Hello everyone, welcome to a new PIA Ringvorlesung session and this time in English where I will be talking about interlinking cultural heritage data and taking examples from my PhD thesis and the PIA research project. My name is Julien Raemy, I am a PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities and until March 2024 I worked at officially at the Digital Humanities Lab for the PIA research project. I am still working on my thesis but since last month I work as a Data Scientist at the Swiss Federal Archives and also as a scientific collaborator at DaSCH, the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities. At the end of the session, you can also ask questions in German or in French.

My role within the project has been around the revision of the Cultural Anthropology Swizerland or EKWS data model following the database migration that has been a couple of times mentioned during this lecture series, as well as expanding the digital infrastructure by implementing a series of so-called APIs or application programming interfaces.

I am doing my PhD in Digital Humanities on Linked Open Usable Data, with a focus on its (potential) use in the cultural heritage field and the perspectives it could bring in terms of community practices and semantic interoperability. Through the next slides I hope to make clear the meaning of my dissertation title.

I will start by a definition of cultural heritage data, then talk about the ways that data can be interlinked on the web, discuss what is Linked Open Usable Data or LOUD and then it will be time to wrap-up.

I have divided this definition into three parts and will give one interesting use case dealing with a series of objects and performances, Parts of a Body House, from artist Carolee Schneemann.

Heteregenous in two instances, one is the agnosticism of data, where you flatten artefacts into bits, formats. So you have a very diverse arrays of entitites that are on the same level and also thiking of cultural heritage beyond just its materiality. "Digital or data-driven affordances" refers to the capabilities and opportunities provided by converting cultural heritage into digital forms. This allows us to access, analyze, and interact with cultural elements through technologicl means. Metadata, Online Exhibitions, you name it. Cultural heritage data includes the digitised forms of tangible heritage like buildings and artefacts, intangible heritage such as traditions and music, and natural heritage represented by landscapes and biodiversity.

Every dataset embodies an underlying potential that research and interpretation bring to light. A noticeable divide, especially within cultural heritage, exists between the generation of data, description of it and its use, owing to the diverse array of unforeseen applications. This second characteristic also highlights the temporal dimension, presenting cultural heritage data as a repository of latent knowledge awaiting discovery and interpretation. Notably, not all artefacts are – or should be – digitised, and even among those that are, (mis)representation and challenges in interconnecting them persist.

This dimension reinforces the essential role played by a variety of entities, predominantly classic cultural heritage institions sometimes called the GLAM or LAM sector or academic instituitions, in safeguarding and managing resources, ensuring their preservation and accessibility for present and future generations. However, it's crucial to acknowledge the great divide in terms of resources, with indigenous and local communities often facing challenges in custodianship responsibilities.

I would like now to provide an example of cultural heritage resources from a study and article written by Rossenova and Di Franco examining artists' books, namely on Carolee Schneemann's "Parts of a Body House". Carolee Schneemann was an influential artist known for her explorations of the body and sexuality. Artists' books, particularly from the 1960s, have gained recognition as art objects and are typically housed in art libraries rather than in traditional museum spaces. These books present challenges of classification as they can be archival, serial or ephemeral and often defy traditional library and archival norms. The study notes that Schneemann's works are categorised differently in different institutions, highlighting the complexity of integrating such unique art forms into standard collections.

For unconventional art archives such as artist's books, the network model of linked data provides a means of mapping relationships between indefinable embodied versions, constructing complex histories beyond categorisation or canonisation. However, community discussions revealed difficulty in fully describing the array of relationships across editions, reinterpretations, serializations, or appropriations of publications within the model structure. Rossenova & Di Franco (2022)

I am going to deep dive a little bit more about how data, as the example from the previous two slides, can be interlinked on the web, I will try not be too technical.

The first thing I want to highlight is that the web was openly created, in 1989 at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee.

This Web, which has claimed to be a Semantic Web for several years now, has a centrepiece known as Resource Description Framework (RDF), a general method for describing and exchanging graph data. The Semantic Web offers major opportunities for scholarship as it allows data to be reasoned together, that is to be understood by machines via those RDF-based ontologies, a formal way to represent human-like knowledge.

In 2010, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the Five-Star Open Data Deployment Scheme to provide a structured framework for publishing and promoting data on the web. 5-star open data scheme  1) make your stuff available on the Web (whatever format) under an open license 2) make it available as structured data 3) make it available in a non-proprietary open format (e.g., CSV instead of Excel 4) use URIs to denote things, so that people can point at your stuff 5) link your data to other data to provide context

Example of the updated data model, their classes or entities if you will and how they are connected to each other through properties, that are actually metadata fields.

You can see here the same entities on the DaSCH Service Platform application and the number of resources that exist for each of these.

Technically, this is how the data model looks like through the application programming interface or API, in a format called JSON-LD.

The DaSCH Service Platform has also implemented another API, which is the IIIF Image API - and I am going to talk more about this afterwards. Here is the URL you that provides you a cropped image. SGV_10P_00026 [Haus Kreis am Steinengraben 79 in Basel]

`Object` and `ImageRepresentation`

Another view of the same resource but on our prototype which also comes with its own API, here it's not the representation of the all model but the representation of this particular resource through the API.

Lots of different entry points you may ask... Synoptic View of the PIA Infrastructure: Showcasing its Connection to DSP and the CAS Photo Archive Website How to ensure that this linked constellation remains universally usable by developers that create tools, services, and interfaces? How to make things easier for PIA in terms of external collaboration? What I mean by this is that not everything needs to happen on our front-end...

This is the basis of my answer: Linked Open Usable Data, not ony linked, not only open, but usable data. I will talk about it design principles, the different standards, then discuss their social fabrics that develop and maintain such standards as well as briefly showcasing a platform that embodies the implementation of such community-driven standards on a large scale.

The overall idea of LOUD is to make data easy to use for humans, especially for developers. JSON-LD allows for some mapping of ontological constructs into JSON, which is the lingua-franca of modern developers and is a cornerstone technology of LOUD. Five design principles to promote data consumption have been conceived. To be part of the Web, not just on the Web.

So why do we need IIIF? Digital images are fundamental carriers of information across the fields of cultural heritage, STEM, and others. They help us understand complex processes through visualization. They grab our attention and help us quickly understand abstract concepts. They help document many the past--and the present--and preserve it for the future. They are also ubiquitous: we interact with thousands of them every day both in real life and on the web. In short, images are important and we interact with large volumes of them online. Image 1: Female Figurine, Chupicuaro, 500/300 B.C Image 2: Vision of Saint Gregory, unknown artist, n.d. Image 3: Iyo Province: Saijo, Utagawa Hiroshige, 1855

A series of APIs for different purposes...

- Linked Art is focused on usability, not full precision / completeness - Consistently solves actual challenges from real data - Development is iterative, as new use cases are found

Linked Art presents a layered framework that distinguishes between the conceptual and implementation aspects of its model. This diagram illustrates five layers, delineating the transition from shared abstractions (in blue) to their sustainable implementations (in green) in the Linked Art ecosystem.

LOUX integrates technologies, mostly community-driven, like IIIF, WADM, and Linked Art. Together, they demonstrate a transformative potential in how cultural heritage data is interacted with and understood, reshaping traditional humanities and opening new research opportunities.

IIIF is a community-driven initiative, which brings together key players in the academic and CH fields, and has defined open and shared APIs to standardise the way in which image-based resources are delivered on the Web. Implementing the IIIF APIs enables institutions to make better use of their digitised or born-digital material by providing, for instance, deep zooming, comparison, full-text search of OCR objects or annotation capabilities.

Organisations

And individuals/meetings

This bar plot provides a snapshot of the Linked Art meetings from January 2019 to March 2024. The group convenes fortnightly to deliberate on refining the model and the API. It indicates participation trends over this period, showing that 130 different individuals attended the 115 meetings held, predominantly in a virtual format, with five of these meetings being face-to-face. Each participant attended an average of 13.57 of sessions, but the median attendance was only 2, indicating a very long tail of participation. This suggests a core group of highly engaged members who contribute consistently, while a larger number of participants engage more sporadically.

Socio-technical aspects Emphasis on Usable Linked Data: Both IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and Linked Art communities prioritize creating and using data that is interconnected, user-friendly, and easily accessible. Shared Leadership and Expertise: Key individuals play pivotal roles across both initiatives, bringing a wealth of shared knowledge and leadership. Joint Standards and Development Efforts: Collaboration is a cornerstone in these communities, evident in their joint efforts in standardizing, developing, and organizing meetings. This fosters a strong culture of community-led initiatives and collective wisdom. Inclusivity and Collaboration at Core: Both communities are known for their inclusive approach, welcoming contributions and ideas from diverse backgrounds and expertise. Openness and Friendliness as Guiding Principles: A welcoming atmosphere and an open-door policy characterize both IIIF and Linked Art, encouraging participation and innovation. Commitment to Transparency: Transparency is key in all their operations, from decision-making to development processes, ensuring that all actions are clear and accountable to the community.

LUX enhances and prepares Yale collections data for further collaboration, use, and re-use. With the support of a well-resourced research university–including Yale’s Vice-Provost office–in addition to the support of active committees with members across Yale and a meticulous technical team, LUX is well-positioned to help bridge gaps and create more accessible and diverse representations of cultural heritage collections. [Metcalfe Hurst 2023]

Thee of the nine dimensions... Embeddedness: Infrastructure is sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies. People do not necessarily distinguish the several coordinated aspects of infrastructure. Links with conventions of practice: Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice. Embodiment of standards: Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardised fashion.

An important proposition arises from the observation that adherence to the \ac{LOUD} design principles makes specifications more likely to be adopted. The primary benefit of adopting \ac{LOUD} standards lies in their grassroots nature. The development and maintenance of \ac{LOUD} standards by dedicated communities are characterised by collaboration, consensus building, and transparency. This grassroots approach not only aligns with the core values of openness and collaboration within the \ac{DH} community but also serves as a common denominator between \ac{DH} practitioners and \acp{CHI}. This unique alignment fosters a sense of shared purpose and common ground. However, it's essential to acknowledge that while \ac{LOUD} and its associated standards, including IIIF, hold immense promise, their limited recognition in the wider socio-technical ecosystem may currently hinder their full potential impact.

Taking part of the community (directly or indirectly)