Call: Imaging the future of digital archives and collections

stedelijk

THEME OUTLINE

The web of digitized collections and archives in the field of arts and culture is expanding rapidly. As with any technological burst, the digital imperative evokes promises for an improved functionality, but also brings about new challenges and perils. Many museums, like other memory institutions, embrace the digitalization of their archives and collections as means to attract new audiences, for instance, and further their participation and engagement in their collections, their program of activities, and their research. At the same time, these digital transformations challenge existing modes of knowledge production and dissemination, requiring new competencies and new forms of collaboration.

This issue of Stedelijk Studies investigates how we imagine those transformations, and how they affect cultural and academic practices. We invite manuscripts that critically investigate how practices of digitization of collections and archives transform knowledge production and knowledge exchange across academia, museums, and archives. This question ties in with recent scholarship in the fields of digital heritage, digital art history, and digital humanities, but is also addressed in other fields, such as science and technology studies (STS), artistic practices, and design theory.

Scrutinizing existing digitization practices allows us to identify and challenge the forceful imaginaries that often kick-start and drive large-scale and costly digitization projects. Socio-technological imaginaries are part of new technological developments, but as social theorists (c.f. Castoriadis 1997; Marcus 1995; Flichy 1999; Jasanoff and Kim 2015) have argued, such imaginaries are not innocent; they shape our perceptions and elicit our actions, even if we may not realize they do. With this issue we therefore aim to explore how interdisciplinary scholarship on the effects and challenges of digitalization may enhance a deeper understanding of past and current projects concerned with the digitization and new usages of archives and collections in the field of arts and culture, such as Stedelijk Text Mining Project, Time Machine, and Accurator. To start the discussion, we identify three dominant promises associated with such digitization projects. Contributions addressing other possible promises are equally welcome.

Promise 1: Towards increasing inclusivity

Projects involving digital archives and collections are often presented as challenging traditional forms of knowledge production and consumption, and by extension, as questioning our cultural canons (Ciasullo, Troisi & Cosimato 2018). Through co-creation and participatory designs, such projects promise a less hierarchical form of knowledge production in which practitioners, academics, and, increasingly, citizens or niche experts are considered equal contributors to knowledge production (Ridge 2016). The development of more inclusive and diverse digital “pipelines” that include crowdsourcing and folksonomies, however, also warrants practical, moral and epistemological concerns over biases, authority and accuracy, and issues of multiple interpretations and narratives.

Promise 2: Towards complete connectivity

Many heritage and cultural institutions are adopting linked open data as a way to organize and disseminate their collections, archives, and research data (Jones & Seikel 2016; Van Hooland & Verborgh 2014). The advent of linked open data would allow unlimited aggregation of materials from disparate geographical locations. It promises a transition from specialized and siloed information in archives and museums to a web of cultural data. Yet the operationalization of linked open data comes with many questions and concerns, ranging from web standards and domain-specific ontologies, loss of contextual information, presentation of provenance, and user interfaces, to legal and ethical considerations related to copyright and privacy.

Promise 3: Towards unlimited and easy access

Online resources provide access to tens of millions of items from thousands of cultural institutions. In an ideal world, these increasingly democratic and connected institutions will offer unlimited and easy access to data that are personalized and meaningful, but also reusable for academic research. In reality, the myriad interfaces and smart digital techniques notwithstanding, many users and producers still experience difficulties in accessing, interpreting, and presenting online archival and collection data (Kabassi 2017). This may in part be the result of lagging digital literacy skills, and evokes concerns about, for instance, the aptness of the methodologies researchers employ in analyzing this data. It also raises questions about how diverging interests of developers, cultural organizations, and audiences affect the affordances of human-centered designs in graphical and conversational user interfaces.

This issue of Stedelijk Studies aims to reflect on these kinds of promises, encouraging practitioners and academic researchers to revisit past and current digitization efforts. We particularly invite discussions of good practices as well as failed projects in order to assess indicators of success and failure against the backdrop of such promises. Contributions can be submitted in the form of text with images, but with this issue we also seek to explore innovative digital publication formats. We welcome theoretical, methodological, and practice- or case-based contributions focusing on questions such as: 

  • What kinds of imaginaries can be identified in the digitization of archives and collections? How are future imaginaries about the digital enacted in archiving practices? 
  • How do diverging expectations of developers, content producers, volunteers, niche experts, and computer scientists affect digital projects involving collections and archives? 
  • How can we assess the processes and outcomes of digitization projects of memory institutions in light of presumed promises? What are examples of good practices, and what can we learn from failed attempts?
  • Which new imaginaries may emerge from scrutinizing past and current projects in the realm of digital archives and collections? 

The thematic issue Imagining the Future of Digital Archives and Collections will be edited by Dr. Vivian van Saaze (Maastricht University), Dr. Claartje Rasterhoff (University of Amsterdam), and Karen Archey (Stedelijk Museum).

ABOUT STEDELIJK STUDIES

Stedelijk Studies is a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The journal comprises research related to the Stedelijk collection, exploring institutional history, museum studies (e.g., education and conservation practice), and current topics in the field of visual arts and design. https://stedelijkstudies.com/stedelijk-studies-spring-2020-call-for-papers/

SUBMISSION

Deadline for the abstract (max. 300 words) and CV is June 14, 2019. 

Deadline for the article (4,000–5,000 words) is October 15, 2019. 

Publication of the issue will be in May 2020. 

Please send abstracts and other editorial correspondence to:

Esmee Schoutens

Managing Editor, Stedelijk Studies 

Search written and spoken Dutch with OpenSoNaR

opensonarOn Tuesday 9 April, the Institute for the Dutch Language launched a new version of the OpenSoNaR web application, which allows you to search in large quantities of written and spoken Dutch. The application provides access to data from the SoNaR Corpus, a collection of written texts of more than 500 million words, and the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (CGN), a collection of 900 hours of Dutch speech.

The new web application makes it possible to search the data of the two collections (corpora). The texts are provided with additional linguistic information such as part of speech and lemma, and the sound fragments of the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands can be played. In the application you can easily search for a word, or do a more complex search by selecting a specific annotation or by using regular expressions. It is also possible to save the search results, consult the search history and view frequency lists.

CGN and SoNaR

cgn logoThe Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (CGN) is a collection of 900 hours (almost 9 million words) of contemporary Dutch speech from Flemish and Dutch speakers. The speech fragments (spontaneous and prepared) are provided with various transcriptions (e.g. orthographic, phonetic) and annotations (syntactic, POS-tags). The SoNaR Corpus contains more than 500 million words of text from various domains and genres.
All texts were automatically tokenized, POS-tagged and lemmatized. The named entities were also labelled.

OpenSoNaR can be accessed free of charge with a university user account, or with a CLARIN account. The application was developed by a team from the Institute for the Dutch Language, Tilburg University and Radboud University, within the CLARIN-NL and CLARIAH projects.

opensonar

ESSLLI 2020: Call for Course and Workshop Proposals

Call for Course and Workshop Proposals

32nd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information - ESSLLI 2020
3-14 August, 2020, Utrecht, The Netherlands
https://www.esslli.eu

Important dates

1 June 2019 Proposal submission deadline
14 September 2019 Notification
3-14 August, 2020 32nd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information - ESSLLI 2020
, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Under the auspices of FoLLI the European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year in a different European country. It takes place over two weeks in the European Summer, hosts approximately 50 different courses at both the introductory and advanced levels, attracting around 400 participants each year from all the world.

The main focus of the program of the summer schools is the interface between linguistics, logic and computation, with special emphasis in human linguistic and cognitive ability. Courses, both introductory and advanced, cover a wide variety of topics within the combined areas of interest: Logic and Computation, Computation and Language, and Language and Logic. Workshops are also organized, providing opportunities for in-depth discussion of issues at the forefront of research, as well as a series of invited lectures.

For all relevant information see here on the ESSLLI-website.

ParlaFormat: Call for Participation

ParalWorkshop
A workshop on a proposed standard format for parliamentary data is organised by the CLARIN Interoperability Committee in close collaboration with Tomaž Erjavec and Andrej Pančur from CLARIN Slovenia. 

The workshop will take place on 23 May and 24 May 2019 at Utrecht University in Utrecht, The Netherlands. 

Workshop goal

The goal of the workshop is to propose an outline of a standard format for parliamentary data to the research community, to assess the support for it and to identify potential or real problems for its development and wide adoption. It is intended as a preparation for the work on the CLARIN endorsed proposal for a standard encoding of parliamentary data. If the workshop shows sufficient support for the proposed standard format, it may be followed in the future by a shared task and accompanying workshop.

To read more about the workhop and how you can particpate, please visit the ParlaFormat event page 

 

CLARIN ERIC: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 2019

Dates 30 September – 2 October 2019
Location Leipzig, Germany
Website https://www.clarin.eu/event/2019/clarin-annual-conference-2019-leipzig-germany
Submission Deadline 15 April 2019
Submission link https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clarin2019

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

CLARIN ERIC is happy to announce the CLARIN Annual Conference 2019 and calls for the submission of extended abstracts. CLARIN is a research infrastructure that makes digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen-scientists from all disciplines, coordinates work on collecting language resources and tools, and offers advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine such datasets, wherever they are located.

CONFERENCE AIMS

The CLARIN Annual Conference is organized for the wider Humanities and Social Sciences community in order to exchange experiences with and plans for the CLARIN infrastructure. This includes the design, construction and operation of the CLARIN infrastructure, the data, tools and services that it contains or should contain, its actual use by researchers, its relation to other infrastructures and projects, and the CLARIN Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Special topic:

Humanities and Social Science research enabled by language resources and technology

We especially invite papers for a thematic session that reports on research carried out in the Humanities or the Social Sciences that crucially made use of language resources, technology or services from the CLARIN infrastructure. Perspectives addressed by these papers include, but are not limited to use cases, data life cycles, service life cycles, and demonstrations, for instance the following:

  • a use case of language documentation enabled by CLARIN resources, tools and services
  • illustrations of data life cycles and of service life cycles for different types of CLARIN resources and tools
  • workflows for CLARIN resources and/or tools that support data-driven research in different SSH disciplines
  • a demonstration of an application in CLARIN that played a crucial role in addressing a specific research question in the Humanities and Social Science

Other topics: 

Use of the CLARIN infrastructure, e.g.

  • Use of the CLARIN infrastructure in Humanities and Social Sciences research;
  • Usability studies and evaluations of CLARIN services;
  • Analysis of the CLARIN infrastructure usage, identification of user audience and impact studies;
  • Showcases, demonstrations and research projects in Humanities and Social Sciences that are relevant to CLARIN;

Design and construction of the CLARIN infrastructure, e.g.

  • Recent tools and resources added to the CLARIN infrastructure
  • Metadata and concept registries, cataloguing and browsing
  • Persistent identifiers and citation mechanisms
  • Access, including single sign-on authentication and authorisation
  • Search, including Federated Content Search
  • Web applications, web services, workflows
  • Standards and solutions for interoperability of language resources, tools and services
  • Models for the sustainability of the infrastructure, including issues in curation, migration, financing and cooperation
  • Legal and ethical issues in operating the infrastructure

CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure and Dissemination, e.g.

  • User assistance (help desks, user manuals, FAQs)
  • CLARIN portals and outreach to users
  • Videos, screencasts, recorded lectures
  • Researcher training activities
  • Knowledge infrastructure centres

CLARIN in relation with other infrastructures and projects, e.g.

  • Relations with other SSH research infrastructures such as DARIAH, CESSDA, etc.
  • Relations with meta-infrastructure projects such as EUDAT, RDA and Digital Humanities
  • Relations with national and regional initiatives

FORMAT OF THE PROGRAMME SESSIONS

The programme of both the general sessions and the thematic session may include oral presentations, posters, and demos. The type of session for which a paper will be selected will not be dependent on the quality of the paper but only on the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) in view of the content of the paper. The authors of accepted submissions will be provided an additional opportunity to a demo their work.

SUBMISSIONS

Proposals for oral or poster presentations (optionally with demo) must be submitted as extended abstracts (length: 3-4 pages A4 including references) in PDF format, in accordance with the template (ZIP-archive, online Overleaf template). Authors can freely choose between anonymous and non-anonymous submission. 

Extended abstracts should address one or more topics that are relevant to the CLARIN activities, resources, tools or services, and this relevance should be explicitly articulated in the submission, as well as in the presentation at the conference. Contributions addressing desiderata for the CLARIN infrastructure that are currently not in place are also eligible. It is not required that the authors are or have been directly involved in national or cross-national CLARIN projects.

Extended abstracts must be submitted through the EasyChair submission system and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. 

All proposals will be reviewed on the basis of both individual criteria and global criteria.

Individual acceptance criteria are the following:

  • Appropriateness: the contribution must pertain to the CLARIN infrastructure or be relevant for it (e.g., its use, design, construction, operation, exploitation, illustration of possible applications, etc.), and this relevance should be explicitly articulated in the submission. In addition, submissions to the special thematic session will be selected on the basis of their appropriateness to the special topic.
  • Soundness and correctness: the content must be technically and factually correct and methods must be scientifically sound, according to best practice, and preferably evaluated.
  • Meaningful comparison: the abstract must indicate that the author is aware of alternative approaches, if any, and highlight relevant differences.
  • Substance: concrete work and experiences will be preferred over ideas and plans.
  • Impact: contributions with a higher impact on the research community and society at large will be preferred over papers with lower impact.
  • Clarity: the abstract should be clearly written and well structured.
  • Timeliness and novelty: the work must convey relevant new knowledge to the audience at this event.

USEFUL LINKS

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

  • Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • António Branco, University of Lisbon, Portugal
  • Griet Depoorter, Dutch Language Institute, The Netherlands/Flanders
  • Koenraad De Smedt, University of Bergen, Norway
  • Roald Eiselen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources, South Africa
  • Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
  • Eva Hajičová, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic
  • Erhard Hinrichs, University of Tübingen, Germany
  • Nicolas Larrousse, Huma-Num, France
  • Krister Lindén, University of Helsinki, Finland
  • Monica Monachini, Institute of Computational Linguistics «A. Zampolli», Italy
  • Karlheinz Mörth, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
  • Costanza Navaretta, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Jan Odijk, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
  • Maciej Piasecki, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland
  • Stelios Piperidis, ILSP, Athena Research Center, Greece
  • Eirikur Rögnvaldsson, University of Iceland, Iceland
  • Kiril Simov, IICT, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Chair)
  • Inguna Skadiņa, University of Latvia, Latvia 
  • Marko Tadič, University of Zagreb, Croatia
  • Jurgita Vaičenonienė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
  • Tamás Váradi, Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
  • Kadri Vider, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Martin Wynne, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

subMenu

How can we help you

Made possible by

  • KNAW
  • NWO

Contact

Spinhuis - Huygens ING/CLARIAH-bureau
Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185
1012 DK AMSTERDAM

t + 31 (0)20 - 224 68 00

NWO grant number: 184.033.101

Creative Commons-LicentieDit werk van ©CLARIAH: Infrastructuur voor de Geesteswetenschappen, valt onder:
Creative Commons Naamsvermelding-NietCommercieel 4.0 Internationaal-licentie. 

Naar boven