Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities

Preserving and Promoting Archival and Special Collections

Arjun Sabharwal

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780081001431
• eBook ISBN:
  9780081001783
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Archives and special collections departments have a long history of preserving and providing long-term access to organizational records, rare books, and other unique primary sources including manuscripts, photographs, recordings, and artifacts in various formats. The careful curatorial attention to such records has also ensured that such records remain available to researchers and the public as sources of knowledge, memory, and identity. Digital curation presents an important framework for the continued preservation of digitized and born-digital collections, given the ephemeral and device-dependent nature of digital content. With the emergence of analog and digital media formats in close succession (compared to earlier paper- and film-based formats) came new standards, technologies, methods, documentation, and workflows to ensure safe storage and access to content and associated metadata. Researchers in the digital humanities have extensively applied computing to research; for them, continued access to primary data and cultural heritage means both the continuation of humanities scholarship and new methodologies not possible without digital technology. Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities, therefore, comprises a joint framework for preserving, promoting, and accessing digital collections. This book explores at great length the conceptualization of digital curation projects with interdisciplinary approaches that combine the digital humanities and history, information architecture, social networking, and other themes for such a framework. The individual chapters focus on the specifics of each area, but the relationships holding the knowledge architecture and the digital curation lifecycle model together remain an overarching theme throughout the book; thus, each chapter connects to others on a conceptual, theoretical, or practical level. - Theoretical and practical perspectives on digital curation in the digital humanities and history - In-depth study of the role of social media and a social curation ecosystem - The role of hypertextuality and information architecture in digital curation - Study of collaboration and organizational dimensions in digital curation - Reviews of important web tools in digital humanities

1

Defining digital curation in the digital humanities context

Abstract

Digital curation, as represented through the digital content lifecycle model, involves the preservation, promotion, and long-term access to born-digital and digitized collections of heritage material, data, and publications supporting research with surviving (albeit considered obsolete), current, and emerging digital technologies. Social curation involves community and public feedback using various social media platforms; it aims to add meanings to collections and enrich public discourse on collection or exhibition themes. The definitions for curation, digital curation, digital preservation, and digital humanities data curation outline the scope of digital curation. There are multiple levels of curation, which vary by the institutional context, but this chapter emphasizes the principle that archives perform vital services to ensure accessibility to data used in digital humanities and sciences. This chapter focuses on digital curation as a practical framework for preserving and promoting cultural heritage collections, data, and other forms of digital content as well as discussing the various levels of curation aiming to preserve the quality and integrity of those collections and data. Although scholarly work in the digital humanities may extend beyond the physical archives, many projects will continue to use primary sources and data from archives and the digital repositories they maintain.

Keywords

Archives; Curation; Digital curation; Digital humanities data curation; Digital preservation; Levels of curation

Digital curation involves the preservation, promotion, and providing long-term access to born-digital and digitized collections of heritage material, data, and publications supporting research with surviving (albeit considered obsolete), current, and emerging digital technologies. As with the term “archive,” “digital curation” needs a semantic clarification, as it has different meanings in the context of archival profession and digital humanities, given also the distinct perspectives of collaborating archivists and digital humanists. Digital archivists focus on preserving digital content in the context of archiving whereas some digital humanists, on creating thematic collections to create new interpretations, theoretical frameworks, and knowledge. There is also social curation, which involves community and public feedback using various social media platforms; its aim is to add meanings to the collections and enrich public discourse on collection or exhibition themes. The overlap in the definitions and applications of digital curation in these related contexts brings archivists, digital humanists, and the public together, and thus enhances collaboration at various levels of curation. This chapter calls this collaborative framework the digital curation workspace because it expands the meaning of “digital curation” to represent the works of collaborating archivists, librarians, digital humanists, technologists, information architects, and the public in different—perhaps intersubjective—contexts.

In his Introduction and Welcome talk at a Seminar in London titled “Digital Curation: Digital archives, libraries and e-science seminar” sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition and the British National Space Centre, Beagrie (2001) ascribed the emergence of “digital curation” to the continuing interdisciplinary dialogue between scientists and librarians. The association of digital curators with scientific work by Lord and Macdonald (2003) has placed digital curators in an active role of preserving and adding value to collections for the public good by promoting new science and maintaining a solid community of scientists. In the sciences, curation refers to the maintenance and publishing of databases containing knowledge and evidence, annotations, linkage, management, validation, and editorial input providing value to the digital library. In the digital humanities context, however, the definition of curation—rooted in fourteenth-century practices and associated primarily with museum artifacts—has undergone significant changes due to the influence of emerging technologies and the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship. “Digital curation has added a new dimensionality to the mix, which is technical knowledge, but even here technological knowledge is key but not a requirement” (Tebeau, 2011, “Digital Humanities Curation,” para. 4).

The interdisciplinary scope of digital humanities not only spans the humanities and technology, however, but as Flanders and Muñoz (2011) point out, it also covers archival science, library and information science, computer science, systems, and records management. The digital humanities have also introduced new methodologies for the analysis, interpretation, and visualization of humanities data, which present a separate and new level of curation in addition to existing practices. The mutual relationship between digital humanities and digital curation is explained by the digital humanities’ role to provide an interdisciplinary framework to support collaboration among scholars, archivists, librarians, and technologists on the one hand and to promote the role of digital curation for the long-term preservation of and access to resources needed in the digital humanities on the other.

This chapter focuses on digital curation as a practical framework for preserving and promoting cultural heritage collections, data, and other forms of digital content as well as discussing the various levels of curation aiming to preserve the quality and integrity of those collections and data. Although scholarly work in the digital humanities may extend beyond the physical archives, many projects will continue to use primary sources and data from archives and the digital repositories they maintain. The chapter first reviews foundational definitions of curation and digital curation, followed by discussions of the digital content lifecycle, levels of curation, and levels of representation essential to understanding the digital curation process. Then the chapter explicates digital humanities data curation and various aspects of treating and interpreting humanities data. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on linked open data, including curating heritage collections, archives, and libraries. Although mashups present both primary and secondary data to create new services, the curation of such data also serves an important purpose: to preserve the relationship of data and collections from multiple sources and to build a broader ontological framework for preserving knowledge. The preservation of metadata in this context not only enhances the lifecycle of digital contents but also the continued accessibility of humanistic and scientific data across multiple generations of data models, file types, and other obsolete material. To this end, archives may become the epistemic bridge between the world of print on one side and digital content on the other, ensuring a continuum of knowledge transfer from print and analog to digital. However, this model does not advocate abandoning nondigital collections for the sake of emerging popular technologies.

Foundational definitions for curation

The lexical definition for curation, offered in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), is “guardianship,” which falls under the purview of the curator defined in Oxford as the “officer in charge of a museum, gallery of art, library; a keeper, custodian” (p. 625). While the online version of Oxford Dictionaries does not define curation per se, it is derived from curate, which means “select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition)” and “select, organize, and present (suitable content, typically for online or computational use)” (Oxford, 2013, “curate”). The Museum Curation Community (2013) Web site defines “museum curation” as “The practice of managing historically valuable collections of artifacts,” but adds that “museum curators should not be confused with museum archivists; a museum archivist usually only works with valuable documents” (“museum curation,” para. 1). The distinction applies to archivists in general but not to repositories that accept three-dimensional objects as part of a larger donation of private collections, historical manuscripts, and organizational records.

The semantic clarification of curation, preservation, and archiving has been the work of Lord and Macdonald (2003) addressing the differences between these terms describing three curatorial activities:

Curation: The activity of, managing and promoting the use of data, from its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use. For dynamic datasets this may mean continuous enrichment or updating to keep it fit for purpose. Higher levels of curation (as in the Digital Humanities) will also involve maintaining links with annotation and with other published materials.

Archiving: A curation activity which ensures that data is properly selected, stored, can be accessed and that its logical and physical integrity is maintained over time, including security and authenticity.

Preservation (after Hedstrom): “An activity within archiving in which specific items of data are maintained over time so that they can still be accessed and understood through changes in technology.”

As cited in Lord and Macdonald (2003, p. 12)

The Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Pearce-Moses, Ed., 2012) offers no definition for curation but defines curator as “An individual responsible for oversight of a collection or an exhibition” or “The administrative head of a museum or collection” (“Curator”). The definition for manuscript curator is “An individual responsible for appraising, acquiring, arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to a collection of original documents; an archivist” (“Manuscript curator”). The curation of manuscripts, photographs, nontextual (e.g., audio–visual) medium, and three-dimensional artifacts may fall under the purview of specialists at larger repositories.

Digital curation

Curation has its origins in the fourteenth century in the context of healing and later as guardianship of personal affairs. In scientific usage during the 1960s and 1970s, “curation” referred to the systematic care of specimens. The linguistic turn of the recent decades introduced yet another shift from referring to an officer of a museum or a library to specialists interested in the continued access to the material for purposes of reuse, which eventually extended to the preservation of data for continued access and reuse and public involvement in collaborative approaches to curation. The linguistic turn contributed to the introduction of “digital curation” in 2001 as a cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary concept, but differences between definitions of “digital preservation,” “digital archiving,” and “digital curation” still required further clarification.

Tibbo (2012) acknowledges interchangeable uses of “digital preservation” and “digital curation” in earlier definitions; she addresses the conceptual and technical dimensions of digital curation, which distinguishes it from digital preservation. “The term naturally blends both technical (digital) and conceptual (curation) facets [where] ‘digital’ is a modifier while ‘curation’ is the head word that carries most of the weight in the term” (p. 190). While digital curation remains curation, it does require the knowledge of applicable technologies that were not included in predigital curation practices, and involves a lifecycle.

An early definition of digital curation by Beagrie (2004) covers a broad base for data curation so as to address scientific use in addition to preserving historical, humanistic, and cultural heritage in archives. He writes,

[Digital curation refers to] the actions needed to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their entire lifecycle and over time for current and future generations of users. Implicit in this definition are the processes of digital archiving and digital preservation, but it also includes all the processes needed for good data creation and management, and the capacity to add value to data to generate new sources of information and knowledge.

p. 7

Yakel (2007) regards digital curation as the “umbrella concept that includes digital preservation, data curation, electronic records management, and digital asset management” (335). Lee and Tibbo (2007) define digital curation as

Stewardship that provides for the reproducibility and re-use of authentic digital data and other digital assets. Development of trustworthy and durable digital repositories; principles of sound metadata creation and capture; use of open standards for file formats and data encoding; and the promotion of information management literacy are all essential to the longevity of digital resources and the success of curation efforts.

“Opportunities and challenges,” para. 3

What are trustworthy or trusted repositories, however? Must digital repositories comply to a different set of standards and expectations than do traditional repositories with physical collections? Jantz and Giarlo (2006) offer some clarifications for “trusted repositories” applicable to both physical and digital repositories. The first requirement is that trusted repositories must come with preservation policies, content description standards (such as metadata), and proper physical infrastructure (such as climate control, security, and disaster planning) needed for long-term preservation. Second, the digital repository must use reliable systems of software and hardware that can follow certain rules and standards. Not only do preservation standards improve the quality of localized practices and resources but they also support global protocols for interoperability such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Digital preservation

Jones and Beagrie (2001) define digital preservation as “the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary” (p. 10). Digital preservation is a critical activity to counter the impending threats regarding the longevity of digital contents:

[Digital] information will not survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management from as early in the lifecycle as possible. The information and the ability to read it can be lost in a few years. Storage media such as punched paper tape, floppy disks, CD-ROM, DVD evolve and fall out of use. Digital storage media have relatively short archival life-spans compared to other media. As the volumes, heterogeneity, and complexity of digital information grows, this requirement for active management becomes more challenging and more critical to a wider range of organisations.

p. 10

Watry (2007) approaches preservation as a necessary step toward ensuring the survival of collections in the future. He postulates a “concept of digital preservation from one that is focused on sending the records (metadata) into the future to one that can also send into the future a description of the environment that is being used to manage and read the records” (p. 42). This approach involves a combination of preservation, technical, and administrative metadata to inform future curators about the context within which the records were created. Moore (2008) presents what preservation may directly offer to digital humanists as a channel of “communication with the future” which “corresponds to moving records onto new choices of technology and as the validation of communication from the past” (p. 64). In fact, both definitions accurately represent the objectives in curation.

With respect to the long-term preservation of digital content, Hedstrom (2001) addresses temporal interoperability as an important issue related ...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor
• Copyright
• List of figures and tables
• About the author
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Defining digital curation in the digital humanities context
• 2. Archives and special collections in the digital humanities
• 3. Digital history, archives, and curating digital cultural heritage
• 4. Information architecture and hypertextuality: concerns for digital curation
• 5. Digital curation lifecycle in practice
• 6. Organizational dimensions of digital curation
• 7. Social networks’ impact on digital curation
• Afterword
• References
• Index