• Evan Higgins ,
• Josh Cowls

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

At HyperStudio, the home of Digital Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our main aims is to develop new, dynamic ways of representing, researching, and learning about the past. Through our Active Archives Initiative, we are exploring the emerging role that digital archives can play in this process.

A core purpose of Active Archives is to empower users to engage in ‘story-making’, by discovering, interpreting and organising archived materials to construct new representations of the past. These archives should be simple and enjoyable to use, and designed with a wide range of prospective users in mind, from professional scholars to school students. By combining rich sets of resources with a design that accommodates a diverse user base, we hope that our Active Archive model will facilitate the creation of new, previously untold stories.

We have selected two existing projects as prototypes for this initiative. For the US-Iran Relations project, we have collected and digitised documents and testimonies relating to the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Iran during the past several decades. The Blacks in American Medicine project combines biographical records of African American physicians with countless primary documents associated with these practitioners to create a comprehensive archive of all black physicians within America from 1860 to 1980. These projects leverage interactive tools such as dynamic timelines and innovative collection and story-making tools, allowing previously untold narratives and unseen connections to emerge.

As we continue to develop our Active Archives Initiative, we’re putting particular emphasis on the idea that our content is not only accessible but, more importantly, that it is intuitive and useful to our audiences. Presenting a paper about the initiative at the Digital Humanities Congress will allow us to gather feedback from thought leaders in the field in order to facilitate the evolution of this exciting new concept.

• Agiatis Benardou ,
• Lorna Hughes

Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre (DCU)

The past twenty years has seen an enormous investment in the digitization of Europe’s Cultural Heritage, and much of it is accessible via the Europeana.eu platform. However, there is still very little understanding of how this content is used in research: among researchers, there still exists limited awareness of how to find and engage effectively with this content, specifically integrating it into the research life cycle. Barriers still exist, especially in the knowability of digital content; opening up this data for use and re-use; and creating better environments for drawing together multimedia content from a variety of sources for analysis and publication.

This presentation will draw on research undertaken for three collaborative European research projects, Europeana Research; Europeana Cloud; and the ESF Research Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH), to explore the use of digital heritage in research. Specifically, the presentation will introduce the new programme of work developed through Europeana Research. This is an important mechanism for connecting digital heritage with the research community, creating a better understanding of how content and metadata is actually used, and its relationship with digital methods and tools, and developing targeted outreach and engagement activities and approaches. As such, it will explore the development of Europeana.eu as a potential “digital commons” for humanities research: a basis for future production, anticipating new ways of using and re-using digital heritage for research. It will also provide an important layer of evidence that will help shape the development of research infrastructures in the humanities.

• Eliza Papaki ,
• Agiatis Benardou ,
• Vicky Garnett

Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre (DCU)

The use of digital content has, over the past couple of decades, become almost the norm for many researchers within the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Curation of both digitised legacy data and born-digital content, however, makes it imperative that items are managed at an individual level in order for larger collections of data to be trusted and useful.  Europeana is shifting focus from being a discovery portal of over 30million digitised items to a platform that allows third parties to develop tools based on its content. In order to gather information about the potential use of existing collections in Europeana, research was conducted into developing an empirically-based, comprehensive list of User Requirements. Investigations included current data reuse within the sector, the quality of the content itself and identification of topics with which Europeana can be of most use; as well as how researchers within these fields make best use of tools when analysing content.

In our investigations through the Europeana Cloud project, we took the approach from both users and providers. Topics were selected for trial using Europeana’s current content, and other potential resources, both of which were subjected to questioning: how useful was the data to them?; what tools or services could be used with it; how would that advance knowledge in the field; what were the failings of the  content and how might that be overcome?  Within this paper, we have selected two of these topics as case studies: Conflict-related Population Displacement; and Children’s Literature.  Both topics have showcased the need for improved metadata, and also highlighted the importance of more generic tools that match scholarly primitives and methods in order to encourage use and meaningful reuse of content within the platform.