I wanted to write up notes from two workshops I attended recently; the first 'Cultural Values?' (15 May 2014), was a workshop to share current research at the University of Leeds, linked to the theme of cultural value; the second, 'Building Scholarly Resources for Wider Public Engagement' (13 June 2014), was a digital humanities workshop organised by dhAHRC in Oxford.
Cultural Values?
In this workshop, selected researchers gave 3 minute talks, introducing their research. The topic of cultural value is being examined in a range of fields but shared concerns include problematising the definition of cultural value, and challenging assumptions that would equate it simplistically with economic or exchange value. Here's a summary of some of the speakers' topics.
Experiencing the Digital World: the Cultural Value of Digital Engagement with Heritage
See: http://www.digitalheritage.leeds.ac.uk/ (Laura King and Paul Cook)
What is the purpose of digital engagement in the Arts and Humanities?
* Digital tools can become expensive furniture in museum space
* Digital is just one tool in the curator's toolbox
* Is it the medium or the message that is important?
People get entranced by the digital (a fetishisation of the future that seems incongruous with the past) - the relationship between past, present and future is important. The notion of value is often future-oriented - impact with regard to value. But how does digital engagement help people experience heritage? Understanding “end users” and evaluation is key (see Nina Simon, 'digital tools constitute a broken feedback loop'). The sector is more driven by policy than by bottom up processes. 'Experiencing the Digital World' project on-going until August (Simon Popple is involved).
'A Culture is no Greater than its Woods': Forests and Cultural Values
(Amy Cutler)
* Ancient trees
* Using the forest as a public conduit for culture and social ecological utopia
* 'Wilderness' and 'ancient woodland' defined as social categories
* New and competing discourses
Arts and Humanities Research/Teaching and Cultural Values
Anna Upchurch
See new book: Humanities in the Twenty-first century: Beyond Utility and Markets - http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?is=9780230366633
* Values and ideas vs. entrepreneurship
* NESTA toolkit for entrepreneurs (value-led)
* How ideas could be considered 'values' - Human Values Theory
Pararchive Community Groups, History, Heritage and Culture
See: http://pararchive.com (Andy Tuner)
* Collaborating with Science Museum and BBC (via Simon Popple)
* Different legitimating mechanisms for value (making it an object of scrutiny)
* Democratisation of space, people creating their own spaces
* Social analysis and policy (Geography dept at Leeds)
Approaching Cultural Value as a Complex System: Experiencing the Arts and Articulating the City in Leeds
(Stuart Murray and Jonathan Gross)
Relocating cultural value from the space of the event to cultures of everyday life.
* Participation-experience and anthropology-phenomenology
* Public-private space the and etiquette of being and being in place with art
* Keenness to understand and access the experience of participants in new ways
* Does feedback culture detract sometimes from the art, from the experience?
* Where is everyday life?
* Where is the value of an event?
* What is the value of the arts?
* Participatory and reflexive practice (thinking with not about)
Building Scholarly Resources for Wider Public Engagement
The dhAHRC workshop consisted of a series of presentations related to the field of the digital humanities, touching on issues including digital transformations, specialist IT skills, copyright and IPR, open data, and licensing.
Ethical Issues in Digital Humanities (DH)
(Anna Crowe)
ICCPR - article 17: 'no one will be subject to disproportionate interference'.
Where does data come from? What is open data? Personal data is not open data; even non-identifiable data can be personal because the nature of personal data in the 21st century makes the likelihood of it remaining non-identifiable lower (see Unique in the Crowd study).
For useful guideline around privacy see:
* Ethical Privacy Guidelines for Mobile Connectivity Measurements
* Virginia Tech - Twitter guidelines
Reassembling the Republic of Letters
See http://www.e-enlightenment.com/ (Howard Hotson)
Engagement activities (see Early Modern Letters Online - three strands: emlocollect, emloedit, front end website).
Prosopographical approaches underpin letters info, used to map intellectual networks.
Linked to COST project under e-infrastructures strand of Horizon 2020.
The Zooniverse
See https://www.zooniverse.org/ (Robert Simpson)
'Cognitive Surplus' - see Clay Shirky; this is the principle behind many of the crowdsourcing projects on Zooniverse.
Human input informs approaches to training machines to do the work (e.g. Snapshot Serengeti, Old Weather) - Simpson interested in developing a project specifically for children.
Zooniverse is now developing crowdsoucing tools as a free online service, for which it received a Google global impact award.
Sharing Data from a Researcher's Perspective
(Ernesto Priego and James Baker)
Differences between file formats (e.g. Word, Excel, PDF) suggest different degrees of openness. To encourage re-use, build re-usability into the process and format from the start.
Although research papers given at conferences may not be at a suitable stage for publishing online, the slides from the presentation could be made available to increase researcher visibility.
Crowdsourcing in the Community
(Ylva Berglund Prytz)
Have the idea and the specific community in mind from the start.
Three levels of history (e.g. the history of WW1):
* Official records
* Soldiers' diaries and associated items
* Personal reminiscences (see e.g. Age Exchange)
From The Great War Archive project to Europeana 1914-1918
Scholarly Social Machines
(David de Roure)
This idea is developed from Tim Berners Lee's idea of social machines:
"Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration. The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines".
Big, data, more people participating in digital culture, along with new social processes happening in realtime (e.g. unsubstantiated rumours on Twitter).
The ability to create new forms of social processes is happening at a citizen and population level. There's a methodological shift in the digital environment (audience driven) - post-digital approaches are required to understand these changes.
See also The End of the Paper
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