Crowdsourced Digital Collections in the Age of AI: Keywords, Maps and Memories

Technological advances have transformed how we create, manage, share and engage with digital collections. In this talk, Catherine Conisbee (University of Oxford) will introduce the 'Their Finest Hour Online Archive', a crowdsourced collection of Second World War stories and objects, and share findings from this and two further projects it inspired: ‘Mapping the Their Finest Hour Collection’ and ‘Extracting Keywords from Crowdsourced Collections’.

Catherine will reflect on the opportunities and challenges the team encountered while exploring digital methods to enhance search and discovery, speaking to the team’s experiences using AI, how their role as data stewards shaped their research, and the transformative impact of collaboration.  

During this talk Catherine will signpost resources used by the team, and introduce new interactive tools and resources they have developed to support AI literacy and democratise access to text mining approaches. 

This is the latest talk in the Bodleian Bytes series, hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries.

Speaker Biography

Catherine Conisbee is Project Officer in the Sustainable Digital Scholarship (SDS) service (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford). As part of the SDS team, Catherine provides research data management expertise to colleagues across the university, advocating for FAIR data management practices and offering guidance on hosting and curating research outputs on the SDS platform (an open access institutional digital repository). 

Catherine has a deep interest in digital humanities methods and how they can be used to reveal connections across and between digital collections. Alongside her role at the Bodleian, Catherine has spent the last three years collaborating with Professor Stuart Lee (PI) and Dr Matthew Kidd on a number of grant-funded, collections-focused research projects based in the Faculty of English, including the National Lottery Heritage Funded, Second World War crowdsourcing project, ‘Their Finest Hour’.  

Bodleian Bytes

Bodleian Bytes is a series of online talks hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries. The series engages with innovative national and international research in digital scholarship. It is a virtual space for discussions surrounding different tools and methodologies whilst also providing inspiration for future digital research.