Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people's national collection
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Glasgow
Department Name: School of Humanities
Abstract
The national collection is distributed throughout communities, localities, and national organisations. In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a form of 'citizen history' that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past. This reservoir could immeasurably enrich our national and global understanding but remains largely untapped, hard to find, and at risk of disappearing altogether.
The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK's prime cultural assets, but it is 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers. CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, meaning that resources often funded and produced by the public stand alone or are inaccessible. Diverse community-focused voices, sustaining the fragile histories of communities in transition, have effectively been silenced within our shared national collection. Existing solutions to this problem involving bespoke interventionist activities are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, whilst any unsophisticated computational integration of this data would result in a lowest-common-denominator solution which would erase the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators.
The Our Heritage, Our Stories project responds to this urgent challenge by bringing together a powerful partnership, including researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at our HEI partners, the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA), the project's lead IRO. This team will bring cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC and the collections of TNA. We will collaborate in this process with leading UK heritage organisations, including Tate, the British Museum, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations holding digital content created by and relating to communities. Our geographic range is essential for a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK.
Our project will use multidisciplinary methods to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable within the national collection, while respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity by co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make it searchable and connected. We will showcase its new accessibility to the world through a major new public-facing Observatory at TNA where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections, we will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences and open them up for research - demonstrated via multidisciplinary case studies - and embed new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training. Public engagement is a driving theme in our project, which will be developed on principles of co-production and participatory design.
The lasting legacies of this project will be the wealth of previously siloed, hidden, and fragmented CGDC it will situate and render discoverable. By so doing, we will revolutionise our understanding of the past, and the methods and means to achieve this, by developing cutting-edge tools, AI methods, historical and linguistic research, and new frameworks for sustainable archival practice. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.
The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK's prime cultural assets, but it is 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers. CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, meaning that resources often funded and produced by the public stand alone or are inaccessible. Diverse community-focused voices, sustaining the fragile histories of communities in transition, have effectively been silenced within our shared national collection. Existing solutions to this problem involving bespoke interventionist activities are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, whilst any unsophisticated computational integration of this data would result in a lowest-common-denominator solution which would erase the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators.
The Our Heritage, Our Stories project responds to this urgent challenge by bringing together a powerful partnership, including researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at our HEI partners, the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA), the project's lead IRO. This team will bring cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC and the collections of TNA. We will collaborate in this process with leading UK heritage organisations, including Tate, the British Museum, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations holding digital content created by and relating to communities. Our geographic range is essential for a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK.
Our project will use multidisciplinary methods to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable within the national collection, while respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity by co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make it searchable and connected. We will showcase its new accessibility to the world through a major new public-facing Observatory at TNA where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections, we will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences and open them up for research - demonstrated via multidisciplinary case studies - and embed new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training. Public engagement is a driving theme in our project, which will be developed on principles of co-production and participatory design.
The lasting legacies of this project will be the wealth of previously siloed, hidden, and fragmented CGDC it will situate and render discoverable. By so doing, we will revolutionise our understanding of the past, and the methods and means to achieve this, by developing cutting-edge tools, AI methods, historical and linguistic research, and new frameworks for sustainable archival practice. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.
Organisations
- University of Glasgow (Lead Research Organisation)
- Digital Preservation Coalition (Collaboration)
- National Library of Scotland (Collaboration)
- National Library of Wales (Collaboration)
- Tate (Project Partner)
- Digital Preservation Coalition (United Kingdom) (Project Partner)
- British Museum (Project Partner)
- Software Sustainability Institute (Project Partner)
- Association for Learning Technology (Project Partner)
Description | Digital Humanities Data Hive: Accessing Humanities Data At Scale |
Amount | £93,320 (GBP) |
Funding ID | AH/W007584/1 |
Organisation | Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 11/2021 |
End | 03/2022 |
Description | Collaboration on further project bid - Digital Humanities Data Hive: Accessing Humanities Data At Scale (funded by AHRC) |
Organisation | Digital Preservation Coalition |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
PI Contribution | During discussions with project partners, the need for further projects to develop digital humanities infrastructure became apparent. The Our Heritage, Our Stories research team therefore researched and wrote a funding proposal for a further scoping project investigating the current DH data landscape. The aim of this scoping project is to generate a business case and project plan for the Digital Humanities Data Hive that lays out its feasibility and high-level specification and addresses its value, challenges, barriers, opportunities, sustainability, and costs. |
Collaborator Contribution | Partners on Our Heritage, Our Stories contributed their expertise and insight on Digital Humanities data to produce and support this further funding proposal. Their detailed knowledge of the current DH data landscape, and its strengths and limitations, served to initially establish the need for further research. They also contributed their knowledge to the development and refinement of the proposal, ensuring the scoping project proposed would appropriately and comprehensively survey existing approaches and infrastructure. |
Impact | A full project bid was produced by this collaboration with partners on Our Heritage, Our Stories. This bid was submitted to the AHRC's funding call 'Digital Research Infrastructure' in September 2021 and was successfully funded, with work on this project currently ongoing. |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | Collaboration on further project bid - Digital Humanities Data Hive: Accessing Humanities Data At Scale (funded by AHRC) |
Organisation | National Library of Scotland |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | During discussions with project partners, the need for further projects to develop digital humanities infrastructure became apparent. The Our Heritage, Our Stories research team therefore researched and wrote a funding proposal for a further scoping project investigating the current DH data landscape. The aim of this scoping project is to generate a business case and project plan for the Digital Humanities Data Hive that lays out its feasibility and high-level specification and addresses its value, challenges, barriers, opportunities, sustainability, and costs. |
Collaborator Contribution | Partners on Our Heritage, Our Stories contributed their expertise and insight on Digital Humanities data to produce and support this further funding proposal. Their detailed knowledge of the current DH data landscape, and its strengths and limitations, served to initially establish the need for further research. They also contributed their knowledge to the development and refinement of the proposal, ensuring the scoping project proposed would appropriately and comprehensively survey existing approaches and infrastructure. |
Impact | A full project bid was produced by this collaboration with partners on Our Heritage, Our Stories. This bid was submitted to the AHRC's funding call 'Digital Research Infrastructure' in September 2021 and was successfully funded, with work on this project currently ongoing. |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | Collaboration on further project bid - Digital Humanities Data Hive: Accessing Humanities Data At Scale (funded by AHRC) |
Organisation | National Library of Wales |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
PI Contribution | During discussions with project partners, the need for further projects to develop digital humanities infrastructure became apparent. The Our Heritage, Our Stories research team therefore researched and wrote a funding proposal for a further scoping project investigating the current DH data landscape. The aim of this scoping project is to generate a business case and project plan for the Digital Humanities Data Hive that lays out its feasibility and high-level specification and addresses its value, challenges, barriers, opportunities, sustainability, and costs. |
Collaborator Contribution | Partners on Our Heritage, Our Stories contributed their expertise and insight on Digital Humanities data to produce and support this further funding proposal. Their detailed knowledge of the current DH data landscape, and its strengths and limitations, served to initially establish the need for further research. They also contributed their knowledge to the development and refinement of the proposal, ensuring the scoping project proposed would appropriately and comprehensively survey existing approaches and infrastructure. |
Impact | A full project bid was produced by this collaboration with partners on Our Heritage, Our Stories. This bid was submitted to the AHRC's funding call 'Digital Research Infrastructure' in September 2021 and was successfully funded, with work on this project currently ongoing. |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | Discussion panel: Masterpiece International Art Fair Symposium |
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 | The Masterpiece International Art Fair themed its symposium on Museums, Research and Discovery. Its panel on Modes of Discovery focussed sharing data between institutions and with the public can lead to types of discovery that might not otherwise be possible. My contribution to the discussion explored collaboration between collections, provenance, public participation in research, how technologies such as machine learning, computer vision and crowdsourcing platforms can generate new ways of understanding and interacting with collections, and how community-generated digital content can be linked to established collections. 70 people attended the online panel and break-out sessions afterwards. The organisers reported a high level of engagement. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUvduGhrD8iGNONAcct528BGY8dMI9ejcDO |
Description | Keynote lecture for Maltese national project launch |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Pip Willcox, Head of Research at The National Archives, delivered the keynote lecture at the launch of Memorja, the National Oral Sound and Vision archive in Malta. The lecture explored digital public engagement with archival collections, including through citizen research and through co-designing automated methods of linking community-generated digital content to more established collections. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://nationalarchives.gov.mt/en/Pages/Memorja.aspx |
Description | Our Heritage Our Stories project website |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | An academic domain was registered to host a project information website - ohos.ac.uk. This website features a project summary, information on project team members, and information on project events. This website will be regularly updated with engagement activities as these take place throughout the project. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
URL | http://www.ohos.ac.uk |
Description | Social Media |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | The project's Twitter account is the primary interactive means of engaging the public with our activities. It has been used to consolidate our network of researchers, collection users, and information and heritage professionals: it is a platform for sharing ideas and knowledge about the activities of OHOS and the wider 'Towards a National Collection' programme. Additionally, information about research and public events will be advertised via our social media platform. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://twitter.com/OHOS_NatColl |