Earlier this year, as part of the DM2E project, we put out a call to all humanities academics and technologists to see if they could come up with innovative ideas for small technology projects that would further humanities research by using open content, open data and/or open source.

We’re very pleased to announce that the winners are Dr Bernhard Haslhofer (University of Vienna) and Dr Robyn Adams (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London). Both winners will receive financial support to help them undertake the work they proposed and will be blogging about the progress of their project. You can follow their progress via the DM2E blog.

Award 1: Semantic tagging for old maps… and other things

The first Award goes to Dr Bernhard Haslhofer of Vienna University. His project will involve building on an open source web application he has been working on called Maphub.

Dr Haslhofer told us a little bit about the inspiration for his project:

“People love old maps” is a statement that we heard a lot from curators in libraries. This combined with the assumption that many people also have knowledge to share or stories to tell about historical maps, was our motivation to build Maphub.

In essence Maphub is an open source Web application that, first of all, pulls out digitized historical maps from closed environments, adds zooming functionality, and assigns Web URIs so that people can talk about them online. It also supports two main use cases:

(i) georeferencing maps by linking points on the map to Geonames locations; (ii) commenting on maps or map regions by creating annotations. While users are entering their comments, Maphub analyzes the entered text on the fly and suggests so-called semantic tags, which the user accepts or rejects.

Semantic tags appear like “normal” tags on the user interface, but are in fact links to DBpedia resources. In that way, the user links her annotations and therefore also the underlying historical map with resources from two open data sources. Besides consuming open data during the annotation authoring process, Maphub also contributes collected knowledge back as open data by exposing all annotations following the W3C Open Annotation specification. In that way, Maphub supports people in a loop of using and producing open data in the context of historical maps.

Dr Haslhofer looks forward to seeing how collaborations will blossom between these various web annotation systems:

We believe that people also love other things on the Web and that Web annotation tools should support semantic tagging as well. Therefore, we will make it available as a plugin for Annotorious. Annotorious is a JavaScript image annotation library that can be used in any Website, and is also compatible with the Open Knowledge’s Foundations’s Annotator.

Annotorious and Maphub have common origins and the Open Humanities will support us in unifing parallel development streams into a single, reusable annotation tool that works for digitized maps but also for other media. We will also conduct another user study to inform the design of that function for other application contexts.

Award 2: Joined Up Early Modern Diplomacy: Linked Data from the Correspondence of Thomas Bodley

The second award goes to Dr Robyn Adams of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London. The project will re-purpose the open resource that Dr Adams has been building with a team of others: the Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley.

The project will use ‘additional’ information that was encoded into the digitisation of early modern letters that took place at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. In the initial incarnation of the project this data which included biographical and geographical information contained within letters was not used (although it was encoded).

Dr Adams told us a little bit about what she plans on doing with the money from the Awards:

With the prize funding from the Open Humanities Awards, we propose to mine the data that was generated but not fully used in the first phase of the project. This data is a rich source of biographical and geographical information, the visualization of which evokes the complex and diverse texture of the late sixteenth-century European diplomatic and military landscape. Bodley’s position in The Hague as the only English representative on the Dutch Council of State put him at the centre of a heterogeneous nexus of correspondents a time long before the Republic of Letters burgeoned in the subsequent century.

The project will interrogate three data fields within the larger data set of Bodley’s diplomatic correspondence in order to generate visualizations; the network of correspondents and recipients, and the people and places mentioned within the letters. These visualizations will be incorporated into the project website, where they will enhance and extend the knowledge derived from the existing corpus of correspondence. The visualizations, which will have scope to be playful while drawn from scrupulous scholarship, will offer an alternative pathway for scholars and the interested public to understand that in this period especially, the political, university and kinship networks were fundamental to advancement and prosperity.

“In mapping the relational activity between data sets,” Dr Adams went on, “I hope to further illuminate and reanimate Bodley’s position within the Elizabethan compass. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that fruitful routes of enquiry can result if scholars commit to going the extra mile to encode and record data in their research that may not have immediate relevance to their own studies.”

We offer our heartiest congratulations to the both Dr Haslhofer and Dr Adams both of whom will be presenting their work at the forthcoming Web as Literature conference at the British Library and this year’s OKCon in Geneva. Follow the progress of the Awards recipients via the DM2E project website.

Exciting news: The Metropolitan New York Library Council in collaboration with OpenGLAM and Wikimedia NYC have today unveiled the first ever Open Data Fellowship for cultural heritage institutions starting this summer. The paid 8-week placement will combine two roles:

• Facilitator for institutions interested in pursuing broader open data initiatives
• Wikipedian-in-Residence for member institutions in the METRO consortium

Position Details

Open Cultural Data role

• Assist membership and collaboration with existing open cultural data initiatives from around the OpenGLAM Network
• Research and use open source tools for working with open cultural data for possible uptake by the library
• Develop guides and manuals for GLAMS for working opening up data
• Contribute to an emerging multi-institutional linked open data project as needed

Wikipedian-in-Residence role

• Assist METRO membership in their understanding and use of Wikipedia
• Provide training and guidance on Wikipedia/Wikimedia use and WikiProjects
• Assist membership with releasing collection content into Wikimedia (or other) Commons
• Organize and host at least one Wikipedia-related special event or workshop

Fellow is expected to document their experience through METRO, OpenGLAM, GLAM-Wiki, or other community channels.

Position Requirements

• Must have experience creating or editing Wikipedia content, contributing to Wikimedia (or other) Commons, and/or using other open data platforms
• Student (graduate or undergrad) preferred, but any qualified candidates will be considered
• Experience working in GLAMs or other cultural heritage institutions is preferred
• Some experience in user training or creating instructional resources is preferred
• Must be a US citizen

About the Position

• Stipend: $5000 for a full-time, 8-week term working a 35-hour week
• Position Term: 8 weeks, start and end date flexible, but primarily during summer
• Located: At METRO (57 E. 11th St. NYC); some possible work at member organizations (within New York City’s five boroughs and Westchester county)

How to Apply

Submit a cover letter (including your Wikipedia experience, username, and other skills you bring to the position) along with your resume and two references along with their contact information. Email the above in PDF format to info@metro.org. Applications accepted through May 15, 2013. Questions may be directed to Jefferson Bailey, jbailey@metro.org.

We are very pleased to announce that the Internet Archive has joined the OpenGLAM Network.

The Internet Archive has been one of the leading lights in the movement to get more freely available copies of public domain works online. It has also been pioneering the attempt to archive the internet, keeping a record of millions of pages for future generations.

We’re looking forward to collaborating with the Internet Archive around the development of our tools for digital scholarship and crowdsourced data enrichment as well as working with them to surface more of the wonderful works found in their vast libraries through projects like The Public Domain Review.

Alexis Rossis, Web Collections Manager at the Internet Archive, said:

The Internet Archive is looking forward to working with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OpenGLAM initiative to help realise the shared goal of a world in which all public domain artefacts have a digital copy that is freely available to everyone.

The Internet Archive joins a host of other organisations including Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Europeana who we are collaborating with to help our cultural institutions reach their potential in the digital age.

If you’re an organisation working with cultural institutions and helping them to open up their holdings online and would like to join out Network email openglam@okfn.org.

That time of year is upon us again where our social media channels get full up with chatter about SXSWi. This year you’ll also be hearing a lot from our camp as we prepare for our slot on the Culture Hack panel.

I will be speaking alongside colleagues Antoine Isaac, Scientific Coordinator for Europeana and Emily Gore, Director of Content at the Digital Public Library of America and Rachel Frick, Program Director at the CLIR Digital Library Federation about the sate of openness in the cultural heritage domain and where we go to next in order to build a vibrant cultural commons free for everyone to re-use and enjoy.

As we’ve recently kicked-off OpenGLAM activity in the US, I’m very keen to talk to people in the States already working in this space and those who just want to get involved and help us build the tools and communities that will make a difference.

On the panel, we’ll be looking at questions such as:

• How are cultural heritage institutions dealing with the questions of copyright and open data licensing
• What are people building with the content, data, and metadata that cultural heritage institutions are publishing
• Is this shift in engaging the public in institutional collections leading to new revenue opportunities either for the institutions or the general economy?
• How can my institution make our collections available as Open Data, who can we work with, and how do we find help?
• If I want to build a new app or project with data or content from my local library or museum, what’s the best way to approach them and encourage them to let me do it?

All-in-all, it’s set to be a fascinating panel, do make it down if you can and grab me to say hi. I’ll be Tweeting from @OpenGLAM on the day, so do get in touch via that handle.

More info on the panel itself can be found here.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Reports provide insight into the technology trends that are most likely to have significant impact over the next 5 years. Put together by a distinguished, global advisory board of experts from a variety of sectors and with over one million downloads downloads in the last ten years, it has become an invaluable resource for those wanting to know what the next big thing is going to be.

The 2012 Museum Edition has highlighted the growing importance of Open Content cultural heritage sector, focussing on the ways in which Open Content can impact exhibitions, collections and marketing within GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) as well as the interpretation of cultural artefacts themselves:

For museums, open content is a way collections and exhibition materials representing the world’s natural and cultural common wealth can be more easily shared. of content.

It is now the mark — and social responsibility — of world-class institutions to develop and share free cultural and educational resources. Potential abounds for a museum’s open content to be dispersed, repurposed, and curated all over the web.

The report also clearly marks out the way in which the growth of open content on the web is changing our fundamental attitudes to education and the function of educational institutions:

The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way scholars in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it. Open content embraces not only the sharing of information, but the sharing of pedagogies and experiences as well.

The report discusses the way in which open content is challenging traditional modes of educational and academic publishing and offering a much more cost-effective alternative:

Part of the appeal of open content is that it is also a response to both the rising costs of traditionally published resources and the lack of educational resources in some regions. It presents a cost-effective alternative to print catalogs and other materials.

Touching on the issue of how cultural heritage institutions are having to re-think the way they license material and share it with the public, the report highlights the opportunity that exists for cultural heritage instituions to be on the forefront of the open culture movement:

New intellectual property licensing options have resulted in some museums rethinking the dissemination of content. Many in museums believe that they should be at the forefront of open content modeling — illustrating how best to share content, establish standards, and take part in the global conversations about policy, the Creative Commons, and open culture.

To read more about the report and the other key tech trends that will be influencing the GLAM sector in the coming years visit the NMC site.