Hello everyone, my name is Tugce Karatas.
I'm a PhD fellow in the programme Digital Technologies for Cultural Heritage
hosted by Department of Computer Science
the University of Torino, Italy.
And with my supervisor Prof. Vincenzo Lombardo,
we will present today:
A Multiple Perspective Account
of Digital Curation for Culture Heritage.
I will be talking about the tasks,
disciplines and institutions specifically.
So just start to give you the glimpse of the presentation,
I will be talking about the Digital Curation
through the schema that we created.
And in this schema, I will be talking about
the cultural heritage domain from its the beginning till the end.
What is happening...
What all the tasks...
What are digital technologies...
The goal of this research is examining the contribution of digital curation
which is fairly new in the field of cultural heritage.
By doing that I will be reviewing
the component of the cultural heritage tasks, the curatorial tasks for
the cultural heritage specifically and some digital tools.
In the long term, my project is about
developing a unified digital curation framework.
And... What is this digital curation?
Managing data actively from its point of creation or
acquisition until it's determined to be useful or not useful - or the end -
considering all the accessibility, preservation, personalization or
authentication issues.
Some of them consider it as an operational workflow.
It basically consists of preservation, data creation and management.
It combines all these things
from the lifecycle of the cultural heritage assets.
Also, an emerging field...
Because it's kind of making relations
between the researcher, practice, training...
multinational, multidisciplinary...
Then... Why digital creation is still far from being a common practice?
In fact, as much as the digital technologies are evolving,
cultural heritage institutions are
still neglecting the importance of the information technologies, right?
Cultural heritage assets physically are not the same as digital assets.
And there are several softwares, several digital environments and several disciplines.
Since its beginning till now,
- beginning, I mean the first time
the digital curation term is coined in 2001 -
there are several institutions,
several researchers tried to create frameworks for digital curation.
As you can see there are a couple of frameworks
but there is not one simple or unified framework yet.
What we did is we examined these frameworks
and we got six different tasks.
So later, I will be talking through all these six tasks
which is data creation or acquisition...
data curation and preservation...
data publication and dissemination...
And I will give examples and explain the tasks and technologies.
So overall the schema as you can see here
starts with the cultural heritage domain
and ends with either the archive, repository
or the publication, website and exhibition.
Just to start with the data creation or acquisition,
as you know that
the acquisition is about bringing data from an outside source.
Whereas creation is getting this kind of measurements and the signals from
real-world physical connection and converting it in a digital
numeric values both of these either or and/or creation and
acquisition creates "raw data" after the process.
So, from the interdisciplinary account
these diverse tools and workflows
and this kind of decision of
the scientific communities to
what is the best tool for the best quality of the data is
very important in personalized access.
As an example, I think the Virtual Electronic Poem is the best example.
Because this project was a replica of the Le Corbusier -the famous architect-
Pavilion in 1958 in Brussels World Expo.
And later, the researchers tried to reconstruct it.
To virtually reconstruct it, they had to
on the left hand side
you can see the original
drawings of the architect Le Corbusier.
And these drawings acquired from Philips Archives.
But it wasn't enough to digitally reconstruct the pavilion.
They had to in the middle you can see that
they had to create the data from scratch.
Getting all this information so this combines the
data acquisition and the data creation together.
So another step is "data processing and modelling".
While we have the "raw data" after the process of
the data creation or acquisition,
now we had to get the processed data.
To do that this kind of creating conceptual model from "raw data".
And feed it with metadata.
By metadata, I mean the data about data.
In this sense, you have to also understand the role of metadata which is crucial.
So why it's crucial?
Different scientific communities
have different sets of metadata standards.
For example...
A very known example of Mona Lisa...
So on the left, you can see
EDM (European Data Model), Dublin Core or CIDOC-CRM.
So this kind of
enriching the data about Mona Lisa,
shows you that the provider is
in France and then also
you can get in the web "hasview" aspect.
And also as well as the CIDOC-CRM "person" of Leonardo da Vinci.
So the basic thing about data interpretation is making sense of all these numerical data from
different source and between scientific knowledge.
All the members of the project
need access to this kind of holistic overview of data.
For example, project "Çatalhöyük" is in Konya, Turkey.
And it's one of the long term, multinational,
multidisciplinary project, archaeological project, maybe in Turkey.
Over 40- 50 years, numerous of the disciplines, numerous of the people
international and national worked on this project, right?
So what digital technologies and digital curation allow us to get
during this task of data interpretation to be more specific is that
giving this access of the knowledge by layer by layer.
All these colors represent the different years,
different scientific communities. And it combines them in one virtual environment.
GIS is specifically for work on the archaeological project.
Geographic Information System and to do that in order to do that you need to
get all this kind of scientific knowledge into
this kind of...
interpretation of the data.
The later, actually this is kind of overall umbrella
of data processing and modeling as well as data interpretation.
So it's kind of
protecting and preserving the data.
These management of the data is
actually more related with the semantic relationships
between things and people
also the artifacts and this kind of digital parts
and relational database as well.
For example, so this repository
tDar, maybe you might know, is about archaeological knowledge.
And as you can see on the left hand side,
there is fragment of the ontology.
In order to understand all this kind of the "curation and preservation" of
this data, you need to understand the data processing and interpretation.
But also the relations of the database 1 and 2.
As you can see and the numbers and
the taxonomies as well as the coding and sheets...
So these kind of environments and tools,
digital tools gives you holistic view about the project.
And also data documentation and archiving.
Here is, as you might notice that
archive and the repository is not the same thing.
What it means that
this kind of the managing the metadata information about this kind of tables
and database and understand how to use the data
and this gives you the opportunity to learn who collect it,
where it was collected. When, where or how...
To understand that I'm gonna give you an example,
So while we were talking about Çatalhöyük project obviously
everything collected during the years can not be in the archive because this
kind of living archive website it shows you who collected and
how it was collected. And it's open access.
In the personalization aspect,
different scientific fields can also contribute this knowledge on the
creation of the project.
But at the same time you have to be purposeful in terms of
archiving so it can be by years by who and by where and when...
so it's kind of...
providing you this purposeful archiving website through this platform.
The last one is data publication and dissemination.
Here it's very simply
providing this data from one source to the several different sources.
It means using these interfaces
you present and publish and disseminate the knowledge.
For one of the project that we were involved "BeArchaeo"
building this website.
This website actually serves both publication and
also dissemination propose.
Anyone can reach this data but this data comes from
strictly from these excavations in Japan, about a cofun under a tomb.
and it's
also coming from the different scientific perspective.
In order to do
that creating this kind of interfaces for the users both for
scientific and general public
it is very crucial to have this personalised access.
Because also it gives you an opportunity to combine back-end and the
front-end and also this kind of knowledge when is created in the system
you can reflect it in the exhibitions.
And you can reflect it in the publication
So what we learned? And just conclude a little bit...
It is important to conceptualise the entire process.
Digital curation gives you this opportunity.
And also gives you this kind of management skills
to decide the tasks in advance.
Because it's important to define the
roles and responsibilities in the beginning.
And to do that you need to
gain the knowledge
and also then exchange the know-how to train for the
specific tools and the software application
which I told that it's not
the same for each scientific communities.
Digital curation helps these issues of the personalization.
The further steps of my research, on the other hand,
is about reviewing the tasks and frameworks.
And then compare them.
Then eventually, create a unified digital curation framework.
Thank you.
We would like to hear your thoughts.
I hope you enjoyed.
You can always email me and my supervisor.
Also, I put some additional info here.
If you are interested in the BeArchaeo project
and also my PhD program Tech4Culture...
You can always reach me through my personal website.
Thank you!