Digital technologies are beginning to play a vital role in the work of museums and galleries, whether on websites and handheld devices or in gallery displays and many are using digital technology in innovative ways to support visitor experiences. They are becoming more embedded, and networked, and are changing the experience of visiting museums be providing more flexible and personalised information and to encourage interaction and discussion between visitors.  The distinctions between real and virtual, are already blurred, creating a new set of relationships between objects, visitors and digital technology, in which museums are, above all, places of exploration and discovery.

In particular the development of mobile technology has become very important to museums and many are in exploring how digital and communication technologies can be developed to offer visitors a more interactive, personalised museum experience.  This growing emphasis on the interactional and informal nature of museum experience provides the perfect opportunity to showcase digital interactive technologies as important resources for engaging visitors in exhibits and more generally in museums as a whole. In general, however, despite the growing interest in deploying digital technology as interpretation devices in museums and galleries, there are relatively few studies that examine how visitors, both alone and with others, use new technologies when exploring museum content.

At UCL we are trying to change that.  It is not enough to claim that digital technology can enhance visitor museum experiences, it needs to be demonstrated.   UCL’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, Centre for Digital Humanities (aka us) and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis are working with UCL Museums and Collections to develop research projects which look specifically at digital technology in museums.   The Petrie Museum is currently host to 4 digital projects.

QRator – an iPad-based interactive live object label. This allows everyone to have a say in how an museum object is interpreted. Unique in the UCL technology is the ability to ‘write’ back to the museum interpretation panel.  QRator allows member of the pubic to type in their thoughts and interpretation of the object and click send.  These comments become part of the objects history and ultimately the display itself.

Talesof Things – connect to object information via QR codes and add your own tale. Throughout the Petrie galleries are a series of QR code tagged objects which can be read by iPhone and Android phones.  Once a code has been scanned it connects the visitor to the Tales of Things site which contains text, video, and audio information about the object.  Visitors can then add their own tale about that object on the site.

iCurator– curate your own exhibition in a 3D environment and collaborate remotely. ICurator is a computer based design tool which holds a library of 3D rendered objects, display cases and museum spaces which users can combine to create their own displays.

3D Encounters – 3D scanning technologies creating digital models of ancient artefacts.  3D Encounters is an experimental digital exhibition entitled Crossing Over, where visitors can see 3D digital models of artefacts from the Petrie collection.  The models can be rotated from angles and perspectives not possible in the real displays.

Last week saw the Digital Think Drink at the Petrie Museum; it gave us a chance to trial and receive some user feedback on the four digital projects which aim to change the way people engage with material heritage.  The Petrie Museum was acting as a lab where real world applications for new technologies can be developed and tested.   It was great to see people using the technology in gallery and to be able to hear people’s opinions on the research that we are doing.  The digital think drink was an experiment, we hope everyone enjoyed it.  It prompted a lot of questions which we will be trying to answer as we move forward with the development and research of whether or not digital technology can increase access and engagement with museum collections.

Image by UCL, Petrie Museum / Matt Clayton

The Grant Museum of Zoology is one of the oldest natural history collections in England, dating back to 1827. The collection comprises over 68,000 skeletal, taxidermy and wet specimens, covering the whole of the animal kingdom. Many of the species are now endangered or extinct including the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, the quagga and the dodo.  Whilst maintaining the intriguing atmosphere of a densely-packed Victorian collection the new Grant Museum space offers the opportunity to showcase the historic collections, but to treat them in entirely different ways and to position the Museum as a place of experimentation, dialogue and debate. UCL is taking the opportunity to rethink what a university museum can be; a place not simply for a passive experience but for conversation – a cultural laboratory for the meeting of minds.

Through the QRator project the Grant will be experimenting with ways of using a natural history collection as a starting point for questions about science. Alongside displays of stuffed chimpanzees and extinct dodos, iPads will be scattered, asking provocative questions about the ways museums operate, and the role of science in society.

The Grant Museum doesn’t open until the 15th March, in the mean time we want people to join the conversation and ask engage in some Current Questions.  The first of these investigates the relationships and conflicts between pets and wildlife. It will be really interesting to interrogate what it means to be interested in animals. The Grant wants to get discussions going on how people relate pets to wild animals represented in Natural history museums.

If you would like to join the conversation you can over on the QRator site. (NB. this is a temporary site, until QRator is fully launched in March)

Following on from the excitement about the Digital Think Drink at the Petrie Museum, which is now sold out, there will also be some one on one evaluation sessions for those who have missed out on the Digital Think Drink. We would like to hear your views on new digital technology that aims to support research and enhance the visitor museum experience.

If you wish to come along and in and share your opinions it would be very much appreciated.  The evaluation days are as follows and your involvement will take no longer than 30 minutes:

• Thursday 17^th February (10am – 4pm)
• Thursday 24^th February (10am – 4pm)
• Thursday 3^rd March (10am – 4pm)
• Thursday 10^th March (10am – 4pm)

If you would like to take part in the evaluation or would like further information, please contact our evaluator Naomi Haywood directly and tell her what day and what time you are able to come and also your contact number.

All feedback received will help shape the development of four exciting new technologies aimed at increasing access and engagement with museum collections.

We at UCLDH , in collaboration with Product Developers at the Europeana Foundation, are undertaking research into academic use of cultural heritage search portals with particular focus on usability and functionality.

2011 sees the release of the second operational release of Europeana.eu, also known as the Danube release. The aim of the Danube release is to provide sophisticated functionality for Europeana’s digital library of over 10 million items of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.

We are asking any interested individuals to take part in one of our focus groups so that we can better understand the usability and expectations of cultural heritage search portals, not only in a teaching and research context, put also in usability in the cultural heritage professions as well as ‘general visitors’, in order to develop user requirements for the Europeana Danube release which is under development. The results of this work should provide us with further insight into usability and
functionality of Cultural Heritage search portals and help to find appropriate methodologies to detect and evaluate their impact. The results will be fed directly into the development of the Danube release.

We have two focus groups coming up:

• The Museum, Archive, and Library professionals focus group will be on the 9^th February at 5.30pm  in G31 Foster Court, UCL, wine and nibbles will be provided.
• The Academic Staff focus group will be on the 23rd February at 2pm in Wilkins JBR Meeting Room, UCL and coffee and pastries will be provided.

It will take roughly an hour. If you are interested in attending either the focus group, please contact Claire Ross claire.ross@ucl.ac.uk

On Thursday 10 February Professor Philip Schofield and Valerie Wallace of UCL Laws will be talking about ‘Transcribe Bentham: Taking the Bentham Edition into the Digital Age‘. Venue: Room G32 (Senate House, Ground Floor) from 17:30 – 19:30. Transcribe Bentham is a very exciting project that we at UCLDH are proud to be part of. It uses crowd sourcing techniques to encourage people outside academia to become part of the Bentham project; reading and transcribing scans of original manuscripts which then become part of the digital archive. Come and hear all about their work, and of course sign up to take part in transcription.

As Part of the QRator project, UCLDH has been working with UCL Museums and Collections on a range of digital projects which aim to change the way we engage with material heritage.  The Petrie Museum has become a living laboratory where real world applications for new technologies can be developed and tested.   We have orgainsed a evening of testing, talking, playing and giving feedback on the digital media available in the museum. A Digital  Think Drink, or a Mini Digital Excursion, if you will.

The Petrie Museum, in conjunction with UCLDH, UCL’s Department of Computer Engineering and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, invite you to:

An Evening of Digital Technology at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology!

On Wednesday February 16 from 18.30-20.30 the Petrie Museum is showcasing 4 new digital technologies that will revolutionise the way we interact with museum collections:

• QRator – an iPad-based interactive live object label. Who is ‘the Man from Mitanni’?  Work it out with a glass of wine and find out why you shouldn’t trust museum databases on our iPad label.

• Tales of Things – connect to object information via QR codes and add your own tale. Or Follow the QR code museum trail.

• iCurator – curate your own exhibition in a 3D environment and collaborate remotely.

• 3D Encounters – 3D scanning technologies creating digital models of ancient artefacts.

If you wish to come along and in and help shape the development of four exciting new technologies aimed at increasing access and engagement with museum collections, then book here! (it’s free to attend and will be accompanied by a glass of wine or two)

UCLDH has a new project, small, but hopefully perfectly formed.

We are working with UCL Museums and Collections and CASA on a project Called QRator.

With the help of UCL’s Public Engagement Unit Innovation Seed funding the QRator project is exploring how handheld mobile devices, QR codes and interactive digital labels can create new models for public engagement, personal meaning making and the construction of narrative opportunities inside museum spaces. The project aims to engage members of the public within the Grant Museum by allowing them to become the ‘Curators’.

The project aims to work with UCL museums to become a true forum for academic-public debate, using low cost, readily available technology, enabling the public to collaborate and discuss museum concepts and object interpretation with museum curators, academic researchers and each other.

The Grant Museum has some really brilliant specimens, a playful attitude and a refreshing outlook for pushing the boundaries of how museums should/could behave. The team behind CASA’s wicked Tales of Things project are providing the technical knowhow and the development and UCLDH is undertaking the user evaluation.

You can find out a bit more about the QRator project at the UCL Public Engagement site

Despite the snow we had a remarkably good turnout for the third London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, which proved thoroughly enjoyable. Thank you to everyone who got there! However, some of our usual attendees couldn’t make it but were sufficiently intrigued, when following the tweets, to want to find out more about what was said. As a result, Henry Woudhuysen has kindly agreed to produce a summary of his talk, including some thoughts on how CELM might develop in future. This may not be as good as being there, but I hope it’s the next best thing:

In 1966, Peter Beal, a graduate of the University of Leeds, started work on the Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450-1700 (IELM). The first volume of what was originally meant to be a one-year project appeared in 1980. Its two parts covered the years 1450 to 1625 and were followed, in 1987 and 1993, by a further volume in two parts taking the coverage up to 1700. For the first time, English Renaissance scholars had a full catalogue of the manuscripts – autograph and scribal – of the major authors of the period. The Index included writings in verse, prose, dramatic, and miscellaneous works, including letters, documents, books owned, presented, and annotated by the authors, and related items. In 23,000 entries, Peter Beal covered the works of 128 authors – of these two were women: his choice was determined by a decision to base the whole project (further volumes covered the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) around authors with entries in The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1974). Each author’s entry begins with a valuable introduction giving an overview of the surviving material.

The project initiated a series of investigations into what has come to be known as ‘scribal publication’, and this phenomenon in itself has contributed an important element to the study of the history of the book in Britain. Following the Catalogue’s publication, Peter Beal continued to collect material relating to the authors whose manuscripts he had already described, and by the early years of the new century he was ready to find a way of updating the Index. A proposal in 2004 to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (later Council) for a five-year project to create an enhanced digital version of the Index was successful, and the following year work began on The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450-1700 (CELM). Since then, Peter Beal has continued his researches, assisted by John Lavagnino of King’s College London’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities, who has acted as the project’s technical advisor, while I have acted as its general overseer, along with a distinguished international advisory panel .

CELM will cover the work of around 200 authors (60 of them women) in some 40,000 entries. The author entries range in length from having no items (Emilia Lanier and Isabella Whitney) to having only one (Thomas Deloney and Sir Thomas Elyot), to having around 4,500 (John Donne). A conference relating to the project was held at King’s in the summer of 2009, when the database was shown to a number of scholars, and the Catalogue will be launched online as an open-access resource at a larger event in the summer of 2011.

Work on CELM began with keyboarding all the entries in IELM, turning the contents of the books into a database. In many ways, CELM is instantly recognisable as a digital version of IELM. However, whereas IELM was solely based around authors, CELM has a repository view as well as an author view – both are available in longer and shorter forms. The repository view allows the user to see what is available in some 500 locations from Aberdeen University Library to the Zentralbibliothek, Zürich, Switzerland, by way of numerous Private Owners and Untraced items. Even though the repository view only contains descriptions of items by CELM’s authors, it is a major step towards producing what is in effect a short-title catalogue of English manuscripts of the period.

Much thought has been given to the question of tagging material and to the possibilities of full-text searching. For example, it will be easy to find some specific literary genres, such as verse letters or epigrams by text searching, but other ‘hidden’ categories, such as women, scribes, compilers, owners, collectors, composers, dealers, bindings and binders will remain elusive unless tagged. The project has enormous scope for further development. It might, for example, supply links to library home pages and their catalogues and to related digital projects such as ODNB, Perdita, and the Electronic Enlightenment. Most importantly of all, there are several areas where CELM offers a valuable starting point for further research: for example, into paper and bindings, auction and booksellers’ catalogues, the history of scribal publication, literary genres, authorship, and collecting. One obvious development would be to link entries to images of the material that is being described, while in time it is hoped that full descriptions of each manuscript referred to can be created. There is scope for more work on as yet unvisited repositories, as well as for including more authors and literary types, especially anonymous works. Some thought has already been given to how to maintain the website and how to signal the addition of new material to users.

What began as a simple one-year survey of what was thought to be quite a limited field has grown, through Peter Beal’s extraordinary labours, into a vast digital project that will be essential to the work of all scholars of the period.

H.R. Woudhuysen

Today sees the launch of the Transcribe Bentham Transcription Desk, an online tool designed to harness the efforts of all Bentham fans – whether schoolchildren, history enthusiasts, academics or armchair philosophers – to bring his work into the digital age and the world at large.

The Transcription Desk allows participants to transcribe material from facsimile images of Bentham’s previously unpublished manuscripts. The resulting transcripts will be included in a freely-accessible database of Bentham’s Manuscripts at UCL, and will assist in the preparation of future printed volumes of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham at the Bentham Project.

This is the first major crowdsourcing transcription project which we hope will provide interesting results on the nature of community engagement.

The project is administered by the Bentham Project and UCLDH and funded by the AHRC.

The Transcription Desk is now open to the public and we encourage everyone to have a go at transcribing Jeremy Bentham’s papers! All  contributions and all thoughts on anything relating to Bentham and the project in general are welcome. You are warmly encouraged to explore the site, create a profile and post comments on our discussion board. You can also track the progress of transcription by viewing the Benthamometer.

We hope you will get involved!

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We are pleased to announce the second one day conference organised by UCLDH’s INKE project, and hope you will consider submitting a proposal.

Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: Textual Methodologies and Exemplars
15 December 2010
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), The Hague
in conjunction with the conference Text & Literacy (16-17 December)
Proposals due 30 September 2010

Digital technology is fundamentally altering the way we relate to writing, reading, and the human record itself. The pace of that change has created a gap between core social/cultural practices that depend on stable reading and writing environments and the new kinds of digital artefacts–electronic books being just one type of many–that must sustain those practices now and into the future.

This one-day gathering explores research foundations pertinent to understanding those new practices and emerging media, specifically focusing on work in textual method, in itself and via exemplar, leading toward [1] theorizing the transmission of culture in pre- and post-electronic media, [2] documenting the facets of how people experience information as readers and writers, [3] designing new kinds of interfaces and artifacts that afford new reading abilities, [4] conceptualizing the issues necessary to provide information to these new reading and communicative environments, and [5] reflection on interdisciplinary team research strategies pertinent to work in the area.

The gathering is offered in conjunction with the Text & Literacy conference (16-17 December) and is sponsored by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands), the Book and Digital Media Studies department of Leiden University, and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments research group.

We invite paper and poster/demonstration proposals that address these and other issues pertinent to research in the area. Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (of approximately 250 words) plus list of works cited, and the names, affiliations, and website URLs of presenters; fuller papers will be solicited after acceptance of the proposal. Please send proposals before 30 September 2010 to siemens@uvic.ca.