About me

a bit about me….

I’m a museums Geek, and proud of it.  I’m excitable about almost everything especially tea and cake.

I am a Geordie girl, born and raised in the North East and I love the Romans, especially their spoons. Traditionally I’m an archaeologist, but gave up on the mud and concentrated on museum interpretation and learning. I love museums and what people think of them.

I’ve been a Research Assistant at the Centre for Digital Humanities since 2009, you can find out more about the projects I have worked on on my LinkedIn page .  Below is the most up to date projects (as of Feb 2013).

Currently I’m a RA for the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis on the TOTEM Labs project. TOTEM Labs is a UCL Enterprise initiative which aims to build and capitalise on previous TOTEM projects within the retail, service, health, transport, built environment and cultural sectors to produce a series of social and commercial enterprises ‘powered by Tales of Things’ with users and knowledge transfer ranging from the general public to small and medium enterprises through to large organisations, and advertisers.  I am also working on a Share Academy project with the Museum of Brands and Exhibition Curator for the next Octagon Exhibition at UCL.

I am the lead Researcher on the QRator project (2010 – to date). QRator is a collaborative project between the Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and UCL Museums and Collections, to develop new kinds of content, co-curated by the public, museum curators, and academic researchers, to enhance museum interpretation, community engagement and establish new connections to museum exhibit content. Supported by the UCL Public Engagement Unit.

I was also one of the research technical partners for the Social Interpretation  project with the Imperial War Museums, Knowledge Integration and Gooii (2011-2012). The Social Interpretation project is a Research and Development exercise joint funded by the NESTA / Arts Council / AHRC digital R&D Fund, and Imperial War Museums (IWM). At its heart, it aims to bring successful social interactions already found online and apply them across IWM’s collections – making social objects out of museums objects.  I focused on user centred design elements of the project.

I am also undertaking doctoral research at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and my particular research interest is in visitor experience in digital cultural contexts.   I am also the Chair of the committee of the Digital Learning Network For Museums, Libraries and Archives as well as on the committee for Ignite London.