9 Jun 2010, UCL

A set of interesting talks from researchers, museum staff and a technology supplier on digital heritage. Common themes were enhancing interaction and engagement with collections through digital media and the crowdsourcing of transcription work with its attendant risks and benefits. Crowdsourcing is seen having particular potential at a time when it is hard to secure funding for digitisation and online projects.

1. David Arnold, University of Brighton

David Arnold presented on advances in 3D object representations for heritage collections. Not really my area this, so I only picked up a few points:

• 3D Coform Project – part of big EU project with museums.
• Phased adoption of technology – first phase just reproduces what you do manually. Subsequent phases only possible with tech.
• Every time we digitise, we create potential legacy problems with the data

Tools:

• triangulated laser scanning, KULeuvan ARC 3D tool
• Sourceforce FOSS mesh processing

Example: publicscupturesofsussex.co.uk – map + 3d pics

Metadata: 3D COFORM adopted CIDOC-CRM & extension to “Digital Provenance”

2. Andy Hudson-Smith, UCL (cf Digitalurban blog)

Andy spoke about a new project aimed to attach memories to objects: Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM). Site is: talesofthings.com

You take a photo of an object/building etc.. of personal significance to you, upload it to their website and get a QR code sticker. API under development.

The object is then tagged and you can add your memories to it via the web. Object also tweets on updates. Audioboo for the audio tagging.

Apps: talking Oxfam objects (what happened to my old trousers?), artist adds QR to art to record people’s reactions to his art.

Plan to make QR code out of mosaic tiles for Shoreditch church.

“Tagging is Connecting” paper M/C journal

Follow project at twitter.com/talesofthings

Alzheimers link – triggering memories in sufferers.

3. Melissa Terras, UCL

Melissa spoke about her “Transcribe Bentham” Project & Crowdsourcing the transcriptions.

Jeremy Bentham – large amount of papers & material on him at UCL.

Crowdsourcing roots. Often those outside institutions took lead in exploiting new tech. Old idea – e.g. metal detectors revolutionising archeology with uptake by enthusiasts.

Holley, R D-Lib Magazine. “Crowdsourcing: how and why should libraries do it?”

Crowdsourcing successes:

• Galaxy Zoo – 60 million galaxies classified
• Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program www.nla.gov.au/ndp. 9000+ members thousands of lines corrected
• V & A – crowdsourcing best crops of images from collections. 14,000 to date.
• Family search indexing of family trees www.familysearch.org

and many more..

Learning from crowdsourcing experience:

• Majority of work is done by 10% of users
• Personal interest & reward – use of cognitive surplus
• Pensioners, disabled, terminally ill particularly keen
• Builds up IT expertise, “addictive”, rewards = ranking

.

Rose Holley’s checklist (on dlib). Launching system in July.

www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham

..system will be based on mediawiki

Issues :

• linking transcription, catalogue & image
• Undoing vandalism
• Quality control

#TranscriBentham

4. Fiona Romeo, National Maritime Museum

Fiona also presented a range of NMM digital projects including crowdsourding of transcripts also.

“Your Paintings” project with BBC. Public Catalogue Foundation.

NMM photos on Flickr. Get foreign language tags as well as semantics (content related) . Some additional annotations. Get questions, which helps guide information design. Indicommons project, make it easier to share content.

Naval-history.net Naval history community – connected with them and got them to work on a set of scans – CC sharealike licenced.

NMM have a new wing under development dedicated to digital interaction and a number of interesting ideas for social sharing and enhancement of objects in the collection.

5. Sascha Curzon, Gallery Systems

Sascha presented the eMuseum federated search system, a nonprofit project which enables museums and galleries to expose their catalogues, enabling end users to search across collections. The aggregated data will also be available as XML and RDF.

To see them in the context of the conference programme, I converted the tweets and the event schedule to XML suitable for display in a Simile Timeline. Click the screenshot below to access the resulting timeline mashup (nb tweets take a few seconds to load).

What would have made this exercise easier, and the conference tweets easier to track:

• If the conference programme had been published in a more mashable format eg iCal / XML
• If there was a way to identify a particular conference track (a sub hashtag? – or is that overkill?)
• A way to distinguish critical comments, reportage, and general flim-flam. Though perhaps that is part of the fun!

Bill Gates’ keynote began by focusing on the big problems in development that his Foundation is targeting — childhood mortality, immunisation and education. Perhaps to deliberately deemphasise ICT, he introduced it only later in his talk, where he talked about scalability and learning to recognise those projects with a genuine impact while recognising failures (citing Digital Green and M-Pesa as successful examples). In doing so, there was some feeling that he was not giving due regard to the importance of localised, context-dependent solutions (eg Richard Heeks’ response)

Ricardo Legorreta's impressive Carnegie Mellon building in Doha

Earlier in the day, a very interesting study by Melissa Ho and colleagues on ICT for health in Ghana had compared a top-down, government-sponsored solution with a more bottom-up practitioner-led initiative. Both solutions dealt with communication and referrals between health care professionals, the former being based on a web platform and the latter a mobile solution. The study found more uptake with the latter, though interestingly this also seemed to have some unintended consequences, such as doctors’ phones going off at inopportune moments. This seemed to typify the delicate balance between over-structured “official” systems which struggle for uptake and the unstructured, occasionally chaotic outcomes with a user-led approach. The interesting question for me is whether such community-led work can develop sufficient structure and conformity for the solution to work efficiently into the long term.

Among the other (mostly very good) presentations that stood out for me was that by Aishwarya Ratan et al from Microsoft Research on Kelsa+, which did an ethnographic study of off-duty workers using a PC, capturing some compelling footage of workers teaching themselves basic computing through peer observation and experimentation.

The poster presentations and system demos were great, and although I didn’t get round to all of them I had a very good live demo of Frontline SMS linked to Ushahidi for participatory crisis reporting and a look at the Moca system for remote diagnosis in healthcare.

Carlos Braga giving his closing keynote

In his closing keynote, Carlos Braga of the World Bank talked about the global financial crisis and how it will continue to hit developing countries hard. While acknowledging the role of ICT in the credit crisis (through enabling complex but opaque derivative calculations), it is increasingly shown to play a strong role in economic growth. Braga compared the development trajectories of South Korea and Ghana, attributing a large amount of the divergence between the two on the better harnessing of knowledge in Korea. Braga also made use of the excellent animated bubble chart for GDP growth from Gapminder World

In sum, it was a privilege to get to sample the range of quality research and innovation going on in the ICT4D space. While the theoretical navel-gazing was occasionally wearing, there were also real signs of an emerging, more balanced synergy between the power of ICT and the headline issues in global development.

The BGDD network has had four projects over the last three years that have looked at aspects of digital inclusion in Kenya, India and Chile. The meeting reported back on progress from each of the projects, which are now nearing completion.

Guest speakers Paula Kotze and Gary Marsden from South Africa talked about their ongoing projects using mobiles and “digital doorways” – robust internet kiosks.

A key theme of both their talks was the move towards more flexible, ongoing projects that spend more time percolating technology into a community. Similarly, technology is becoming more flexible and not dictating how it should be used. Notable is the success of the MobileEd project, which provides an voice interface to wikis on a mobile, and Big Board, where users can download (and upload) content over bluetooth connections without charges.

The keynote was from Clay Shirky, who talked about spontaneous communities on the web (“Every Page is a Latent Community”). He made a key point that successful platforms are feature-light, but that community rules are the new complexity.

Another interesting point, made in response to a question form the floor, is that mixing amateurs and experts in online communities enriches both groups.

The original publishing metaphor – filter then publish – has become publish and then filter. He suggested the role of libraries should be to apply collaborative filtering and moving toward servicing communities rather than individuals.

I followed this up with the talk from Jenny Levine on the new media for libraries track. She gave a number of examples of academic and public libraries using web2 tools and widgets, including tweeting what users are borrowing and the promise of more social catalogue software such as bibliocommons. The idea of the participatory library was floated.

I then switched over to a series of talks on search optimisation and analytics. Tony Hirst from the Open University talked about course analytics as a way of determining student learning behaviour (with surprisingly long study sessions recorded – unless they were just Facebooking in another window he he). Susanne Koch from Pandia.com gave a good characterisation of online stories as rockets (interesting now), sleepers (catering to the long tail), late bloomers (suddenly popular by chance), honey pots (gateways), screwdrivers (tools) and pubs (social spaces). All backed with analytics data.

Other good talks I saw were on the changing role of the information professional. Dennie Heye talked about the seven skills of successful information professionals which emphasised the need to be proactive and persuasive. Shiela Corrall gave a really good talk on the hybrid professional, who can combine content, context and technology specialisms.

For me some useful content, then, albeit interspersed with people presenting technology and ideas we have all heard before rather too many times now..