Day of Claire Ross

For the start of my Day of DH 2012, I’m on a train, on the way to London, via Bedford due to signally problems. So I’m already off to a bumpy start.  I’m on my way to the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in Lambeth for a board meeting about the Social Interpretation (SI) Project.  SI is a NESTA Digital R&D Funded project and it aims to make museum objects social.  We’re creating in gallery, mobile and online applications which use social media concepts and apply them to museum collections.  The idea is that the visitor voice is just as important as the museum voice, and we are giving them equal waiting, which we hope will encourage engagement and spread of IWM’s collections.  It’s a fantastic project, which I’m really excited about; particularly because we are trying to embed agile and user centered design principles in all aspects of the project (which is more difficult than you would expect).

The board meeting happens once a month, where the entire team, stakeholders and funders get together to talk about progress and sign off some of the tricker elements. On the agenda today are:

• the project handover, roles and responsibilities
• Budget
• Scope (we are trying to avoid scope creep, so we keep checking that we haven’t gone overboard)
• Spam bots
• Rollback
• Mobile app
• Web
• Risk register

On top of that I will be talking mobile app design with IWM’s brilliant designer Christian, who has mocked up a designed wireframe.  We met last week to discuss some of the user feedback I had received from the paper based functional wireframes, so its going to be really interesting to see what Christian has done with that feedback, and the IWM colour pallet.  Then there will be chats about QR codes and content. And probably some discussion about design of the some of the web pages. It’s always a busy day at IWM.

So that what lies ahead of me, but currently I’m sitting on a surprisingly busy train watching the world go by. I have learnt to enjoy the commute into London, it gives me time to reflect and ponder and occasionally doze off.   There are multiple thought strands running through my head.  Elements which I probably blog about during the rest of the day.

I’m going to start with the most appropriate: The Day of DH. This is the third year I have taken part, it’s quite a shock that it’s been three years since I began to consider myself to be a DHer. Time flies when you are having fun! I’ve reviewed my previous posts to see how things have changed. If I’m honest the only real thing that has changed is my location.  I no longer live in London, instead chosing the train commute rather than the bus or the bikathon through central London. There’s also the biggy, I’m very much a PhD student now, rather than my previous incarnation as a research assistant at UCLDH. I’m really lucky to be working on projects which I am directly using in my PhD and I love coming in to London to work on them.

But any way back to Day of DH.  Every year Day of DH brings new discussions about what it means to be a Digital Humanist.  It interesting to see how peoples definitions and expectations of Digital Humanities have evolved over the three years I have taken part.  But for me, my definition from 2010 still stands firm:

“For me Digital Humanities explores how and whether we can apply technology to our experience of history, heritage and culture. DH questions how technology changes the environment around us, physical and digital, and discusses whether those changes are for the better. I believe the concept of digital humanities is much more than just humanities computing; as society becomes increasingly digital, it become a way of life and it is important to understand how and why that is happening”

I’m pretty sure my day at IWM fits quite nicely into that definition.  The SI project is exploring how we can apply social media methods and digital technology to transform the visitor experience of the museum collections. Whether or not these changes are for the better is still up for debate, but that’s where my role as the user evaluation researcher comes into play.