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JABES 2015 - Digital curation and exploration : learning the lessons (of the last 500 years) /...
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Abstract
The last 20 years has seen a vast amount of digitisation and a large number of digital projects that have not yet succeeded in establishing long lasting collaborative and integrated platforms for quality research, education and engagement.
The task of representing both the diversity of cultural resources, as well as common and related histories from different perspectives, is still a significant challenge.
Despite considerable investment the use of technology in representing cultural heritage is still in a ‘disruptive’ and fragmented phase. This paper looks at the role of ‘real world’ knowledge representation in providing a truly representative and joined up picture of cultural heritage within and across national borders.
Digital Curation in the Open World
Learning the Lessons(of the last 500 years)
Dominic OldmanBritish Museum27th May 2015Journées ABES
2015 Montpellier
Learning from the last 20 or 500 years
Or, The Answer to Life the Universe and
Everything The artificial closed world The real or open world
• Background: What’s the Problem? • What is a Conceptual Reference Model?• Our will to order• Reuniting collections• Exploring heterogeneous information.• Building Knowledge
1. What’s the problem?
UCL Survey of BM Collection Online
“The majority are seeking a known object, and utilise discipline specific search terms, showing goal-driven
intent and a detailed prior knowledge of the museum.”
[Scholarly Information Seeking Behaviour in the British Museum Online Collection, (2011), Terras, Ross]
“It also suggests that academic browsing in a museum environment is
somewhat problematic as users have to be fairly linear in their search strategies with little
satisfaction when searching broadly or
browsing.”[Scholarly Information Seeking Behaviour in the British Museum Online
Collection, (2011), Terras, Ross]
UCL Survey of BM Collection Online
“A Library platform will give access not only to all… the items on its shelves, the e-items it has permission to provide, and the items (physical and virtual) within its network of collaborating institutions - but also to all the data it can find: Data from a curated set of reliable institutions, including scientific and non-profit”
David Weinberger
Issue for Libraries?
How can it meaningfully
integrate these
resources?When we haven’t been able to
OPAC
Currently by Misrepresentation!
Type: Image or Man-made (physical) object? Subject: archaeology or is that the department?
Type: Foreign Archaeology? Subject: Africa? Identifier: what do these mean.
Square pegs, round Holes Type: Image or Man-made (physical) object? Subject: Mummy mask or is that Object Type
“he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of
which were immeasurable”.
W.G. Sebald
“Meaning cannot be counted, even as it can be counted upon, so meaning has become marginalized in an informational culture
Mark Pesce
Quantity and Quality
But
“…the information explosion, far from serving the needs of the burgeoning knowledge economy, intensifies the need for quality information and expertise that libraries and librarians provide”.Beyond the Book - Schnapp & Battles • Public Library Visitor figures down -
particularly digital visitors.• Academic library enquires down.
Libraries
Museums
“to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload” Andreas Huyssen
• Visitors figures up - a beneficiary of current digital disruption?
How do we achieve digital stability?
How do we achieve a contextual, semantic, cross disciplinary OPAC?
2. What is a Conceptual Reference Model?
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,…. A variant of Twenty Questions, derived from the Linnaean taxonomy of the natural world with origins from pre-history
“[it]..contained promiscuously, rocks of unusual shape, coins, stuffed animals, manuscript volumes, ostrich eggs, and
unicorn horns. Statues and paintings stood side by side with curios and exemplars of natural history in these cabinets of
wonder when people started collecting art objects. Giorgio Agamben
The Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosity)
Ferrante Imperato's Dell'Historia Naturale(Naples 1599),Museum Wormianum : Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities. (16th C)
Agsburg cabinet – 17th C
"Only seemingly does chaos reign in the Wunderkammer,
however: to the mind of the medieval scholar, it was the sort of microcosm that reproduced, in its harmonious confusion, the animal, vegetable, and mineral macrocosm. This is why the
individual objects seem to find their meaning only side by side with others, between the walls of a room in which the scholar
could measure at every moment the boundaries of the universe!”
Giorgio Agamben - The Man Without Content
The Microcosms
The Cabinets of Curiosity
The Wunderkammers
The Macrocosm
The Conceptual Reference Model
Wunderkammer CRM Animal Entity
Vegetable EntityMineral Entity
CIDOC CRM Biological ObjectPhysical Thing
Physical Man-made ThingPhysical Object
Man-Made objectConceptual Object
3. Our Will to Order
Big Comprehensive Collections
• Big question across time, place and cultures.
• Global relationships.
• Natural overlapping with artificial.
Rationalisation & Classification
Question“Is it an accident that the library, natural history specimens, sculptures and antiquities were part of the same institution?” Answer: “I think it is”
Edmund Oldfield Assistant Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum in 1857.
Antonio Panizzi British Museum’s Principal Librarian Asserted a fundamental distinction between Christian art and “heathen antiquities”
Natural History Museum - 1881
National Gallery 1824
British Museum - 1753
British Library - 1973
Divisions & Re-classifications
• Specialisations of expertise • New classification systems• The unity of things is forgotten.
“We study the order of things, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And because it is so, it befits our philosophy to be writ small”W.G. Sebald on Thomas Browne
“For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but
similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“don't think, but look!” --
Ars Contextualis
http://grieve-smith.com/ftn/?p=383
4. Re-uniting the Collection – Returning to a Conceptual Reference
Model
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Events
Things(Physical and conceptual)
involve
People and Groups
involve
Time Spans
have
Places
located at
occur atAppe
llatio
nsth
at id
entif
yTerm
inology (Types)That refine and provide perspective
Top Level CIDOC CRM Integration
Concepts
Thingeverything consisting of or
carried by matter
Man-made Thing+ must be existing due to
human intention (this erases "natural")
Physical Man-Made Thing
: + must be ³ consisting of matter´
Man-Made Object+ must be physically
separate
Man-Made Feature+ must be physically
embedded
General(but
precisely defined)
Less General(and
precisely defined)
Legal Object
Physical Thing
Physical Object
Biological Object
Person
Conceptual Object
Propositional Object
Information Object
CIDOC CRMDifferent Levels of Knowledge
Object CollectionsCIDOC CRM
Immoveable Object Photographic Archive CIDOC CRMCRMDig
Bibliographic CIDOC CRM FRBRoo
Harmonising using universal concepts
Literature does this all the time
“Their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being”
W.G. Sebald
“everything in the world exists to give rise to a book”Stéphane Mallarmé
Samuel Wale
Exploring ConnectionsTerracotta temple, Surul, IndiaVictorian Railway station, Lowestoft, Suffolk
Hand-Book to Lowestoft and Its Environs
Museums & Archives – Building a Picture
• Earliest site for human habitation in Britain.
• Roman settlement. • Settled by the Danes in the 9th century
after killing the King of the East Angles.• Many important navel battles fought on
the coast. Battle of Lowestoft.• Important fishing town since middle ages.• Victorian Holiday Spa Town
Looking Back / Looking Forward
Cultural Perspectives
Related Items rarely relate to the subject of the object – more to the artist or the place it was painted – more technical information.
Scottish Museums Perspective
Lowestoft & Scotland
‘Mary MacDonald from Point, Lewis was a herring girl in the 1930s. She said “I saw a lot of the world. I went to Lerwick, Stonsay, Lochmaddy, Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Peterhead and Fraserburgh.”’
http://wovencommunities.org/collection/the-herring-industry/
Autumn Evening, Lowestoft – Sir Muirhead Bone
Using the a Conceptual Reference Model
Joseph Conrad (Actor) was present at
Sailing of the SS. Tuscania (Event)
has time spanTime-Span Event
beginning 21 April 1923
ending to 1st May 1923
SS Tuscania (Man-Made Thing)
was produced by
Shipbuilding (Production Event)
has time span
Time-Span Event
some time within
1921 - 1922
Portrait of Joseph Conrad (Man-made Thing)
was produced by
Drawing
(Production Event)
has time span
Time-Span Event
some time within
April 1923 – May 1923
No Dead Ends! Etching
(Man-made Thing)
was produced by
A Production Event
took place at
Workshop of Muirhead Bone (Petersfield,
Hampshire)
(Place)
The Point – at Last!
1. This took ages – even with computers!2. It should be instantaneous. The computer should
already have found these relationships for me!3. We need a conceptual reference model to mediate
between these resources.
Summary
A common reference for the purpose of agreeing what we are talking about even if we disagree about the essence or nature of these things.
5. Exploring Heterogeneous Data
Balancing Recall and Precision
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.”
Neil Gaiman
Serious Consequences…“The heavy reliance on keyword search in e-discovery places an enormous burden on today’s legal teams. Inconsistencies in language, inefficiencies in search techniques and software user interfaces, which conceal more than reveal, place the attorney in a difficult position”.
Legal Profession• More and More data. • Variable vocabularies.• Inadequate search tools.• Poor balance of recall and precision.• Serious consequences for legal cases.
348,000 results in 0.23 seconds But no understanding of context
Associative Queries – using structured data to improve keywords searching.
Animal, mineral, vegetable….
Thing
Actor
Place
Category
Time
Event
Thing
Actor
Place
Category
Time
Event
Fundamental Contextual
Relationships
6. Building Knowledge
Research Data Mandates Context
• Digital representation – Should not be a surrogate of reality
• Rather a platform for the externalisation of argument.
Digital Argument Requires Context
Observation
Belief
Proposition Belief Value
Concluded that
that Hold to be
Belief Adoption
adopted
InferenceMaking
Used as a Premise
This isn’t a belief of the original organisations
Thinking About Data?
cvcv
• Closed World• Flat properties• Tables and Fields
• Open World• Levels of Knowledge• Events & Activities
Poor Reuse Value
High Reuse value
Core Fixed Models Misrepresent Information
“It's still essentially impossible to bring data from existing museum automation systems into a common view…
Increasingly it seems that we should have concerned ourselves with the relationships…between the objects.”
(David Bearman 1995)
The Intersection of the Digital Humanities
we are "still in an era of confusion in the digital environment around the sort of business models we apply to questions of impact, depth of data and so on. We may not yet have the tools to understand how we make those decisions about the depth of data.“
Andrew Prescott
Digital Curation in the Real World
Learning the Lessons(of the last 500 years)
Dominic OldmanBritish Museum27th May 2015Journées ABES
2015 Montpellier