Drinking about museums: the Manchester edition, July 10

A few years ago the Museums Computer Group committee started inviting people attending our events to join us for drinks the night before. For locals and people who’ve travelled up the night before an event, it’s a nice way to start to catch up with or meet people who are interested in technology in museums. These days people around the world are organising events under the #drinkingaboutmuseums label, so we thought we’d combine the two and have a #drinkingaboutmuseums in Manchester on Tuesday July 10, 2012. Come join us from 6:30pm at the Sandbar, 120 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HL.

And of course, the reason we’re gathering – on Wednesday July 11, 2012, the MCG (@ukmcg) are running an event with the Digital Learning Network (@DLNet) on ‘Engaging digital audiences in museums‘ in Manchester (tickets possibly still available at http://mcg-dlnet.eventbrite.com/ or follow the hashtag #EngageM on twitter) so we’ll have a mixed crowd of museum technologists and educators. You’re welcome to attend even if you’re not going to the conference.

If you’ve got any questions, just leave a comment or @-mention me (@mia_out) on twitter. We’ll also keep an eye on the #drinkingaboutmuseums tag. You can find out more about #drinkingaboutmuseums in my post about the June New York edition which saw 20-ish museum professionals gather to chat over drinks.

Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage – meetup in London July 7

Somehow I’ve ended up organising an (very informal) event about ‘Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage’ on Wednesday, July 7, at a pub near Liverpool St Station. I have no real idea what to expect, but I’d love some feisty sceptics to show up and challenge people to make all these geeky acronyms work in the real museum world.

As I posted to the MCG list: “A very informal meetup to discuss ‘Linking museums: machine-readable data in cultural heritage’ is happening next Wednesday. I’m hoping for a good mix of people with different levels of experience and different perspectives on the issue of publishing data that can be re-used outside the institution that created it. … please do pass this on to others who may be interested. If you would like to come but can’t get down to that London, please feel free to send me your questions and comments (or beer money).”

The basic details are: July 7, 2010, Shooting Star pub, London. 7:30 – 10pm-ish. More information is available at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/July-2010-meetup and you can let me know you’re coming or register your interest.

In more detail…

Why?
I’m trying to cut through the chicken and egg problem – as a museum technologist, I can work towards getting machine-readable data available, but I’m not sure which formats and what data would be most useful for developers who might use it. Without a critical mass of take-up for any one type, the benefits of any one data source are more limited for developers. But museums seem to want a sense of where the critical mass is going to be so they can build for that. How do we cut through this and come up with a sensible roadmap?

Who?
You! If you’re interested in using museum data in mashups but find it difficult to get started or find the data available isn’t easily usable; if you have data you want to publish; if you work in a museum and have a
data publication problem you’d like help in solving; if you are a cheerleader for your favourite acronym…

Put another way, this event is for you if you’re interested in publishing and sharing data about their museums and collections through technologies such as linked data and microformats.

It’ll be pretty informal! I’m not sure how much we can get done but it’d be nice to put faces to names, and maybe start some discussions around the various problems that could be solved and tools that could be
created with machine-readable data in cultural heritage.

Melbourne museum 3.0 meetup/pecha kucha July 16

More details about the museum 3.0 meetup/pecha kucha in Melbourne on July 16:

Drinks @ ACMI Lounge from 5:30pm
About 6pm take our drinks to Studio 1 for the Pecha Kutcha sessions
After that: a selection of this side of the city’s finer drinking establishments…

We have four pecha kucha speakers so far – you could volunteer yourself (or a workmate) on the museum 3.0 ning thread.  It might sound intimidating, but it’s a lot of fun, and as a speaker it’s good because it’s all over in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

The London museum pecha kucha was a lot of fun and I’m generally looking forward to meeting some people working in cultural heritage in Melbourne and finding out about some of the cool work going on here.

The location-aware future is here (and why cities suck but are good)

Thought-provoking article in Wired on the implications of location-aware devices for our social relationships, privacy concerns, and how we consume and publish geo-located content:

I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle

The location-aware future—good, bad, and sleazy—is here. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google’s Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what—and who—is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you’ll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.

Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.

The article neatly finishes with a sense of ‘the more things change, the more things stay the same’, which seems to be one of the markers of the moments when technologies are integrated into our lives:

I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place. Sure, with the proper social filters, location awareness needn’t be invasive or creepy. But it can be isolating. Even as we gradually digitize our environment, we should remember to look around the old-fashioned way.

Found via Exporting the past into the future, or, “The Possibility Jelly lives on the hypersurface of the present” which in turn came via a tweet.

I also recently enjoyed ‘How the city hurts your brain… and what you can do about it‘. It’s worth learning how you can alleviate the worst symptoms, because it seems cities are worth putting up with:

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.

Freebase meetup, London, August 20

As she explains on the Freebase blog, Kirrily from Freebase will be in London for a little while this month and she’d having an informal meet up with Freebase users and those who might be interested to learn more about it:

We’ll be meeting at the Yorkshire Grey Pub in Holborn from 6:30pm, having a few drinks, and talking about open data, building communities around free information, mashups, and more. If you’re interested, please stop by. There’ll be free wifi available, so bring your laptops if you’ve got them.

You can RSVP on upcoming.org. I’m going because I think Freebase could be really useful for a personal project but also because it’s another way of helping people make the most of their digital heritage.

If you don’t know much about Freebase, or haven’t seen it lately, this video on Parallax, their new browsing interface should give you a pretty good idea of how useful it can be for cultural heritage and natural history data. It’s 8 minutes long, and it’s really worth taking the time to watch particularly for the maps and timelines, but if you’re pressed for time then skip the first two minutes.

You can also get more background at The Future of the Web or Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism. There are lots of possibilities for museums, archaeology and other cultural content so come along for a chat and a pint.

[Update: if you’re not in London but have some questions about Freebase and digital heritage that you think might be useful for discussion or need some context to explain, drop me a line via the form on miaridge.com and I’ll take them along.]
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