£14.5m awarded to transform online exploration of UK’s culture and heritage collections through harnessing innovative AI.

In order to connect the UK’s cultural artefacts and historical archives in new and transformative ways, The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has awarded £14.5m to the research and development of emerging technologies, including machine learning and citizen-led archiving.

Five major projects form the largest investment of Towards a National Collection, a five-year research programme. The announcement reveals the first insights into how thousands of disparate collections could be explored by public audiences and academic researchers in the future.

The five ‘Discovery Projects’ will harness the potential of new technology to dissolve barriers between collections. They will open up public access and facilitate research across a range of sources and stories held in different physical locations. One of the central aims is to empower and diversify audiences by involving them in the research and creating new ways for them to access and interact with collections. In addition to innovative online access, the projects will generate artist commissions, community fellowships, computer simulations, and travelling exhibitions.

Daria Cybulska, Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK said “We were delighted that two Discovery Projects we are involved in were selected for this round of funding by the AHRC. Increasing and diversifying access to UK’s collections and supporting open research is of strategic importance for Wikimedia UK. Through our involvement we will aim to demonstrate the benefits of open knowledge, especially for public engagement, and its abilities to help dissolve barriers between separate collections. We see an exciting amount of overlap between the projects we are directly supporting and our priorities, for example amplifying underrepresented community heritage in the Our Heritage, Our Stories project, and linked open data, including Wikidata in the Congruence Engine project.”

The investigation is the largest of its kind to date. It extends across the UK, involving 15 universities and 63 heritage collections and institutions of different scales, with over 120 individual researchers and collaborators.

Together, the Discovery Projects represent a vital step in the UK’s ambition to maintain leadership in cross-disciplinary research, both between different humanities disciplines and in their work with other sectors. Towards a National Collection will set a global standard for other countries building their own collections, enhancing collaboration between the UK’s renowned heritage and national collections worldwide.

Read more about the two Discovery Projects Wikimedia UK are engaged in:

The Congruence Engine: Digital Tools for New Collections-Based Industrial Histories

Principal Investigator: Dr Timothy Boon, Science Museum Group

Project partners: British Film Institute, National Museums Scotland, Historic Buildings & Monuments Commission for England (Historic England/English Heritage), National Museum Wales, National Museums Northern Ireland, The National Archives, National Trust, The V&A, universities of Leeds, London, and Liverpool, BBC History, Birmingham Museums Trust, BT Heritage & Archives, Grace’s Guide to Industrial History, Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, Saltaire World Heritage Education Association, Society for the History of Technology, Whipple Museum of the History of Science (Tools of Knowledge Project), Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Discovery Museum), Bradford Museums and Galleries, Wikimedia UK and Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab).

The Congruence Engine will create the prototype of a digital toolbox for everyone fascinated by our industrial past to connect an unprecedented range of items from the nation’s collection to tell the stories they want to tell. What was it like then? How does our past bear on our present and future? Until now, historians and curators have become acclimated to a world where it has only been possible to work with a small selection of the sources – museum objects, archive documents, pictures, films, maps, publications etc – potentially relevant to the history they want to explore.

The Congruence Engine will use the latest digital techniques to connect collections held in different locations to overcome this major constraint on the histories that can be created and shared with the wider public in museums, publications and online. Digital researchers will work alongside professional and community historians and curators.

Through iterative exploration of the textiles, energy and communications sectors, the project will tune collections-linking software to make it responsive to user needs. It will use computational and AI techniques – including machine learning and natural language processing – to create and refine datasets, provide routes between records and digital objects such as scans and photographs, and create the tools by which participants will be able to enjoy and use the sources that are opened to them.

Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection

Principal Investigator: Professor Lorna Hughes, University of Glasgow

Project partners: The National Archives, Tate, British Museum, University of Manchester, Association for Learning Technology, Digital Preservation Coalition, Software Sustainability Institute, Archives+, Dictionaries of the Scots Language, National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland & Wikimedia UK

In the past two decades communities have gathered, recorded, and digitised their collections in a form of ‘citizen history’ that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past, known as community-generated digital content (CGDC). However, CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, for lack of infrastructure and the multilingual, multidialectal, and multicultural complexity of the content.

Our Heritage, Our Stories will dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability for CGDC, through co-designing and building sophisticated automated AI-based tools to discover and assess CGDC ‘in the wild’, in order to link it and make it searchable. This new accessibility will be showcased through a major public-facing CGDC Observatory at The National Archives, where people can access, reuse, and remix these newly-integrated collections.

The project will make CGDC more discoverable and accessible whilst respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity. Through this, it will help tell the stories of communities through their rich collections of CGDC, which are at present hidden from wider view. By dissolving barriers between these and showcasing their content, the project will help centre diverse community-focused voices within our shared national collection.

Further information & images press@wikimedia.org.uk

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John Cummings is not one to shy away from large-scale projects. Fresh from helping build one of the largest Wikipedia endeavours ever – converting the Welsh town of Monmouth into the world’s first “Wikipedia town” – John moved on to become the Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum (NHM).

His upbringing has played a key role in developing his interests, shooing him onto a path towards the role. “I’ve always had an interest in natural history,” he says. “I didn’t study science at university, but my mum’s a garden designer, I grew up in the countryside… This is one of those roles that probably doesn’t happen that often.”

He held the role at the museums in South Kensington between 2013 and 2014, and helped to promote a culture of openness there as well as exploring what the institutions could do with Wikipedia.

One major aspect of this was looking into content donations, and how they could be beneficial for the museums in promoting their content.

“One of the main ways I encouraged content release under an open licence was just to tell people how Wikimedia projects are made and how many people see the information. It’s amazing – it’s such a wide audience and not just in Britain.

“You can reach people in lots of languages, and amazing projects like Wikipedia Zero [a project to allow free access to Wikipedia in developing countries] give people access to information they can’t get in another way.”

John says that working with the museums provided an avenue to improving Wikipedia by simply tapping into the tremendous resources there.

“It was a wonderful opportunity not only to engage with the public,” he says, “but also with research scientists who have a specialist contribution to make to Wikipedia, built over a whole lifetime of knowledge.

“The thing about the Natural History Museum is you work there because you care about the natural environment, and people are very willing to spend their time educating the public,” John adds. “Wikipedia is just one more avenue for that, but the great thing about Wikipedia is that it has such a large audience, so that contribution can have a wide impact.”

One major event John helped to organise was with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the non-ministerial department tasked with collecting and collating statistics on various aspects of politics and life in England and Wales.

“Working at the museums gives you a lot of opportunity to connect with other organisations,” John explains. “One of those was the ONS. They produce all their content under the Open Government Licence which is compatible with Wikimedia projects.

“They produce wonderful infographics about all sorts of subjects that help people easily understand complicated statistics, and we’ve been able to put them straight onto Wikipedia with no change of license, it’s completely compatible.”

He is also keen to take ONS data and feed it into Wikidata, a relatively new Wikimedia project focused on open data collection. “This would allow the ONS to reach a wide audience in many languages very easily,” he says.

This attitude of helping to promote the museums’ work to as many people as possible has been the driving factor behind John’s time in the role. He argues the interaction has given them a chance to reach millions by learning to tap into the global reach of Wikipedia.

“Having a Wikimedian in Residence is a great way to engage with a wider audience that is potentially quite hard to engage with without this kind of bridge into the movement,” he says. “Wikipedia is not the easiest thing to edit in a lot of ways. It’s great to have the understanding of licensing, the rules around conflicts of interest, and other guidelines that the Wikimedia movement has.

“It’s really helpful to have someone internally within the organisation, who’s easily accessible, who’s able to get people started with engagement,” he continues.

“It’s like learning to ride a bike or play an instrument – it’s hard to start off with, but once you get going you kind of feel your way through… it takes practice.”

• For more on The GLAM-Wiki Revolution, visit the project page, or find out more about the Natural History Museum and Science Museum Wikimedian in Residence project

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This post was written by Roberta Wedge, Gender Gap Project Worker

On Wednesday evening a small team of staff and volunteers left the Wikimedia UK office for the Science Museum, for some focussed research on what makes a great Late. These monthly adults-only events are a popular way for galleries and museums to open themselves out to an under-served audience. The V&A claims to be “the original contemporary late night event”, and since 1999, GLAMs large and small have tried their hand at “drinking and thinking” evenings. After many years of sampling, I still think that the V&A and the Science Museum are the best exemplars.

As you may have heard (through the UK-wiki list and on the Water Cooler page within the WMUK wiki), the Science Museum has offered WMUK the opportunity to showcase our work at the Late in November. In October they’re launching their biggest gallery in many years, The Information Age, and unusually, the Late on Wednesday 26 November will be themed around that. We’re very fortunate in being invited to take part.

Last night was one of the best Lates I’ve been to. Not only was the whole museum packed with about 5000 happy people (all over 18 and most under 35, and crucially for my role, about half of them were women), but the range of events was truly impressive. I counted about 30 things going on, most of them free, from pub quiz and game show to demonstrations and workshops. September’s theme was the science of magic and illusion. Make your own zoetrope! Enjoy safe but satisfying indoor explosions with Punk Science! Watch the salinity of the oceans change, speeded up a million times and modelled on a 2m glowing globe! Debunk the Cottingley Fairies!

So as we were sitting in the IMAX theatre, watching the cheerfully scruffy presenters rouse the crowd to participate, we were thinking, what would this look like with a Wikimedia theme? How could we harness their dynamic but informal style to bring out the fun and wonder of wiki-ness? I would love to see a data whiz take on the challenge of filling that floating globe with the traces of Wikipedia edits, different languages ebbing and flowing like ocean currents as Indonesia goes to sleep and Germany wakes up — and the sun never sets on the anglophone empire. We already have high hopes of big-screen audio-visual manifestations of our activities, like Listen to Wikipedia, but it’s all up for grabs. If there’s something you’d love to show off at the Information Age Late, please let me know as soon as possible. We already have almost a dozen ideas, but want to expand the pool of possibilities before meeting with the Science Museum again, when cold reality may have to come into play.

More research is needed: I can’t wait for the next Science Museum Late, on October 29, with the theme of “Food and Drink”.

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Wikimedia UK is very happy to report that John Cummings, a long-standing and well known Wikimedian, has begun his work as Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum.

This is a ground-breaking partnership between two of the UK’s most prestigious cultural institutions and the charity that promotes and supports Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the UK. His role with the museums will last for four months.

John said: “It’s a real privilege to work with institutions with such important places in the history and public understanding of science. I hope I will be able to help the museums in their goals.”

John is the co-founder and project leader for MonmouthpediA and Gibraltarpedia, the world’s first Wikipedia town and city, and he is a Wikimedia UK accredited trainer for communities and institutions.

He is also technical lead for Leaderwiki, a collaborative education resource for emerging leaders from all over the world who want to make a positive contribution in their communities.

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