Launch of Towards a National Collection discovery projects

£14.5m awarded to transform online exploration of UK’s culture and heritage collections through harnessing innovative AI

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has awarded £14.5m to the research and development of emerging technologies, including machine learning and citizen-led archiving, in order to connect the UK’s cultural artefacts and historical archives in new and transformative ways.

Image by Colin McDowall, courtesy of Towards a National Collection. (Young woman winding bobbins on wheel in the loom shop, 1898 Blanket factory, Witney, Oxfordshire © Historic England Archive CC73_00946 | Indian laundry couple with the man ironing clothes. Attributed to a painter from Tanjore (Thanjavur), ca. 1840. Gouache drawing. 32247i © Wellcome Collection | Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) Stephen Slaughter (1697–1765) (attributed to) © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London | A starboard bow view of the three-masted barque Glenbervie (1866) with crowds of people, on the rocks at Lowland Point. G14146. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Gibson’s of Scilly Shipwreck Collection | Artwork by Peter Morphew illustrating the repositories of the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections.)

The Archives Hub is pleased to announce that we will be a project partner in one of five major projects being launched today. The projects form the largest investment of Towards a National Collection, a five-year research programme. Today’s launch reveals the first insights into how thousands of disparate collections could be explored by public audiences and academic researchers in the future.

The five ‘Discovery Projects’ will harness the potential of new technology to dissolve barriers between collections – opening up public access and facilitating research across a range of sources and stories held in different physical locations. One of the central aims is to empower and diversify audiences by involving them in the research and creating new ways for them to access and interact with collections. In addition to innovative online access, the projects will generate artist commissions, community fellowships, computer simulations, and travelling exhibitions. The projects are:

● The Congruence Engine: Digital Tools for New Collections-Based Industrial Histories

● Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection

● Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage

● The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections

● Unpath’d Waters: Marine and Maritime Collections in the UK

The investigation is the largest of its kind to be undertaken to date, anywhere in the world. It extends across the UK, involving 15 universities and 63 heritage collections and institutions of different scales, with over 120 individual researchers and collaborators.

Together, the Discovery Projects represent a vital step in the UK’s ambition to maintain leadership in cross-disciplinary research, both between different humanities disciplines and between the humanities and other fields. Towards a National Collection will set a global standard for other countries building their own collections, enhancing collaboration between the UK’s renowned heritage and national collections worldwide.

Archives Hub and the Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage project

Donald Locke 1972-4, Trophies of Empire © Estate of Donald Locke Courtesy of Tate | Claudette Johnson, Figure in Blue, 2018. © Claudette Johnson. Image Credit: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre | Iniva_Rivington Place: Photograph by Carlos Jimenez, 2018 | Rachel Jones, lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist.
Donald Locke 1972-4, Trophies of Empire © Estate of Donald Locke Courtesy of Tate | Claudette Johnson, Figure in Blue, 2018. © Claudette Johnson. Image Credit: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre | Iniva_Rivington Place: Photograph by Carlos Jimenez, 2018 | Rachel Jones, lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London.

The Archives Hub at Jisc will be working with fellow project partners:

susan pui san lok, 2021
susan pui san lok, 2021: Courtesy the artist
  • Tate
  • Arts Council Collection
  • Art Fund
  • Art UK
  • Birmingham Museums Trust
  • British Council Collection
  • Contemporary Art Society
  • Glasgow Museums
  • Iniva (Institute of International Visual Art)
  • Manchester Art Gallery
  • Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
  • National Museums Liverpool
  • Van Abbemuseum (NL)
  • Wellcome Collection

The Principal investigator for Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage project is Professor susan pui san lok, University of the Arts London.

More than twenty years after Stuart Hall posed the question, ‘Whose heritage?’, Hall’s call for the critical transformation and reimagining of heritage and nation remains as urgent as ever. This project is driven by the provocation that a national collection cannot be imagined without addressing structural inequalities in the arts, engaging debates around contested heritage, and revealing contentious histories imbued in objects.

An arrangement of different castes including snake charmer, brick-layer, basket-maker, potter and wives. Gouache drawing. 28438i © Wellcome Collection.

Transforming Collections aims to enable cross-search of collections, surface patterns of bias, uncover hidden connections, and open up new interpretative frames and ‘potential histories’ (Azoulay, 2019) of art, nation and heritage. It will combine critical art historical and museological research with participatory machine learning design, and embed creative activations of interactive machine learning in the form of artist commissions.

Untitled 1986 1987.21, Manchester Art Gallery © Keith Piper.

Among the aims of this project are to surface suppressed histories, amplify marginalized voices, and re-evaluate artists and artworks ignored or side-lined by dominant narratives; and to begin to imagine a distributed yet connected evolving ‘national collection’ that builds on and enriches existing knowledge, with multiple and multivocal narratives.

The role of the Archives Hub will centre around:

  • Disseminating project aims, developments and outcomes to our contributors, through our communication channels and our cataloguing workshops, to encourage a wide range of archives to engage with these issues.
Glasgow Women’s Library, Museum of the Year finalist, 2018. Art Map 2019. © Marc Atkins / Art Fund 2018
  • Working with the Creative Computing Institute, at the University of the Arts London, to integrate the Machine Learning (ML) processing into the Archives Hub data processing workflows, so that it can benefit for over 350 institutions, including public art institutions.
Mick Grierson, Exploring the Daphne Oram Collection using 3D visualisation and machine learning (screenshot). 2012. Mick Grierson, Parag MitalLondon © the artist.
  • Providing expertise from over 20 years of running an archival aggregator and working with a whole range of UK archive repositories, particularly around sustainability and the challenges of working with archival metadata.

Big Data, Small Data and Meaning

Victorian joke. From the Victorian Meme Machine, a BL Labs project (http://www.digitalvictorianist.com/)
Victorian joke. From the Victorian Meme Machine, a BL Labs project (http://www.digitalvictorianist.com/)

The BL Labs is an initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation that invites researchers and developers to work with the BL and their digital data to address research questions.  The Symposium 2014 showcased some of the work funded by the Labs, presenting innovative and exploratory projects that have been funded through this initiative. This year’s competition winners are  the Victorian Meme Machine, creating a database of Victorian jokes,  and a Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT) for linking areas on a page image and a clear transcription of the content.

Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History from the University of Sussex, opened with a great keynote talk. He started out by stressing the role of libraries, archives and museums in preserving memory and their central place in a complex ecology of knowledge discovery, dissemination and reflection. He felt it was essential to remember this when we get too caught up in pursuing shiny new ideas.  It is important to continually rethink what it is to be an information professional; whilst also respecting the basic principles that a library (archive, museum) was created to serve.

Tim Hitchcock’s talk was Big Data, Small Data and Meaning. He said that conundrums of size mean there is a danger of a concentration on Big Data and a corresponding neglect of Small Data. But can we view and explore a world encompassing both the minuscule and the massive? Hitchcock introduced the concept of the macroscope, a term coined in a science fiction novel  by Piers Anthony back in 1970. He used this term in his talk to consider the idea of a macro view of data. How has the principle of the macroscope influenced the digital humanities? Hitchcock referred to Katy Borner’s work with Plug-and-Play Macroscopesa: “Macroscopes let us observe what is at once too great or too slow or too complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.” (See http://vimeo.com/33413091 for an introductory video).

Hitchcock felt that ideally macroscopes should be to observe patterns across large data and at the same time show the detail within small data.  The way that he talked about Big Data within the context of both the big and the small helped me to make more sense of Big Data methods. I think that within the archive community there has been something of a collective head scratching around Big Data;  what its significance is, and how it relates to what we do. In a way it helps to think of it alongside the analysis that Small Data allows researchers to undertake.

Graph from Paper Machines
Paper Machines visualisation (http://papermachines.org/)

Hitchcock gave some further examples of Big Data projects. Paper Machines is a plugin for Zotero that enables topic modelling analysis. It allows the user to curate a large collection of works and explore its characteristics with some great results; but the analysis does not really address detail.

The History Manifesto, by Jo Guldi and David Armitage talks about how Big Data might be used to redefine the role of Digital Humanities. But Hitchcock criticised it for dismissing micro-history as essentially irrelevant.

Scott Weingart is also a fan of the macroscope. He is a convincing advocate for network analysis, which he talks about in his blog, The modern role of DH in a data-driven world:

“distant reading occludes as much as it reveals, resulting in significant ethical breaches in our digital world. Network analysis and the humanities offers us a way out, a way to bridge personal stories with the big picture, and to bring a much-needed ethical eye to the modern world.”

Hitchcock posited that the large scale is often seen as a route to impact in policy formation, and this is an attractive inducement to think large. In working on a big data scale, Humanities can speak to power more convincingly; it can lead to a more powerful voice and more impact.

We were introduced to Ben Schmidt’s work, Prochronisms. This uses TV anachronisms to learn about changes in language scales of analysis around the analysis of text used, and Schmidt has done some work around particular TV programmes and films, looking at the overall use of language and the specifics of word use. One example of his work is the analysis of 12 Years a Slave:

visual representation of language in 12 Years a Slave
12 Years a Slave: Word Analysis (http://www.prochronism.com/)

‘the language Ridley introduces himself is full of dramatically modern words like “outcomes,” “cooperative,” and “internationally:” but that where he sticks to Northup’s own words, the film is giving us a good depiction of how things actually sounded. This is visible in the way that the orange ball is centered much higher than the blue one: higher translates to “more common than then now.”‘

Schmidt gives very entertaining examples of anachronisms, for example, the use of ‘parenting a child’ in the TV drama series Downton Abbey, which only shows up in literature 5 times during the 1920’s and in a rather different context to our modern use; his close reading of context also throws up surprises, such as his analysis of the use of the word ‘stuff’ in Downton Abbey (as in ‘family stuff’ or ‘general stuff’), which does not appear to be anachronistic and yet viewers feel that it is a modern term.  (A word of warning, the site is fascinating and it’s hard to stop reading it once you start!)

Professor Hitchcock gave this work as an example of using a macroscope effectively to combine the large and the small. Schmidt reveals narrative arcs; maybe showing us something that hasn’t been revealed before…and at the same time creates anxiety amongst script writers with his stark analysis!

Viewing data on a series of scales simultaneously seems a positive development, even with the pitfalls. But are humanists privileging social science types of analysis over more traditional humanist ones? Working with Big Data can be hugely productive and fun, and it can encourage collaboration, but are humanist scholars losing touch with what they traditionally do best? Language and art, cultural construction and human experience are complex things. Scholars therefore need to encompass close reading and Small Data in their work in order to get a nuanced reading.  Our urge towards the all-inclusive is largely irresistible, but in this fascination we may lose the detail. The global image needs to be balanced with a view from the other end of the macroscope.

It is important to represent and mobilise the powerless rather than always thinking about the relationship to the powerful; to analyse the construct of power rather than being held in the grip of power and technology. Histories of small things are often what gives voice to those who are marginalised. Humanists should encompass the peculiar and eccentric; they should not ignore the power of the particular.

Graph showing evidence for the Higgs boson particle
Graph showing evidence for the Higgs particle (http://www.atlas.ch/news/2012/latest-results-from-higgs-search.html)

Of course, Big Data can have huge and fundamental results. The discovery of the Higgs particle was the result of massive data crunching and finding a small ‘bump’ in the data that gave evidence to support its existence. The other smaller data variations needed to be ignored in this scenario. It was a case of millions of rolls of the dice to discover the elusive particle. But if this approach is applied across the board, the assumption is that the signal, or the evidence, will come through, despite the extraneous blips and bumps. It doesn’t matter if you are using dirty data because small hiccups are just ignored.  But humanists need to read data with an eye to peculiarities and they should consider the value of digital tools that allow them to think small.

Hitchcock believes that to perform humanities effectively we need to contextualise.  And the importance of context is never lost to an archivist, as this is a cornerstone of our work. Big Data analysis can lose this context; Small Data is all about understanding context to derive meaning.

Using the example of voice onset timing, which refers to the tiny breathy gap before speaking, Hitchcock showed that a couple of milliseconds of empty space can demand close reading, because it actually changes depending on who you are talking to, and it reveals some really interesting findings. A Big Data approach would simply miss this fascinating detail.

Big data has its advantages, but it can mean that you don’t look really closely at the data set itself. There is a danger you present your results in a compelling graph or visualisation, but it is hard to see whether it is a flawed reality. You may understand the whole thing, and you can draw valuable conclusions, but you don’t take note of what the single line can tell you.

Digital Humanities: Patterns, Pictures and Paradigms

The recent Digital Humanities @ University of Manchester conference presented research and pondered issues surrounding digital humanities. I attended the morning of the conference, interested to understand more about the discipline and how archivists might interact with digital humanists, and consider ways of opening up their materials that might facilitate this new kind of approach.

Visualisation within digital humanities  was presented in a keynote by Dr Massimo Riva, from Brown University. He talked about the importance of methodologies based on computation, whether the sources are analogue or digital, and how these techniques are becoming increasingly essential for humanities.  He asked whether a picture is worth one million words,  and presented some thought-provoking quotes relating to visualisation, such as a quote by John Berger: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972).

Riva talked about how visual projection is increasingly tied up with who we are and what we do. But is digital humanities translational or transformative? Are these tools useful for the pursuit of traditional scholarly goals, or do they herald a new paradigm?  Does digital humanities imply that scholars are making things as they research, not just generating texts?  Riva asked how we can combine close reading of individual artifacts and ‘distant reading’ of patterns across millions of artifacts. He posited that visualisation helps with issues of scale; making sense of huge amounts of data. It also helps cross boundaries of language and communication.

Riva talked about the fascinating Cave Writing at Brown University, a new kind of cognitive experience. It is a four-wall, immersive virtual reality device, a room of words. This led into his thoughts about data as a type of artifact and the nature of the archive.

“On the cusp of the twenty–first century…we speak of an ex–static archive, of an archive not assembled behind stone walls but suspended in a liquid element behind a luminous screen; the archive becomes a virtual repository of knowledge without visible limits, an archive in which the material now becomes immaterial.” This change “has altered in still unimaginable ways our relationship to the archive”. (Voss & Werner, 1999)

The Garibaldi panorama is a  276 feet long, a panorama that tells the story of Garibaldi, the Italian general and politician. blog-dighum-garibaldiIt is fragile and cannot be directly consulted by scholars. So, the whole panorama was photographed in 91 digital images in 2007. The digital experience is clearly different to the physical experience. But the resulting digital panorama can be interacted with it many various ways and it is widely available via the website along with various tools to help researchers interpret the panorama. It is interesting to think about how much this is in itself a curated experience, and how much it is an experience that the user curates themselves. Maybe it is both. If it is curated, then it is not really the archivists who are curators, but those who have created the experience  those with the ability to create such technical digital environments. It is also possible for students to create their own resources, and then for those resources to become part of the experience, such as an interactive timeline based on the panorama. So, students can enhance the metadata as a form of digital scholarship.

Riva showed an example of a collaborative environment where students can take parts of the panorama that interests them and explore it, finding links and connections and studying parts of the panorama along with relevant texts. It is fascinating as an archivist to see examples like this where the original archive remains the basis of the scholarly endeavour. The artifact is at a distance to the actual experience, but the researcher can analyse it to a very detailed level. It raises the whole debate around the importance of studying the original archive. As tools and environments become more and more sophisticated, it is possible to argue that the added value of a digital experience is very substantial, and for many researchers, preferable to handling the original.

Riva talked about the learning curve with the software. Scholars struggled to understand the full potential of it and what they could do and needed to invest time in this. But an important positive was that students could feedback to the programmers, in order to help them improve the environment.

We had short presentations on a diverse range of projects, all of which showed how digital humanities is helping to reveal history to us in many ways. Dr Guyda Armstrong made the point that library catalogues are more than they might seem – they are a part of cultural history. This is reflected in a bid for funding for a Digging into Data project, metaSCOPE, looking at bibliographical metadata as datamassive cultural history.  The questions the project hopes to answer are many: how are different cultures expressed in the data? How do library collections data reflect the epistemic values, national and disciplinary cultures and artifacts of production and dissemination expressed in their creation?  This project could help with mapping the history of publishing in space and time, as well as showing the history of one book over time.

We saw many examples of how visual work and digital humanities approaches can bring history to life and help with new understanding of many areas of research. I was interested to hear how the mapping of the Caribbean during the 18th century opened up the coastline to the slave traders, but the interior, which was not mapped in any detail, remained in many ways a free area, where the slave traders did not have control. The mapping had a direct influence on many people’s lives in very fundamental ways.

Another point that really stood out to me was the danger of numbers averaging out the human experience – a challenge with digital humanities approach, as, at the same time, numbers can give great insights into history. Maybe this is a very good reason why those who create tools and those who use them benefit from a shared understanding.

“All archaeological excavation is destruction”, so what actually lives on is the record you create, says Dr Stuart Campbell. Traditional monographs synthesize all the data. They represent what is created through the process of excavation. It is a very conventional approach. But things are changing and digital archiving creates new ways of working in the virtual world of archaeological data. Dr Campbell made the point that interpretation is often privileged over the data itself in traditional methods, but new approaches open up the data, allowing more narratives to be created. The process of data creation becomes apparent, and the approach scales up to allow querying that breaks out beyond the boundaries of archaeological sites. For example, he talked about looking at pattens on ancient pottery and plotting where the pottery comes from. New sophisticated tools allow different dimensions to be brought into the research.  Links can now be created that bring various social dimensions to archeological discoveries, but the understanding of what these connections really represent is less well understood or theorised.

Seemingly a contrast to many of the projects, a project to recreate the Gaskell house in blog-dighum-gaskellManchester is more about the physical experience. People will be able to take books down from the shelves, sit down and read them. But actually there is a digital approach here too, as the intention is to add value to the experience by enabling visitors to leaf through digital copies of Gaskell’s works and find out more about the process of writing and publishing by showing different versions of the same stories, handwritten, with annotations, and published. It is enhancing the physical experience with a tactile experience through digital means.

To end the morning we had a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of Websites. A very impressive site, allowing users to browse in detail through an Arabic manuscript, is to be taken down, presumably because of changes in personnel or priorities at the hosting institution.The sustainability of the digital approach is in itself a huge topic, whether it be the data or the dissemination approaches.