Timeline design for visualising cultural heritage data

This thesis is concerned with the design of data visualisations of digitised museum, archive and library collections, in timelines. As cultural institutions digitise their collections—converting texts, objects, and artworks to electronic records—the volume of cultural data available grows. There is a growing perception, though, that we need to get more out of this data. Merely digitising does not automatically make collections accessible, discoverable and comprehensible, and standard interfaces do not necessarily support the types of interactions users wish to make. Data visualisations—this thesis focuses on interactive visual representations of data created with software—allow us to see an overview of, observe patterns in, and showcase the richness of, digitised collections. Visualisation can support analysis, exploration and presentation of collections for different audiences: research, collection administration, and the general public. The focus here is on visualising cultural data by time: a fundamental dimension for making sense of historical data, but also one with unique strangeness. Through cataloguing, cultural institutions define the meaning and value of items in their collections and the structure within which to make sense of them. By visualising threads in cataloguing data through time, can historical narratives be made visible? And is the data alone enough to tell the stories that people wish to tell? The intended audience for this research is cultural heritage institutions. This work sits at the crossroads between design, cultural heritage (particularly museology), and computing—drawing on the fields of digital humanities, information visualisation and human computer-interaction which also live in these overlapping spaces. This PhD adds clarity around the question of what cultural visualisation is (and can be) for, and highlights issues in the visualisation of qualitative or nominal data. The first chapter lays out the background, characterising cultural data and its visualisation. Chapter two walks through examples of existing cultural timeline visualisations, from the most handcrafted displays to automated approaches. At this point, the research agenda and methodology are set out. The next five chapters document a portfolio of visualisation projects, designing and building novel prototype timeline visualisations with data from the Wellcome Library and Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York City, and the Nordic Museum, Stockholm. In the process, a range of issues are identified for further discussion. The final chapters reflect on these projects, arguing that automated timeline visualisation can be a productive way to explore and present historical narratives in collection data, but a range of factors govern what is possible and useful. Trust in cultural data visualisation is also discussed. This research argues that visualising cultural data can add value to the data both for users and for data-holding institutions. However, that value is likely to be best achieved by customising a visualisation design to the dataset, audience and use case. Keywords: cultural heritage data; historical data; cultural analytics; cultural informatics; humanities visualisation; generous interfaces; digital humanities; design; information design; interface design; data visualisation; information visualisation; time; timeline; history; historiography; museums; museology; archives; chronographics

The European Landscape of Qualitative Social Research Archives: Methodological and Practical Issues

In this article I set about describing current practices in archiving and reusing qualitative data. I discuss where can you find archived sources of qualitative data, and discuss some of the debates surrounding methodological, ethical and theoretical considerations relating to re-using data. I then address more pragmatic issues involved acquiring, preserving, providing access to and supporting the use of the data. Where best do qualitative data collections sit?in traditional libraries or archives alongside historical documents or as part of more holistic digital collections of contemporary social science research resources? This question relates to accessibility, resource discovery and cataloging methods, data preparation and documentation and promotional and outreach efforts to encourage data use. The ESDS Qualidata unit at the UK Data Archive is used as case study for showcasing archival practices, and is situated within the broader European landscape of social science-oriented data archives. Infrastructure requirements for running an archive are discussed and a look forward future developments

Cataloging Practices through an Ethnographic Lens: Workarounds, Disagreements, and Manifestations of Culture

Cataloging models emphasize selective aspects of cataloging and serve the purposes of conceptual debates and theoretical developments. Many complexities, uncertainties, dilemmas, challenges, and “rare” scenarios that catalogers encounter in practice are not presented in the models. To study cataloging practices, the author presents cataloging scenarios observed from an ongoing fieldwork. Through weekly participatory observations and unstructured interviews of catalogers, the work presents cases among the diverse and complex cataloging practices, and surfaces the tensions and time involved in cataloging. This paper will focus on three themes: workarounds, disagreements, and manifestations of culture in cataloging practice. The first scenario describes a non-linear cataloging process and the different workarounds applied. The workarounds highlight the tacit knowledge of experienced catalogers. The second scenario shows catalogers’ different perspectives about the authorship of stone rubbings. Disagreements, negotiation, and compromises in cataloging process are often not documented or explained. This scenario examines cataloging contexts that we cannot observe from analyzing cataloging standards or records. The third scenario describes the proposal of a Library of Congress Demographic Group Term (LCDGT): Zhiqing, and how it was approved as a LCSH: Zhiqing generation instead. The term encompasses a combination of regional, temporal, and cultural aspects of a demographic group. In the proposal process, I identified cultural manifestations in cataloging process through observing “the missing pieces” and local adaptations. This study contributes to the knowledge organization literature by presenting cataloging scenarios that require prolonged engagement to study

Cataloging practices through an ethnographic lens: workarounds, disagreements, and manifestations of culture

Cataloging models emphasize selective aspects of cataloging and serve the purposes of conceptual debates and theoretical developments. Many complexities, uncertainties, dilemmas, challenges, and “rare” scenarios that catalogers encounter in practice are not presented in the models. To study cataloging practices, the author presents cataloging scenarios observed from an ongoing fieldwork. Through weekly participatory observations and unstructured interviews of catalogers, the work presents cases among the diverse and complex cataloging practices, and surfaces the tensions and time involved in cataloging. This paper will focus on three themes: workarounds, disagreements, and manifestations of culture in cataloging practice. The first scenario describes a non-linear cataloging process and the different workarounds applied. The workarounds highlight the tacit knowledge of experienced catalogers. The second scenario shows catalogers’ different perspectives about the authorship of stone rubbings. Disagreements, negotiation, and compromises in cataloging process are often not documented or explained. This scenario examines cataloging contexts that we cannot observe from analyzing cataloging standards or records. The third scenario describes the proposal of a Library of Congress Demographic Group Term (LCDGT): Zhiqing, and how it was approved as a LCSH: Zhiqing generation instead. The term encompasses a combination of regional, temporal, and cultural aspects of a demographic group. In the proposal process, I identified cultural manifestations in cataloging process through observing “the missing pieces” and local adaptations. This study contributes to the knowledge organization literature by presenting cataloging scenarios that require prolonged engagement to study

ArCEs A Digital Archive of Italian Colonial Cartography and Scientific Expeditions

ArcCEs is a study for developing a digital archive on Italian scientific expeditions in Northern and Eastern Africa and the former Italian colonies (19th–20th centuries). The aim of the project is to assess, protect and enhance an important corpus of documents (historical cartographies, photographs, scientific papers and archive documents) distributed among public archives and private collections. The database structure is based on the Dublin Core metadata standard. The information system is designed to integrate and make interoperable digital resources, to ensure standardized and complex indexing, and to support advanced retrieval, according to the standards in use. The geolocation of the resources in a GIS environment can display query results in the Google Earth environment

Computational approaches to semantic change

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least  understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans. A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned  knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with  cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics. The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge.  The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields. This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems —  e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives