Digital Humanities in Practice SeminarOpen University, UK. 24th January 2013

Adrian StevensonSenior Technical Innovations Coordinator

Mimas, University of Manchester, UK@adrianstevenson

Digital Humanities and the First World War

927233355446

ww1.discovery.ac.uk

WW1 Discovery Project

• Proof-of-Concept illustrating principles of the JISC Discovery initiative

• Discovery about advocating ‘open’ and ‘aggregating’

• Make digital content more discoverable by people and machines

• Building WW1 aggregation API and discovery layer

www.discovery.ac.uk

What is an API?• ‘Application Programming Interface’• Allows machine readability of data– Typically over the Web

• Provides access to content or functions for other systems

• Many ways to do this – e.g.– Google, Facebook, Flickr, twitter APIs ….– OAI-PMH, Z39.50– RDF - Linked Data, Semantic Web

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WW1 Discovery: How?

• Aggregate data from existing APIs – NMM, V&A, Europeana

• Help others with example API – BL, Welsh Voices, Postal Museum

• Formats: SOLR, RSS, OpenSearch, OAI-PMH, CSV

http://ww1.discovery.ac.uk/how-to-use-our-api/

Challenges• Lack of APIs• Difficulties merging data– Varied content and formats– Relevance ranking dubious

• From Discovery ‘Technical Principles’ - “Discovery is distributed … Discovery is concerned with a plethora of information resources and services from a wide variety of sources and is prepared, where appropriate, to deal with these in situ”

• Speed of API response• Lack of content– images– geo-data and time data

• Content licenses not open

Contact

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Adrian StevensonMimas, University of Manchester, UKadrian.stevenson@manchester.ac.uk

www.mimas.ac.uk

www.twitter.com/adrianstevensonwww.linkedin.com/in/adrianstevenson

www.slideshare.net/adrianstevenson

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