Blog Posts

Wikipedia at 24: Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence

Wikipedia at 24 “With more than 250 million views each day, Wikipedia is an invaluable educational resource”.[1] In light of Wikipedia turning 24 years this week (January 15th), and the Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh turning 9 years old this week too, this post is to examine where we are with Wikipedia today in light […]

Witch Lore and Scottish Castles September Editathon

Witch Lore and Scottish Castles: a Wikipedia Editathon On Friday 27th September we were joined by castle buffs and witchcraft enthusiasts to help us improve the representation of Scottish witchcraft and heritage on Wikipedia. Our Witch Lore and Scottish Castles editathon event saw people coming together in the Digital Scholarship Centre of the Main Library […]

Scotland loves Monuments 2024

Get involved in Wiki Loves Monuments! Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo competition which takes part throughout the month of September every year, and is supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. You can see historic locations near you that are missing an image using our handy interactive map (red pins are locations without an […]

MAT Medicine Anthropology Theory

Medicine Anthropology Theory (MAT) – An Open Access & Open Licensed Journal

Medicine Anthropology Theory is an open-access and open licensed journal publishing scholarly articles, position pieces, reviews, and notes from the field related to the fields of: medical anthropology, the anthropology of biomedicine, critical global health studies, medical humanities, and science and technology studies.

MAT is hosted on the University Library’s Journal Hosting Service and is part of the University’s growing portfolio of fully open-access internationally-leading academic journals.

Eric Liddell crossing the finishing line

Eric Liddell – Olympic Medals and Chariots on Fire

Paris Olympics 2024 are underway with the opening ceremony tonight and medal fever starting to ramp up, which makes it an excellent time to look at some 1924 Paris Olympic medals in our own collections.

Our Centre for Research Collections hold Eric Liddell’s 1924 Paris Olympic Medals: Gold Medal for 400m; Bronze Medal for 200m; and the Paris Olympic 2024 Medal for participation. All three were presented to the University by Mrs Patricia Russell, daughter of Eric Liddelll, on Wednesday 20 May 1992.

Reflections on ‘Their Finest Hour’

In July 2023, I began working on Their Finest Hour, my internship, I was initially told, would last six months. Yet, I am now clocking off, one year later, after continuous exciting and rewarding work on the project. The last year has involved a huge variety of challenges. Organising the collection day itself involved events […]

Teaching data literacy with real world (witchy) datasets

Our Digital Humanities award-winning interactive map (witches.is.ed.ac.uk) caught the public’s attention when it launched in September 2019 and has helped to change the way the stories of these women and men were being told with a campaign group, Witches of Scotland, successfully lobbying the Scottish Government into issuing a formal apology from the former First […]

A Whole University Approach to Sustainability

The University’s efforts to fight the climate crisis are incorporated across everything we do, including work to reduce carbon emissions and embed sustainability into research, teaching and governance, operations, and partnerships. This includes the work we do in the OER Service and with our Online Course Production Service colleagues.

Their Finest Hour Archive Launch

On the 6th June, the online archive for Their Finest Hour will be launched, after 73 Digital Collection Day events took place across the UK in 2023 and 2024, including the one that we ran at the University of Edinburgh on 25 November 2023,. Overall, Their Finest Hour digitised over 25,000 previously hidden artefacts from […]

Edinburgh Award 2023/24 Success!

Edinburgh Award 2023/4 Blog This year I had my first experience helping with the Edinburgh Award Wikipedia project. The Edinburgh Award is a scheme which encourages students to volunteer in various projects that are happening around the University whilst undertaking their studies, with the ultimate aim of improving employability and graduate outcomes. Having undertaken an […]

Wikipedia, inclusive practice and improving representation online

Since January 2016, I have worked as Wikimedian in Residence with the University of Edinburgh’s course teams to quickly generate real examples of technology-enhanced learning activities appropriate to the curriculum. As a result, students from diverse learning communities and a variety of disciplines benefit from learning new digital and information literacy skills appropriate for the […]

7 years of Wikipedia and the Translation Studies MSc

A Wikipedia assignment has been part of Translation Studies MSc since 2016 when I first met with Dr. Charlotte Bosseaux and convinced her to try a new approach to a pedagogical problem they had; getting the students to have meaningful, published translation practice that they would be motivated to complete. Course leaders were keen to […]

A part of an inner courtyard surrounded by a red brick building

An OER Intern Going to OER24

Last week, I had the privilege to attend the OER24 conference at Munster Technological University, Cork. As an undergrad student and someone wishing to become an academic someday, joining a conference was thrilling and somewhat terrifying at the same time. However, OER24 was friendly and participatory, exemplified by the finale of the day, the Gasta session with strictly 10-minute informal presentations, agitations, or raising questions, and I was grateful for its welcoming environment.

23 Things for Digital Knowledge: An Intern’s Experience

Paula Gomez Valiente, MSc Language and Intercultural Communication student and 23 Things for Digital Knowledge intern, shares her experience working on the relaunch of the 23 Things for Digital Knowledge course. The new 23 Things course is aimed at students—undergraduate and postgraduate students alike—who would benefit from learning all about the myriad of free resources, software, and apps at their disposal.

OER24: Gathering Courage

Last week the OER24 Conference took place at the Munster Technological University in Cork and I was privileged to go along with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto.  The themes of this year’s conference were:  Open Education Landscape and Transformation Equity and Inclusion in OER Open Source and Scholarly Engagement Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI […]

bird silhouettes showing relative size to each other

Birds of Midlothian: Open Textbook Interview

In our fifth and final Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interview, Charlie Farley talks to Mayu Ishimoto, an Architectural History and Heritage student who worked as an Open Content Curator intern with the OER Service over the summer of 2023. Mayu now works one day a week as an intern with the OER Service, and published the open textbook Birds of Midlothian as one of her summer projects.

Ilustration of three ghost shaped microscopy characters

Introduction to Bioimage Analysis: Open Textbook Interview

In the fourth of our Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interviews, Charlie Farley talks to Dr Peter Bankhead, Reader in the Institute of Genetics and Cancer at The University of Edinburgh. Creator of digital imaging open-source software, QuPath, which has been downloaded close to half a million times, cited in about 3,000 academic articles, and is used all over the world, both in academia and industry. Dr Bankhead has published his open textbook Introduction to Bioimage Analysis using GitHub and Jupyter Books.

Black and white image of sheet music

Fundamentals of Music Theory: Open E-Textbook Interview

In the third of our Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interviews, Charlie Farley  talks to Dr Nikki Moran, Senior Lecturer in Music at the ECA. Niki is lead author and presenter of the University of Edinburgh’s Coursera MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Fundamentals of Music Theory, engaging 300000 active learners and recruiting around 500 new students per week. Fundamentals of Music Theory was the first open e-textbook published on Edinburgh Diamond as part of a pilot project in collaboration with the OER Service.

Illustration of a rat and text: RatR(D)SVS

R@R(D)SVS: Open Textbook Interview

In the second of our Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interviews, Charlie Farley  talks to Dr Jill Mackay, Senior Lecturer (Veterinary Medical Education) at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. Dr Mackay is a proponent of open science, and particularly exploring how education research can adopt open science practices. She has created and published multiple OER, including the open textbook R@R(D)SVS designed to help staff and students get to grips with with R programming.

Sketch of an open book with the words 'Open Text Books' and arrow spreading out to figures of people reading and using tech

Open Textbook Interview Series for OE Week 2024

March 4th-8th marks Open Education Week 2024, an annual celebration and opportunity for those working in Open Education to actively share their achievements and learn about what others are achieving worldwide.  This year we’re celebrating Open Education Week by publishing a series of interviews with staff and students across the University who have created and published open textbooks. Open textbooks are books that have been made accessible online free of cost and are also openly licensed to allow free modifications, use, and sharing.

laptop with 23 Things logo background

Re-use, OER, & 23 Things

The University of Edinburgh’s 23 Things for Digital Knowledge is a self-directed course aimed towards students new to The University of Edinburgh to introduce and refresh the range of digital tools, services, software, support, and knowledge available. What you may not know is that for both iterations of the course, content has been created by re-using open licensed content from the University of Edinburgh and itself is open licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY). In fact we actively encourage you to take our Digital Knowledge course and adapt it for your own purposes.

Upload Stage & WW2 Educational Resource

The upload stage of Edinburgh’s Their Finest Hour project has begun! After collecting over fifty testimonies, and thousands of photographs of WW2-related objects at the collection day, we are now working through the stories and photos, and uploading them to Oxford’s online archive that will launch in June. While we do this, we’re keeping a […]

Happy 23rd Birthday Wikipedia!

This post is written by new Assistant Wikimedian in Residence, Ellie Whitehead. 23 years ago, on 15th January 2001, Wikipedia was launched as an independent, online open-source encyclopaedia. In its first year it amassed 20, 000 articles appearing in 18 different languages. Since then, Wikipedia has grown to be an internationally known and respected symbol […]

Edinburgh Collection Day

  On Saturday 25th November, Edinburgh University student and staff volunteers ran a successful digital archive event on Saturday as part of the University of Oxford’s Their Finest Hour project.  Over 100 members of the public came to the event, and volunteers recorded over 50 interviews and took thousands of photographs of items including a […]

Press Release

Public event aims to preserve Second World War memories  The University of Edinburgh is inviting people to bring stories and objects relating to the Second World War to a Digital Collection Day at Rainy Hall, New College on 25th November 2023, from 10am to 4pm.      The University of Edinburgh is excited to partner with […]

SIGN-UP: Edinburgh Digital Collection Day

Do you have any Second World War related stories and objects passed down to you from your parents, grandparents and other family members? Would you like to digitally preserve these stories and objects before they are lost to history? Bring your diaries, letters, photos, memories, objects* or stories about your family’s wartime experience to our Digital […]

Starting the “Their Finest Hour” Internship

In July 2022, the University of Oxford launched a digital preservation project; to collate as many World War Two stories and objects as possible across the UK. The scheme, called Their Finest Hour, trains individuals to organise ‘Digital Collection Days’ in their local communities, where members of the public can bring war-related memories, photographs, diaries and any […]