Sabharwal Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities

Preserving and Promoting Archival and Special Collections
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-08-100178-3
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 182 Seiten

Archives and special collections departments have a long history of preserving and providing long-term access to organizational records, rare books, and other unique primary sources including manuscripts, photographs, recordings, and artifacts in various formats. The careful curatorial attention to such records has also ensured that such records remain available to researchers and the public as sources of knowledge, memory, and identity. Digital curation presents an important framework for the continued preservation of digitized and born-digital collections, given the ephemeral and device-dependent nature of digital content. With the emergence of analog and digital media formats in close succession (compared to earlier paper- and film-based formats) came new standards, technologies, methods, documentation, and workflows to ensure safe storage and access to content and associated metadata. Researchers in the digital humanities have extensively applied computing to research; for them, continued access to primary data and cultural heritage means both the continuation of humanities scholarship and new methodologies not possible without digital technology. Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities, therefore, comprises a joint framework for preserving, promoting, and accessing digital collections. This book explores at great length the conceptualization of digital curation projects with interdisciplinary approaches that combine the digital humanities and history, information architecture, social networking, and other themes for such a framework. The individual chapters focus on the specifics of each area, but the relationships holding the knowledge architecture and the digital curation lifecycle model together remain an overarching theme throughout the book; thus, each chapter connects to others on a conceptual, theoretical, or practical level. - Theoretical and practical perspectives on digital curation in the digital humanities and history - In-depth study of the role of social media and a social curation ecosystem - The role of hypertextuality and information architecture in digital curation - Study of collaboration and organizational dimensions in digital curation - Reviews of important web tools in digital humanities

Arjun Sabharwal joined the University of Toledo Library faculty in January 2009 as Assistant Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian. He holds a Master of Library and Information Science and a Graduate Certificate in Archival Administration in addition to previously earned graduate degrees. He oversees the digital preservation of archival collections, manages the Toledo's Attic virtual museum web site, designs virtual exhibitions, leads the planning and implementation of UTOPIA (The University of Toledo OPen Institutional Archive) and the University of Toledo Digital Repository at the university, and manages digitization projects. Current professional interests include archiving, digital humanities, digital history, and developing thematic research collections. He has authored several research articles and reviews, and presented at conferences on work related to archives and digital libraries. Since 2010, he has engaged in digital scholarship via his international blog on ResearchGate titled Digital Humanities and Archives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sabharwal, Arjun

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1

Defining digital curation in the digital humanities context

Abstract

Digital curation, as represented through the digital content lifecycle model, involves the preservation, promotion, and long-term access to born-digital and digitized collections of heritage material, data, and publications supporting research with surviving (albeit considered obsolete), current, and emerging digital technologies. Social curation involves community and public feedback using various social media platforms; it aims to add meanings to collections and enrich public discourse on collection or exhibition themes. The definitions for curation, digital curation, digital preservation, and digital humanities data curation outline the scope of digital curation. There are multiple levels of curation, which vary by the institutional context, but this chapter emphasizes the principle that archives perform vital services to ensure accessibility to data used in digital humanities and sciences. This chapter focuses on digital curation as a practical framework for preserving and promoting cultural heritage collections, data, and other forms of digital content as well as discussing the various levels of curation aiming to preserve the quality and integrity of those collections and data. Although scholarly work in the digital humanities may extend beyond the physical archives, many projects will continue to use primary sources and data from archives and the digital repositories they maintain.

Keywords

Archives; Curation; Digital curation; Digital humanities data curation; Digital preservation; Levels of curation

Digital curation involves the preservation, promotion, and providing long-term access to born-digital and digitized collections of heritage material, data, and publications supporting research with surviving (albeit considered obsolete), current, and emerging digital technologies. As with the term “archive,” “digital curation” needs a semantic clarification, as it has different meanings in the context of archival profession and digital humanities, given also the distinct perspectives of collaborating archivists and digital humanists. Digital archivists focus on preserving digital content in the context of archiving whereas some digital humanists, on creating thematic collections to create new interpretations, theoretical frameworks, and knowledge. There is also social curation, which involves community and public feedback using various social media platforms; its aim is to add meanings to the collections and enrich public discourse on collection or exhibition themes. The overlap in the definitions and applications of digital curation in these related contexts brings archivists, digital humanists, and the public together, and thus enhances collaboration at various levels of curation. This chapter calls this collaborative framework the digital curation workspace because it expands the meaning of “digital curation” to represent the works of collaborating archivists, librarians, digital humanists, technologists, information architects, and the public in different—perhaps intersubjective—contexts.

In his Introduction and Welcome talk at a Seminar in London titled “Digital Curation: Digital archives, libraries and e-science seminar” sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition and the British National Space Centre, Beagrie (2001) ascribed the emergence of “digital curation” to the continuing interdisciplinary dialogue between scientists and librarians. The association of digital curators with scientific work by Lord and Macdonald (2003) has placed digital curators in an active role of preserving and adding value to collections for the public good by promoting new science and maintaining a solid community of scientists. In the sciences, curation refers to the maintenance and publishing of databases containing knowledge and evidence, annotations, linkage, management, validation, and editorial input providing value to the digital library. In the digital humanities context, however, the definition of curation—rooted in fourteenth-century practices and associated primarily with museum artifacts—has undergone significant changes due to the influence of emerging technologies and the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship. “Digital curation has added a new dimensionality to the mix, which is technical knowledge, but even here technological knowledge is key but not a requirement” (Tebeau, 2011, “Digital Humanities Curation,” para. 4).

The interdisciplinary scope of digital humanities not only spans the humanities and technology, however, but as Flanders and Muñoz (2011) point out, it also covers archival science, library and information science, computer science, systems, and records management. The digital humanities have also introduced new methodologies for the analysis, interpretation, and visualization of humanities data, which present a separate and new level of curation in addition to existing practices. The mutual relationship between digital humanities and digital curation is explained by the digital humanities’ role to provide an interdisciplinary framework to support collaboration among scholars, archivists, librarians, and technologists on the one hand and to promote the role of digital curation for the long-term preservation of and access to resources needed in the digital humanities on the other.

This chapter focuses on digital curation as a practical framework for preserving and promoting cultural heritage collections, data, and other forms of digital content as well as discussing the various levels of curation aiming to preserve the quality and integrity of those collections and data. Although scholarly work in the digital humanities may extend beyond the physical archives, many projects will continue to use primary sources and data from archives and the digital repositories they maintain. The chapter first reviews foundational definitions of curation and digital curation, followed by discussions of the digital content lifecycle, levels of curation, and levels of representation essential to understanding the digital curation process. Then the chapter explicates digital humanities data curation and various aspects of treating and interpreting humanities data. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on linked open data, including curating heritage collections, archives, and libraries. Although mashups present both primary and secondary data to create new services, the curation of such data also serves an important purpose: to preserve the relationship of data and collections from multiple sources and to build a broader ontological framework for preserving knowledge. The preservation of metadata in this context not only enhances the lifecycle of digital contents but also the continued accessibility of humanistic and scientific data across multiple generations of data models, file types, and other obsolete material. To this end, archives may become the epistemic bridge between the world of print on one side and digital content on the other, ensuring a continuum of knowledge transfer from print and analog to digital. However, this model does not advocate abandoning nondigital collections for the sake of emerging popular technologies.

Foundational definitions for curation

The lexical definition for curation, offered in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), is “guardianship,” which falls under the purview of the curator defined in Oxford as the “officer in charge of a museum, gallery of art, library; a keeper, custodian” (p. 625). While the online version of Oxford Dictionaries does not define curation per se, it is derived from curate, which means “select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition)” and “select, organize, and present (suitable content, typically for online or computational use)” (Oxford, 2013, “curate”). The Museum Curation Community (2013) Web site defines “museum curation” as “The practice of managing historically valuable collections of artifacts,” but adds that “museum curators should not be confused with museum archivists; a museum archivist usually only works with valuable documents” (“museum curation,” para. 1). The distinction applies to archivists in general but not to repositories that accept three-dimensional objects as part of a larger donation of private collections, historical manuscripts, and organizational records.

The semantic clarification of curation, preservation, and archiving has been the work of Lord and Macdonald (2003) addressing the differences between these terms describing three curatorial activities:

Curation: The activity of, managing and promoting the use of data, from its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use. For dynamic datasets this may mean continuous enrichment or updating to keep it fit for purpose. Higher levels of curation (as in the Digital Humanities) will also involve maintaining links with annotation and with other published materials.

Archiving: A curation activity which ensures that data is properly selected, stored, can be accessed and that its logical and physical integrity is maintained over time, including security and authenticity.

Preservation (after Hedstrom): “An activity within archiving in which specific items of data are maintained over time so that they can still be accessed and understood through changes in technology.”

As cited in Lord and Macdonald (2003, p. 12)

The Glossary of Archival and Records...