Events
Building Stronger and Connected Knowledge through Data Driven Cognitive Maps
Digital scholarship in the humanities relies heavily on, and is constrained by, the digital architecture of software tools originally designed from a business perspective. The problems humanities scholars face making effective use of digital tools lies not with their inability to learn programming skills, but with a disconnect between their ‘real world’ contexts of inquiry, and the types structured information environment that computer specialists promote as self-evident, predicated on a supposedly neutral ontology. ResearchSpace is a knowledge representation system designed to support inquiry that originates from diverse vantage points. It is a dynamic and collaborative space that offers the flexibility to integrate qualitative and quantitative abstractions and to bring together overlapping data narratives that express the specific vantage points of groups and individuals
Dominic Oldman
Libraries Discovery and Conceptual Reference
Cornell University - Nov 2020
“Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialisation of images of the world of autonomous images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving”. Guy Dubord
Dominic Oldman & Artem Kozlov
See slidesThe Revival of Data: Reflections on a New Old History Revisited
Ghent University, Faculty of History, 26th September 2019
Historical Event Modelling- In I968 the French historian, Le Roy Ladurie, thought that, "the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing". But today, nothing could be further from the truth.
Dominic Oldman(British Museum)
See abstract See slidesDigital Humanities Oxford Summer School 2019
Keble College, Oxford, July 26, 2019 (Morning)
Session 1 - The Gap between Digital and Humanities: Issues for the Semantic Web (theory)
Session 2 - The Human Curated Knowledge Graph (practice)
Dominic Oldman & Diana Tanase (British Museum)
See details of the sessions See DHOXSS SiteMoving from Documentation to Knowledge Building: ResearchSpace Principles and Practices
Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) Berlin, 10th December 2018
Cultural Heritage documentation and cataloguing was designed for a narrow range of institutional functions and is unable to satisfy the different uses and potential that networks of information and people enable. For digital networks of cultural heritage data to be sustainable they need to address a wider range of contextual and historical relationships, reflect changing knowledge and different perspectives, and provide sufficient expressiveness and meaning to provide a dynamic environment required for better collaborative and engagement. ResearchSpace seeks to provide a new type of panoramic knowledge environment that creates greater use value. It addresses the problem of digital relevance and sustainability for structured data applications associated with static and reference based online resources.
See slidesIssues of Distance in Digital Art History: A ResearchSpace for Art History
The Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), 2 Rue Vivienne - 75002 Paris, 14th January 2019 @ 18:00
The concept of distance applies to different aspect of art, but the digital introduces a new distance that many art historians find problematic.
Dominic Oldman & Diana Tanase (British Museum)
See abstract See INHA websiteMoving from Documentation to Knowledge Building: ResearchSpace Principles and Practicese
Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) Berlin, 10th December 2018
Cultural Heritage documentation and cataloguing was designed for a narrow range of institutional functions and is unable to satisfy the different uses and potential that networks of information and people enable. For digital networks of cultural heritage data to be sustainable they need to address a wider range of contextual and historical relationships, reflect changing knowledge and different perspectives, and provide sufficient expressiveness and meaning to provide a dynamic environment required for better collaborative and engagement. ResearchSpace seeks to provide a new type of panoramic knowledge environment that creates greater use value. It addresses the problem of digital relevance and sustainability for structured data applications associated with static and reference based online resources.
See slidesBeyond the Historical Narrative
University of California, Berkeley, Faculty of History, 4th October 2018
Exploring the limitations of the narrative but also the failure of data to represent complexity in an expressive, meaningful and transparant way.
Dominic Oldman & Diana Tanase (British Museum)
See abstract See slidesCan the ‘Curatorial’ extend to the Digital Space?
MOMA, San Francisco, 5th October 2018
Talk starts promptly 3:00 – 5:00 pm @ SFMOMA. Please arrive at least 15 minutes before.
The relationship between art and the world is usually experienced and interpreted in person within the physical walls of a gallery, the curatorial movement has sought to extend the physical boundaries and include associated community orientated activities. Can this extension be applied to the Digital, and what form should it take?
Dominic Oldman & Diana Tanase (British Museum)
See abstract See slidesReshaping the Knowledge Graph by connecting researchers, data and practices in ResearchSpace
Asilomar Conference Grounds – Monterey, California, USA, October 10, 2018
ResearchSpace is an open source platform designed at the British Museum to help establish a community of researchers, where their underlying activities are framed by data sharing, active engagement in formal arguments, and semantic publishing.
Dominic Oldman & Diana Tanase (British Museum)
See abstract
Collection Data and Social Justice
Belvedere, Art in the Digital Age, Jan 15, 2021
Data is an increasingly important medium in modern information networks. However, legacy data standards and narrow technological approaches are not aligned with new narratives and fail to expose the reality of collections in terms of their historical and present context. Data can contradict other Museum messages by artificially limiting the boundaries of data generation and thereby affecting its content, leading to issues of bias and the omission of information relevant to social issues important to wider audiences. Instead of describing collections in the context of the display cabinet and the storage stack using 'essentialist' vocabularies, data needs to start placing collections in the real world, using a dynamic, flexible, and collaborative framework for representing wider perspectives. Unlike established digital indexes and data references that claim Western neutrality, achieving a type of objectivity based on a diversity of knowledge requires a transition of documentation systems into effective, meaningful, and collaborative knowledge systems. Such an approach can strengthen both internal and external information and research processes restricted by outmoded IT orientated database approaches.
Dominic Oldman