Events

Computing the History of Cultural Heritage Collections

This presentation will focus on the re-use of data relating to collections in libraries, museums and archives to address research questions in the humanities. Large-scale research into the history and characteristics of cultural heritage materials is heavily dependent on the availability of collections data in appropriate formats. Until recently, this kind of research has been seriously limited by lack of access to suitable data. The speaker will be discussing four major projects. The first two relate to medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, and involve using data from a range of digital and non-digital sources to reconstruct the histories of large numbers of manuscripts, both from the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps and more generally. For the third project, “Collecting the West”, I am working with the British Museum to evaluate their ResearchSpace software, which is designed to integrate heterogeneous collection data into a cultural heritage knowledge graph. The final project is HuNI – the Humanities Networked Infrastructure – which is endeavouring to build a “virtual laboratory” for the humanities by reshaping collections data into semantic information networks.