Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence

Software solutions for web information systems in digital humanities: review, analysis and comparative study

Research in the humanities increasingly depends on how information is structured and managed and how, on the basis of that information, new knowledge is produced. Additionally, participatory approaches, which often rely on web information systems as their supportive infrastructure, have made an impact on the most recent historiographical trends, in particular in the methodological framework of digital humanities. The aim of this paper was to produce, from an operational and implementation perspective, a review of software solutions frequently used to develop web information systems for research projects in humanities and cultural heritage, in order to provide an understanding of the various possibilities available and their positives and limitations, also based on different users’ requirements. An individual and comparative analysis of sixteen different application frameworks commonly used in these fields, either generic or developed for a specific research domain, has been carried out, considering their main functionalities, strengths, and weaknesses. The achieved results facilitate critical and reasoned decision-making among several available options, guiding the makers of those systems, both researcher(s) and developers(s), and providing them also with a common ground of terms and use cases to facilitate their necessary dialogue

Revisiting Linking Early Geospatial Documents with Recogito

Recogito is a web-based environment for collaborative semantic annotation. It is open source software, and provides support for working with either text or image documents, including those served via the IIIF protocol. Originally, the tool has been designed for geographic annotation, i.e. the transcription, marking up and geo-resolving of maps and geographical texts (such as itineraries and travel reports) in the context of historical scholarship, e.g. to map or extract data from a source, or to prepare a digital edition. Over time, however, Recogito’s feature set has grown to provide more general annotation functionality, broadening the scope for further potential application areas. Following up from an earlier article we published in e-Perimetron in 2015, in which we first introduced Recogito, this article looks back on the past four years of use and development. We present how Recogito has technologically evolved; how it has been applied in practice in different projects and for different purposes; and how a vibrant user community has sprung up around it that is shaping its further development. The paper also looks forward to some planned next steps, and sets out our future vision for Recogito’s long-term development and sustainability

Exploring film language with a digital analysis tool: The case of kinolab

This article presents a case study of Kinolab, a digital platform for the analysis of narrative film language. It describes the need for a scholarly database of clips focusing on film language for cinema and media studies faculty and students, highlighting recent technological and legal advances that have created a favorable environment for this kind of digital humanities work. Discussion of the project is situated within the broader context of contemporary developments in moving image annotation and a discussion of the unique challenges posed by computationally-driven moving image analysis. The article also argues for a universally accepted data model for film language to facilitate the academic crowdsourcing of film clips and the sharing of research and resources across the Semantic Web

Working with Text in a Digital Age

This Institute will provide 30 participants with three weeks in which (1) to develop hands on experience with TEI-XML, (2) to apply methods from information retrieval, text visualization, and corpus and computational linguistics to the analysis of textual and linguistic sources in the Humanities, and (3) to rethink not only their own research agendas but also new relationships between their work and non-specialists (e.g., an expansion in opportunities for tangible contributions and significant research by undergraduates, new collaborations that transcend boundaries of language and culture, and increased opportunities for the general public both to contribute to our understanding of the past). A two-day conference on the theme of the Institute will then follow in the summer of 2013 with an open call for contributions and will provide both a venue for and a challenge to the issues/ideas raised during the initial Institute and their importance for the digital humanities

A crowdsourcing recommendation model for image annotations in cultural heritage platforms

Cultural heritage is one of many fields that has seen a significant digital transformation in the form of digitization and asset annotations for heritage preservation, inheritance, and dissemination. However, a lack of accurate and descriptive metadata in this field has an impact on the usability and discoverability of digital content, affecting cultural heritage platform visitors and resulting in an unsatisfactory user experience as well as limiting processing capabilities to add new functionalities. Over time, cultural heritage institutions were responsible for providing metadata for their collection items with the help of professionals, which is expensive and requires significant effort and time. In this sense, crowdsourcing can play a significant role in digital transformation or massive data processing, which can be useful for leveraging the crowd and enriching the metadata quality of digital cultural content. This paper focuses on a very important challenge faced by cultural heritage crowdsourcing platforms, which is how to attract users and make such activities enjoyable for them in order to achieve higher-quality annotations. One way to address this is to offer personalized interesting items based on each user preference, rather than making the user experience random and demanding. Thus, we present an image annotation recommendation system for users of cultural heritage platforms. The recommendation system design incorporates various technologies intending to help users in selecting the best matching images for annotations based on their interests and characteristics. Different classification methods were implemented to validate the accuracy of our work on Egyptian heritage.Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. TIN2017-87604-RXunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431B 2020/3

Developing the Read/Write Library

Background: This article considers the use of Fedora-based library digital asset management systems (DAMS) as digital humanities (DH) research platforms.Analysis: The features of DAMS are evaluated to identify the ways in which they can currently meet researcher needs, and to suggest areas where further development is necessary.Conclusion and implications: Fedora-based DAMS hold great promise as the basis of digital humanities research platforms. Mature functionality is available for identity management, file and metadata management, versioning, publishing, social media sharing, discovery, interoperability, and long-term preservation. Further development is necessary in order to incorporate annotation, mark-up, and text analysis tools