Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities (2017) is free to access for one week, get free access to the book (via this link) for 7 days.
After this 7-day period, you can buy a copy for £10/$15!
You can also visit the official Routledge History, Heritage Studies etc. Twitter page
and thanks to Routledge editor Heidi Lowther.
Infrastructure Requirements For A World Heritage Archival Infrastructure
Conference: DH2015 UWS Sydney
Here are notes from a short talk at Digital Humanities 2015 conference, Sydney. Never published. Writing a new paper on digital and virtual heritage infrastructures at the moment. So much of the below to update!
https://twitter.com/plevy/status/433058523836985344/photo/1
IBM estimates 90% of the world’s data has been created in last 2 years alone.. Minecraft Denmark created at 1:1 (1tb data, 4000 billion bricks) but blown up by US hackers, refer http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/07/07/reproducible-computing-rctrack-big-data-challenge/
Digital Humanities and Open Access: An Interview with Brett Bobley of the National Endowment for the Humanities
Check out the citation rates for different fields especially humanities at the bottom.
Recomposing Scholarship: The critical ingredients for a more inclusive scholarly communication system, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/10/25/gray-recomposing-scholarship/
Cultural heritage tools and archives 2013 workshop
Digital Heritage 2013
note: digital heritage 2015 Granada Spain 5-9 Oct
APA Bologna model
Blender (interactive in OpenSceneGraph)
NEH idea: Hold two workshops a year apart, with technical support working on projects discussed in the interim..
UCLA VSim real-time exploration of highly detailed, 3D computer models
The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges such as data integration and interoperability among national and regional digital cultural heritage repositories. The result is dispersed and poorly-linked cultured heritage data, backed by non-standardized search interfaces, which thwart users’ attempts to contextualize information from distributed repositories. A recently introduced geospatial semantic web is being adopted by a great many new and existing digital cultural heritage repositories to overcome these challenges. However, no one has yet conducted a conceptual survey of the geospatial semantic web concepts for a cultural heritage audience. A conceptual survey of these concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field is, therefore, needed. Such a survey equips cultural heritage professionals and practitioners with an overview of all the necessary tools, and free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic web platforms that can be used to implement geospatial semantic web-based cultural heritage repositories. Hence, this article surveys the state-of-the-art geospatial semantic web concepts, which are pertinent to the cultural heritage field. It then proposes a framework to turn geospatial cultural heritage data into machine-readable and processable resource description framework (RDF) data to use in the geospatial semantic web, with a case study to demonstrate its applicability. Furthermore, it outlines key free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic platforms for cultural heritage institutions. In addition, it examines leading cultural heritage projects employing the geospatial semantic web. Finally, the article discusses attributes of the geospatial semantic web that require more attention, that can result in generating new ideas and research questions for both the geospatial semantic web and cultural heritage fields.
I mentioned last month Hafizur and I had an open access journal article out, “3D Digital Heritage Models as Sustainable Scholarly Resources” at MDPI Sustainability journal.
Champion, E.; Rahaman, H. 3D Digital Heritage Models as Sustainable Scholarly Resources. Sustainability 2019, 11, 2425.
We were invited at very short notice to write this article, with a strict word limit, but a month before the invitation we had an earlier, sort of similar article reviewed very critically (apparently) by the first reviewer of another journal. Rather than wait for review 2 we pulled that article. So this article was built on the ruins of that article. However I never saw the reviewer 1 comments!
I write this as this article has been very well received (and downloaded) so far (well in 3 or so weeks). If there are negative comments out there I am happy to hear them. The article was merely to document what was missing from virtual heritage conference papers and direct access to 3D models, it was not meant to say there are no major 3D repositories or to blame conferences for not having many links to 3D contents. Rather it was meant to say, here is the data, you can cite or use it if you like (from the MDPI website), improve or critique it, but let us next try to solve these problems.
Thinking about the above for a meeting with 19 other people in a few weeks at an organization I have never been to, with people I don’t think I know..to discuss NRI. For humanities and social sciences.
There was criticism from the Australian Academy of Humanities President on the Australian Government 7 May 2018 response (to the 2016 report), entitled FACILITIES FOR THE FUTURE UNDERPINNING AUSTRALIA’S RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
Funding will enable greater integration and modern accessibility of datasets available through the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) and the Atlas of Living Australia.
Investments will ensure the preservation of the National Collections maintained by CSIRO through the construction of a new and purpose-built building to consolidate the housing of existing national insect, wildlife and plant collections to ensure their long term preservation. A scoping study will be undertaken to identify the technology platform and capabilities needed to establish HASS and Indigenous research platforms.
CSIRO stands for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. So not obviously Humanities or Social Sciences (HASS). Yet many of their projects and infrastructure have implications for communities. Perhaps an opportunity wasted, or perhaps still waiting to be explored.
So where does this leave my planning for the workshop? It seems to me funding and recognition typically boils down to machines, centres, or investment/competition/start up plans. With Digital Humanities in Australia, one can argue there is no clear equivalent say to the European EU DH infrastructures/meta groups; nor an equivalent to the US NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities).
Digital Archaeology and virtual heritage are not exactly equivalent but I have not seen a paper putting forward a clear definition and relationship. Perhaps that is why a Digital Heritage conference could be attended by archaeologists, archivists, museum experience people, interaction designers, programmers, scanning experts, librarians or museum people. Seldom are they all together, let alone in the same sessions.
If UNESCO and related organizations wish to preserve digital cultural heritage they will have to clearly distinguish between CAD model repositories and online web models (one can have both in one but is it too much of a compromise?)
Another issue is that charters developed for digital heritage, UNESCO digital heritage charter, London Charter, Seville Principles, Burra charter, ICOMOS Venice charter, are read but not used in the creation and storage of most projects.
My solution would be to build a template that is both a heuristics and an information collector that would be used to create suitable meta-tags and classification, based on a hybrid practical implementation of the charters as a query form that helps relate models to ontologies and to other digital collections.
DH2014 Workshop: Maximum Number of Participants: 30 (flexible)
Date: Tuesday, July 8th 2014, 13.00-16.00
Facilitator(s):
Overview:
This workshop aims to bring together leading scholars involved in major digital scholarly infrastructure projects such as DARIAH, NeDiMAH, Europeana Cloud, ARIADNE, 3D ICONS, EHRI, DASISH, LARM, CLARIN, DiRT and DHCommons, in dialogue with practising digital humanists. Topics to be addressed include cultural heritage and digital media infrastructures, tools and services; the creation and curation of humanities digital resources; social and institutional issues of Digital Humanities infrastructures; and finally, lessons learnt from the role of digital humanities in pedagogy and academic curricula. It will provide an opportunity for humanists to find out about cutting edge developments on major digital infrastructure initiatives in Europe and beyond, and to make their views matter on future developments in this field.
The workshop aims to go beyond a description of project presentations. It will seek to provide an analytical framework that could contribute to a critical understanding of the current state of digital infrastructures vis-à-vis the potential of digital archives, tools and services for humanities scholarship, by addressing the following questions:
1. What are the objectives of each digital infrastructure project, and what are its intended users?
2. What are the functionalities and outcomes it aims to provide, and how do they serve the overarching goal of supporting and transforming humanities research?
3. To what extent were the needs of humanities researchers considered, and how is the digital humanities research community involved in the project?
4. Are there potential synergies, and actual collaboration, with other infrastructure projects? Conversely, are there any overlaps?
5. What are the main lessons learned from the life of the project so far? What are the pitfalls and potential failures, and what improvements could be achieved?
Audience:
The half-day workshop is expected to be of interest both to those involved in digital research infrastructure work, and to digital humanists who may benefit from the use and contribute to shaping the plans for future developments of digital infrastructures, tools and services.
Proposals should consist of an abstract of up to 500 words and a short bio which should be submitted by e-mail to: a.benardou@dcu.gr
The submission deadline is April 30th 2014.
The proposals will be evaluated and selected by a program committee of international experts. The length allocated to each contribution (10-15 minutes) will be decided by the program committee, depending on the number of contributions and the strength of the proposals.
Notifications regarding the acceptance of proposals will be sent out by May 14th, 2014
My article Researchers as Infrastructure is now available in The Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012 at:
http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/openbook
This is the first issue of the University of Sheffield’s new journal, Studies in the Digital Humanities.
The journal is optimised for viewing on desktop PCs and mobile devices, in HTML, PDF and e-Book formats.
..sometimes.
Research infrastructure is not research just as roads are not economic activity. We tend to forget when confronted by large infrastructure projects that they are not an end in themselves. There is an opportunity cost to investing precious research funds into infrastructure. Every $100,000 lab that lasts four years before needing renewal is the equivalent to $25,000 a year for a Ph.D. student to do research for four years.
A is not B, just as C is not D. OK. But C can be A.
Road Infrastructure The backbone of transport system
In order to develop innovative and cost-effective alternative transport concepts and to assess their potential impact, research is required on two areas. First, the needs and opportunities for new transport means and systems over the next 10 to 30 years, such as the innovative use of pipelines, floating tunnels, automated underground distribution systems, large capacity transport means, including investigations as to how current means could fulfil future requirements and how innovative technologies can be integrated. Second, the safe, efficient and environmentally-friendly integration of new means of transport, e.g. high-speed vessels, into existing transport operations.
I enjoy Professor Rockwell’s papers, but I disagree that infrastructure is not research, and by that I mean research infrastructure has to be research-based, otherwise it is not providing for genuine research. This is a complex argument (I hope that does not mean long-winded) so I won’t go into it too much tonight.
Key issues though are
From my knowledge of gothic cathedrals and computer games I say “yes it can” to the last question.
I still like his conclusion though even if I argue with his definition of (research) infrastructure.
NB is housing intangible? I think not.
“research infrastructure” means equipment, specimens, scientific collections, computer software, information databases, communications linkages and other intangible property used or to be used primarily for carrying on research, including housing and installations essential for the use and servicing of those things.” (From the Budget Implementation Act, 1997, c. 26)
Reference
Rockwell, G. (2010, May 14). As Transparent as Infrastructure: On the research of cyberinfrastructure in the humanities. Retrieved from the Connexions Web site: http://cnx.org/content/m34315/1.2/
Ear Zow Digital