Connecting to the network of Digital Cultural Heritage

About the project

The aim of this project is to integrate the Data Legend Tools within an online course that will explain the principles of LOD (Linked Open Data). The course will consist of various modules at beginner, intermediate and advanced level. The development of this online course on the basic principles of Linked Open Data started in March 2021, with the financial support of the ‘education innovation’ grant (awarded by the faculty and the Expert Centre for Online Learning (ECOLe), Leiden University). However, there is still a need to improve the teaching materials. To gain a better understanding of LOD, students need to learn more about the concrete process of constructing RDF data, starting from data that is in CSV or XML format originally. The teaching materials will use COW, a CSV On the Web converter. In the teaching materials that will be developed, we shall explore the ways in which the newly created RDF data can be integrated with existing LOD sets provided by the National Library, British Museum and
the RKD.

Eventually, this online course will cover the basic principles of LOD (by uploading or converting a CSV file), learn them how to build SPARQL queries and visualizations of data on the fly. They can also learn how to integrate the results of data analyses within data stories. The Yasgui SPARQL editor, made available by CLARIAH, will allow students to write their own queries within a supportive environment (e.g. error detection, autocompletion of predicates, auto-generation of prefixes and syntax highlighting). We like to further develop the Data Legend Tools so that they can be used in an academic teaching environment. This will involve establishing links between the Data Legend Datasets and LOD heritage collections (e.g. Europeana, KB), as well as expending the (example) data queries and stories.

This online course will be tested in a student workshop in December and after that integrated within the modules “Digital Access to Cultural Heritage”, part of the MA Book and Digital Media Studies, and “Curating in the Digital Age”, within the MA Arts and Culture at Leiden University. The student experience will be documented in a video lecture and also evaluated to further improve the online course. Ultimately, both the documentation and the online course will be made available at the CLARIAH portal and disseminated more widely amongst academics and professionals within the heritage sector, who can use this teaching material and integrate it within their own modules or workshops.

Current developments