Costis Dallas

Understanding the Information Requirements of Arts and Humanities Scholarship

This paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work.

DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model

The proliferation of Web, database and social networking technologies has enabled us to produce, publish and exchange digital assets at an enormous rate. This vast amount of information that is either digitized or born-digital needs to be collected, organized and preserved in a way that ensures that our digital assets and the information they carry remain available for future use. Digital curation has emerged as a new inter-disciplinary practice that seeks to set guidelines for disciplined management of information. In this paper we review two recent models for digital curation introduced by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the Digital Curation Unit (DCU) of the Athena Research Centre. We then propose a fusion of the two models that highlights the need to extend the digital curation lifecycle by adding (a) provisions for the registration of usage experience, (b) a stage for knowledge enhancement and (c) controlled vocabularies used by convention to denote concepts, properties and relations. The objective of the proposed extensions is twofold: (i) to provide a more complete lifecycle model for the digital curation domain; and (ii) to provide a stimulus for a broader discussion on the research agenda.

A New Architecture and Approach to Asset Representation for Europeana Aggregation: The CARARE Way

This paper presents a new metadata aggregation approach based on a mediating repository that intends to ensure the integrity, authenticity and semantic enrichment of metadata provided to Europeana by heterogeneous collections. Primary metadata are mapped to CARARE schema, a schema suitable for describing archaeological and architectural heritage assets, digital resources, collections, as well as events associated with them. The paper specifies the proposed schema and discusses the overall architecture of the proposed approach.

Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: from Practice to Infrastructure

Abstract As a “grand challenge” for digital archaeology, I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled global digital infrastructures, and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and meaning making. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology, viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence. This is exemplified in contemporary practices of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, in epistemological reflexivity and in pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity “from the field to the screen” in a variety of archaeological situations. I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive, epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods, and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. It has a potential value in helping to establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agencyoriented and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology.

A Curation-Oriented Thematic Aggregator

The emergence of the European Digital Library (Europeana) presents the need for aggregating content using a more intelligent and effective approach, taking into account the need to support potential changes in target metadata schemas and new services. This paper presents the concept, architecture and services provided by a curation-oriented, OAIS-compliant thematic metadata aggregator, developed and used in the CARARE project, that addresses these challenges.

From Europeana Cloud to Europeana Research: The Challenges of a Community-Driven Platform Exploiting Europeana Content

This paper presents Europeana Cloud, a Best Practice Network coordinated by the Europeana Foundation, which aims at setting the foundations and building Europeana Research, a platform allowing third parties to develop tools and services based on Europeana content. Through a collaborative, user-centred and a mixed methods approach, we have tried to identify the needs of researchers in the fields of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, while attempting to actively engage various sub-disciplines in the course of our work.

Archaeological Knowledge Production and Global Communities : Boundaries and Structure of the Field

Abstract Archaeology and material cultural heritage enjoys a particular status as a form of heritage that, capturing the public imagination, has become the locus for the expression and negotiation of regional, national, and intra-national cultural identities. One important question is: why and how do contemporary people engage with archaeological heritage objects, artefacts, information or knowledge outside the realm of an professional, academically-based archaeology? This question is investigated here from the perspective of theoretical considerations based on Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere theory, which helps to describe the connections between the centre and peripheries of professional archaeology as sign structures. The centre may be defined according to prevalent scientific paradigms, while periphery in the space of creolisation in which, through interactions with other culturally more distant sign structures, archaeology-related nonprofessional communities emerge. On the basis of these considerations, we use collocation analysis on representative English language corpora to outline the structure of the field of archaeology-related nonprofessional communities, identify salient creolised peripheral spaces and archaeology-related practices, and develop a framework for further investigation of archaeological knowledge production and reuse in the context of global archaeology.

Archaeological perspectives in information science: Archaeological Perspectives in Information Science

Archaeology is a domain that has intersections with information science and technology research both as an empirical domain of investigation and as a perspective to inquire into how people interact with information. The aim of this panel is to highlight this interdisciplinary nexus of diverse engagements and to explicate how archaeology has informed and could inform information science research and practice in the future, and how empirical information science research on archaeological practices has enhanced our understanding of both archaeological work and human information behavior and practices in general.

Archaeological perspectives in information science

Archaeology is a domain that has intersections with information science and technology research both as an empirical domain of investigation and as a perspective to inquire into how people interact with information. The aim of this panel is to highlight this interdisciplinary nexus of diverse engagements and to explicate how archaeology has informed and could inform information science research and practice in the future, and how empirical information science research on archaeological practices has enhanced our understanding of both archaeological work and human information behavior and practices in general.

Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities

What are the leading tools and archives in digital cultural heritage? How can they be integrated into research infrastructures to better serve their intended audiences? In this book, authors from a wide range of countries, representing some of the best research projects in digital humanities related to cultural heritage, discuss their latest findings, both in terms of new tools and archives, and how they are used (or not used) by both specialists and by the general public.