Bridging communities of practice: Emerging technologies for content-centered linking

FAIN: HD-51766-13

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Douglas W. Oard (Project Director: October 2012 to April 2016)

Two workshops to further explore how automated computational methods may facilitate access to cultural heritage materials by establishing structured relationships or links between digitized and born-digital sources, including web and social media content.

The project fosters convergence between two communities by addressing complementary aspects of a shared opportunity. Digital humanists are at the forefront of developing ways to render cultural heritage metadata increasingly interoperable as linked open data in tandem with information professionals working in libraries, archives, and museums. Computer scientists are developing automated techniques for extracting linkable data from the content itself. Bringing these communities together offers transformational potential for the application of a critical infrastructure in humanities scholarship. Two workshops will be organized to seize this unique opportunity. The first will bring together humanities scholars and computer scientists to explore applications of new content linking technologies to dispersed and disparate material. In the second, a larger group of humanities scholars will identify specific content to which techniques described in the previous workshop will be applied.