Abstract

The last 20 years has seen a vast amount of digitisation and a large number of digital projects that have not yet succeeded in establishing long lasting collaborative and integrated platforms for quality research, education and engagement.

The task of representing both the diversity of cultural resources, as well as common and related histories from different perspectives, is still a significant challenge.

Despite considerable investment the use of technology in representing cultural heritage is still in a ‘disruptive’ and fragmented phase. This paper looks at the role of ‘real world’ knowledge representation in providing a truly representative and joined up picture of cultural heritage within and across national borders.

Digital Curation in the Open World

Learning the Lessons(of the last 500 years)

Dominic OldmanBritish Museum27th May 2015Journées ABES

2015 Montpellier

Learning from the last 20 or 500 years

Or, The Answer to Life the Universe and

Everything The artificial closed world The real or open world

• Background: What’s the Problem? • What is a Conceptual Reference Model?• Our will to order• Reuniting collections• Exploring heterogeneous information.• Building Knowledge

1. What’s the problem?

UCL Survey of BM Collection Online

“The majority are seeking a known object, and utilise discipline specific search terms, showing goal-driven

intent and a detailed prior knowledge of the museum.”

[Scholarly Information Seeking Behaviour in the British Museum Online Collection, (2011), Terras, Ross]

“It also suggests that academic browsing in a museum environment is

somewhat problematic as users have to be fairly linear in their search strategies with little

satisfaction when searching broadly or

browsing.”[Scholarly Information Seeking Behaviour in the British Museum Online

Collection, (2011), Terras, Ross]

UCL Survey of BM Collection Online

“A Library platform will give access not only to all… the items on its shelves, the e-items it has permission to provide, and the items (physical and virtual) within its network of collaborating institutions - but also to all the data it can find: Data from a curated set of reliable institutions, including scientific and non-profit”

David Weinberger

Issue for Libraries?

How can it meaningfully

integrate these

resources?When we haven’t been able to

OPAC

Currently by Misrepresentation!

Type: Image or Man-made (physical) object? Subject: archaeology or is that the department?

Type: Foreign Archaeology? Subject: Africa? Identifier: what do these mean.

Square pegs, round Holes Type: Image or Man-made (physical) object? Subject: Mummy mask or is that Object Type

“he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies, the consequences of

which were immeasurable”.

W.G. Sebald

“Meaning cannot be counted, even as it can be counted upon, so meaning has become marginalized in an informational culture

Mark Pesce

Quantity and Quality

But

“…the information explosion, far from serving the needs of the burgeoning knowledge economy, intensifies the need for quality information and expertise that libraries and librarians provide”.Beyond the Book - Schnapp & Battles • Public Library Visitor figures down -

particularly digital visitors.• Academic library enquires down.

Libraries

Museums

“to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload” Andreas Huyssen

• Visitors figures up - a beneficiary of current digital disruption?

How do we achieve digital stability?

How do we achieve a contextual, semantic, cross disciplinary OPAC?

2. What is a Conceptual Reference Model?

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,…. A variant of Twenty Questions, derived from the Linnaean taxonomy of the natural world with origins from pre-history

“[it]..contained promiscuously, rocks of unusual shape, coins, stuffed animals, manuscript volumes, ostrich eggs, and

unicorn horns. Statues and paintings stood side by side with curios and exemplars of natural history in these cabinets of

wonder when people started collecting art objects. Giorgio Agamben

The Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosity)

Ferrante Imperato's Dell'Historia Naturale(Naples 1599),Museum Wormianum : Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities. (16th C)

Agsburg cabinet – 17th C

"Only seemingly does chaos reign in the Wunderkammer,

however: to the mind of the medieval scholar, it was the sort of microcosm that reproduced, in its harmonious confusion, the animal, vegetable, and mineral macrocosm. This is why the

individual objects seem to find their meaning only side by side with others, between the walls of a room in which the scholar

could measure at every moment the boundaries of the universe!”

Giorgio Agamben - The Man Without Content

The Microcosms

The Cabinets of Curiosity

The Wunderkammers

The Macrocosm

The Conceptual Reference Model

Wunderkammer CRM Animal Entity

Vegetable EntityMineral Entity

CIDOC CRM Biological ObjectPhysical Thing

Physical Man-made ThingPhysical Object

Man-Made objectConceptual Object

3. Our Will to Order

Big Comprehensive Collections

• Big question across time, place and cultures.

• Global relationships.

• Natural overlapping with artificial.

Rationalisation & Classification

Question“Is it an accident that the library, natural history specimens, sculptures and antiquities were part of the same institution?” Answer: “I think it is”

Edmund Oldfield Assistant Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum in 1857.

Antonio Panizzi British Museum’s Principal Librarian Asserted a fundamental distinction between Christian art and “heathen antiquities”

Natural History Museum - 1881

National Gallery 1824

British Museum - 1753

British Library - 1973

Divisions & Re-classifications

• Specialisations of expertise • New classification systems• The unity of things is forgotten.

“We study the order of things, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And because it is so, it befits our philosophy to be writ small”W.G. Sebald on Thomas Browne

“For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but

similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“don't think, but look!” --

Ars Contextualis

http://grieve-smith.com/ftn/?p=383

4. Re-uniting the Collection – Returning to a Conceptual Reference

Model

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Events

Things(Physical and conceptual)

involve

People and Groups

involve

Time Spans

have

Places

located at

occur atAppe

llatio

nsth

at id

entif

yTerm

inology (Types)That refine and provide perspective

Top Level CIDOC CRM Integration

Concepts

Thingeverything consisting of or

carried by matter

Man-made Thing+ must be existing due to

human intention (this erases "natural")

Physical Man-Made Thing

: + must be ³ consisting of matter´

Man-Made Object+ must be physically

separate

Man-Made Feature+ must be physically

embedded

General(but

precisely defined)

Less General(and

precisely defined)

Legal Object

Physical Thing

Physical Object

Biological Object

Person

Conceptual Object

Propositional Object

Information Object

CIDOC CRMDifferent Levels of Knowledge

Object CollectionsCIDOC CRM

Immoveable Object Photographic Archive CIDOC CRMCRMDig

Bibliographic CIDOC CRM FRBRoo

Harmonising using universal concepts

Literature does this all the time

“Their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being”

W.G. Sebald

“everything in the world exists to give rise to a book”Stéphane Mallarmé

Samuel Wale

Exploring ConnectionsTerracotta temple, Surul, IndiaVictorian Railway station, Lowestoft, Suffolk

Hand-Book to Lowestoft and Its Environs

Museums & Archives – Building a Picture

• Earliest site for human habitation in Britain.

• Roman settlement. • Settled by the Danes in the 9th century

after killing the King of the East Angles.• Many important navel battles fought on

the coast. Battle of Lowestoft.• Important fishing town since middle ages.• Victorian Holiday Spa Town

Looking Back / Looking Forward

Cultural Perspectives

Related Items rarely relate to the subject of the object – more to the artist or the place it was painted – more technical information.

Scottish Museums Perspective

Lowestoft & Scotland

‘Mary MacDonald from Point, Lewis was a herring girl in the 1930s. She said “I saw a lot of the world. I went to Lerwick, Stonsay, Lochmaddy, Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Peterhead and Fraserburgh.”’

http://wovencommunities.org/collection/the-herring-industry/

Autumn Evening, Lowestoft – Sir Muirhead Bone

Using the a Conceptual Reference Model

Joseph Conrad (Actor) was present at

Sailing of the SS. Tuscania (Event)

has time spanTime-Span Event

beginning 21 April 1923

ending to 1st May 1923

SS Tuscania (Man-Made Thing)

was produced by

Shipbuilding (Production Event)

has time span

Time-Span Event

some time within

1921 - 1922

Portrait of Joseph Conrad (Man-made Thing)

was produced by

Drawing

(Production Event)

has time span

Time-Span Event

some time within

April 1923 – May 1923

No Dead Ends! Etching

(Man-made Thing)

was produced by

A Production Event

took place at

Workshop of Muirhead Bone (Petersfield,

Hampshire)

(Place)

The Point – at Last!

1. This took ages – even with computers!2. It should be instantaneous. The computer should

already have found these relationships for me!3. We need a conceptual reference model to mediate

between these resources.

Summary

A common reference for the purpose of agreeing what we are talking about even if we disagree about the essence or nature of these things.

5. Exploring Heterogeneous Data

Balancing Recall and Precision

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.”

Neil Gaiman

Serious Consequences…“The heavy reliance on keyword search in e-discovery places an enormous burden on today’s legal teams. Inconsistencies in language, inefficiencies in search techniques and software user interfaces, which conceal more than reveal, place the attorney in a difficult position”.

Legal Profession• More and More data. • Variable vocabularies.• Inadequate search tools.• Poor balance of recall and precision.• Serious consequences for legal cases.

348,000 results in 0.23 seconds But no understanding of context

Associative Queries – using structured data to improve keywords searching.

Animal, mineral, vegetable….

Thing

Actor

Place

Category

Time

Event

Thing

Actor

Place

Category

Time

Event

Fundamental Contextual

Relationships

6. Building Knowledge

Research Data Mandates Context

• Digital representation – Should not be a surrogate of reality

• Rather a platform for the externalisation of argument.

Digital Argument Requires Context

Observation

Belief

Proposition Belief Value

Concluded that

that Hold to be

Belief Adoption

adopted

InferenceMaking

Used as a Premise

This isn’t a belief of the original organisations

Thinking About Data?

cvcv

• Closed World• Flat properties• Tables and Fields

• Open World• Levels of Knowledge• Events & Activities

Poor Reuse Value

High Reuse value

Core Fixed Models Misrepresent Information

“It's still essentially impossible to bring data from existing museum automation systems into a common view…

Increasingly it seems that we should have concerned ourselves with the relationships…between the objects.”

(David Bearman 1995)

The Intersection of the Digital Humanities

we are "still in an era of confusion in the digital environment around the sort of business models we apply to questions of impact, depth of data and so on. We may not yet have the tools to understand how we make those decisions about the depth of data.“

Andrew Prescott

Digital Curation in the Real World

Learning the Lessons(of the last 500 years)

Dominic OldmanBritish Museum27th May 2015Journées ABES

2015 Montpellier