What is DH? And What’s it Doing at the Claremont Colleges?
why open cultural data
1. Why Open Cultural Data?
Mia Ridge, Open University
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
October 2012
2. Outline
• Benefits of publishing open cultural data
• Case studies:
– Powerhouse Museum
– Cooper-Hewitt museum
– Europeana + OCLC
– Flickr Commons
3. BBC ‘Key Benefits of Using Semantic
Web Technology’
• Usability—Making a site around the things people care about.
• User Experience—Having meaningful predicates and granular,
addressable resources, so that those resources can be visualised in
new ways.
• User Journeys—Allowing users to make their own journeys across
our content.
• One page per thing—Making our resources part of the Web and
therefore linkable and discoverable.
• Our web site is our API—One URI for both machines and web
browsers. Our web site can be used by third parties to create new
products,
• Loosely coupled development—Different teams can work together
in a loosely coupled fashion. Each team focuses on their domain of
interest.
4. JISC
• 'increasing the return on public investment by
fuelling innovation, enhancing learning and
thus creating new knowledge’
5. Open cultural data
• More discoverable
• Put content where people hang out
• Other people will help correct and improve it
• People will create innovative things with it
• Be part of the web of data
• Use open data to improve your sites
6. ‘Flickr meets Google Street View – Paul Hagon’s Then
& Now (or interesting things clever people do with
your data #6247)’
7. ‘Flickr meets Google Street View – Paul Hagon’s Then
& Now (or interesting things clever people do with
your data #6247)’
9. invoke the ‘magic circle’
make participating instant and easy
clear task
10. One Facebook status
update asking for players:
180 turns (176 tagging
turns, 4 fact turns), 1179
tags and 4 facts about 145
objects from 26 players in c.
6 hours
19. Europeana + OCLC
• ‘OCLC and Europeana are collaborating to
investigate ways of creating semantic links
between the millions of digital objects that are
accessible online through Europeana.eu in
order to improve “similar object” browsing’.
22. Flickr Commons
• Fiona Miller, product marketing manager at
Flickr: “The Commons have really showed
institutions the benefits of sharing their
photos archives ... The wealth of knowledge
they get back from sharing that content is
really incredible.”
23. Since launching...
• 127 million views
• 7 million favorited images
• 130 million member comments
• Comments ‘have often lent historical context
not previously known by their home
institutions’ records’.
