Introducing… Mia Ridge

We’ve asked each member of the Living with Machines team to introduce themselves in their initial blog post.

What’s your name?

Mia Ridge

What’s your background?

My background is in museum technologies, crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and using digitised collections for research and fun. Like many of my generation, I began by teaching myself HTML, and later CSS and JavaScript; later I went back to uni for a degree in computer science to learn how to programme properly. Along the way, I discovered the joys of working in cultural heritage – the mixture of interesting problems, expert colleagues and the rewards of providing access to collections has kept me interested.

My academic training bridges humanities and technical subjects. My PhD in History/Digital Humanities looked at the impact of ‘digitality’ on historical research and collaboration, and my dissertation for my MSc in Human-Computer Interaction tested whether crowdsourcing games could motivate people to contribute tags about collection images.

In one sentence, what is your role on the project?

As Co-Investigator and Digital Curator in the Digital Scholarship team, I lead the British Library team and ensure that project outputs and benefits are embedded in the Library. As Lead of the Communities Lab, I create opportunities for public participation through crowdsourcing (and human computation, on the data science side), and amplify the reach of any code, datasets, tutorials, case studies, metadata and other outputs among the cultural heritage and academic communities. (Yes, that’s two sentences. I cheated.)

What excites you about the project?

Learning from and with others; developing research questions together; finding ways to share results, integrate contributions and expertise from expertise academics and the public.

What challenges do you see ahead?

The scale of the project is a challenge in itself, as is agreeing milestones and processes across the whole project. Finding ways to stay true to our vision of ‘radical collaboration’ might be hard day-to-day.

What’s the last (non-work) book you read, exhibition or performance you saw?

I’m just finishing Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga.

Where can we find out more about you and your work?

I post on the British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog, and hopefully will have lots of posts here. There’s also my personal website and Open Objects blog.