Linked.Art: Networking Digital Collections and Scholarship
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Engineering Science
Abstract
'Linked.Art: Networking Digital Collections and Scholarship' brings together researchers and experts from some of the leading art museums in the UK and US. In a spirit of technological cooperation and collaboration they will work to unlock the data within their collections and provide a transformative foundation for digital scholarship and public access. Partners include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institution, The V&A, The National Gallery of Art (US), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Frick Collection, and the American Numismatics Society.
The network is proposed and supported by an experienced team at the University of Oxford, which itself embodies the multidisciplinary approach of the wider network, building on a partnership between the e-Research Centre, the Centre for Digital Scholarship, and the University's Gardens Libraries and Museums: the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, the Museum of the History of Science, the Museum of Natural History, and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
At the core of the network's activities is the Linked.Art model, initially developed at the J Paul Getty Trust. The model provides a template by which digital records describing works of art can be organised and structured in a consistent manner, so that information from different cultural heritage institutions can be compared and combined. At a technical level, this allows digital connections to be made between collections on a global scale using Linked Data, which in turn can enables computational algorithms to assist complex scholarly investigations - as well as providing for more straightforward voyages of discovery!
Experts in the research network will work together to discuss and debate how machines should apply and interpret a standardised set of concepts and relationships - such as what the work of art is, what it depicts, when it was created, sold (or stolen) and exhibited. They will consult with academics to ensure the relevance and utility of the Linked.Art model which will underpins this 'web of data', so providing for a step change in opportunities for digital art history and provenance scholarship.
The network is proposed and supported by an experienced team at the University of Oxford, which itself embodies the multidisciplinary approach of the wider network, building on a partnership between the e-Research Centre, the Centre for Digital Scholarship, and the University's Gardens Libraries and Museums: the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, the Museum of the History of Science, the Museum of Natural History, and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
At the core of the network's activities is the Linked.Art model, initially developed at the J Paul Getty Trust. The model provides a template by which digital records describing works of art can be organised and structured in a consistent manner, so that information from different cultural heritage institutions can be compared and combined. At a technical level, this allows digital connections to be made between collections on a global scale using Linked Data, which in turn can enables computational algorithms to assist complex scholarly investigations - as well as providing for more straightforward voyages of discovery!
Experts in the research network will work together to discuss and debate how machines should apply and interpret a standardised set of concepts and relationships - such as what the work of art is, what it depicts, when it was created, sold (or stolen) and exhibited. They will consult with academics to ensure the relevance and utility of the Linked.Art model which will underpins this 'web of data', so providing for a step change in opportunities for digital art history and provenance scholarship.
Planned Impact
Primary beneficiaries beyond academia will be the art museums directly engaged with the network (listed in the full Pathways to Impact). Successful establishment of the network will ultimately lead to definition and delivery of a complete Linked.Art model, which will benefit art museums through the lowered individual costs of delivering a Linked Data platform - the overheads of refining the model will be shared amongst the collective efforts of the network participants. The models will be documented and shared with the community on a public website, with explanations of both how and when they can be used, examples of what a conforming implementation might produce, and "recipes" or "walk-throughs" for how institutions have used the models to solve their own, real, problems.
A secondary benefit of a completed model will, in due course, be the improved discoverability of any single museum's collection, given improved means to cross-link between collections sharing common data structures via Linked.Art standards. This discoverability will extend to automated retrieval and processing by assistive algorithms, opening collections to new approaches of digital scholarship, thereby increasing awareness and understanding of collection content.
During the initial network phase, participating museums will benefit from:
* the assurance that their local use cases, if shared by others, will be met by the Linked.Art data model
* recognition of their contribution to advancing the field of Linked Data in cultural heritage
* direct access to other experts in the field for discussion of the best solutions for addressing the challenges of cultural heritage data
The wider art museum and cultural heritage sector will also benefit from the leadership and advocacy activities undertaken by the network, building knowledge, experience and innovation capacity in the UK and US. The network will engage with sector bodies such as the American Art Collective, PHAROS consortium, and UK University Museums Group. Linked.Art will be incorporated into material delivered at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which is attended by a range of industry professionals and practitioners.
General benefits to the sector include:
* documentation of a shared and consistent data model for use in art museums around the world
* advancement of the shared mission of providing easy access to institutional collections and research, encouraging other organisations to follow suit
* the cost-savings for institutions around the world to not have to design, document, and implement their own data model and conforming software
* simpler availability of museums data to external programmers wishing to consume collections information and become involved in the wider art historical information ecosystem
* an expanding body of experience and practice ready to be extended into cultural heritage applications beyond works of art
An ongoing governance structure will also be discussed to ensure the longevity and sustainability of the work, including the potential to have the model incorporated under the umbrella of an existing standards organization such as the IIIF Consortium, W3C, DCMI or ICOM.
A secondary benefit of a completed model will, in due course, be the improved discoverability of any single museum's collection, given improved means to cross-link between collections sharing common data structures via Linked.Art standards. This discoverability will extend to automated retrieval and processing by assistive algorithms, opening collections to new approaches of digital scholarship, thereby increasing awareness and understanding of collection content.
During the initial network phase, participating museums will benefit from:
* the assurance that their local use cases, if shared by others, will be met by the Linked.Art data model
* recognition of their contribution to advancing the field of Linked Data in cultural heritage
* direct access to other experts in the field for discussion of the best solutions for addressing the challenges of cultural heritage data
The wider art museum and cultural heritage sector will also benefit from the leadership and advocacy activities undertaken by the network, building knowledge, experience and innovation capacity in the UK and US. The network will engage with sector bodies such as the American Art Collective, PHAROS consortium, and UK University Museums Group. Linked.Art will be incorporated into material delivered at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which is attended by a range of industry professionals and practitioners.
General benefits to the sector include:
* documentation of a shared and consistent data model for use in art museums around the world
* advancement of the shared mission of providing easy access to institutional collections and research, encouraging other organisations to follow suit
* the cost-savings for institutions around the world to not have to design, document, and implement their own data model and conforming software
* simpler availability of museums data to external programmers wishing to consume collections information and become involved in the wider art historical information ecosystem
* an expanding body of experience and practice ready to be extended into cultural heritage applications beyond works of art
An ongoing governance structure will also be discussed to ensure the longevity and sustainability of the work, including the potential to have the model incorporated under the umbrella of an existing standards organization such as the IIIF Consortium, W3C, DCMI or ICOM.
Publications
Weigl D
(2019)
Combine or connect: Practical experiences querying library linked data
in Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Description | Through the support of the Linked Art Research Networks, researchers and museum professionals from the UK and US have participated in the Linked Art Editorial Board, working on a common profile to be used for sharing art collections data between museums and other institutions and users. In addition, the research network ran outreach workshops for scholars and museum professionals to explain and situate Linked Art in the context of their work, laying the groundwork for future adoption by institutions. |
Exploitation Route | Once the first version of the Linked Art Profile is completed and published, art institutions will be able to implement the Profile to share their collections data, and link it to the collections of other museums. This, in turn, will unlock these collections for digital scholarship and public access. |
Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
URL | https://linked.art/model/ |
Description | Early adoption and evaluation of the Linked Art Profile is beginning in the cultural heritage sector. 'Van Gogh Worldwide', led by the Rijksmuseum, was an early example. Linked Art can now also be seen (or rather 'behind the scenes') in the new collections interface from the Getty, and is the basis for the unifying LUX system across collections at Yale. |
Sector | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
Impact Types | Cultural |
Description | Collaborative Doctoral Partnership - Novel application of computational approaches in addressing problematic terminology and descriptions within V&A Museum catalogues |
Amount | £93,414 (GBP) |
Funding ID | AH/X004775/1 (2784579) |
Organisation | Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 01/2023 |
End | 09/2026 |
Description | Linked Art II: Developing Community, Practice, and Scholarship |
Amount | £80,630 (GBP) |
Funding ID | AH/T013117/1 |
Organisation | Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 02/2020 |
End | 01/2021 |
Description | LinkedMusic project collaboration |
Organisation | McGill University |
Country | Canada |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | The principal investigator and a research team member are invited collaborators with the Canadian SSHRC-funded 'LinkedMusic' project, based at McGill University, where they contribute their accumulated expertise in digital music information systems and their application to digital musicology. |
Collaborator Contribution | The goal of the LinkedMusic Partnership is to link music databases through metadata schemas: structures for organizing information stored in a database. This will go a long way towards bringing online music search to the same level of sophistication currently possible for text-based resources, allowing us to answer fundamental questions about music and how it interacts with human creativity, society, culture, and history. |
Impact | - |
Start Year | 2022 |
Description | Connecting cultural heritage collections data with Linked Art |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Kevin Page and Tanya Gray presented the outcomes of Linked Art II at the Linked Data strand of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, including a hands-on practical workshop during which attendees were guided in learning how to use the software workflows for creating and manipulating Linked Art data which were developed in the project. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-humanities-oxford-summer-school |
Description | DReAM Lab workshop: Linked Data for the Humanities |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Dream Lab (Digital Resources and Methods) is a week-long digital humanities training opportunity hosted at the University of Pennsylvania and designed to help humanists become more confident and thoughtful users, creators and critics of digital technology. 19 people attended the 'Linked Data for the Humanities: a semantic web of scholarly data' workshop run and taught by Kevin Page and David Lewis. This drew upon data and tools developed at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, including from the FAST, Unlocking Musicology, Linked Art, and Mapping Manuscript Migrations projects. Delegates left the workshop with practical experience, new knowledge, and enthusiasm for Linked Data approaches, alongside new familiarity with these projects. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Data Scholarship for the Humanities, July 2019 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | The Oxford e-Research Centre Digital Humanities team organised and hosted a workshop on "Data Scholarship for the Humanities" on 5th July 2019. 15 attendees gained hands-on practical experience and new skills in learning to investigate datasets using computationally extracted features (e.g. from the HathiTrust Digital Library). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Linked Art Editorial Board |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | 25 international cultural institutions and Universities are represented on the Linked Art Editorial Board, working to standardise the Linked Art profile for sharing Linked Open Data describing Art. The Editorial Board meets fortnightly by teleconference, and biannually at face-to-face meetings. A first version of the profile is expected to be completed by Spring 2021. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019,2020,2021,2022,2023,2024 |
URL | https://linked.art/ |
Description | Linked Art Editorial Board face-to-face meeting (F2F1), 4th-6th March 2019, Los Angeles, USA |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | The first face-to-face meeting of the Linked Art Editorial Board took place at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, USA, on 4-6th March 2019. The group is standardising a Linked Data profile for art and artworks. Invited representatives were present from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Europeana, the Smithsonian Institute, Newfields - Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, University of Bologna, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Princeton University, University of Oxford, the Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and FORTH. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://linked.art/ |
Description | Linked Art Editorial Board face-to-face meeting (F2F2), 2nd-4th October, Oxford, UK |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | The second face-to-face meeting of the Linked Art Editorial Board took place at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, Oxford, UK, on 2nd-4th October 2019. The group is standardising a Linked Data profile for art and artworks. Invited representatives were present from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Europeana, the Smithsonian Institute, Newfields - Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, University of the Arts London, American Numismatic Society, the Rijksmuseum, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Princeton University, University of Oxford, the Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), University of Zurich, and FORTH. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://linked.art/ |
Description | Linked Art Editorial Board face-to-face meeting (F2F3), 28-30th January 2020, Philadelphia, USA |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | The third face-to-face meeting of the Linked Art Editorial Board took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA, on 28-30th January 2020. The group is standardising a Linked Data profile for art and artworks. Invited representatives were present from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Europeana, the Smithsonian Institute, Newfields - Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, University of the Arts London, American Numismatic Society, the Rijksmuseum, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Princeton University, University of Oxford, the Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), University of Zurich, and FORTH. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | https://linked.art/ |
Description | Linked Art briefing for NFDI4Culture |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Kevin Page and Rob Sanderson briefed the NFDI4Culture project on progress and plans for Linked Art within and in support of research infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities, and discussed the possibilities for future collaboration. NFDI4Culture is to establish a demand-oriented infrastructure for research data on tangible and intangible cultural assets within the overall structure of the German Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Linked Art sectoral engagement at Rijksmuseum |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Project members contributed to delivery of a Linked Art workshop hosted by the Rijksmuseum in October 2023, attended by representative of the host institution and art museums and associated cultural institutes, primarily from the Netherlands but also adjoining European countries. An introduction for Linked Art was presented alongside examples of its use, including those from the project; discussion was focussed on use and adoption by the represented institutions. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
Description | Linked Art: Networking Digital Collections and Scholarship event, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1st October 2019 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | The "Linked Art: Networking Digital Collections and Scholarship" event was held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London on 1st October 2019. The event was intended and advertised to professionals working with digital cultural heritage data in art museums and cultural heritage institutions, and scholars using those collections in their research. The full day event took the form of two halves: in the morning an overview of work-to-date on the Linked Art model was presented, including its use, benefits, implementation, and challenges of Linked Open Usable Data in an art museum environment; in the afternoon smaller, focussed, break-out groups discussed the uses and potential of Linked Art in their own institutions and with their data. A total of 72 attendees registered for the event, with excellent engagement with the workshop modelling activities in the afternoon; many expressed an interest in continuing to engage with Linked Art activities and outputs, with a view to potentially adopting the standard once it is completed. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/linked-Art-networking-digital-collections-scholarship |
Description | Linked Data for Digital Humanities talk - Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2019 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Kevin Page gave a talk on 'Linked Data for Digital Humanities: Introducing the Semantic Web' to the Introduction to Digital Humanities strand at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, on 25th July 2019. The Summer School offers training to anyone with an interest in the Digital Humanities, including academics at all career stages, students, project managers, and people who work in IT, libraries, and cultural heritage. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Panel at Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School - Data standards in the Digital Humanities |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Kevin Page and Tanya Gray were panellists on the topic of 'Data standards in the Digital Humanities' within the Linked Data strand at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-humanities-oxford-summer-school |
Description | Presentation at the Digital Humanities 2019 conference, July 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands (Kevin Page) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Kevin Page presented "A Layered Digital Library for Cataloguing and Research: Practical Experiences with Medieval Manuscripts, from TEI to Linked Data" at the DH2019 conference, the largest annual gathering of those working on and in the digital humanities. Co-authors of the work presented were Toby Burrows, Andrew Hankinson, Matthew Holford, Andrew Morrison, David Lewis, and Athanasios Velios. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Workshop on Uncertainty and Subjectivity in Provenance Linked Open Data |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Kevin Page was invited to participate in this workshop on Uncertainty and Subjectivity in Provenance Linked Open Data, hosted by Leuphana University, where he shared experience of applying Linked Art in research projects. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Workshops co-chair of ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 2019 (Kevin Page) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Kevin Page was invited to be co-chair of the workshops and tutorials programme for the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2019, held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, in June 2019. The conference is a key annual event for the digital libraries community; 4 workshops and and 5 tutorials were accepted and co-ordinated after review. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://2019.jcdl.org/ |