Linking islands of data

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Museum collections often include artefacts that do not seem to belong to a corpus and therefore are perceived as isolated. The lack of connections between these objects and wider collections mean that when they are displayed the lack of context and connections can make them difficult for audiences to understand. These difficulties around display and interpretation mean that curators are reluctant to display them so often they don't come out of museum storage, which means that audiences' views of the past can become skewed. Even when they are displayed, temporary exhibitions have a short life (3-6 months) and the requirements to create concise textual information mean that the non-expert audience will either struggle to view the artefacts or fully contextualise the artefact. Through connecting museum collections holding related information, this project will improve the visibility of each artefact, enhancing the objects' context and enabling cross-searches. By bringing together experts from across museology, the study of the material ancient world and digital humanities disciplines, this project will develop best practice in easy, low cost routes for museums lacking the digital experience and expertise to access and implement digital solutions. The projects focuses on the Classical World of Archaeology and will lead to an openly-accessible digital exhibition to accompany a physical exhibition, Being an Islander: Art and Identity of the large Mediterranean Islands, that will be held at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2020/21. The majority of the outputs of this project are aimed at public consumption on a large scale, with Fitzwilliam Museum exhibitions regularly reaching around 90,000 people attending. This exhibition will potentially tour to other venues following its close in Cambridge. This project will create a wide array of digital outputs that can be used to publicise the project. These include:1) A set of 3 social media friendly films, set in each of the locations chosen for the project (all extremely photogenic - the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Getty and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. These films can be disseminated in various formats and on a wide variety of platforms. All will be mobile friendly and have subtitles for accessibility. 2) A web presence from day one of the project, hosted on the Fitzwilliam Museum's servers with an associated blog that will have scheduled and curated content that documents the research progress3) A strong social media presence (the majority of the core staff of the network proposed have strong social media presence) generated by the team and through liaison with institutional communications teams (for example Cambridge University has over 400,000 followers on Twitter and 2.1 million on Facebook.)4) A series of technical articles that will document how to implement the methods that are studied during the network's workshops, for example Linked Open Data modelling or 3D photogrammetric data processing5) Through major conference presentations and journal publications (which will be funded as in-kind contributions by the PI and Co-Is institutions)Through developing a collaborative, cross-disciplinary and international network that aims to exploit the research potential of new digital tools, we are responding to the AHRC's heritage strategic priority area strategy.