Cultural Heritage Collections Research Articles

Is medieval distant viewing possible? : Extending and enriching annotation of legacy image collections using visual analytics

Abstract Distant viewing approaches have typically used image datasets close to the contemporary image data used to train machine learning models. To work with images from other historical periods requires expert annotated data, and the quality of labels is crucial for the quality of results. Especially when working with cultural heritage collections that contain myriad uncertainties, annotating data, or re-annotating, legacy data is an arduous task. In this paper, we describe working with two pre-annotated sets of medieval manuscript images that exhibit conflicting and overlapping metadata. Since a manual reconciliation of the two legacy ontologies would be very expensive, we aim (1) to create a more uniform set of descriptive labels to serve as a “bridge” in the combined dataset, and (2) to establish a high-quality hierarchical classification that can be used as a valuable input for subsequent supervised machine learning. To achieve these goals, we developed visualization and interaction mechanisms, enabling medievalists to combine, regularize and extend the vocabulary used to describe these, and other cognate, image datasets. The visual interfaces provide experts an overview of relationships in the data going beyond the sum total of the metadata. Word and image embeddings as well as co-occurrences of labels across the datasets enable batch re-annotation of images, recommendation of label candidates, and support composing a hierarchical classification of labels.

Application of computer vision techniques for 3D matching and retrieval of archaeological objects

Background As cultural institutions embark in projects oriented to digitise art and archaeological collections in three dimensions, the need for developing means to access the resulting 3D models has become imperative. Shape recognition techniques developed in the field of computer vision can help in this task. Methods This paper describes the implementation of three shape descriptors, specifically shape distributions, reflective symmetry and spherical harmonics as part of the development of a search engine that retrieves 3D models from an archaeological database without the need of using keywords as query criteria. Use case The usefulness of this system is obvious in the context of cultural heritage museums, where it is essential to provide automatic access to archaeological and art collections. The prototype described in this paper uses, as study case, 3D models of archaeological objects belonging to Museo del Templo Mayor, a Mexican institution that preserves one of the largest collections of Aztec cultural heritage. Conclusions This work is part of an ongoing project focused on creating generic methodologies and user-friendly computational tools for shape analysis for the benefit of scholars and students interested in describing, interpreting and disseminating new knowledge about the morphology of cultural objects.

Tracing the lead source of maiolica: a pilot isotopic study on artefacts from the area of Florence, Italy (fifteenth–nineteenth century)

The manufacturing of Italian maiolica (tin-glazed pottery) was extremely appreciated during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, leading to the production and collection of a rich cultural heritage. This pilot study aims to characterize the production technique and the origin of the lead used as a flux in a set of samples of maiolica glazes made in the area of Florence over a wide time span, ranging from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In particular, this is the first study that applies provenance analysis, using lead isotopes, to tin-glazed artefacts made in the site of Montelupo Fiorentino and by the Ginori manufactory in Doccia (Florence, Italy), both important production centres of ceramics in Italy. The samples were first analysed by scanning electron microscopy to characterize their layer structure and chemical composition. Lead isotope analysis was then performed by thermal ionization mass spectrometry and showed that the samples tend to be distributed into distinct groups according to their period of production. Moreover, the comparison with the lead isotope composition of the deposits of the European and circum-Mediterranean area from which lead was historically extracted showed that the isotopic composition of the samples differs from that of the Italian deposits, suggesting that lead was imported from abroad. The isotopic composition of all the investigated maiolica glazes is compatible with German ore deposits, in agreement with what is reported by the historical sources relating to the lead supply areas.

Risk analysis for preventive conservation of heritage collections in Mediterranean museums: case study of the museum of fine arts in Alexandria (Egypt)

The impacts of climate change on heritage collections in Mediterranean museums are serious and lead to accelerated material degradation, loss of value, increasing conservation costs and climatisation. Climate change scenarios and simulation models have been developed to predict the extreme and average future environmental conditions and to assess the future long-term risks caused by global warming for museum buildings and their collections in Mediterranean countries, with Egypt being particularly at risk. This paper presents the results of the risk analysis of the indoor and outdoor environments in Alexandria Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) in Egypt to provide an overview of the current situation of conservation and museum management and to provide evidence-based data to support decision-making regarding preventive conservation given the museum's limited funding, capacity and resources. Unfortunately, the air quality in the museum cannot be considered satisfactory and specific measures need to be taken to improve the level of air quality and museum and building management. The results enabled an assessment of indoor air quality and provided information on potential risks to the museum building and collections, including variations in temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH), concentrations of NO2, SO2, O3, CO2, acetic and formic acid and lighting conditions, as well as the location and management of the museum. The results necessitate the development of a preventive conservation plan to address the challenges associated with high T/RH fluctuations and pollution pressure. This requires more regular use of the HVAC system within certain T/RH set points as well as minimising light exposure and the use of UV-filtering glazing. Care should be taken to ensure that housekeeping and emergency preparedness reduce the damping and salt florescence in the museum building. However, dealing with the impact of climate change on indoor and outdoor environments and museum collections in Mediterranean museums requires a holistic and adaptive approach that includes joint collaboration, research, training and strategic planning to ensure the long-term preservation of valuable cultural heritage collections in different climates with customised adaptations based on local environmental conditions, resources and needs. Resilience planning should be region-specific and take into account the potential impacts of extreme weather events, sea level rise and other climate-related challenges.

Image searching in an open photograph archive: search tactics and faced barriers in historical research

AbstractDuring the last decades, cultural heritage collections have been digitized, for example, for the use of academic scholars. However, earlier studies have mainly focused on the use of textual materials. Thus, little is known about how digitized photographs are used and searched in digital humanities. The aim of this paper is to investigate the applied search tactics and perceived barriers when looking for historical photographs from a digital image archive for research and writing tasks. The case archive of this study contains approximately 160,000 historical wartime photographs that are openly available. The study is based on a qualitative interview and demonstration data of 15 expert users of the image collection searching photographs for research and writing tasks. Critical incident questions yielded a total of 37 detailed real-life search examples and 158 expressed barriers to searching. Results show that expert users apply and combine different tactics (keywords, filtering and browsing) for image searching, and rarely using one tactic only is enough. During searching users face various barriers, most of them focusing on keyword searching due to the shortcomings of image metadata. Barriers were mostly in the context of the collection and tools. Although scholars have benefited from the efforts put into digitizing cultural heritage collections, providing digitized content openly online is not enough if there are no sufficient means for accessing the content. Automatic annotation methods are one option for creating metadata to improve the findability of the images. However, a better understanding of human information interaction with image data is needed to better support digitalization in the humanities in this respect.

Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections (NEH)

Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections (NEH)

Mapping European Digital Heritage Politics: An Empirical Study of Europeana as a Web-based Network

ABSTRACT Europeana is a cultural heritage initiative financed by the European Union (EU) with the primary scope of curating a platform aggregating digital collections of European cultural heritage. Among other tasks, Europeana designs best practices and digital tools aligned with the EU’s digital cultural policy to support the digitization of cultural heritage institutions in the member states. Therefore, it can be considered a socio-political actor building an international network. Nevertheless, it has mainly been studied as a digital service. To investigate Europeana’s impact on the European cultural sector, this work proposes a three-level methodology combining web mapping, close reading of websites, and statistical analysis. This methodology offers a comprehensive picture of the Europeana platform’s role on the web, providing evidence of its action as a social hub gathering a network of national and local actors in the European cultural environment.

Investigating the Intersections of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence in the Collections as Data Position Papers

ABSTRACTA paradigm shift is currently underway with the emergence of the Collections as Data movement, which advocates the creation and dissemination of cultural heritage collections that are amenable to large‐scale computation to empower both collection managers and users. Although this discourse is beginning to gain some traction in the literature, critical evidence‐based assessments of the opportunities and risks of this process are underexplored. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of the official position statements (n = 83) produced in the Collections as Data forums and written by international professionals working with digital collections. Although preliminary, the analysis presented and discussed here sheds light on the initial reception of the idea of Collections as Data and its articulation in practice. The study represents the first systematic attempt to explore the complexities of the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence in the context of cultural heritage, aiming at providing a valuable precedent for further elaboration and discussion.

Content Analysis of Libraries’ Instagram Posts: Cultural Collection, Activities, and Preservation of Cultural Heritage

Abstract Libraries’ roles and contributions in promoting and raising awareness of culture and cultural heritage to support the sustainability of cultural life can be strengthened by utilizing social media platforms, including Instagram. However, there is a gap in studies and research relating to how academic libraries reflect their cultural functions through social media, i.e., Instagram. This paper provides a content analysis of academic libraries’ Instagram accounts at three academic libraries located in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. These libraries represent their universities’ concerns with promoting sustainable development goals, specifically Sustainable Development Goal 11 (make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable). This study analyzed and categorized the Instagram posts of academic libraries related to culture and cultural heritage to answer the following research question: how do academic libraries reflect their cultural functions through social media, i.e., Instagram? The results show that the academic libraries studied here considered reflecting their cultural functions through social media by informing users about various cultural events, collections, facts, and news on Instagram.

Cultural Heritage Collections as Data

Amaç: Günümüzde dijital insani bilimler araştırmalarında kullanılan ana veri/bilgi kaynakları dijital ortama aktarılmış çözünürlüğü yüksek belgeler ve verilerden oluşan koleksiyonlar ile bu koleksiyonlara ait makinece okunabilir ve işlem yapılabilir üstverilerdir. Bu araştırmanın amacı dijital insani bilimler araştırmacılarının “veri olarak koleksiyonlara” yönelik ihtiyaç ve beklentilerini ve kültürel bellek kurumlarının bu ihtiyaç ve beklentileri ne ölçüde karşıladıklarını saptamaktır.
 Yöntem: Araştırma kapsamında nitel yöntemler kullanılmış, 10 dijital insani bilimler araştırmacısı ve 16 kültürel bellek kurumu temsilcisi ile yarı yapılandırılmış görüşmeler gerçekleştirilmiştir. Araştırmacılara 20, kurum temsilcilerine 23 soru sorulmuş, tüm görüşme kayıtları çözümlenmiş (transkribe edilmiş) ve MaxQDA nitel veri analiz yazılımı aracılığıyla görüşme kayıtlarının içerik analizi yapılmıştır.
 Bulgular: Araştırmacılar koleksiyonlara makinece okunabilir ve işlem yapılabilir formatlarda veri setleri halinde erişmeye ihtiyaç duymaktadırlar. Protokol karşılığında veya talep olduğunda koleksiyonlarını bu şekilde paylaşabilecek az sayıda kurum olsa da henüz hiçbir kurum makinece okunabilir formatlarda ve bilişimsel erişime uygun biçimde dijital koleksiyonlarını hizmete açmamıştır. Kurumların koleksiyonlarını dönüştürmek için nitelikli personele, bütçeye, teknik altyapıya, yönetim desteğine, işbirliğine, zamana ve konuya ilişkin bir rehbere ihtiyaçları bulunmaktadır.
 Sonuç: Kurumlar, üstverileri düzenlemek, koleksiyonları dijitalleştirmek ve bu koleksiyonları veri olarak koleksiyon yaklaşımına uygun olarak araştırmacıların erişimine açmak için bu konuda farkındalık oluşturmalı, teknik, idari ve maddi yönlerden desteklenmeli ve nitelikli personel yetiştirmelidir.
 Özgünlük: Bu çalışma hem araştırmacıların hem de kültürel bellek kurumlarının bakış açılarından Türkiye’de veri olarak koleksiyonlar hizmetine yönelik gereksinimleri, beklentileri ve engelleri saptayan ilk araştırmadır.

Building a community of resilience and response—development of disaster response and training programmes

The increasing impact of catastrophic disasters has inspired a strong network of cooperative disaster resiliency programmes focussing on protection and response for heritage collections and sites around the world. A dedicated community of professionals has developed successful partnership organisations that form a collaboration of institutions, first responders, local community groups and volunteers. At the core in the United States is a consortium of governmental and private organisations. Advocating for and safeguarding cultural heritage against risks draws on conventions, policy frameworks and guidance, becoming an imperative part of effective collection and site management. This article outlines the history, missions, interrelationship and expanded programming of this resolute, primarily volunteer community. The evolution of strategic disaster resilience in North America is non-linear, as are the histories of the organisations and individuals who have contributed to the nascent specialty. Key people and agencies are dedicated to protecting cultural assets and progressively improving and professionalising disaster resilience and recovery. The strategic, physical and psychological needs of disaster-affected communities are now standard management protocols for cultural heritage collections. Tangible documentation of these changes and interconnections are spread between professional repositories and personal archives, with minimal finding aids and dependence on individual memories. This information is gathered, regularly shared and updated as part of experiential training but seldom published in historical or scholarly articles. This article is intended to bridge the gap between a literature review and a record of experiences that have moved the profession of cultural heritage responder and their support organisations forward in time.

How generous interface affect user experience and behavior: Evaluating the information display interface for museum cultural heritage

AbstractMuseum web interfaces continue to be important in how users search for information and navigate through digital cultural heritage resources. A generous interface was deemed appropriate for displaying large amounts of digital cultural heritage. However, more example verification is required in this field of study. This study compared the traditional interface and the generous interface of the Liaoning Provincial Museum to investigate the role of a generous interface for cultural heritage collections. Forty second‐year design graduate students were randomly assigned to one of two interface groups: traditional interface or generous interface. Four variables were measured to compare the differences between the two interfaces for the participants. In addition, two parameters, holding time and average retrieval time, are recorded and used to evaluate and compare the impact of the two interfaces on user behavior. The generous interface, according to the findings, is more effective than the traditional interface in increasing participants' engagement with cultural heritage and is perceived to be more aesthetically pleasing. In addition, the generous interface has been proven to be more suitable for casual leisure users to explore cultural heritage information. This research provides the basis and reference for developing the web interface of cultural heritage collections.

Digital Literary Landmarks of Aotearoa New Zealand

Digital literary forms in and of Aotearoa New Zealand have yet to be adequately historicised, and such works – and their authors – risk being lost to New Zealand’s literary history. Addressing the added challenge of doing history in the digital age, I offer an analytical survey of early digital literary works in or of NZ based around the categories of fiction, poetry, performance, and videogames. Cultivating a digital literary history serves us well not only in situating individual works of creative media in our collective cultural heritage but also in situating New Zealand amid broader networked culture.

Why collections matter: impacts of cultural heritage collections on people’s lives

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of a global, cross-cultural survey conducted by ICCROM that invited people from all walks of life to describe the impacts that cultural heritage collections have on their lives. The qualitative responses of nearly 2,400 collected surveys were coded to extract main themes, which were subsequently analysed against respondents’ ages, geographic distribution, and occupations using asymmetrical correspondence analysis. Across eight main themes, this research explores recurring justifications observed in the survey data describing how heritage collections were perceived to impact – or not impact – people’s lives, considering variance across different demographic groups. It further engages contemporary heritage debates to discuss what the results might say about the actual and potential roles of heritage collections in today’s global societies, as well as some possible implications on their management.

Towards a Semantics-Based Recommendation System for Cultural Heritage Collections

While the use of semantic technologies is now commonplace in the cultural heritage sector and several semantically annotated cultural heritage datasets are publicly available, there are few examples of cultural portals that exploit these datasets and technologies to improve the experience of visitors to their online collections. Aiming to address this gap, this paper explores methods for semantics-based recommendations aimed at visitors to cultural portals who want to explore online collections. The proposed methods exploit the rich semantic metadata in a cultural heritage dataset and the capabilities of a graph database system to improve the accuracy of searches through the collection and the quality of the recommendations provided to the user. The methods were developed and tested with the Archive of the Art Textbooks of Elementary and Public Schools in the Japanese Colonial Period. However, they can easily be adapted to any cultural heritage collection dataset modelled in RDF.

Bias mitigation techniques in Image Classification: Fair Machine Learning in Human Heritage Collections

A major problem with using automated classification systems is that if they are not engineered correctly and with fairness considerations, they could be detrimental to certain populations. Furthermore, while engineers have developed cutting-edge technologies for image classification, there is still a gap in the application of these models in human heritage collections, where data sets usually consist of low-quality pictures of people with diverse ethnicity, gender, and age. In this work, we evaluate three bias mitigation techniques using two state-of-the-art neural networks, Xception and EfficientNet, for gender classification. Moreover, we explore the use of transfer learning using a fair data set to overcome the training data scarcity. We evaluated the effectiveness of the bias mitigation pipeline on a cultural heritage collection of photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, and we used the FairFace data set for the transfer learning experiments. After the evaluation, we found that transfer learning is a good technique that allows better performance when working with a small data set. Moreover, the fairest classifier was found to be accomplished using transfer learning, threshold change, re-weighting and image augmentation as bias mitigation methods.

The Relationship between User Perceived Value and Use Intention of Digital Cultural Heritage Collection Apps: An Empirical Study from China

The Relationship between User Perceived Value and Use Intention of Digital Cultural Heritage Collection Apps: An Empirical Study from China

Lietuvių diasporos dokumentinis paveldas: susigrąžinimo, pažinimo ir tyrimų problemos

During the three decades of independent Lithuania, a lot of important work was done in preserving and researching the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora. Various state institutions have expressed concern about the fate of the archival heritage of the diaspora, and the documentary heritage of the diaspora, its search, and the accumulation of information in state strategic documents, have been identified as significant barriers to the activities of state institutions for almost two decades. The work of identifying and recovering heritage important to Lithuania abroad is successfully underway, and collections of diaspora cultural heritage are returning to Lithuania from various parts of the world. During these decades, many important studies of the cultural history of the diaspora have been conducted, and a number of books and monographs have been published. Still, the history of the Lithuanian diaspora, its documentary heritage, remains a little-known and rather foreign thing to Lithuanian society. The article discusses the issues of the fate of the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora and analyzes the relevance, dispersion, preservation, accessibility, research, and dissemination of cultural heritage, which are faced by the institutions protecting the documentary heritage operating both in Lithuania and abroad. From the end of the 19th century to the present day, many cultural values were created through emigration. Only a small part of the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora has been preserved and known, part of which was inevitably destroyed by time, and the rest is kept in various institutions and private archives in Lithuania, Canada, the USA, Australia, Germany, and other countries. The heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora, which is disappearing rather rapidly in various countries, remains one of the most pressing problems to this day. As the number of representatives of the Lithuanian diaspora who created and preserved this heritage decreases, the questions of the fate of this archival heritage become more and more relevant. In Lithuania, there is still no unified information archiving system of the documentary heritage related to Lithuania located abroad: there is a lack of information on which and how many are the diaspora archives, and in which institutions they are stored. Archives that have returned to Lithuania are scattered among various cities and towns, museums, libraries, state archives, and scientific institutions, where their storage, management, and digitization work is strongly influenced by the availability of financial and human resources. Institutions protecting the historical heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora are increasingly faced with the problems of identifying and evaluating this heritage, because: a) the ranks of the actors of the cultural life of the diaspora who created, preserved and can recognize this documentary heritage are constantly thinning, and the young generation of diaspora is almost not interested in the legacy of their parents; b) in Lithuania, there is a decrease in the number of specialists working and researching the history of the diaspora. In order for the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora not to be condemned to oblivion, it is not enough just to take care of the preservation of these diaspora archives, their transportation to Lithuania, and their safe storage in archive storage facilities: it is necessary to research and get to know it so that this heritage becomes its own, important and necessary part of the historical legacy of the Lithuanian nation.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Natural and Cultural Heritage: Opportunities and Challenges

This introduction to the special issue “Digital Natural and Cultural Heritage” has two aims: First, it briefly introduces individual contributions and explains how they relate to one another. Second, it explains our motivation for producing a special issue aimed at bridging the perceived gap between the fields of digital natural and cultural heritage. More concretely, it presents different computational approaches to tackle heterogeneity in digital natural and cultural heritage collections. Here the goal is to make information retrievable, interlinked, and interpretable for researchers and the general public. However, instead of offering final solutions, this special issue rather hopes to highlight the enormous potential that collaborations across domains have. We hope that we offer a starting point for transdisciplinary research in which researchers, curators, and infrastructure developers of both domains communicate and work much tighter together.

Application of computer vision techniques for 3D matching and retrieval of archaeological objects

Background: As cultural institutions embark in projects oriented to digitise art and archaeological collections in three dimensions, the need for developing means to access the resulting 3D models has become imperative. Shape recognition techniques developed in the field of computer vision can help in this task. Methods: This paper describes the implementation of three shape descriptors, specifically shape distributions, reflective symmetry and spherical harmonics as part of the development of a search engine that retrieves 3D models from an archaeological database without the need of using keywords as query criteria. Use case: The usefulness of this system is obvious in the context of cultural heritage museums, where it is essential to provide automatic access to archaeological and art collections. The prototype described in this paper uses, as study case, 3D models of archaeological objects belonging to Museo del Templo Mayor, a Mexican institution that preserves one of the largest collections of Aztec cultural heritage. Conclusions: This work is part of an ongoing project focused on creating generic methodologies and user-friendly computational tools for shape analysis for the benefit of scholars and students interested in describing, interpreting and disseminating new knowledge about the morphology of cultural objects.