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No abstract available.

It is essential that we develop effective systems for the management and preservation of digital heritage data. This chapter outlines the key issues surrounding access, sharing and curation, and describes current efforts to establish research infrastructures in a number of countries. It aims to provide a detailed overview of the issues involved in the creation, ingest, preservation and dissemination of 3D datasets in particular. The chapter incorporates specific examples from past and present Archaeology Data Service (ADS) projects and highlights the recent work undertaken by the ADS and partners to specify standards and workflows in order to aid the preservation and reuse of 3D datasets.

This chapter discusses the computational challenges and innovations encountered in the development of the Scottish corpora (the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech and the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing), considers how tools for corpus analysis can encourage new audiences and complement existing resources, and explores possible future technological advances for corpus creation and exploitation.

How can semantic technologies help small heritage organisations share their digitised collections holdings? Over a decade has passed since the European Agenda for Culture (2007) recognised digitisation as a fundamental driver for fostering cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, but the promise of digitisation is yet to be realised by many small and regional museums across Europe. The chapter discusses the benefits and challenges of making the cultural heritage data of small regional museums findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Using the Archaeological Museum of Tripoli, Greece, as a case study, it demonstrates how the employment of semantic methods, such as semantic enrichment and linking to Linked Data resources, and semantic technologies, such as the CIDOC-Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) and other standard ontologies, can help alleviate some of these challenges and help small museums make their data FAIR. It also discusses how a semantics-based approach can facilitate collaboration between Digital Humanities and Information Studies researchers, and cultural heritage institutions, by providing a common means of communication that means cultural heritage data can be reused, repurposed, and redeployed efficiently.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that digital content and infrastructures are increasingly essential, at a time when routine business and commercial frameworks have been disrupted or permanently destroyed, particularly in the cultural and heritage sectors (Arts Council 2020;Bakhshi 2020; Creative Scotland 2020). Yet it has also been a time of digital opportunity for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums: when digital representations of culture and heritage is all that is accessible, digitised versions of artefacts and objects have shown both how essential digitisation now is, and the versatility of digitisation. Cultural Heritage is important for wellbeing(Power and Smyth 2016), and although many institutions worldwide had to restrict physical access, 86% of museums increased their online presence and/or the amount of content they were placing online (ArtFund 2020), online searches for aggregated cultural content “quadrupled” (Gaskin 2020), with emerging opportunities regarding the reframing of digitised content as anessential part of cultural memory (Kahn 2020).

This paper takes as an example the envisioned portal of the newly started Polifonia project that interlinks resources from very rich, old, established archives while making optimal use of the latest semantic web technologies. In the project, ten research pilots, spanning from historical bells and organ heritage, classification of polyphonic notated music, to the historical role of music in children's lives, form the driving force behind the development of the dedicated interface. Based on a mixture of participation and participatory observation, we describe and reflect on the processes involved in making the portal. In other words - exemplified with the case of Polifonia - we reflect on the role of interfaces (of various types, shapes, manifestations and/or durations) to organise knowledge in an interdisciplinary project. In particular, we focus on the role of data management within the project as a key component of research methodology and cross-disciplinary collaboration, rather than an administrative exercise. The knowledge generated by this part of the project serves at least three different purposes: (1) to envision new research questions (competence questions) guiding the engineering backbone processes; (2) to define the future elements of the portal both for experts, other researchers, wider public and specific parts of the wider public; and last but not least, (3) the documentation task needed to support reproducibility and FAIRness of all data processes. Figure 1 below illustrates how the three components, namely the sociotechnical roadmap of the portal, the ontology-based knowledge graphs created in the research pilots, and the data management plan form three complementary components of the Polifonia project, that ultimately all feed into the web portal. In this paper, we claim that behind any interface there is the need for a layer of interfaces that form the basis of the final interface visible to the public. These procedural, intermediary, interfaces take the form of meetings, shared notes, github presence - and will result in products of their own (Data Management Plan, knowledge graphs), as well as inform the decisions during the process of designing the portal.

Involving the collaboration of researchers from Classics, Geography and Archaeological Computing, and supported by funding from the AHRC, HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) aims to enrich contemporary discussions of space by developing an innovative methodology for the study of an ancient narrative, Herodotus’s Histories. Using the latest digital technology in combination with close textual study, we investigate the geographical concepts through which Herodotus describes the conflict between Greeks and Persians. Our findings nuance the customary topographical vision of an east versus west polarity by drawing attention to the topological network culture that criss-crosses the two, and develop the means of bringing that world to a mass audience via the internet. In this paper we discuss three main aspects to the project: the data capture of place-names in Herodotus; their visualization and dissemination using the web-mapping technologies of GIS, Google Earth and Timemap; and the interrogation of the relationships that Herodotus draws between different geographical concepts using the digital resources at our disposal. Our concern will be to set out in some detail the digital basis to our methodology and the technologies that we have been exploiting, as well as the problems that we have encountered, in the hope of contributing not only to a more complex picture of space in Herodotus but also to a basis for future digital projects across the Humanities that spatially visualize large text-based corpora. With this in mind we end with a brief discussion of some of the ways in which this study is being developed, with assistance from research grants from the Google Digital Humanities Awards Program and JISC.

One of the most important goals of digital humanities is to provide researchers with data and tools for new research questions, either by increasing the scale of scholarly studies, linking existing databases, or improving the accessibility of data. Here, the FAIR principles provide a useful framework. Integrating data from diverse humanities domains is not trivial, research questions such as “was economic wealth equally distributed in the 18th century?”, or “what are narratives constructed around disruptive media events?”) and preparation phases (e.g. data collection, knowledge organisation, cleaning) of scholars need to be taken into account. In this chapter, we describe the ontologies and tools developed and integrated in the Dutch national project CLARIAH to address these issues across datasets from three fundamental domains or “pillars” of the humanities (linguistics, social and economic history, and media studies) that have paradigmatic data representations (textual corpora, structured data, and multimedia). We summarise the lessons learnt from using such ontologies and tools in these domains from a generalisation and reusability perspective.