Innovations for a Unified Digital Collection - The Sloane Lab Journey
This presentation, originally given as part of the DARIAH-EU Friday Frontiers Webinar Series, takes the learner through the journey of integrating Sloane’s historical catalogues and present-day cataloguing systems, driven by insights from a participatory design process and contemporary understandings of cultural heritage collections that emphasise the needs and requirements of decolonised and multivocal heritage. Crucially, the participatory design process has sought to co-create with expert and interested communities, knowledge of the questions that individuals and communities wish to ask of Sloane lab-also in light of the highly problematic nature of Sloane’s collection, having been partly funded through the profits derived from the enslavement of African people and to respond to the historical and epistemic violence via the technical design of the lab. Uniting the Sloane collection serves as a microcosm of the challenges faced in integration of disparate data and mobilisation of historical datasets for facilitating access to extensive knowledge and information held in such a vast and varied collection.
At the core of the Sloane Lab resides the Knowledge Base (KB), which extends CIDOC-CRM with semantics that handle uncertainty, multivocality and modality of the collection (e.g., conflicting data from different records about the same object), data absences (i.e., gaps in the records), the difficulty of classifying objects, and the fact that some of the objects described in the historical catalogues reflect the collector’s language and perspective and that some are now lost. Providing a homogeneous data environment using formal semantics to allow data integration, semantic enrichment, and knowledge discovery across a disparate environment of resources the KB facilitates resourceful query, visualisation, and fact-finding. This presentation provides a rich insight to the design and development of the Sloane Lab knowledge base, the modelling choices, and priorities in relation to semantics and vocabularies and the range of challenges addressed in the process of aggregation in terms of data disparity, integration facility, conflicting information and inconsistency, uncertainty and data absence.
Learning Outcomes
After watching this presentation, learners will:
- have an insight into the complexity of managing heterogeneous sources in a data laboratory setting
- understand how participatory design can improve understanding and curation of a large collection