JISC Digitisation Programme

For all the successes of digitisation, it’s still a long, slow route from scanner to published article (or even monograph). Your team can create a rich, engaging website, but it takes plenty of time for scholars to start to work with the new material. It slips slowly into their ideas and interpretations, perhaps helped, perhaps hindered by the methodologies that sat behind the creation of the content.

It seems to me that this process could so with some acceleration, where digitisation and research projects are merged, or brought much more close together, so that the scholarly context and methodology has a much closer relationship with the digital development.

Though complex, such a model offers numerous advantages. Scholarly communities can be more closely involved in the selection of content and the methodologies by which it is digitised. Much better context can be provided, giving the interpretative gloss that provides intellectual rigour to a resource. More broadly, it embeds the digitised output within the disciplinary community – the users are already close to home.

Of course, this is difficult to set up; it requires the correct funding structures.

Within the UK, this could be a possible area of future work for the Research Councils and JISC. The Research Councils obviously have the well-established links to the research communities; JISC has the policies and management to help deliver sophisticated resources. In particular, the AHRC and ESRC, where the research demand for digitised content is strongest would seem the most likely allies of JISC.

One recently funded JISC project has hit upon this formula. The National Maritime Museum and the University of Cambridge received an AHRC grant to undertake research on the Board of Longitude papers, an competition set up by the British government in the eighteenth century to encourage the submission of ideas, instruments and data that would help solve the navigational problem of finding longitude at sea. Independently of this, Cambridge received JISC funding to digitise the related Board of Longitude papers on which this research was being undertaken. This allowed the two projects to be brought more closely together, with obvious benefits. The digitised papers are also being integrated into an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, funded by the AHRC project.

It would be great to see more of this type of project in the future.

Scots Words and Place Names, run at the University of Glasgow, engaged the Scottish public via a variety of channels (direct contact with schools, a website, Facebook, Twitter) to enrich understanding of the uses and meanings of words and place names in Scots.

The final report, just published, has some interesting findings

• This crowdsourcing project was incredibly useful for allowing the university to further links with schools, and tap into existing general public interest in Scots language
• If you’re collecting structured data, you need your own website. But Facebook is also useful for gathering such data; Twitter less so
• The research team learnt few new Scots words; but more on informal place-names
• Crowdsourcing and building a community of interest takes time

The report is available as a pdf on the JISC website

The research project is on the Glasgow website; there is also the Facebook account; and the Twitter account.

The Internet first strengthened then destroyed the idea of a canon of art history.

Early Internet dreamers saw the possibility of the utopian virtual museum, drawing together all the world’s great masterpieces to present a coherent narrative of the history of art. But the very proliferation of images that appeared on the web demonstrated the pointlessness of focussing on a single set of definitive images – there are just too many images to choose from. The notion of a canon, intellectually battered during the twentieth century, was helped into its grave by the postmodern sprawl of the World Wide Web.

The more pragmatic approach to creating a portfolio of digital images was to let museums, galleries and other collectors release their own digitised artworks, with which users could then sift through to their heart’s content. Digitise enough high-quality painting, sculpture, architecture etc. and you can let the user define their own canon.

And yet we are nowhere near the tools that are needed to let the user do that. The Internet is a horrible hodge-podge of discoloured images, cropped slides, often without crucial attribution (or worse with the wrong attribution) or posted in flagrant disregard for licencing terms. Using Google search for ‘Bernini’, ‘Braque’ or ‘Ronchamp Chapel’ brings a random collection of images, that might be useful for the casual browser, might not sufficient for professional education.

Alternatives to Google Search exist. There is ArtStor, which has a healthy assemblage of digital images, though its subscribing libraries in the UK find it horrendously expensive (an early more altruistic form of ArtStor, AMICO, failed because it couldn’t find the right business model). Google Art Project gets closers and offers some favourite images, but it’s locked down proprietatry approach defeats the purpose for many art historians (see here and here. The Visual Arts Data Service is great but the collections are often quite niche. The Flickr Commons has had successes but is limited in scope. Wikimedia Commons offers an open alternative but it does not deliver very many artistic images at the moment and it would take a tremendous leap of faith from senior curators before they started using it to publish images from their collections.

Given the difficulty of assembling a centralised pool of digital images, the future is much more likely to see a pool of the related metadata. Content owners are reluctant to freely and openly share their colour corrected, professionally created, high resolution digital images, but they recognise the importance of sharing their metadata. A recent Europeana report (pdf) highlighted the work of the Rijksmuseum in flooding the Internet with high-quality metadata about the Vermeer painting The Milkmaid – with the intention that inserting open metadata in the right channels would lead users back to their high quality version of the image on the museum website. If content curators begin to get more savvy about how metadata is released, then it will become easier to construct the tools which lead people back to the images.

For those interested in art history via the Internet, therefore, it may not be the images but the words that describe them that are the most important thing.

(Prompted by a tweet from Tim Hitchcock, this is a series of short blog posts on imaginary / future resources in the Digital Humanities)

When charting the history of the west, churches, cathedrals and abbeys provide spectacular material evidence. Their art, architecture and archives not only formed notions of aesthetic beauty but are testament to the social and economic powers that formed the notion of ‘western civilisation’.

Within the UK, there have been plenty of projects that have digitised aspects of this tradition – 3D representations of Yorkshire abbeys, church plans online, catalogues of stained glass, directories of funerary monuments.

But such projects tend to be unconnected, restricting analysis to local and regional debates within specific disciplinary areas.

So what’s really needed is a project that joins these items together, so that churches are seen in a larger context. A corpus of stained glass should not be seen be isolated, but situated itself in the context of everything that is (or has been) around it in that church – the sculpture, architecture, the events, the archives.

Of course, this is not really one project. Rather it’s a shared approach, an intellectual infrastructure that allows for all this data to be allied seamlessly; for networks of intelligent chains to be made between different resources. It’s not a monolithic project with a start and a finish, but built piecemeal by different projects in many different places.

For this to happen, for users to be offered to interlinks and connections, we need to use Linked Data in more effective ways. This means creating a whole range of metadata that draws on the intellectual elements that join such projects together; elements like style, geography, time, topic, biblical reference, liturgal practices. Difficult work, fraught with problems, but the end result would be worth it.

Two projects within the current JISC Content programme 2011-2013 have been recently picked up by BBC News.

Observing the 1980s, based at the University of Sussex, will make available as Open Educational Resources (OER) written and oral testimonies from people from a range of backgrounds on what it was like to live in 1980s Britain. The content is being selected from the Mass Observation Project and the British Library Oral Histories Collections.

The University of the Creative Arts will contribute a flavour of 1980s fashion, but in fact covering a much wider time span, through the works of fashion icon Zandra Rhodes, as part of the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection.

JISC is delighted to announce that King’s College London has been awarded funding for a project on “WW1 Discovery: Content Prioritisation”

This work will undertake essential primary research that will guide and underpin the wider JISC WW1 Discovery programme which aims to aggregate and deliver WW1 content by building an aggregation, API and discovery layer so that related material can be discovered more easily by educators and researchers.

The ‘war to end all wars’ to this day remains the most widely covered in teaching in further and higher education and is a huge focus for research across disciplines but despite the growth of exciting multidisciplinary approaches to its study, little centralised information exists on what aspects of the war are being taught or the key research questions in development.

Due to this breadth and depth of content available around WW1, it is necessary to prioritise the potential content that could or should be included in an initial aggregation of material and which will, ideally, act as a foundation for future work in this area.

KCL will be conducting desk research and telephone interviews as necessary on what is actually taught in HE, compiling targeted surveys of resources available and their use and seeking input of academic and information professionals through focus groups, lists and invitations to blog/Twitter.

If you are able to input into any of this ongoing research, please contact patricia.methven@kcl.ac.uk or geoffrey.browell@kcl.ac.uk

More information is available on JISC WW1 commemoration blog

The excerpt below is from the Intellectual Property Office website. The planned Exchange will be of great interest to those digitising orphan or in copyright works, hopefully leading to a acceleration of the process of rights clearance.

On 22 November Business Secretary Vince Cable announced the appointment of Richard Hooper to lead a feasibility study on developing a Digital Copyright Exchange (DCE) in the UK.

The DCE feasibility study will consider options for developing a functional digital market in rights clearance and a source of information about rights ownership, as recommended by the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth and accepted by the Government.

Richard Hooper has invited stakeholders to respond to a call for evidence which asks two questions:

First, whether they agree with the ‘Hargreaves Hypothesis’ – that the current copyright licensing system is not fit for purpose;

Secondly whether they agree with his proposed definitions, including the market definition.

Richard Hooper said:

“This is a controversial issue with strongly held opinions across the spectrum – we are seeking hard data and evidence for or against the main, or parts of the, hypothesis. The responses I receive will help to inform my thinking as I move to develop a concept for a workable licensing solution.”

To submit a response to the Call for Evidence (142Kb), send your evidence with a completed response sheet via e-mail by no later than Friday 10 February 2012.

Stanley Fish recently published a blog post in the NY Times with the grandiose title, The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality. The article is engaging; it seems to sharpen the knife for the Digital Humanities but then decides not to stick it in (although that might be to follow)

What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.

This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.

The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.

All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?

No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?

But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.

And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.

I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.

Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.

After over four very happy years, I’m moving on from JISC to a new role in the Netherlands.

It’s been a privilege to work with colleagues in one of the most innovative educational funding bodies in the world, and also with a broader community of researchers, librarians, teachers, archivists, policy wonks and web geeks. While I’ve been here at JISC such people have been responsible for some brilliant ideas and projects in large-scale digitisation, crowdsourcing, text and data mining as well as fighting battles with a flotilla of difficult issues – copyright, business models, metadata and users, users, users.

My new job is in The Hague, working for The European Library (TEL). TEL currently acts as the joint catalogue for just under 50 national libraries in Europe. It has ambitious plans to include research libraries, to increase the quantity of digitised cotnent and to devise the tools to exploit such content. It also aims to work more closely with Europeana and eventually morph into ‘Europeana Research’, ie become part of the Europeana service that is focussed on the needs of Higher Education users.

This also means that there will be a new post opening up at JISC for a Programme Manager dealing with Content and Digitisation. Full details are not available yet, but Catherine Grout (c.grout@jisc.ac.uk) is available for informal discussion for anyone interested in applying. I’m in the UK until the end of January should anyone want to know about my experience in the role. Or indeed buy me a drink.

Alastair Dunning, JISC Programme Manager

When the University of Cambridge, with help from the University of Sussex (and JISC funding), released its Newton Papers, there was widespread acclaim for the resultant website, but also some criticism of their use of Creative Commons.

Some bloggers (here and here) asserted that the (seventeenth-century) documents are out of copyright and therefore should be labelled as public domain.

It seems a common sense argument, but this ignores the actual state of UK and the complexity of digitising fragile material.

UK Copyright law implies that digitised images can create their own copyright, if the digitisation is of high-quality.* A quick snap with a cameraphone of an ancient document does not accrue copyright; but a complex procedure involving conservation, handling, colour calibration, adjusting lighting conditions, careful focussing does create copyright in the resultant digital image. The contextual infrastructure to actually deliver the Digital Library also required serious investment of time and money.

Thus in the case of Newton Papers, Cambridge do have a right to assert Creative Commons over their digitised versions of the papers.

It also should be noted that the Cambridge licence used is still very liberal – as long as you don’t make money from it and attribute the source you can use it in any way you want, including creating derivative images. A few years ago, it was a very rare university that would have gone near such an open licence.

* However, it should be noted that this implication has never been tested in a UK courtroom. It was tested in the USA (in the Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. case), but the result in favour of Corel is not binding in the UK. The dispute between the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery is also interesting in this respect.