2 posts tagged with "semantic web"

My first job in the museums field was in 2008, right at the height of the Great Recession. The digitization team I joined had just lost roughly a quarter of their staff in a series of buyouts and layoffs, and the mood was grim. We were tasked with getting a large collection of historic photographs online, and the sooner the better—the only rub was that the collection wasn’t fully catalogued, and doing so properly would take time that we did not have. The pressure was on to justify our jobs, and so the discussions we had about metadata leaned towards the provisional. If the database is unpopulated, does just the accession number suffice? Okay, what about the accession number and artist? The solutions we came up with reflected the stressors of that moment: we aimed for something good enough in lieu of something exemplary, carefully balancing data requirements with the drive to generate content.

For the next decade and a half or so, Winnicott’s “good enough” parent has been a guiding principle in my role as a data custodian...

The core of the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) project is the simple proposition that making Linked Open Data (LOD) out of the stuff scholars use to understand and analyze culture will make a difference. LINCS hopes to make a difference to how we can make sense of the human past and present. It aims to enable such work within and beyond academic contexts, and in so doing to improve how things cultural can be presented and circulated on the World Wide Web.

I say stuff and things to demystify the notion of data. Those who make culture seldom think of themselves as creating data, and neither do those who collect, celebrate, curate, and analyze cultural objects, processes, and events. But everything we make and do can be represented as data and circulated on the Web, and a large part of contemporary culture is Web culture...