5 posts tagged with "Linked Open Data"

I’ve always found that context changes everything when learning something new, especially when it comes to understanding why that something matters. The first example I can think of is how, for all the general chemistry courses I’ve taken, the concepts never really clicked, nor did I see why I had to learn them. Four of these courses later, I wasn’t very excited to take biochemistry, but when I did, I couldn’t believe how much of a difference it made to have a real context: the human body, where chemical reactions happen for a reason. Suddenly, the abstract became pretty important—I could see how it all fit together, and in turn, my understanding of general chem probably increased threefold. Rest assured, this blog post is not going to be about chemistry. Rather, it’s about how the same phenomenon occurred this summer, when working on the Orlando Project changed the way I think about data...

The Digital Humanities (DH) was not something I had a lot of experience with before starting as a LINCS undergraduate research assistant. My work with LINCS pertains to the Early Modern London project, working alongside the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) team. Part of my job is what LINCS refers to as reconciliation, or what MoEML refers to as disambiguation...

My first job in the museums field was in 2008, right at the height of the Great Recession. The digitization team I joined had just lost roughly a quarter of their staff in a series of buyouts and layoffs, and the mood was grim. We were tasked with getting a large collection of historic photographs online, and the sooner the better—the only rub was that the collection wasn’t fully catalogued, and doing so properly would take time that we did not have. The pressure was on to justify our jobs, and so the discussions we had about metadata leaned towards the provisional. If the database is unpopulated, does just the accession number suffice? Okay, what about the accession number and artist? The solutions we came up with reflected the stressors of that moment: we aimed for something good enough in lieu of something exemplary, carefully balancing data requirements with the drive to generate content.

For the next decade and a half or so, Winnicott’s “good enough” parent has been a guiding principle in my role as a data custodian...

I joined the LINCS Project as an undergraduate research assistant, mainly to work on the Orlando Project. This position gave me my first real experience with Digital Humanities (DH). Before starting the job I could barely have come up with even a vague definition of DH (despite my best efforts and quite a bit of Googling). When I finally did start to get a sense of the nature of DH—a field that brings together humanities research and new technologies, birthing new possibilities and adding depth to research—there were elements of it that felt very familiar and in line with the sort of work I had experience with as an undergraduate student majoring in English...

History has always been something I’ve been passionate about, and as an undergraduate student approaching graduation, I’ve become more eager to find ways to preserve primary sources. From my experience, having access to primary sources makes the researching process a lot easier, and these sources would not exist if there weren’t proper measures to preserve them.

If you’ve ever taken a history class, you probably know about the distinction between primary and secondary sources, and how primary sources are integral to the reliability of any history paper or assignment. Among primary sources in history, one type that goes largely unnoticed and can actually be hard to define is oral history...