#DAM Data – Asset – Method.
Harnessing the Infinite Archive
The Story So Far
DAM Network objectives:
1) to specify the requirements that will ensure the full exploitation
by all stakeholders in next-generation digital resources and
repositories;
2) to evaluate current humanities theories/methods with regard
to their capacity for organising and harvesting these data as well
as to suggest new and more appropriate methods and theories.
Workshop 1: What’s driving you? Methods of collection,
organisation and interpretation.
• infinite modalities of access to data, including forms of access shaped
by the users of the data (Aphra, Richard).
• importance of being able to forget, and to be able to blow up the
categories within which we collect and organise data (Richard).
• relevance of the spatial map as a reference system, a framework with
which to organise data (Bobby, Katharina).
Katharina Lorenz (University of Nottingham) ‘Form as Method: Digital Archives and Ancient Art’
Richard Marciano (University of North Carolina) ‘Big Data Collections for Cultural Content’
Aphra Kerr (National University of Ireland) ‘Post-Human Governance in Virtual Worlds:
Implications for Researchers’
Robert Allen (University of North Carolina) ‘From Cinema as Object to Cinema as Experience:
Blowing up the Film Archive’
Workshop 2: So you think you’re an expert? Academic judgement
in the time of crowd-sourcing.
• new forms of collaboration offered/imposed by the infinite archive (Stephen,
Jon).
• crowd-sourcing not restricted to the mechanical turk concept (Jon, Gabriella,
Stuart).
• topics such as emotions can now be studied in an entirely new ways (Jon).
• linked data can result in negative focalisation (lowest common denominator)
(Mac).
Stephen Robertson (University of Sydney) ‘Joining the Crowd: Finding an Audience for Digital History’
Jonathan Dovey (University of the West of England) 'Documentary Data: Collaboration and Curation'
Gabriella Giannachi (University of Exeter) ‘Art Maps: Mapping the Archive’
Derek McAuley (University of Nottingham/Director of Horizon Digital Economy Research) ‘Social
Networking Meet Cultural Perspectives: Some Challenges’
Workshop 3: The infinite archive. The archival perspective.
• technical problems and legal implications of mining commercial data (Neil,
Michaela, Seth, Stephen).
• how to facilitate serendipitous discovery (Aquiles).
• the challenges of an iterative approach within an unstable/non-replicable
system such as the web (Michaela).
• need for new protocols of activity, not new digital tools (Neil).
Aquiles Alencar-Brayner (Digital Curator, The British Library), Digital Scholarship at the British Library
Michaela Mahlberg (School of English, The University of Nottingham), Methodological challenges of accessing and
analysing data from the ‘infinite archive’- a corpus linguistic view
Seth Cayley (Publisher – Media History, Cengage Learning) ‘Providing Access to Digital Data: Challenges and
Opportunities’
Stephen Brooks (Senior Publisher, ProQuest) ‘Large newspaper archives: The challenges of digitisation and online
delivery’
Neil Smyth (Libraries and Research and Learning Resources, The University of Nottingham), New assets for making
commercial data available for research and teaching: the challenge for library and learning services.
Mahendra Mahey (Project Manager, The British Library), British Library Labs (http://labs.bl.uk/)
Themes: Logistics of access.
• stakeholders, including the commercial data providers,
are still playing catch-up: lack of clarity with regard what
can be done with certain types of data; lack of technical
skills to do those things with data that might be possible.
• Forms of co-creation complicate the copyright situation: it
is not only the actual data, but also value-added meta/para-data provided by other stakeholders that needs to
be acknowledged.
Themes: Importance of interpretation & (Para-)Frameworks.
•
how to maintain the complexity of the data without impeding
understanding? Or, conversely, how not to settle for the lowest
common denominator?
•
Web 2.0 no longer about the WHAT, but the HOW - we are leaving
the era of the encyclopedia for an era of modality: questioning
strategies of semiotic and post-structuralist approaches are now
shaping not just the way we deal with primary evidence, but the
primary evidence itself.
•
How do we shape research attitudes capable of dealing with that?
•
How do we avoid seemingly a priori frameworks of interpretation,
given we have done away with an a priori frameworks of collecting?
Themes: Protocols and/or tools.
• need for more new protocols, routines of dealing with data
better suited for the new tasks at hand: new protocols for
humanist, and better protocols of engaging in commercial
negotiations around data.
• What frameworks can we come up with in order to iteration
and experiment in humanities scholarship? And what types
of repositories would we need to have in order to do it
successfully? Or, to put it differently, how can we co-create,
rapid-prototype and blow up the archive in scholarly
fashion?