Making an Impact: How Digitised Resources Change Lives
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Transcript of Making an Impact: How Digitised Resources Change Lives
Simon Tanner King’s College London
Email: [email protected] Twitter: SimonTanner
www.kcl.ac.uk/ddh/
Department of Digital Humanities
Research
Teaching
Innovation
. International leader in the application of technology in the arts and humanities, and in the social sciences.
Involved in typically more than 30 major collaborative research projects at any one time.
The highest rated digital humanities research unit in the UK. 65% of our research is judged to be 'world- leading' or 'internationally excellent' .
DDH has 3 MA programmes: Digital Asset Management, Digital Humanities, and Digital Culture and Society
Innovation partnerships with >500 projects and 20 countries.
Digital Humanities is about Collaboration
. Literary/linguistic
English
History
Art History
Music
Theatre studies
Information management
Digital library and archives
National and international strategic activities
Honoring our sponsors
. The research underpinning this presentation is
funded from two sources:
Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship:
The value & benefits of digitised resources
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
Impact of Digitised Resources
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html
Culture is the wealth of nations
. “Knowledge is power... knowledge is also wealth”
Dr Joseph Phaahla, Deputy Minister
South African Ministry of Arts & Culture
International Conf of African Digital Libraries & Archives
Culture is essential to develop information into personalised
knowledge
Culture is an essential underpinning for national identity
Memory institutions are essential actors in national cultural
identity and digitisation is re-emphasising this role
Cultural values are an important element in economic
advancement
Culture: Edward Said’s View
Two distinct meanings:
Cultural practice – the manifestation of ideas that come into being in aesthetic forms, whose main reason for being is to provide pleasure for those who consume them – e.g . novels, art, music...
Conceptual container – culture is seen as an abstract tool for refining and elevating a society – it is the container for all that can be defined as the greatest offerings in terms of knowledge, creativity and thought that society can offer.
In this mode, culture will become associated with a
nation or a state and is a source of identity for the
group that identifies with it. Said, E.W. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. 4th Ed. Vintage
National Identity – contested space?
Anderson posits: national identity is preceded by and grows out of
cultural resources and institutions. History, maps, museums,
censuses, literature etc all contribute to the collective imagining of
something called a nation.
Benedict Anderson (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism
Pickover: “cyberspace is not an uncontested domain. The digital
medium contains an ideological base – it is a site of struggle. So,
the real challenges are not technological or technical but social
and political.”
Curators/librarians/archivists are thus “agents of social change” Pickover, M. (2005) Negotiations, contestations and fabrications: the politics of
archives in South Africa ten years after democracy. (from ukzn.ac.za)
INNOVATION-PIETERMARITZBURG
The role of public repositories: My View
My view:
A place where a community nourishes its memory and its imagination – where it connects with the past and invents its future. Purpose of digitisation:
To educate, enlighten and entertain: to promote and disseminate and to preserve culture
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship
New areas of research enabled
“Old Bailey Online reaches out to communities, such as family historians, who are keen to find a personal history, reflected in a national story, and in the process re-enforces the workings of a civil society. Digital resources both create a new audience, and
reconfigure our analysis to favour the individual.” Professor Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire
“Digitised resources allow me to discover the hidden lives of
disabled people, who have not traditionally left records of their lives. I have found disability was discussed by many writers in the
Eighteenth Century and that disabled men and women played an important role in the social life of the time.”
Dr David Turner, Swansea University www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
Effective, efficient and world leading
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
Bringing collections out
of the dark
Bestowing economic & community benefits
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
Glasgow Museum's Collection is the city’s biggest single fiscal asset valued at £1.4 billion. It contains around 1.2 million objects. On average only 2% of the collection is exhibited to the public at any one time. Digital access is opening up further access to these collections.
A major impact sought is to increase self-confidence in the populace – to feel less marginalised, less insignificant, less unheard. Increased feelings of self-worth through interaction with the Museums will spill over into every aspect of their lives.
Digitised content & JISC Collections negotiations save the sector ~£43 mill ion per year
“The Freeze Frame archive is invaluable in charting changes in the polar regions. Making the material available to all will help with further research into scientific studies around global warming and climate change”
Pen Hadow, Polar Explorer
Interdisciplinary & collaborative
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
A digital library vision for the future
What the Bodleian Library is doing now, in digitising large portions of our vast collections,
is like the human genome project.
Thousands of people can evaluate and use creatively the digital resources to discover new ideas
and make innovations.
Many hands make light work and those many hands will profoundly touch Britain's future capacity for
learning, research and innovation.
Dr Sarah Thomas, Bodleian Library, Oxford University
Digitising for our Digital Futures
We are sitting on a goldmine of content which
should be within a coherent UK national digital
strategy. To support Digital Britain we need to
deliver a critical mass of digital content.
Access... ought to be the right of every citizen,
every household, every child, every school and
public library, universities and business.
That's a vision worth delivering on.
Dame Lynne Brindley, The British Library
Digitising for our Digital Futures??
“You want a massive digital collection: SCAN THE STACKS!... You agonize over digital metadata and the purity thereof...
And you offer crap access.
If I ask you to talk about your collections, I know that you will glow as you describe the amazing treasures
you have. When you go for money for digitization projects, you talk up the incredible cultural value...
But then if I look at the results of those digitization projects, I find the shittiest websites on the planet.
It’s like a gallery spent all its money buying art and then just stuck the paintings in supermarket bags and leaned them against the wall.”
Nat Torkington (@gnat) http://bit.ly/rNHMVr “Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong” The text of a Speech delivered to
provoke the National and State Librarians of Australasia, November 2011
Making an impact or just a splash?
© H de Smet
The Balanced Scorecard: museum example
DigitisationStrategy
Audience & external
stakeholders
Innovation & development
Financial
Internal museum
processes
People
Events
Places
Times
Concepts
Subjects, themes
Audience Development
Access
Learning & Education
Revenue
Research
Making Collections
Visible
Marketing
Conservation
Web 2.0
Exhibition
Courtesy of www.museum-analytics.org
Courtesy of www.museum-analytics.org
Understanding the audience: methods
http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/
Understanding the audience: methods
http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/
http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/
Understanding the audience: methods
http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/
Changing a life or life opportunity!
© H de Smet
5 m
odes
of c
ultu
ral v
alue
•People value the possibility of enjoying the digitised resources and the resultant research outputs created through the endeavours of academics and HE now or sometime in the future.
Option Value
•People derive utility from knowing that a digitised resource, HE institution or its research, is cherished by persons living inside and outside their community.
Prestige Value
•People are aware that digitised resources contribute to their own or to other people’s sense of culture, education, knowledge and heritage and therefore value it.
Education Value
•People benefit from knowing that a digital resource exists but do not personally use it.
Existence Value
•People derive satisfaction from the fact that their descendents and other members of the community will in the future be able to enjoy a digitised resource if they choose to.
Bequest Value
Future research directions
The Arcadia Fund have provided a further $143,000 to explore methodologies for impact and value assessment.
Factoring impact as meaning:
how has a life or life opportunity been changed?
More information: www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html
I would welcome your comments, guidance and ideas! Results will be published freely under Open Access
Measuring life changes?
To measure change we need to know the baseline from which change happens
To measure life changes we have to look at methods from a wide range of Impact Assessment practitioners:
Health IA Environmental & Ecological IA Social IA Economic & Governmental IA, etc...
We also consider longitudinal studies may prove useful.
The study will report in May 2012 www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html
One last thought for you to consider...
Is value in the wine, the glass or the drinking?
Twitter: @SimonTanner