Digital curation of cultural heritage: theoretical underpinnings, contexts of use, and research perspectives

Costis DallasAssistant Professor, Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University &

Research Fellow, Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre

c.dallas@dcu.gr

C. Dallas (2008) Digital curation of cultural heritage: theoretical underpinnings, contexts of use, and research perspectives

A virtually unified digital space

• Digital collections out of large-scale cultural digitisation

• Distributed, hererogeneous cultural assets on the Web

Challenges

• Resource discovery and interoperability

• Long term digital preservation

• Adequate knowledge representation

Additional questions

• How to ensure authenticity and integrity of digital cultural assets?

• What to preserve and what not?

• How to ensure usability and accessibility?

• How to ensure the future “fitness for purpose” of born-digital and digitized cultural objects?

The challenge of digital heritage

Digital curation

An interdisciplinary field, and a community of practice

Disciplinary traditions

• computer science, archival science, librarianship and information science, history of art, archaeology, biology, space and earth sciences …

Application areas

• e-humanities and e-science repositories, organizational records management

• …and, also, museums, libraries and archives

Commonly accepted definition (UK Digital Curation Centre)

• digital curation is about maintaining, and adding value to, a trusted body of digital information for current and future use

New strategies and approaches

Strategies to protect repositories from the “data mortuary” risk

• Lifecycle approach, allowing for continuous semantic enrichment

• Event-centric methodologies

• Actors to include producers of knowledge and public communication

• Accounting for diverse disciplines and contexts of use

More specifically, averting epistemic failure through…

• Emphasis on understanding differences between disciplines

• Representations of both epistemic context and epistemic content

• Semantic augmentation through “exercising the archive”

• An agency-oriented view

A broader definition of digital curation activities, to include…

• maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use, through the active ‘questioning’, dynamic co-evolution and adequate representation of its epistemic/pragmatic content and context’

C. Dallas (2008) Digital curation of cultural heritage: theoretical underpinnings, contexts of use, and research perspectives

From objects to data

recording,description

digitization

physical and informational

objects

digital repositories

recording,description

metadatadigital

surrogates

recordsphotosdesigns

analog recordings...

data (digital)

Constitution of art-historical knowledge acc.

Panofsky

Active curation of collections knowledge

Traditional museum functions redefined

• Collecting - information on objects and object histories

• Preserving - inventories, catalogues, terminologies and other information sources

• Disseminating - through representation of collections’ cultural, historical and artistic context

Covering the entire lifecycle of curatorial activity

• Fieldwork and object acquisition, documentation, scholarly research, interpretation and public communication through exhibition, educational programmes, publication, outreach

Problems for knowledge representation and access

• Inconsistent terminologies, narrative, textual and rhetorical aspects, multiple specialisation/generalisation, part aggregation, temporal, spatial and conceptual context-dependency, partial or missing information, and subjectivity/multivocality…

The Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre

•Founded in 2007

•Its objectives are to conduct research, develop technologies and applications, contribute to the creation, evolution and application of standards, and provide services, advice and learning across the entire spectrum of digital curation lifecycle

•A physical laboratory, bringing together academic researchers from different disciplines, postgraduate research scholars and project-based research support staff

•Research fellows

• Prof. Panos Constantopoulos, Dept of Informatics, AUEB (Director)

• Asst Prof. Ion Androutsopoulos, Dept of Informatics, AUEB

• Asst Prof Costis Dallas, Dept of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University

• Asst Prof Antonis Deligiannakis, Computer Science Dept, Crete Technical University

• Asst Prof Yannis Kotidis, Dept of Informatics, AUEB

• Asst Prof Christos Papatheodorou, Dept of Library and Archival Studies, Ionian University

2/2/2008 Κ. Δάλλας, Π. Κωνσταντόπουλος 8

DCU activity area: research and technological development

• Models and process management of digital preservation and digital curation

• Cross-disciplinary approaches from the point of view of information systems, management, archival and library science, material culture and museum studies

• Knowledge organisation systems

• Domain-specific development of methods, techniques, software, as well as of knowledge resources; automatic and assisted formation and management of knowledge resources.

• Domain models

• Development and evolution of domain models and ontologies

• Database preservation and curation

DCU activity area: applications and services

• Digital resource lifecycle management

• Requirements analyhsis, digital resource usage analysis, appraisal methods, standards and services for collections management, annotation, formatting, publication, search and retrieval, rights and usage management, long term preservation

• Knowledge organisation

• Domain model and knowledge organisation systems development

• Digital repositories

• Organisation of digital respositories, management and access services

DCU and e-humanities infrastructures

Member of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH, www.dariah.eu) initiative

Goals

• Prepare for the development of a European research infrastructure in the arts, humanities and cultural heritage

• Participants include CNRS, DANS (NL), AHDS, Max Planck G., the Academy of Athens, et al.

Digital Curation Unit remit within DARIAH

• Work on conceptual analysis and modelling of humanistic research processes and discourse

• Understanding of requirements for knowledge work in the humanities

• Modelling and specifications

• Participation in prototype development and evaluation

C. Dallas (2008) Digital curation of cultural heritage: theoretical underpinnings, contexts of use, and research perspectives

appraisal

context management

ingestionknowledge

enhancement

classification

indexing

cataloguing

presentation

publication

dissemination

preservationrepository management

authority management

goal and usage models

domain models

usage experiences

digital resources lifecycle management

digital curation

A broader scope for digital curation processes

The DCU process model: curation beyond preservation

A broader scope than traditionally accepted

Fully extending the digital resources lifecycle with...

• Appraisal

• User experience

Overarching “semantic” processes

• Goal and usage modelling

• Intentions, goals, representations of human agency

• Domain modelling

• Capturing domain-specific, context-dependent interpretations

• Authority management

• Co-evolution of authorities with domain knowledge

• Safeguarding coverage, specificity, coherence, consistency and parsimony

The DCU model vis-a-vis the DCC Lifecycle Model

DCU Digital Curation Model

• Lifecycle processes: appraisal, ingest, classification, knowledge enhancement, presentation, usage experience

• A broader definition of processes

• Presentation: “process of generating new genres of artefacts (scientific, scholarly, artistic, etc.) from existing primary or secondary digital resources, dependent on functional context and producing [new] resources”

• Explicitly including pragmatics

• Goal and usage modelling

DCC Digital Curation Lifecycle Model

• Conceptualise, create, access and use, appraise and select, ingest, preservation action, store, access and reuse, transform

• A stricter definition of processes

• Transform: “creation of new material, e.g. by migration into a different form, [or] by creating a subset by selection or query [as] newly derived results, perhaps for publication”

• Pragmatics only via resource life

Research agenda: priority areas

1. modelling digital curation processes2. ontologies and reference models3. knowledge resources and knowledge organization systems4. enrichment from text by extracting relevant entities and

relations5. ontology-driven search and fact discovery6. automatically generating text for preservation and

communication7. discover and access inter- and intra- domain associations and

overlay context-dependent interpretations8. preserving contextual, schema and operational information9. user community modelling and social tagging10.conceptualisations of epistemic discourse and communication

genres11.motives, activities and contexts of appraisal, knowledge

enhancement and use by diverse interpretive communities12.cost-benefit assessment of preservation policies

C. Dallas (2008) Digital curation of cultural heritage: theoretical underpinnings, contexts of use, and research perspectives

Towards digital curation of cultural heritage

Enabling developments

• Emergence of the CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127) standard ontology for cultural documentation

• Movement for convergence of museum, library and archive systems, e.g., CRM-compatible FRBR-oo model

National initiatives in Greece

• National monuments record system

• Large-scale digitisation outcomes in need of harmonisation

• Standards and guidelines

A call for action

C. Dallas (2008) Digital curation of cultural heritage: theoretical underpinnings, contexts of use, and research perspectives

C. Dallas, "Humanistic research, information resources and electronic communication," in Electronic Communication and Research in Europe, J. Meadows and H.-D. Boecker, Eds. Luxembourg: European Commission, 1999, pp. 209-239

C. Dallas, "Archaeological knowledge, virtual exhibitions and the social construction of meaning," Archeologia e Calcolatori, vol. 18, pp. 31-64, 2007

C. Dallas, "An agency-oriented approach to digital curation theory and practice," in International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting (ICHIM07): Proceedings, Toronto, 2007 http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/papers/dallas/dallas.htm

Contact

Costis Dallas c.dallas@dcu.gr

Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre http://www.dcu.gr

Artemidos 6 & Epidavrou street

151 25 Maroussi, Greece

Further information

C. Dallas, "Humanistic research, information resources and electronic communication," in Electronic Communication and Research in Europe, J. Meadows and H.-D. Boecker, Eds. Luxembourg: European Commission, 1999, pp. 209-239

C. Dallas, "Archaeological knowledge, virtual exhibitions and the social construction of meaning," Archeologia e Calcolatori, vol. 18, pp. 31-64, 2007

C. Dallas, "An agency-oriented approach to digital curation theory and practice," in International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting (ICHIM07): Proceedings, Toronto, 2007 http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/papers/dallas/dallas.htm

P. Constantopoulos & C. Dallas, “Aspects of a digital curation agenda,” in IEEE International Conference on Distributed Human-Machine Systems (2008): Proceedings, Athens, 2008

Contact

Costis Dallas c.dallas@dcu.gr

Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre

Artemidos 6 & Epidavrou street http://www.dcu.gr

151 25 Maroussi, Greece +30 210 6875364