Program

23 November 2020:

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11:00 – 12:30: Opening & keynote

• Words of welcome
  Prof. Jaap van den Herik (PI/Leiden University)
  Dr. Christiane Klöditz (NWO)
  Stefan Einarson (Brill publishers, Leiden)
  Peter Schalk (Naturalis)

• Keynote lecture on From Event to Data Set: Perspective, structure, and the problem of representation in data-driven digital history by Sharon Leon (Michigan State University). (see abstract below ⬇ )

• Session chair: Andreas Weber (U Twente)

24 November 2020:

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11:30 - 12:30: Keynote lecture on The Data Challenge for Cultural and Natural Heritage by Franco Niccolucci (PIN - University of Florence) (see abstract below ⬇)

• Session chair: Marco de Niet (Leiden University, University Library)

Keynote lecture by Franco Niccolucci (PIN - University of Florence)

The data challenge for cultural and natural heritage

The challenge of managing cultural and natural heritage data depends on their ever-increasing amount vis-à-vis the limited researchers’ time to access, check and possibly use them. Their intrinsic nature of being heterogenous, fragmentary and interpretive makes such data difficult to find, examine and fully re-use with off-the-shelf tools. The lecture will analyse the requirements of a comprehensive approach, discussing which technology is available, which one needs further (but doable) work and which one appears as a promising solution but hides traps that can make it totally ineffective. The focus will be on semantics and on machine-actionable services, in order to guarantee a reliable and efficient data re-use as envisaged by the FAIR data principles.

Biography:

Franco Niccolucci is the director of VAST-LAB research laboratory at PIN in Prato, Italy. A former professor at the University of Florence until 2008, he has directed the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center at the Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, until 2013. Prof Niccolucci has coordinated several EU-funded projects on the applications of Information Technology to Archaeology, and is currently the coordinator of ARIADNEplus, a research infrastructure on archaeological data. His main research interests concern knowledge organization of archaeological documentation and the communication of cultural heritage. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of JOCCH, the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage. He has authored about 100 papers and book chapters.

Round table discussion convened by Martha Fleming (Natural History Museum of Denmark)

Semantics and Beyond: Modeling and enriching longue-durée biocultural data for answering interdisciplinary and epistemic research questions

Natural history museum collections are complex assemblages of biota, minerals, rocks and ores removed from their habitats and then embedded into museological, archival, documentary and classificatory information ecosystems that span hundreds of years — from manuscript notebooks to present-day genomic databases. In this regard, they are ‘biocultural’ collections: of high significance to all humanity, and research objects for both biology and the humanities. Entering a ‘collection,’ specimens are then transformed in multiple, technical and increasingly standardised ways: analysed, arrayed, redistributed, mounted for display, atomised, frozen, scanned at high resolution, sequenced, and of course catalogued. Then these analyses, fragments, scans, genomic sequences and catalogues are aggregated and publicly shared — often nowadays in digital form, and on a global scale.

All these activities are knowledge producing processes with epistemic value and consequences. Present-day database catalogues of these collections in no way represent the full scale of data that has been recorded about these materials, and of course do not contain significant bodies of often local and/or indigenous knowledge that were not recorded at the time of collection. Considerable collaborative efforts on the part of humanities, digital humanities, and information science scholars working as librarians, archivists and curators are incrementally improving both the enrichment of digitally accessible metadata and the connectivity between different forms of data to improve this situation. And their work is surfacing a raft of epistemic questions with deep historical roots.

Enriching data ‘from below’ is critical to understanding habitat and climate change, yet large-scale online (often open access) biological databases such as GBIF, BOLD, GGI, JSTOR Plants and others still present data derived from earlier incomplete natural historical catalogues. To a significant degree, the research question ‘what counts as information, and why?’ that has recently illuminated much early modern natural history practice is also applicable to the highly sophisticated information architectures of present day natural history. What provisions are being created at scale to accommodate fresh, valuable and potentially paradigmatic knowledge derived from archival research and made newly interoperable through semantic alignment? This exploratory panel will begin to more clearly articulate and map a number of these epistemic questions and showcase some interdisciplinary answers and solutions. It is hoped that the findings will contribute to, and be extended by, working groups being initiated by major digital infrastructure initiatives such as Europeana, Biodiversity Heritage Library and DiSCCo in both the sciences and the humanities across Europe and beyond.

Round-table chairs:

• Martha Fleming (Natural History Museum of Denmark)

• Katy Wolstencroft (Leiden University)

Panelists:

Sally Chambers

Sally Chambers is Digital Humanities Research Coordinator at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. She has also been invited by DiSSCo to advise and inform the developing consortium on the needs and contributions of humanities researchers in relation to large-scale biological data.

Isabelle Charmantier

Isabelle Charmantier is Head of Collections at the Linnean Society, a significant historical collection that includes a herbarium, natural history specimens, illustrations, notebooks, and catalogues (both manuscript and digital). Her post-doctoral work uncovered the critically important paper information architectures in the work of Linneaus.

Tahani Nadim

Tahani Nadim is a junior professor for socio-cultural anthropology (joint appointment: Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Humboldt-University's Institute for European Ethnology). Her interdisciplinary research project "Data Natures" problematizes data practices and data infrastructures in biodiversity discovery and natural history collections.

Nicky Nicolson

Nicky Nicolson is Senior Research Leader in Biodiversity Informatics at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She is effecting data mining research on digitised herbarium specimen collections mobilised via the GBIF network and scientific name publication data from the International Plant Names Index to identify distributed 'duplicates' and identify historical collection events and collector trajectories.

Neil Safier

Neil Safier is the Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University. He is an environmental historian specialising in Central and South American colonial contexts. The John Carter Brown Library is the preeminent research collection in the world for the study of the Americas prior to 1825.