About me

Here’s a link to my most recent and upcoming talks and a generic conference bio:

Mia’s PhD in digital humanities (Department of History, Open University) focusses on participatory digital history, particularly crowdsourcing/citizen history and scholarly practices in historical research. Mia has published and presented widely on her key areas of interest including: user experience design, human-computer interaction, open cultural data, audience engagement and participation in the cultural heritage sector and digital history. Her edited volume, ‘Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage’ (Ashgate) was published in October 2014.

In 2014, she was a CENDARI Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Mia has also had residencies at the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, 2012) and the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum (New York, 2012) and two short Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Polis Center Institute on ‘Spatial Narrative and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities’ (Indianapolis, 2012) and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s One Week | One Tool institute (Fairfax, Virginia, 2013), where she helped create the award-winning Serendip-o-matic. Mia is also known for her work on crowdsourcing metadata games for museums.

Formerly Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum Group, Mia has worked internationally as a business analyst, digital consultant and web programmer in the cultural heritage and commercial sectors. While at the Science Museum, Mia held the first ever museum mashup competition, helped the Science Museum’s Centenary Icons poll hit the front page of the BBC News, and organised the release of over 200,000 collections records as open data. Mia has also worked for Culture24’s Let’s Get Real project, the Museum of London and Museum Victoria/Melbourne Museum. She has maintained a wiki listing museum, gallery, library and archive APIs and machine-readable data sources for open cultural data and cool things made with them since 2009.

Mia has post-graduate qualifications in software development (RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001) and an MSc in Human-Centred Systems (City University, London, 2011). She is Chair of the Museums Computer Group (MCG) and a member of the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH). She tweets at twitter.com/mia_out and blogs at www.openobjects.org.uk/

If I’m presenting at your event, please feel free to use a version of this bio. An photo of me suitable for programmes is here or there’s a photo from the GLAM-Wiki conference here.

For my PhD, I’m interested in the impact of digitality on scholarly practice, and am investigating this through historical and location-based resources co-created by online participants.

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, I now live in Oxford (via Amsterdam and London). I started as a Arts student, played around in multimedia, and eventually graduated as a software engineer. After working as a museum technologist for over a decade, I’m back in a Faculty of Arts.

In 2011 I was elected as Chair of the Museums Computer Group, having served as a Committee Member since 2007. In January 2013 I was elected to serve on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) for the 2013-2016 term. I’m a member of various conference Programme Committees (Museums and the Web, Museum Computer Network) and academic project Steering Groups (Commodity Histories, Social Interpretation). I was also a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Thinktank ‘UK Museums and the Semantic Web‘ in 2006/7 and of JISC’s ‘Developer Focus’ group that works with their DevCSI project to improve the developer community in higher education.