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

我们的遗产，我们的故事：链接和搜索社区生成的数字内容以开发人民的国家收藏

• 批准号: AH/W00321X/1
• 负责人: Lorna Hughes
• 金额: $ 376.57万
• 依托单位: University of Glasgow
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW00321X%2F1
• 关键词: Our; Heritage; Stories; Linking; searching

The national collection is distributed throughout communities, localities, and national organisations. In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a form of 'citizen history' that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past. This reservoir could immeasurably enrich our national and global understanding but remains largely untapped, hard to find, and at risk of disappearing altogether. The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK's prime cultural assets, but it is 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers. CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, meaning that resources often funded and produced by the public stand alone or are inaccessible. Diverse community-focused voices, sustaining the fragile histories of communities in transition, have effectively been silenced within our shared national collection. Existing solutions to this problem involving bespoke interventionist activities are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, whilst any unsophisticated computational integration of this data would result in a lowest-common-denominator solution which would erase the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators.The Our Heritage, Our Stories project responds to this urgent challenge by bringing together a powerful partnership, including researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at our HEI partners, the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA), the project's lead IRO. This team will bring cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC and the collections of TNA. We will collaborate in this process with leading UK heritage organisations, including Tate, the British Museum, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations holding digital content created by and relating to communities. Our geographic range is essential for a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK.Our project will use multidisciplinary methods to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable within the national collection, while respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity by co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make it searchable and connected. We will showcase its new accessibility to the world through a major new public-facing Observatory at TNA where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections, we will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences and open them up for research - demonstrated via multidisciplinary case studies - and embed new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training. Public engagement is a driving theme in our project, which will be developed on principles of co-production and participatory design.The lasting legacies of this project will be the wealth of previously siloed, hidden, and fragmented CGDC it will situate and render discoverable. By so doing, we will revolutionise our understanding of the past, and the methods and means to achieve this, by developing cutting-edge tools, AI methods, historical and linguistic research, and new frameworks for sustainable archival practice. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.

国家收藏品分布在各个社区、地方和国家组织。在过去的二十年里，社区采用数字技术以“公民历史”的形式收集和记录他们的收藏，创造了一个真正民主和巨大的关于过去的新知识库。这个水库可以极大地丰富我们的国家和全球的理解，但在很大程度上仍然没有开发，很难找到，并有完全消失的危险。社区生成数字内容（CGDC）的智力和经济投资是巨大的，其丰富多样的内容是英国的主要文化资产之一，但由于技术和组织障碍，它是“极度濒危”。CGDC已证明对传统的联系和整合方法具有极大的抵抗力，这意味着通常由公众资助和产生的资源是孤立的或无法获得的。不同的以社区为重点的声音，维持着过渡中社区的脆弱历史，在我们共同的国家集合中实际上被压制了。现有的解决方案涉及定制干预活动，成本高昂、耗时且大规模不可持续，而对这些数据进行任何不复杂的计算整合都将产生最低公分母的解决方案，这将抹去CGDC及其创造者的意义和目的。我们的遗产，我们的故事项目通过汇集强大的合作伙伴关系来应对这一紧迫挑战，包括我们的HEI合作伙伴格拉斯哥大学和曼彻斯特大学的数字人文、档案、历史、语言学和计算机科学研究人员，该项目的牵头机构国家档案馆（TNA）拥有世界领先的档案和数字基础设施开发。该团队将带来来自文化遗产，人文科学和计算机科学的尖端方法，以消除现有的障碍，并在CGDC和TNA的集合中开发可扩展的链接和可扩展性。在这一过程中，我们将与英国领先的遗产组织合作，包括泰特美术馆、大英博物馆、苏格兰和威尔士国家图书馆、国家彩票遗产基金、北方爱尔兰公共记录办公室，以及一个由较小的区域和地方遗产组织组成的网络，这些组织拥有由社区创建并与社区相关的数字内容。我们的地理范围对于真正的全国性方法至关重要，该方法涉及英国的各个地区。我们的项目将使用多学科方法，使以前无法找到和无法链接的CGDC在国家收藏中被发现，同时通过共同设计和构建复杂的自动化工具来尊重和拥抱其复杂性和多样性，使其可搜索和连接。我们将通过TNA的一个面向公众的大型新天文台向世界展示其新的可访问性，人们可以访问，重复使用和重新混合这些新集成的内容。随着我们消除障碍并在这些收藏品之间增加有意义的联系，我们将使它们能够接触到新的和多样化的受众，并通过多学科案例研究将其开放用于研究，并将CGDC未来管理的新战略嵌入遗产实践和培训中。公众参与是我们项目的一个驱动主题，该项目将根据共同制作和参与式设计的原则进行开发。该项目的持久遗产将是以前孤立的，隐藏的和分散的CGDC的财富，它将重新整合和呈现。通过这样做，我们将彻底改变我们对过去的理解，以及实现这一目标的方法和手段，通过开发尖端工具，人工智能方法，历史和语言研究以及可持续档案实践的新框架。通过使CGDC能够被重新使用和重新构想，我们将帮助它为未来和我们共享的国家收藏而生存和滋养。