Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata

This chapter seeks to demystify invisible work at the heart of manuscript digitization. Descriptive metadata and its curation are the unseen elements upon which image discoverability—and later reuse—depends. Seeing and taking seriously that labor, I contend, is fundamental to developing a more rigorous understanding of medieval manuscripts in our increasingly digital age. The chapter begins by connecting major challenges facing manuscript interoperability to the deeper disciplinary histories of codicology, library studies, and digital humanities. Next, it progresses through three case studies, each of which illustrates different challenges in digital manuscript studies. Studying the Walters Art Museum metadata, I emphasize how change (mouvance, variance) is inevitable in digital manuscripts. Working with Parker on the Web, I reveal how and why data curation is a process not just of preservation, but also of loss. Finally, in ecodices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, I connect individual curatorial choices to larger debates about access, audience, and the problematic monolingualism of the digital humanities. Throughout, I argue that creation and curation are not neutral acts. I repeatedly highlight how my medievalist roots shaped specific curatorial practices and use medieval poets to theorize my work on digital manuscripts. By foregrounding my own narrative of growth as a digital humanist, I seek to show how often-unseen laborers profoundly influence digitizations--and, through them, digital humanities more broadly. Ultimately, I argue that a more just digital humanities must include digitizers in its histories, presents, and futures

Prospects for a Big Data History of Music

This position paper sets out the possibility of a musicology based on the analysis of musical-bibliographical metadata as Big Data. It outlines the work underway, as part of the AHRC-funded project A Big Data History of Music, to align seven major datasets of musical-bibliographical metadata. After discussing some of the technical challenges of data alignment, it suggests how analysis and visualization of this data might transform musicological understandings of cultural transmission and canon formation

The development and interlinkage of a drought vocabulary in the EuroGEOSS interoperable catalogue infrastructure

Metadata catalogues are used for facilitating the discovery of data and web services in, e.g., growing collections of Earth observation resources. Two conditions need to be met in order to successfully retrieve resources in catalogues: the metadata describing resources have to be complete and accurate and the keywords used in searches semantically related to the keywords contained in the metadata descriptions. One method to increase the rate of successfully retrieved metadata in catalogues is the use of controlled vocabularies. Such vocabularies can be used for annotating metadata with appropriate keywords and then also presented to users of the catalogue for specifying search terms. In the process of preparing metadata for drought-related data and services within the EuroGEOSS project, the need of a drought-specific vocabulary arose. This paper presents this drought vocabulary, the methodology followed for its development, its integration in the EuroGEOSS drought infrastructure and discusses its usefulness for the drought thematic area. The usefulness of the vocabulary is hereby measured by an increased use of search terms coming from an appropriate vocabulary and by an increase in the successful retrieval of resources. In particular, metadata must be annotated with appropriate keywords from a controlled vocabulary, thesaurus or ontology suitable for that particular field

Finding lost relations: identifying our ephemera files

Art ephemera are an evocative resource that can document innovative art and convey diverse histories. This article looks at the relationship between such ephemera and contemporary art practices, and at the relative values given to ephemera by artists, curators and librarians and, in this context, considers integrated catalogues and online guides as methods of re-contextualising art ephemera in the library. Recent collaborative initiatives, and projects that identify and locate artists’ files are reviewed and three themes are identified: the biographical approach, interfaces for distributed catalogues and the integration of art and its documentation

Towards a Digital Land of Song: A Digital Approach to the Archival Record of Welsh Traditional Music, its Performance and its Reception

Divided between a prototype digital resource and a written companion, this research implements and examines some of the possibilities and prospects offered to the study of Welsh traditional music by digital humanities methods and approaches. Built on a relational database, the digital prototype functions as a server-based annotated index of a sample of sources from the collections of the National Library of Wales. The user interface of the prototype uses hyperlinks and geographical mapping to express connections between sources of, figures involved with, and reception information relating to Welsh traditional music. Its written companion serves as a contextual review and exposition of some of the research interests that have informed the creation of the prototype. Philosophically, these interests include the concepts of cultural geography, national identity, collective memory, archive, and their intersections with music. Musicologically, the research centres around twin axes: the traces of Welsh traditional music in the theoretical and literal archive constituted by the National Library of Wales, and the integration and inter-referencing of these traces in a virtual space in order to consider Welsh traditional music and its material record as a situated cultural activity

Forgotten as data – remembered through information. Social memory institutions in the digital age: the case of the Europeana Initiative

The study of social memory has emerged as a rich field of research closely linked to cultural artefacts, communication media and institutions as carriers of a past that transcends the horizon of the individual’s lifetime. Within this domain of research, the dissertation focuses on memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums) and the shifts they are undergoing as the outcome of digitization and the diffusion of online media. Very little is currently known about the impact that digitality and computation may have on social memory institutions, specifically, and social memory, more generally – an area of study that would benefit from but, so far, has been mostly overlooked by information systems research. The dissertation finds its point of departure in the conceptualization of information as an event that occurs through the interaction between an observer and the observed – an event that cannot be stored as information but merely as data. In this context, memory is conceived as an operation that filters, thus forgets, the singular details of an information event by making it comparable to other events according to abstract classification criteria. Against this backdrop, memory institutions are institutions of forgetting as they select, order and preserve a canon of cultural heritage artefacts. Supported by evidence from a case study on the Europeana initiative (a digitization project of European libraries, archives and museums), the dissertation reveals a fundamental shift in the field of memory institutions. The case study demonstrates the disintegration of 1) the cultural heritage artefact, 2) its standard modes of description and 3) the catalogue as such into a steadily accruing assemblage of data and metadata. Dismembered into bits and bytes, cultural heritage needs to be re-membered through the emulation of recognizable cultural heritage artefacts and momentary renditions of order. In other words, memory institutions forget as binary-based data and remember through computational information