• Gethin Rees

The British Library

Keywords – Cultural Heritage, Web Map, Interface

Abstract-

Locating a National Collection (LaNC) aims to help cultural heritage organisations to use location data — such as where objects were made and used or the places they depict and describe — to connect collections and engage audiences. Location-based interfaces such as web maps offer opportunities to open up collections to new audiences and uses. Place metadata can form the basis of engaging stories and tangible links between overlooked groups and local pasts that underscore notions of community empowerment. LaNC seeks to identify how the design of interfaces can be tailored to meet the needs of diverse users thus improving uptake and broadening the appeal of digital cultural heritage. To this end we gathered structured feedback from two groups: cultural heritage professionals and the public. Interviews with cultural heritage professionals helped us to understand motivation and priorities in the sector. Audience research included surveys and focus groups with representative samples of the UK population that offered insights into attitudes and behaviour alongside opportunities to test interface ideas. The research has demonstrated how values, such as local identity, alongside motivations such as curiosity around heritage visits offer hooks into cultural heritage collections. These findings will inform the development of LaNC’s map-based prototype, providing insights into how geospatial data structures and interface design can help institutions leverage serendipitous discovery and curiosity-driven exploration of their collections.

• Jamie McLaughlin

University of Sheffield

Sheffield’s Digital Humanities Institute now maintains about 85 project websites, some of them dating back to the early 2000s. This is a huge and growing burden in terms of developer time. In their current state they will never be cost-effectively maintainable.

The project data is sound. DH was quick to recognise the value of open data standards. But the project interfaces are built upon a jumble of forgotten and ancient technologies; many of them once flavour of the month, now obsolete and unmaintainable. In the commercial sector, websites are overhauled every few years as a byproduct of continual funded development. The academic research grant does not offer that luxury.

And in broad terms, most of these interfaces do many of the same things: Browse records in some sort of hierarchical list. Fill in a search form. View a results list. Should it not be possible to standardise the technical implementation of some of this behaviour?

Seasoned Digital Humanists will immediately be sceptical. The field has long attempted to formalise its techniques, with mixed success.

The Digital Humanities Institute Data Service was conceived as a pragmatic way to address the department's maintenance burden; a way to keep project data available even if a project website could no longer be maintained. But while developing it, it became clear that obvious parallels in interface function could be drawn across its hosted projects. To what extent do we dare imagine a standard DH interface? Does such an undertaking undermine the originality and research value of our work? Would it be inevitably destined to join the discarded technology scrap heap alongside the interfaces it was meant to replace?

This paper examines how we might go about defining and standardising the broadest, most common functions of Digital Humanities web interfaces. Doing so has both technical and project management implications. It is relevant to any developer or PI who is beginning to feel that they may have implemented essentially the same DH web interface more than once.

• Sarah Ames ,
• Lucy Havens

National Library of Scotland

Keywords: Libraries, datasets, Jupyter Notebooks

Abstract:

The National Library of Scotland’s Digital Scholarship Service has been releasing collections as data on its data-delivery platform, the Data Foundry (https://data.nls.uk/), since September 2019. Datasets are released as large, bulk downloads, enabling those with programming experience to analyse the collections at scale.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, the Service experienced significantly higher traffic, as library users increasingly made use of online resources. To ensure that as many users as possible were able to explore the datasets on the Data Foundry, the Library invested in a Digital Research Intern post, with a remit to provide introductory analysis of the Data Foundry collections using Jupyter Notebooks. 

The goal of these Notebooks was to provide users with an initial overview of the datasets and some analysis of the data as a start-point for their research, as well as to enable those with little or no coding skills to begin accessing the Library’s collections at scale. The Notebooks use Python, a widely-used programming language for data analysis, in conjunction with the Natural Language Toolkit platform to demonstrate text mining methods on digitized collections and bibliography metadata.

This paper provides a case study of the project, explaining the Library’s work to date releasing datasets on the Data Foundry; the reasoning behind providing Jupyter Notebooks; the Notebooks themselves and what types of analysis they contain, as well as the challenges faced in creating them; and the publication and impact of the Notebooks.