53 million objects and then what?On the challenge of abundanceDavid Haskiya | Erasme - Descartes 2016

The challengeToday I want to talk about abundance, the deluge of content that we produce, also in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM)-sector.

How can we make such abundance of content meaningful and useful to citizens, researchers, educators and students?

How can we make it easier for them to find that specific needle in the haystack?

Outline of my talk

• An introduction to Europeana (Collections)

• Curation - what do I mean by it and why do we need it?

• Examples of curating content for different audiences and use

cases

• Summary and takeaways

What is Europeana?In a couple of Tweet lengths, tops!

France, Public Domain1914, National Library of France

Agence de presse Meurisse

Concours de cycles nautiques sur le lac d’Enghien : Berregent piloté par Austerling

What and who is Europeana?

• We’re a non-profit foundation - idealists and true believers

• A network of like-minded heritage and technology professionals

• An open data platform with many services and drawing on the

collections of nearly 4000 European GLAMs

• Europeana Collections, Europeana APIs

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

“We want to build on Europe’s rich heritage and make it easier for people to use, whether for work, for learning or just for fun!”

CurationWhat do I mean by it? Why do we need it?

Norway, CC BY-SA1921, Oslo Museum

Ernest RudeErnest Marini - dancer in a costume

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/30/age-of-algorithm-human-gatekeeper

What is curation?

“Content curation is...the gathering, organizing and online

presentation of content related to a particular theme or

topic.”

• So, in contemporary web lingo, not the same as what e.g. most

museum curators would define it.

• But the quote is missing something? Any suggestions?

Users!Here represented by Personas

Europeana Music CollectionsCC BY-SA

What is curation?

“Content curation is...the gathering, organizing and online

presentation of content related to a particular theme or

topic, for a particular audience (or user).”

• There, I fixed it.

• Curation should not be audience agnostic

Some examples For different audiences

National Library of France, Public Domain

Agence de presse Mondial Photo-Presse,

Tournoi royal de motos à Londres : changement d'une roue de side-car en marche

For digital humanists: Newspapers

• 10 libraries, 426 newspaper

titles, c. 11 million pages, 70

Gigabytes of text (compressed)

• Allows unprecedented capability

to research the role of news

from pan-European perspectives

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.

For the teacher: World War I - A Battle of Perspectives

• Created by teacher Gwen

Vergouwen, Apple Distinguished

Educator

• iBook - allowing interactive

teacher-guided exploration of

contextualised primary sources

• iTunesU - a course with

expanded materials from the

book

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

Sources and interpretation concerning the origins of the First World War

For the citizen: WWI on Wikipedia

• 993 files in total, a small curated subset of what users have

contributed to the Europeana 1914-1918 storytelling platform

• Not Europeana’s content, it’s the user’s content, but we have

uploaded it on their behalf

• Various World War I related imagery: photographs, postcards,

documents, trench art, militaria, etc.

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

Wikipedia is the top online source for information

• c. 1.2 million views of the files in Wikipedia articles - per month*

• The postcard of Franz Ferdinand minutes before his assassination is viewed c.

150 000 times per month

• The files are used in about 50 language versions of Wikipedia

• Technical quality is medium with images typically in 2-3 MP range

Some stats

For art lovers: Art on Wikidata and Wikipedia

• 30 countries, 300 artworks

• 816 Wikipedia articles, 10 000

artwork title pairs

• Engaged dozens of art lovers

in editing and translating

articles

• Articles will be read millions

of times per month

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

World’s most used encyclopedia and linked open database, fuels Google’s Knowledge Graph

For art professionals: Hi-res altarpieces

• Microsites with hi-res multi-spectral imagery allows for seeing

what otherwise couldn’t be seen

• Of interest to art historians, conservators and people with a

great love of art!

• Costly and typically siloed and proprietary solutions, but with

IIIF as the emerging image sharing standard, imagery can be

accessed and used by other applications.

• Developed by our partner project Europeana Space

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

Ghent Altarpiece and the Rode altarpieces of Lübeck and Tallin

Takeaways to remember

• Be open - don’t enclose the public domain, use Creative

Commons licences

• Be generous - share your highest quality digital objects

• Be humble - work with partners, use platforms other than

your own, meet your audience where they already are

• Be aware - of your users needs and package your digital

content accordingly

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

If your forget all else, remember this!

Big Data, built by aggregating and de-siloing multiple

Small Data(sets), need to become Small Data(sets)

again. Segmented along different dimensions,

contextualised, re-packaged, curated if you will, to

become meaningful to the users they aim to serve.

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

09 November 2015

The Music Lesson, Louis Moritz,1808, Rijksmuseum , Public Domain

For computational musicologists: Music recording features and metadata

• 35 000 music recordings - traditoinal and folk music, classical

music

• Metadata for all the recordings for download

• Extracted audio features for download

• iPython Jupiter Notebook documentation

The GLAMwiki toolsetCC BY-SA

Computational musicology is defined as the study of music with computational modelling and simulation.

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