SOCIAL MACHINE WORKSHOP
The workshop in Newcastle was extremely fruitful, as always when the wider CE team are able to meet in person and work together for a few days. I was particularly intrigued by a strand of conversation that raised in the second day. I facilitated the first discussion on Work/Value (what powers the social machine) which stimulated some key reflections on the lack of resources in museum organizations to sustain a participatory process where everyone can contribute to the National Collection in an inclusive way. I then co-facilitated with Stuart a group discussion continuing reflecting on this topic, trying to address some of the key questions that raised from the first round of conversation:
How do museum’s roles need to change in a National Collection as a Social Machine? Can we imagine a new Museum Role which can sustain the inclusive process that we are envisaging when we think of the National Collection as a Verb? What are the digital humanities skills that this role needs to have? What are the other roles we need to think of? And how does this affect other job roles in other heritage organizations, such as Wikipedia?
Reflecting on the distributed nature of the National Collection, we imagined a National Collection Curator Role that can act as facilitators also across different institutions, but also between different departments in bigger institutions. At the same time, we recognised the need to rethink the roles within the organizations, acknowledging the role of customized training activities which can bring people – and not only data - together. Working together, exchanging knowledge and expertise, confronting vocabularies and ways of working is at the heart of Congruence Engine and needs to be at the heart of the National Collection as well. Inspired by the way in which the investigations are formed and carried out in the project, we also discussed the opportunity to create a dedicated Funding Programme to sustain collaborative research projects exploring new ways of connecting collections. This will also ensure that the National Collection will respond to the continuously evolving digital technology ecosystem and embracing the emerging nature of research (in relation to this, we envisaged the potential synergy with One By One, a worldwide leading project on digital literacy in museums). Drawing upon the experience of Wikipedia, we also discussed the need to address the anxiety in data sharing and to introduce a more open attitude, also looking at similar case studies at international level.
At the end of the day, I start discussing with Stuart the opportunity to summarize the main insights from the group discussion and involve more people in the discussion (potentially using one of the next Whole Team Meetings and breakout rooms). Asa suggested the opportunity to start using Notion for collaborative writing and this could be the way we develop a document on museum roles together.
FOLK SONGS INVESTIGATION – FIRST ANNOTATION SESSION WITH JENNIFER
On 3rd April Daniel and I started our first official session with Jennifer (full recording available here). We presented to Jennifer how we could use Word as annotation tool to start reflecting on key terms, vocabulary, and categories of words. Jennifer noticed that she doesn’t have Microsoft Word installed on her laptop (an obstacle that we will need to solve over the next weeks). She also pointed out that it might be more effective annotating the songs together, and we decided to start annotating a first song from the Lancashire Ballads during the meeting, to allow her to familiarize with the method. In introducing the song (Hard Times) Jennifer started singing, and I realized how difficult it is to work on the text separately from the music. The last line of the song, for example, is sang without a break to the following line, to shout at the ‘hard times’: this nuance can be captured only by singing (in a similar way how we pronounce the sentences can change their meaning). She very easily identified key terms in the songs related to objects & places but also words with connotative meanings which can be understood only in their historical context. It took almost 1 hour to annotate the song together, and sometimes it was difficult to capture all her insights on the comments: at one point Jennifer even mimed the wheel going in and out at the top of the ginnygate (another reason for recording these sessions).
Key questions/insights raising from the first annotation session: