Digital history & historiography

Making connections: new ways of accessing cultural heritage online

27 April 2022

Making connections: new ways of accessing cultural heritage online

Section of a CB1 manual telephone exchange switchboard, 1925–1960, Science Museum Group Collection, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Hands on History talk with Prof. Jane Winters, School of Advanced Study, University of London

This presentation will consider the limits of search for exploring digital cultural heritage and discuss some of the alternative modes of discovery that become possible through data linking and visualisation. It will draw on the experience of two projects: the Heritage Connector and the Congruence Engine. Both are concerned with unlocking the full potential of museum catalogues, which are largely unstructured, variable in consistency and overwhelmingly composed of what might be described as ‘thin’ records. The Heritage Connector project sought to build links at scale between the collections of the UK’s Science Museum Group, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Wikidata, and the Congruence Engine initiative expands this work to include data from more than 20 cultural heritage and university partners. New forms of visualisation and access are at the heart of these interdisciplinary collaborations. The presentation will conclude by considering how useful these methods might be for exploring vast born-digital collections, such as web and social media archives.

 

 

Jane Winters is Chair of Digital Humanities and Pro-Dean for Libraries at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her research interests include digital history, the archived web, big data for humanities research, new forms of scholarly communication, and open access publishing. She is a Fellow and Councillor of the Royal Historical Society.

 

Wednesday, 27 April 2022

14.00 - 15.00

Online - Webex

If you want to participate, please send an e-mail to vanessa.napolitano@uni.lu to receive the link.