Category: Smithsonian
Working around the Shutdown
Meghan
Sharing opportunities to engage with Smithsonian collections and distribute knowledge during the U.S. government shutdown which closed to the public all federal institutions including the Smithsonian Institution and its facilities
On Tuesday, with the shutdown of the U.S. government, many of the greatest FREE opportunities to experience science, art, culture, and technology have CLOSED indefinitely. An extremely simplified version of events: without federal funding, the Smithsonian Institution buildings must close, services end, and federal staff face furlough. It should be noted that many national parks and other locations that share cultural heritage stories are also closed to visitors.
The Smithsonian’s current slogan is “seriously amazing” and it could not be more accurate as a description of the breadth and depth of events, research, and access to information. As with many large-scale institutions, there are controversies and gaps in representation – though work continues to address these issues while improving access to physical and digital Smithsonian Institution collections.
In my fieldwork, most apparent in each exchange with staff, volunteers, and researchers in different units: every unit is engaged in passionate pursuit of its goals and energetically seeking to engage with its audience(s). These folks are advocates for learning and clearly agree on:
- the primacy of the distribution of knowledge
- the need to craft better and more dynamic experiences in person and remotely through digital spaces
- their desire to collaborate and share their enthusiasm for their work and
- the need to make collections more widely available (find ways around restrictions)
With such passionate stewards, it seems such a misfortune for visitors to Washington, D.C. (and NYC and affiliate locations) that opportunities for learning and exploration are not available…
Or are they?? The doors may be locked and lights turned off, but all this knowledge cannot be contained by physical barriers!
BARRIERS OR NOT: GET BUSY!
In the interim of government shutdown, let’s explore ways you can engage with Smithsonian Institution collections and materials, whether hosted by SI or other digital repositories.
There are still plenty of opportunities to transcribe and review content at the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center – try your hand transcribing Carl Heinrich’s fieldnotes on butterflies or tackle John Reed Swanton’s detailed English-Alabama and Alabama-English vocabulary cards. You’ll find plenty more to do at the Transcription Center, especially reviewing fellow participants’ transcripts!
You can view truly astounding images on Flickr in albums and photostreams from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), and Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA).
If you want to help develop Smithsonian Institution knowledge AND view detailed images at the same time, perhaps adding machine tags to images in the EOL and BHL Flickr albums is up your alley. Here are the instructions – you are welcome to add machine tags or even tag as you would typically do on Flickr.
You can also to participate in a data mining research sprint in early February 2014 as a part of pioneering efforts to mine Encyclopedia of Life and the Biodiversity Heritage Library – and learn more about the free access to biodiversity resources. Download the new mobile app, M-EOL, on iTunes or Google Play; earn points as you roll the dice and travel across continents, dynamically mapping relationships between different plant and animal species.
There are on-going opportunities to help build and share knowledge in Wikipedia through Smithsonian collections. Find to-do lists for several museums and archives like SIA and Archives of American Art (AAA) and get editing!
You can explore Freer-Sackler Asian art exhibitions through their website or explore selections hosted by the Google Cultural Institute. Find more details about collections on view and held by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden – there are so many pieces to admire (and analyze) in these listings!
Want to learn more about what’s happening in related spaces? Check out the weekly round-ups and Link Love posts at the blogs of different units, including Smithsonian Institution Archives Bigger Picture blog.
Education and outreach sites including the Smithsonian Latino Center and the apps and Google+ hangouts hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center have regional, national, and cultural foci on intersections and daily experiences.
If you’ve got a head for researching more, consider exploring archives and collections with finding aids at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Archives, the National Anthropological Archives (an AMAZING series of collections!), Anacostia Community Museum, and the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History.
You can also see rich interrelated content from Smithsonian on Tumblr – this is a fantastic chance to develop those webs of knowledge through relationships of cultural heritage, scientific, and artistic content. Check out Smithsonian, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Libraries, and the Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum.
While the #shutdown is on-going, Smithsonian social media will not be populated with new information; now is the time to catch up on what you’ve missed!
Connect with Smithsonian Institution museums, archives, galleries and libraries here – from each unit’s presence on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, and more. Keep up-to-date with any announcements or changes to open status at the the main Smithsonian Facebook page and @smithsonian on Twitter.
That’s merely a drop in the bucket of Smithsonian digital activities – there are so many opportunities to learn AND share the knowledge you’ve developed. If you have other suggestions for this list, such as a favorite app or Smithsonian online activity, please share your thoughts in the comments!
**Featured image for this post of Francis Davis Millet (1846-1912) at work in his studio, courtesy Archives of American Art
Historically Speaking: Transcription, Collaboration, & Crowdsourcing
Meghan
Last week, Forbes’ contributor Nathan Raab wrote about transcription, collaboration, and crowdsourcing for his Historically Speaking blog. I’m quoted in the piece that focuses on the ways institutions like the Smithsonian and the National Archives are “using technology to engage the public in the discovery and preservation of its own history.”
Nathan interviewed me about my role in the development of narrative strategies and understanding engagement with the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center. In our discussion, I highlighted
- the potential for collaboration between institutions serving as stewards for history and culture,
- the ways in which we are actively making knowledge more easily accessible and available for (re)use, and
- the fantastic stories emerging around the collections, as well as the motivations transcription participants are sharing with us
Here’s my part of the discussion from the blog post:
“Technology is opening doors for people to learn and explore and create an understanding of the world around them.” said Dr. Meghan Ferriter, who consulted on the project at the Smithsonian. “There are a lot of people doing related and overlapping projects, but nobody’s connected all of the pieces yet.”
You can already see the ball rolling. Ferriter notes that many organizations have to start work from scratch, but the Smithsonian is working on changing that. She tells me, “In my role as Research Associate, I am in essence creating a series of recommendations that can be used here at the Smithsonian and elsewhere. This is… something of a strategic plan. We are aiming to share best practices around the world.”
Click through to the full article to learn more about the landscape of crowdsourced participation in transcription – that is, “Americans taking part in the discovery and preservation of American history.”
From SIA: Can You Relate? Themes and the Transcription Center
Meghan
Read about the ways that organizing collections through themes can uncover relationships between materials in the Transcription Center at this post I wrote for SIA Bigger Picture Blog.
Great news! The Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center is back up and live!! As you check out the improved features and try your hand at transcription (and reviewing!), consider the ways we may be able to organize existing and future collections. This post I wrote for the Smithsonian Institution Archives Bigger Picture Blog last week suggests several themes. Do you have any other suggestions?
Finally, reorganizing and finding new relationships between materials may also allow us to ask new questions – using the data from the transcribed pages to answer lingering questions and round out new stories. We can also learn more about and provide context for the successes and challenges the scientists, artists, and authors faced; and how these experiences relate to our lives today.
Summarizing Outcomes: Expeditions & Explorers Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Meghan
This post summarizes the outcomes and experience of the June 21 Expeditions & Explorers Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, co-hosted by Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) and National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) for Field Book Project materials.
We believe the event helped to advance freely available knowledge by harnessing the power of the GLAM-wiki relationship. As a reminder, GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums and the cultural heritage collections that they steward. The advancing elements of the Expeditions & Explorers event were:
- catalyzing diffusion of knowledge through article creation,
- interlinking of existing articles, subjects, and categories,
- sharing and highlighting the accessibility of GLAM resources, including finding aids and digitized texts and images
- uploading Smithsonian Institution collections images to Wikimedia Commons
These tasks serve to improve Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia, as well as GLAM-Wikipedia relationships in several ways.
First, it offered participants a dynamic experience for experienced and inexperienced editors and civilian and museum professionals to bring a variety of skills and knowledge bases to play in unlocking the power of the crowd.
Secondly, the event activities were focused on learning, playing, and working with cultural heritage and scientific materials. This included an exclusive special collections tour and curated discussion and exposure to electronically available resources which allowed participants to understand the diversity of and relationships between Smithsonian Institution collections.
Finally, participants shared their experiences with others through social media; highlighting the ways in which they were having fun, while working on and exploring Wikipedia and the new transcription center. This can only encourage other to participate in future events.
Event Goals
The event was a success in relation to all of the stated goals. Here are several examples of specific ways in which the five goals were achieved:
1. “To encourage inexperienced editors and show them how they can contribute to Wikipedia”
Event participants included five new, inexperienced editors. Our event focused on showing them how they can contribute to Wikipedia
- through an editing tutorial
- helping them establish a Wikipedia user account
- providing best practice tips
- encouraging open discussion of how, when, and why to perform certain tasks on Wikipedia – as with this slide from the best practice tips
2. “To improve a selection of Wikipedia articles related to scientists and expeditions”
- We identified five existing articles about scientists and expeditions and asked participants to improve these articles.
- We also identified four expeditions and scientists who were not represented on Wikipedia and asked participants to help make articles for them.
- This resulted in expansion of seven existing articles and creation of four new articles, as well as wikilinking between existing and new articles, for a more robust web of knowledge
Updated Articles:
- Theodore Roosevelt
- A. S. Hitchcock
- Mary Agnes Chase
- Edward Palmer (botanist)
- Edgar Alexander Mearns
- United States and Mexican Boundary Survey
- Edmund Heller
Newly created Articles
3. “To make Smithsonian-held materials more openly linked”
- Within our Expeditions & Explorers to-do list, we provided Smithsonian Institution resources and electronic records
- We linked at least 15 Smithsonian Institution materials within and to at least nine articles.
4. “To test a new transcribing tool to make our field books more findable and useful”
We invited participants to test the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center and also gathered feedback and discussed the tool with participants
5. “To increase awareness of the research resources freely available through libraries, archives, and museums”
- We believe we achieved this goal not only through the pre-event work in providing resources for articles and the during-event work of editing from specific GLAM resources,
- But also by tweeting about and sharing progress on our event goals during and after the event, with further reports to follow
See posts by my fellow edit-a-thon facilitators Carolyn Sheffield and Effie Kapsalis for perspectives and observations on the edit-a-thon; the Field Book Project blog and the SIA Bigger Picture blog, respectively. The next steps for my analysis include moving through the work to explore the collaborative production of knowledge occurring around these materials – then developing the next Wikipedia edit-a-thon event.
Remember, you can always participate in Wikipedia edit-a-thons remotely – many events are happening daily and “anyone can edit,” so please join in and help build knowledge where you can.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain, held with SIA)
Smithsonian Institution Transcription Center in Beta
Meghan
We launched the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center Friday 21 June as a collaborative, crowdsourced process that aims to bring digitized collections out from archives and museums. We are inviting our SERIOUSLY AMAZING audiences to help us unlock their stories by transcribing and reviewing their contents – to make them more accessible, searchable, and open.
This is another outstanding opportunity to make webs of knowledge and learn about the connections between collections. Please jump in and help where you can!
**UPDATE** (14 October): The Transcription Center is fully back in business with new features to launch shortly – while many projects have been moved to completion, there are still plenty of pages to transcribe and review. Join the community of digital volunteers!
My role has involved advising on use for communities of practice, understanding crowdsourcing capabilities, and developing coherent narratives for the pieces – rather than technical development – but I welcome feedback on usability, design, and any other “would be nice.”
Feel free to transcribe and offer feedback if you have thoughts to share! The service is still in beta and we are constantly integrating what we learn from users. Thanks for allowing me to share this successful first step in our transcription process – more to follow…