Enhancing Digital Cultural Heritage Collections with Social Network Capabilities

IBM Haifa Research Lab

© 2014 IBM Corporation

Enhancing Digital Cultural Heritage Collections with Social Network Capabilities

Maristella Agosti ([email protected]), Nicola Ferro ([email protected])Sara Porat ([email protected]), Ella Rabinovich ([email protected])

mailto:[email protected]





© 2014 IBM Corporation2

What is CULTURA

• Digital humanities portal supporting the exploration of cultural heritage collections by a range of different users

• Professional researchers and historians

• Students with little or no experience of a particular archive

• There are three digitised collections in the portal

• 1641 Depositions (http://cultura-project.eu/1641/)

• Bureau of Military History - 1916 Rising (http://cultura-project.eu/1916)

• IPSA Collection (http://cultura-project.eu/ipsa)



Motivation and Goals

Increase the engagement of researchers with digital heritage collectionsby inferring social network between researchers and discovering relationshipsamong them; that, by exploiting researchers’ annotations.

• Social network of researchers, based on inferred relations

• Content and people recommendations

• Adaptive personalized search



The 1641 Depositions

• Collection of noisy text documents, mainly of legal nature

• Contain witness testimonies from Irish people following the outbreak of rebellion by the Catholic Irish in 1641

• Contains over 8,000 depositions of 20,000 pages dating from the 17th Century

• Inconsistent in spelling, punctuation and nomenclature



Flexible Annotation Semantic Tool (FAST)

• Annotation is a multimedia object constituted by different signs

• textual signs, image signs etc.

• User can annotate text or image, and create different types of annotations

• Targeted annotation – associated with a specific part of a document

• Note – associated with the entire document

• Annotation has a scope that defines its visibility

• Public, shared or private

targeted annotation

note



Example of Annotation



Social Networks and Discovery (SaND)

• IBM Social Analytics engine in IBM Connections

• Provides social network and recommendations

• People and content recommendations

• Recommendations for new users

• All involve highly transparent explanations

• Personalized search

• Based on social networks and topicsof interest

• Social relationship analysis

• Social path from person to person

• Social graph visualization

• Community features



SaND Widgets in IBM Connections

CommunitiesHomepage Profiles



SaND Visualization



SaND meets FAST

Researchers’ annotations are used to infer relationships, suggest groupsof interest, assign “personal profile” to a researcher, and provide

recommendations of people and content.



Extending the Entity Model to Support Social Services

Annotation

offset

Researcher

id

name

function

institute

emailcreation_datecontent

Deposition

id

create_date

mentioned_date

type

nature

publisher

content

Person

id

name

occupation

origin

religion

Location id

Mentioned

offset

Mentioned

offset

PersonLocation

Mentioned

offset

Event id

document

persontag



Summary and Future Work

• Framework for exploiting users’ annotations on texts, thus fostering collaboration and relationships among researchers of heritage collections

• Extending Entity-Relationship model to support social activities

• IBM’s Social Networks and Discovery (SaND)

• Future work includes implementation of the proposed ideas into a prototype and evaluation with actual users



Education

Enhancing Digital Cultural Heritage Collections with Social Network Capabilities