  The idea that you might actually include facsimiles of every page with your transcription -- that's a standard.  I'm not talking about standards like TEI -- I'd love for amateur editions to be elevated to the point that print editions were in 1950 -- we're just talking about some basics here.

Lack of community and lack of a platform.
So let's talk about standards.

How does an amateur learn about editorial methodologies?  How do they learn about emendations?  How do they learn about these kinds of things?

Well, how do they learn about any other subject?  How do they learn about dendrochronology if they're interested in measuring tree rings? 
Wikipedia!

Let's go check out Wikipedia!
Wikipedia has a problem for most subjects, which is that Wikipedia is filled with jargon.  If you look up dendrochronology, you don't really have a starting place, a "how to".  If you look up the letter X, you get this wonderful description of how 'X' works in Catalan orthography, but it presupposes you being familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, and knowing that that thing which looks like an integral sign is actually the 'sh' sound.

Now if amateurs are trying to do research on scholarly editing and documentary editing in Wikipedia, they have a different problem:
There's nothing there. There's no article on documentary editing.
There's no article on scholarly editing.

These practices are invisible to amateurs. 
So if they can't find the material online that helps them understand how to encode and transcribe texts, where are they going to get it?

Well--going back to crowdsourcing--one example is by participation in crowdsourcing projects.  Crowdsourcing projects--yes, they are a source of labor; yes they are a way to do outreach about your material--but they are a way to train the public in editing.  And they are training the public in editing whether that's the goal of the transcription project or not.  The problem is that the teacher in this school is the transcription software--is the transcription website.

This means that the people who are teaching the public about transcription--the people who are teaching the public about editing--are people like me: developers.

So, how do developers learn about transcription?

Well, sometimes, as Paul [Flemons] mentioned, we just wing it.  If we're lucky, we find out about TEI, and we read the TEI Guidelines, and we find out that there's so much editorial practice that's encoded in the TEI Guidelines that that's a huge resource.

If we happen to know the people in this room or the people who are meeting at the Association for Documentary Editing in Ann Arbor, we might discover traditional editorial resources like the Guide to Documentary Editing.  But that requires knowing that there's a term "Documentary Editing".

So what does that mean?  What that means is that people like me--developers with my level of knowledge or ignorance--are having a tremendous amount of influence on what the public is learning about editing.  And that influence does not just extend to projects that I run -- that influence extends to projects that archives and other institutions using my software run.  Because if an archive is trying to start a transcription project, and the archivist has no experience with scholarly editing, I say, You should pick some transcription conventions.  You should decide how to encode this.  Their response is, What do you think?  We've never done this before.  So I'm finding myself giving advice on editing.
Okay, moving on.

The other thing that amateurs need is community.

Community is important because community allows you to collaborate.  Communities evaluate each [member's] work and say, This is good.  This is bad.  Communities teach each [member].  And communities create standards -- you don't just hang out on Flickr to share your photos -- you hang out on Flickr to learn to be a better photographer.  People there will tell you how to be a better photographer.

We have no amateur editing community for people who happen to have an attic full of documents and want to know what to do with them.
So communities create standards, and we know this.  Let me quote my esteemed co-panelist, Melissa Terras, who, in her interviews with the managers of online museum collections--non-institutional online "museums"--found that people are coming up with "intuitive metadata" standards of their own, without any knowledge or reference to existing procedures in creating traditional archival metadata.
The last big problem is that there's currently no platform for someone who has an attic full of documents that they want to edit.  They can upload their scans to Flickr, but Flickr is a terrible platform for transcription.

There's no platform that will guide them through best practices of editing.

What's worse, if there were one, it would need a "killer feature", which is what Julia Flanders describes in the TAPAS project as a compelling reason for people to contribute their transcripts and do their editing on a platform that enforces rigor and has some level of permanence to it -- rather than just slapping their transcripts up on a blog.
So, let's talk about the future.  In his proposal for this conference, Peter Robinson describes a utopia and dystopia: utopia in which textual scholars train the world in how to read documents, and a dystopia in which hordes of "well-meaning but ill-informed enthusiasts will strew the web willy-nilly with error-filled transcripts and annotations, burying good scholarship in rubbish." 
This is what I think is the road to dystopia:

1. Crowdsourcing tools ignore documentary editing methodologies.  If you're transcribing using the Transcribe Bentham tool, you learn about TEI.  You learn from a good school.  But almost all of the other crowdsourced transcription tools don't have that.  Many of them don't even contain a place for the administrator to specify transcription conventions to their users!
2. As a result, the world remains ignorant of the work of scholarly editors, because we're not finding you online--because you're invisible on Wikipedia--and we're not going to learn about your work through crowdsourcing.
3. So you have the public get this attitude that, well, editing is easy -- type what you see.  Who needs an expert?  I think that's a little bit worrisome.
4. The final thing--which, when I started working on this talk, was a sort of wild bogeyman--is the idea that new standards come into being without any reference whatsoever to the tradition of scholarly or documentary editing.

I thought that [idea] was kind of wild.  But, in March, an organization called the Family History Information Standards Organization--which is backed by Ancestry.com, the Federation of Genealogy Societies, BrightSolid, a bunch of other organizations--announced a Call for Papers for standards for genealogists and family historians to use -- sometimes for representing family trees, sometimes for source documents.
And, in May, Call for Papers Submission number sixty-nine, "A Transcription Notation for Genealogy", was submitted.
Let's take a look at it.

Here we have what looks like a fairly traditional print notation.  It's probably okay.
What's a little bit more interesting, though, is the bibliography.

Where is your work in this bibliography?  It's not there.

Where is the Guide to Documentary Editing?  It's not there.

So here's a new standard that was proposed the month before last.  Now, I hope to respond to this--when I get the time--and suggest a few things that I've learned from people like you.  But these standards are forming, and these standards may become what the public thinks of as standards for editing.
All right, so let's talk about the road to utopia.

The road to the utopia that Peter described I see as in part through partnerships between amateurs and professionals:  you get amateurs participating in projects that are well run -- that teach them useful things about editing and how to encode manuscripts.

Similarly, you get professionals participating in the public conversation, so that your methodologies are visible.   Certainly your editions are visible, but that doesn't mean that editing is visible.  So maybe someone here wants to respond to that FHISO request, or maybe they just want to release guides to editing as Open Access.

As a result, amateurs produce higher-quality editions on their own, so that they're more useful for other researchers; so that they're verifiable.

And then, amateurs themselves become advocates -- not just for their material and the materials they're working on through crowdsourcing projects, but for editing as a discipline.

So that's what I think is the road to utopia.
So what about the past?

Back in Shillingsburg's "Dank Cellar" paper, he describes the problems with the e-texts that he's seeing, and he really encourages scholarly editors not to worry about it -- to disengage -- [and] instead to focus on coming up with methodologies--and again, this is 2006--for creating digital editions.  He says that these aren't well understood yet.  Let's not get distracted by these [amateur] things -- let's focus on what's involved in making and distributing digital editions.

Is he still right?  I don't know.

Maybe--if we're in the post-digital age--it's time to re-engage.

[Edit: I was interviewed by The Freelance Web about these tips - hear me talk about this stuff over here]

So we’re just signing off our accounts for the second year of Thirty8 Digital (crazy business: two years? Where the hell did that go?). Things have been brilliant so far ~clutches hard at large piece of wood~ and I wouldn’t now do anything apart from work for myself.

I just got an email from my friend and ex-colleague Frankie Roberto, telling me he’s going freelance and asking for some tips. I have much to say about this stuff, and stopped myself writing him a thesis, but thought it might be interesting to throw the things I said into a quick blog post.

So here it is, the things I’ve taken away from the first two years of business:

> Get an accountant, it’s worth every single penny

> Don’t bother with stuff like FreeAgent, at least until things get much more complicated. Use Google Docs instead and save yourself the monthly fee.

> Find a blinding host if you’re going to be doing that stuff (ours is Vidahost, who are bloody brilliant: disclaimer, here’s an affiliate link… http://my.vidahost.com/aff.php?aff=1450).

> Try to avoid really low budget stuff, even though you’ll probably have to do that shit when you first get started just to get rolling – but in my experience the people who have £500 to spend on a website almost always want a £5000 website, whereas those who have £5000 to spend probably want a £5000 one…

> Genuinely under-promise and over-deliver. It’ll hurt a bit now, but later on people will come back because of it.

> Run your entire business life out of Google Docs. There really isn’t a viable alternative, which might hurt from a privacy perspective but you’re going to have to live with that right now.

> It’s hackneyed, but *everything* takes twice as long as you think. Make sure your estimates reflect this.

> Back every bastard thing up in at least three different places. This includes files, images, code, websites, everything. You probably knew that already, but worth making sure

> Introduce lots of people to lots of other people. I’m pretty sure there’s a karma thing going on here somewhere..

> Fix a single rate for everything you do, and then apply a discount if you want to do things cheaper for, say, a specific sector or client. It’ll make them feel good that you’re cutting prices for them and it won’t force you to do something over-complicated with your pricing.

That’s mine. What are yours?

The Waag Society, Amsterdam, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, and University of Amsterdam, have released a call for applications for a 10 month project exploring the use of Bio-Art as a science communication strategy, potentially leading to a PhD project.

The relation between art-science and strategies for public engagement raises some fascinating and underexplored questions about how different goals, outputs, and modes of working can be put into constructive (or perhaps usefully de-structive) interaction with each other. I’m looking forward to following the project, and to exploring this and related questions at the Lorentz Workshop on the Future of Art-Science Collaborations I’m lucky enough to be participating in in October. 

If you fancy getting a glimpse of the Waag Society in bio-action, they’re also hosting a summer school on biotechnology and digital fabrication ‘BioFab Bootcamp‘. Wish I could go…

 

Call for Embedded Researcher, post MA/Pre-PhD level: Bio-Art, Ethics, and Engagement, University of Amsterdam.

 

DEADLINE: 31 July 2013

 

10 month project to analyse Bio-Art Interventions at the Waag Society, beginning October 2013.

 

An ambitious researcher with a training in the history of medicine, knowledgeable about major current developments in life sciences & health and with an interest in pursuing doctoral research is sought for a funded research project on the use of Bio-Art as a strategy to improve science communication between professionals and diverse publics. The concrete product delivered at the end of the project will be a PhD proposal that will synthesize the history of strategies for the public communication of science since this field of communication developed in the second half of the twentieth century and which will analyse case studies of Bio-Art projects to suggest a model for improved communication between scientists and the public using the strategies found in Bio-Art. The research-in-progress will be presented by the embedded researcher at an expert meeting at the Waag Society where artists, scientists, and scholars will discuss current trends in Bio-Art and how they relate to challenges and opportunities in science communication. Finally, the applicants will mentor the embedded researcher in a collaborative project to demonstrate a model of science communication in an artwork co-produced with an artistic advisor to the project.

 

The research position is funded by the Creative Industries Research Center Amsterdam (CIRCA) and the project I will be developed in collaboration with The Waag Society, Amsterdam, and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, and supervised by Manon Parry, Assistant Professor of Public History, University of Amsterdam. Contact Dr. Parry for a full description of the project, and to submit a CV and writing sample in application by July 31, at *protected email*

 

CIRCA (http://circa.uva.nl/)

The Waag Society, Amsterdam (http://waag.org/en)

Museum Boerhaave (http://www.museumboerhaave.nl/english/)

 

Manon Parry, PhD,

Assistant Professor of Public History

University of Amsterdam

Department of History

Spuistraat 134 | kamer 5.30

1012 VB Amsterdam | T +31.(0)20.525.8194

E-mail: *protected email*