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Digital Cultural Heritage Projects - 2024 Roundup

Source

An attempt to record new research projects, research infrastructures, websites, etc I've come across this year to try to keep track of them, hopefully of use to others but also for my own selfish reasons to free up space in my poor crowded brain (and reduce web browser tabs). It's also because I've found it hard to note them otherwise, it's surprising to me there is still no good way I know of to record projects in progress (to keep track of them); any upcoming conferences (for the call for papers, and then to read proceedings) and for journals of interest (CFP/published). There must be someone working on the Zotero equivalent for these standard workflows of research ?

I'm hoping for this to be an annual tradition (tradition in the sense that this is the first time I've done it and who knows, I may do it again next year). But given the 8 year gap between this blog post and the previous one, the odds are not great)

Other posts will follow with new or updated research related tools, another with articles/reports of particular interest, and then (most importantly?) any new terminology I've come across this year, again mostly to help myself having to look up for the umpteenth time what 'meso-level' actually means.

Project Outputs

These projects may have been around for a long time but I have possibly just discovered their outputs (i.e. the website with the results of the projects work or some in-progress publication/media).

  • Mapping Color in History - https://mappingcolor.fas.harvard.edu/ - "Mapping Color in History™ is a searchable database of pigment analysis in Asian paintings"

  • Language of Bindings - https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lob/ - "The Language of Bindings Thesaurus (LoB) includes terms which can be used to describe historical binding structures."

  • CATALOG of DISTINCTIVE TYPE (CDT), Restoration England (1660-1700) - https://cdt.library.cmu.edu

  • Sloane Lab Knowledge Base - https://knowledgebase.sloanelab.org/resource/Start - "The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base is an interactive portal reuniting the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, which consist of the founding collections of the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the British Library. It is still in development, with more features being built and datasets in our ingestion pipeline. The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base enables the cross-searching and investigation of object, records, people and places in the Sloane Collections. The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base makes also possible the crosslinking of Sloane’s historical manuscript catalogue entries with contemporary database records found in museum collections today. "

  • imagineRio - "A searchable digital atlas that illustrates the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro, as it existed and as it was imagined. Views of the city created by artists, maps by cartographers, and site plans by architects or urbanists are all located in both time and space. It is a web environment that offers creative new ways for scholars, students, and residents to visualize the past by seeing historical and modern imagery against an interactive map that accurately presents the city since its founding." - https://www.imaginerio.org/en

  • Zamani Project - "Zamani Project undertakes data collection and analysis, heritage communication, and training and capacity building for experts and the public so that they have access to high-quality spatial heritage data, and can learn from, conserve, and protect heritage." - https://zamaniproject.org/

  • Data/Culture - "Data/Culture is a sandbox for the re-use of data and tools in the humanities and arts, in ways that develop high-quality research and strong collaborative communities. " - https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/dataculture-building-sustainable-communities-around-arts-and-humanities

  • A Gamification Approach to Literary Network Analysis - Battle of the Plays playing cards (!) - https://sukultur.de/produkt/battle-of-the-plays-a-gamification-approach-to-literary-network-analysis/ (why don't more research projects create games from their outputs!)

Project Announcements

Infrastructure

  • ECHOES - https://www.echoes-eccch.eu/ - "The Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH) is a shared platform designed to provide heritage professionals and researchers with access to data, scientific resources, training, and advanced digital tools tailored to suit their needs" - Part of the Cultural Heritage Cloud Horizon Infrastructure funding.

Manuscripts

  • LostMA - ‘LostMa: The Lost Manuscripts of Medieval Europe: Modelling the Transmission of Texts | École Nationale Des Chartes - PSL’. Accessed 30 December 2024. https://www.chartes.psl.eu/en/research/centre-jean-mabillon/research-projects/lostma-lost-manuscripts-medieval-europe-modelling-transmission-texts. - Jan 2024 - Dec 2028 - Ecole nationale des Chartes - France

  • INSULAR - https://le.ac.uk/news/2024/april/insular-project - "The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a prestigious Advanced Grant, for €2.5m, to an ambitious new project to study early medieval manuscripts made in Britain and Ireland between AD 600–900." - Institutions: University of Leicester, University of Göttingen, Bodleian Library, University of Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin, BNF, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Leuven University -

  • DISCOVER - https://erc-discover.github.io/ - "Our goal is to develop approaches to assist experts in identifying and analyzing patterns. Indeed, while the success of deep learning on visual data is undeniable, applications are often limited to the supervised learning scenario where the algorithm tries to infer a label for a new image based on the annotations made by experts in a reference dataset."

  • STEMMA - "This project develops and applies a data-driven approach in order to provide the first macro-level view of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript. It focuses on English verse manuscripts written and used between the introduction of printing in England in 1475 and 1700, by which time the rapid changes in both literary taste and publishing norms ushered in by the Restoration had fully transformed literary culture. The project includes manuscripts circulating in England and anywhere else English was spoken and read, including Ireland, the North American colonies, and continental exile communities." - https://stemma.universityofgalway.ie/

AI

Project Updates

(i.e. ongoing projects I've discovered this year or re-discovered after some announcement)

Network Analysis

  • DISSINET - https://dissinet.cz/ - "The “Dissident Networks Project” (DISSINET), hosted at Masaryk University’s Centre for the Digital Research of Religion, is a research initiative exploring dissident and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe from the perspective of social network analysis, geographic information science, and computational text analysis"

AI

  • RePAIR Project - https://www.repairproject.eu/ - "an acronym for Reconstructing the Past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics meet Cultural Heritage. State-of-the-art technology will, for the first time, be employed in the physical reconstruction of archaeological artefacts, which are mostly fragmentary and difficult to reassemble."