Linked Open Usable Data for Cultural Heritage

Julien A. Raemy, PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities
DHLab, University of Basel
ORCID Google Scholar GitHub Mastodon

PhD Midway Meeting | Wednesday, 1 February 2023

Agenda

  • 15:00 Current state
  • 15:30 Research Scope, Methodology and Empirical Research
  • 16:00 Dissertation's structure (ToC) - Focus on the Literature Review
  • 16:30 Theoretical Framework (Through and beyond an Actor-Network Theory Lens)
  • 16:50 Next steps
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Meeting Goals

  • Giving an update
  • Setting research directions for 2023
    • To be able to start writing the literature review
    • To refine the research quetions and objectives
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Current state

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Academic progress

ECTS (PhD) ECTS (Master)
Required on the doctoral agreement 12 6
Obtained (Jan 2023) 25 6
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Important documents/links

  • Overleaf, an online LaTeX editor used for writing, editing and publishing scientific documents
  • PhD Website, based on Omeka S, an open-source content management system for online digital collections
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

PhD Website

  • Thesis Summary
  • Notebook Entries
  • PhD Data Model
  • Research Outputs

https://phd.julsraemy.ch

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Working title of the dissertation

  1. Deploying a Citizen Humanities Infrastructure with Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD) Standards: Perspectives on Interoperability and Knowledge Representation
  2. Linked Open Usable Data for Citizen Science
  3. Linked Open Usable Data for Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities
  4. Linked Open Usable Data for Cultural Heritage: Perspectives on Community Practices and Semantic Interoperability
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Research Scope, Methodology and Empirical Research

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Research Scope

  • 5 Research Questions and 5 Hypotheses
  • 8 Objectives
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Methodology → Empirical Research

  • Situating LOUD → Epistemological Foundations and Perception of LOUD
  • The social fabrics of IIIF and Linked Art → Assessement of the Practices of the IIIF and Linked Art Communities
  • PhD Data Model → Linked Art Modelling and Publishing as a Reflective Exercise
  • PIA as a Laboratory → Deployment of LOUD within PIA
  • Yale's LUX → LUX: Deployment and Data Consistency of a Large-Scale LOUD Application
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Next slides

A few examples of what has been done

  • Slide 17: IIIF Community Overview Objective 02
  • Slides 18-19: PhD Data Model Objective 04
  • Slide 20: IIIF Resource Generation for PIA Objective 06
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Dissertation's structure

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

A pretty standard ToC

  1. Introduction
  2. Context
  3. Literature Review
  4. Theoretical Framework
  5. Methodology
  6. Empirical Research
  7. Discussion
  8. Conclusion
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Literature Review

Interlinking Cultural Heritage Data

  1. Scientific Movements and Principles
  2. Open Web Platform and Linked Data
  3. Linked Open Usable Data
  4. Characterising Semantics and Interoperability for Digital Humanities
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Theoretical Framework

Through and beyond an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) Lens

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Theoretical Framework

Sections of the chapter:

  • Implosion of the Boundaries: Objects have Agency
  • Assembling the Collective
  • The Translation Process

→ The goal is to look and discuss all findings with an ANT-like lens

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Actor-Network Theory (Latour, Akrich, Callon, Law)

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) aims at describing the very nature of societies. But to do so it does not limit itself to human individual actors, but extent the word actor - or actant - to non-human, non-individual entities

Latour 1996

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Situated Knowledges (Haraway)

Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular. The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions-of views from somewhere.

Haraway 1998

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Boundary Objects (Star & Griesemer)

Objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation.

Star & Griesemer 1989

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Cf. Back and Forth from Boundry Objects to IIIF Resources

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Next steps

Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

After this meeting

  • Amending the research scope, methodology and empirical research on the spreadsheet and on Overleaf
  • Updating the ToC on Overleaf
  • Adding new information on the PhD Website
  • Sending a new version of the doctoral agreement to the Faculty (with updated working title)
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Upcoming presentations/papers

  • EuroMed 2022: Implementation of the IIIF Presentation API 3.0 based on Software Support: Use Case of an Incremental IIIF Deployment within a Citizen Science Project - with Adrian
  • DHNB 2023: Community and Interoperability at the Core of Sustaining Image Archives - with Ulrike, Peter and Max
  • Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH): Annotations as Knowledge Practices in Image Archives: Application of Linked Open Usable Data and Machine Learning - with Murielle and Florian / Awaiting Reviewer Assignment
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Possible presentations/papers

  • DH2023 (Poster): Enabling Participatory Data Perspectives for Image Archives through a Linked Art Workflow - with Tanya Gray, Alwyn Collinson and Kevin Page (Oxford) / Pending
  • Situating LOUD / Data Models as Actors
  • Using the Linked Art Validator against Yale's LUX data / Reasoning with Linked Art
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Short visit(s) at Yale?

Week of 15 May 2023
  • A few days
  • Linked Art face-to-face meeting
Around September/October 2023?
  • A couple of weeks, a month?
  • For Objectives 7 and 8
  • To have a point of comparison with PIA
Julien A. Raemy | PhD Midway Meeting

Image Credits

  • [Blick auf das Spalentor]. Basel, 1938. Ernst Brunner. SGV_12N_00115
  • [Katze auf einer Mauer]. Ort und Datum unbekannt. Ernst Brunner. SGV_12N_19553
  • [Ringtanz während der Masüras auf der Alp Sura]. Guarda, 1939. SGV_12N_08589
  • ["Steffenbach-Brücke" der Furka-Bahn: Bau und Erneuern der Brücke]. Kanton Wallis, 1950. Ernst Brunner. SGV_12N_36937

These images are part of the photographic archives of the Swiss Society for Folklore Studies. Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0

This presentation is about the current state of my PhD in Digital Humanities

As you have seen on the Google Doc agenda, I have planned two hours for this call and hopefully we will have enough time for discussion after each segment, ideally up to 15 minutes for questions and remarks for each part.

The goals of this meeting are to give you an update of where I stand, knowing that I am halfway through the PhD and setting the overal research directions for this year, but also for 2024.

As you can see I have earned enough credits, but this is to ensure that if I want to enroll into a doctoral program at the University, I still have enough flexibility to do it without taking new courses.

There are two main documents or links that you can always access. I write my dissertation on Overleaf, an online LaTeX editor and I have decided to set up a dedicated website.

Here is how it looks like, with the editor on the left-hand side and the output, which is a PDF, on the right-hand side.

The website has four components. It's not only a website that describe what I've been doing and what I intend to do, but also a sort of meta exercise.

I am mostly happy with the new working title but I like to have one that sticks for the upcoming two years as it greatly helps for the structure.

As you may have seen on the PDF or the dedicated spreadsheet, I set up five research question, each with their hypothesis, as well as eight objectives.

For the research question and hypothesis pair, there is also a chapter in the Methodology and a chapter in the Empirical Research

And I think I will switch to the Google Sheet to get a better overview.

IIIF Community Overview: IIIF is a community-driven effort which is sometimes rather confusing to grasp quickly given the number of different committees, groups and denominations involved. I have tried to provide an overview of the different actors showing the relationships and sometimes the deliverables.

- a meta level of my thesis to describe the dissertation and its chapters/sections - the notebook entries that will be published on https://phd.julsraemy.ch - the concepts that are not available via the Getty vocabularies - the actors (people and groups) involved within the PIA research project and my thesis.

PhD Data Model. Example of the dissertation

IIIF Workflow within PIA

Here are the main chapters of the PhD. You have received a more extensive, which is actually an ouptut in PDF that I generated from Overleaf a couple of weeks ago. What is quite important

1) Demonstrating how non-human entities have agency.; 2) Identifying the human and non-human actors participating in the process; 3) Investigating how the concept of translation is carried out, i.e. the process that allows a network to be represented by a single entity.