Day 2 – Lose Control, gain influence!

Improvisation sessions

Day 2 – Tuesday 8 December Dish_geel Track 3: Lose control, gain influence!
Cultural Heritage is NOT a Business: Moving from the canvas to enabling reuse and collaboration
Tine van Nierop

Tine van NieropTine van Nierop is project manager Open Access of Archive 2020 Programme at the National Archives of the Netherlands. The main goal is to stimulate archives and (local) governments to provide that their collections are visible, accessible and reusable through use of standards, architecture and innovation. Tines heart is in open access and linking heritage collections. The more data is opened, the more we can use semantic methods to connect data and the better we can ask meaningful questions to get meaningful answers. By making data available as open data for transparency and democratic control, many thresholds have to be overcome. Open data requires a shift of awareness. Archive 2020 lends a helping hand to archives and government to make these steps.
Tine worked previously as an information specialist at various cultural heritage organizations on sustainable digital collection management and accessibility in a digital environment. (Rijksmuseum, Institute of Sound and Vision, Delft Archive and national umbrella organizations as STAP, DEN, RCE).

This panel provokes thinking about a paradigm shift in valuing the output of cultural heritage organisations. It argues for the appreciation of the following Key Performance Indicators:

  • Increasing visibility of cultural heritage through the dissemination across third party platforms and distributors (reuse, reach, diversity)
  • Collaboration in networks of organisations with similar goals, by division of task and contributing specific expertise that benefit the network as a whole
  • Adherence to open standards that ensure sustainable access and interoperability
  • Opening of metadata and digital objects for reuse by third parties (including commercial entities)
  • Implementation of Linked Open Data standards for enrichment and alignment of digital collections with the broader web

These KPIs will be demonstrated and advocated by various experts from the cultural heritage sector, and beyond.

Wikidata for beginners
Sandra Fauconnier

sandra FauconnierSandra Fauconnier has more than 15 years of experience with online projects in the cultural sector. She has worked for archives and collections of new media art (V2_ in Rotterdam, Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam) and was project lead of ARTtube, the video website of Dutch and Belgian museums. In the last years, she has increasingly focused her work and attention towards projects in free culture, as Wikipedian in Residence for the Dutch Foundation for Academic Heritage (SAE) and as project lead and volunteer for a variety of Wikimedia projects.

“Free culture is not ‘just cheap’. It offers superb value and great return on investment for society as a whole.”

Wikidata, launched in 2012, is the youngest and fastest-growing project in the Wikimedia family. It is the free (CC0 / public domain), volunteer-driven, multilingual database behind Wikipedia, intended to be readable by humans and machines. Supported by (among others) Google, Wikidata aims to bring together the ‘hard data’ behind every Wikipedia article in the world.

But there is much more. Wikidata effectively has the potential to become a major data hub of the World Wide Web. In the cultural domain, volunteers have gathered and described more than 100,000 paintings on Wikidata, and they eventually want to cover every painting in any museum in the world (project ‘Sum of All Paintings‘). Wikidata items are cross-referenced to dozens of authority databases and thesauri. Collections of cultural institutions on Wikidata are not closed silos of data anymore: the items in them are enriched with the broad context of, indeed, the whole world (or at least any subject that has a Wikipedia article). And all this data is freely reusable by anyone.

In a playful improvisation session, participants make their first steps on Wikidata and learn the basics. Wikidata volunteers and relevant projects are introduced. The session ends with a discussion and an inventory of questions for possible follow-up.

Please bring your own laptop!

Hacking historical space with the ErfGeoviewer
Jason Yergeau

Jason YergeauJason Yergeau is a full-stack developer at Total Active Media. He focuses primarily on the public, cultural and journalism sectors, and builds products and tools for content producers. He’s interested in new forms of readerly behavior and finding ways of connecting and interlinking texts. At DISH he will be presenting the ErfGeoviewer, a geographical tool for searching cultural databases and embedding them online.

“Maps, journalism, lit. Developer. The Dutch think I’m Canadian, Americans think I’m Dutch, and the Canadians are really really sorry about all of this.”

The ErfGeoviewer is a browser-based tool to plot cultural heritage objects from the Dutch Digital Collection onto a map. In this workshop we will search through these collections to tell a personalized story about a particular place. Dutch participants are invited to tell a story about a town or place they already know. Visitors who are less familiar with the country can mark out an exploratory landscape of people and events that they can discover later on through travel or research. All objects taken from the Digital Collection can be tweaked by participants to reflect their own vision of the place they are mapping. By the end of the workshop, attendees will have a working cultural heritage map they can share with friends on social networks.