New prospects for state-of-the-art technologies in Digital Humanities: The CrossCult H2020 project

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CrossCult: Empowering reuse of digital cultural heritage in context-aware crosscuts of European history

The paper presents the H2020 CrossCult project, providing a short overview, a summary of the platform developed by the project, a description of the consortium, lessons learnt in three main dimensions (humanities, technology and business), the open challenges and the main tools developed by the project

Semantic Web Technologies for CrossCult

CrossCult (www.crosscult.eu) is a three-year H2020 research project, which started in March 2016. It consists of 11 European institutions and 14 associated partners, from Computer Science, History and Cultural Heritage. The goal of CrossCult is to spur a change in the way European citizens appraise History, fostering the re-interpretation of what they may have learnt in the light of crossborder interconnections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens viewpoints and physical venues. Its aim is to enable a unified, IT-facilitated history approach, which goes beyond the conventional siloed presentation of historical data, and focuses on aspects that are cross-cultural, cross-border, cross-gender and cross ethic, in order to trigger substantial reflection on history as we know it, as well as on grant societal challenges, such as population movements, access to health services, women’s place in society, power structures, etc

Empowering reuse of digital cultural heritage in context-aware crosscuts of European history

The paper presents the H2020 CrossCult project, providing a short overview, a summary of the platform developed by the project, a description of the consortium, lessons learnt in three main dimensions (humanities, technology and business), the open challenges and the main tools developed by the project

Semantic Web Modelling: Challenges and Opportunities in Small and Large Museum Collections

Semantic Web technologies foster connection and contextualization. They can benefit museum collections by disclosing information in a scalable and interoperable way, aggregating previously heterogeneous and siloed data. Based on formal languages such as RDF, RDFS or OWL they can describe the meaning and the connections among disparate data to define concepts, entities, and relationships and to facilitate multifaceted retrieval, reasoning, data integration and knowledge reuse. Benefits of Semantic Web technologies to the broader DH domain include but not limited to harmonised views of distributed sources, semantic-based content aggregation, enrichment, search, browsing and recommendation. Over the last decades we have witnessed a proliferation of semantic web projects in the broader cultural heritage domain at a national and European level. Infrastructure programmes, such as EUROPEANA, DARIAH, PARTHENOS and ARIADNEplus, to name but a few, have delivered rich interoperable structures and innovations that advanced the tasks of data integration, sharing, analysis, retrieval, and visualisation. As conceptual models mature and expand, and CIDOC-CRM is becoming an undeniable standard in the domain, we reflect on the challenges and opportunities encountered when semantic web technologies are applied both to regional small and large, globally renowned museum collections. The role and application of semantic modelling is examined through two distinct case studies; a) the regional Archaeological Museum of Tripolis (Greece) of limited digital presence, but with a unique collection of regional antiquities that employed semantic methods to enrich and share their digitised collections holdings and b) the Sloane Lab (UK) that aims to aggregate a multitude of catalogue records (both historic and current, from multiple disciplines) dispersed across the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library. The presentation delivers useful insight and highlights the opportunities and challenges both for small heritage organisations and large global institutions when applying high-level semantics to withdraw silo barriers of museum items and enable interoperable and multi-layered representations

CrossCult D2.4 Refined digital cultural resource data & data structure

This report presents the CrossCult digital datasets of the four project pilots.It contains a description of the methods and data structures used to semantically model and ingest the digital resources of the pilots into the CrossCult Knowledge Base following the semantics of the CrossCult Upper-level ontology, a set of examples of semantic enrichment, information retrieval and association discovery among the pilots’ resources and other related information in the CrossCult Knowledge Base,and a brief description of how the pilots’ digital resources can be viewed and access through three different front-end application

Semantic Representation and Location Provenance of Cultural Heritage Information: the National Gallery Collection in London

This paper describes a working example of semantically modelling cultural heritage information and data from the National Gallery collection in London. The paper discusses the process of semantically representing and enriching the available cultural heritage data, and reveals the challenges of semantically expressing interrelations and groupings among the physical items, the venue and the available digital resources. The paper also highlights the challenges in the creation of the conceptual model of the National Gallery as a Venue, which aims to i) describe and understand the correlation between the parts of a building and the whole; ii) to record and express the semantic relationships among the building components with the building as a whole; and iii) to be able to record the accurate location of objects within space and capture their provenance in terms of changes of location. The outcome of this research is the CrossCult venue ontology, a fully International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) compliant structure developed in the context of the CrossCult project. The proposed ontology attempts to model the spatial arrangements of the different types of cultural heritage venues considered in the project: from small museums to open air archaeological sites and whole cities

CrossCult D2.5 Upper-level Cultural Heritage Ontology

This paper presents the Upper-level Ontology and the other ontological schemas and vocabularies that we used to model the semantics of the “world” of CrossCult and its four pilots. It consists of two documents: a report describing the rationale and structure of the ontology and a PDF file containing the definitions of the classes and properties of the CrossCult ontologies in the syntax of Description Logics

From Usability Testing and Text Analysis to User Response Criticism

The article creates a bridge between the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Digital Humanities (DH), where HCI techniques are used to evaluate tools developed in DH projects and the results of this evaluation are analysed via DH methods. Two case studies in interface and game design are presented by the application of textual analysis to user-response via three systems, for visualisation of the text as a network (Textexture), corpus analysis (TXM), and sentiment analysis (TheySay). Although further experiments and more insight into the theoretical matters are intended, we assume that this kind of analysis, beyond its usability-oriented value, may inform humanistic interface design and approaching of user models, and inspire new paths of reflection on user’s self projection in the digital space, at the intersection of digital hermeneutics, digital aesthetics, and the theory of literary response