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

Costis Dallas
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University & Research Fellow, Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre c.dallas@dcu.gr

The challenge of digital heritage

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?

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

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 coevolution and adequate representation of its epistemic/pragmatic content and context

From objects to data

physical and informational objects

recording, description

data (digital)

digitization

records photos designs analog recordings ...

digital repositories

digital surrogates

recording, description

metadata

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

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

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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

A broader scope for digital curation processes

digital curation

context management

digital resources lifecycle management

goal and usage models

appraisal

usage experiences

domain models ingestion authority management

classification indexing cataloguing knowledge enhancement

presentation publication dissemination

repository management

preservation

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

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 DCC Digital Curation Lifecycle Model Lifecycle processes: appraisal, Conceptualise, create, access and ingest, classification, knowledge use, appraise and select, ingest, enhancement, presentation, usage preservation action, store, access experience and reuse, transform A broader definition of processes A stricter definition of processes Presentation: process of Transform: creation of new generating new genres of material, e.g. by migration artefacts (scientific, scholarly, into a different form, [or] by artistic, etc.) from existing creating a subset by primary or secondary digital selection or query [as] newly resources, dependent on derived results, perhaps for functional context and publication producing [new] resources Pragmatics only via resource Explicitly including pragmatics life Goal and usage modelling

Research agenda: priority areas

1. 2. 3. 4. modelling digital curation processes ontologies and reference models knowledge resources and knowledge organization systems enrichment from text by extracting relevant entities and relations 5. ontology-driven search and fact discovery 6. automatically generating text for preservation and communication 7. discover and access inter- and intra- domain associations and overlay context-dependent interpretations 8. preserving contextual, schema and operational information 9. user community modelling and social tagging 10.conceptualisations of epistemic discourse and communication genres 11.motives, activities and contexts of appraisal, knowledge enhancement and use by diverse interpretive communities 12.cost-benefit assessment of preservation policies

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

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

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 Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre Artemidos 6 & Epidavrou street 151 25 Maroussi, Greece c.dallas@dcu.gr http://www.dcu.gr +30 210 6875364