Read on Twitter
Hi! I’m the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at @edinburghuni, & today I’ll be talking about the digitisation of Gallery, Library, Archive & Museum (GLAM) material in the context of #Covid19, & how that intersects with #digitalhumanities research interests #DHgoesVIRAL 1/20
First, I want to acknowledge how stressful a time this is for all of us. Also the work that went into the sudden shut down of our memory institutions. More than ever, we are all dependent on digital, & the digitisation of all of society #DHgoesVIRAL 2/20 https://twitter.com/AliceStrang/status/1243428529863188480
We’re dependent on cultural content for our wellbeing, as well as our work. It has been wonderful to see the GLAM sector rise to the challenge of content creation, & dissemination, communicating with a vastly increased digital audience #DHgoesVIRAL 3/20 https://twitter.com/levostregc/status/1243339092772835329?s=11
It’s a real time to sweat those previously digitised cultural heritage assets! We’ve seen streamed content, 3D tours, virtual exhibitions, online webinars, broadcast of archival films, interactive quizzes, Q&As, and even #IIIF jigsaws! #DHgoesVIRAL 4/20 https://twitter.com/bl_madedigital/status/1240982454007193600?s=11
I’m particularly interested in using the digital to co-produce content. First, of course, crowdsourcing is an established method in the GLAM sector, and when’s a better time to ask volunteers to contribute to transcription projects? #DHgoesVIRAL 5/20 https://twitter.com/CILIPCIG/status/1242816687369568256?s=20
Or, recreate your favourite artwork in isolation: this initiative from @GettyMuseum shows the power of social media interaction around cultural heritage in a time of shutdown, & has had a phenomenal, hilarious response. Content as tonic! #DHgoesVIRAL 6/20 https://twitter.com/gettymuseum/status/1242845952974544896?s=11
Art, Literature, and History are important parts of modern society, and it’s been great to see such personal, organic engagement with digital collections. This stuff may not be life and death, but it is certainly life, & life just now. #DHgoesVIRAL 7/20 https://twitter.com/annacmmurray/status/1243165182349717506
This is a phenomenal creative response to the closing of physical doors of heritage institutions. All those poor objects, without the audiences they were designed for! At least we have the digital of some, & also – user generated content #DHgoesVIRAL 8/20 https://twitter.com/profdanhicks/status/1245077194759700486?s=11
There are many things to consider about this... Firstly: it doesn’t happen without a lot of work behind the GLAM scenes. There are armies of folk keeping the infrastructure up and running and creating content available for others to use #DHgoesVIRAL 9/20 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1243954064133627904?s=20
Second, old bugbears have not gone away in a time of pandemic! Copyright, licensing, and commercial imperatives still abide! Do explore the kerfuffle around the wonderful #NationalEmergencyLibrary from the fabulous @internetarchive #DHgoesVIRAL 10/20 https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1244730407737634816?s=20
It can take time to work out institutional responses, & change digital infrastructures. This doesn’t happen without people, who, like the rest of us, are worried, stressed, & juggling. There's great work happening throughout the sector #DHgoesVIRAL 11/20 https://twitter.com/UkNatArchives/status/1245340191964958721
Our digital libraries and archives may hold crucial clues and content about how to help with the #covid19 outbreak: particularly this is the case with scientific literature. Now is the time for institutional bravery around access! #DHgoesVIRAL 12/20 https://twitter.com/petermurrayrust/status/1244191334879150082
But, digitisation depends on people. We can only build on what has been previously digitised, at the moment, which brings in issues about resourcing, equality, and known biases in the digital canon. And I know you wouldn’t do this but… #DHgoesVIRAL 13/20 https://twitter.com/arkhamlibrarian/status/1242100248534757383
It’s not an equal playing field (it never has been): many smaller institutions may not have the resources to digitally pivot right now. And remember, of course, only a fraction of the world’s heritage collections are digitised anyways. #DHgoesVIRAL 14/20 https://twitter.com/heyshaelyn/status/1244646181873074178
Wait a minute! Where’s the #digitalhumanities in all this? Well, we’re dependent on access to cultural heritage data to do analysis. Shout out to the amazing Data Foundry at the @natlibscot re how to deliver data well to researchers! #DHgoesVIRAL 15/20 https://twitter.com/semames1/status/1239547150981369856?s=11
If I had one suggestion re watching Digital Cultural Heritage, and the sweating of digitised assets, over the past couple of weeks… there’s a lot of content broadcast going on, assuming a certain type of relatively passive consumption #DHgoesVIRAL 16/20 https://twitter.com/hyperallergic/status/1243727926543220738?s=20
DH can ask… where does the data come into play here? What resources can we make more open to researchers? What data can we let others analyse? How can the DH community help guide this? see @thomasgpadilla's work on collections as data: #DHgoesVIRAL 17/20 https://zenodo.org/record/3152935#.XoTD-S-ZNBw
This is happening behind the scenes as GLAM staff now work from home, even at a time of great uncertainty, including transcription, metadata cleaning, catalogue improving, and OCR checking, to help their audiences further down the line! #DHgoesVIRAL 18/20 https://twitter.com/kcur/status/1245095775245193217
We’ve many new users of @transkribus, our Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for manuscripts tool: some people have a chance to experiment. It’s digital cultural heritage’s time! Are we ready to embrace it, & work together with GLAM institutions on data needs? #DHgoesVIRAL 19/20
The concluding question for the #digitalhumanities community is: with all this work by the GLAM sector pros on digital, are we ready to work with & alongside them, to make the most of these data and digital assets, when our own capacity for research returns? #DHgoesVIRAL 20/20
