Digital Curation

Digital Curation/Practice,promise&prospects

by Hatice Yazici

Edited by: Helen R. Tibbo, Carolyn Hank, Christopher A. Lee, Rachael Clemens

‘Knee-Deep in the Data’: Practical Problems in Applying the OAIS Reference Model to the Preservation of Computer Games

by Jerome McDonough

2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System has been extraordinarily influential within the digital... more The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System has been extraordinarily influential within the digital preservation community. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project explored the application of the OAIS Reference Model for the preservation of computer games, videogames and electronic literature within a research library setting. This paper identifies practical problems in determining the appropriate range of representation and context information needed to preserve computer games and discusses possible solutions to those problems.

Definitions of Dataset in the Scientific and Technical Literature

by Simone Sacchi

Renear, A., Sacchi, S., & Wickett, K. (2010, October 22-27). Definitions of Dataset in the Scientific and Technical Literature. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), October 22-27, 2010, Pittsburgh, PA.

The integration of heterogeneous data in varying formats and from diverse communities requires an improved... more The integration of heterogeneous data in varying formats and from diverse communities requires an improved understanding of the concept of a dataset, and of key related concepts, such as format, encoding, and version. Ultimately, a normative formal framework of such concepts will be needed to support the effective curation, integration, and use of shared multi-disciplinary scientific data. To prepare for the development of this framework we reviewed the definitions of dataset found in technical documentation and the scientific literature. Four basic features can be identified as common to most definitions: grouping, content, relatedness, and purpose. In this summary of our results we describe each of these features, indicating the directions a more formal analysis might take.

A Framework for Applying the Concept of Significant Properties to Datasets

by Simone Sacchi

Sacchi, S., Wickett, K. M., Renear, A. H., & Dubin, D. S. (2011). A Framework for Applying the Concept of Significant Properties to Datasets. Proceedings of the 74rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting. Presented at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA.

The concept of significant properties, properties that must be identified and preserved in any successful digital... more The concept of significant properties, properties that must be identified and preserved in any successful digital object preservation, is now common in data curation. Although this notion has clearly demonstrated its usefulness in cul- tural heritage domains its application to the preservation of scientific datasets is not as well developed. One obstacle to this application is that the familiar preservation models are not sufficiently explicit to identify the relevant entities, prop- erties, and relationships involved in dataset preservation. We present a logic-based formal framework of dataset concepts that provides the levels of abstraction necessary to identify and correctly assign significant properties to their appropri- ate entities. A unique feature of this model is that it recog- nizes that a typed symbol structure is a unique requirement for datasets, but not for other information objects.

BOM_vl WP2. 3 Archivalisering en selectie: aandachtspunten voor een duurzame digitaliseringspraktijk in de cultuur-en erfgoedsector

by Inge Van Nieuwerburgh

Report on trusted digital repositories

by Candida Fenton

CASPAR Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval Instrument: Information Society Technologies Thematic Priority: 2.5.10 Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources. IST-2006-033572. Co authors David Giaretta and Joy Davidson 2009

Report for the CASPAR project which examines concepts of, and approaches to trust. Reports the findings of a... more Report for the CASPAR project which examines concepts of, and approaches to trust. Reports the findings of a questionnaire on trust in relation to digital repositories, and considers the importance of standards.

The Primcurator by Reiner Schneeberger

by Reiner Schneeberger

Conservation of 3D Art - made in various grids (Second Life, OSgrid, Metropolis, Avination, inworldZ, Simulacron-1 and more) in opensimulator database with stand-alone viewer for 100 years. First Prim is the given virtual name for the Primcurator

The Primcurator - Conservation of Digital Art in 3D
by Reiner Schneeberger, Planning a Retrospective of an Art... more The Primcurator - Conservation of Digital Art in 3D
by Reiner Schneeberger, Planning a Retrospective of an Art Form, printed in MUSEUM AKTUELL, Munich, September 2011, p. 32-35.

It will be seen in the year 2035 whether the project to archive the first works of Avatarkunst published on the occasion of the reopening of the Kunsthalle Bremen this summer will keep its promise: to conserve walkable 3D-worlds in the way they have existed since 2005. ... Lots of links provided as footnotes

Transcription Maximized; Expense Minimized? Crowdsourcing and Editing 'The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham'

by Tim Causer

Co-authored with Justin Tonra and Valerie Wallace.

Published in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 27, Issue 2, 2012, pp. 119-137.

This paper discusses the award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, Transcribe Bentham, and how it... more This paper discusses the award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, Transcribe Bentham, and how it will impact upon long-established editorial practices at the Bentham Project, University College London, which is producing the new and authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. We site Transcribe Bentham in the burgeoning field of scholarly crowdsourcing projects, and attempt to assess the potential benefits of engaging the public in a seemingly complex task in order to further humanities research by detailing our experiences of running and administering the project.

The paper examines the conceptualisation and development of Transcribe Bentham, and how editorial practices at the Bentham Project may change as a result. We account for the design of the bespoke transcription tool which is at the project’s heart, and allows volunteers to transcribe the material and encode it in TEI-compliant XML. We attempt to answer five key questions: is crowdsourcing the transcription of complex manuscripts cost-effective? Is crowdsourcing exploitative? Would the volunteer-produced transcripts be of sufficient quality for editorial use and uploading to a digital repository, and what quality controls are required? Would crowdsourcing ensure sustainability and widen access to this priceless material? And finally, should the success of a project like Transcribe Bentham be measured solely according to cost-effectiveness or the volume of work produced, or do considerations of public engagement and access outweigh such concerns?

THE IDEA OF DIGITALITY

by Terry Flaxton

Things are changing and we need to go beyond text - consequently I'm posting this series of talks that I organised in December 2010 as if they were a paper. Please click the button below 'View on flaxton.btinternet.co.uk' for access to all video online presentations

This series of talks was organised to examine the notion of digitality and the move towards identifying the stage we... more This series of talks was organised to examine the notion of digitality and the move towards identifying the stage we are in as being post-digital

Again, With Feeling!

by Dave Colangelo

Exhibition text for N/A exhibition “Again, With Feeling!” Nov 17-20, 2011, curated by Hanna Hur.

The Digital Dark Ages

by Simon Tanner

Aspects of a Digital Curation Agenda for Cultural Heritage

by Costis Dallas

Cite as: P. Constantopoulos & C. Dallas “Aspects of a digital curation agenda for cultural heritage”. In V. Mařík et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Human-Machine Systems, Prague: IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society & Czech Technical University in Prague (2008), 317-322.

Digital curation emerged recently as an important concept in the theory and management of cultural heritage... more Digital curation emerged recently as an important concept in the theory and management of cultural heritage information. This paper presents the approach and research agenda adopted by the newly-founded Digital Curation Unit of Athena Research Centre, Greece, and illustrates its relevance to the management and use of cultural heritage digital collections. It highlights the need to tackle the risks of epistemic failure tied with the prospect of long-term access to curated repositories, and presents the case for multidisciplinary research, informed by humanistic and social science as well as computer science perspectives. A multi-tiered research agenda, it argues, would need to resolve problems of representing domain knowledge; developing and maintaining knowledge resources; streamlining the enrichment of these resources from text; automatically generating text from databases; discovering and accessing domain associations; enabling the use of databases containing valuable data over time; conceptualizations of epistemic discourse, and communication genres in specific contexts; grounded research on the motives, activities and contexts of digital resources appraisal, knowledge enhancement and use; and, cost-benefit assessment of preservation policies. These complementary approaches are particularly relevant in the field of cultural heritage, where large-scale digitisation of heritage resources on one hand, and web-based social computing on the other, already create a deluge of un-curated and poorly represented cultural information.

Becoming Digital

by Suzanne Keene

Behind the Scenes of the Museum Website.

by Ross Wilson

Museum Management and Curatorship Volume 26, Issue 4, 2011 (373-389)

This article examines the role of online resources hosted by museums as a means to communicate, engender research and... more This article examines the role of online resources hosted by museums as a means to communicate, engender research and reach out to new audiences. A number of scholars have already analysed the online presence of institutions and created an innovative new field of study by critiquing and theorising the emergence of ‘digital heritage’. Building upon these developments, this article examines museum websites from a new perspective, through the markup and programme languages used to deliver the online content to the user. Drawing upon the nascent field of ‘critical code studies’, this article analyses the online exhibition ‘Ancient Cyprus in the British Museum’, to illustrate the value of this approach. This analysis highlights the manner in which the ‘virtual’ visitor experience is structured in a fashion comparable to the ‘real’ visitor experience. Using theories of ‘intertextuality’, this article examines the analogous relationship between the markup and programme languages and wider museum practice.

Digital Curation of Humanistic, Multimedia Materials: Lessons Learned and Future Directions

by Jerome McDonough

'Cinema Distribution in the Age of Digital Projection'

by Charlotte Crofts

Forthcoming in Post Script special volume on Distribution edited by Dean Conrad.

In this paper I explore the different ways in which digital projection has been adopted by the cinema distribution and... more In this paper I explore the different ways in which digital projection has been adopted by the cinema distribution and exhibition industries in the UK, the European Union (EU) and the United States, arguing that whilst in America digital projection has largely been embraced on a commercial basis, in Europe, where there was initially a slower take up of digital distribution, there has been a tendency for governments to subsidize the technology for cultural reasons. I examine the current state of digital projection, investigating why it has taken longer for digital technologies to permeate into distribution and exhibition (as opposed to image capture and post production), and looking at the aesthetic and economic drivers and challenges which have delayed the full-scale conversion to digital cinema (D-cinema). The essay ends by exploring the dilemma of digital distribution for the viability of the 35mm release print, the impact of this on film stock production, and how this will affect film preservation,even of those films that are born digital.

This is the published version of a talk I gave at Watershed Media Centre, Bristol at 'The Look: From Capture to Display - Digital Cinema Aesthetics and Workflows' Symposium organised by Terry Flaxton. You can view a video of my presentation at:
http://www.dshed.net/content/look-exhibition-and-display

A Question of Practice: The Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings in the ARTstor Digital Library

by Christine Kuan

Published in Master Drawings, vol. 48, no. 3 (2010), pp. 374-9.

This paper examines an ARTstor Digital Library (www.artstor.org)... more This paper examines an ARTstor Digital Library (www.artstor.org) endeavor to digitize and share the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings, an important photo archive of master drawings. It argues that the value of making these archival collections accessible online for teaching and research is important to the cultural heritage community and that the study and interrogation of these collections and their associated data is fundamental to the principles of art historical scholarship.

"The Song Remains...the Same? Three Case Studies of Issues of Digital Preservation in Second Life Performance Practices

by Dennis Moser

Slides from the DRHA 2010 presentation

ECCO and the Future of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

by Corey E. Andrews

The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 22.2 (2008): 8-13.

Scholarly discussion of Thomson-Gale’s database Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) has continued unabated... more Scholarly discussion of Thomson-Gale’s database Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) has continued unabated since the recent publication of articles by Sayre Greenfield and Robert Hume in The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer. It is hard to argue against the merits of a revolutionary database like ECCO, but placing such primary importance on a proprietary database may have unexpected consequences for the field of eighteenth-century studies. If ECCO-based research truly assumes the stature and cachet described by Hume and Greenfield, it will come at a considerable cost. Hard-working scholars at non-ECCO institutions may find themselves increasingly blocked from presenting and publishing their work, and graduate students at such institutions may discover that they cannot compete in the job market without ECCO-based dissertations and training. However, scholars who haven’t “got ECCO” don’t necessarily have to admit defeat. In fact, such scholars might desire to create their own digital archives, producing searchable texts in a non-proprietary format for universal use. With the help of non-proprietary databases and the sharing of knowledge in digital formats, the future of eighteenth-century studies for those without ECCO may not be as dire as it appears.

Digital Decay

by Charlotte Crofts

Published in The Moving Image - Volume 8, Number 2, Fall 2008, pp. xiii-35

The fate of 35mm as an acquisition and exhibition medium is intimately connected with questions of future-proofing,... more The fate of 35mm as an acquisition and exhibition medium is intimately connected with questions of future-proofing, archiving, preservation, and access, which are currently at the foreground of recent debates around screen heritage in the UK. In this article, I explore the threat of digital projection to the viability of the 35mm release print, the impact of this on film stock production, and how this will affect film preservation. Whilst these issues are universal, this article is oriented toward a UK perspective.  You can also download from UWE's official research repository at https://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/7782/