Three ways you can help with 'In their own words: collecting experiences of the First World War' (and a CENDARI project update)

Somehow it's a month since I posted about my CENDARI research project (in Moving forward: modelling and indexing WWI battalions) on this site. That probably reflects the rhythm of the project - less trying to work out what I want to do and more getting on with doing it. A draft post I started last month simply said, 'A lot of battalions were involved in World War One'. I'll do a retrospective post soon, and here's a quick summary of on-going work.

First, a quick recap. My project has two goals - one, to collect a personal narrative for each battalion in the Allied armies of the First World War; two, to create a service that would allow someone to ask 'where was a specific battalion at a specific time?'. Together, they help address a common situation for people new to WWI history who might ask something like 'I know my great-uncle was in the 27th Australian battalion in March 1916, where would he have been and what would he have experienced?'.

I've been working on streamlining and simplifying the public-facing task of collecting a personal narrative for each battalion, and have written a blog post, Help collect soldiers’ experiences of WWI in their own words, that reduces it to three steps:

1. Take one of the diaries, letters and memoirs listed on the Collaborative Collections wiki, and
2. Match its author with a specific regiment or battalion.
3. Send in the results via this form.

If you know of a local history society, family historian or anyone else who might be interested in helping, please send them along to this post: Help collect soldiers’ experiences of WWI in their own words.

Work on specifying the relevant data structures to support a look-up service to answer questions about a specific units location and activities at a specific time largely moved to the wiki:

• Talk:British battalions and regiments in World War I
• Talk:British Army Hierarchies
• Template talk:Battalion - what information should be recorded on every battalion/unit page?
• Template talk:Infobox command structure - what structured data should be recorded about military hierarchies?
• Template talk:Infobox theatre of war/doc - what structured data should be recorded about a unit's activities and engagements in the war?
• Template talk:Infobox military unit - what structured data should be recorded about a battalion/unit?

You can see the infobox structures in progress by flipping from the talk to the Template tabs. You'll need to request an account to join in but more views, sample data and edge cases would be really welcome.

Populating the list of battalions and other units has been a huge task in itself, partly because very few cultural institutions have definitive lists of units they can (or want to) share, but it's necessary to support both core goals. I've been fortunate to have help (see 'Thanks and recent contributions' on 'How you can help') but the task is on-going so get in touch if you can help!

So there are three different ways you can help with 'In their own words: collecting experiences of the First World War':

• collect diaries linked to specific battalions; 
• help check or complete the lists of Australian battalions, British battalions and regiments, Canadian battalions and regiments, Indian battalions, Italian battalions and New Zealand battalions in World War; 
• review and contribute to the data structures needed to record information about military units in the Talk and Template pages above

Finally, last week I was in New Zealand to give a keynote on this work at the National Digital Forum. The video for 'Collaborative collections through a participatory commons' is online, so you can catch up on the background for my project if you've got 40 minutes or so to spare. Should you be in Dublin, I'm giving a talk on 'A pilot with public participation in historical research: linking lived experiences of the First World War' at the Trinity Long Room Hub today (thus the poster).

And if you've made it this far, perhaps you'd like to apply for a CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowships 2015 yourself?

Moving forward: modelling and indexing WWI battalions

A super-quick update from my CENDARI Fellowship this week. I set up the wiki for In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War a week ago but only got stuck into populating it with lists of various national battalions this week. My current task list, copied from the front page is to:

•  Populate list of military units: Australian battalions in World War I, British battalions and regiments in World War I), Canadian battalions in World War I, Indian battalions in World War I, Italian battalions in World War I, New Zealand battalions in World War I. A list of battalions is needed to form the basis for the collecting process. (I'm starting with a list of divisions because I can get it from Wikipedia, but I know this is problematic)
• Collate lists of personal diaries, letters, memoirs that can be linked to units through their authors
• Collate lists of official unit diaries and histories
• Collate resources on researching World War One records to help researchers know where to start
• Create a sample battalion page as a demonstrator to show how personal accounts can be linked
• Collate information about private letters, diaries and memoirs

If you can help with any of that, let me know! Or just get stuck in and edit the site.

I've started another Google Doc with very sketchy Notes towards modelling information about World War One Battalions. I need to test it with more battalion histories and update it iteratively. At this stage my thinking is to turn it into an InfoBox format to create structured data via the wiki. It's all very lo-fi and much less designed than my usual projects, but I'm hoping people will be able to help regardless.

So, in this phase of the project, the aim is find a personal narrative - a diary, letters, memoirs or images - for each military unit in the British Army. Can you help? 

In which I am awed by the generosity of others, and have some worthy goals

A quick update from my CENDARI fellowship working on a project that's becoming 'In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War'. I've spent the week reading (again a mixture of original diaries and letters, technical stuff like ontology documentation and also WWI history forums and 'amateur' sites) and writing. I put together a document outlining a rang of possible goals and some very sketchy tech specs, and opened it up for feedback. The goals I set out are copied below for those who don't want to delve into detail. The commentable document, 'Linking lived experiences of the First World War': possible goals and a bunch of technical questions goes into more detail.

However, the main point of this post is to publicly thank those who've helped by commenting and sharing on the doc, on twitter or via email. Hopefully I'm not forgetting anyone, as I've been blown away by and am incredibly grateful for the generosity of those who've taken the time to at least skim 1600 words (!). It's all helped me clarify my ideas and find solutions I'm able to start implementing next week. In no order at all - at CENDARI, Jennifer Edmond, Alex O'Connor, David Stuart, Benjamin Štular, Francesca Morselli, Deirdre Byrne; online Andrew Gray @generalising; Alex Stinson @ DHKState; jason webber @jasonmarkwebber; Alastair Dunning @alastairdunning; Ben Brumfield @benwbrum; Christine Pittsley; Owen Stephens @ostephens; David Haskiya @DavidHaskiya; Jeremy Ottevanger @jottevanger; Monika Lechner @lemondesign; Gavin Robinson ‏@merozcursed; Tom Pert @trompet2 - thank you all!

Worthy goals (i.e. things I'm hoping to accomplish, with the help of historians and the public; only some of which I'll manage in the time)

At the end of this project, someone who wants to research a soldier in WWI but doesn't know a thing about how armies were structured should be able to find a personal narrative from a soldier in the same bit of the army, to help them understand experiences of the Great War.

Hopefully these personal accounts will provide some context, in their own words, for the lived experiences of WWI. Some goals listed are behind-the-scenes stuff that should just invisibly make personal diaries, letters and memoirs more easily discoverable. It needs datasets that provide structures that support relationships between people and documents; participatory interfaces for creating or enhancing information about contemporary materials (which feed into those supporting structures), and interfaces that use the data created.

More specifically, my goals include:

• A personal account by someone in each unit linked to that unit's record, so that anyone researching a WWI name would have at least one account to read. To populate this dataset, personal accounts (diaries, letters, etc) would need to be linked to specific soldiers, who can then be linked to specific units. Linking published accounts such as official unit histories would be a bonus. [Semantic MediaWiki]
• Researched links between individual men and the units they served in, to allow their personal accounts to be linked to the relevant military unit. I'm hoping I can find historians willing to help with the process of finding and confirming the military unit the writer was in. [Semantic MediaWiki]
• A platform for crowdsourcing the transcription and annotation of digitised documents. The catch is that the documents for transcription would be held remotely on a range of large and small sites, from Europeana's collection to library sites that contain just one or two digitised diaries. Documents could be tagged/annotated with the names of people, places, events, or concepts represented in them. [Semantic MediaWiki??]
• A structured dataset populated with the military hierarchy (probably based on The British order of battle of 1914-1918) that records the start and end dates of each parent-child relationship (an example of how much units moved within the hierarchy)
• A published webpage for each unit, to hold those links to official and personal documents about that unit in WWI. In future this page could include maps, timelines and other visualisations tailored to the attributes of a unit, possibly including theatres of war, events, campaigns, battles, number of privates and officers, etc. (Possibly related to CENDARI Work Package 9?) [Semantic MediaWiki]
• A better understanding of what people want to know at different stages of researching WWI histories. This might include formal data gathering, possibly a combination of interviews, forum discussions or survey 

Goals that are more likely to drop off, or become quick experiments to see how far you can get with accessible tools:

• Trained 'named entity recognition' and 'natural language processing' tools that could be run over transcribed text to suggest possible people, places, events, concepts, etc [this might drop off the list as the CENDARI project is working on a tool called Pineapple (PDF poster). That said, I'll probably still experiment with the Stanford NER tool to see what the results are like] 
• A way of presenting possible matches from the text tools above for verification or correction by researchers. Ideally, this would be tied in with the ability to annotate documents 
• The ability to search across different repositories for a particular soldier, to help with the above.

Commentable version: 'Linking lived experiences of the First World War': possible goals and a bunch of technical questions.

Linking lived experiences of WWI through battalions?

Another update from my CENDARI Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, looking at 'In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War', which is a small-scale, short-term pilot based on WWI collections. My first post is Defining the scope: week one as a CENDARI Fellow. Over the past two weeks I've done a lot of reading - more WWI diaries and letters; WWI histories and historiography; specialist information like military structures (orders of battle, etc). I've also sketched out lots of snippets of possible functions, data, relationships and other outcomes.

I've narrowed the key goal (or minimum viable product, if you prefer) of my project to linking personal accounts of the war - letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs, etc - to battalions, by creating links from the individual who wrote them to their military unit. Once these personal accounts are linked to particular military units, they can be linked to higher units - from the battalion, ship or regiment to brigade, corps, etc - and to particular places, activities, events and campaigns. The idea behind this is to provide context for an individual's experience of WWI by linking to narratives written by people in the same situation. I'm still working out how to organise the research process of matching the right soldier to the right battalion/regiment/ship so that relevant personal stories are discoverable. I'm also still working out which attributes of a battalion are relevant, how granular the data will be, and how to design for the inevitable variation in data quality (for example, the availability of records for different armies varies hugely). Finally, I’m still working out which bits need computer science tools and which need the help of other historians.

Given the number of centenary projects, I was hoping to find more structured data about WWI entities. Trenches to Triples would be useful source of permanent URLs, and terms to train named entity recognition, but am I missing other sources?

There's a lot of content, and so much activity around WWI records, but it's spread out across the internet. Individual people and small organisations are digitising and transcribing diaries and letters. Big collecting projects like Europeana have lots of personal accounts, but they're often not transcribed and they don't seem to be linked to structured data about the item itself. Some people have painstakingly transcribed unit diaries, but they're not linked from the official site, so others wouldn't know there's a more easily read version of the diary available. I've been wondering if you could crowdsource the process of transcribing records held elsewhere, and offer the transcripts back to sites. Using dedicated transcription software would let others suggest corrections, and might also make it possible to link sections of the text to external 'entities' like names, places, events and concepts.

Albert Henry Bailey. Image:
Sir George Grey Special Collections,
Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19150909-39-5

To help figure out the issues researchers face and the variations in available resources, I'm researching randomly selected soldiers from different Allied forces. I've posted my notes on Private Albert Henry Bailey, service number 13/970a. You'll see that they're in prose form, and don't contain any structured data. Most of my research used digitised-but-not-transcribed images of documents, with some transcribed accounts. It would definitely benefit from deeper knowledge of military history - for a start, which battalions were in the same place as his unit at the same time?

This account of the arrival and first weeks of the Auckland Mount Rifles at Gallipoli from the official unit history gives a sense of the density and specificity of local place names, as does the official unit diary, and I assume many personal accounts. I'm not sure how named entity recognition tools will cope, and ideally I'd like to find lists of places to 'train' the tools (including possibly some from the 'Trenches to Triples' project).

If there aren't already any structured data sources for military hierarchies in WWI, do I have to make one? And if so, how? The idea would be to turn prose descriptions like this Australian War Memorial history of the 27th AIF Battalion, this order of battle of the 2nd Australian Division and any other suitable sources into structured data. I can see some ways it might be possible to crowdsource the task, but it's a big task. But it's worth it - providing a service that lets people look up which higher military units, places. activities and campaigns a particular battalion/regiment/ship was linked to at a given time would be a good legacy for my research.

I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of things, and my list of questions is longer than my list of answers, but I should end here. To close, I want to share a quote from the official history of the Auckland Mounted Rifles. The author said he 'would like to speak of the splendid men of the rank and file who died during this three months' struggle. Many names rush to the memory, but it is not possible to mention some without doing an injustice to the memory of others'. I guess my project is driven by a vision of doing justice to the memory of every soldier, particularly those ordinary men who aren't as easily found in the records. I'm hoping that drawing on the work of other historians and re-linking disparate sources will help provide as much context as possible for their experiences of the First World War.

--
Update, 15 October 2014: if you've made it this far, you might also be interested in chipping in at 'Linking lived experiences of the First World War': possible goals and a bunch of technical questions.

Defining the scope: week one as a CENDARI Fellow

I'm coming to the end of my first week as a Transnational Access Fellow with the CENDARI project at the Trinity College Dublin Long Room Hub. CENDARI 'aims to leverage innovative technologies to provide historians with the tools by which to contextualise, customise and share their research', which dovetails with my PhD research incredibly well. This Fellowship gives me an opportunity to extend my ideas about 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons' without trying to squish them into a history thesis, and is probably perfectly timed in giving me a break from writing up.

View over Trinity College Dublin

There are two parts to my CENDARI project 'Bridging collections with a participatory Commons: a pilot with World War One archives'. The first involves working on the technical, data and cultural context/requirements for the 'participatory history commons' as an infrastructure; the second is a demonstrator based on that infrastructure. I'll be working out how official records and 'shoebox archives' can be mined and indexed to help provide what I'm calling 'computationally-generated context' for people researching lives touched by World War One.

This week I've read metadata schema (MODS extended with TEI and a local schema, if you're interested) and ontology guidelines, attended some lively seminars on Irish history, gotten my head around CENDARI's work packages and the structure of the British army during WWI. I've started a list of nearby local history societies with active research projects to see if I can find some working on WWI history - I'd love to work with people who have sources they want to digitise and generally do more with, and people who are actively doing research on First World War lives. I've started to read sample primary materials and collect machine-readable sources so I can test out approaches by manually marking-up and linking different repositories of records. I'm going to spend the rest of the day tidying up my list of outcomes and deliverables and sketching out how all the different aspects of my project fit together. And tonight I'm going to check out some of the events at Discover Research Dublin. Nerd joy!

'The cooperative archive'?

Finally, I've dealt with something I'd put off for ages. 'Commons' is one of those tricky words that's less resonant than it could be, so I looked for a better name than the 'participatory history commons'. because 'commons' is one of those tricky words that's less resonant than it could be. I doodled around words like collation, congeries, cluster, demos, assemblage, sources, commons, active, engaged, participatory, opus, archive, digital, posse, mob, cahoots and phrases like collaborative collections, collaborative history, history cooperative, but eventually settled on 'cooperative archive'. This appeals because 'cooperative' encompasses attitudes or values around working together for a common purpose, and it includes those who share records and those who actively work to enhance and contextualise them. 'Archive' suggests primary sources, and can be applied to informal collections of 'shoebox archives' and the official holdings of museums, libraries and archives.

What do you think - does 'cooperative archive' work for you? Does your first reaction to the name evoke anything like my thoughts above?

Update, October 11: following some market testing on Facebook, it seems 'collaborative collections' best describes my vision.

Who loves your stuff? How to collect links to your site

If you've ever wondered who's using content from your site or what people find interesting, here are some ways to find out, using the Design Museum's URL as an example.

'Links to your site' via Google Webmaster Tools https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/55281

Reddit - plug your URL in after /domain/
http://www.reddit.com/domain/designmuseum.org

Wikipedia - plug your URL in after target=
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=*.designmuseum.org
Depending on your topic coverage you may want to look at other language Wikipedias.

Pinterest - plug your URL in after /source/
http://www.pinterest.com/source/designmuseum.org/

Twitter - search for the URL with quotes around it e.g. "designmuseum.org"

If you can see one particular page shooting up in your web stats, you could try a reverse image search on TinEye to see where it's being referenced.

What am I missing? I'd love to hear about similar links and methods for other sites - tell me in the comments or on twitter @mia_out.

Update: in a similar vein, Tim Sherratt @wragge launched a new experiment called Trove Traces the same day, to 'explore how Trove newspapers are used' by listing pages that link to articles: http://trovespace.webfactional.com/traces/

Update 2: Desi Gonzalez ‏@desigonz tried out some of these techniques and put together a great post on 'Thoughts on what museums can learn from Reddit, Yelp, and what @briandroitcour calls vernacular criticism'
You might also be interested in: Can you capture visitors with a steampunk arm?

Does 'slow art day' work online?

Saturday was 'slow art day', and the Getty Museum (@GettyMuseum) shared a Robert Hughes clip that really resonated with me:

'We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.'

I was tied to my desk writing that day so I wondered how I could have a similar experience: can you 'do' slow art online?  Assuming you can switch off all the other distractions of email, social media, flashing ads, etc, and ignore the fact that your house, office or library is full of other tasks and temptations, can you slow down and sit in front of one art work and have a similar experience through an image on a screen, or does being in a gallery add something to the process?  On the other hand, high-resolution images and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) mean you can see details you'd never see in a gallery so you can explore the artwork itself more deeply*.  And to remove the screen from the equation, would looking at a really good print of a painting be as rewarding as looking at the original? And what of installations and sculpture?

Related to that, I've been wondering how to relate online collections (whether thematic, exhibition-style or old school catalogues) to audience motivations for visiting museums. I've just been reading a great overview of people's motivations for visiting museums in Dimitra Christidou's Re-Introducing Visitors: Thoughts and Discussion on John Falk’s Notion of Visitors’ Identity-Related Visit Motivations. Christidou summarises Falk and Storksdieck's 2005 research on 'museum-specific identities' reflecting visitor motivations:

1. Explorers are driven by their personal curiosity, their urge to discover new things.
2. Facilitators visit the museum on behalf of others’ special interests in the exhibition or the subject-matter of the museum.
3. Experience seekers are these visitors who desire to see and experience a place, such as tourists.
4. Professional hobbyists are those with specific knowledge in the subject matter of an exhibition and specific goals in mind.
5. Rechargers seek a contemplative or restorative experience, often to let some steam out of their systems.

Once I'd gotten past the amusing mental image of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's head exploding at the concept of 'big' and 'small' online identities that change according to context, interests, motivations, etc**, I thought the article provided a useful framework for returning to the question of 'what are museum websites for?'.  We can safely assume that most gallery sites consider the needs of 'professional hobbyists', but what of the other motivations? Some of these motivations are embedded in social experiences - do art sites enable multi-user experiences online, or do they assume that 'sharing' or facilitation only happens via social media? Does looking at art online go deep enough to count as an 'experience'? And how much of the 'recharging' experience is tied to the act of getting to a particular space at a particular time, or to the affordances of the space itself and its physical separation from most distractions of the world?

What new motivations should be added for online experiences of museum exhibitions and objects? What's enabled by the convenience, accessibility and discoverability of art online? And to return to slow art, how can museums use text and design to cue people to slow down and look at art for minutes at a time without getting in the way of people who want a quick experience?  (And is this the same basic question I'd asked earlier about 'enabling punctum' or 'what's the effect of all this aggregation of museum content on the user experience'?)

* Assuming you don't look so closely that you slip into 'inappropriate peering'.
** I'm sure Zuckerberg knows people have different identities in different situations, it's just more convenient for Facebook not to care. Christopher 'moot' Poole opposed this push quite well in a series of talks in 2011. 

Clash of the models? Object-centred and object-driven approaches in online collections

While re-visiting the world of museum collections online for some writing on 'crowdsourcing as participation and engagement with cultural heritage', I came across a description of Bernard Herman's object-centred and object-driven models that could be useful for thinking about mental models designing better online collections sites.

(I often talk about mental models, so here's a widely quoted good definition, attributed to Susan Carey’s 1986 journal article, Cognitive science and science education:

'A mental model represents a person’s thought process for how something works (i.e., a person’s understanding of the surrounding world). Mental models are based on incomplete facts, past experiences, and even intuitive perceptions. They help shape actions and behavior, influence what people pay attention to in complicated situations, and define how people approach and solve problems.'

To illustrate a clash in models, when you read 'model' you might have thought of lots of different mental pictures of a 'model', including model buildings or catwork models, and they'd both be right and yet not quite what I meant:

And now, back to museums...)

To quote from the material culture site I was reading, which references Herman 1992 'The Stolen House', in an object-centred approach the object itself is the focus of study:

"Here, we need to pay attention to the specific physical attributes of the object. The ability to describe the object – to engage, that is, with a list of descriptive criteria – is at the forefront of this approach. A typical checklist of the kinds of questions we might ask about an object include: how, and with what materials, was the object made? what is its shape, size, texture, weight and colour? how might one describe its design, style and/or decorative status? when was it made, and for what purpose?"

In object-driven material culture:

"the focus shifts toward an emphasis on understanding how objects relate to the peoples and cultures that make and use them. In particular, ideas about contextualisation and function become all important. As we have already noted, what objects mean may change through time and space. As products of a particular time and place, objects can tell us a great deal about the societies that gave birth to them. That is, they often help to reflect, or speak to us, of the values and beliefs of those who created them. At the same time, it is also important to remember that objects are not simply ‘passive’ in this way, but that they can also take on a more ‘active’ role, helping to create meaning rather than simply reflect it."

It seems to me that the object-centred approach includes much of the information recorded in museum catalogues, while the object-driven approach is closer to an exhibition.  Online museum collections often re-use content from catalogues and therefore tend to be object-centred by default as catalogues generally don't contain the information necessary to explain how each object relates 'to the peoples and cultures that make and use them' required for an object-driven approach.  If that contextual information is available, the object might be sequestered off in an 'online exhibition' not discoverable from the main collections site.

A complicating factor is the intersection of Herman's approaches with questions about the ways audiences think about objects in museums and other memory institutions (as raised in Rockets, Lockets and Sprockets - towards audience models about collections?).  The object-centred approach seems more easily applicable to individual objects but the object-driven approach possibly works better for classes of objects.  I'm still not sure how different audiences think about the differences between individual objects and classes of objects, so it's even harder to know which approach works best in different contexts, let alone how you would determine which model best suits a visitor when their interaction is online and therefore mostly contextless.  (If you know of research on this, I'd love to hear about it!)

I'd asked on twitter: 'Can mixed models make online collections confusing?'  John Coburn suggested that modes of enquiry online might be different, and that the object-driven attributes might be less important.  This was a useful point, not least because it helped me crystallise one reason I find the de-materialisation of objects online disconcerting - attributes like size, weight, texture, etc, all help me relate to and understand objects.  Or as Janet E Davis said, 'I automatically try to 'translate' into the original medium in my head'.   John answered with another question: 'So do we present objects via resonant ideas/themes/wider narrative, rather than jpg+title being "end points"?', which personally seems like a good goal for online collections, but I'm not the audience.

So my overall question remains: is there a potential mismatch between the object-driven approach that exhibitions have trained museum audiences to expect and the object-centred approach they encounter in museum collections online?  And if so, what should be done about it?

Reflections on teaching Neatline

I've called this post 'Reflections on teaching Neatline' but I could also have called it 'when new digital humanists meet new software'. Or perhaps even 'growing pains in the digital humanities?'.

A few months ago, Anouk Lang at the University of Strathclyde asked me to lead a workshop on Neatline, software from the Scholar's Lab that plots 'archives, objects, and concepts in space and time'. It's a really exciting project, designed especially for humanists - the interfaces and processes are designed to express complexity and nuance through handcrafted exhibits that link historical materials, maps and timelines.

The workshop was on Thursday, and looking at the evaluation forms, most people found it useful but a few really struggled and teaching it was also slightly tough going. I've been thinking a lot about the possible reasons for that and I'm sharing them both as a request for others to share their experiences in similar circumstances and also in the hope that they'll help others.

The basic outline of the workshop was an intros round (who I am, who they are and what they want to learn); information on what Neatline is and what it can do; time to explore Neatline and explore what the software can and can't do (e.g. login, follow the steps at neatline.org/plugins/neatline to create an item based on a series of correspondence Anouk had been working on, deciding whether you want to transcribe or describe the letter, tweaking its appearance or linking it to other items); and a short period for reflection and discussion (e.g. 'What kinds of interpretive decisions did you find yourself making? What delighted you? What frustrated you?') to finish. If you're curious, you can follow along with my slides and notes or try out the Neatline sandbox site.

The first half was fine but some people really struggled with the hands-on section. Some of it was to do with the software itself - as a workshop, it was a brilliant usability test of the admin interfaces of the software for audiences outside the original set of users. Neatline was only launched in July this year and isn't even in version 2 yet so it's entirely understandable that it appears to have a few functional or UX bugs. The documentation isn't integrated into the interface yet (and sometimes lacks information that is probably part of the shared tacit knowledge of people working on the project) but they have a very comprehensive page about working with Neatline items. Overall, the process of handcrafting timelines and maps for a Neatline exhibit is still closer to 'first, catch your rabbit' than making a batch of ready-mix cupcakes. Neatline is also designed for a particular view of the world, and as it's built on top of other software (Omeka) with another very particular view of the world (and hello, Dublin Core), there's a strong underlying mental model that informs the processes for creating content that is foreign to many of its potential users, including some at the workshop.

But it was also partly because I set the bar too high for the exercises and didn't provide enough structure for some of the group. If I'd designed it so they created a simple Neatline item by closely following detailed instructions (as I have done for other, more consciously tech-for-beginners workshops), at least everyone would have achieved a nice quick win and have something they could admire on the screen. From there some could have tried customising the appearance of their items in small ways, and the more adventurous could have tried a few of the potential ways to present the sample correspondence they were working with to explore the effects of their digitisation decisions. An even more pragmatic but potentially divisive solution might have been to start with the background and demonstration as I did, but then do the hands-on activity with a smaller group of people who were up for exploring uncharted waters. On a purely practical level, I also should have uploaded the images of the letters used in the exercise to my own host so that they didn't have to faff with Dropbox and Omeka records to get an online version of the image to use in Neatline.

And finally it was also because the group had really mixed ICT skills. Most were fine (bar the occasional bug), but some were not. It's always hard teaching technical subjects when participants have varying levels of skill and aptitude, but when does it go beyond aptitude into your attitude about being pushed out of your comfort zone? I'd warned everyone at the start that it was new software, but if you haven't experienced beta software before I guess you don't have the context for understanding what that actually means.

I should make it clear here that I think the participants' achievements outshine any shortcomings - Neatline is a great tool for people working with messy humanities data who want to go beyond plonking markers on Google Maps, and I think everyone got that, and most people enjoyed the chance to play with Neatline.

But more generally, I also wonder if it has to do with changing demographics in the digital humanities - increasingly, not everyone interested in DH is an early, or even a late adopter, and someone interested in DH for the funding possibilities and cool factor might not naturally enjoy unstructured exploration of new software, or be intrigued by trying out different combinations of content and functionality just 'to see what happens'.

Practically, more information for people thinking of attending would be useful - 'if you know x already, you'll be fine; if you know y already, you'll be bored' would be useful in future. Describing an event as 'if you like trying new software, this is for you' would probably help, but it looks like the digital humanities might also now be attracting people who don't particularly like working things out as they go along - are they to be excluded? If using software like this is the onboarding experience for people new to the digital humanities, they're not getting the best first impression, but how do you balance the need for fast-moving innovative work-in-progress to be a bit hacky and untidy around the edges with the desires of a wider group of digital humanities-curious scholars? Is it ok to say 'here be dragons, enter at your own risk'?

Museums and the audience comments paradox

I was at the Imperial War Museum for an advisory board meeting for the Social Interpretation project recently, and had a chance to reflect on my experiences with previous audience participation projects.  As Claire Ross summarised it, the Social Interpretation project is asking: does applying social media models to collections successfully increase engagement and reach?  And what forms of moderation work in that environment - can the audience be trusted to behave appropriately?

One topic for discussion yesterday was whether the museum should do some 'gardening' on the comments.  Participation rates are relatively high but some of the comments are nonsense ('asdf'), repetitive (thousands of variants of 'Cool' or 'sad') or off-topic ('I like the museum') - a pattern probably common to many museum 'have your say' kiosks.  Gardening could involve 'pruning' out comments that were not directly relevant to the question asked in the interactive, or finding ways to surface the interesting comments.  While there are models available in other sectors (e.g. newspapers), I'm excited by the possibility that the Social Interpretation project might have a chance to address this issue for museums.

A big design challenge for high-traffic 'have your say' interactives is providing a quality experience for the audience who is reading comments - they shouldn't have to wade through screens of repeated, vacuous or rude comments to find the gems - while appropriately respecting the contribution and personal engagement of the person who left the comment.

In the spirit of 'have your say', what do you think the solution might be?  What have you tried (successfully or not) in your own projects, or seen working well elsewhere?

Update: the Social Interpretation have posted I iz in ur xhibition trolling ur comments:

"One of the most discussed issues was about what we have termed ‘gardening comments’ but to put it bluntly it’s more a case of should we be ‘curating the visitor voice’ in order to improve the visitor experience? It’s a difficult question to deal with... 

We are at the stage where we really do want to respect the commenter, but also want to give other readers a high value experience. It’s a question of how we do that, and will it significantly change the project?"

If you found this post, you might also be interested in Notes from 'The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC'.

Update, March 2014: I've just been reading a journal article on 'Normative Influences on Thoughtful Online Participation'. The authors set out to test this hypothesis:

'Individuals exposed to highly thoughtful behavior from others will be more thoughtful in their own online comment contributions than individuals exposed to behavior exhibiting a low degree of thoughtfulness.' 

Thoughtful comments were defined by the number of words, how many seconds it took to write them, and how much of the content was relevant to the issue discussed in the original post. And the results? 'We found significant effects of social norm on all three measures related to participants’ commenting behavior. Relative to the low thoughtfulness condition, participants in the high thoughtfulness condition contributed longer comments, spent more time writing them, and presented more issue-relevant thoughts.' To me, this suggests that it's worth finding ways to highlight the more thoughtful comments (and keeping pulling out those 'asdf' weeds) in an interactive as this may encourage other thoughtful comments in turn.

Reference: Sukumaran, Abhay, Stephanie Vezich, Melanie McHugh, and Clifford Nass. “Normative Influences on Thoughtful Online Participation.” In Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3401–10. Vancouver, BC, Canada: ACM, 2011. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979450.

How things change: the Google Art Project (again)

The updated Google Art Project has been launched with loads more museums contributing over 30,000 artworks.  The interface still seems a bit sketchy to me (sometimes you can open links in a new tab, sometimes you can't; mystery meat navigation; the lovely zoom option isn't immediately discoverable; the thumbnails that appear at the bottom don't have a strong visual connection with the action that triggers their appearance; and the only way I could glean any artist/title information about the thumbnails was by looking at the URL), but it's nice to see options for exploring by collection (collecting institution, I assume), date or artist emphasised in the interface. 

Anyway, it's all about the content - easy access to high-quality zoomable images of some of the world's best artworks in an interface with lots of relevant information and links back to the holding institution is a win for everyone.  And if the attention (and traffic) makes museums a little jealous, well, it'll be fascinating to see how that translates into action.  After all, keeping up with the Joneses seems to be one way museums change...

Reading some online stories about the launch, I was struck by how far conversations about traditional and online galleries have come.  From one:

As users explore the galleries they can also add comments to each painting and share the whole collection with friends and family. Try doing that in the Tate Modern. Actually, don’t.

Although, of course, you can - it's traditionally known as 'having a conversation in a museum'. 
But in 2012, is visiting a website and sharing links online seen as a reasonable stand-in for the physical visit to a museum, leaving the in-person gallery visit for 'purists' and enthusiasts?  (This might make blockbuster exhibtions bearable.)  Or, as the consensus of the past decade has it, does it just whet the appetite and create demand for an experience with the original object, leading to more visits?

'I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think'

More and more open and/or linkable cultural heritage data is becoming available, which means the next big challenge for memory institutions is dealing with 'death by aggregation: creating meaningful, engaging experiences of individual topics or objects within masses of digital data.  With that in mind, I've been wondering about the application of Roland Barthes' concepts of studium and punctum to large online collections.  (I'm in the middle of research interviews for my PhD, and it's amazing what one will think about in order to put off transcribing hours of recordings, but bear with me...)

Studium, in Wikipedia's definition, is the 'cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph'.  While Barthes was writing about photography, I suspect studium describes the average, expected audience response to well-described images or objects in most collections sites - a reaction that exists within the bounds of education, liking and politeness.  However, punctum - in Barthes' words, the 'element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me' - describes the moment an accidentally poignant or meaningful detail in an image captures the viewer.  Punctum is often personal to the viewer, but when it occurs it brings with it 'a power of expansion': 'I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think'.  You cannot design punctum, but can we design collections interfaces to create the serendipitous experiences that enable punctum?  Is it even possible with images of objects, or is it more likely to occur with photographic collections?

While thinking about this, I came across an excellent post on Understanding Compelling Collections by John Coburn (@j0hncoburn) in which he describes some pilots on 'compelling historic photography' by Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums. The experiment asked two questions: 'Which of our collections best lends themselves to impulse sharing online?' and 'Which of our collections are people most willing to talk about online?'.  It's well worth reading both for their methods and their results, which are firmly grounded in the audiences' experience of their images: a 'key finding from our trial with Flickr Commons was that the mass sharing of images often only became possible when a user defined or redefined the context of the photograph', 'there’s a very real appetite on Facebook for old photography that strongly connects to a person’s past'.

Coming back to Barthes, their quest for images that 'immediately resonated with our audience on an emotional level and without context' is almost an investigation of enabling punctum; their answer: 'anything that How To Be a Retronaut would share', is probably good enough for most of us for now.  To summarise, they're 'era-specific, event-specific, moment-specific' images that 'disrupt people’s model of time', that 'tap into magic and the sublime', and that 'stir your imagination, not demand prior knowledge or interest'.  They're small, tightly-curated, niche-interest sets of images with evocative titles.

That's not how we generally think about or present online collections.  But what if we did?

[Update, May 16, 2012.

This post, from Flickr members co-curating an exhibition with the National Maritime Museum, offers another view - is the public searching for punctum when they view photographic collections, and does the museum/archive way of thinking about collections iron out the quirks that might lead to punctum?

'It is frightening to imagine what treasures will never see the light of day from the collection at the Brass Foundry. I got the sense that the Curators and the National Maritime Museum in general see these images as closely guarded historical documents and as such offer insight location, historical events and people in the image. There seems to be a lack of artistic appreciation for the variety of unusual and standalone images in the collection, raising an important question concerning the value attributed to each photograph when interpreted by an audience with different aesthetic interests. ... In my opinion it is the ‘unknown’ quality of photography that initially inspires engagement and subsequently this process encourages an exploration of our own identity and how we as individuals create meaning.'  Source: 'The Brass Foundary Visit 19/04/2012']

Can you capture visitors with a steampunk arm?

Credits: Science Museum

This may be familiar to you if you've worked on a museum website: an object will capture the imagination of someone who starts to spread the link around, there's a flurry of tweets and tumblrs and links (that hopefully you'll notice in time because you've previously set up alerts for keywords or URLs on various media), others like it too and it starts to go viral and 50,000 people look at that one page in a day, 20,000 the next, furious discussions break out on social media and other sites... then they're gone, onto the next random link on someone else's site.  It's hugely exciting, but it can also feel like a missed opportunity to show these visitors other cool things you have in your collection, to address some of the issues raised and to give them more information about the object.

There are three key aspects to riding these waves of interest: the ability to spot content that's suddenly getting a lot of hits; the ability to respond with interesting, relevant content while the link is still hot (i.e. within anything from a couple of hours to a couple of days); and the ability to put that relevant content on the page where fly-by-night visitors will see it.

For many museums, caught between a templated CMS and layers of sign-off for new content , it's not as easy as it sounds.  When the Science Museum's 'steampunk artificial arm' started circulating on twitter and then made boingboing, I was able to work with curators to get a post on the collections blog about it the next day, but then there was no way of adding that link to the Brought to Life page that was all most people saw.

In his post on “The Guardian’s Facebook app”, Martin Belam discusses how their Facebook app has helped archived content live again:

Someone shares an old article with their friends, some of their friends either already use or install the app, and the viral effect begins to take hold. ... We’ve got over 1.3 million articles live on the website, so that is a lot of content to be discovered, and the app means that suddenly any page, languishing unloved in our database, can become a new landing page. When an article becomes popular in the app, we sometimes package it with content. Because we know the attention has come at a specific time from a specific place, we can add related links that are appropriate to the audience rather than to the original content. ...when you’ve got the audience there, you need to optimise for them

As a content company with great technical and user experience teams, the Guardian is better placed to put together existing content around a viral article, but still, I'm curious: are any museums currently managing to respond to sudden waves of interest in random objects?  And if so, how?

On releasing museum data and the importance of licenses

I've been preparing for the workshop on 'Hacking and mash-ups for beginners' I'm running at the Museum Computer Network conference (MCN2011) this year, which as always means poking around the GLAM APIs, linked and open data services page for some nice datasets to use in exercises.  Meanwhile, people have been using NMSI data at Culture Hack North this weekend, and a question from that event made me realised I never blogged here about the collections data released by NMSI (i.e. the UK Science Museum, National Media Museum and National Railway Museum) back in March 2011.

There's more in the post I wrote on the museum developers blog at the time, Collections data published, but in summary:

We’ve released the files [218,822 object records, 40,596 media records and 173 event records] as a lightweight experiment – we’d like to understand whether, and if so, how, people would use our data. We’d also like to explore the benefits for the museum and for programmers using our data – your feedback will inform decisions about future investment in more structured data as well as helping shape our understanding of the requirements of those users. The files are in CSV format – because it’s a really simple format, viewable in a text editor, we hope that it will be usable by most people.

And since someone asked for some background on how I dealt with the organisational issues, the short answer is - I was pragmatic, figured any reasonable data was better than none, and kept it simple.  Or, as I wrote at the time in Update on collections data and geocoded NRM data:

A few people have commented on the licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, CC BY-NC-SA) and on the format (CSV).  As tomorrow is my last day, I can’t really speak for the museum but the intention is to learn from how people use the data – the things they make, the barriers they face, etc – and iterate (as resources allow) until we get to an optimal solution (or solutions). So please get in touch if you’ve got requests or think you can help clear up some of the issues these kinds of projects face, because there’s a good chance you’ll help make a difference.

The licence is a pragmatic solution – it’s clarification of existing terms rather than a change to our terms, because this avoided a need for legal advice, policy review, etc, that would have added several months to the process.

And yes, I know CSV is quick and dirty, but it’s effective. The museum sector is still working out how to match the resources available with the needs of mash-up type developers who work best with JSON and those who are aiming for linked open data; my hope is that your feedback on this will help museums figure out how to support people using open data in various forms. A simple solution like this also means it’s easy for the museum to re-run the export to update the data as time goes on, and that anyone, geek or not, can open the files without being startled by angle brackets and acronyms. Also, did I mention it was quick?

In some ways, 2011 has been the year I really understood how much of a barrier a 'non-commercial' license is to re-use ('Wired releases images via Creative Commons, but reopens a debate on what “noncommercial” means' is quite a useful article for understanding the confusion though the LOD-LAM Summit was really where it came together for me).  Even I've struggled with questions like 'does a non-commercial license mean I can or can't upload the data to Google Fusion Tables to clean it?', let alone 'can a widget made with non-commercial data be displayed on an ad-supported blog site?'.

Most people who want to play with heritage data want to do the right thing, so an ambiguous 'non-commercial' license effectively prevents them using it (people who want to do bad things with it would probably just scrape the data anyway).  I get the sense that museums (and other GLAM orgs) are strongly loss averse, so a full 'commercial use ok' statement might be a bit much, but maybe we can do more to define exactly what's reasonable 'commercial' use and what's not?  The Wired article provides some useful starting questions, as does Europeana's discussion of their Data Exchange Agreement. Maybe 2012 will be the year we start to provide answers...

Update, January 2013: I've been writing a piece on open cultural data in museums so have been coming across more material on confusion about 'non-commercial'.  The Danger of Using Creative Commons Flickr Photos in Presentations discusses one case where the owner of a photograph was confused about whether it was being used commercially or not.  While that may turn out to be a case of mistaken identity, one commenter, Michael, says:

'Commercial and non-commercial are very difficult to determine. As such, I make a point of never using photos that have a non-commercial license. Too much hassle. (I also now do not use photos with a share-alike provision. Same reason, too much hassle.)'

A post on the Creative Commons blog, Library catalog metadata: Open licensing or public domain? discusses the case for and against requesting vs requiring attribution.

'Entrepreneurship and Social Media' and 'Collaborating to Compete'

[Update: I hope the presentations from the speakers are posted, as they were all inspiring in their different ways.  Bristol City Council's civic crowdsourcing projects had impressive participation rates, and Phil Higgins identified the critical success factors as: choose the right platform, use it at the right stage, issue must be presented clearly. Joanne Orr talked about museum contexts that are encapsulating the intangible including language and practices (and recording intangible cultural heritage in a wiki) and I could sense the audience's excitement about Andrew Ellis' presentation on 'Your Paintings' and the crowdsourcing tagger developed for the Public Catalogue Foundation.]

I'm in Edinburgh for the Museums Galleries Scotland conference 'Collaborating to Compete'. I'm chairing a session on 'Entrepreneurship and Social Media'. In this context, the organisers defined entrepreneurship as 'doing things innovatively and differently', including new and effective ways of working. This session is all about working in partnerships and collaborating with the public. The organisers asked me to talk about my own research as well as introducing the session. I'm posting my notes in advance to save people having to scribble down notes, and I'll try to post back with notes from the session presentations.

Anyway, on with my notes...

Welcome to this session on entrepreneurship and social media. Our speakers are going to share their exciting work with museum collections and cultural heritage.  Their projects demonstrate the benefits of community participation, of opening up to encourage external experts to share their knowledge, and of engaging the general public with the task of improving access to cultural heritage for all.  The speakers have explored innovative ways of working, including organisational partnerships and low-cost digital platforms like social media.  Our speakers will discuss the opportunities and challenges of collaborating with audiences, the issues around authority, identity and trust in user-generated content, and they'll reflect on the challenges of negotiating partnerships with other organisations or with 'the crowd'.

You'll hear about two different approaches to crowdsourcing from Phil Higgins and Andy Ellis, and about how the 'Intangible Cultural Heritage' project helps a diverse range of people collaborate to create knowledge for all.

I'll also briefly discuss my own research into crowdsourcing through games as an example of innovative forms of participation and engagement.

If you're not familiar with the term, crowdsourcing generally means sharing tasks with the public that are traditionally performed in-house.

Until I left to start my PhD, I worked at the Science Museum in London, where I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the history of science and technology more engaging, and the objects related to it more accessible. This inspired me when I was looking for a dissertation project for my MSc, so I researched and developed 'Museum Metadata Games' to explore how crowdsourcing games could get people to have fun while improving the content around 'difficult' museum objects.

Unfortunately (most) collections sites are not that interesting to the general public. There's a 'semantic gap' between the everyday language of the public and the language of catalogues.

Projects like steve.museum showed crowdsourcing helps, but it can be difficult to get people to participate in large numbers or over a long period of time. Museums can be intimidating, and marketing your project to audiences can be expensive. But what if you made a crowdsourcing interface that made people want to use it, and to tell their friends to use it? Something like... a game?

A lot of people play games… 20 million people in the UK play casual games. And a lot of people play museum games. Games like the Science Museum's Launchball and the Wellcome Collection's High Tea have had millions of plays.

Crowdsourcing games are great at creating engaging experiences. They support low barriers to participation, and the ability to keep people playing. As an example, within one month of launching, DigitalKoot, a game for National Library of Finland, had 25,000 visitors complete over 2 million individual tasks.

Casual game genres include puzzles, card games or trivia games. You've probably heard of Angry Birds and Solitaire, even if you don’t think of yourself as a 'gamer'.

Casual games are perfect for public participation because they're designed for instant gameplay, and can be enjoyed in a few minutes or played for hours.

Easy, feel-good tasks will help people get started. Strong game mechanics, tested throughout development with your target audience, will motivate on-going play and keep people coming back.

Here’s a screenshot of the games I made.

In the tagging game 'Dora's lost data', the player meets Dora, a junior curator who needs their help replacing some lost data. Dora asks the player to add words that would help someone find the object shown in Google.

When audiences can immediately identify an activity as a game – in this the use of characters and a minimal narrative really helped - their usual reservations about contributing content to a museum site disappear.

The brilliant thing about game design is that you can tailor tasks and rewards to your data needs, and build tutorials into gameplay to match the player’s skills and the games’ challenges.

Fun is personal - design for the skills, abilities and motivations of your audience.

People like helping out - show them how their data is used so they can feel good about playing for a few minutes over a cup of tea.

You can make a virtue of the randomness of your content - if people can have fun with 100 historical astronomy objects, they can have fun with anything.

To conclude, crowdsourcing games can be fun and useful for the public and for museums. And now we're going to hear more about working with the public... [the end!]

The rise of the non-museum (and death by aggregation)

A bit of an art museum/gallery-focussed post... And when I say 'post', I mean 'vaguely related series of random thoughts'... but these ideas have been building up and I might as well get them out to help get them out of 'draft'.

Following on from various recent discussions (especially the brilliantly thought-provoking MCG's Spring meeting 'Go Collaborate') and the launches over the past few months of the Google Art Project, Artfinder and today's 'Your Paintings' from the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation, I've been wondering what space is left for galleries online.  (I've also been thinking about Aaron's "you are about to be eaten by robots" and the image of Google and Facebook 'nipping at your heels' to become 'the arbiter of truth for ideas' and the general need for museums to make a case for their special place in society.)  Between funding cuts on the one hand, and projects from giants like Google and the BBC and even Europeana on the other, what can galleries do online that no-one else can?

So I asked on twitter, wondering if the space that was left was in creating/curating specialist interest and/or local experiences... @bridgetmck responded "Maybe the space for museums to work online now is meaning-making, intellectual context, using content to solve problems?"  The idea of that the USP of an museum is based on knowledge and community rather than collections is interesting and something I need to think about more.

The twitter conversation also branched off into a direction I've been thinking about over the past few months - while it's great that we're getting more and more open content [seriously, this is an amazing problem to have], what's the effect of all this aggregation on the user experience?  @rachelcoldicutt had also been looking at 'Your Paintings' and her response was to my 'space' question was: "I think the space left is for curation. I feel totally overwhelmed by ALL THOSE paintings. It's like a storage space not a museum".  She'd also just tweeted "are such enormous sites needed when you can search and aggregate? Phaps yes for data structure/API, but surely not for *ppl*" which I'm quoting because I've been thinking the same thing.

[Update 2, July 14: Or, as Vannevar Bush said in 'As We May Think' in 1945: "There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record."]

Have we reached a state of 'death by aggregation'?  Even the guys at Artfinder haven't found a way to make endless lists of search results or artists feel more like fun than work.

Big aggregated collections are great one-stop shops for particular types of researchers, and they're brilliant for people building services based on content, but is there a Dunbar number for the number of objects you can view in one sitting?  To borrow the phrase Hugh Wallace used at MuseumNext, 'snackable' or bite-sized content seems to fit better into the lives of museum audiences, but how do we make collections and the knowledge around them 'snackable'?  Which of the many ways to curate that content into smaller sets - tours, slideshows, personal galleries, recommender systems, storytelling - works in different contexts?  And how much and what type of contextual content is best, and what is that Dunbar number?  @benosteen suggested small 'community sets' or "personal 'threads'" - "interesting people picking 6->12 related items (in their opinion) and discussing them?".  [And as @LSpurdle pointed out, what about serendipity, or the 'surprising beauty' Rachel mentioned?]

I'm still thinking it all through, and will probably come back and update as I work it out.  In the meantime, what do you think?

[Update: I've only just remembered that I'd written about an earlier attempt to get to grips with the effects of aggregation and mental models of collections that might help museums serve both casual and specialist audiences in Rockets, Lockets and Sprockets - towards audience models about collections? - it still needs a lot of thought and testing with actual users, I'd love to hear your thoughts or get pointers to similar work.]

Rockets, Lockets and Sprockets - towards audience models about collections?

This is something I wrote for my MSc dissertation ('Playing with difficult objects: game designs for crowdsourcing museum metadata', view the games I built for it at http://museumgam.es/ or check out the paper (Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections) I wrote for Museums and the Web 2011) about the role of 'distinctiveness' in mental models about collections, that's potentially relevant to discussions around telling stories with and collecting metadata about museum collections.   I'm posting it here for reference in the conversation about instances vs classes of objects that arose on the UKMCG list after the release of NMSI (Science Museum, National Media Museum, National Railway Museum) data as CSV.  One reason I've been thinking about 'distinctiveness' is because I'm wondering how we help people find the interesting records - the iconic objects, the intriguing stories - in a collection of 240,000 objects.

I'm interested in audiences' mental models about when a record refers to the type of object vs the individual object - my sense is that 'rockets', in the model below, are generally thought of as the individual object, and that 'sprockets' are thought of as the type of object, but that it varies for 'lockets', depending how distinctive they are in relation to the person.

I'm also generally curious about the utility of the model, and would love to know of references that might relate to it (whether supporting or otherwise) - if you can think of any, let me know in the comments.

Not all objects are created equal

Both museum objects and the records about them vary in quality. Just as the physical characteristics of one object - its condition, rarity, etc - differ from another, the strength of its associations with important people, events or concepts will also vary. To complicate things further, as the Collections Council of Australia (2009) states, this 'significance' is 'relative, contingent and dynamic'.

When faced with hundreds of thousands of objects, a museum will digitise and describe objects prioritised by 'technical criteria (physical condition of the original material), content criteria (representativeness, uniqueness), and use criteria (demand)' (Karvonen, 2010). In theory, all objects are registered by the collecting institution, so a basic record exists for each. Hopefully, each has been catalogued and the information transcribed or digitised to some extent, but this is often not the case. Records are often missing descriptions, and most lack the contextual histories that would help the general visitor understand its significance. Some objects may only have an accession number and a one word label, while those on display in a museum generally have well-researched metadata, detailed descriptions and related narratives or contextualised histories. Variable image quality (or lack of images) is an issue in collections in general. This project excludes object records without images but does include many poor-quality images as a result of importing records from a bulk catalogue.

This project posits that objects can be placed on a scale of 'distinctiveness' based on their visual attributes and the amount and quality of information about them. Within this project, bulk collections with minimal metadata and distinctiveness have been labelled 'sprockets', the smaller set of catalogued objects with some distinctiveness have been labelled 'lockets', and the unique, iconic objects with a full contextual history have been labelled 'rockets'. This concept also references the English Heritage 'building grades' model (DCMS, 2010). During the project, the labels 'heroic', 'semi-heroic' and 'bulk' objects were also used.


These labels are not concerned with actual 'significance' or other valuation or priority placed on the object, but relate only to the potential mental models around them and data related to them - the potential for players to discover something interesting about them as objects, or whether they can just tag them on visual characteristics.


In theory there is a correlation between the significance of an object and the amount of information available about it; there may be particular opportunities for games where this is not the case.

Project label	Information type	Amount of information	Proportion of collection
Rockets	Subjective	Contextual history ('background, events, processes and influences')	Tiny minority
Lockets	Mostly objective, may be contextual to collection purpose	Catalogued (some description)	Minority
Sprockets	Objective	Registered (minimal)	Majority

Table 1 Objects grouped by distinctiveness

This can also be represented visually as a pyramid model:

Figure 2 A figurative illustration of the relative numbers of different levels of objects in a typical history museum.

References
Department of Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) (2010) Principles of Selection for Listing Buildings [Online] Available from: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/imported-docs/p-t/principles-of-selection-for-listing-buildings-2010.pdf

Karvonen, M. (2010). "Digitising Museum Materials - Towards Visibility and Impact". In Pettersson, S., Hagedorn-Saupe, M., Jyrkkiö, T., Weij, A. (Eds) Encouraging Collections Mobility In Europe. Collections Mobility. [Online] Available from: http://www.lending-for-europe.eu/index.php?id=167

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