General project description
The main goal of the project was to facilitate cooperation between scientific institutions (conducting research in the area of digital humanities) and GLAM institutions and organizations (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) involved in public humanities. In this case, the cooperation was understood primarily as a chance to share expertise and develop competence in the use of digital tools for gathering, compilation and dissemination of cultural sector data. The core of the project was the series of workshops, each devoted to a specific issue and carried out in a different part of Poland plus a final meeting, held alongside the third annual conference of the DARIAH-PL Consortium. Workshops were organized by the members of the DARIAH-PL Consortium, working together with the Coalition for Open Education (Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji, KOED), a national alliance of institutions and NGOs involved in culture, education, and science.
Detailed project description
During the preparatory workshop representatives of DARIAH-PL and KOED identified issues of the major importance for both researchers and practitioners from the GLAM sector. Three main groups of topics were established: (1) an exchange of information on the oral history resources – meta data and controlled vocabularies; (2) visualization of knowledge in the humanities; (3) open data and publishing platforms. Each group of topics was dealt with in one cycle of workshops, organized by a specific team formed within the DARIAH-PL Consortium and representatives of selected institutions from KOED, active in the subject area specific to each meeting. The first workshop was designed as a one day seminar and the other two took form of the series of shorter presentations and hands-on activities.
List of workshops
- An exchange of information on oral history resources – metadata and controlled vocabularies, Warsaw, 3rd October 2016, Marcin Wilkowski, Joanna Majdanik, Łukasz Kowalski. Workshop organised by the University of Warsaw DARIAH Team and the Digital Humanities Lab in cooperation with the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre (member of KOED).
- Visualisation of knowledge in the humanities, Lublin, 10-11th October 2016. Workshops organized by the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (member of the DARIAH-PL Consortium) and the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” (member of KOED).
- Introduction to network visualization, Radosław Bomba;
- Dynamic social networks – analysis and visualization, Wiesława Osińska;
- Tools for analysis and visualization of pictures, Andrzej Radomski;
- Scientific visual narrations in digital collections, Konrad Niciński, Paweł Ryżko, Agnieszka Kochańska;
- Visualisations – interesting, but dangerous: testing the limits of method while working on the Wikipedia articles in the RStudio, Marcin Wilkowski;
- LoCloud Collections – platform for digital storytelling, Błażej Betański;
- Developing popular science website, Łukasz Kowalski;
- Popularization of three-dimensional documentation: case study of the works of 3DScan Laboratories (Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw), Marta Bura, Janusz Janowski.
- Open data and publishing platforms, Wrocław, 14-15th of October 2016. Workshops organized by the University of Wrocław (member of the DARIAH-PL Consortium) and Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt:Polska (member of KOED).
- Scientific digital edition with TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), José Luis Losada Palenzuela, Michał Kozak;
- Dissemination of resources – copyright issues and potential for reuse, Kamil Śliwowski;
- Use of digital collections in research: current possibilities and needs of humanities researchers, Karolina Bohdanowicz, Marcin Werla;
- Data processing – act locally, think globally, Piotr Malak.
The participants of workshops were recruited in the open call from the representatives of the GLAM and academic sectors. In order to give some idea of the outcomes of the workshops, we present a detailed description of two of them.
Detailed description of selected workshops
An exchange of information on oral history resources – metadata and controlled vocabularies
The workshop group was formed with the representatives of GLAM and memory institutions, oral history researchers from Polish universities, and scholars involved in linguistic studies. Most of them were also members of the Polish Society of Oral History and had already taken part in the two-day long workshop organised earlier by the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Warsaw. This first workshop was designed as an introduction to work with metadata.
The workshop conducted on the 3rd of October was more specific, devoted to work with controlled vocabularies of metadata. After a short introduction/reminder about the basics of metadata schema, the participants got to work with Dublin Core and tried to plan the general rules on how to work with a dc:subject element. In order to develop a general search engine indexing the aggregated metadata, there is a need to standardize the vocabulary used in distributed oral history directories. To visualise that work a sample installation of TemaTres open source software was prepared and the participants started to clean and merge keywords from the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre oral history database. They exported and installed into TemaTres vocabulary software more than 6k original keywords describing oral history collections. The task was to clean them and prepare a sample corpus of keywords that can be used later.
The workshop was helpful in defining main challenges that the researchers working with oral history resources come across during their work. One of the most urgent needs is to create a system aggregating information on oral history resources. To achieve this goal, basic standards of metadata must be designed and implemented. This can be successfully done only through close cooperation of academic researchers and practitioners associated with memory institutions.
Popularization of three-dimensional documentation: case study of the works of 3DScan Laboratories
This workshop was led by the members of the 3D Scan Laboratories, Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw, who presented methods of using the three-dimensional documentation in archaeological practice. Participants could see how 3D scans are created and how different types of point clouds (from laser scanner Leica P30, structured light scanner Smarttech or from the photographs, with the Remake Autodesk) are acquired. An important part of the meeting was a possibility of presenting three-dimensional models by different technologies, e.g. Sketchfab, TrueView, Pdf 3d, Google VR.
The workshop also proved to be helpful in defining barriers to conducting further research in the field. Interestingly, they are quite similar to problems identified during the workshop on oral history resources: lack of common standards regarding files description; lack of common formats for file archivization and presentation; a need to make source files easily available.Therefore it will be necessary to develop some common standards for three-dimensional documentation. A good starting point for this work could be to prepare a list of standards and good practices.
Perspectives for further cooperation of GLAM sector and (academic) digital humanists in Poland
Our workshops confirmed the need of further collaboration between academic and GLAM sectors. In general, heritage institutions can be an excellent source of cultural content and data to use in academic research, but they must acquire more competencies in working with digital methods and metadata in order to provide a good quality resources. On the other hand, academic sector needs more information and tools to include cultural data in research projects. Especially, there is a strong demand for educational support in choosing and using digital tools and implementing critical digital methods.
The oral history field can be seen as a model example of academic, GLAM, and NGO sectors working together. There is a content which has to be indexed and described, and there is also a need to catalogue it within one web interface, using a standard metadata scheme. As a result of the workshop described above, we’ve started to prepare such a system in Poland.
