The National Transport Data Framework

Report by Professor Peter Landshoff (Cambridge University) and Professor John Polak (Imperial College London) on a project for the Department for Transport. emails: [email protected] [email protected] NTDF is designed to be a resource for data owners to deposit descriptions into a central catalogue, so that people can search for data and find data and understand their characteristics. The value of this is to individuals, to commercial organizations, and to public bodies. For example, services that provide better information to travellers will help to make their journey less stressful and persuade them to make more use of public transport. Transport operators need very diverse information to help them plan developments to their services: demographic, geographical, economic etc. And policy makers need a similar range of information to help them decide how to divide their budget and afterwards to evaluate how valuable it has been.This work was supported by the Department for Transport (DfT)

Digging Into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters

The Digging Into the Enlightenment: Mapping The Republic of Letters project is a collaborative effort between humanities scholars and computer scientists at Stanford University and the University of Oklahoma in the United States, and at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Our research hypothesis is that we can revolutionize the practice of interpretive research in the humanities by integrating innovative visualization and annotation techniques into highly interactive tools for excavating and dissecting details about people, places, times, and relationships in large data sets. Our project focuses on the Electronic Enlightenment (EE), a University of Oxford collection currently containing more than 53,000 letters. The goal of the project is thus to develop new visualization techniques and tools that support research into the "Republic of Letters" by facilitating interpretation of the complex data sets that have been materialized from this predominantly textual archival collection

Railroads and the Making of Modern America -- Tools for Spatio-Temporal Correlation, Analysis, and Visualization

This project aims to integrate large-scale data sources from the Digging into Data repositories with other types of relevant data on the railroad system, already assembled by the project directors. Our project seeks to develop useful tools for spatio-temporal visualization of these data and the relationships among them. Our interdisciplinary team includes computer science, history, and geography researchers. Because the railroad "system" and its spatio-temporal configuration appeared differently from locality-to-locality and region-to-region, we need to adjust how we "locate" and "see" the system. By applying data mining and pattern recognition techniques, software systems can be created that dynamically redefine the way spatial data are represented. Utilizing processes common to analysis in Computer Science, we propose to develop a software framework that allows these embedded concepts to be visualized and further studied

Presenting the Compendium Isotoporum Medii Aevi, a multi-isotope database for Medieval Europe

Here we present the Compendium Isotoporum Medii Aevi (CIMA), an open-access database gathering more than 50,000 isotopic measurements for bioarchaeological samples located within Europe and its margins, and dating between 500 and 1500 CE. This multi-isotope (δ13C, δ15N, δ34S, δ18O, and 87Sr/86Sr) archive of measurements on human, animal, and plant archaeological remains also includes a variety of supporting information that offer, for instance, a taxonomic characterization of the samples, their location, and chronology, in addition to data on social, religious, and political contexts. Such a dataset can be used to identify data gaps for future research and to address multiple research questions, including those related with studies on medieval human lifeways (i.e. human subsistence, spatial mobility), characterization of paleo-environmental and -climatic conditions, and on plant and animal agricultural management practices. Brief examples of such applications are given here and we also discuss how the integration of large volumes of isotopic data with other types of archaeological and historical data can improve our knowledge of medieval Europe.Background & Summary Methods Data Records Technical Validation Usage Note

Listening from within a Digital Music Archive : Metadata, Sensibilities, and Music Histories in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's Music Archive

This thesis examines how digital music archives can facilitate different versions of the history of recorded music. It argues that digital technologies and metadata enable coexisting historical narratives of recorded music that move across time and musical genre, and that can cross geographical and cultural space. The study sees a correlation between archival strategies and the presentation of recorded music. It exemplifies this by examining the development and structuration of the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). The thesis amplifies that the presentation of recorded music on DR’s in-house digital music platform /Diskoteket can impact how the music is perceived. It is asserted that music streaming experiences are directed by imaginaries of the history of recorded music, which can be guided by metadata. As this study is the first to have an explicit focus on DR’s music archive, it also offers a historical perspective alongside its more practical and technological analyses. The thesis traces the inner workings of DR’s digital music archive and assesses how its architecture makes for multiple and parallel histories of recorded music. It concludes that formations of metadata have the capability to deepen and change the perception and reception of music releases. The thesis argues that metadata give structure to DR’s digital music archive while also giving it meaning and purpose, and it suggests that this applies to all types of digital music archives

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Pathways to Discovery for LGBTQ+ Archival Materials: An Analysis of Discovery Tools and Descriptive Quality in Online Finding Aids

This study investigated and assessed the availability of online archival finding aids and descriptive metadata for LGBTQ+ materials at research universities in the Southeastern United States

Scholarly chronographics: can a timeline be useful in historiography?

Our paper is concerned with the visualisation of historical events and artefacts in the context of time. It arises from a project bringing together expertise in visualisation, historiography and software engineering. The work is the result of an extended enquiry over several years which has included investigation of the prior history of such chronographics and their grounding in the temporal ontology of the Enlightenment. Timelines - visual, spatial presentations of chronology - are generally regarded as being too simple, perhaps too childish, to be worthy of academic attention, yet such chronographics should be capable of supporting sophisticated thinking about history and historiography, especially if they take full advantage of the capabilities of digital technologies. They should enable even professional academic historians to 'make sense' of history in new ways, allowing them insights they would not otherwise have achieved. In our paper we highlight key findings from the history of such representations, principally from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and show how, in a project to develop new digital chronographics for collections of cultural objects and events, we have explored new implementations of the important ideas we have extracted about timewise presentation and interaction. This includes the representation of uncertainty, of relations between events, and the epistemology of time as a 'space' for history. We present developed examples, in particular a chronographic presentation of a large database of works by a single author, a composer, and discuss the extent to which our ambitions for chronographics have been realised in practice. Keywords: timeline, chronographic