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(Re)connecting heritage collections as data, infrastructure, and participatory engagement: big dreams, big challenges: Sloane Lab online seminar series is over

UPD: The video recordings are available here.

On 22 June the final online seminar concluded the series of events “(Re)connecting heritage collections as data, infrastructure, and participatory engagement: big dreams, big challenges: Sloane Lab online seminar series” co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the University of Southampton, and the University of Portsmouth. During a month, a wide range of presentations from leading experts, academics, and museum practitioners underpinned the topic of Collection as Data from various perspectives.

The agenda of the series was as follows and in the nearest future, the videos of the presentations will be published in the OpenLearnWare.

25th May 2023 12:45pm – 2:00pm

Kathleen Lawther, Freelance Curator/Collections Researcher

Title: People make the data: Museum Makers, people-centred cataloguing and collections as data.

Abstract: Many museums are reconsidering their cataloguing practice with the aim of recording information about their collections in ways that are meaningful for people (see, for example, the Collections Trust’s Rethinking Cataloguing campaign). At the same time, initiatives like Towards a National Collection are thinking about how collections information can be read as data by machines. This presentation will consider the relationship between small scale, focussed, people-centred cataloguing practice on one hand, and large-scale projects which zoom out to try to understand collections as data on the other, through reflections on my recent work.

Florence Okoye, Qualitative researcher, User Experience and Service designer, Natural History Museum

Title: Approaches for anti-colonial narratives through digital collections.

Abstract: A discussion on experiments with creative approaches for requirements gathering and what has been learned about supporting interdisciplinary and anti-colonial practice through access to digital collections.

1st June 2023 12:45pm – 2:00pm

Koraljka Golub, Professor, iInstitute, Linnaeus University, co-leader of LNU’s Digital Humanities Initiative, programme coordinator for M.A. in Digital Humanities

Title: Subject access in online information services for humanities: the case of LGBTQI fiction.

Abstract: While controlled vocabularies have been used by libraries and other information institutions for decades now, their potential is rarely explored at the level of the search interface. Most information institutions conduct subject indexing, but the user rarely has the opportunity to enjoy them at the level of the interface. Search interfaces rarely take advantage of the full potential of controlled vocabularies and users of most search interfaces are still unable to select the best term for their task – for example, which of the available synonyms should they use, what is the most specific term used by the system, what are broader or related terms, how can one disambiguate between homonyms. At the same time, some collections are traditionally not indexed by subject, such as fiction and, in particular, LGBTQI fiction, exacerbating the problem further. The talk will present the Swedish QUEERLIT project which aims to index and provide subject access to Swedish LGBTQI fiction with a dedicated search interface.

Inna Kizhner, Research Fellow, Digital Humanities Lab, Haifa University

Title: Exploring epistemic bias in museum collections.

Abstract: Museum collections, metadata and curatorial texts are a rich source of high quality data. This material can be analysed across time and space, using distant reading of museum catalogues. Observing geographic and temporal distribution of metadata records produces a clear picture of cultural colonialism when some countries or time periods are overrepresented at the expense of hidden or concealed cultures. Cultures of ethnic minorities or colonized nations can also be silenced when they are represented through objects that show imperial attitudes, imperial infrastructures or imperial networks. In such contexts, collections as data will result in reproducing a single perspective, concealing other interpretations. Applying algorithms to such datasets will take us to the world of unified cultures where variety is reduced to what algorithms recommend. This talk will demonstrate the results of case studies on thousands of museum objects. These results will support my argument that ‘collections as data’ is a concept that is complicated by a lack of data, a lack of alternate interpretations, and a lack of explication of production circumstances. To understand the meaning of objects, and consequently the complexity of cultures, we need more examples of the change of semantic space in metadata for specific cultures across geographic locations and time periods.

8th June 2023 12:45pm – 2:00pm

Lucille Junkere, Visual artist, educator and researcher. Recent research focusses on the legacy of colonialism in African Caribbean textile history.

Title: Cultural Colours Jamaica

Abstract: Colonial botany involved the extraction of local knowledge, plants, information and labour; and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and ecological practices. This mirrors the erasure and denigration of African identity through colonialism and European enslavement.

One of the most challenging legacies of the transatlantic slave trade is the destruction of indigenous African knowledge systems. Perhaps the most culturally and historically relevant illustrations of how naming and language are bound up with power and dominance were European colonisers attacking, defiling, and altering African names: names of humans, names of plants, and names of spiritual practice.

The African-Jamaican journey is a search for roots, for that sense of historical continuity, identity, and self-worth. How do you restore people whose languages, customs, and beliefs were obscured, constrained, and disassembled?

With dye and pigment plants as a metaphor for family and home, a framework to repair fractured cultural identities and histories, my research aims to restore and share Jamaican plant colour knowledge through practice-based research. My study privileges local plant names, providing deep insights into African Jamaican worldview.

I am framing my research in decolonising methodology, exploring alternative ways of documenting and shifting power dynamics. The imperative to decolonise informs and underlies every aspect of my methods, including fieldwork, archival study, and art practice.

Benjamin Lee, incoming Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, as well as a Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress

Title: Reimagining Search and Discovery for Digital Collections with Machine Learning.

Abstract: Widespread efforts by libraries and archives have drastically improved digital access to cultural heritage collections. Yet, scholars and the public alike face a persistent challenge: how to explore and analyze these collections, which frequently contain millions of items and often suffer from imperfect metadata. My interdisciplinary research addresses this question by bringing together approaches from machine learning, library & information science, and the digital humanities in order to build and examine large-scale search systems for digital collections. In this talk, I will present my project, Newspaper Navigator, which reimagines search and discovery for the visual culture embedded within 16 million digitized historic newspaper pages. Begun while I was an Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress and a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, the project has grown to consist of three components. First, I will discuss constructing and publicly releasing the Newspaper Navigator dataset and search application. Second, I will present ongoing collaborations to use Newspaper Navigator in order to advance digital humanities research surrounding ethnic newspapers and community-based archives. Third, I will discuss my efforts to examine the project from a critical sociotechnical perspective, resulting in the Newspaper Navigator data archaeology.

15th June 2023 12:45pm – 2:00pm

Ananda Rutherford, Research Fellow, Transforming Collections, Decolonising Arts Institute, University of Arts London.

Title: Problematising catalogue texts: writing, editing and the potential of interactive machine learning.

Abstract: In this presentation I will suggest that museum cataloguing, interpretation and object description practice needs to move beyond the “find and replace” of pejorative and offensive words to ask how ethical and anti-racist critical thinking could be encouraged and embedded in the texts we produce? Can Machine Learning (ML) prompt criticality in how museum practitioners produce knowledge? Further, can we design and employ ML models that help to surface the oppressive thinking we chose not to see, and resist the seduction and solutionism of predictive NLP tools?

Jane Stevenson, Archivist, Archival Cataloguing

Title: The Shortcomings of and Opportunities for Archival Cataloguing to Create a Fuller Picture of Our Histories.

Abstract: Archival catalogues are the way into our archives, and we may like to think that they perform this function well. But archival catalogues are hugely diverse, often lacking in structure, lacking in common data formats, often not very detailed, and hard to bring together as a coherent whole. The international archival community came up with a standard for archival description in the 1990s. Before that there was no real sense of standardisation, although there were widely acknowledged principles of cataloguing (respect des fonds and original order). However, the International Standard for Archival Description has not been updated for over 20 years. Implementation of the Standard as it stands has been patchy, but the truth is that it cannot stand up to the requirements of the digital age. A new standard, Records in Context (RiC), is intended to encourage archivists to take a more modern approach, thinking in terms of entities and relationships, and enabling far more complex modelling and nuanced understandings. But the reality is that archival cataloguing systems, and sometimes cataloguers themselves, are not likely to make this an easy transition. Even if RiC was adopted over the next 5 years for new catalogues, legacy data would remain a huge problem.

So, how can we utilise current archival catalogues to create a more complex picture, and what sort of approaches should we adopt as from now?

I manage a UK aggregation of archival descriptions, the Archives Hub, and we deal with the catalogue data from hundreds of UK archives. Our experience has confirmed to us that archives need to work together to achieve this kind of advancement. Catalogues as data, opportunities for computational methods, and new tools for data processing and analysis, create a much more technical paradigm than archivists have been used to. Given the lack of resourcing for archives, and the often woeful lack of technical support, the best way to seize these opportunities must be through working together.

I want to talk about what we are doing on the Archives Hub to progress this agenda. I will outline the challenges that we face and talk a bit about how I think these challenges can be mitigated. I will outline our methods of data processing, intended to help us create better quality data. I will explain why I think that aggregating content could allow for many new stories and connections to be made, why the data quality impedes this and how we are using various sophisticated methods of data processing and also Machine Learning as a way to try to get more from the data that we have.

22nd June 2023 12:45pm – 2:00pm

Rosemary Grennan, Mayday Rooms archive

Title: Leftovers Digital Archive: Somewhere between automation and the handmade.

Abstract: This presentation will look at how MayDay Rooms practices around our paper archive have been reflected on and developed in a digital environment. Focusing on our digital platform Leftovers it will ask: how can building shared and collaborative digital archives which instead of being governed by preoccupations around perservation, promotes use and reuse of historical material? How can digital archives be structured and categorised in a way so that they become a resource for contemporary movements rather than a static repository? Finally, it will look at how Leftovers has started to develop networks of sisterly archives who share digitisations and back-up each other’s data.

Amalia S Levi, Archivist/Cultural heritage Professional, HeritEdge Connection, Bonn University’s Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies

Title: Archival Dependencies: The Cascading Violence of Colonial Records.

Abstract: Collections as data approaches capture that which is already visible. We usually focus on content to be extracted, and neglect contextual information that is “lost in translation” with each successive reformatting of archival material. As heritage collections metamorphose from analogue into digital and furthermore into data, silences and legacies of empire, colonialism, and nationalism are reinscribed and exacerbated. Deliberately unearthing and emphasizing dependencies in archival collections can provide us with generative ways to follow the life trajectories of enslaved people.

Sloane Lab seminar series

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
nadezhdapovroznik (June 26, 2023). (Re)connecting heritage collections as data, infrastructure, and participatory engagement: big dreams, big challenges: Sloane Lab online seminar series is over. HDSM. Retrieved April 19, 2025 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/1024


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