Melissa Terras | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)
Papers by Melissa Terras
2019 15th International Conference on eScience (eScience), 2019
This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables histo... more This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables historical research. It allows for running text mining queries across large datasets, such as historical newspapers and books in parallel via Apache Spark. It handles queries against collections that comprise several XML schemas and physical representations. The proposed tool has been successfully evaluated using five different large-scale historical text datasets and two HPC environments, as well as on desktops. Results shows that defoe allows researchers to query multiple datasets in parallel from a single command-line interface and in a consistent way, without any HPC environment-specific requirements.
Who undertook the foundational work of the discipline now known as Digital Humanities (DH)? Whose... more Who undertook the foundational work of the discipline now known as Digital Humanities (DH)? Whose work merits inclusion in the history of the genesis of DH the leaders of scholarly projects? Their research assistants? Their administrators? Their funders? Have important contributions to early DH projects gone unacknowledged or been silenced by the field’s dominant ‘founding father’ narratives? How can a better understanding of previously undocumented contributions to the founding of DH allow us to evaluate the centrality of processes like collaboration and interdisciplinarity to the development and establishment of DH? This paper describes our research on the ‘hidden contributions’ to the Index Thomisticus project of Fr Roberto Busa S.J. (1913-2011). Busa is often said to be the founding father of DH: “Most fields cannot point to a single progenitor, much less a divine one, but humanities computing has Father Busa, who began working (with IBM) in the late 1940s on a concordance [the ...
Digit. Humanit. Q., 2017
How can digital methods be used to conceptualize historical research projects, including their te... more How can digital methods be used to conceptualize historical research projects, including their teams, approaches, methods, and outputs? What methodologies can be used to synthesize and analyze archival records, workshop plans, photographic evidence, and oral histories? This co-authored paper describes an ongoing effort by a collaborative group* to understand and recover the work of Father Roberto Busa, commonly thought to be the “founding father” of Digital Humanities. Starting in 1949, Roberto Busa, S.J., began a landmark collaboration with IBM to build a lemmatized concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 1956 Busa founded the world’s first humanities computing center in Gallarate, Italy, located after 1961 in a former textile factory stocked with rows of IBM punched-card machines. This was CAAL, the Centro per L’Automazione dell’Analisi Letteraria—the Center for the Automation of Literary Analysis. There Busa and his mostly female student operators processed the monumen...
Archival Science, 2020
A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to... more A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to archives. These questions are increasingly being asked of digital archives, too. Here, we examine the complex interplay of institutional, intellectual, economic, technical, practical and social factors that have shaped decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of digitised newspapers in and from online archives. We do so by undertaking and analysing a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with public and private providers of major newspaper digitisation programmes. Our findings contribute to emerging understandings of factors that are rarely foregrounded or highlighted, yet fundamentally shape the depth and scope of digital cultural heritage archives and thus the questions that can be asked of them, now and in the future. Moreover, we draw attention to providers’ emphasis on meeting the needs of their end-users and how this is shaping the form and function of digital archives...
Journal of Documentation, 2019
Purpose In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentu... more Purpose In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed art images. Design/methodology/approach Following a review of the literature, the authors scope out how end users can discover institutions participating in OpenGLAM, and use case studies to examine the process they must follow to find, obtain and reuse openly licensed images from three art museums. Findings Academic literature has so far focussed on examining the risks and benefits of participation from an institutional perspective, with little done to assess OpenGLAM from the end users’ standpoint. The authors reveal that end users have to overcome a series of barriers to find, obtain and reuse open images. The three main barriers relate to image quality, image tracking and the difficulty o...
Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2012
This paper describes the methodology and presents preliminary results of a project using multispe... more This paper describes the methodology and presents preliminary results of a project using multispectral imaging to document the deterioration of parchment. A series of treatments has been applied to degrade samples from a deaccessioned manuscript using both physical and chemical agents. Each sample is photographed before and after the treatment by a multispectral imaging system to record the effect of the treatments on both the writing and the parchment. Here we present the initial imaging of the samples, and we show how some of the agents affect the writing and parchment.
Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2018
In the last decade significant resources have been invested for the digitisation of the collectio... more In the last decade significant resources have been invested for the digitisation of the collections of a large number of museums and galleries worldwide. In Europe alone, 10 million EUR is annually invested in Europeana (Europeana 2014). However, as we gradually move on from "the start-up phase" of digitisation (Hughes 2004), revenue generation and sustainability must be considered (Hughes 2004). Even beyond digitisation, generating revenue through innovation and in particular "finding new business models to sustain funding" (Simon 2011) ranks amongst museums' top challenges (Simon 2011). More importantly, despite the significant wealth of digitised assets museums now own, little has been done to investigate ways these institutions could financially benefit from their digitised collections. For art institutions in particular, this has been largely limited to the sale of image licenses, with the fear of losing this revenue posing as one of the key reasons art museums are reluctant to join the Open Content movement (Kapsalis 2016). This paper examines how recent technological advancements, such as image recognition and Print-on-Demand automation, can be utilised to take advantage of the wealth of digitised artworks museums and galleries have in their possession. A pilot study of the proposed solution at the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) in Thessaloniki, Greece, is covered and the findings are examined. Early feedback indicates that there is a significant potential in the utilisation of the aforementioned technologies for the monetisation of digitised collections. However, challenges such as blending the real-world experience with the digital experience, as well as flattening the learning curve of the technological solution for museum visitors, need to be addressed. Based on the pilot study at SMCA, this paper investigates how emerging technologies can be utilised to facilitate revenue generation for all museums and galleries with digitised collections.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016
The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical reco... more The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical record of the estates of the county of Londonderry (in modern day Northern Ireland). It contains key data about landholding and population in the Irish province of Ulster and the city of Londonderry and its environs in the mid-17th century, at a time of social, religious, and political upheaval. Compiled in 1639, it was severely damaged in a fire in 1786, and due to the fragile state of the parchment, its contents have been mostly inaccessible since. We describe here a long-term, interdisciplinary, international partnership involving conservators, archivists, Pal et al. 2 of 31 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016 2 The Great Parchment Book The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society (hereafter 'the Irish Society') is a major survey of all the estates in the county of Derry Digitally reconstructing the Great Parchment Book Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016 3 of 31 Digitally reconstructing the Great Parchment Book Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016 5 of 31
Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement, 2016
This chapter describes a highly collaborative project in digital humanities, which used tools and... more This chapter describes a highly collaborative project in digital humanities, which used tools and expertise from a diverse range of disciplines: medical physics, image science, and conservation. We describe this collaboration through three examples: the use of phantoms taken from medical physics, a historically accurate model of parchment degradation, and a detailed description of the steps taken to run experiments and collect data within a manageable budget. Each example highlights how procedures from a discipline were adapted for the project through collaboration. Whilst conservation focuses on developing methods to best preserve cultural heritage documents, we describe an unusual collaboration between conservation and image science to document through multispectral imaging the deliberate damage of a manuscript. Multispectral imaging has been utilised to examine cultural heritage documents by providing information about their physical properties. However, current digitisation efforts concentrate on recording documents in their current state. In this project, we aimed at recording the process How to cite this book chapter:
Digital imaging technology can now produce detailed and trustworthy surrogates of historical docu... more Digital imaging technology can now produce detailed and trustworthy surrogates of historical documents. 1 Leveraged by technological improvements in imaging and image processing, humanities scholars have been able to image, analyse, and recover more information from historical documents than was previously possible. 2,3,4 Multispectral imaging has been utilised to examine the characteristics of documents by providing additional information about their physical properties and condition. 5,6,7 However, current digitisation efforts have concentrated on recording documents in their current state. In this project we used multispectral imaging to record the process of macroscopic document degradation by imaging a parchment document before and after a series of degradation processes. This project is part of a larger effort to investigate the methodologies for acquiring and processing multispectral images of damaged cultural heritage documents. 8,9
Medicine 2.0, 2013
Background: Since their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich... more Background: Since their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich source of information for researchers and have attracted interest in their affordances and use. Since 2009 PubMed has included 123 journal articles on medicine and Twitter, but no overview exists as to how the field uses Twitter in research. Objective: This paper aims to identify published work relating to Twitter within the fields indexed by PubMed, and then to classify it. This classification will provide a framework in which future researchers will be able to position their work, and to provide an understanding of the current reach of research using Twitter in medical disciplines. Methods: Papers on Twitter and related topics were identified and reviewed. The papers were then qualitatively classified based on the paper's title and abstract to determine their focus. The work that was Twitter focused was studied in detail to determine what data, if any, it was based on, and from this a categorization of the data set size used in the studies was developed. Using open coded content analysis additional important categories were also identified, relating to the primary methodology, domain, and aspect. Results: As of 2012, PubMed comprises more than 21 million citations from biomedical literature, and from these a corpus of 134 potentially Twitter related papers were identified, eleven of which were subsequently found not to be relevant. There were no papers prior to 2009 relating to microblogging, a term first used in 2006. Of the remaining 123 papers which mentioned Twitter, thirty were focused on Twitter (the others referring to it tangentially). The early Twitter focused papers introduced the topic and highlighted the potential, not carrying out any form of data analysis. The majority of published papers used analytic techniques to sort through thousands, if not millions, of individual tweets, often depending on automated tools to do so. Our analysis demonstrates that researchers are starting to use knowledge discovery methods and data mining techniques to understand vast quantities of tweets: the study of Twitter is becoming quantitative research. Conclusions: This work is to the best of our knowledge the first overview study of medical related research based on Twitter and related microblogging. We have used 5 dimensions to categorize published medical related research on Twitter. This classification provides a framework within which researchers studying development and use of Twitter within medical related research, and those undertaking comparative studies of research, relating to Twitter in the area of medicine and beyond, can position and ground their work.
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing - UbiComp '12, 2012
Hudson-Smith, A and Gray, S and Ross, C and Barthel, R and de Jode, M and Warwick, C and Terras, ... more Hudson-Smith, A and Gray, S and Ross, C and Barthel, R and de Jode, M and Warwick, C and Terras, M Experiments with the Internet of Things in Museum Space: QRator. In: (Proceedings) International Workshop on Digital Object Memories for the Internet of Things, DOMe-IoT 2012. 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012).. (In press). ... Full text not available from this repository. ... International Workshop on Digital Object Memories for the Internet of Things, DOMe-IoT 2012. 14th International ...
Journal of Documentation, 2011
PurposeTo date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies ... more PurposeTo date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies are used by and can benefit scholars. This paper aims to investigate the use of Twitter by an academic community in various conference settings, and to pose the following questions: Does the use of a Twitter‐enabled backchannel enhance the conference experience, collaboration and the co‐construction of knowledge? and How is microblogging used within academic conferences, and can one articulate the benefits it may bring to a discipline?Design/methodology/approachThis paper considers the use of Twitter as a digital backchannel by the Digital Humanities (DH) community, taking as its focus postings to Twitter during three different international 2009 conferences. The resulting archive of 4,574 “Tweets” was analysed using various quantitative and qualitative methods, including a qualitative categorisation of Twitter posts by open coded analysis, a quantitative examination of user conventions,...
Journal of Documentation, 2013
PurposeSince its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have p... more PurposeSince its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have provided a rich dataset for researchers, leading to the publication of over a thousand academic papers. This paper aims to identify this published work and to classify it in order to understand Twitter based research.Design/methodology/approachFirstly the papers on Twitter were identified. Secondly, following a review of the literature, a classification of the dimensions of microblogging research was established. Thirdly, papers were qualitatively classified using open coded content analysis, based on the paper's title and abstract, in order to analyze method, subject, and approach.FindingsThe majority of published work relating to Twitter concentrates on aspects of the messages sent and details of the users. A variety of methodological approaches is used across a range of identified domains.Research limitations/implicationsThis work reviewed the abstracts of all papers available via ...
UCL logo UCL Discovery. ...
Museums and the Web 2011: Proceedings, 2011
This paper presents a collaborative study between UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and the Briti... more This paper presents a collaborative study between UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and the British Museum. It considers the use and information-seeking behaviour by scholars of the British Museum's Collection Online. The research focuses on user perspectives, search strategies and general use of museum digital resources, highlights the scholarly value of museum digital resources, and examines the existing structures of presentation and representation of the British Museum Collection Online for aiding academic information ...
UCL logo UCL Discovery. ...
2019 15th International Conference on eScience (eScience), 2019
This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables histo... more This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables historical research. It allows for running text mining queries across large datasets, such as historical newspapers and books in parallel via Apache Spark. It handles queries against collections that comprise several XML schemas and physical representations. The proposed tool has been successfully evaluated using five different large-scale historical text datasets and two HPC environments, as well as on desktops. Results shows that defoe allows researchers to query multiple datasets in parallel from a single command-line interface and in a consistent way, without any HPC environment-specific requirements.
Who undertook the foundational work of the discipline now known as Digital Humanities (DH)? Whose... more Who undertook the foundational work of the discipline now known as Digital Humanities (DH)? Whose work merits inclusion in the history of the genesis of DH the leaders of scholarly projects? Their research assistants? Their administrators? Their funders? Have important contributions to early DH projects gone unacknowledged or been silenced by the field’s dominant ‘founding father’ narratives? How can a better understanding of previously undocumented contributions to the founding of DH allow us to evaluate the centrality of processes like collaboration and interdisciplinarity to the development and establishment of DH? This paper describes our research on the ‘hidden contributions’ to the Index Thomisticus project of Fr Roberto Busa S.J. (1913-2011). Busa is often said to be the founding father of DH: “Most fields cannot point to a single progenitor, much less a divine one, but humanities computing has Father Busa, who began working (with IBM) in the late 1940s on a concordance [the ...
Digit. Humanit. Q., 2017
How can digital methods be used to conceptualize historical research projects, including their te... more How can digital methods be used to conceptualize historical research projects, including their teams, approaches, methods, and outputs? What methodologies can be used to synthesize and analyze archival records, workshop plans, photographic evidence, and oral histories? This co-authored paper describes an ongoing effort by a collaborative group* to understand and recover the work of Father Roberto Busa, commonly thought to be the “founding father” of Digital Humanities. Starting in 1949, Roberto Busa, S.J., began a landmark collaboration with IBM to build a lemmatized concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 1956 Busa founded the world’s first humanities computing center in Gallarate, Italy, located after 1961 in a former textile factory stocked with rows of IBM punched-card machines. This was CAAL, the Centro per L’Automazione dell’Analisi Letteraria—the Center for the Automation of Literary Analysis. There Busa and his mostly female student operators processed the monumen...
Archival Science, 2020
A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to... more A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to archives. These questions are increasingly being asked of digital archives, too. Here, we examine the complex interplay of institutional, intellectual, economic, technical, practical and social factors that have shaped decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of digitised newspapers in and from online archives. We do so by undertaking and analysing a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with public and private providers of major newspaper digitisation programmes. Our findings contribute to emerging understandings of factors that are rarely foregrounded or highlighted, yet fundamentally shape the depth and scope of digital cultural heritage archives and thus the questions that can be asked of them, now and in the future. Moreover, we draw attention to providers’ emphasis on meeting the needs of their end-users and how this is shaping the form and function of digital archives...
Journal of Documentation, 2019
Purpose In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentu... more Purpose In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed art images. Design/methodology/approach Following a review of the literature, the authors scope out how end users can discover institutions participating in OpenGLAM, and use case studies to examine the process they must follow to find, obtain and reuse openly licensed images from three art museums. Findings Academic literature has so far focussed on examining the risks and benefits of participation from an institutional perspective, with little done to assess OpenGLAM from the end users’ standpoint. The authors reveal that end users have to overcome a series of barriers to find, obtain and reuse open images. The three main barriers relate to image quality, image tracking and the difficulty o...
Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2012
This paper describes the methodology and presents preliminary results of a project using multispe... more This paper describes the methodology and presents preliminary results of a project using multispectral imaging to document the deterioration of parchment. A series of treatments has been applied to degrade samples from a deaccessioned manuscript using both physical and chemical agents. Each sample is photographed before and after the treatment by a multispectral imaging system to record the effect of the treatments on both the writing and the parchment. Here we present the initial imaging of the samples, and we show how some of the agents affect the writing and parchment.
Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2018
In the last decade significant resources have been invested for the digitisation of the collectio... more In the last decade significant resources have been invested for the digitisation of the collections of a large number of museums and galleries worldwide. In Europe alone, 10 million EUR is annually invested in Europeana (Europeana 2014). However, as we gradually move on from "the start-up phase" of digitisation (Hughes 2004), revenue generation and sustainability must be considered (Hughes 2004). Even beyond digitisation, generating revenue through innovation and in particular "finding new business models to sustain funding" (Simon 2011) ranks amongst museums' top challenges (Simon 2011). More importantly, despite the significant wealth of digitised assets museums now own, little has been done to investigate ways these institutions could financially benefit from their digitised collections. For art institutions in particular, this has been largely limited to the sale of image licenses, with the fear of losing this revenue posing as one of the key reasons art museums are reluctant to join the Open Content movement (Kapsalis 2016). This paper examines how recent technological advancements, such as image recognition and Print-on-Demand automation, can be utilised to take advantage of the wealth of digitised artworks museums and galleries have in their possession. A pilot study of the proposed solution at the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) in Thessaloniki, Greece, is covered and the findings are examined. Early feedback indicates that there is a significant potential in the utilisation of the aforementioned technologies for the monetisation of digitised collections. However, challenges such as blending the real-world experience with the digital experience, as well as flattening the learning curve of the technological solution for museum visitors, need to be addressed. Based on the pilot study at SMCA, this paper investigates how emerging technologies can be utilised to facilitate revenue generation for all museums and galleries with digitised collections.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016
The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical reco... more The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical record of the estates of the county of Londonderry (in modern day Northern Ireland). It contains key data about landholding and population in the Irish province of Ulster and the city of Londonderry and its environs in the mid-17th century, at a time of social, religious, and political upheaval. Compiled in 1639, it was severely damaged in a fire in 1786, and due to the fragile state of the parchment, its contents have been mostly inaccessible since. We describe here a long-term, interdisciplinary, international partnership involving conservators, archivists, Pal et al. 2 of 31 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016 2 The Great Parchment Book The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society (hereafter 'the Irish Society') is a major survey of all the estates in the county of Derry Digitally reconstructing the Great Parchment Book Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016 3 of 31 Digitally reconstructing the Great Parchment Book Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016 5 of 31
Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement, 2016
This chapter describes a highly collaborative project in digital humanities, which used tools and... more This chapter describes a highly collaborative project in digital humanities, which used tools and expertise from a diverse range of disciplines: medical physics, image science, and conservation. We describe this collaboration through three examples: the use of phantoms taken from medical physics, a historically accurate model of parchment degradation, and a detailed description of the steps taken to run experiments and collect data within a manageable budget. Each example highlights how procedures from a discipline were adapted for the project through collaboration. Whilst conservation focuses on developing methods to best preserve cultural heritage documents, we describe an unusual collaboration between conservation and image science to document through multispectral imaging the deliberate damage of a manuscript. Multispectral imaging has been utilised to examine cultural heritage documents by providing information about their physical properties. However, current digitisation efforts concentrate on recording documents in their current state. In this project, we aimed at recording the process How to cite this book chapter:
Digital imaging technology can now produce detailed and trustworthy surrogates of historical docu... more Digital imaging technology can now produce detailed and trustworthy surrogates of historical documents. 1 Leveraged by technological improvements in imaging and image processing, humanities scholars have been able to image, analyse, and recover more information from historical documents than was previously possible. 2,3,4 Multispectral imaging has been utilised to examine the characteristics of documents by providing additional information about their physical properties and condition. 5,6,7 However, current digitisation efforts have concentrated on recording documents in their current state. In this project we used multispectral imaging to record the process of macroscopic document degradation by imaging a parchment document before and after a series of degradation processes. This project is part of a larger effort to investigate the methodologies for acquiring and processing multispectral images of damaged cultural heritage documents. 8,9
Medicine 2.0, 2013
Background: Since their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich... more Background: Since their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich source of information for researchers and have attracted interest in their affordances and use. Since 2009 PubMed has included 123 journal articles on medicine and Twitter, but no overview exists as to how the field uses Twitter in research. Objective: This paper aims to identify published work relating to Twitter within the fields indexed by PubMed, and then to classify it. This classification will provide a framework in which future researchers will be able to position their work, and to provide an understanding of the current reach of research using Twitter in medical disciplines. Methods: Papers on Twitter and related topics were identified and reviewed. The papers were then qualitatively classified based on the paper's title and abstract to determine their focus. The work that was Twitter focused was studied in detail to determine what data, if any, it was based on, and from this a categorization of the data set size used in the studies was developed. Using open coded content analysis additional important categories were also identified, relating to the primary methodology, domain, and aspect. Results: As of 2012, PubMed comprises more than 21 million citations from biomedical literature, and from these a corpus of 134 potentially Twitter related papers were identified, eleven of which were subsequently found not to be relevant. There were no papers prior to 2009 relating to microblogging, a term first used in 2006. Of the remaining 123 papers which mentioned Twitter, thirty were focused on Twitter (the others referring to it tangentially). The early Twitter focused papers introduced the topic and highlighted the potential, not carrying out any form of data analysis. The majority of published papers used analytic techniques to sort through thousands, if not millions, of individual tweets, often depending on automated tools to do so. Our analysis demonstrates that researchers are starting to use knowledge discovery methods and data mining techniques to understand vast quantities of tweets: the study of Twitter is becoming quantitative research. Conclusions: This work is to the best of our knowledge the first overview study of medical related research based on Twitter and related microblogging. We have used 5 dimensions to categorize published medical related research on Twitter. This classification provides a framework within which researchers studying development and use of Twitter within medical related research, and those undertaking comparative studies of research, relating to Twitter in the area of medicine and beyond, can position and ground their work.
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing - UbiComp '12, 2012
Hudson-Smith, A and Gray, S and Ross, C and Barthel, R and de Jode, M and Warwick, C and Terras, ... more Hudson-Smith, A and Gray, S and Ross, C and Barthel, R and de Jode, M and Warwick, C and Terras, M Experiments with the Internet of Things in Museum Space: QRator. In: (Proceedings) International Workshop on Digital Object Memories for the Internet of Things, DOMe-IoT 2012. 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012).. (In press). ... Full text not available from this repository. ... International Workshop on Digital Object Memories for the Internet of Things, DOMe-IoT 2012. 14th International ...
Journal of Documentation, 2011
PurposeTo date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies ... more PurposeTo date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies are used by and can benefit scholars. This paper aims to investigate the use of Twitter by an academic community in various conference settings, and to pose the following questions: Does the use of a Twitter‐enabled backchannel enhance the conference experience, collaboration and the co‐construction of knowledge? and How is microblogging used within academic conferences, and can one articulate the benefits it may bring to a discipline?Design/methodology/approachThis paper considers the use of Twitter as a digital backchannel by the Digital Humanities (DH) community, taking as its focus postings to Twitter during three different international 2009 conferences. The resulting archive of 4,574 “Tweets” was analysed using various quantitative and qualitative methods, including a qualitative categorisation of Twitter posts by open coded analysis, a quantitative examination of user conventions,...
Journal of Documentation, 2013
PurposeSince its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have p... more PurposeSince its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have provided a rich dataset for researchers, leading to the publication of over a thousand academic papers. This paper aims to identify this published work and to classify it in order to understand Twitter based research.Design/methodology/approachFirstly the papers on Twitter were identified. Secondly, following a review of the literature, a classification of the dimensions of microblogging research was established. Thirdly, papers were qualitatively classified using open coded content analysis, based on the paper's title and abstract, in order to analyze method, subject, and approach.FindingsThe majority of published work relating to Twitter concentrates on aspects of the messages sent and details of the users. A variety of methodological approaches is used across a range of identified domains.Research limitations/implicationsThis work reviewed the abstracts of all papers available via ...
UCL logo UCL Discovery. ...
Museums and the Web 2011: Proceedings, 2011
This paper presents a collaborative study between UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and the Briti... more This paper presents a collaborative study between UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and the British Museum. It considers the use and information-seeking behaviour by scholars of the British Museum's Collection Online. The research focuses on user perspectives, search strategies and general use of museum digital resources, highlights the scholarly value of museum digital resources, and examines the existing structures of presentation and representation of the British Museum Collection Online for aiding academic information ...
UCL logo UCL Discovery. ...
Emergent mobile technologies offer museum professionals new ways of engaging visitors with their ... more Emergent mobile technologies offer museum professionals new ways of engaging visitors with their collections. Museums are powerful learning environments and mobile technology can enable visitors to experience the narratives in museum objects and galleries and integrate them with their own personal reflections and interpretations. UCL‟s QRator project is exploring how handheld mobile devices and interactive digital labels can create new models for public engagement, personal meaning making and the construction of narrative opportunities inside museum spaces. The use of narrative in museums has long been recognised as a powerful communication technique to engage visitors and to explore the different kinds of learning and participation that result. This chapter discusses the potential for mobile technologies to connect museums to audiences through co-creation of narratives, taking the QRator project as a case study. The QRator project aims to stress the necessity of engaging visitors actively in the creation of their own interpretations of museum collections through the integration of QR codes, iPhone, iPad, and Android apps into UCL‟s Grant Museum of Zoology. Although this chapter will concentrate on mobile technology created for a natural history museum, issues of meaning making and narrative creation through mobile technology are applicable to any discipline. In the first instance, the concern is with the development of mobile media in museums followed by a discussion of the QRator project which stresses the opportunities and challenges in utilizing mobile technology to enhance visitor meaning making and narrative construction. Finally, this chapter discusses the extent to which mobile technologies might be used purposefully to transform institutional cultures, practices and relationships with visitors.
Crowdsourcing (the harnessing of online activities and behaviour to complete large-scale computat... more Crowdsourcing (the harnessing of online activities and behaviour to complete large-scale computational tasks) has been recently adopted in the cultural and heritage sectors to improve the quality of, and widen access to, online collections. Within Digital Humanities there have been attempts to crowdsource more complex tasks traditionally assumed to be carried out by academic scholars, such as the accurate transcription of manuscript material. This chapter surveys the growth and uptake of crowdsourcing for culture and heritage, particularly within Digital Humanities. It asks how the use of technology to involve and engage a wider audience with tasks that have been the traditional purview of academics can broaden the scope and appreciation of humanistic enquiry, and how such public facing projects are contributing to the field of Digital Humanities.