This has been a short week for me, as I will be on leave on Thursday and Friday for my PhD graduation ceremony (I can’t wait!). Despite it was short, I had three very intense and creative days that allow me to develop some of the work I started in this new year.

First of all, I finalized the folk songs investigation proposal with Daniel, and sent it to Alex and Tim. We hope that we can start discussing it already on Monday, in the first Investigation Meeting of 2023.  The pipeline we propose would combine machine learning techniques & participatory methods, as we believe there is potential to involve a group of folk songs experts in the phases of data gathering and linkage.  We would be keen to explore how NER and NLP more broadly can help us to connect the songs’ lyrics with both museum objects and audio/video recordings of performances. In so doing, we aim to connect material artifacts belonging to the history of mining and textiles - such as lamps, shovels, looms - with the musical and sonic culture related to them, so enhancing the museum interpretation of these objects. I am especially keen to explore, throughout the investigation, also a museological question that is closely linked to my PhD research on sound culture in museums: how the dynamic, participatory nature of folk songs challenge the traditional concept of ‘museum object’? Folk songs are not ‘fixed items’ but change over time, as they originate from oral tradition and might have been subsequently transcribed, published and recorded using different instruments and ways of presenting the material. We would like to develop a collaborative experiment on Yarn to explore if digital participatory platforms can help museums to interact with this changing, multidimensional and intangible nature. In terms of technical resources, we are keen to discuss with the Digital Panel the details both in terms of the tools we could experiment with, and potential data scientists that we can involve in this investigation. We think there might be scope to build on what Stef De Sabbata will be doing in the Oral History investigation, but we are also open to explore different methods and directions.

In terms of the Oral History investigation, Stef has received the approval from the East Midlands Oral History Archive to use the data from the Mines of Memory collection for the first experiment. I am scheduling a meeting with the EMOHA, Tom Fisher & Tonya Outtram from Nottingham Trent University to discuss the opportunity to include also the data from the Textile Tales project. Nina will be involved in all these conversations so we can frame the use of this additional material within Congruence Engine. I am also working with Stef in an abstract proposal to present this experiment in the one-day conference New Directions for Museum Analytics at King’s College in London.

Parallel to this, on Monday I had a very inspiring meeting with Simon to discuss the call for proposal launched by De Monfort University ‘Stitches that speak: biography through objects symposium’. We would like to participate in the call presenting the potential of digital participatory approaches to objects biographies, drawing upon an experiment I developed over the weekend. Inspired by the focus of the call, which aims to explore how personal garments can reveal the lived experiences of both owners, makers and wearers, I created a story on Yarn which starts from a Harris Tweed cap I bought in Cambridge before Christmas. The story combines my personal memories connected to this cap and the research I did on its origins from the Outer Hebrides, displaying unexpected connections between my family history and the history of textiles. Simon will add notes to this story and we will share it on Basecamp, inviting other participants to write a similar narrative starting from a personal garment. I am also keen to involve in this experiment a group of UCL students attending the SMG led Module ‘Curating Science and Technology’ in February. I will be teaching a session on digital participatory curation and I will invite them to experiment with object biography using Yarn.