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On November 16 and 17, 2023, NFDI4Culture and the Specialized Information Service Musicology of the SLUB Dresden invited to the virtual event “Audio(visual) cultural heritage and research data. Requirements for workflows, metadata and repositories”. The topic met with great interest: Over 200 participants from research and heritage institutions took part.
Over two afternoons, various portals, projects and archives that store audio(visual) data and make it accessible and gave insights into their work, The aim was to share experiences and challenges met at all stages of the life cycle of audiovisual data: from digitization and description to publication, which enables re-usability.
The first day was dedicated to current activities at the SLUB Dresden. Lukas Schneider presented the workflows in the state funded programme Safeguarding the audio-visual heritage in Saxony which since 2016 has enabled both institutional and private data providers to digitize audio and film material and to store and make it accessible in the long term.
To simplify the work steps associated with the digitization of audiovisual material, the SLUB is working on the further development of the open source software suite Kitodo hat comprises a production and presentation environment. This is connected to the development of a specific cataloging tool that will make it easier for external data providers to deliver structured metadata on their material to the SLUB. The contributions by Erik Sommer and André Eckardt were dedicated to the system architecture and the processes connected to it.
Barbara Wiermann and Martha Stellmacher spoke about the musiconn.audio repository for audio(visual) research data at the SLUB, a service currently being developed by the Specialized Information Service for Musicology. It responds to the growing need in musicology to publish audio or video files from research in a long-term and referenceable manner and will be available free of charge to projects or individual researchers for the publication of smaller amounts of data.
Rolf Bader (University of Hamburg) made the connection to the scientific perspective with a focus on the use of artificial intelligence to analyze audio or video recordings in the COMSAR project, including the Ethnographic Sound Recording Archive. In this portal, researchers can also upload their own field recordings and use the integrated tools for musical analysis.
On the second day of the event, four audio and video archives with different focuses reported on their practical experience with collecting, storing and making data accessible.
The recently launched Oral-History.Digital portal, presented by Herdis Kley and Cord Pagenstecher (Freie Universität Berlin), offers a cataloging platform and research environment for life history interviews. Compared to text transcripts, audiovisual recordings feature greater historical proximity , but necessitate an especially sensitive approach. In addition to technical aspects, methodological issues were discussed, as the use of interviews requires differentiated rights management and dedicated biographical contextualization.
Sven Strobel and Matti Stöhr provided insights into the technical development and content maintenance of the TIB AV Portal. This open access platform for scientific videos reacts on user habits of commercial streaming platforms—in its design, the provision of video recommendations, but also with integrated tools such as automatic speech recognition. Despite its focus on science and technology, the portal is open for content from all disciplines.
Maurice Mengel reported on the history and challenges of the Phonogramm-Archiv of the Ethnological Museum Berlin as part of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The archive uses the museum’s internal database MuseumPlus to describe its collections. Researchers can deposit their recordings in this archive, but currently only the metadata are accessible online via the “SMB Collections Online” portal.
The Language Archive Cologne focuses on endangered languages and oral literature. Felix Rau from the Data Center for the Humanities at the University of Cologne presented the data structure and demonstrated how researchers can submit their data to the repository which is based on the open source repository software KA³.
This intensive two-day event provided the opportunity for constructive and critical dialog on cutting-edge topics both by the individual contributions and the multifaceted discussions. In addition to the exchange on specific technical tools, workflows and long-term archiving solutions in the individual portals and projects, overarching topics such as uniform data standards for better interoperability and the adaptation of services to specific target groups have been discussed.
Program: https://nfdi4culture.de/id/E5193
Shared material:
Slides of the talks
Minutes of the event
Collection of useful links
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Dear colleagues,
This year's Joint Conference TEIMEC will connect both coding communities, TEI and MEI, for the first time and will take place in Paderborn. The Music Encoding Initiative and NFDI4Culture are pleased to support this special conference with eight travel grants. The Music Encoding Initiative supports researchers with five grants, NFDI4Culture with three, these three travel grants are realised within the framework of the community measures of the disciplines Media Studies, Musicology and Art History in NFDI4Culture. The travel grants will be awarded in the maximum amount of €500 each. Reimbursement of travel costs (travel, accommodation, conference fee) will be made after the conference (after the submission of receipts).
Conditions
1. Students Students of the humanities or digital humanities with a reasoned or proven interest in the digital humanities and the coding, annotation and modelling of research data are eligible to apply. It is also possible to apply without making a contribution at the conference.
2. PhD students PhD students working on individual or group projects in the field of Digital Humanities related to coding, annotation and modelling of research data and whose conference submission has been accepted are eligible to apply. To apply, a contribution must have been successfully submitted to the conference.
3. Postdoc Postdocs working on individual or group projects in the field of Digital Humanities related to coding, annotation and modelling of research data and whose conference submission has been accepted are eligible to apply. To apply, a contribution must have been successfully submitted to the conference.
Reporting (all applicant groups):
The grant holders commit themselves to report on their experiences during the conference or at the latest four weeks after the end of the conference. Suitable forms of reporting include blog posts, taking over the conference Twitter/Mastodon account on a daily or section-by-section basis, photo or other multimedia documentation and short conference reports via other media channels. Other creative forms of presentation and publication are highly welcome and can be considered after consultation. An orientation towards the project and dissemination activities of NFDI4Culture, MEI or TEI is desirable.
Selection criteria and process
1. Students
Fit to the call for applications Interest in the Digital Humanities expressed in the letter of motivation Proposal for media coverage of the conference
2. PhD students
Quality of the submission (result of the review) Commitment to the Digital Humanities Letter of motivation (detailed, 1 page for application without own contribution) Proposal for media coverage of the conference
3. Postdocs
Quality of the submission (result of the review) Commitment to the Digital Humanities Letter of motivation Proposal for media coverage of the conference
Application and selection
Applications can be submitted until 25 July 2023. The application documents should contain (in a PDF file) the following:
tabular CV of max. 1 page max. 1-page explanatory letter of motivation brief outline of ideas for media coverage of the confernce (approx. ½ page) for doctoral students and postdocs: proposal of the accepted contribution including the reviews
Please send your application via e-mail to: coordination-office@nfdi4culture.de.
If you have any questions about the travel grants for junior researchers and students, please also contact: coordination-office@nfdi4culture.de.
The selection of grantees will be made jointly by representatives of the subject communities in accordance with the project objectives of NFDI4Culture. The travel funds associated with the scholarships are restricted to the participation at the TEIMEC conference. There is no entitlement to the travel funds associated with the travel grants. By applying, the applicant declares that they have read and agree to these terms and conditions of participation.
Notification
The grant holders will presumably be notified by the beginning of August 2023 and informed about the further details concerning the modalities of the awarding.
Data protection
The personal data of the applicants will be processed on the basis of the data protection declaration of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz and exclusively for the purpose of carrying out the selection process under the stated conditions. If you have any questions regarding data protection in the context of the scholarships, please contact the Academy's Data Protection Officer (datenschutz@adwmainz.de).
Exclusion of liability and exclusion of legal recourse
The Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz, as the sponsor of the NFDI4Culture project, reserves the right to change the conditions of participation for the call for applications at any time. The call for applications and the awarding of the scholarships may be cancelled or terminated at any time without prior notice and without giving reasons. The Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz accepts no liability for lost opportunities to participate due to technical malfunctions or other reasons. Legal recourse is excluded. In the event of a contradiction between the German version of these conditions of participation and a translation, the German version shall prevail.
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Lecture and discussion series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" (online)
Summer Semester Focus: 'Archiving Efforts' – Securing and Long-Term Archiving of Social Media Data
The working group 'Social Media Data', an initiative of NFDI4Culture together with BERD@NFDI, KonsortSWD and Text+ within the framework of the National Research Data Infrastructure, has been organising the lecture and discussion series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" since the beginning of 2022.
This summer semester, we wanted to focus on archiving and problems from the perspective of archives and repositories as well as researchers. Dealing with the time-critical capture and long-term archiving of text and image data from social media, we looked at examples of the systematic preservation of dynamic and high-frequency content from distributed platforms and apps.
What does it mean to understand messages and threads, images and videos, layouts and designs not as more or less static data, weakly structured tables and lists, files and datasets, but also to include the respective interfaces, programming environments and contexts of their generation and presentation in the 'archiving effort'? How can this research data be sustainably secured and the knowledge gained from it be kept reproducible in the long term?
PROGRAMME
Summer Semester Focus: 'Archiving Efforts' – Securing and Long-Term Archiving of Social Media Data
Show & Tell VII (12.05.)
Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban History, Lviv): "Emergency Archiving – Telegram Archive of the War" (slides)
Being in the state of war – among many other things – means scrolling updates constantly. Telegram has become an everyday go-to app for millions of Ukrainians since the full-scale invasion. The social media platform does not only reflect on current developments but also affects the warfare and wartime experiences directly. As captured and documented, it creates evidence, covering all areas from the battlefield to the everyday routine across Ukraine on either side of the frontline. How do we capture, assess and make accessible such flows for future research, considering the legal and ethical complexity of documenting social media? With no definitive methodological answers but as an emergency effort, the Center for Urban History launched this archiving initiative to preserve the social media practices of the war in Ukraine as well as to document how Ukrainians learn, live, and share testimonies through Telegram.
Show & Tell VIII (26.05.)
Britta Woldering & Claus-Michael Schlesinger (DNB & Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): "Tweets archivieren in der DNB" (slides)
Twitter und das Twitter-Archiv sind für viele wissenschaftliche Disziplinen eine wichtige Forschungsquelle. Mit der Übernahme durch ein Investorenkonsortium ist die Plattform in Turbulenzen geraten. Twitter hat bereits mit dem Umbau der Plattform begonnen und weitere Änderungen sind zu erwarten. Nutzende haben sich in mehreren Wellen von Twitter distanziert oder ihre Accounts gelöscht. Aufgrund dieser Entwicklungen erscheint der wissenschaftliche Zugriff zunehmend unsicher. Aus kulturgeschichtlicher und archivarischer Sicht ist es dringend erforderlich, wenigstens einen Teil des Twitter-Archivs zu sichern und zu bewahren. Deshalb ruft eine Initiative aus dem Science Data Center for Literature und der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek zu einer konzertierten Aktion zum Herunterladen möglichst aller deutschsprachigen Tweets auf. Wir beschreiben die gemeinsame Initiative und den aktuellen Stand und stellen einige Punkte hinsichtlich der weiteren Perspektiven für die fortgesetzte Archivierung und künftige Bereitstellung zur Diskussion.
Show & Tell IX (23.06.)
Katrin Weller (GESIS / CAIS): "Data Sharing in Social Media Research: Insights to Researchers' Practices and Challenges" (slides)
Social media data can help to identify attitudes and opinions, behaviour, and characteristics of human users of digital technologies. Development of best practices is impacted by the changing nature of social media platforms and users. The talk presents some researchers‘ practices and experiences in data sharing as well as legal, ethical and archival challenges.
The series is dedicated to tools in the field of social media research and wants to highlight best practices of selected projects. In addition to pragmatic solutions and technical possibilities (interfaces, repositories, metadata standards, interoperability ...), the focus lies also on ethical and legal challenges (e.g. personal rights and copyrights) in the sustainable, secure and critical handling of this data (code and data literacy, FAIR & CARE principles). Last but not least, we would like to invite our communities to discuss interdisciplinary research approaches and teaching methods that strain traditional and subject-specific frameworks and tools.
The first talks and discussions of the Show & Tell series took place in the summer term 2022 on 'Twitter Tools', 'Social Media Corpora' and 'Multimodal Data'. In autumn/winter 2022/23 we dealt with 'Reddit Data', 'Memes, Platform Data, and Computer Vision' as well as 'Social Bots' and their detection. The focus of the series was on interfaces and customized tools for collecting, linking and analysing. The aim was to exhaust APIs such as terms of use and to identify intersections between the participating consortia and data communities.
A cooperation series of
BERD@NFDI – Consortium for Business, Economic and Related Data
KonsortSWD – Consortium for the Social, Behavioural, Educational and Economic Sciences
NFDI4Culture – Consortium for research data of tangible and intangible cultural assets
Text+ – Consortium for text- and language-based research data
If you are interested in presenting and discussing your project, repository or research project (probably in the coming semesters), please contact us with a short proposal for a contribution (title, links and a short abstract of three to four lines).
coordination: christoph.eggersgluess (at) uni-marburg.de
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Lecture Series: "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice II" (online)
The working group "Social Media-Daten", initiated by NFDI4Culture in cooperation with BERD@NFDI, KonsortSWD and Text+ as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI), hosted three instalments of its lecture series during the fall/winter term 2022/23.
The lecture series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" is dedicated to the tools in the field of social media research. In each zoom hour short input talks should aim to highlight best practices and selected research projects. In addition to pragmatic solutions and technical features (software, interfaces, repositories, metadata standards, interoperability ...), points of focus lie on ethical and legal barriers (personal and individual rights, copyrights) in the creation and evaluation of data sets and corpora, as well as the sustainable, secure and critical handling of them (code and data literacy, FAIR & CARE). Last but not least, we would like to invite scholars to discuss interdisciplinary research approaches and teaching methods that stress both traditional and subject-specific frameworks and tools.
We met for a first round of three talks on the topic of 'Twitter Tools', 'Social Media-Corpora' and 'multimodal data' during the summer term. This fall/winter we dealt with 'Reddit Data', 'Memes, Platform Data, and Computer Vision' as well as 'Social Bots' and their detection with an overall focus on available APIs as well as custom built tools. Please find abstracts as well as links to slides and articles below.
PROGRAMME of the lecture series: "Show & Tell – Social Media-Daten in der Forschungspraxis II" (in cooperation with BERD@NFDI, KonsortSWD, NFDI4Culture and Text+ as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI))
11.11. Doing Social Research with Reddit (Show & Tell IV)
Anna-Carolina Haensch (LMU München): Things to know when working with reddit data (slides)
Social media are becoming more popular as a source of data for researchers in many disciplines. These data are plentiful and offer the potential to answer new research questions at smaller geographies and for rarer subpopulations. When deciding whether to use data from social media, it is useful to learn as much as possible about the data and its source. Social media data have properties quite different from those with which many researchers are used to working, so the assumptions often used to plan and manage a project may no longer hold. For example, social media data are so large that they may not be able to be processed on a single machine; they are in file formats with which many researchers are unfamiliar, and they require a level of data transformation and processing that has rarely been required when using more traditional data sources (e.g. survey data). Unfortunately, this type of information is often not obvious ahead of time as much of this knowledge is gained through word-of-mouth and experience. In this talk, we attempt to document several challenges and opportunities encountered when working with Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” and popular social media site. In addition, we introduce two APIs that researchers can use to compile reddit data corpora tailored to their specific research needs in short time.
Ruben Bach, Alexander Wenz (MZES/Universität Mannheim): Gender roles in parenting discussions during the Covid-19 pandemic on reddit (slides)
We study gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on parenting. Measures to prevent the spread of the virus, such as lockdowns and school closures, may have forced mothers to take over more domestic work than fathers, thereby reinforcing traditional gender norms. To detect gendered effects on parenting, we analyze the posting behavior of parents on reddit, a popular social media platform. We collected data from the mother-centered subreddit r/mommit and the father-centered subreddit r/daddit, covering the time before the pandemic (January-November 2019) and during the pandemic (January-November 2020). Overall, our data include 17,902 textual posts by 12,400 Reddit users. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, we find evidence for gendered patterns in parenting during the COVID-19 pandemic: While mothers are more involved in discussing different aspects of daily life, such as the preparation of food, housekeeping, and school issues, fathers are rather concerned with special occasion events, such as becoming a father. Moreover, mothers are more likely to manage the pandemic life of their families and to cope with upcoming problems related to school closures and lockdown-activities with their children. We conclude that the unpaid labor of mothers seems to be of great importance in coping with the effects of this public health crisis.
16.12. Memespector (Show & Tell V)
Elena Pilipets, Jason Chao (Universität Siegen): Memespector – Memes, Platform Data, and Computer Vision (slides)(slides)
Memespector GUI is an open-source tool that aims to support investigations both with and about computer vision Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) by enabling users to repurpose, audit, and critically examine their outputs in the context of image research. The first part of the session provides a technical definition of computer vision and focuses on what kinds of outputs computer vision APIs produce (Jason Chao). The second part of the session focuses on using Memespector GUI to analyze larger online image collections with particular attention to their memetic potential and contextual specificity. Drawing on a series of case studies, we will discuss different platform-mediated characteristics (imitation, resonance, multi-situatedness) that constitute memes as networked media objects and data multiplicities (Elena Pilipets).
20.01. Social Bots (Show & Tell VI)
Franziska Martini (FU Berlin / Weizenbaum Institut): Bot, oder nicht? – Erkennungsmethoden für Social Bots auf Twitter aus sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (article)
Die sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung zu Social Bots interessiert sich vor allem für Fragen nach ihrem Einfluss auf die (politische) Online-Kommunikation, wie etwa die Beeinflussung von Diskursdynamiken, die Manipulation der Meinungsbildung oder die Verbreitung von Desinformation. Bevor jedoch der Einfluss von Social Bots empirisch untersucht werden kann, müssen die automatisierten Accounts zunächst einmal erkannt werden – ein Problem, welchem zwar in Disziplinen wie der Informatik viel Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt wird, das aber in sozialwissenschaftlichen Studien nur selten explizit thematisiert wird. Es sollen daher zunächst praktische Einblicke in die Forschung mit frei zugänglichen Social-Bot-Erkennungsmethoden für Twitter gegeben werden. Anschließend werden die grundlegenden Probleme bei der Verwendung solcher Tools diskutiert, unter anderem in Bezug auf die Validität und Replizierbarkeit der Ergebnisse, die oft mangelnde Transparenz bezüglich Trainingsdaten und Kriterien von Machine-Learning-Klassifikatoren sowie die schwierige Vergleichbarkeit früherer, auf unterschiedlichen Methoden basierender Studien.
Dennis Assenmacher (GESIS Köln), Christian Grimme (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster): Social Bot – Entwicklung einer Technologie und eines Kampfbegriffs (slides)
Der Begriff 'Social Bot' wird landläufig genutzt, um unterschiedlich weit entwickelte oder auch nur vorgestellte Automatisierung in sozialen Netzwerken durch Dritte zu beschreiben. Wurde das Phänomen Social Bot 2016 und 2017 noch genutzt, um Manipulation im Kontext des Brexit-Referendums oder die Wahl von Donald Trump zu erklären, hat sich der Begriff inzwischen auch zu einem Kampfbegriff zur Diskreditierung von Gesprächspartnern in öffentlichen Diskussionen entwickelt. Dieser Vortrag versucht eine differenzierte Betrachtung des Begriffes, indem auf die Evolution der technischen Eigenschaften und Fähigkeiten von Social Bots eingegangen wird. Dies zeigt sowohl die Spannbreite der zugrundeliegenden Logik, als auch die zukünftigen Potenziale, offenbart jedoch auch die Schwierigkeiten in der eindeutigen Detektion von Automatisierung. Zugleich wagen wir einen datengetriebenen Blick auf die Verwendung des Begriffes 'Social Bot' und auf die Polarisierung, die von diesem Begriff in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft ausgeht.
contact: christoph.eggersgluess (at) uni-marburg.de
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March 20 and 21, 2024, from 1 to 4 pm (online)
Linked Open Data terminologies such as controlled vocabularies, standard data and application ontologies are a key element for interoperable, easily reusable, FAIR research data. The NFDI4Culture task area "Standards, Data Quality, Curation" is organizing an online forum to assess the current state of application practice and the prospects for future joint facilitated integration of Linked Open Data vocabularies.
The humanities face a particular challenge here, as they require a wide range of vocabularies for describing and referencing of historical entities (persons, geographies, corporate bodies, works/objects, etc.), but also for the sufficiently specific subject indexing of their objects.
While there is as yet no vocabulary that meets all needs equally or is accepted as standard in all disciplines, there is a great deal of overlap in the needs and practices of the humanities domains. Although there is a growing awareness of the strategic role of controlled vocabularies for sustainable data in the scholorary communities, application practice is still very inconsistent.
The event will present the assessments of current practice and the approaches taken or proposed by the humanities NFDI consortia to support their researchers in the use of terminologies. The discussion will provide an opportunity to identify where future services should focus in order to develop the potential of shared terminologies.
The event will be held in German. More information on the programme and registration will be available here soon.
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With the invitation to the third NFDI4Culture Community Plenary, we have invited members of our community to share a vision of the digital future of your discipline with us in Pecha Kucha format. They have 6:40 minutes to present 20 slides in 20 seconds each. The speakers could develop a position on one of the following three guiding questions from the perspective of the institution or research group:
The future has already begun: Which future-oriented methods of the present for generating and researching with data do we need to consider in NFDI4Culture? Building the future: NFDI4Culture in 2028. What will be necessary, where do we want to be? Looking back from the future: humanities and cultural studies research in 2040. How have NFDI and NFDI4Culture changed research, publishing and teaching?
Below you will find the abstracts of the submitted community impulses. Further talks are planned, information will follow.
Robert Nasarek, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg
Title: 2028, the NFDI4Culture has managed to build an infrastructure and culture that makes it easy to create, distribute and re-use data.
Abstract: Through events, helpdesk and information material, data literacy could be increased significantly. Researchers know how to successfully digitise and enrich digital cultural assets - or can learn about it in NFDI4Culture. Tools and standards have been consolidated in such a way that it is much easier to create, connect, compare and understand data. Every research project, small or large, has possibilities for FAIR data publication and archiving, or can find all the information it needs to become a provider in its own right. This has been achieved by centralising information and training opportunities, standardising and disseminating reference models and interfaces, and highlighting or further developing appropriate tools and services - but without monopolising or politicising solutions.
Julia Rössel, DDK Photo Marburg
Title: Building(s in the) future – monuments online
Abstract: Imagine... we would like to travel within Germany in 2028 and explore the history and culture of a place. Search, map views or image recognition on the spot, information about a listed site, a building, a collection and the objects it contains - everything unfolds with just a few clicks. Through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, cultural heritage objects could be automatically identified, described and located through geospatial data to facilitate the indexing of new data. This initial recording would be a starting point for the competent heritage authority to check the status of the monument. It would add specialist information to the data as a result of the review. In addition, however, the data collection can also be supplemented through crowdsourcing, with citizens actively participating in correcting or adding information to further improve and expand the data collection. This would help to ensure that the heritage portal remains a dynamic and constantly evolving platform. From a record of my favourite building with the most relevant information, I can click on to other websites, search library catalogues or web shops for media dealing with the building. I can buy tickets to visit the premises and share where I am on social media to meet friends at the site. Because I liked it so much, I can also take virtual tours of my favourite building from home. I can find out if there are any special events at this place or if I might even host a family celebration here. Here I can also research which buildings or historic places in my neighbourhood are threatened by decay and what it would take to protect them. In this utopia, the use of data on cultural heritage in Germany would be an important building block for its preservation and promotion. The portal and the data accessible there would enable broad and open cultural mediation and help make Germany's cultural diversity and history accessible to all. But how do we approach this utopia? We would like to address this question and, above all, motivate all those who are already working in the field to dream and become active with us.
Sol Sarratea, Participant of 3D-Hackathon Creating New Dimensions
Title: Computational approach to building the future
Abstract: Computational thinking is more than just a set of skills used by programmers; it's a problem-solving approach that can be applied in many different contexts. During this presentation, I will share some of the methods I use for tackling challenges in the realm of being a software developer. By combining it with the maieutic method, a Socratic technique that involves asking questions to uncover deeper insights, we will unlock new perspectives on the future of digital heritage.
Susanne Krömker and Steffen Bauer, Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Computing, Visualisation and Numerical Geometry Group
Title: "The inscribed altar slab in St. Peter, Reichenau Niederzell"
Abstract: In the church of St. Peter on the island of Reichenau, Lake Constance, is a unique altar slab with more than 300 names inscribed as inks and carvings dating from 900 to 1200 A.D. We captured this slab with our 3D scanner in March 2021 and evaluated it with scientific computing methods. Since then, the altar slab has again been inaccessible to the public under an oak cover. The 3D data consists of a mesh of triangles on which we analyse the carvings based on the surface curvature using the GigaMesh software developed at Heidelberg University. We can make this information visible in false colours in a web interface and overlay it with the original colour images. In addition, it is possible to navigate to individual names or change the angle of incidence of the virtual light, which further improves recognisability.
Samuel Mund, Center for World Music - Foundation University of Hildesheim
Title: #aunt_nancy: a (digital) utopia
Abstract: What role will digital archives play in 2040? Although the so-called "digital revolution" began more than three decades ago, audiovisual archives in 2023 remain far behind in terms of the wealth of access and usage possibilities. Skipping over urgently needed technical refinements and necessary political processes, this talk uses a fictional platform to illustrate how a public audiovisual archive could function in 2040. Firstly, technical aspects such as deep learning, neural networks and big data / information retrieval will be discussed, secondly, the usability of the outlined digital archive offer will be looked at, and thirdly, ethical and legal implications of making large amounts of digital content available will be critically discussed.
Johannes Wolf, arthistoricum.net - Specialised Information Service Art, Photography, Design - SLUB Dresden
Title: #FreeAnnotations
Abstract: Image annotations are already a central part of the digital research process in the humanities and cultural studies. We are convinced that the importance of user-oriented annotation tools for the collection, storage and publication of meta- and research data will increase even more in the future. In our presentation, we therefore want to develop a future vision for working with image annotations and their circulation in the research cycle on the basis of a hypothetical development status of our arthistoricum.net IIIF viewer (Mirador III).
Barbara Fischer, German National Library
Title: "An Ecosystem of Linked Data - Authority Files beyond Librarian Use"
Abstract: Everything is about data in the National Research Data Infrastructure. But can you find the information you are looking for among the many zeros and ones? Humans and machines depend on semantic reference points as orientation markers. Data standards provide - equally readable for machines and humans - unambiguous search entry points, permanent identifiers and a defined set of identifying characteristics. The largest hub of reliable standards data for very different entity types in the German-speaking world, from persons to general terms, from places to works, is the Integrated Authority File (GND). We will briefly introduce it to you so that you can use it free of charge to improve your data and make your work easier.
Tilman Baumgärtel, University of Applied Studies Mainz
Title: Needs for research data for media art research using an artist's estate as a case study
The Pecha Kucha presentations will take place during the Plenary on Thursday, March 30, 2023, from 4 - 5:45 p.m.
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The shortlist for the NFDI4Culture Music Award 2023 has been decided!
From all submissions received, the jury consisting of representatives of NFDI4Culture, the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (GfM), the Deutscher Musikrat and the Zentrum Musik - Edition - Medien (ZenMEM) has now chosen the best projects for publication on a shortlist. On the basis of this shortlist, submissions will be selected to receive the award.
The award is given by the musicological community in NFDI4Culture and is intended to recognise music-related or musicological projects and undertakings that contribute in a special way to the goals in the consortium's fields of activity. It was awarded for the first time in 2022.
The awards will be presented at a ceremony during the NFDI4Culture Plenary 2024.
Prof. Dr. Julian Caskel (Folkwang Universität der Künste Essen), Frithjof Vollmer (Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart), Thomas Wozonig (Kunstuniversität Graz): Netzwerk Softwaregestützte Interpretationsforschung
The network "Software-supported interpretation research" was founded in 2021 after a number of recurring challenges were observed in the work in this research field, which is characterised by strong interdisciplinarity. The platform's declared aims include promoting the development of standards for the digitisation and archiving of audiovisual data for musicological interpretation research, co-developing tools for interpretation analysis and finding suitable repositories for archiving research data and results. The first insights gained through exemplary community work have now been published in the submitted anthology "Softwaregestützte Interpretationsforschung. Principles, Desiderata and Limits" (Würzburg 2023). Editors Julian Caskel, Frithjof Vollmer and Thomas Wozonig have succeeded in bringing together the relevant sub-disciplines of musicology, audio engineering and computer science. In addition to the book publication, the network's work has resulted in additional plugins for the Sonic Visualiser analysis software, exemplary research data sets and material for university teaching, with the participants endeavouring to adhere to the principles of open access, open data and FAIR data. The next activity planned is an intensified exchange with the research area of Music Information Retrieval and music practice.
Dr. Anita Jóri (Universität der Künste Berlin): Anbahnung „Berliner Techno-Archiv / Berlin Techno-Archive“
The proposed project aims to sound out a project that will secure a music-related collection of sources and make it accessible to the public and researchers in the long term, which is not only highly diverse in terms of media: since the 1980s, the Berlin techno scene has produced a wide range of printed and digital, audio and spoken-word documents, the long-term preservation and accessibility of which is hardly guaranteed for various reasons: The rapidly developing technical possibilities for sound recordings during this period, the various media that accompanied the scene (posters, fanzines, forums), information institutions (clubs but also companies in the music industry) and individuals (first-person documents of the protagonists of the time) pose a variety of challenges for future historical and systematic work. In addition to the technical availability of audiovisual media in particular, this primarily concerns a wide range of legal issues associated with digital and, ideally, freely accessible research. The project aims to outline the repertoire in more detail and test the possibilities of digitisation in individual case studies.
Category 2 - Project Award (Shortlist, submissions in alphabetical order by name of contributors)
Unfortunately, no suitable proposals were received by the submission deadline this year.
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NFDI4Culture supports cultural studies communities in their project work, connects stakeholders, identifies needs and developsrefers to offers and solutions in infrastructure. Part of this is the consulting (NFDI4Culture Helpdesk) of research, software or infrastructure projects - regardless of whether they are planned, applied for, ongoing or already completed.
Project consultations are highly individual: the respective frameworks, project contexts, constellations of involved participants, funding opportunities, time frames, etc. vary and require a high degree of flexibility in project consultation, while at the same time a high quality standard of consulting is necessary. Consequently, the NFDI4Culture helpdesk team sought professional coaching. The coaching included four virtual sessions and addressed professional project consulting, especially in scientific contexts, quality criteria of consulting as well as communication and moderation techniques, such as the technique of dialogical conversation management, active listening and the method of collegial consulting. All topics were theoretically founded and practically exercised.
The NFDI4Culture Helpdesk team was able to check and develop its consulting skills through the coaching and will integrate the techniques and methods of professional project consulting into its consulting processes. The workshop was made possible in close cooperation with the project "NFDI in Hessen - professional-infrastructural HeFDI cluster".
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First Cross-NFDI Hackathon
As part of its community engagement, NFDI4Culture hosted the first nationwide 3D hackathon on open research data in the fall of 2022, together with NFDI4Biodiversity, NFDI4Objects, and AG3D. This was the first Cross-NFDI Hackathon, jointly planned and prepared by our nine-person orga team across disciplines.
3D data and data in the making
Institutions from the communities of all participating NFDI consortia and NFDI initiatives were called upon to make their diverse data assets available under an open license. Our call was answered by 27 cultural institutions, museums, archives, and university collections from across Germany, who submitted 34 colorful, multimodal, and multidisciplinary datasets. Those who wanted to could take advantage of our offered prepare-your-data workshops as a data provider the introduction to the format hackathon and the requirements for the data in advance. The research data repository Radar4Culture assisted us in providing the datasets for the 3D Hackathon.
Kick-off on September 24 and 25, 2022 at the State Library Berlin
At the end of September, the time had finally come and the 3D Hackathon celebrated its Kick-off in the large halls of the Berlin State Library in the Potsdamer Straße building. Participating hackers included national and international cultural practitioners, 3D designers, coders, and hackathon enthusiasts. Over the course of a weekend, the data providers presented their data sets, workshops were held, and initial ideas were formed among the participating hackers. From these, a dozen enthusiastic teams and projects crystallized by the end of the kick-off weekend and even in the weeks after to develop new solutions with new approaches from the provided image files, 3D data, and metadata. Four weeks of intensive development work followed by a creative collaboration of data providers and coders.
The final on October 24, 2022, at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
At the final in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin on October 24, 2022, ten teams presented their developments, including a virtual underground mining experience, a 3D postcard editor, an app to display stereographs in 3D, and an escape game for beetles. Our four-member jury awarded prizes to the most successful applications and everyone celebrated the conclusion of our first Cross-NFDI Hackathon into the evening.
Conclusion The exciting part: Trying out creative approaches and novel solutions, and the multidisciplinary mix of datasets generated new, often unexpected angles and potentially alternative ways of communicating knowledge in the hands of the participants for the data-providing research, science, and cultural institutions. We are sure that this will not be the last Cross-NFDI Hackathon.
You can read all about the 3D Hackathon, the data sets, our judges and applications, and the winners at https://creating-new-dimensions.org/.
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Where does the history of digital games begin to become critical? How can computer game history be written and preserved on the basis of archiving conditions and media-technical dependency relationships? The lack of documentation of some games, which in the early days only ran on mainframes (Spacewar! from 1962), may be just one example among many. Even today, long-term preservation of digital games remains difficult. Long-term preservation strategies such as bitstream preservation or format migration are not suitable for making digital games, like other dynamic digital objects, accessible in a long-term and sustainable way. Emulating environments, on the other hand, are complex and costly. Thus, in the future, large parts of this cultural heritage are in danger of being lost and research work with dynamic digital objects affected.
To discuss these pressing problems and questions, the Cultural Research Data Academy and the media studies repository media/rep/ hosted a joint discussion panel at the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft as part of the Forum Medienwissenschaft in NFDI4Culture. The conference was held at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Germany, September 27–30, 2023, on the topic of "Abhängigkeiten" (Dependencies). The panel titled "Lost without emulation? On the dependency of dynamic digital objects on current long-term archiving strategies using the example of digital games" gathered speakers and researchers from various disciplines in order to raise conservational or media archaeological questions and to focus attention on topics such as music and sound, some of which are still neglected.
The panelists Dîlan Canan Çakir, M.A. (Freie Universität Berlin, previously Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach), Alexander Holz, M. A. (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach), Prof. Dr. Dr. Stefan Höltgen (SRH Heidelberg) and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Melanie Fritsch (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf) first presented their perspectives on the topic in short inputs: Çakir and Holz reported on the collection activities in the field of digital games at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, which are primarily carried out under the aspects of reference to literature. In this context, productions by writers who have become game authors are also considered as hybrid forms between literature and games, as well as narrative experiments. Digital games are treated as special forms of born-digitals. Höltgen addressed the historical and technical aspects of emulators and focused on the possibilities, challenges and limitations that such software programs bring with them: For example, the fact that emulators are for the most part developed by hobbyists, which ensures a variety of emulators, but by no means a permanent and error-free operation. In addition, emulators always represent only ideal systems. Fritsch presented the challenges she faces in the field of Ludomusicology: There is often a lack of metadata on the composers/sound designers involved, both in the games themselves and in the supporting material, and research on this is difficult. In addition, emulators make the games playable again, but the sounds of the original game environment (e.g. hardware sounds) are missing, which must be considered as part of the historical performance practice.
Following the inputs, the discussion (moderated by Prof. Dr. Malte Hagener) was opened to all participants. Among other things, the existing hurdles and challenges in the preservation and research of digital games were discussed. It became clear that historical game environments can only be preserved and reconstructed with emulators to a limited extent. This is especially true for the soundscapes of digital games, which were shaped by the hardware used. Inseparable from the question of archiving are legal dependencies, since many companies conclude non-disclosure agreements with their employees and researchers, which represent an obstacle to research. At the same time, however, the company's archiving situation is often poor. Reasons for this are, for example, company takeovers, but also a generally weak archive awareness in the computer games industry. The transition of the games industry from the distribution of games as born-digitals to born-virtuals also poses major challenges for archiving practice with regard to the different workflows.
One possible way to improve the existing precarious situation was seen by the discussants in a stronger approach of research and archives to the production companies as well as in possible collaborations to work towards the creation of a pragmatic archive culture in the games sector. Another important measure for the preservation of this cultural heritage was the ideally comprehensive, systematic archiving of digital games (various versions, but also accompanying materials such as wallpapers and content created by the communities, as well as forum discussions that document the history of reception) by public institutions, since this has so far been done primarily through private initiatives. This would need to be accompanied by the creation of standards for games-related metadata, as well as the granting of special rights to archives with respect to the preservation and accessibility of digital games. Emulators can contribute to making these games experienceable at all within limits, but their development and versioning should be made comprehensible. In recent years, repositories have been increasingly used for this purpose.
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The 4D Community Browser project was financially supported by the NFDI4Culture Flex Funds in 2022. It was carried out between June 1 and December 31, 2022 by Dr Heike Messemer at the CODIP of the TU Dresden in close consultation with the former head of the junior research group Prof. Dr Sander Münster and the computer scientist Jonas Bruschke, who was largely responsible for the technical implementation of the 4D browser. The aim of the project was to prepare the 4D browser developed by the junior research group HistStadt4D (http://www.urbanhistory4d.org/wordpress/research-group-urban-history-4d/) for opening to the community.
The HistStadt4D project was funded by the BMBF from 2016 to 2021, within which the 4D browser was developed as a demonstrator to show the potential of spatio-temporal image search. The 4D Browser is a digital research tool that is publicly accessible online. It offers multimedia possibilities for searching, 4D display and analysis of existing image digitalisates of historical photographs (https://4dbrowser.urbanhistory4d.org). This application is thus primarily aimed at researchers working on historical photographs, urban development, urban history and architecture, but also at the interested public.
The 4D browser includes an interactive, digital 3D city model of Dresden, in which historical photographs are virtually located, starting from the respective locations of the photographers. A timeline also makes it possible to recreate the changes in the photographic image of the city over time. The spatio-temporal visualisation enables users to virtually perceive, search, filter and analyse the photographs directly in the urban fabric. Quantitative analyses can also be carried out using several different visualisation options.
Through these diverse approaches, the image corpus can be viewed from new perspectives and with new questions: Which historical settings were preferentially photographed from which perspectives in which time? Has the photographic behaviour of photographers changed over time? The 4D Browser enables a spatio-temporal approach to historical photographs as well as their quantitative analysis. With these possibilities, it goes far beyond the functions of established image repositories (e.g. Europeana, Deutsche Fotothek, prometheus, etc.) and offers an innovative research tool to the community dealing with historical photographs, urban development, urban history, architecture, etc. It is intended primarily for experts. It is primarily intended to serve as a tool for experts in the fields of art history and history, but also to provide interested laypersons with an informative access and an interactive exploration of the depicted city and its photographic documentation.
In order to prepare the 4D browser for opening up to the community, it was presented to the community in different contexts:
At the Barcamp 3D and Cultural Heritage 2022 of the NFDI4Culture on 06 July 2022, the research tool was presented in a separate session. This also enabled valuable feedback to be obtained from the community. At the international conference Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT) in Vienna on 10 November 2022, the project was presented in a paper - "Exploring Historical Cities with the 4D Community Browser. Requirements of a Spatio-Temporal Research Tool" - in the session on "Planning history and urban heritage. Historical towns atlases as a tool for research, heritage management and participation".
The core of the work in the project was the evaluation of a survey that had been carried out in HistStadt4D 2020. The aim of the survey was to find out what kind of research questions researchers would like to work on with the 4D browser and how they assess the functions of the tool. The online survey among the digital humanities community received a response of 50 survey forms in total.
A five-minute video served as the basis for the survey. In it, the most important functions of the 4D browser were explained in a screen capture with voice-over. The aim was to find out which functions are relevant for the participants, how the functions are assessed (important, purposeful, relevant for work, exciting) and whether the functions are understandable and, if necessary, whether functions are still missing. In addition, the participants also had the opportunity to leave suggestions and comments freely.
The results of the survey will be presented at the 3rd Workshop on Research and Education in Urban History in the Age of Digital Libraries (UHDL) on 28 March 2023 in Munich and published in the corresponding peer-reviewed Springer Post-Proceedings (Communications in Computer and Information Sciences, CCIS).
Author: Dr. Heike Messemer (TU Dresden)
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CfP: Long-term archiving, cataloguing, and provision of dynamic data from social media – Twitter and beyond (DNB)
Conference from 19 to 20 March 2024 at the German National Library (Frankfurt am Main)
Social media is both a source of data for and the focus of a range of research approaches in the humanities, social sciences, IT, sciences and life sciences. The development of social media over time makes it a part of our digital cultural heritage, but the process for institutions to archive and document these in ways which fully reflect its detail and complexity is still only rudimentary. One key reason for this is the unique characteristics of the data in terms of media technology, economics, social factors and aesthetics. This confronts researchers, research institutions and cultural heritage institutions with many different challenges in terms of how to archive, catalogue and provide the data for later use. One example of this is Twitter (now known as “X”). The monetisation of the platform’s internal archive (part of ongoing restructuring of the platform) has had a radical impact on research and archiving. While flexible APIs and access opportunities before early 2023 led to a boom in research activity and the creation of comprehensive collections, access for research and archive has been made increasingly difficult since then.
Archiving, cataloguing and providing dynamic data from social media present challenges which affect researchers, research institutions, libraries and archives in equal measure, and the best way to solve these problems is through collaboration and partnership. This requires wide-ranging efforts which would be impossible for a single data community or discipline.
The aim of the conference is to facilitate networking between libraries, archives, research institutes and researchers in German-speaking countries who are involved in archiving and long-term use of data and digital objects from social media. Conference presentations should focus on the following topics:
The interaction between research and archiving Research data problems in Tweet-based research caused by the loss of Twitter as a data provider The status and maintenance of social media from an archival and cultural-historical perspective, e.g. posts, interactions and platform elements The consolidation of collections, corpora, and holdings such as metadata Initiatives to encourage archiving and cataloguing of social media data Concepts for providing derivative datasets from social media and how these can be used Ethical questions Legal issues The possibility of creating a social media data registry
Please submit your abstract (max. 1 page / 500 words) and no more than 1 page of biobibliographic data as a PDF in German or English. Up to 20 minutes are available for each presentation, plus 10 minutes for discussion.
Submission: twarchiv(at)dnb(dot)de
Web: https://www.dnb.de/EN/twittertagung
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 October 2023
Feedback on acceptance of paper: 30 November 2023
Conference
The conference will take place from about noon, 19 March 2024 and end in the early evening of 20 March. It will be followed by a data sprint working with a long-term corpus of German Twitter data on 21 & 22 March 2024. More information coming soon.
Conference: 19. - 20. March 2024
Data Sprint: 21. - 22. March 2024
Venue: German National Library, Frankfurt am Main
Speakers who do not have their own resources for travel may apply for up to €300 to cover travel and accommodation costs.
Organisation: Britta Woldering, Letitia Mölck, German National Library, twarchiv(at)dnb(dot)de
Programme Committee (in alphabetical order)
Stefan Dietze (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, GESIS) Dimitar Dimitrov (GESIS) Christoph Eggersglüß (Philipps-Universität Marburg, NFDI4Culture) Philippe Genêt (German National Library, Text+) Tatjana Scheffler (Ruhr-Universität-Bochum) Claus-Michael Schlesinger (University Library, Humboldt-Universität Berlin) Britta Woldering (German National Library)
Partners
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek BERD@NFDI KonsortSWD NFDI4Culture NFDI4Data Science Text+
LINK/INFO: https://www.dnb.de/EN/twittertagung
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In March 2023, the science podcast #arthistoCast went online. It is all about digital art history: the use of digital methods in art historical research – how technical developments can be used for academic approaches and how research methods have changed in the course of digitization.
In each episode, experts from different disciplines and fields of work are invited to talk about their work and experiences with digital methods and technologies. The focus is not only on good approaches and established systems, but also on current challenges and opportunities associated with the use of digital methods in art history.
The podcast funded by NFDI4Culture is produced by Jacqueline Klusik-Eckert on behalf of the Arbeitskreis Digitale Kunstgeschichte (AK). She guides the listeners through the jungle of terms in the world of technology and helps everyone to get familiar with the topic. She is supported by the editorial team with the AK members Peter Bell, Lisa Dieckmann, Peggy Große, Waltraud von Pippich and Holger Simon. The podcast is published by arthistoricum.net and hosted by Heidelberg University Library.
#arthistoCast is a must for anyone interested in art history, digitization, and technology! The podcast provides a platform for discussing current developments and trends in art historical research, while also providing a deeper understanding of the role of digital methods in art studies.
Go directly to #arthistoCast – the Digital Art History Podcast. Even better: subscribe to the podcast and you'll get every episode directly to your device. You can do this via RSS feed, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast, Deezer, PodBean, Sticher, Google Podcasts and others.
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"Audiovisuelle Materialien in Forschung und Lehre – eine Übersicht zu urheberrechtlichen Aspekten" (Audiovisual materials in research and teaching – an overview of copyright aspects) is the title of a legal opinion written in German by Prof. Dr. Paul Klimpel and Fabian Rack, which has now been published as a new guideline on the NFDI4Culture Knowledge Base.
The original legal opinion, entitled "Urheberrechtliche Aspekte beim Umgang mit audiovisuellem Material in Forschung und Lehre" (Copyright aspects of handling audiovisual material in research and teaching), was commissioned by the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands (VHD, the Association of German Historians) and the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM, the German Society for Media Studies) and written by Dr. Paul Klimpel and Dr. Eva-Marie König and made available to the public in 2015.
Numerous changes in the legal situation regarding the German "Urheberrecht" (copyright) have prompted the VHD, GfM and NFDI4Culture to commission an updated version, which is hereby made available to the public under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Since the first version was published, the legal framework has changed significantly. On the one hand, German legislation subjected the copyright permissions for use in research and teaching to a fundamental reform in 2017. On the other hand, the European Union adopted a (further) copyright directive in 2019, which, among other things, facilitated the use of "unavailable" works. This legal opinion aims to explain the impact of these changes on the handling of audiovisual works in research and teaching.
But not only the legal framework has changed since 2014. The reception behaviour of at least contemporary film has also shifted strongly away from the carrier medium and towards streaming. This can make it difficult to make local copies, both in fact and in law. Developments since the publication of the first version of the legal opinion have necessitated a comprehensive revision and reworking of the legal issues dealt within this legal opinion. Its structure has also been modified.
An adaptation of the text to a gender-equitable style as well as the editing and set-up was carried out in consultation with the authors by Martin Albrecht-Hohmaier and Alexander Stark on behalf of NFDI4Culture, the VHD and the GfM.
Direct link to the legal opinion on the NFDI4Culture Knowledge Base: docs.nfdi4culture.de/ta6-audiovisuelle-materialien-urheberrecht-in-forschung-und-lehre
The data publication can be accessed together with the PDF version via https://zenodo.org/record/8096439 and will soon be available as a PDF download on the websites of the Association of Historians of Germany (VHD) and the Society for Media Studies (GfM) as well as at iRights law.
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The NFDI4Culture portal now includes a new service, the Educational Resource Finder, which presents the curated portfolio of the Cultural Research Data Academy (CRDA) and makes it searchable.
Within the framework of annual forum events, own training courses and meetings with representatives of partner institutions and FDM national initiatives, as well as in constant exchange with colleagues from the NFDI4Culture communities, needs for further training offers and additional information on the topic of research data management as well as data and code literacy are queried. On this basis, own course formats are developed as well as a list of external training offers, which is constantly supplemented and revised. This list is now gradually being published and made searchable in the Educational Resource Finder. The CRDA team adds information concerning the target group, costs, technical requirements and processing time to the list. The offers listed are thematically oriented towards the NFDI4Culture communities (art history, musicology, film and media studies, theatre and dance studies, and architecture), supplemented by some generic introductions to the topic of research data management.
Starting with an initial selection of offerings, the Educational Resource Finder will continue to grow in the coming months and will be supplemented with further course offerings.
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The focus of the fifth meeting of the Expert Forum "Sustainable Software Development in NFDI4Culture", which was held on 25. April 2023, was on institutional aspects of professionalizing software development in science. The discussion was stimulated by impulses from representatives of computing, data, and DH centers of excellence, from funders, and from academia. The professionalization of software development in research faces the particular challenge that software is largely developed in the context of research projects whose funding expires at the end of the project. Even though this problem cannot be solved directly, conclusions and lessons can be drawn on how the various institutional actors, e.g. computing centers, institutes, DH competence centers, funders, and infrastructure projects can deal with this precarious situation. A detailed report is available in the DHd blog.
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Publish and annotate your data with Semantic Kompakkt @ NFDI4Culture – call for project participants
Extended: apply from now on until 07.12.2023
This year-long programme, running in the context of the national research data infrastructure NFDI4Culture, offers access to training and computational resources to assist you (individual researchers, projects or research groups) in semantifying and annotating your multimodal cultural research data. The team at TIB Hannover will:
provide hosting infrastructure for large datasets and 2D/3D models; assist in helping you connect your existing published data into the linked open data environment of Semantic Kompakkt; host co-design workshops where we connect different cultural communities to discuss shared data workflow problems and plan and design common solutions.
Background
Semantic Kompakkt is a free and open source toolchain for the viewing and annotation of 3D models, and other visual media within a linked open data (LOD) environment. Consisting of Wikibase (for metadata storage as LOD) and Kompakkt (for publishing and annotating 2D, 3D and AV media), Semantic Kompakkt offers a range of functionalities via user-friendly graphical interfaces and open APIs. It is developed by the Open Science Lab at TIB Hannover.
Example projects
Corpus der barocken Deckenmalerei in Deutschland
Herrenhäuser im Ostseeraum
About this call
This call is to invite new project participants into a curated programme of piloting the data space of Semantic Kompakkt as a service to cultural research communities between January 2023 and December 2024. The programme will be carried out virtually in German and English. Accepted participants will be expected to take part in at least 2 out of 3 co-design workshops carried out at regular intervals during the programme. Tutorials and technical support sessions will be arranged with all accepted projects on an individual basis. The programme will conclude with a public presentation and networking event in Berlin.
Requirements
Affiliation with a German research or cultural institution is desirable, but not mandatory. Project partners should have existing datasets including 3D model data, as well as additional texts, images, videos, etc., that can be used to contextualize and annotate the models. 3D data can include scanned objects, photogrammetry or digitally (re)constructed environments. All data must have clear copyright status. While open licenses are preferable, there will be options to accommodate copyrighted materials, too.
To apply:
Prepare a short abstract and motivation statement (each 200-300 words). Submit these alongside information about the formats and structure of your data, licenses and related details via this form:
https://cloud.nfdi4culture.de/apps/forms/s/Li4sQTdjrMc4xJjHFDxeqKJs
Questions:
In case of questions, feel free to reach out to Lozana Rossenova at lozana.rossenova(at)tib(dot)eu or Zoe Schubert at zoe.schubert(at)tib(dot)eu.
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Across all disciplines software is a crucial part of research processes and fulfills important functions in the collection of data, its processing and analysis, publication, re-use, and archiving. Therefore, software is closely interwoven with the process of research data management, and at the same time represents an object that has an underlying life-cycle and needs to be managed accordingly. This holds for software in general, but also in particular for research software.
The focus of the consortium NFDI4Culture lies on research software which is used in the area of cultural heritage and the disciplines represented in NFDI4Culture (among others: architecture, arts history, musicology, theatre, film, and media studies). The aim is to foster and establish the conscious dealing with sustainability of software development, provide information on strategies for sustainability and develop suitable infrastructure components. This shall enhance the sustainability of software development in all underlying dimensions (e.g. technical, organisational, for education and teaching, and for the scientific political system).
On this grounds, on April 20, 2021 the first virtual meeting of the expert forum "Sustainable Software Development" was held. A detailed workshop report is now available at the DHd-Blog.
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29 Sept - 1 Oct 2021
NFDI4C supports the second edition of the series "Sammlung trifft Forschung" (Collection meets Research) for networking and exchange focused on "Untold Stories - New Perspectives for Collection and Research in Performing Arts ", which is organised by the Federal Association of Theatre Collections in Germany (TheSiD) e.V. in collaboration with the Theatre Studies Collection (TWS) of the University of Cologne, the AG ARCHIV of the Society for Theatre Studies and the International Theatre Institute Germany (ITI)/ Mediathek for Dance and Theatre (MTT). As part of the work meeting, NDFI4C will present its tasks and services for the professional community of Performing Arts on 30th September 2021 from 10.00 - 11.30 am.
Program overview
Universities, museums, archives and collections are institutions for the mediation of our cultural memory and play an important role in processes of identity formation. At the same time, cultural identity has become a term of struggle and the questioning of focal points, structures, archival and knowledge organisation represents a crucial aspect of the work in and with collections in connection with the efforts towards dehierarchisation, decolonisation and diversification. But what exactly does this mean for institutions managing collections and for the researchers who use them? How can other perspectives be adopted, how can they become detectable in the existing landscape or find their way into collection and research projects?
Enabling dialogue between perfoming arts collections and research, the work meeting will be arranged as three workshops focusing on the stories that still need to be told, on the potential arising from digital infrastructures of collection and research, and on international perspectives of networking, exchange and cooperation.
Further information and to register for the meeting
"Sammung trifft Forschung" is a cooperation between theFederal Association of Theatre Collections in Germany (TheSiD) e.V. together with the Theatre Studies Collection (TWS) of the University of Cologne in collaboration with the Performing Arts Archive of the Academy of the Arts Berlin, the German Theatre Museum Munich, the Specialist Information Service Performing Arts (FID DK), the Institute for Theatre Studies at the University of Leipzig, the International Theatre Institute Germany/ Mediathek for Dance and Theatre (MTT) and the AG Archiv of the Society for Theatre Studies, funded by NFDI4C (DFG project number 441958017) and the Society for Theatre Studies (gtw).
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As already announced, the third public community forum „(Further) development of Research Tools & Data Services in NFDI4Culture“ will take place on Friday, 29th September 2023, 9 am – 1 pm.
Now we would like to call for the submission of abstracts for funding of projects/measures in 2024. Proposals can refer, for instance, to the (further) development of features/ functionalities, the improvement of software or services interoperability, the API implementation or porting to current technologies, code refactoring, documentation, designing or setting up a test environment, interlinking of tools and/ or services. Please note that measures which have already been funded have the opportunity to reapply. Within the task area "Research Tools and Data Services" a total of € 120,000 is available in 2024 for the realisation of the proposed projects. The work packages in the projects/measures should not exceed a limit of € 10,000 each. However, several work packages can be specified.
Please submit your proposals by 29th August 2023 via the following form.
In order for us to be able to discuss and evaluate the submissions in good manner, please provide as many concrete information as possible and outline the work packages of your proposal as planned, including expected cost and timeframe. Please note that proposals will need to be realised within 2024.
The schedule for the forum event as well as for the subsequent evaluation and decision procedure will be as follows:
29th August 2023: Submission deadline 31st August 2023: Submission review, 4th September 2023: Invitation and programme announcement 29th September 2023, 9 am – 1 pm: Community forum Last quarter of 2023: Analysis and selection of measures as well as decision by the Culture Steering Board, preparation for granting of funds for 2024
If you do not have a funding proposal but would like to participate in the forum discussion, we kindly ask you to register for the event by 28th September 2023.
We are very much looking forward to getting in touch and collaborating with you!
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NFDI4Culture – FAIR Research Data Management
The programmatic announcement "After the norm: musicology in the 21st century" of this year's GfM conference, which also aims at future perspectives of the subject, touches the work of NFDI4Culture (Consortium for Research Data of Tangible and Intangible Cultural Objects in the National Research Data Infrastructure, under the auspices of musicology, media studies and art history, among others) in several respects:
for example, in the question of new technical or legal standards and their connectivity to the habits and requirements of the discipline, in the digital reorientation of GLAM institutions, during research projects or in the synergetic effects of cross-disciplinary and cross-locational collaboration between the disciplines represented in the consortium.
The various NFDI4Culture Task Areas, aligned with the data lifecycle model, act as catalysts for current disciplinary advancements and constructively accompany the digital transformation.
Throughout, the panel is intended as an invitation for questions and open discussion, for which ample time is therefore deliberately allotted.
I. Towards FAIR Research Data Management –Practical Insights into NFDI4Culture
The first part of the event will address the need for information that has been expressed time and again, especially by the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung: In the form of a panel, concrete examples will be used to show where and to what extent the work of NFDI4Culture has an impact on musicology. This will be shown by an introductory lecture by the consortium spokesperson Torsten Schrade on the structure and objectives of NFDI4Culture, and will take place in four following short lectures on a wide range of case studies. The structure deliberately reflects the so-called "FAIR" principles, which have been defined as a central orientation grid for the development of science-led, sustainable research data management.
Under the keyword Findability, the focus will be on an example from the Task Area Standards, Data Quality and Curation: Authority data for musical works, as found in the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) and also maintained in RISM, are a central and generic tool for standardizing music-related metadata and thus an important means of ensuring data findability. Accompanied by NFDI4Culture, a data exchange between these two major data hubs, RISM and GND, is being pursued that will further promote the effectiveness of scholarly work.
The case study on Accessibility also comes from the same Task Area: The DFG Viewer for Musical Sources is a tool that will significantly improve and facilitate the accessibility of digitized materials through collaboration between librarians and musicologists.
The Research Tools and Data Services Task Area will present an example of interoperability with the MEI-Garage project: Web services and tools for converting, adapting, validating, and configuring different file formats, encoding standards, and MEI versions will lead to better conectivity of research data.
At the latest when data are to be made available for reuse – keyword reusability – questions of open or restricted accessibility become relevant, i. e., legal and ethical issues such as copyright and licensing law, personal rights and data protection, and the handling of culturally sensitive objects. The design of after-use and accessibility will be highlighted using music-related cases from the Legal Helpdesk, one of NFDI4Culture's most requested services.
Introduction to NFDI4Culture, Torsten Schrade
Practical example Findability, Desiree Mayer and Jürgen Kett: "Normdaten für Kulturobjekte" (Standard data for cultural objects)
Practical example Accessibility, Andrea Hammes: "The DFG Viewer for Musical Sources".
Practical Example Interoperability, Anne Ferger and Daniel Röwenstrunk: "Presentation of the MEI Garage".
Practical example Reusability, Grischka Petri: "Relationship between law and culture".
II. FAIR Music Research – What do the new requirements mean for the subject? – Round Table with Plenary Discussion
In the second part of the event, we would like to take the previously opened panorama of topics as an opportunity to discuss the significance of research data management and, in particular, the FAIR principles for music research in a joint discussion between our guests at the round table and in the plenary. Since these questions are strongly conditioned both within the discipline itself, but also by changing political objectives (such as Open Science), legal frameworks (such as data protection and data ethics), and criteria for research funding and financing, it seems important to us to bring representatives from different fields into conversation with each other and with the discipline. The discussion will focus on fundamental questions of research policy as well as on concrete perspectives of scientific work under digital conditions.
Round Table:
Stefan Karcher, DFG Head Office Jürgen Kett, DNB Frankfurt Grischka Petri, FIZ Karlsruhe/Leibniz Institute Klaus Pietschmann, University of Mainz Dörte Schmidt, UdK Berlin Torsten Schrade, NFDI4Culture Moderation: Andreas Münzmay, NFDI4Culture
Further Information: https://www.musikundmedien.hu-berlin.de/de/musikwissenschaft/gfm2022/programmplanung_01-09-webseite.pdf
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Kompakkt is a web-based software solution that allows 3D objects to be shared, annotated, shared and discovered in a collaborative and multimedia way in the browser. Kompakkt aims to further develop this component and make it more accessible to the community. Within the past NFDI4Culture funding period, the team prioritised the following work packages:
Refactoring the code base Extension of the E2E tests Addition of measurement tools Improved support for mobile devices Extending user support
The following document describes the work done to execute these work packages and evaluates their results.
Refactoring
Kompakkt has the long-term goal of building an open source community that is intrinsically motivated to develop the product in a future-oriented way. In order to keep up with the technical evaluation as well as the needs of the community, the work package refactoring the code base has acted as a foundation for further development. The refactoring involved a major overhaul of the existing code to make it more robust, efficient, easy to understand and maintainable. This refactoring has laid the groundwork for successful further development of the product to meet the needs of the community and current technical standards. It should be noted, however, that refactoring is never really finished and can be constantly improved. However, the work of the last months has formed a good basis for newcomers to enter the project more easily and contribute actively, which is also evident in the new cooperation with the Leibniz Technical Information Library.
Tests
Automated End to End Tests (E2E) aim to test the functions of an application for their behaviour and thus systematically find and document potential bugs in the system. With the introduction of an E2E test framework, we have made it possible for the Kompakkt community to add and test new features more securely in the future. The developed E2E tests can be used as a basis for further development of the application and thus provide a long-term solution for efficient testing of the web application. In addition to the E2E tests, we also created integration tests for the Kompakkt server to simulate and recreate more complex server processes, enabling detailed error analysis and troubleshooting. This allows the Kompakkt Server to be extended in the future with further interfaces to other data models and functions without restricting existing functionality.
User Support
In order to increase the community impact of Kompakkt, the development team prioritised the evaluation of user behaviour. This has been an important step for the whole development package, including refactoring and E2E testing. In order to test the usability of Kompakkt, user tests were conducted, both on mobile devices and computers. Prior to the sessions, users were given a demonstration of Kompakkt's key features and were split into small groups to actively try out Kompakkt's core functionalities, with a particular focus on collaboration and annotation. The results of these tests were used to support the development of epics and user stories. In the process, the key components of Kompakkt as a service were identified. The core components of the application were captured in better detail through the execution of user stories and are fundamental to establishing an engaging and user-friendly product. Kompakkt aims to further establish an open source approach. This has been developed within the last promotion by means of improved and shortened communication channels between the core team and the benefits.
Support of mobile devices
In order to further develop the support of mobile devices, the team first conducted an evaluation of the status to date. This has been done by exploratory testing on different devices for main functions of the viewer. The usability of viewing the Viewer has a higher priority than annotating on mobile devices and accordingly a computer or laptop is recommended for annotations. Addition of measurement tools In the spirit of enhanced and facilitated use in the Viewer, it was determined with the help of user studies and requests that the measurement tools in the Viewer are not necessary for all use cases, but precision is necessary for those where they are required. There is no way to accurately transfer the model size via the metadata, so an implementation of measurement tools requires more detailed technical elaboration. The user specifies points on the model via the viewer, which are linked to real length measurements. In this way, the model is displayed in three-dimensional space to make the units of measurement more comprehensible. In this process, it was worked out how to handle annotations that affect several points on a model at the same time, such as a measurement in the annotation data model, as previously only 1-point annotations were available in the viewer. Measurements are treated as special cases of multi-point annotations. Multi-point annotations not only lay the foundation for measurements in Kompakkt Viewer, but also offer the possibility for functionalities such as area annotations in the future.
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In the context of the development of existing data formats, controlled vocabulary and authority records for the disciplines involved in the NFDI4Culture consortium (art history and architecture, musicology, theatre and media studies), an intensive cooperation between Task Area 2: Standards, Data Quality and Curation and the Integrated Authority File (GND) has developed over the last few months. The GND is the largest authority data service for cultural and research data in the German-speaking countries. It is coordinated by the German National Library (DNB) and co-operatively maintained by mainly libraries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Originally created as a tool for cataloguing in libraries, the importance of authority records in the course of digital transformation grows in research contexts as well as in archives and museums, which provide data for scientific use. In particular in the areas of humanities and cultural studies dealing with tangible and intangible cultural heritage, authority data allow unique references to persons, places, corporations, but also to buildings and works of art as nodes, which in turn enable linking and contextualisation of information and knowledge. Universally valid, jointly agreed and verified authority data are the ideal approach to digitally connect dispersed cultural assets, library collections and research data across disciplines and divisions. With this in mind, the GND partners are in the process of pushing forward the consistent opening of the authority services to non-library application scenarios, for which the project GND for Culture Data (GND4C) lays the foundations.
With the aim of standardising and improving the quality of data relevant to the disciplines represented by NFDI4Culture, TA2 is particularly committed to its FAIRness, i.e. its improved findability, accessibility, reusability and interoperability. These requirements need to be increasingly considered in the context of semantic technologies such as linked open data applications, with the interpretability of data by machines being a prerequisite. Here, linking with widely used authority records plays a key role. In cooperation with the GND, subject-specific requirements for authority records can be discussed, while, additionally, sustainable solutions can be developed. Primarily, the focus is on authority records for buildings, musical works and (multimedia) works of art, and on modeling concepts for event-based staging works and controlled vocabulary in the performing arts. Here, more supporting community initiatives have emerged with the support of NFDI4Culture's TA2.
Pilot Agency for Buildings
Through a pilot agency for monuments established as part of the GND4C project, the German Documentation Center for Art History – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg aims to promote the improved representation of buildings and immobile monuments in the GND. On the one hand, the aim is to improve the coverage of objects that have so far been underrepresented in the GND in terms of quantity while on the other hand, it communicates the requirements of non-library user groups to the GND cooperative and its committees. As a service point, it particularly will support stakeholders from national heritage agencies, building research and history of art and culture, who are eligible as prospective data providers for the GND or as GND users in research and documentation.
Authority records for musical works
RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), the international source dictionary of music, has been discussing the need for authority data for musical works for a long time. Within the framework of NFDI4Culture, a cooperation between RISM and the GND has now been initiated. The aim is to network the two data hubs, to ensure controlled data exchange and efficient data management. The consistent use of authority record for musical works would sustainably qualify research data from the field of musicology.
Forum Performing Arts in the GND
In the field of performing arts, modelling of authority data still requires further clarification, since both the specific, mostly collective ways of working and the structural connection of production and reception processes can hardly be adequately covered by the usual categories of work and authorship. Performative practices as well as corresponding research focus on performances and processes that are not reproducible in an identical manner. As immaterial cultural assets, they have a connection to the materials and documents preserved by GLAM institutions that are often difficult to reconstruct. The process of builing an universal understanding on terms, vocabulary and modelling of authority data for performative works and events is now under way, to improve data quality for a more sustainable research on the performing arts. Further information about the activities: https://home.uni-leipzig.de/gtw-ag-archiv/?page_id=1142
Dissemination
In addition to exploring the role and possible applications of authority data, the above-mentioned cooperative initiatives between NFDI4Culture and the GND repeatedly focus on the question of how to communicate the specific services of the GND to the 4Culture community in an effective, targeted, and easy-to-use manner. In an exchange of ideas, solutions are designed that enable or facilitate the use of GND for researchers. A common objective is the improvement of the GND towards a sustainable interdisciplinary service. This includes the adaptation of the data model and the indexing rules as well as the provision of a software toolbox with tools and interfaces for authority data referencing in non-library application scenarios. Intensifying communication with various stakeholders and making the GND network visible are additional approaches to help consolidate work with authority records in research contexts. The following tutorial produced by the GND team contributes to this: https://youtu.be/6zb_eIOUJ-M
Further information on the GND cooperative and on how to participate can be found at: https://gnd.network/Webs/gnd/DE/Home/home_node.html
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Friday, 1.12.2023, 10 a.m. - 4.30 p.m. (online)
For the performing arts and practices as well as for their research and documentation as (immaterial) cultural heritage, digitisation and the current discussion about research data pose special challenges: What is performing arts research data in the collections as well as in teaching and research, including artistic and applied research, anyway? And how can the principles of discoverability, accessibility, interconnectivity and re-usability (FAIR) as well as collective benefit, self-determined control and ethical responsibility for data (CARE) be implemented in this field? The connection of diverse sources and materials, from texts to photographs and videos to objects and stage (image) models in digital space opens up new perspectives of knowledge and at the same time the necessity of specific digital methods. But the publication and storage of research results is also undergoing a transformation, especially with regard to the transparent organisation and dissemination of knowledge.
With this year's, 4th edition of "Collection Meets Research", there will again be several workshops in the already established exchange of perspectives between research, collection, artistic practice and education, focusing on the following questions for discussion:
● What do we mean by research data specific to our subject culture and what infrastructures do we need for it?
● How do historical knowledge concepts and technical developments shape the directory systems of memory institutions and their collection data? To what extent do these collection data also count as research data?
● How do organisational structures in digital environments affect the function and meaning of dance and theatre-related knowledge?
● How does artistic research in the performing arts manifest itself in digital environments and how can it also shape these itself?
● What impact can AI systems and machine learning have on future theatre, knowledge, collection and research spaces?
Programm and Registration until 27.11.2023 via the following link: https://events.nfdi4culture.de/e/sammlung_triff_forschung_IV
Download further Information
The fourth meeting of the series "Collection Meets Research" is organised by the Institute for Theatre Studies at the University of Leipzig together with the Bundesverband Theatersammlungen im deutschsprachigen Raum (TheSiD) e.V. as well as the AG ARCHIV of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft and the Fachinformationsdienst Darstellende Kunst (FID DK).
The event is supported by NFDI4Culture, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) - 441958017.
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Event date: November 3–4, 2022
This year's forum of the Cultural Research Data Academy (CRDA) was held on the topic 'GLAM digital – data competencies for cultural heritage institutions'. It was the first forum of the NFDI4Culture consortium to explicitly address the broad and diverse group of so-called GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums).
Over a total of two days in Marburg, the hybrid event focused on numerous topics related to the key words 'digital' and 'data literacy'. Representatives from a wide range of institutions were present, from university representatives to archivists and museum staff. The wide-ranging expertise of the speakers and the audience, present both in person and digitally, created interesting questions and lively discussions.
After a short welcome by the organizing team, the first day of the conference began with three parallel online workshops, which were organized and hosted by NFDI4Culture staff members from different Task Areas: In addition to a basic course on research data management by CRDA staff members Dr. Martin Albrecht-Hohmaier and Katharina Bergmann, tailored to the needs of the GLAM community, a workshop on 'FAIR roadmaps for cultural heritage institutions – and how data management plans can help you achieve them' was offered by Angela Kailus and Dr. Celia Krause (Task Area 2: Standards, data quality and curation). Prof. Dr. Ina Blümel and Dr. Lozana Rossenova (Task Area 1: Data capture and enrichment of digital cultural assets) held a workshop on 'Representation of three-dimensional objects using Kompakkt and Wikibase-based annotations'.
Following these workshops, the first day of the conference focused on the topic of education and training of existing and future GLAM staff in two panels under the theme "Training Data Competences". The panels, which were structured by ten-minute inputs from the speakers and following discussion, addressed both the training of data competences in higher education and (distance) training at higher education institutions, as well as the supervision and training of trainees.
The first of the two panels concentrated on career entry and further qualification. Eva Eick presented the funding programme of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Culture and Science 'Forschungsvolontariat Kunstmuseen NRW'. Prof. Dr. Claudia Frick reported on the Master in Library and Information Science (MALIS) at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and Prof. Dr. Susanne Freund gave an overview of the advanced education programmes in the field of archives at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. The following discussion between the speakers and the plenum focused mainly on three major topics: The basic digital education of students/young academics, which cannot be regarded as a prerequisite and often has to be worked out during their studies, the capacity limits in the (distance) advanced training courses that are in high demand, and the desire for qualitatively outstanding advanced training opportunities for staff members. Attention was also drawn to the problem that the content to be taught changes faster than curricula can be adapted, which poses further challenges for training institutions. In addition a desire was expressed from various sides for stronger networking between GLAM institutions and higher education institutions, which could take place via NFDI4Culture and in the framework of which cultural heritage institutions could open up portfolios for study programmes in which future GLAM staff could be trained.
The second panel of the day was labelled 'University and Education'. Mario Röhrle reported on the media and paper restoration courses at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and how data competence is taught to students there. Dr. Irmgard Christa Becker, head of the Marburg School of Archives, provided a look at a classic archivist's education and the ways in which digital skills are taught. The discussion with the plenary and the digital audience once again underlined the aspect of the previous panels by unanimously calling for a stronger integration of training in digital methods and content into the curricula of undergraduate degree programmes. It also became clear that even at first glance very different subject areas are facing many similar problems and can benefit from cooperation and exchange of experience.
The first day closed with a round table discussion entitled 'Challenges of digital change in the GLAM sector'. Moderated by CRDA co-spokespersons Prof. Dr. Malte Hagener and Prof. Dr. Andreas Münzmay, Dr. Irmgard Christa Becker (Marburg School of Archives), Prof. Dr. Peter Bell (Philipps University Marburg) and Freya Schlingmann (Central Scientific Project Management museum4punkt0) discussed the topic. Followed by the observation that the digital transformation is taking place at different speeds in many GLAM fields, it was agreed that it is important not to neglect small and medium-sized institutions and to establish and expand alliances in order to be able to act together effectively and move forward. Another defining theme of the discussion was the point raised by Irmgard Becker about integrating management skills more strongly into training. With regard to professional life, Freya Schlingmann made a plea for teams with a diverse professional background, which should unite different areas of expertise. The resulting topic of interdisciplinary cooperation and the exchange of experiences then dominated the discussion with the plenary.
The second day of the conference was themed 'Applying Data Literacy' and included three panels, addressing partially very different sets of topics: The day began with the aspects of collecting and preservation, essential components of the work of every GLAM institution and also an area that is strongly affected by digitisation. Prof. Dr. Dorothee Haffner, Professor of Museology at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, Martin Stricker from the Coordination Centre for Scientific University Collections in Germany, Dr. Birgitta Coers, Head of the documenta archiv and Dr. Frank Bär, Head of the Collection of Musical Instruments at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum presented their handling of collection data and individual as well as overarching challenges with these. The focus of the individual inputs moved between topics such as knowledge resources, digitisation strategies and standards, and specific challenges on a structural, personnel and technical level. Furthermore, these topics formed gateways to the subsequent discussion against the background of the different GLAM cultural heritage institutions, as well as working conditions in the individual disciplines. The special training needs for personnel and the limited training capacities of the individual universities were also discussed. The panel emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation, the need to establish diverse teams in the institutions, the relevance of networking opportunities and the wish for the NFDI4C consortium to offer similar formats to this forum in the future.
The fourth panel, entitled 'Using tools and services', was opened by Chiara Marchini, who presented the German Digital Library (DDB), emphasised the awareness of data quality and controlled vocabularies and gave an outlook on the DDBs relaunch. Frauke Rehder then presented the digiCult network and explained services such as interfaces. Dr. Elisabeth Böhm reported on the support offered by the eCulture project of the Saxony-Anhalt Museum Association, especially regarding advice for institutions and projects. Dr. Christian Bracht broadened the view to the topic of 'Open GLAM' and the free accessibility and re-usability of collection and research data. In addition to problematic image rights and licences, Bracht presented an 'Open Access Policy for Cultural Heritage Institutions'. In the followup discussion, special legal questions took up a large part, mainly relating to the re-use of photographs (of works of art) or also dealing with the still inconsistent fee and cost regulations for the acquisition of rights of use. Case studies were also used to explain concrete challenges faced by institutions and projects, as they exist for tools and services in the face of certain legal hurdles.
The event concluded with a panel on educational aspects and making collection data accessible. Katharina Ewald from the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and Anna Gnyp from the Landesmuseum Württemberg presented various projects at their institutions, their digital strategies in general and digital educational concepts. Theresa Stärk, head of the project 'Digitale Kunstvermittlung | ART 4.0', followed up with an example from university education in art education. Prof. Dr. Bernhard Thull from the Technical University of Darmstadt presented his work on the Digital Pina Bausch Archive and, as a computer scientist and software developer, was able to contribute an interesting, differentiated view of digital projects. After a short discussion about the relevance of persistent identifiers for collection data, the topic of teaching data literacy in-house and its relevance was raised. In addition, it was emphasised that it is important to document data handling well – in general as well as in projects – so that knowledge remains available for a long time and can be re-used, internally as well as in sharing with other institutions.
In summary, it can be said that the conference, which was broad in content, on the one hand highlighted existing problems and challenges, and on the other hand also presented initial approaches to solutions and revealed possible synergies and opportunities for cooperation. The CRDA and NFDI4Culture as a whole do not want to let the important discussions and possible cooperations between the institutions die down and are looking forward to becoming active as a coordinating and supporting networking element.
The presentation slides are available for download here: https://cloud.nfdi4culture.de/s/kD7XzeCyJLwm3TH
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"The (...) new edition of the Beethoven catalogue of works will probably be the last to appear in print. The future of such a collection and preparation of information lies in the digital medium."
These are the closing words of the introduction to the two big volumes that became the new landmark of Beethoven research in 2014. Since then, several projects have laid the foundations for digital source and work catalogues using the XML schema MEI (Music Encoding Initiative). More projects are in the planning stage - some work catalogues are based on TYPO3 extensions, others use independent presentation systems for MEI data.
The possibilities of a digital catalogue will be particularly fruitful for complex works or collections of works with multiple references and connections - as is to be expected, for example, in the case of Franz Liszt. His works often developed fluidly over decades and often enough in processes of collective authorship, so that concepts such as "original" and "adaptation" or "work" and "version" are not always suitable. This is manifested in three existing attempts at systematization (Raabe, Searle, Mueller/Eckhardt)*, that show different (and not always satisfactory) results.
In June 2022, the "Digital Liszt Sources and Works Catalogue" (LisztQWV, carried out by the University of Heidelberg, the SLUB Dresden and the Goethe and Schiller Archive Weimar) was launched. This long-term project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) aims at enabling different approaches to Franz Liszt's musical oeuvre and the corresponding sources in the digital space. In order to exchange experiences and to discuss the conceptual and technical basis of the planned catalogue, the project team invited ongoing and completed projects and other representatives of the digital community in cooperation with NFDI4Culture to a workshop in Dresden on November 10 and 11.
Input presentations, a poster session, specialized group discussions as well as a concluding World Café enabled a multifaceted exchange. Staff members of the LisztQWV first presented the current status of the project, in particular the already ongoing indexing of sources as well as first considerations on data management and data flows. Peter Stadler (Paderborn) presented the MerMEId software developed in Copenhagen. This input mask for metadata in MEI format is currently being further developed as a community project in Paderborn. Laurent Pugin (RISM Digital Center, Bern) spoke about the role that the International Inventory of Musical Sources RISM plays currently and could play in the future in the field of digital work catalogues. Dennis Ried (Paderborn), as spokesman for the MEI-Metadata and Cataloging Interest group, addressed the work with the MEI header as well as opportunities and challenges in applying the FRBR levels to complex works or collections of works. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records make a conceptual distinction between the levels Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item which can cause complications at various points.
The participating projects on Anton Bruckner, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Johannes Brahms, Joseph Haydn, Georg Philipp Telemann and Franz Liszt as well as on Near Eastern music manuscripts (Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae) presented their respective approaches in a poster session. It quickly became apparent that a one-size-fits-all solution does not exist. Another poster by Silke Reich addressed the representation of performances in the FRBR model.
In the discussions, several aspects proved to be relevant across the projects. Since the available oeuvres and the existing data differed greatly, these topics are approached in different ways. Particular emphasis was placed in the discussion on the relationship between local data storage on the one hand and third-party repositories, in particular RISM (that can be used for primary data indexing or for displaying data that has been indexed elsewhere) and authority data hubs on the other. Another key aspect in the discussion were the data flows which have to be planned precisely due to different data formats (including MARC21, MEI, or MerMEId-specific MEI) and have consequences for data sovereignty and versioning. Other important aspects included front-end presentation to keep user experience in mind, the design of input masks to standardize entries, and workflows. From an IT perspective, spotlights were cast on emergent technologies such as Semantic Data, which are gaining ground in the Digital Humanities. Now, based on the results of the workshop, we are beginning with the detailed planning of the technical realization of the LisztQWV. Moreover, the participants of the workshop unanimously agreed that the fruitful exchange between the projects should be continued!
Severin Kolb, Katrin Bicher und Matthias Richter
* Peter Raabe: Franz Liszt, Bd. 2: Liszts Schaffen, Stuttgart 1931 (Tutzing 1968). * Humphrey Searle and Sharon Winklhofer: Franz Liszt, in: Chopin, Schumann, Liszt. The New Grove Early Romantic Masters, New York und London 1985, S. 237–378. * Alan Walker, Maria Eckhardt and Rena Charnin Mueller: Art. „Liszt, Franz“, in: The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, vol. 14, London und New York 2001, S. 755–877.
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Lecture Series: "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" (online)
The working group "Social Media-Data", initiated by NFDI4Culture in cooperation with KonsortSWD and Text+ as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI), hosted three installments of its lecture series “Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice” during the summer. Due to the success, the format will continue and welcome BERD@NFDI in its next round in fall.
The lecture series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" is dedicated to the tools in the field of social media research. Within one hour short input talks should highlight best practices and selected research projects. In addition to pragmatic solutions and technical possibilities (software, interfaces, repositories, metadata standards, interoperability ...), points of focus will lie on ethical and legal barriers in the creation and evaluation of data sets and corpora (personal and individual rights, copyrights), as well as the sustainable, secure and critical handling of them (code and data literacy, FAIR & CARE). Last but not least, we would like to invite you to discuss interdisciplinary research approaches and teaching methods that stress both traditional and subject-specific frameworks and tools. We met on 13th May on the topic of 'Twitter Tools', on 10th June on 'Social Media-Corpora' and 1st July on 'multimodal data handling' ("Immer Ärger mit den Bildern").
The series kicked off with presentations by Carolin Gerlitz (Digital Media and Methods, Universität Siegen) and Johannes Breuer (GESIS, Köln / CAIS, Bochum) under the topic "Twitter Tools: Collecting, Curating and Analysing Data" on 13th May. They focused on software and interfaces for collecting and analysing data sets. The speakers introduced their research with TCAT, Jupyter notebooks, Git and the analysis of Twitter data with R. Presentations were followed by a lively discussion among the participants on data analysis, other plattforms and further projects.
The programme continued on 10th June with a panel on “Social Media-Corpora”. In her lecture "A corpus on language in WhatsApp communication – the Mobile Communication Database (MoCoDa2)", Sarah Steinsiek (Universität Duisburg-Essen) presented tools of data collection and analysis. Not only were the technical interfaces and metadata schemes highlighted, but also the privacy rights of data donors discussed (declaration of consent, pseudonymisation...). Harald Lüngen (IDS – Mannheim) traced the development and analysis of "Social media corpora in DeReKo", in particular using Wikipedia and Twitter sample corpora. Legal barriers to the inclusion of internet-based communication in the German reference corpus were as much a subject here as corpus comparison tools.
The summer semester concluded with three lectures on 1st July entitled “Immer Ärger mit den Bildern” with a focus on the handling of multimodal data. Sven Stollfuß (Universität Leipzig) reported in his input "Social TV and Research Data" on the institutional and production-cultural contexts as well as platform structures and gave insight into his research project right down to research systems, tables and coding. Verena Straub (TU Dresden) presented her current sub-project "Memes as political image practice" and some of the tools she uses in her short lecture "Image protests in social media – methodological challenges for the analysis of image networks". She explained methodological problems in collecting and clustering, in cross-platform comparability as well as in image-scientific analysis. Margarete Pratschke (HU Berlin) showed in her lecture "Uproar. On Challenges of Research on Digital Image Processes and Political Image Events on Social Media" starting points for the analysis of image cultures. In the course, she emphasised and questioned forensic practices from the perspective of form analysis and media culture studies.
All lectures were accompanied by a pragmatic and critical examinations of user interfaces and platform-dependent text-image relationships. The winter semester continues with contributions on Google and Reddit, among others.
PROGRAMME of the lecture series: "Show & Tell – Social Media-Daten in der Forschungspraxis" (in cooperation with NFDI4Culture, KonsortSWD and Text+ as part of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI))
13th May 14:00: "Twitter Tools" (I)
Carolin Gerlitz (Digital Media and Methods, Universität Siegen): "Doing research with Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (TCAT)" Johannes Breuer (GESIS, Köln / CAIS, Bochum): "Twitter-Daten in R"
10th June 14:00: "Social Media-Sprachkorpora" (II)
Sarah Steinsiek (Universität Duisburg-Essen): "Ein Korpus zur Sprache in der WhatsApp-Kommunikation – die Mobile Communication Database (MoCoDa2)" Harald Lüngen (IDS – Mannheim): "Social Media-Korpora in DeReKo"
1st July 14:00: "Immer Ärger mit den Bildern" (III)
Sven Stollfuß (Universität Leipzig): "Social TV und Forschungsdaten" Verena Straub (TU Dresden): "Bildproteste in den Sozialen Medien - Methodische Herausforderungen für die Analyse von Bildnetzwerken" Margarete Pratschke (HU Berlin): "Aufruhr. Über Herausforderungen der Forschung zu digitalen Bildprozessen und politischen Bildereignissen auf Social Media"
In fall the lecture series will continue and hosted by NFDI4Culture, KonsortSWD, Text+ and BERD@NFDI.
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From Wednesday, March 23rd 2022, to Friday, March 25th 2022, the 36th Congress of German Art Historians will take place in Stuttgart. The Specialised Information Service Art, Photography, Design - arthistoricum.net has been part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) funded by the German Research Foundation since October 2020. Its Task Area 4 (TA 4) "Data publication and data availability" is jointly managed by SLUB Dresden and UB Heidelberg as co-applicants.
The Specialised Information Service Art, Photography, Design - arthistoricum.net will have a stand on site. There you will find the TA4 team of Heidelberg University Library on Wednesday, 23rd March 2022, between 10 am-1 pm and 3:30 pm-5:00 pm. Please feel free to come by with any questions you may have on the topic of publishing and archiving research data in art history.
In addition, the arthistoricum.net teams from Heidelberg and Dresden will be on site to inform you about the diverse offers and services of arthistoricum.net, such as open access publications in art history, subject catalogue and image and literature search, thematic portals and platforms, digitisation and indexing of image and text sources relevant to art history, IIIF and image annotation tools. Come by with your questions.
The TA4 team of NFDI4Culture and the arhistoricum.net team are looking forward to seeing you there!
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The 4CULTURE BARCAMP 2023, dedicated to the topic of "3D Research Data for Material Cultural Heritage", was an excellent success and once again demonstrated the crucial role the community plays in the success of such events. On July 5, 2023, the Barcamp took place online via Zoom, providing a platform for experts, interested individuals, and researchers to exchange ideas and network throughout the entire day.
Following the success of previous Barcamps focusing on digital cultural heritage and 3D data, this time, the thematic focus shifted to digital 3D objects in collections and museums as research data.
The aim of this year's Barcamp was to showcase the diversity of the 3D research data world and its versatile usage scenarios. Participants had the opportunity to discuss what qualifies as 3D data for research, existing application areas, and potential future possibilities. The lack of routine and standardization for publishing and archiving 3D research data, as well as its significance for individual research and provision to external researchers, were particularly highlighted.
The day was expertly guided by the moderator Kristin Narr. The Barcamp began with a warm welcome and a collective warm-up, followed by an inspiring keynote speech by Prof. Kai-Christian Bruhn from i3mainz, who introduced the participants to the topic. The sessions were organized in an open format, emphasizing exchange, interaction, and participation. Participants had the opportunity to submit their own session proposals in advance or contribute them directly during the event. This ensured that the topics and discussions came from the participants themselves, catering to the needs and interests of the community. The physical well-being of the participants was also taken into account with a relaxation exercise led by the wonderful Franziska Fritzsche.
The participation in the Barcamp was impressive, with a broad range of interested individuals, from those without prior knowledge to experts in the field of 3D digitization and analysis. Among the participants were researchers, curators, conservators, data providers, professional digitizers, and users, as well as individuals interested in art history and archaeology. Overall, there were over 170 registrations and over 100 active participants on the day of the event.
The collaboration with NFDI4Objects was particularly valuable, as they contributed their expertise in documenting and collecting cultural heritage objects to the Barcamp. The involvement of NFDI4Objects, including the keynote speech by Prof. Kai-Christian Bruhn, enriched the event and provided participants with deeper insights into the topic.
The Barcamp sessions were highly informative and diverse. Topics included the requirements for digitizations for dissemination and long-term archiving, scenarios for systematic indexing, reconstructions, and much more. Participants shared their experiences, ideas, and research projects, leading to inspiring exchanges and new insights.
In summary, the 4CULTURE BARCAMP 2023 was a great success and significantly contributed to raising awareness of the importance of 3D research data in the context of tangible cultural heritage. The event promoted knowledge exchange, networking, and collaboration within the community and inspired participants for new projects and ideas. Thanks to the dedicated participation and broad interest of the community, the Barcamp became a lively and enriching event.
The results and insights from the Barcamp are of great significance for the NFDI4Culture project and will be incorporated into further development and implementation. We highly appreciate the valuable inputs from the community, which make an essential contribution to shaping and implementing the project's outcomes.
The organizing teams of NFDI4Culture (Task Area Digitization and Enrichment) and NFDI4Objects (Task Area Documentation) extend heartfelt thanks to all participants, session hosts, and our moderator Kristin Narr for their valuable contributions and dedication. Our sincere thanks also go to the organizing teams of NFDI4Culture and NFDI4Objects as a whole, as well as the speakers, especially Prof. Kai-Christian Bruhn from i3mainz, who opened the event with his keynote speech.
We are already looking forward to the next 4CULTURE BARCAMP and are excited about further insights and developments in the 3D digitization community.
All links and materials: • The Barcamp Webpage with all information • An overview of all Barcamp sessions and the associated pads (session-specific notes can also be added) • A collection of shared links • The slides from the Inspiration Talk, made available by the speaker Prof. Kai-Christian Bruhn • All shared materials
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On July 12, 2022, team members from the Open Science Lab, TIB, co-convened a special meeting of the NFDI4Culture LOD Working Group for a workshop focusing on terminology services. Terminologies play an important role across several key focus points of the Task Areas in NFDI4Culture, including TA1’s Data enrichment, TA2’s Data Standards, and TA5’s focus on Knowledge Graphs.
Currently, terminology service tools in use within other NFDI consortia, such as the Ontology Lookup Service used by NFDI4Ing and NFDI4Chem, struggle to accommodate vocabularies and ontologies used in the arts and humanities disciplines due to their typically large size, variety of serialisation formats and complexity of hierarchical relations within the category trees. In the context of TA1 and TA5, members of the Open Science Lab at TIB are prototyping a new service which aims to address the gaps in current service provisions. The motivation to host a dedicated workshop was to ensure that the new service meets the most pressing needs of the NFDI4Culture community in this area.
The workshop featured hands-on exercises with existing terminology services in order to observe how culture community participants interact and make use of such services. Furthermore, the workshop aimed to identify the most widely used vocabulary and ontology resources in the community and discuss what common issues arise when researchers are browsing or looking up terms in these resources. In the end, the Open Science Lab team presented current service architecture plans and an initial prototype built around a set of speculative user stories. The goal of the workshop was to test the feasibility of these user stories against the real-world scenarios the workshop participants face in their daily research activities.
Twelve diverse culture community representatives took part in the workshop, including researchers, archivists and computer scientists working in the fields of musicology, performing arts, fine art, architecture and design, among others.
The workshop concluded with a discussion reiterating the key requirements listed in the findings section of this report, and with a call for feedback on future service developments at OSL. Upon requests from the participants to continue this line of open conversations, the workshop will likely turn into a series with future events providing further opportunities to test not only services developed at OSL, but other tools and terminology resources developed by members of the culture community.
To stay up-to-date with this workshop series and all other events planned by the NFDI4Culture LOD Working group, sign up to the mailing list or request to join the Rocket Chat channel.
Find the full workshop report on Zenodo.
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Freedom, peace and dialogue are elementary prerequisites for science, art and culture worldwide. In NFDI4Culture, we have joined together as an international network with the goal of promoting exchange in research, art and culture and connecting them in common infrastructures.
We react with shock to the military attack on Ukraine in violation of international law. A brutal war in the middle of Europe brings immense suffering to people and threatens cultural exchange as well as cultural artefacts from centuries of common European history.
Our unrestricted solidarity goes to all people in Ukraine. It applies to all scientists and artists who stand up against aggression, war and oppression there and all over the world.
With the help of our consortial network we support researchers and artists at risk and put them in touch with contact persons and initiatives that enable them to continue their work in safe places. Please contact us directly via our Twitter channel (https://twitter.com/nfdi4culture) and via contact(at)nfdi4culture(dot)de.
Prof. Torsten Schrade (Spokesperson, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz) Prof. Dr. Holger Simon (Chairperson des Steering Boards, Verband deutscher Kunsthistoriker e.V.) Prof. Dr. Dörte Schmidt (Chairperson des Advisory Councils, Universität der Künste Berlin)
Reinhard Altenhöner (Co-Spokesperson, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) Prof. Dr. Ina Blümel (Co-Spokesperson, TIB Hannover) Prof. Dr. Franziska Boehm (Co-Spokesperson, FIZ Karlsruhe) Dr. Jens Bove (Co-Spokesperson, SLUB Dresden) Dr. Christian Bracht (Co-Spokesperson, Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte, Bildarchiv Foto Marburg) Dr. Lisa Dieckmann (Co-Spokesperson, Universität zu Köln) Dr. Maria Effinger (Co-Spokesperson, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg) Prof. Dr. Malte Hagener (Co-Spokesperson, Philipps-Universität Marburg) Daniel Röwenstrunk (Co-Spokesperson, Universität Paderborn) Prof. Dr. Harald Sack (Co-Spokesperson, FIZ Karlsruhe) Prof. Dr. Barbara Wiermann (Co-Spokesperson, SLUB Dresden)
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Theatre-related collections and archives in dialogue with institutions of artistic teaching and research
2 December 2022 | 10-19:30 | online
The Bundesverband Theatersammlungen im deutschsprachigen Raum (TheSiD) e.V. (Federal Association of Theatre Collections in German-Speaking Countries) is organising the workshop "Sammlung trifft Forschung 2022" (Collection meets Research 2022) together with the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (HZT) Berlin (Inter-University Centre for Dance) and the AG ARCHIV of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft (Society for Theatre Studies). For this third working meeting, the focus is on artistic education. Six workshops will explore the question of how teachers, students and graduates of the performing arts use objects and documents in collections and memory institutions and what services and infrastructures are available for this.
Programme Project presentations by students and teachers provide insight into creative and artistic work in this field. Another question concerns the archives of the artistic training institutes themselves: What cooperation and strategies are needed to sustainably secure, present and make accessible these collections? This also involves everyday challenges in data collection, systematisation and administration at the training institutions as well as the use of research tools for artistic engagement with external collections. Last but not least, the workshops will discuss which new forms of cooperation can (and must) be developed between collections and institutions of artistic teaching and research. Overall, the working meeting aims at the exchange of experiences and interests of theatre-related collections and the researchers, teachers, students and alumni of artistic universities working with them and beyond. The aim is to encourage a transfer of knowledge that promotes cooperation between institutions of artistic teaching and research and theatre-related collections. The programme is divided into 2 workshop sessions:
Session 1: WS 1.1 The educational institutions' own archives and archived student life WS 1.2 Collection holdings and knowledge orders of the archives in education WS 1.3 Development of new artistic performance formats in libraries
Session 2: WS 2.1 With whom and with what do we tell the past? WS 2.2 Media as documentation and artistic objects in educational practice WS 2.3 Teaching project on working with a historical media archive
Lecture The working meeting will conclude with the lecture "RECYCLING KNOWLEDGE - Contact Improvisation in Connection with Practice & Theory, Dance, Music, Visual Arts and Video" by Dieter Heitkamp (HfMDK Frankfurt am Main).
Registration All interested parties are cordially invited to register for this digital workshop with us by 28.11.2022. Please write us which workshop of Session 1 and which workshop of Session 2 you would like to attend (one workshop per session). Please send registrations to: Nathalie Rosenbaum (einladung@hfs-berlin.de). The link to participate will then be sent to you shortly before the event.
Further information
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We are pleased to announce a call for papers, posters, panels, and workshops for Encoding Cultures, a joint conference of the annual Music Encoding Conference and Text Encoding Initiative Members’ Meeting.
The conference will be held 5–8 September 2023 at Paderborn University, Germany, with pre-conference workshops 4–5 September 2023.
This event brings together, for the first time, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) communities, both of which are involved in the digitization and encoding of cultural heritage artifacts. While musical and textual artifacts have fundamental differences, there are many overlapping approaches in regard to data modeling, encoding theory, and digital publication. MEI and TEI also share technical tools and services, as both XML vocabularies are formally expressed using TEI's customization and documentation language.
The conference topic is Encoding Cultures, understood both as the encoding of multiple cultures and cultural outputs as well as the variety of encoding cultures that exist within and across our communities.
Encoding Cultures will be the 23rd annual meeting of the TEI community and the 11th annual Music Encoding Conference, a cross-disciplinary venue for the MEI community and all who are interested in the digital representation of music.
The deadline for submissions is 16 April 2023. Please find more information and the text of the full Call for Proposals at https://teimec2023.uni-paderborn.de/cfp.html.
We look forward to seeing you in Paderborn!
Raff Viglianti on behalf of the Program Committee
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On February 4, 2021, the first Culture Community Plenary took place, which at the same time was to give the official starting signal for the NFDI4Culture. In addition to the ceremonial opening of the consortium foundation by the director of the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reiner Anderl and the director of the NFDI, Prof. Dr. York Sure-Vetter, the program also consisted of presentations by the NFDI4Culture disciplines of architecture, art history, media studies, musicology, and dance and theater studies, which were intended to stimulate exchange and discussion. As a change from the professional discussion, there were still artistic performances from the fields of visual and performing arts and music, despite the virtual event format.
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The latest version of the NFDI4Culture Portal has been released on 07/06/2022, introducing some exciting new features. A brief look at two major modules of this release illustrates the portal's progressive development into a digital cultural data hub.
The Culture Knowledge Graph rests on the NFDI4Culture Ontology, which is also available in the first version. Collaboratively curated through the Culture Research Information System the first 660 resources have been integrated and described with about 10,000 triples. These include 180 institutions and organizations (co-applicants, participants, collaborating partners), 217 individuals associated with NFDI4Culture, all news articles, events, and reports published to date since the start of the project, initial infrastructure contributions and services from consortium partners (such as the research data repositories curated by Task Area 4), and classifications for media types and academic disciplines. All content of the Knowledge Graph as well as the Culture Ontology is fully curated online via the portal's underlying content management system. The Linked Data Extension for TYPO3 is used for this purpose.
All NFDI4Culture resources are offered as Linked Open Data via a standardized API in open formats (e.g. Turtle, JSON-LD etc.). The API of the portal follows a REST architecture, which is semantically described by the Hydra specification of the Hydra W3C Community Group for accessing clients. At the same time, all resources are also version controlled and regularly updated via a Git repository for download as a data dump.
A public SPARQL endpoint allows direct query and export of the data along the SPARQL 1.1 standard. For example, all research data repositories described in the Knowledge Graph can be filtered out or all partners of NFDI4Culture with their different roles and mappings to Wikidata can be displayed. The new open source software oxigraph is used as triple store. The Culture Knowledge Graph is continuously enriched with further resources and functionally extended.
Another new addition to the portal is an overview of repositories. Repositories are storage locations for digital research results and research data. Under Resources/Repositories users of the portal will find an overview of subject-specific and generic repositories for the 4Culture community which offer sustainable publication and archiving solutions for humanities and cultural research data in different media formats.
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A Knowledge Graph is a structured representation of knowledge used to provide a comprehensive and interconnected view of a specific domain. The FAIRification process of research data relies heavily on Knowledge Graphs, which serve as foundational elements of modern information systems. However, for individuals lacking a computer science background, comprehending the concept of Knowledge Graphs can be challenging, preventing them from creating or participating in its development. To overcome this, we suggest taking the OpenHPI course "Knowledge Graphs – Foundations and Applications" for anyone interested in the subject.
This programme will provide all the essential knowledge needed to design, execute, and utilise Knowledge Graphs. The course will concentrate on fundamental semantic technologies, such as the principles of knowledge representation and symbolic AI. This encompasses encoding information via RDF triples, representing knowledge through ontologies using OWL, performing efficient queries on Knowledge Graphs by means of SPARQL, expressing latent knowledge in vector spaces, and utilizing knowledge graphs in sophisticated information systems, such as semantic and exploratory search. Furthermore, this course will discuss the role of knowledge graphs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as their potential to improve the explicability and trustworthiness of "black box" deep learning models such as Chat-GPT.
Detailed information about the course can be found here: https://open.hpi.de/courses/knowledgegraphs2023
Participation is free of charge.
Come and join us!
Harald Sack, Tabea Tietz, Oleksandra Bruns, Mahsa Vafaie, Mary Ann Tan
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Collection management systems and the holdings they describe are the core and starting point for a whole range of digital scenarios which enable scientific memory institutions such as museums, archives and similar collections to offer new, broader and more ambitious uses of their holdings in the context of the digital transformation. At the same time, digitality entails a dissolution of the boundaries of traditional collection concepts in all GLAM institutions.
Therefore, it is all the more important to increase the sustainable usability of the permanently curated data holdings by improving data quality. This often involves a change in the focus of documentation and in the corresponding work processes, places new demands on the data literacy of the staff and, last but not least, on the performance spectrum of the software used. How can criteria for data sustainability and quality be specified? How can collections actively shape the process towards better data?
The NFDI4Culture task areas "Standards, Data Quality, Curation" and "Cultural Research Data Academy" are holding a four-part workshop series on this topic in association with the Documentation Section of the German Museums Association. It is aimed primarily at digital managers or digital curators in cultural heritage collections and related projects, as well as at persons involved in process management, the adaptation of digital collection strategies, data publication and consultancy in these areas. The course will provide quality management strategies for all stages of the data life cycle and practical measures for their implementation.
Workshop 1: Making data quality tangible. Quality criteria and purposes of data use, 16.06.2023, 9 a.m.–1 p.m., online. Workshop 2: Effective management for better data quality (focus on data management plans), 23.06.2023, 9 a.m.–1 p.m., online Workshop 3: Structuring object-related information, using controlled vocabularies, 30.06.2023, 9 a.m.–1 p.m., online Workshop 4: Subsequent quality improvement: Analysing, cleaning and enriching data, 07.07.2023, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m., online.
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The shortlist for the NFDI4Culture Music Award 2022 has been decided!
From all submissions received, the jury consisting of representatives of NFDI4Culture, the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (GfM), the Deutscher Musikrat and the Zentrum Musik - Edition - Medien (ZenMEM) has now chosen the best projects for publication on a shortlist. On the basis of this shortlist, two submissions - one for each category - will be selected to receive the award. Additionally, the jury has unanimously agreed to publish a special appreciation for one submission that unfortunately could not be accepted due to formal reasons.
The award is given by the musicological community in NFDI4Culture and is intended to recognise music-related or musicological projects and undertakings that contribute in a special way to the goals in the consortium's fields of activity. It is awarded for the first time in 2022.
The awards will be presented at a ceremony during the NFDI4Culture Plenary 2023 (29 - 31 March 2023) at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz.
Category 1 - Qualification Award (Shortlist, submissions in alphabetical order by name of contributors)
Qualification theses from all music-related subject areas that were completed in 2021/22 were eligible for submission.
Frauke Reglind Pirk (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz): "Conception and prototypical development of an oXygen-based framework for the edition of Ottoman song texts. Supported by a guideline interview to elicit the prior knowledge of the perspective user group" (Master's thesis 2021).
Technically, the thesis is concerned with the development of a possibility to edit song texts in TEI-XML, eliminating the up to now error-prone export and conversion from a proprietary editing program. In terms of research organisation, the thesis is also concerned with how TEI-XML conformant editing tools can be successfully implemented in projects that primarily applied analogue forms of editing. The thesis is supported by a needs-oriented user survey in guided interviews in order to identify and overcome possible hurdles.
Lars Schmedeke (University of Hamburg): "Bass Drop! - The Bass in Modern Popular Dance Music" (PhD 2022).
In his thesis, the author pursues the question of how modern, popular dance music can be generally systematised. Starting from sounding objects and based on frequency analysis, he especially draws on the criterion of the describable perceivable 'fatness'. The analyses of the values measured are visualised through clustering.
Category 2 - Project Award (Shortlist, submissions in alphabetical order by name of contributors)
Projects of various kinds by cultural workers and scientists from all music-related fields could be submitted.
Ralf Martin Jäger (WWU Münster), Michael Kaiser and Sven Gronemeyer (Max Weber Foundation Bonn): Inter-consortial networking workshop "Critical music and text edition of Ottoman art music".
The aim of the proposed workshop is to place the "Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae" (CMO) project at the centre of an inter-consortial discussion between NFDI4Culture and Text+ in order to identify synergies and common goals and to develop joint strategies. The CMO project is particularly suitable for this purpose, as it encompasses tangible and intangible cultural assets as well as instrumental and vocal music, poetry and performative aspects, thus sharing research data domains from both consortia.
Lukas Retschmeier (TU Munich): Prototype of a user interface for AI-supported bar recognition of digital music records.
The project aims to further develop and visualise a prototype of a tool for the automated clocking of music manuscripts and prints that was created as part of a master's thesis. For this purpose, the AI model based on Tensorflow will be extended for further use.
Maximilian Rosenthal (HMT Leipzig/SLUB Dresden): Database of music publishers
The database of music publishers is developed as part of the DFG project "Geschmacksbildung und Verlagspolitik" (Musical Taste and Publishers' Policies) is intended to contain information from 20,000 business books of music publishers including the date and amount of editions, sales and misprinted paper. The database - also in its technical set-up - serves to make available and connect a considerable corpus of 19th century music production.
Special appreciation of the jury for one submission
Unfortunately, a paper submitted in category 1 could not be accepted according to the conditions of participation as it was already completed in 2020. However, the jury would still like to explicitly acknowledge its important contribution to research - especially to a digital source philology - and to the goals of NFDI4Culture.
Dr. Anna Plaksin (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz): "Modelle zur computergestützten Analyse von Überlieferungen der Mensuralmusik. Empirical text research in the context of phylogenetic procedures" (PhD thesis 2020).
In her dissertation, the author deals with the development of automatable procedures for comparisons of readings of mensurally notated vocal polyphony around 1500 on the basis of an intensive and multi-layered survey of requirements. The aim is to better understand transmission processes in this repertoire, which has not yet been widely explored on the basis of analyses of formalisable aspects of the surviving documents themselves (i.e. not their abstract content, i.e. the "work text", but to a certain extent its "visual" form). The dissertation shows its innovative content not only in the consistent attempt to expand the "mensural music" module of the MEI beyond semantic coding to include specific aspects and metadata describing the notation, but also in its interdisciplinary approach, in which the author transfers procedures for DNA and protein sequencing from bioinformatics to the observation of variant formation in music. In this way, she illustrates in the best possible way the transdisciplinary approaches of Digital Humanities and at the same time points to future collaborative perspectives for music and edition studies.
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Funding period: 01.05.–31.12.2022
1. Object of the funding
The object of the project funding of 20,000 euros was the provision of a low-threshold tool for modelling the structure of research software and its packaging according to the TOSCA standard ("Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications"). The TOSCA standard provides a unified format for the standardised, machine-readable and thus transferable description and documentation of application structures. The specific aim of the funding was to further develop the graphical modelling component of the OpenTOSCA ecosystem (the so-called "Winery", https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/soa.winery) so that it can be installed as a stand-alone desktop application independent of OpenTOSCA and used on all common operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows).
2. Work steps
At the beginning of the project funding, a requirements analysis was first carried out, in which, among other things, the existing dependencies within the OpenTOSCA implementation were identified. This essentially resulted in the following subtasks, which were successfully implemented within the framework of the funding:
Provision of an Electron-based desktop client (https://github.com/electron/electron) that can be installed locally and serves as a runtime environment for all components of the "TOSCA Modelling Tool". Integration of the Java-based Winery backend into the desktop client Integration of the Angular-based Winery frontend into the desktop client Integration of a start or default repo that can be used as a starting point for modelling applications Implementation of an automated mechanism for compiling the "TOSCA Modelling Tool" for different operating systems, taking into account the latest version of the OpenTOSCA Winery (https://github.com/opentosca/winery). Provision and automatic updating of the "TOSCA Modelling Tool" on a dedicated project website, which can and should be extended in the future to include documentation and other metadata.
The development of the "TOSCA Modelling Tool" and thus the expenditure of the project funding took place in an open source manner and can be traced under the following Github repository: https://github.com/olvidalo/desktop-winery A separate project website has also been set up to provide the latest version of the "TOSCA Modelling Tool": https://olvidalo.github.io/desktop-winery
3. Project result
The "TOSCA Modelling Tool" enables developers and maintainers of DH applications to model the structure of their applications in a graphical editor on the basis of the TOSCA standard and then export them in the form of a standardised packaging format (so-called CSAR, for "Cloud Service Archive"). The CSARs created in this way contain, similar to a Docker image, all the components necessary for operating the packaged application (as binaries or specifying package sources or similar). In addition, CSARs also contain an exact specification of the dependencies between the individual components of an application structure - a kind of "instruction leaflet", comparable to Docker compose stacks. The exported CSARs can also be published with a DOI (e.g. via Zenodo), which enables the citation or referencing of applications beyond the citation of the code alone. In the future, the CSARs can also be interpreted and deployed by any TOSCA-capable runtime environment, provided that the modelling is correct and complete. By implementing the "TOSCA Modelling Tool" as a very easy-to-use desktop application, we hope to have significantly reduced the technical requirements for (DH) researchers for TOSCA-compliant modelling of research software.
4. Further steps
Revise the project website to include documentation, logos and copyright/funding information. Addition of copyright/licence headers (Apache) to the source code documentation, among other things. Moving the Github repository to https://github.com/cceh (as well as integration into the OpenTOSCA repositories, if applicable) Addition of a practical guide with best-practice examples for the use of the "TOSCA Modelling Tool".
5. Perspective
The "TOSCA Modelling Tool" should be seen as a further step towards a more sustainable approach to research applications. First and foremost, it should contribute to the introduction and consolidation of TOSCA as a documentation standard in the DH. In the future, the project can be continued with the provision of decentralised, TOSCA-capable runtimes as a community-wide strategy for better referencing and citation of research applications.
Authors:Claes Neuefeind, Marcel Schaeben, Philip Schildkamp (University of Cologne, Cologne Center for eHumanities / Data Center for the Humanities)
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The forum on 12th May 2022 focused on the topic of 3D objects, specifically their creation, presentation and sustainable digital preservation. The task areas "Data capture and enrichment of digital cultural assets" (Task Area 1) and "Data publication and data availability" (Task Area 4) thereby addressed the entire NFDI4Culture specialist community with the intention of providing a platform for researchers as well as for established and upcoming service providers to talk about their needs and ask questions.
The event started with Katja Sternitzke (SBB, Berlin), Zoe Schubert (SBB, Berlin) and Guido Heinz (RGZM) giving an introduction to 3D objects, 3D digitisation and capture as well as data processing. The presentation particularly addressed the challenges around 3D metadata as well as providing access to, sharing, publishing and archiving 3D objects. The latter was part of Jörg Heseler's (SLUB Dresden) talk about principles and methods of digital preservation which aim at archiving data correctly, long-term and in a reusable way by applying different preservation models (content and bitstream preservation) and procedures (format migration, emulation and hardware museum). It became clear that there is no simple answer to the question which formats are suitable for the digital preservation of 3D objects. Current solutions for showcasing 3D objects include, for example, the kompakkt web viewer or the planned extension of the DFG Viewer. The multimedia online repository kompakkt with its viewer, presented by Zoe Schubert (SBB, Berlin), enables not only the publication but also the annotation of 3D objects. Each object can be registered with a DOI and equipped with kompakkt's own metadata format. This metadata format is based on the metadata standards of the Europeana initiative, the Open Annotation Collaboration as well as the W3C Web Annotation Data Model and is further compliant with CIDOC CRM. Moreover, developments for the integration of Wikibase and kompakkt are currently underway at TIB Hannover. Another possibility for the virtual presentation of 3D objects is currently being implemented at SLUB Dresden: An extension of the DFG Viewer will be able to show 3D objects which are stored at decentralised repositories. Sebastian Meyer (SLUB Dresden) presented the current status of the project. The forum further addressed the challenge of 3D preservation. How data find their way into the digital archive was explained by Jörg Heseler (SLUB Dresden): Thereby, the focus was on how to determine the archival value and archivability, choosing a preservation model, identifying significant properties as well as on functional and technical aspects around the process of transferring data into a long-term digital archive.
Finally, five services for data publication and digital preservation, which are available for the NFDI4Culture community, were presented: SLUBArchiv.digital, the digital preservation archive at SLUB Dresden, currently works on an extension feature to be able to offer archiving of 3D objects. With heiARCHIVE, Heidelberg University is in the process of building a dark archive; a trial operation of the service will start in a month. The long-term digital archive of TIB Hannover presented its collaboration with the specialist information service BAUdigital around archiving solutions. BAUdigital showcased their workbench for subject-specific research data management and curation. With RADAR4Culture a free research data publication service for material and immaterial cultural assets is available to the NFDI4Culture community since March 2022.
The final discussion focused on challenges when it comes to handling 3D objects and encouraged a lively exchange between participants, for instance, with regard to existing or planned services, suitability of data formats for archiving as well as which (metadata) standards should be used.
We were very glad about the great response and interesting exchange about this special topic and would like to thank everyone for their active participation. We look forward to receiving further suggestions and questions regarding the long-term digital preservation of 3D objects.
Here you can download all event materials, including the etherpad notes and a list of helpful links.
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That's it: the Barcamp 3D and Cultural Heritage with its 90 registered participants made for an exciting, informative and interesting July 6, 2022!
We from the Orga team (FID BAUdigital and the NFDI4Culture Task Area Digitization and Enrichment) actually could not have imagined it better, which is why we would like to start by thanking everybody for their vivid participation.
From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., our moderator Kristin Narr led through the diverse program in a highly professional manner, with a lot of energy and in constant dialogue with the participants.
After a welcome by Prof. Dr. Ina Blümel (Co-Spokesperson TA1), Dr.-Ing. Clemens Brünenberg (TU Darmstadt, Department of Architecture) raised the central question "What to do with all these models?" in his Inspiration Talk and talked to the audience about digitization and digitality in research, teaching and dissemination. The slides of the talk can be found here.
From then on, the participants were actively involved. As is usual for the barcamp format, sessions were proposed and scheduled as a joint undertaking with the audience. The colorful result with all sessions and contributions can be found here. Our co-organizer FID BAUdigital set an focus in the field of architecture, building research and virtual reconstructions. But we had a wider spectrum of topics beyond that, where questions from our entire community in the field of 3D were addressed..
Three session slots with a total of 10 sessions were documented on corresponding pads. (This session overview provides you with the corresponding links). At this point, we would also like to thank all those who helped with the documentation of the sessions and Franziska Fritzsche (also our support for the organization) for her relaxing gymnastics during the breaks.
We had many instructive suggestions, exciting points of connection, new concerns, takeaways and projects that we will take back to our future work at NFDI4Culture and beyond and share with our community. Existing contacts were enhanced and new ones were established. This was also emphasized by Reinhard Altenhöner (Co-Spokesperson TA1) and Andreas Noback (FID BAUdigital) at their farewell in the afternoon.
Overall, the event became a major success thanks to all participants. Accordingly, we can assure you: this will not have been the last NFDI4Culture Barcamp. We are already looking forward to our next years Barcamp and future community events, such as our 1st Cross-NFDI-Hackathon in September.
We also welcome suggestions and questions and look forward to an exciting collaborative future in the context of NFDI4Culture, FID BAUdigital, and beyond.
Your Orga-Team
of FID BAUdigital and the NFDI4Culture Task Area Digitization and Enrichment of Digital Cultural Assets
All links and materials
• Here is the overview of all barcamp sessions that have occurred and the associated pads (again, feel very free to add session-specific notes further).
• Here is a collection of the links that were shared in general (not within the barcamp sessions) on both days.
• Tweets about the barcamp can be found under the hashtags #3D #barcamp #heritage #NFDIrocks.
• Here are the slides for the Inspiration Talk that were shared by Clemens Brünenberg
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As part of the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung at Humboldt University in Berlin, NFDI4Culture organized a two-part panel on the topic of FAIR research data management.
The first part, "On the Way to FAIR Research Data Management – Practical Insights into NFDI4Culture," addressed the need for information about our work that is repeatedly expressed to us, especially by the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung. Five presentations focused on music research, first on the structure and objectives of NFDI4Culture (Torsten Schrade) and then, in four practical examples, on tools and content that exemplified the role, significance and best practices of FAIR research data management.
Structured according to the terms behind the acronym, the topics included
Findability – the importance of data standards as a generic tool for standardizing music-related metadata (Desiree Mayer and Jürgen Kett), Accessibility – the DFG Viewer as a tool for improving the accessibility of digitized material (Daniel Röwenstrunk, standing in for Barbara Wiermann, who was ill), Interoperability – conversion, adaptation, validation and configuration of different file formats using the MEI Garage (Anne Ferger and Daniel Röwenstrunk) and Reusability – legal and ethical issues such as copyright and licensing law, privacy rights and data protection, and handling culturally sensitive objects (Grischka Petri).
The second part was titled "FAIR Music Research – What do the new requirements mean for our discipline?" in the form of a roundtable with prominent guests. In this highly animated discussion, Stefan Karcher (DFG Head Office), Jürgen Kett (DNB Frankfurt), Grischka Petri (FIZ Karlsruhe/Leibniz Institute), Klaus Pietschmann (University of Mainz), Dörte Schmidt (UdK Berlin) and Torsten Schrade (NFDI4Culture) moderated by Andreas Münzmay (NFDI4Culture) discussed research policy issues and the respective challenges of the digital transformation with each other and also with the plenary. Among many other points, the challenge and opportunity to further and better establish FAIR research data management in music research was highlighted, while at the same time not leaving analog research behind – even though research that manages without digital data means is hard to find today.
All in all, the well-attended panel was an extremely successful event, not only providing concrete insights into digital workshops and projects, but also successfully serving the goals, the mission of NFDI4Culture through the constructive impulses emanating from it.
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NFDI4Culture Forum Data Publication and Archiving #3 Use Cases - How do you archive and publish your research data? 15 September 2021, 10-15 h
In the NFDI4Culture forum of the task area "Data Publication and Availability“ (Task Area 4), we would like to specify the needs of the academic communities in order to address these topics over the next four years. Experiences and approaches regarding sustainable preservation and long-term availability of research data will be presented based on actual use cases.
Please register by 10 September 2021 using the following form: https://cloud.nfdi4culture.de/apps/forms/L4KQD2kttcnXHRBH
Programme
10:00 - 10:15 Welcome & Introduction (Maria Effinger, Heidelberg University Library)
10:15 - 10:30 Günther Görz (Department of Computer Science, FAU, Erlangen-Nuremberg; storage of primary research data)
10:30 - 10:45 Anne Klammt (Deutsches Forum Kunstgeschichte, Paris; research project OwnReality)
10:45 - 11:00 Friederike Kramer (Universität der Künste, Berlin; publication project "Let's talk about our fears")
11:00 - 11:15 Sara Tiefenbacher (Goethe University Frankfurt; staging database Theadok, repository PHAIDRA, University of Vienna)
11:15 - 11:30 Frieder Leipold (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; De Jonge Wiki, Palamusto Project)
11:30 - 11:45 Discussion
11:45 - 12:45 Break
12:45 - 13:00 Ferdinand Maiwald (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena; Use case Photogrammetry)
13:00 - 13:15 Birgit Jooss (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich; Kunsthandelsdaten - Kunsthandlung Julius Böhler)
13:15 - 13:30 Robert Nasarek, Mark Fichtner (Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg; projects of the GNM, the Leopoldina Halle and the ZI Munich)
13:30 - 13:45 Milagros Pacco (University of Cologne; joint project Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America)
13:45 - 14:00 Break
14:00 - 15:00 Discussion & Summary
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On September 15, 2022, the 2nd Community Forum "(Further) Development of Research Tools & Data Services" took place. As last year, the goal of the online event was to identify the needs of the community with regard to research tools and data services in discussion with researchers and members of the various professional societies.
During the period from July 29 to August 29, funding proposals for the (further) development of projects and measures could be submitted from the members of our communities. Projects that received funding in the last forum could submit again. Interested researchers and representatives from the communities could register for participation via web form until September 14.
During the online event on September 15 from 9 a.m. to noon, the projects and measures were presented and discussed in the plenum concerning the needs of our communities. The three-hour forum offered the opportunity to present measures, discuss them in four breakout rooms and record comments, wishes and criticism on a prepared Miro-Board.
After the forum, over the next two months, the 16 presented projects were analyzed based on the forum results and additional expertise was consulted. In the end, ten measures were proposed to the Culture Steering Board for funding.
Gratefully we can announce that this proposal was unanimously accepted and the following measures will be funded:
Further development Graphical User Interface of CVMA Digital Resources Manager, the web-based Digital Resources Manager (DRM) improves collaboration, handling, retrieval, etc. of image-based content including better processing of image metadata in XMP and implementation of controlled vocabularies. Further development of CollAna, CollAna is a web-based tool for comparing versions of printed music. Linking Data made easier, to be developed is the graphical interface of a web component that will allow queries to the GND and WikiData in all web-based environments. Musicological Mark-Up with mei-friend Editor, extending the user interface of mei-friend to be able to create and manage annotations. 4D-Community-Browser 2.0, the 4D-Community-Browser 2.0 is a research tool that can be used to locate photographs together with 3D data on buildings on (historical) maps. WissKI-Cloud, WissKI-Cloud is a software-as-a-service that offers users the possibility to set up and maintain customized WissKI instances in an uncomplicated way. Extending the iArt project, iArt is a web platform that enables image comparisons and annotates images semi-automatically. Now this should be modularized and integrable into different contexts. MusicXML integration in meico, meico is a tool for converting music-related data and is to be extended to include MusicXML as a format as part of the measure. OpenRefine, OpenRefine is a free data editing tool that can be used to clean tabular data, reconcile data units, and connect ones own data to external knowledge bases. Kompakkt, Kompakkt enables the annotation of digital objects, with a focus on 3D objects that are uploaded and stored in a repository.
A total of € 120,000 will be funded in 2023 to further develop these projects. Over four years, a total of approximately € 400,000 will be distributed to NFDI4Culture communities through the annual "(Further) Development of Research Tools & Data Services" forum.
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On November 30, 2023, the NFDI4Culture online forum on Specialist Vocabularies: Terminology Development and Cross-Linking with Reference Vocabularies took place. It was held on the occasion of the completion of the task “Linking Multilingual Vocabularies” which was carried out in the NFDI4Culture framework at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association in 2021–2023. 84 persons participated in the forum event, representing a wide range of disciplines and institutions, including other NFDI consortia like NFDI4Objects and NFDI4Memory.
The forum dealt with the role and significance of thesauri and reference vocabularies for cultural studies documentation work and projects. The focus was primarily on the question of how locally created, subject-specific vocabularies can be mapped to international reference vocabularies. The event and the entire task as a whole thus responded to current developments and desiderata, as the provision of terminologies and the interoperability of vocabularies are of increasing importance today, especially in the context of networked information access to heterogeneous data sources. There is an urgent need for solutions to improve the performance of full-text search systems and to build controlled terminology systems for use in structured data, including metadata.
For the documentation of cultural heritage, the Anglo-American Art and Architecture Thesaurus of the Getty Research Institute plays an important role as an established reference vocabulary, the mapping to which was tested as a pilot project at the Herder Institute. The Material Culture Thesaurus (MCT) which was jointly developed, filled with content, and maintained by the German Documentation Center for Art History - Image Archive Photo Marburg at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and the Herder Institute, served as a laboratory for this measure.
Ksenia Stanicka’s report on the challenges of a collaborative development of terminology and mapping thus opened the event. Various aspects were highlighted, from the intellectual quality of the mappings, through the embedding of terms in different hierarchies, multilingualism, different conceptualizations of knowledge in different regions or disciplines, to technical functionalities.
In the second talk, Sławek Brzezicki (Herder Institute) presented the latest developments in the “Dehio Ostmitteleuropa” project which is implementing a concept for the virtual presentation of content and the integration of contextual information for Georg Dehio’s Handbook of Art Monuments. The project uses federated thesauri as part of its acquisition strategy, including the Material Culture Thesaurus. The presentation focused on the role of thesauri in building a knowledge infrastructure, highlighting aspects like standardization, information retrieval and data mining. Special attention was given to the handling of a large number of naming variants, composites and alternative terms, which feed into the common management of search term variants in the Material Culture Thesaurus.
Hanna-Lena Meiners from the German Documentation Centre for Art History – Image Archive Photo Marburg then presented the challenges and special features of integrating standard data on buildings and new subject headings into the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND; Integrated Authority File) as part of the pilot agency for buildings. Meiners highlighted various aspects of the historically evolved classification practice in the GND and the associated problems of integrating standard data sets. The curation of data according to the GND’s eligibility criteria requires extensive preparatory work, including the alignment of topical and geographical terms with the GND’s topical terms and geographical place names, as well as the revision of names for building designations. Special challenges also arise when functional changes to buildings occur, which so far can only be represented in free text in the GND.
The last presentation was dedicated to the German Digital Library’s subportal Collections from Colonial Contexts (CCC). Romy Köhler and Lisa Quade (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek/Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin) discussed the potentials and limitations of linking LOD vocabularies in the CCC application profile. The portal supports the reappraisal of colonial history from a museum perspective, the creation of transparency about the collections and the integration of the knowledge and perspectives of the communities of origin of the countries concerned into provenance research. Challenges and solutions for two aspects were highlighted in particual: Event-oriented representation of provenance research and the use of controlled vocabularies.
In the final discussion, several issues were clearly addressed, such as potentialextensions of the LIDO terminology, the relationship between ontology/data model and the standardized terminology used, the role of quality control, the lack of standardization, the non-congruent meanings of terms, and the diversity of regional phenomena in terminological vocabularies.
The event illustrated the complex and crucial role of thesauri and vocabularies in humanities research and emphasized the ongoing need for precise but flexible handling of term systems for effective collaboration and knowledge sharing in the community.
Materials (slides and protocol): https://cloud.nfdi4culture.de/s/CZ6YGPL4yR7nf73
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Museums, archives and comparable scholarly collections face the challenge of continually reassessing the reusability of their existing data on their holdings that has been continuously curated over long periods of time. In addition to internal usage purposes such as collection management, loan transactions or exhibition planning, the data also have to be suitable for new and promising scenarios of digital re-use in contexts beyond the individual institution. In this capacity, they are increasingly perceived as research data that should be usable in accordance with the FAIR Data Principles. For these reasons, it is becoming important to understand data quality in terms of interoperability and sustainable usability of the data. This subsequently places new demands on systems and workflows, and not least on the data literacy of staff.
On this topic, the NFDI4Culture task area "Standards, Data Quality, Curation" (TA 2), together with the task area "Cultural Research Data Academy" (TA 6) and the Documentation Section of the German Museums Association, organised a four-part open online workshop series for cultural heritage collections focusing on maintaining and improving the quality of collection data. The aim of the events was to introduce digital managers and curators, as well as those involved in project and process management or data publication, to the various aspects of data quality and strategies for effective planning, implementation, monitoring and subsequent improvement of data quality, and to encourage them to initiate and strengthen relevant initiatives in their institutions.
The offer was well received: More than 220 people registered, with more than 100 attending each workshop. In order to better understand participants' starting points and motivations, a questionnaire was included with registration. Afterwards, they were able to evaluate each workshop by means of a feedback questionnaire, and to express further needs and suggestions. An Etherpad was also used extensively to help exchange ideas and information.
Workshop: "Making data quality tangible. Quality criteria and purposes of data use"
The first workshop (16 June 2023) started by presenting the different manifestations of data quality in general. After an introduction by Celia Krause (Task Area 2) on the principles of quality management, on the categories of data quality and on the most important concepts for ensuring quality through standards, guidelines (FAIR Principles), strategies, process management and operationalisation, the paradigm of "collections as data" from the Anglo-American area was explained. The following talk by Julia Rössel (Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte - Bildarchiv Foto Marburg) presented typical data quality problems that have been investigated in the KONDA project. She pointed out strategies for identifying, classifying and analysing these problems in order to develop appropriate solutions and illustrated this with an example. During the subsequent group work on the online whiteboard, the participants were encouraged to identify and classify quality problems in their institution and to develop target groups, products and key work steps for good data quality. This was done based on their prioritised re-use scenarios, such as the improvement of stock publication, the use by researchers, Linked Open Data, networking, publication on other platforms and improving the searchability of data.
Workshop: "Effective management for better data quality"
The second workshop (23 June 2023) focused on the use of data management plans (DMPs). DMPs can help to plan and run scientific projects, but they can also serve as effective planning and management tools to ensure the quality of collection data on an ongoing basis. In an introductory presentation, Celia Krause highlighted data quality as a management task at the three levels of institution, project and data. She also outlined the requirements that collection data must meet today and subsequently presented the data management plan as a tool. Noreen Klingspor (Württemberg State Museum) and Jana Hoffmann (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) then described the practical implementation of successful data management in their institutions. Despite very different approaches, in both cases the maintenance of defined data quality levels is an integral part of digitally oriented future planning for the entire museum. Both presentations received many enquiries about the feasibility and implementation of various aspects of digital strategies through management practices. In the second part of the event, the topic was first explored in depth through a collaborative exercise to better understand data management plans. Participants then worked in small groups on the online whiteboard to develop such a plan based on a given task.
Workshop: "Setting the course for more quality: structuring object-related information, using controlled vocabularies"
In the third session (30 June 2023) the introductory talk by Angela Kailus (Task Area 2) presented how to set the course for sustainable collection documentation by designing an entity-relationship model in line with community standards. This was backed up by suggestions on how to structure the information to be recorded, how to deal with uncertain knowledge, and how to handle data provenance in accordance with good research practice. In a mapping exercise in several groups on the online whiteboard, the participants transferred existing object descriptions from different collections to the entity-relationship model presented earlier. After lively discussions further presentations followed: Angela Kailus gave advice on practical work with controlled vocabularies, terminology mapping and the efficient use of local thesaurus modules for linking to external terminologies. Chiara Marchini (German Digital Library, DDB) presented the mandatory data element requirements for data suppliers to the DDB and then showed how more extensive datasets compliant with the extended core field set of the updated DFG Practical Guidelines on Digitisation can be used more effectively in the DDB while supporting the FAIR data principles. A minimum dataset recommendation for museums will be developed in the coming months. Lukas Städing (digiCULT Verbund e. G.) pointed out the advantages of working in a networked cooperative. He presented various services of digiCULT that are available to the partners of the cooperative which support the individual institutions considerably, including software for collection management, vocabulary services, consulting, and data publication via various interfaces.
Workshop: "Subsequent quality improvement: Analysing, cleaning and enriching data"
The fourth workshop (7 July 2023) was dedicated to the subsequent modification of already existing data sets. The introductory presentation by Angela Kailus made it clear how insufficiently implemented quality in collection data can affect the institutional processes in the organisation and its range of services. The analysis starts with the work routines and experiences of the users. Based on this, data improvements can be planned and prioritised. Participants were particularly interested in the contribution of Hanna-Lena Meiners (DDK - Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, GND Pilotagentur Bauwerke), who presented OpenRefine, a powerful and flexible tool for data cleansing and enhancement, and gave a live demonstration of various cleansing methods. Michaela Grein (Übersee-Museum Bremen) reported on her museum's experience in an ambitious project to merge and make available its in-house data holdings, which was implemented using OpenRefine and integrated into the museum's continuous data quality management. This contribution was also well received. Joshua Enslin (Freies Deutsches Hochstift – Frankfurter Goethe-Haus) finally described the active data quality management of the museum-digital platform. It not only offers its partners specific support in producing better data, but also strengthens the exchangeability of the data (e.g. loan transactions with the LIDO application profile EODEM) and its reusability for research purposes through data enrichment, provision via APIs and LOD-based graph navigation.
The final discussion provided another opportunity for participants to evaluate the feasibility of the strategies and approaches to active data management presented and to share their own experiences. Many attendees found the workshops to be a valuable source of inspiration for further discussion of the topic, or were encouraged to take up the challenge of data quality in their own collection. In the exchanges, it became clear that some institutions are already well advanced in implementing their digital strategy, while others are still in the early stages. There is a strong willingness to share experiences. However, there is also a need for training and networking opportunities to support collections in the successful implementation of ongoing data quality management. The needs expressed provide a good starting point for NFDI4Culture to design such services or to refer to relevant third party services.
The presentations, etherpads, whiteboards of the workshops and a reading list with additional materials are available for download here.
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One of the most important goals of NFDI4Culture is to impart knowledge and skills on all aspects of research data management in the culture field. A central pillar for this are the guidelines, which explain basic topics and terms of research data management in a comprehensive and understandable way, always from the perspective of the subjects represented in NFDI4Culture.
The publication of the first two guidelines as part of the NFDI4Culture Knowledge Base is an important step in this direction: "Kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungsdaten" (Cultural Studies Research Data) provides a basic introduction to research data management in the arts, cultural studies, and humanities, with explanations of key terms, standards, and tools. The "Leitfaden für die nachhaltige Entwicklung und Nutzung von Forschungssoftware" (Guide for the Sustainable Development and Use of Research Software) explains how software and the research results produced with it can remain sustainably available in the sense of the FAIR principles and be re-usable as far as possible. Further NFDI4Culture guidelines are in preparation.
Permanently available and re-usable are also the guidelines themselves – both have been published not only online, but additionally as a data publication on zenodo under a CC BY license. Thus, we invite you to publish and redistribute these resources anywhere you want.
As another central knowledge resource, the project now provides curated link recommendations. These link recommendations point to high-quality open educational resources (OER) on all aspects of tangible and intangible cultural heritage research data management.
Guidelines and link recommendations are part of NFDI4Culture's comprehensive knowledge base, which in the future will also include reports and specifications from the consortium's work areas and make them permanently available. All resources can be found via a search mask or keywords, can be selected via a filter or browsed by means of a systematic entry in the page menu.
On the occasion of the launch of our knowledge base and the release of the first NFDI4Culture handouts, we would like to thank all those who have made this project such a success – Team Guidelines, in which staff members from every area of NFDI4Culture have worked, and Team Development around Torsten Schrade, which has technically implemented the ideas with the participation of the student staff. Together, they not only made an important contribution to data literacy in NFDI4Culture communities, but also developed a content-related and technical workflow, which will also be publish here as a further guideline.
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The teams of the Specialised Information Service (Fachinformationsdienst) Art-Photography-Design arthistoricum.net and NFDI4Culture based at the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) Dresden jointly organised a virtual workshop on 26th January 2022 to discuss current developments around image annotation tools. Image annotations are an essential part of the digital research process in Humanities and Cultural Studies, especially with regard to collecting, mapping, storing and publishing information on image objects. Although existing technologies and standards enable the enrichment and international exchange of image data, the cultural heritage sector requires sustainable and user-oriented annotation tools that focus on the needs of research groups.
The central aim of the meeting was therefore to create cross-institutional synergies and to identify ways of collaborating in the ongoing development of image annotation tools in the field of cultural studies. While some attendees presented their annotation projects from a subject-specific as well as from a technical point of view, there was also an opportunity for the developers and community experts to openly discuss challenges and problems. In this regard, key topics included the advantages and disadvantages of different frontend and backend technologies, requirements regarding the collection, storage and publication of research metadata as well as questions around access rights management, for instance, how to manage user authentification and collaborative annotation. Among the participants were, besides SLUB Dresden, representatives from the University Library Heidelberg, TIB Hannover and Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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NFDI4Culture is a consortium that is oriented towards the specific research data-related needs of its participating professional communities. One of these is these is the media studies community, whose interests are represented in NFDI4Culture by the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (the German Society for Media Studies). The interests of researchers are taken into account in various ways within the consortium: Through the NFDI4Culture staff, who themselves have corresponding professional backgrounds, through the representatives of the respective disciplines in the Culture Steering Board of the consortium (in the case of media studies, these are Prof. Dr. Anna Tuschling and J.-Prof. Dr. Sven Stollfuß), as well as through the various event formats, such as the forums and the Culture Community Plenary, some of which are dedicated to specific questions and problems.
In addition, individual subject-specific initiatives have emerged in the past year that aim to ensure low-threshold exchange between the communities and NFDI4Culture. In this context, the "Forum Medienwissenschaft in NFDI4Culture" (Forum Media Studies in NFDI4Culture) has also begun its work as a joint initiative of NFDI4Culture, the media studies repository media/rep/, and the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft. The forum is an open and ongoing bottom-up initiative and discussion platform to which all interested people are cordially invited. Prof. Dr. Malte Hagener, one of the co-spokespersons of NFDI4Culture, is responsible for the forum. The goal of the forum is to stimulate discussion on all aspects of the topic of research data in the discipline and to support researchers in relation to research data with offers from NFDI4Culture and media/rep/.
The first two meetings of the forum (via Zoom on April 30, 2021 and in person at the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft Annual Conference 2021 in Innsbruck) addressed several key issues, such as the specific needs of the discipline in the area of research data (including project proposals, metadata, archiving, access, consulting, management), the offers of NFDI4Culture and media/rep/ to support researchers, or the bundling of existing expertise in relation to media studies research data. The events showed that the discipline first needs to agree on essential subjects, such as a concept of research data in media studies, before further questions can be addressed in a constructive manner.
For this reason, at a third meeting on March 3, 2022 (again via Zoom), joint work on a position paper on the concept of media studies research data was started. For this purpose, in addition to modeling a (research) data concept specific to the discipline, a structural requirements profile for media studies research data management is to be developed in particular. The different research complexes and ways of working in media studies require, on the one hand, the reflection and specification of terminologies within the logic of a cross-disciplinary research data management. On the other hand, it is also and especially important to discuss the structural preconditions and subject-specific requirement profiles for a long-term research data management that is directed towards standardization and, in doing so, to work on them in a purposeful and solution-oriented manner as media studies community effort within NFDI4Culture. All members and working groups of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft are invited to participate in the drafting of the position paper. Work on it is expected to be completed in the fall of 2022. Interested people who would like to participate in the "Forum Medienwissenschaft in NFDI4Culture" or the writing process for the position paper in the future are welcome to contact Dr. Alexander Stark (alexander.stark@staff.uni-marburg.de).
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In 2023, the NFDI4Culture Music Award will be presented for the second time to honour projects or undertakings that make a special contribution to the goals of the consortium's areas of activity in the field of music and musicology. Anita Jóri (Berlin University of the Arts) was honoured for her project »Anbahnung ›Berliner Techno-Archiv / Berlin Techno-Archive‹«.
The jury, consisting of representatives from NFDI4Culture, the Society for Music Research (GfM), the German Music Council and the Centre for Music - Edition - Media (ZenMEM), shortlisted the best projects from the submissions received. The award is associated with project funds of up to €3,000, which can be used to finance billable expenses that contribute to the objectives of NFDI4Culture, such as travel expenses, publication costs or expenses for organising project-related workshops. For Kathrin Kirsch, community representative of musicology in NFDI4Culture, »the applications for the NFDI4Culture Music Award have once again made it clear how wide the range of subject and methodological areas of digital music and music culture-related research is. They also show how many outstanding ideas and excellent approaches there are in the community to creatively and productively close infrastructural gaps. NFDI4Culture is and remains irreplaceable for visualising, promoting and bundling these initiatives.«
The award-winning projects will be presented to a large audience at the award ceremony during the NFDI4Culture Plenary 2024.
Statement of the jury
This year, the jury has decided to present the NFDI4Culture Music Award 2023 to Dr Anita Jóri (Berlin University of the Arts). Her project »Anbahnung ›Berliner Techno-Archiv / Berlin Techno-Archiv‹« approaches a source material that is not only in danger of being lost if no efforts are made to collect and (digitally) preserve it. Through its subject matter, the project also addresses specific problems associated with the core concerns of NFDI4Culture: To make music and music culture as a multimedia cultural heritage that is legally subject to different claims and economically integrated, yet as standardised and accessible as possible in the long term. To this end, best practice solutions must be found, which can be jointly developed in a network within the framework of this start-up project on the basis of case studies and with the intensive support of NFDI4Culture.
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Project proposal context
Wikibase is a popular open source tool used by cultural and research institutions to store and structure Linked Open Data, as well as various media files. It is part of the media viewing environment (SemanticKompakkt) developed in the context of Task Area 1: Data capture and enrichment, and part of the portfolio of Knowledge Graph Services developed in Task Area 5: Technical, Ethical and Legal activities at NFDI4Culture. OpenRefine is a widely-used data wrangling tool for cleaning tabular data and connecting it with knowledge bases, including Wikidata and Wikibase. Managers of Wikibase instances regularly need to perform batch uploads and edits of/to their data and media files there. Prior to this project, OpenRefine’s Wikibase extension already supported batch uploads and edits of/to metadata on Wikidata and arbitrary Wikibases. The Flex Funds award allows the OpenRefine team to extend OpenRefine’s existing functionalities by integrating support for local media upload in arbitrary Wikibases and support for custom data types. This project builds upon existing work on the Wikibase extension funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation which supported upload and batch edit of files on Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia’s media repository), but not yet individual Wikibase installations.
Deliverables
1) Batch upload and batch editing of media files in Wikibases through OpenRefine
The OpenRefine Reconciliation Service for Wikimedia Commons was modified and abstracted, so it can be used to connect OpenRefine to any Wikibase instance, not just Wikimedia Commons. As a result, managers of, and contributors to a Wikibase instance are able to upload large batches (up to 10,000s) of media files to an arbitrary Wikibase. In addition, they can also edit (modify, add to, delete) the (structured) metadata of the media files stored in their Wikibase, through using OpenRefine. In order to make this possible, media file upload functionality through OpenRefine has also been modified and made more flexible. This includes adding support in OpenRefine for the media-specific new data type ‘local media file’ that is used in the target Wikibase. Further achievements in this regard include a clearer interface to add additional Wikibase instance connections in OpenRefine, and to switch between multiple connected instances. The schema building interface (where metadata is added to files before upload) has also been adapted to the use case of working with a Wikibase instance vs Wikimedia Commons.
2) Batch editing of data stored in custom (non-Wikidata) data types in Wikibases through OpenRefine
Managers of, and contributors to a Wikibase instance can now also (batch) edit data in any (custom, atypical) data type defined in their Wikibase through using OpenRefine. In order to make this possible, Wikibase data type support in OpenRefine has been modified and made more versatile/flexible. In early 2022, OpenRefine’s Wikibase extension already supports all data types that are used inside Wikidata. However, cases exist where Wikibase managers want to implement / deploy custom data types which differ from the ones used in Wikidata. One example is the local media file datatype (mentioned above). Another example is the EDTF data type in Wikibase, which is more specific than Wikidata’s own Time datatype and which was commissioned and deployed by the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture. With support through the FlexFunds, OpenRefine’s data type support has been made extensible so that in the future, OpenRefine can support more data types, even ones that are not yet developed.
3) Thumbnail support for media files
Additionally to the planned features 1) and 2), support for showing thumbnails of media files (stored in a Wikibase) inside an OpenRefine project grid was newly implemented. This highly visible feature lets users compare the metadata stored in the grid to the actual media file and allows them to spot inconsistencies more easily. This feature is available both on Wikimedia Commons and on third-party Wikibases. It was also the occasion to introduce an extension point in OpenRefine to let plugins customise the way project cells are displayed, giving further opportunity to users to adapt the tool to fit their project-specific needs better.
4) Documentation and dissemination
Following the completion of the technical deliverables above, OpenRefine’s team has produced end user and developer focused documentation for the above mentioned features. The documentation is accessible here: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Uploading_media_files_to_a_Wikibase_with_OpenRefine, and will soon also be available as guidelines via the NFDI4Culture Portal. The new features were also presented to interested NFDI stakeholders during a meeting of the Linked Open Data Working Group organized by Task Area 5. Meeting notes and slides were later made available to all members of the LOD WG and subscribers to the mailing list. In the context of this project and in collaboration with the OpenRefine team, TIB’s Open Science Lab Wikibase maintainers took on the long term hosting and maintenance of the two git repositories for OpenRefine Wikibase reconciliation services required for data editing and media file upload respectively. These are made publicly available on the NFDI4Culture GitLab here: https://gitlab.com/nfdi4culture/ta1-data-enrichment/openrefine-wikibase; and https://gitlab.com/nfdi4culture/ta1-data-enrichment/openrefine-wikibase-media.
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Methods and Goals of Digital Musicology – a Marketplace of Current Research
At the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung 2023 in Saarbrücken, the special interest groups Digital Musicology and Freie Forschungsinstitute, together with NFDI4Culture, are organising a marketplace of current research to provide space for the heterogeneous landscape of digital music research and its current topics.
It will take place on Thursday, 5 October 2023, between 14:00 and 17:30.
The marketplace will present current developments, ideas, methods, tools and standards in digital musicology and invite visitors to the annual conference to try them out and discuss them interactively. About 15 to 20 thematic stations are planned, representing the entire spectrum of digital musicology. The aim is not to present individual projects, but rather overarching methods and work that have been opening up new research spaces and perspectives – in some cases for many years.
The aim of this marketplace is to enter into constructive discussion with all music researchers in order to sound out previous and future research possibilities, but also to make clear the necessities and requirements for today's research and teaching with regard to digital competence and infrastructure.
In order to facilitate a direct exchange at this marketplace, the stations should provide at least two to three people during the afternoon and offer opportunities for active experimentation.
In addition, an introduction to the topic can be given with the help of a presentation or a poster. For this purpose, monitors are available at the stands – laptops must be brought by the contributors themselves.
A theme slam is planned at the beginning of the event to give all visitors a brief overview of the marketplace.
Proposals for contributions to this science marketplace should be submitted
by 28.05.2023
to acquavellarauch@uni-mainz.de or fffi@online.de.
They should
consist of a short abstract of no more than 300 words, a description of the technical requirements and a note on the academic affiliations of the contributors.
Decisions on acceptance will be made by mid-June 2023.
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At the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung 2023 in Saarbrücken, the sections Digitale Musikwissenschaft and Freie Forschungsinstitute together with NFDI4Culture organised a marketplace of current research that gave space to the heterogeneous landscape of digital musicology and its current subjects.
On Thursday, 5 October 2023, between 14:00 and 17:30, current developments, ideas, methods, tools and standards in digital musicology were presented and the visitors of the annual conference were invited to interactively try them out and discuss them.
A total of 16 projects were on site and presented some of their methods and work, some of which have been opening up new research spaces and perspectives for many years. With the addition of large-format posters of the projects, the conference participants were able to try out the projects' offers directly at computer workstations or have them explained to them in conversation.
The aim of this marketplace, to enter into constructive conversation with music researchers, was largely successful, which is why the event will be taken up again in a similar form at the coming annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung in Cologne in 2024. The spokesperson of the Freie Forschungsinstitute, Irmlind Capelle, together with Joachim Veit, has thankfully produced a brochure in which all the participating projects present themselves with their stands, thus providing a very nice and informative overview of current offers and questions in digital musicological research, even for those who were unable to attend the conference. The brochure is published on ZENODO and can be downloaded here.
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On 11 May 2023, the Cultural Research Data Academy held a workshop on "Audiovisual (Research) Data – Application Areas and Analysis Tools" as part of its series of FDM Basic Courses. Together with speakers from the NFDI4Culture community, such as Dr. Kristina Richts-Matthaei (Standards, Data Quality and Curation) and Dr. Josephine Diecke (Digital Cinema-Hub-Project), specific terminologies such as "audiovisual (research) data" were discussed together, and the standards and metadata and selected repositories in this field were presented. In addition, our training team focused on selected visualization and annotation tools, which were framed by a presentation of the FAIR and CARE principles. The aim of this workshop was to provide participants with a basic overview of the range of audiovisual (research) data in the context of research data management and data and code literacy, as well as to enable the exchange of experiences in different areas of application and work. In the course of the discussions, further interest emerged in specific repositories, the handling of audiovisual research data and legal questions regarding audio data.
In total, more than 60 interested participants from different institutions took part in the workshop, from the GLAM sector as well as the university context. The expectations, which were identified in advance, ranged from a general introduction to the topic to interest in metadata standards and practical examples (best practices) as well as to legal requirements and long-term archiving. Given the thematic range and the limited time available, not everything could be covered in this introductory event. The survey and feedback serve the team of the Cultural Research Data Academy as a productive basis for the design of further courses - we are also pleased about the request for more specific trainings and are happy to refer to other workshops in our consortium as well.
The presentation are available to download here: https://cloud.nfdi4culture.de/s/599k4PsRocsEnsB.
We will offer further online courses with different data-specific modules on the eve of our forum event "PERFORMANCE – PRODUCTION – DATA: Modeling and Communicating Event-related Information" (14–15.09.2023) in cooperation with the task area "Standards, Data Quality and Curation" at the University of Leipzig. In this context, we would like to refer to the upcoming workshop series "Improving Sustainability in Four Steps. Data Quality Strategies for Museums and Collections" (16.06–07.07.2023).
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Some call them executable papers, some call them multimodal texts, some call them dynamic resources, some call them living documents, some call them multimedia productions, some call them enhanced publications. Do you know what we mean?
Thank you to our participants in the online survey on enhanced publications. We promised to keep you informed on the outcome. The survey has been evaluated and a summary of the results can be found here:
"Digital Publications in Culture: Examples and Key Features – Survey Results from the NFDI4Culture Community". Digital Publications and Data Working Group (NFDI4Culture). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7107214
German Version: Digitale Publikationen im Kulturbereich: Beispiele und Eigenschaften – Umfrageergebnisse aus der NFDI4Culture Community
The "Digital Publications and Data Working Group" from the Task Area 4, Data Publication and Data Archiving, has been looking at a broad range of digital publications with enhanced features, ranging from conventional academic papers and monographs, to multimodal projects, or enriched databases.
The survey provided us with what we had hoped for: additional examples of enhanced digital publications across all NFDI4Culture fields of subject, in particular from the field of musicology. It also gave us a hint at what features our community associates with the term enhanced publication. The survey has shown a variety of examples and contexts which go beyond standard research publications or digital collections. In addition, it has shown that a term is needed, that can capture multimodal, multimedia, and multilocal publications. The aim of the working group is to establish criteria that can function as a guideline for the publication and the long term preservation of culture research data.
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Event dates: June 17 and 18, 2021
The entire report is also available for download as a pdf file here.
You may find the program and original announcement here and download some of the presentations of the speakers here.
How important is the topic of research data management within academic education in the culture community? What are the different approaches to RDM education in the community, and what are the best practices in the individual disciplines? What are the challenges and problems in anchoring the topic in teaching and what contribution can NFDI4Culture make to reducing these obstacles? From which established, non-subject-specific offers and formats can the community learn? Does the culture community need a competency framework for RDM education?
This year's forum of the Cultural Research Data Academy, an interdisciplinary and decentralized institution within the NFDI4Culture consortium, was dedicated to this comprehensive set of questions. The academy is tasked with the bundling and development of subject-specific and demand-oriented training and further education opportunities in the field of data and code literacy.
The two-day digital workshop, which took place on June 17 and 18, 2021, was intended as a low-threshold event to initiate the broadest possible exchange within the community, which the CRDA would like to continue with all interested parties in the coming years. Participants from various areas of the culture community were invited to present their expertise in the field of RDM education, highlighting various offers and formats with which the topic of research data management has already found its way into teaching or is still to do so, and to discuss these with the audience.
Divided into four panels and a separate discussion round on the topic of a competence framework for RDM training, the workshop was first devoted to the experience gained so far in generic training programs, which can serve as an important basis for the culture community, before two panels took a look at interdisciplinary teaching programs. The presentations in the last thematic block focused on subject- and media-specific mediation approaches.
The first panel "Building on Experiences and Infrastructures" was opened by Dr. Elisabeth Böker, who described her extensive work in the Communication, Information and Media Center at the University of Konstanz as well as on the regional RDM-Initiative in Baden-Wuerttemberg, called bw2FDM, from which the information platform forschungsdaten.info also emerged, that has been in existence since 2019. With the help of this platform, not only state initiatives and designated sites are networked with one another, but terms and concepts of RDM are communicated in a general and coherent manner via topic pages and glossary. The focus lies especially on training offers: Open Science courses are not only linked on the platform, but likewise own webinars are organized. Böker particularly pointed out to query the level of knowledge of the participants, since even basic information on the rather special topic of RDM could be missing here. In addition, it would be useful to integrate practical examples regarding the legal aspects of RDM into training offers.
The second contribution was made by Patrick Helling from the Data Center for the Humanities (DCH) at the University of Cologne. He also introduced the work of the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH), a teaching and research center founded in 2009 by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Cologne, which is now the coordinating body for Digital Humanities of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Helling spoke of the wide range of courses on offer, as well as the opportunity for students and staff to obtain IT certificates. Thus, there are exercises for the study programs of media informatics, information processing and linguistics, Studium Integrale and the graduate school, in which backup and archiving, publication as well as re-use, but more specifically also DMP, software and data curation are taught. Helling emphasized the subject specificity in the courses and also that more input from sub-disciplines would be desirable, which could be ensured by building up a network of experts.
Katarzyna Biernacka from the HEADT-Centre (Humboldt-Elsevier Advanced Data and Text Centre) at Humboldt University Berlin concluded the inputs of the first panel with an insight into the activities of the Sub-Working Group (UAG) Training/Continuing Education of the German Initiative for Network Information(DINI) and the competence network nestor as well as a discussion of the needs and challenges in continuing education.
Different training models were addressed and the close coordination with the Research Data Alliance Germany (RDA-DE) was emphasized. In the long term, there should be a certificate course on FDM, but its introduction is not yet foreseen. Biernacka emphasized the relation of the UAG Training/Continuing Education to the FDMentor Train-the-Trainer concept and underlined the different curricular integration. Likewise, the requirements for further qualification were emphasized, where the workshop format had proven itself (limited in time, focused on specific topics, interactive, practical and oriented to participants). For this purpose, not only the FDMentor train-the-trainer concept offers a full method case, but the Humboldt University also offers a large collection of materials on its hompeage.
The second panel then took up the topic of "Utilizing Synergies – Interdisciplinary Offers", which was to be continued on Friday.
Prof. Dr. Peter Niedermüller and Akademie-Jun. Prof. Dr. Stefanie Acquavella-Rauch from the Institute of Art History and Musicology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz presented the research-oriented and cross-university program of the master's program "Digital Methodology in the Humanities and Cultural Studies," which started in 2016. "Digital Methodology in the Humanities and Cultural Studies" is organized and coordinated as a consecutive, research-oriented degree program by mainzed, the Mainz Center for Digitization in the Humanities and Cultural Studies, which in turn acts as a regional competence and consulting center in the Rhine-Main region. In addition to a basic teaching of core competencies in practice-oriented exercises and research-related block seminars, students from the cultural sciences and humanities as well as computer science choose focal points in elective modules and specializations: Text and Language, Spatial Reference, Music and Media. These cover, for example, digital music editing and music informatics, digital English linguistics, translation studies and translation technology, digital editing and modeling. A special feature is the obligatory project work of several weeks at a research institution. In the future, data literacy and 'teach the teacher' will also be emphasized in training programs for tutors.
Dr. Dennis Mischke, Research Coordinator of the Network for Digital Humanities at the University of Potsdam, gave in his next contribution an insight into the very broad range of courses offered at the University of Potsdam on the basis of the BMBF project Research | Learning – Digital (FoLD), which aims first and foremost to close gaps in DH education across institutes, to develop concepts for teaching and to implement them in individual courses of study: Introductions and courses in Digital Literary Studies thus introduce text mining and computational text technologies to improve data, digital, and code literacy. The program also includes hackathons, tutorials, and self-study units, which are primarily aimed at computational literacy and currently focus on the philologies, but are expected to spread to other subjects in the near future.
The panel was closed by Julia Röttgermann with an input introducing the work of the Digital Humanities professorship in Trier. Prof. Dr. Christof Schöch joined the panel for the discussion. This professorship coordinates the Master of Science Digital Humanities program at the intersection of the humanities and computer science. Röttgermann gave a rich overview of the offerings of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. In this, application-oriented content and teaching units (Open Science, XML formats, GitHub, FAIR, Wikiversum...) are integrated and taught in the presentation of methods and practice tools with a focus on Digital Literary Studies. Finally, in the discussion, it was equally pointed out that this teaching toolbox was not a fixed selection, but an evolving curriculum, which likewise opened it up to student interests beyond large collections and texts.
The third panel continued the complex " Utilizing Synergies – Interdisciplinary Offers". Prof. Dr. Vivien Petras spoke about the master's degree program in "Digital Data Management," a joint program offered by Humboldt University Berlin and the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. The program teaches data literacy, i.e. competencies in (research) data from the fields of science, culture and business. Its modules range from the framework of data management to technologies and agile project management. The program is based on the EDISON Data Science and FAIR4S frameworks. In contrast to offerings that complement courses of study, a complete course of study has been developed here. However, it is not only aimed at regular students, but is also open to interested parties. They can attend individual modules as continuing education courses. Accredited only at the beginning of 2020, the course providers can already draw a positive balance.
Dr. Andreas Hütig and Lennart Linde presented the integration of the course offerings on data literacy into the Studium generale of the Johannes Gutenberg University. The central feature of the Studium generale is interdisciplinarity, which at JGU not only refers to the students participating in the courses, but also the project group is interdisciplinary. Area-specific needs and assessments have been identified for four subject groups (STEM, humanities/cultural studies, social sciences, medicine/life sciences). Core competencies in dealing with data are to be acquired. This is done in four steps: the development of a research question, the selection and evaluation of suitable data sets, their independent analysis and the final documentation. To solve the tasks, students are introduced to common tools, among other things. Looking back at completed courses, the presenters noted that common problems from Studium generale, such as the different entry levels of students, pose some challenges in course design. In general, however, the course is well received and the aim is to make it a permanent part of the Studium generale at JGU.
Following the interdisciplinary offers of the previous panels, the final round of presentations was devoted to discipline-specific offers on RDM.
Prof. Dr. Christoph Seibert is professor of music infomatics at the Karlsruhe University of Music. He talked about data and code literacy in the courses of musicology and music informatics. Since 2004, the two subjects have been thought of more closely together at the HfM and meaningful mutual additions of musicological and musicinformatics study content have been realized. In addition to the basics of programming in Python, research ethics, statistics and data management play an important role against the background of the Digital Humanities. Students can study both subjects equally alongside each other in the Bachelor's degree or choose one of the two as a complementary subject. This possible combination brings both opportunities and challenges; it has already been observed that trained competencies in music informatics rarely find their way into musicology, where they expand a separate field. In the future, the topic of research data management should also be more concretely planned into the training of students.
Prof. Dr. Tobias Matzner then reported on the experiences and approaches of the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Paderborn. Students are largely aware of what the data they deal with in their studies is about and which tools they should use to process it. Nevertheless, there is a great need to teach data literacy, especially the area of data ethics and the recognition and identification of algorithmic biases. Matzner also addressed the social dimension of data literacy and thus, among other things, the aspect that every citizen needs a certain level of data literacy; in the area of social media and their algorithms alone, a basic level of data literacy is required in order to be able to deal correctly with these media.
A theater studies perspective was brought to the event by Dr. Nora Probst, head of the Digital Humanities Department of the Theater Studies Collection (TWS) at the University of Cologne. At TWS, students are taught primarily good research data management in the area of data literacy. Theater Studies collection data are very diverse in their materiality and media; especially in collection acquisition and curation, aspects such as the correct handling of metadata, creating the longest possible reusability and interoperability of datasets are of great importance. However, it is not just a matter of storing the data correctly, but above all of interpreting data sets. In addition, data ethics is also an important element of training in Cologne, and data criticism is a teaching concept.
Dr. Harald Klinke concluded the panel with a presentation on subject- and media-specific offerings in art historical research and in the field of digital art history. In addition to teaching common tools, repositories, and metadata standards, Klinke highlighted creating your own datasets as an important teaching method. Creating, visualizing, and later analyzing datasets is a method that can show students the benefits and problems of digital data analysis in a concrete way. For art history, it is also important to be able to work with concrete and sufficiently large data sets, and so close contact with GLAM facilities and university collections is necessary. In conclusion, Klinke saw the integration of research data management as a digital competence in university education as a future challenge.
Another element of the program was a discussion panel with all participants, which was dedicated to the question "Do we need a competency framework for RDM education in the Culture Community?".
The expectation for the reactions of the forum participants to this pointed question was naturally more than a simple "yes" or "no". Rather, in light of the NFDI's goal of initiating open, user-centered, and science-driven collaboration on research data, the focus here was also to be on the experiences and needs of the community.
In the opinion of NFDI4Culture, the teaching of data and code literacy, and thus also of aspects of research data management, should not just begin at the level of doctoral students, but should already be addressed in BA and MA education. NFDI4Culture sees itself as a networking and communication platform for the culture community and would like to moderate the coordination process for the creation of a competence framework tailored to the community.
In the first of two polls on the title of the panel, quite different positions emerged, clustered around the following areas:
Pro:
Orientation (also for own courses) Serves to clarify basic questions and to agree on basic competencies Avoid duplication of development of content Official consolidation/recommendation of content Standards are hugely important RDM needs to be strengthened in the community A competence framework provides guidance for smaller institutions Provides transparency for students as well A basic RDM education belongs in all degree programs (at the latest at master's level)
Contra:
There are already enough competency frameworks, plus specific, very different requirements Implementation could be difficult (Undesirable) standardization/bureaucracy/too much regulation and standardization freedom of teaching lack of acceptance A competence framework does not do justice to the heterogeneity of the contents and misses the actual needs Is it worth the effort?
These points of view were reflected in the constructive discussion. In addition, it was critically noted, among other things, that parallel developments should be avoided, that establishment must be ensured, that creative thinking must not be suppressed by a competence framework, that competence frameworks must be constantly reviewed, that orientation towards the FAIR principles must consider their "half-life" and that (problem) awareness of RDM must still be created among many colleagues. Issues of data ethics and data law, as well as best practices and sharing of experiences (including nationwide) are seen as important for the CRDA to mediate and "moderate"; without the idea of exclusivity, the planned NFDI4Culture Forums and Workshop formats should be suitable and flexible enough for such moderation. The question of the status of competence frameworks in other NFDI consortia also came up, and was answered with reference to the cross-cutting "Training & Education" team that is being established; among other things, NFDI4Culture could be a pioneer in a cross-cutting area between degree programs on RDM. The creation of platforms from which peer-reviewed materials can be accessed and through which data publications can take place is seen as an opportunity of competence frameworks. In addition, a competence framework must be oriented to the data specificity and to the different competencies; the prerequisites vary greatly – for example, between colleagues from the DH fields and those from the sometimes still largely analogous humanities. This difference is based, among other things, on the fact that the topic of RDM is hardly perceived outside of DH. Changing this should be a central issue, free from the discussion: RDM is good scientific practice, therefore it cannot only be relevant for DH; one should try to get everyone on board and convince the critics or analog colleagues with different strategies (e.g..: "They are already generating research data, they just need to do it properly ...", "Even the Internet is a big device ..."). Basically, data literacy is well presented on Wikipedia, likewise there are already some competence frameworks at universities. Agreeing on common standards is a challenge, stakeholders should be guided by the data lifecycle (create, provide, evaluate, visualize, interpret data), among others, but also by questions like: Who needs to be able to do what? What do we expect from infrastructure staff and scientists in the future? Who makes which RDM offers, how much competence do scientists need to critically evaluate them?
In the second survey, a word cloud (see above) was used to collect key issues that a future competency framework for RDM education in the community might consider. Some aspects that had already been raised reappear at this point, but have been weighted here along with the supplemented terms.
Perspectives
This year's Cultural Research Data Academy forum offered spotlights on the current status of university education in research data management in the culture community. The inputs and discussion contributions reflected the well-known complexity of the topic, but also presented different approaches to solutions for a stronger anchoring of FDM in the education of students.
The contributions and inputs from a wide range of institutions, initiatives and individuals from the field of higher education showed that there are already numerous ideas, concepts and teaching offers, generic as well as discipline-specific. Especially in the conversations and discussions between the presentations, it became clear how fruitful and profitable a closer networking of the participants and other actors in this field can be. In addition to the exchange about best practices and hurdles in the development of services, the participants expressed their desire for further cooperation and collaboration in the development of services.
The CRDA would like to act as a communicator and link, as a stimulator for networking. We do not want to break off contacts that have been made and conversations that have been started, and we offer to facilitate contacts and to create virtual spaces for joint exchange in the future. We would like to continue to expand the network in future forums, involve actors in the cultural sector and discuss potential for improvement in the area of FDM and training. If you are interested in an exchange with us or the input providers of the forum, please contact the team of the Cultural Research Data Academy via the contact form on our website.
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Please click here for more information about the program and registration!
The Cultural Research Data Academy is hosting an online workshop on the topic "Audiovisual (Research) Data – Areas of Application and Analytical Tools" on May 11, 2023 (14:00 to 16:30). The course is part of our series of FDM basic courses and is primarily aimed at employees and researchers from higher education, cultural heritage institutions as well as Research Data Management contact points who would like to address the following questions:
What challenges are evident in the current handling of audiovisual data?
What tools are used in different areas of work in the humanities such as libraries, GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and projects in the higher education context?
In addition to a general introduction to the term "audiovisual data", the course also addresses the significance of standards and metadata in this context. Furthermore, a selection of analytical and visualisation tools within the framework of the FAIR/CARE principles, as well as an excursus on repositories, long-term storage and data publication will be presented in more detail. The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with an overview of the range of audiovisual data against the background of research data management, as well as to enable the exchange of experiences in different areas of application in interactive sessions.
Please feel free to forward the workshop announcement to your peer groups, professional associations and circles.
We are looking forward to your participation,
the CRDA team
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Images in Social Media Research: Digital Tools and Methodological Challenges
Online-Workshop, 10th February 2023, 9.00-16.30 (CET)
From memes on Twitter and Reddit to Instagram posts and TikTok videos: Images are taking on increasingly important roles in social media communication. While social media research can draw on established tools in the field of text analysis, researching visual content still presents particular methodological challenges. How can images be systematically searched and scraped from the web? What qualitative and quantitative possibilities are there for structuring, visualising, and evaluating big image corpora and their metadata? How can a sustainable and critical approach to sensitive images look like? This one-day workshop brought together image researchers from different disciplines. On a very hands-on level, we wanted to explore digital tools that might offer pragmatic solutions for researching images on the web. Furthermore, the academic (re)use of images from social media raises particular ethical and legal issues. Digital media researchers, legal scholars and art historians provided insight into their method designs and opened up critical perspectives on how to deal with visual content online.
Over the course of the three sessions, we had more than 500 visits, around 300 participants joined the webinar. This means that not only the majority of European core countries were represented, but also numerous students and researchers from Australia, Egypt, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Canada, Colombia, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and Ukraine. Social media, the tools and methods of their exploration seem to be a literal cross-cutting topic.
The workshop was accompanied by numerous comments and questions, almost 80 were collected in the Q&A alone, some of which were answered live. Some answers as well as further information were collected on an etherpad during the course of the workshop. Not only platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and co were covered. The questions also targeted Telegram, Flickr, Pinterest and Steam. The pragmatic use of tools, but also differences between fair use (USA), copyright and CC licences as well as ethical questions around the publication of structured raw and sensitive data were addressed.
We do not share any recordings, but please find some of the presentations as well as the archived etherpad with further links and recommendations below.
Programme (PDF / archived etherpad)
9.00 Verena Straub & Christoph Eggersglüß: Welcome and Introduction
9.15-11.15 Tools
Bernhard Rieder: Analysing YouTube through data extraction – Introducing the YouTube data tools Stijn Peeters: Quali-quantitative internet research with 4CAT (slides) Jason Chao: Enriching image data with AI using Memespector-GUI Jens-Martin Loebel: Exploring Yenda and HyperImage – A scientific approach to networked digital image annotation and hypermedia publication
lunch break
12.30-14.30 Methods
Sabine Niederer: Visual methodologies for networked images (slides) Elena Pilipets: Deep TikTok – Three methods for tracing video memes (slides) Janna Joceli Omena & Richard Rogers: Analysing image collections with the computer vision network approach (slides) Lev Manovich: Protests, cities, selfies – How we visualise millions of social media images
coffee break
15.00-16.30 Ethical and Legal Issues
Grischka Petri: Private, social, public? Images on social media and some of their legal conditions (slides) Tanja-Bianca Schmidt: How can violence be appropriately addressed? Some thoughts on images and their ethical dilemma (slides) Evelyn Runge: Wandering images across platforms. Tracking alterations – An exploration
The workshop is organised by the research project Image Protests on Social Media at TU Dresden, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), in collaboration with NFDI4Culture, Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage within the Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI).
Contact: Verena Straub, verena.straub (at) tu-dresden.de & Christoph Eggersglüß, christoph.eggersgluess (at) uni-marburg.de
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On November 30, 2021, the first forum "(Further) Development of Research Tools & Data Services" took place. In a three-hour virtual meeting, about 100 scientists, tool and infrastructure developers came together to discuss and evaluate nine proposed projects to be funded by NFDI4Culture and to be made available to the community.
Following the call of the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII) to build a science-led NFDI, the so-called FlexFunds of the Research Tools and Data Services Task Area are awarded through a process based on the needs of the NFDI4Culture community. In the fall of 2021, a call was published to report needs and proposals for further development, adaptation, consolidation, expansion, or even new development of research tools and services. In this first of four funding years, nine tools, services, and frameworks were proposed from various disciplines in the NFDI4Culture community, many of which are or may be relevant across disciplines. During the forum on November 30, the tools and the necessary measures were presented and discussed in the community concerning their usefulness, their importance for scientific work, possible linkage among each other, but also their sustainability.
The results of the forum were analyzed. Measures that address a need of the community, for which there is no alternative free software, that can be developed sustainably and that can be implemented within a FlexFunds project were proposed to the Culture Steering Board for funding.
Fortunately, the proposal was approved and thus the following proposed activities can be funded:
CollAna, collation tool for prints ConedaKor, documentation/optimization open source graph database system HistStadt4D, conception implementation prototype kompakkt, Optimization 3D-Viewer and Annotation OpenRefine, data cleansing knowledge databases TOSCA, modeling of application structures
Over four years, a total of about 400,000 Euros will be distributed through the forum "(Further) Development of Research Tools & Data Services" for the needs-based improvement of the tool and infrastructure landscape of our community.
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The NFDI4Culture consortium has set itself the task of supporting disciplines such as art history, architecture, music, theatre, dance, film and media studies regarding their challenges around the storage and long-term preservation of research data. After the successful kick-off event for repository operators on 12th March 2021, a need amongst the community to discuss, in particular, the sustainable storage of research data as well as the permanent preservation of digital cultural assets became apparent. Therefore, the NFDI4Culture Data Publication and Availability Forum #2 on 15th June 2021 was dedicated to long-term preservation. The event provided insights into the basics of digital preservation, and an opportunity for participants to share their individual expectations as well as discipline-specific challenges and requirements.
The first part of the forum focused on the general definition of long-term preservation and different archiving models, which were illustrated through presentations about the services offered by SLUB Dresden (SLUBArchiv.digital), Heidelberg University (heiARCHIVE) and FIZ Karlsruhe (RADAR).
The second part of the forum provided a detailed overview of the archiving process as well as associated difficulties and challenges, such as assessing the archival value of archival material, identifying significant properties or selecting archivable formats.
During the subsequent discussion, participants asked questions and described specific concerns, thereby focussing on the following topics:
- individual consultation on developing preservation strategies
- preservation of active and closed databases
- procedure models for when a preservation period expires
- overview of cost models and digital preservation services
- guidelines for assessing the archival value and suitability of research data and digitised cultural property
- preservation of one's own research data as a quality criterion for academic work
- legal advice
- ensuring findability and visibility of research data
- establishment of multilingualism
It became clear that there is a specific need for comprehensive advisory services, especially for general copyright issues or questions around the rights descriptions of archive packages.
This forum focused primarily on the basics of long-term preservation, but also on initial discussions with participants about challenges and difficulties in the archiving process. In the following event "Forum Data Publication and Availability #3 - How do you archive and publish your research data?" on 15th September 2021, individual use cases presented by representatives of the different communities will be discussed in order to identify the needs and challenges for sustainable long-term preservation of research data.
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The third event of the task area Data Publication and Data Availability (Task Area 4) of the Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage was organised as an open forum on 15th September 2021.
On the basis of practical examples, concrete needs of the different NFDI4Culture specialist communities were to be identified. Experiences and approaches to sustainable preservation and long-term availability of research outputs were exchanged and discussed with representatives from science, research and GLAM institutions.
As Task Area 4, we were able to take away important themes from the presentations as well as the discussion, focussing in particular on the need for handouts and best practices on long-term archiving and data publication. In addition, metadata turned out to be an area of concern when it comes to enabling the availability, re-use and exchange of research data. In this context, persistent identifiers for linking different data resources and uniform recording standards are crucial keywords. Data management with a focus on improving software for research data management and developing cost-effective business models was also identified as an important topic area.
During the discussions, it became clear that there is a concrete need for advisory services, such as handouts on 3D data, but also for clarification of general copyright issues.
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Sept. 14–15, 2023, at the Institute of Theatre Studies, University of Leipzig (Ritterstr. 16, 04109 Leipzig), the event will be held in a hybrid format.
This event is a joint forum of the work areas "Cultural Research Data Academy" and "Standards, Data Quality and Curation" of NFDI4Culture – Consortium for Research Data of Tangible and Intangible Cultural Assets.
Performative arts and practices manifest themselves primarily live, in performances and events in front of and with audiences, but beyond that increasingly in media representations. Data on this arises in artistic practice as well as in production, mediation, collection, and research environments. But how should these data be modeled in order to make the respective events and processes clearly referencable, accessible for networked research, and also sustainably usable?
In the mostly object-based structuring of data from GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), it is often precisely the central dimension of the event that is not captured, or only inadequately. The problems associated with this do not only concern the field of theatre and dance studies, but also the subject communities of music, art, media, and film studies, in which the recording of event-related information in the aforementioned sense is also still in its infancy.
The aim of this forum is the interdisciplinary exchange about the collection, aggregation and enrichment of event-related data and the development of adequate data models. Last but not least, it will be about questions of artistic research and the mediation of data literacy, about synergies between the disciplines and their infrastructures for (meta-)data and research data.
More information on the program and registration will be available soon on our NFDI4Culture portal. The conference language is German.
Ideas for possible impulses are welcome! Please send proposals via e-mail to melanie.gruss[at]uni-leipzig.de by April 30, 2023, at the latest.
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As the most important anual event in NFDI4Culture, the Culture Community Plenary (CCP) is dedicated to the exchange of knowledge between the consortium and the community. It serves to report on the targets achieved to date and on further developments. It also serves to involve the 4Culture community, for example through keynote presentations on initiatives and projects in the domain of material and immaterial cultural heritage. For the upcoming Plenary, we would like to offer different formats to foster consortial collaboration and ensure extensive exchange of knowledge, expertise and exprerience.
The Plenary will be held at the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz.
Since NFDI4Culture works with a particularly diverse and innovative community through the participation of architecture, art, music, theater, dance, film, and media studies, we would like to invite you to actively shape the Community Days on Wednesday and Friday. Please choose between a variety of formats for the submission:
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From 14 to 15 September 2023, the NFDI4Culture Forum "PERFORMANCE – PRODUCTIONS – DATA. Modelling and communicating event-related information", organised by the task areas "Cultural Research Data Academy" and "Standards, Data Quality and Curation", took place at the Institute of Theatre Studies at Leipzig University.
The aim of this hybrid event was an interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary exchange on the capture, aggregation and enrichment of event-related data and on perspectives for the development of adequate data models in the field of performing arts.
The event was kicked off on the evening before with three online workshops organised by consortium members. Firstly, Katharina Bergmann and Andrea Polywka, as part of the Cultural Research Data Academy (CRDA), presented an offer from the series of basic courses on research data management (RDM), this time focussing on audiovisual research data. In the first part of the one-and-a-half-hour workshop, important terms from research data management were explained and illustrated using specific examples of audiovisual data. The second part was followed by a project report by Dennis Friedl (University of Paderborn), who provided an insight into the work of the Korngold-Werkausgabe, focussing on works by the film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In addition to the annotation of classical music volumes, the project aims to produce a hybrid critical edition that will deal in particular with audiovisual data.
The online workshop "3D models for the performing arts" by Zoe Schubert and Lozana Rossenova (NFDI4Culture task area "Data Capture and Enrichment of Digital Cultural Assets") had to be cancelled, but the task area is planning another workshop for the performing arts community next spring 2024.
A third workshop was offered by Robert Nasarek (Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg) and presented the Wissenschaftliche Kommunikationsinfrastruktur (WissKI), a linked open data extension for the Drupal content management system. This software enables researchers to create data according to the FAIR principles and publish it dynamically on the internet. In the workshop, the most important functions of WissKI were emphasised and illustrated using a simple example from the performing arts. The process and possibilities of semantic data modelling with WissKI were explained in more detail. The event provided participants with a comprehensive introduction to the use and benefits of WissKI in the context of research data management.
On Thursday, 14 September 2023, the forum was officially opened by Prof. Dr. Patrick Primavesi, who outlined the specific needs for curating and standardising data in the field of performing arts. In particular, the reference to specific events or productions as well as their respective contexts is still hardly given in the mostly object-related data of the heritage institutions available to date. A more adequate modelling and clear referencing of event-related data could be achieved through the interaction of various stakeholders, including not only researchers and collections but also the producing artists and mediating institutions. The forum also sees itself as an opportunity for an exchange between these areas of experience and knowledge, each with their own specific digital infrastructures, said Primavesi.
The first panel focused on the topic of "Networking and making accessible". Christine Henniger (International Theatre Institute Germany, Media Library for Dance and Theatre), Dr. Sara Tiefenbacher (University Library Frankfurt/Main, mv:dk) and Dr. Klaus Illmayer (OEAW ACDH-CH) presented the project „Mediatheken der Darstellenden Kunst digital vernetzen” (mv:dk). They presented work processes and the development of a comprehensive data infrastructure for media library metadata for researching and exploring audiovisual collections at theatre and dance research institutes. In particular, the project-related data modelling, which is based on domain-specific ontologies and fundamental specifications for the description of audiovisual resources, was explained in more detail.
Sören Fenner presented what Theapolis is doing within the framework of the Neustart-Kultur project for the development of a production database for the independent performing performing arts. In several interdisciplinary participation forums, the the data model as well as the question of relevance criteria, utilisation and exploitation options for the data and many other topics were discussed with stakeholders and and actors in the performing arts.
Sina Schmidt (Deutscher Bühnenverein) and Tina Lorenz (Augsburg State Theatre) then presented the "Smarte Theaterdienste" project coordinated by the German Stage Association, Use Case 3 of the "Datenraum Kultur". The aim is to develop machine-readable theatre schedules and the resulting added value for the participating cultural institutions.
The second panel discussed the field of "(artistic) research": Prof. Dr. Berenika Szymanski-Düll and Jorit J. Hopp (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) presented their research project "T-MIGRANTS: Theatermigrationen und ihre Daten". The aim of the project is to use a series of case studies to to collect, analyse and make digitally accessible a body of data on theatre migrants. For this purpose, a database was developed as a repository and at the same time as a basis for analysing and the analysis and visualisation of the data used. Subsequently Dr. Vera Grund (University of Paderborn) presented the DFG project "Tanz/Musik digital". The aim of the project is to develop an editing method with which the diverse sources on dance can be digitally linked in a multimodal structural model. Visualisation and analysis of dance poses, animated gestures and dance steps are combined with information from music, images and texts, which illustrates the interdisciplinary approach of the project. The panel concluded with a contribution by David Rittershaus (Mainz University of Applied Sciences) on the project "#vortanz. Automatisierte Vorannotation in der digitalen Hochschultanzausbildung". Within the joint project, the Mainz-based "Motion Bank" project can further develop its software for annotating dance, with a focus on dance education at universities. The software developed can also be transferred to other contexts and subject areas that deal with audiovisual media.
In the late afternoon, a roundtable discussion moderated by Prof. Dr. Malte Hagener brought together representatives of the academic information services (Fachinformationsdienste / FIDs) musiconn, arthistoricum, adlr.link and performing-arts.eu.
Patricia F. Blume (adlr.link & rufus, Leipzig University Library), Dr. Christian Kämpf (musiconn, Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden), Franziska Voß (performing-arts.eu, University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main) and Johannes Wolf (arthistoricum.net, Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden) answered questions from the moderator and the audience after a short presentation of their respective fields of activity and everyday work. During the discussion, the sometimes different funding situations and conditions were addressed, as well as the opportunities and goals of cooperation between the specialised information services and the NFDI consortia. The latter were described as very constructive, especially the role of the NFDI Association, which primarily concerns networking, visibility, strategic development and homogenisation of different data cultures in the disciplines. In this context, it is also important to overcome reservations about the NFDI and to make it clear to the funding authorities that the concept for success lies in the interaction and complementary cooperation between FIDs and NFDI consortia, as well as in the combination of community proximity and expert networking. The question of the internationalisation of the services presented was also raised, whereupon the exchange of the NFDI with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) was mentioned – this topic is only just being addressed in the FIDs due to the current funding conditions. The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / DFG) in particular was seen as having a duty to become more active in this area. DFG to become more active and to improve the framework conditions for international cooperation, including in funded projects.
A lecture performance by the artist duo TILL&LUBICH took place in the evening to complement the content-related, artistic and research-orientated exchange: Based on their dance and media performance "parallel situation" from 2017, Barbara Lubich and Anna Till presented scenic situations for a seminar room in which dance and photography interact with the help of digital projection. A recording of the performance will be released soon.
On Friday, 15 September 2023, we continued with the third panel "Presentation and Education": Julia Decker and Livia Rutishauser from Dachverband Tanz, the nationwide platform for artistic dance in Germany, presented "tanz:digital", a central streaming and knowledge platform for the dance scene in Germany. tanz:digital offers users of the service networking and presentation opportunities. The second input by Dr. Sarah Youssef (Digi-Kunst.nrw project manager, Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf) and her colleagues, René Bialik and Christian Sievers, presented organisational, conceptual and technical aspects of long-term archiving for art and music academies. The aim of the Digi-Kunst.nrw project is to create a web interface in addition to long-term archiving, which will be available for artistic, academic and public use. At last, the Academy for Theatre and Digitality was presented by Tina Lorenz (Augsburg State Theatre) and Marcus Lobbes (Dortmund Theatre, Academy for Theatre and Digitality), which enables artistic research and at the same time offers technology-oriented training and further education. The ensuing discussion highlighted the growing need for the exchange of experience and information regarding the development of such specialised platforms.
The fourth panel was dedicated to the topic of "Infrastructures and data modelling": Beat Estermann from the Opendata.ch association and the Bern University of the Arts emphasised the relevance of linked data for events in the in the performing arts and referred to existing international projects in this field, including in this field, including wikidata. It was then discussed to what extent NFDI4Culture in terms of a participation structure could facilitate networking and exchange for locations outside of Germany, such as in Switzerland, which require support with data enrichment, for example.
The second contribution by Steffen Wedepohl offered an insight into the "Digitale Archiv der Freien Darstellenden Künste" (DAFDK, Digital Archive of the Independent Performing Arts), which was launched in autumn 2022. In three years' time, a publicly accessible digital platform is to be created on which the holders of holdings can record the documents and materials of their artistic productions and work processes. As a third input, Dr. Melanie Gruß and Franziska Voß provided an insight into the activities of the Performing Arts Working Group of the German National Library's Standardisation Committee. This working group was formed after a one-year exchange and aims to address the specific needs of research and memory institutions within the specialist community and to resolve desiderata with regard to the "Gemeinsame Normdatei" (GND, integrated authority file) in the field of performing arts. Overall, the GND working groups were praised by the audience as functioning exchange formats, but the inaccessibility of the GND had already been criticised in previous panels and presentations. This was taken up again in the subsequent discussion with the wish that the GND should become more open and that user groups should be more involved in data work. Here, too, there is a need for awareness, rapprochement and communication between research and GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums).
In the concluding wrap-up by Prof. Dr. Andreas Münzmay, reference was made to the wide range and interesting insights of the projects presented, as well as to constructive discussions, wishes and ideas – a success also for the NFDI4Culture consortium, which does not want to be perceived as the sole guiding and determining authority for the handling of research data, but primarily sees its task in the joint shaping and mediation of negotiation processes and in a broad range of assistance and information.
A selection of the speakers' presentation slides is available for download here: https://cloud.nfdi4culture.de/s/QE6pYT6jTQtZ4DQ
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After the annual Edirom Summer School (ESS) had been held twice exclusively online, the 13th ESS was now held again in presence with the usual positive response. From 5–9 September 2022, a total of 13 workshops were held at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute of the University of Paderborn, which were used across disciplines both as an introduction, as a consolidation and for further profiling in the field of digital humanities.
The courses were organised in five parallel tracks with the following topics: Text encoding (TEI), music encoding (MEI), basic technologies (git, python, xTech), advanced topics (statistics, automatic enrichment, etc.) and a week-long course on digital editions. The course instructors were again a productive mix of experienced ESS lecturers and new minds.
It is particularly noteworthy that the courses offered were again not limited to music-related topics, and that the MEI track was able to offer a course on older music for the first time, namely an introduction to the encoding of mensural notation in MEI. The MEI introductory course, an annual drawing card at the ESS, was again one of the best-attended workshops this year, with generally the highest demand for introductory offerings among the approximately 80 participants.
The interdisciplinary keynote by Aline Deicke was found to be extremely inspiring. With her lecture "Between 'black box' and source problem – challenges to an archaeological-historical network theory", she opened up diverse insights into the red-hot topic of "network research" from an interdisciplinary perspective – entirely in the spirit of the Digital Humanities.
Next year, the Edirom Summer School will not be able to take place in its usual format, because at the initiative of the Virtual Research Network Edirom (ViFE https://www.edirom.de/, in 2023 there will be a joint conference of the TEI and MEC communities for the first time ever! Since this international premiere of a joint conference would fall in the same period as the ESS, we are still working on a modified concept for the 14th Edirom Summer School; the details will then be published as usual at https://ess.uni-paderborn.de/, among other places.
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Contributed by Jonatan Jalle Steller
Integrating research data from the German Corpus Vitrearum into the NFDI4Culture knowledge graph was as easy as adding a bit of markup to our website, and it came with the added benefit of making our content more discoverable. The markup is designed to not just link content across projects based on features like location, historical period, and motif, but also to make it more machine-readable. With just a few extra lines of markup, the content was automatically added to Google Dataset Search and several popular image searches.
The extra markup needed for the content graph can be added directly into a website’s template or, for example, via plugins that let you add schema.org markup. Like many other websites running content management systems such as TYPO3, WordPress, Drupal, or MediaWiki, the Corpus Vitrearum website uses a flexible templating engine. I decided to add the markup directly into the page displaying the list of all pictures since this part of the template contained all the data we wanted to add to the content graph anyway. Using the basic example from the documentation of NFDI4Culture's Culture Graph Interchange Format (CGIF), we only needed to write a bit of extra code for a single required field that was not yet available in our template: the date when this particular data feed was last updated. For everything else, we merely had to insert the right templating code into the sample code.
The content graph does not ingest all the data that participating projects could provide, but focuses on a limited set of data that is relatively universal and can thus be used to link together content across different projects. Apart from a resource’s URL, this includes its rough type (image, audio, video), its name, its historical period, and keywords from controlled vocabularies, which includes physical locations, associated people, and motifs. As the content graph grows, we can now use its querying interface (SPARQL) to provide related content from other research projects on our website.
This is particularly important for a project engaged in preserving pictures of and knowledge about Medieval and Early-Modern stained glass in Germany: website users may require more contextual information outside the project’s boundaries, such as how a specific motif compares to its depiction in other genres at the same time or how the German stained-glass tradition compares to other parts of the world, but this goal is nearly impossible to achieve without a curated and trustworthy linking tool such as the content graph.
As we worked with NFDI4Culture to provide sample content, we quickly managed to adapt the proposed format to additional use cases like search engine optimisation (SEO). As many search providers require the same schema.org markup as used in the CGIF, we added and documented a limited number of additional fields containing information to allow data to be ingested in further knowledge graphs, like the one built by Google. As a result, our website is not just listed in the academia-focused Dataset Search, but our images are now properly indexed into this commercial provider’s image search, which helps both professional and amateur users discover our project’s high-quality photographs.
We also presented our joint work with the NFDI4Culture teams "Knowledge Graph" and "Portal" at the DHd2023 conference. You can find the slides of the presentation with relevant links, illustrations and example SPARQL queries on Zenodo:
https://zenodo.org/record/7748740 (Knowledge Graph based research data integration in NFDI4Culture)
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25th February 2022 (CRDA of NFDI4Culture, in collaboration with IAML DE)
Research data management (RDM) becomes necessary when it comes to planning and applying for a research project. However, it should not be included in one's research process in a merely superficial manner: a structured RDM is often already part of the research design. It is therefore not least inherent to research design and becomes relevant even before an application is submitted, especially when creating collections and archives and in research partnerships or networks. The NFDI4Culture course "Research Data Management (not only) for music librarians" on the morning of 25th February 2022 was attended by around 50 dedicated colleagues and intended to show that data management plans and sustainable file storage are not only necessary funding requirements or conditions for applications. Focusing primarily on music-related data, a variety of ethical, legal, and technical issues were discussed, especially with regard to handling third-party data and making interoperable research results available for reuse, to enable their enrichment with metadata by a research project or even an extended community.
The course, jointly organised by the Cultural Research Data Academy (CRDA) of NFDI4Culture and the German branch of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), was primarily aimed at music librarians. Although there are numerous offers on this topic, especially digital training courses, only a few focus on the field of music (studies), including its specific data and media. In terms of sequence, the course structure was based on the data life cycle and the task areas of NFDI4Culture. In the process, the CRDA team introduced a number of contact points and information services, explained the FAIR and CARE principles and addressed case studies as well as the NFDI4Culture Helpdesk. Not only were the various legal barriers of reusable digital preservation discussed, but also the benefits of an integrated approach in collaboration with local university libraries and university data centres. Participants repeatedly highlighted a kind of best practice: namely the data-specific selection of an already established, often institutionally hosted repository and its adaptation to their own needs, especially with regard to community-specific maintenance and enrichment with metadata.
In the course of the event, many points were raised that concern the NFDI as such and which further showed that there is still a need for improvement in this area, both in terms of equipment and networking of infrastructural facilities and training offers. The discussion emphasised the need for consulting and funding support, for the establishment of subject/community-specific repositories and with regard to ensuring their sustainable interoperability. Emphasis was put on the enhancement of already existing offers to address one's own research questions. The partial lack of RDM initiatives at federal state level as well as the desire for community-specific exchange were also points of discussion. According to the participants, resources and handouts, specifically around data and for the community, would be welcome as an addition to the numerous generic offers that already exist. Likewise, there were questions about the integration of graduate training offers as well as about data maintenance as a component of undergraduate teaching (introductions, modules, basic courses ...). The course concluded with initial suggestions for further workshop and hands-on training opportunities.
In conclusion, the need for local subject-specific or data-specific repositories, for funding and development support as well as for training opportunities can be pointed out. In this respect, there is a general, proven need for training (especially at graduate level), while the generic need (i. e. basic RDM, FAIR, etc.) is often and sufficiently covered by initiatives and services provided by universities and libraries. The main demand is for the teaching of media- and subject-specific and research-related tools as well as options for publication and digital preservation. The discussion also highlighted the overall impression that RDM does not yet seem to have been sufficiently integrated into the curricula and module catalogues, yet that numerous information platforms already do exist. In this respect, the potential of local development regarding RDM competencies and repositories was particularly emphasised. Further (specific) networking opportunities are desirable, even if these already exist in various forms at different levels. The integration of corresponding forums and working groups within professional associations seems to be a constructive means for an exchange about tools and methods as well as for the promotion of data and code literacy. The very positive feedback from the participants included a request for follow-up events, workshops and forums – especially on licenses (such as Creative Commons) and licensing organisations, rights and rights management, repositories and GLAM.
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Die erste Forumsveranstaltung der Task Area 1 Digitalisierung und Anreicherung digitaler Kulturgüter fand am 7. und 8. Oktober 2021 über zwei halbe Tage digital statt und richtete sich dabei an die gesamte Fachcommunity. Das zentrale Ziel war von Beginn an der intensive Austausch und die Vernetzung, welche erfreulicher Weise durch sehr unterschiedliche Akteure und Interessierte verwirklicht wurde.
An dieser Stelle möchten wir uns erneut für die rege Teilnahme und aktive Beteiligung aller bedanken. Zeitweise waren mit uns über 150 Personen anwesend – ein tolles Zeichen für eine lebhafte und interessierte Community, die die NFDI4C ausmacht und bereichert, da wir gemeinsam gestalten möchten.
Tag 1
Der erste Tag war als "Inspiration Day" organisiert und dabei geprägt durch vier spannende Vorträge aus ganz verschiedenen Perspektiven zum Thema Digitalisierung in der Wissenschaft und die jeweils spezifischen Chancen und Herausforderungen.
Zu Beginn wurde der Blick einer Infrastruktureinrichtung durch Dr. Maria Effinger (Leiterin der Abteilung Publikationsdienste, Koordinationsbereich Kulturelles Erbe und Digital Humanities, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg) eingenommen. Mit ihrem Vortrag »Digitalisierung als Komponente einer agilen und modularen Forschungsinfrastruktur.« gab es nicht nur Applaus bei Twitter – ein Einblick in Ihre Arbeit und Strategie zeigt deutlich die Chancen und den wissenschaftlichen Mehrwert durch eine modulare und nutzbare Forschungsinfrastruktur auf. Genau das also, wozu NFDI4C für die gesamte Community beitragen will und soll.
Direkt im Anschluss konnte JProf. Dr. Elisa Roßberger (Digital Humanities für Vorderasiatische Archäologie und Altorientalistik, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, BMBF-Projekt ACAWAI - CS) mit einem spannenden Einblick in ihr Forschungsprojekt aufzeigen, wie eine internationale und disziplinübergreifende wissenschaftliche Arbeit insbesondere zu einer Nachnutzbarkeit beitragen könnte und kann. Sie konnte aufzeigen wofür NFDI4C in diesem Kontext bereits hilfreich war, aber auch was in Zukunft benötigt wird. »Bilder neu verknoten. Die visuelle Kultur Westasiens und das Semantic Web.« war ein Vortrag, der zu einem angeregten Autausch beitrug und viele Ideen für zukünftige Aufgaben beisteuern konnte.
Kai Mewes, Bildwissenschaft M.A (Leiter Fotoatelier und Digitalisierung, Die Neue Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, München) zeigte dann die Sicht eines Operators auf – »"Do it once and do it right": Internationale Anforderungen an die Bildqualität zur Langzeitdigitalisierung.« Mit einer hohen Genauigkeit und sehr spezifischem Fachwissen konnte er dabei beeindruckend verdeutlichen wie wichtig bei der professionellen und Nachhaltigen Digitalisierung die Qualitätssicherung ist.
Last but definitely not least wurde die Vortragsreihe Dr. Andreas Christoph (Leiter Abteilung Digitales Kultur- und Sammlungsmanagement, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena) komplettiert: die spannende Perspektive eines Digitalisierungszentrums konnte mit dem Vortrag »Digitales Kultur- und Sammlungsmanagement: Vom Datenportal zum Digital Curator.« beleuchtet werden. Dabei konnte er aus der Praxis alle Herausforderungen der Digitalisierung bis hin zur Veröffentlichung und Zugänglichkeit von Daten schildern.
Die Denkanstöße, Vielseitigkeit und Breite des Themas Digitalisierung in der Wissenschaft und die jeweils spezifischen Chancen und Herausforderungen warfen sehr interessante Fragen auf und wie erhofft konnten bereits konkrete Wünsche, Bedarfe und Anregungen an NFDI4C und unsere Task Area angebracht werden.
Tag 2
Dieser Eindruck verfestigte sich am zweiten Tag des Forums: das Format Barcamp ermöglichte es spezifische Fragen und Themen kompakt zu vertiefen und gemeinsam zu diskutieren, sodass die Denkanstöße des ersten Tages, aber auch Themen darüber hinaus Platz fanden. Sehr erfreulich war für uns, dass hier alle Erfahrungslevel vertreten waren, von Neulingen im Feld der Digitalisierung bis hin zu professionellen Digitalsierungsanbietern. Die für uns und für viele Teilnehmende neue Veranstaltungsform feierte im Rahmen von NFDI4C Premiere und trotz einiger technisch-organisatorischen Ruckler (für die wir uns noch einmal entschuldigen möchten) wurde es Dank aller Beteiligten zu einem großen Erfolg. Es wird entsprechend nicht das letzte Barcamp gewesen sein. Auf dieses und zukünftige Veranstaltungen, bei denen wir all den Input aus dem Kick-off aufgreifen möchten, freuen wir uns schon jetzt.
• Hier findet sich der Überblick zu allen Barcamp-Sessions, die sich am zweiten Tag ergeben haben und den zugehörigen Pads (auch hier können sehr gerne sessionspezifische Notizen weiter ergänzt werden).
Nach den beiden für uns spannenden, interessanten und lehrreichen Tagen, sind wir weiterhin dankbar für die rege Teilnahme. Wir sind aktiv damit beschäftigt die Kontakte, Anliegen, Mitbringsel und Projekte in eine Wissensfarm zu schieben, die uns allen zur Verfügung steht.
Wir freuen uns auch jetzt noch sehr über Anregungen und Fragen und sehen in eine spannende kooperative Zukunft im Kontext der NFDI4C, der Task Area 1 Digitalisierung und Anreicherung digitaler Kulturgüter und darüber hinaus.
Weitere Links und Materialien
• Hier eine Sammlung der Links, die allgemein (nicht innerhalb der Barcamp-Sessions) an beiden Tagen geteilt wurden.
• Tweets zum Community Kick-off findet man unter dem Hashtag #4CultureDigitalisierung; #Digitalisierung für die Wissenschaft war außerdem auch das Thema des am darauf folgenden Donnerstags in der #4CultureHour
• Hier die Materialien aus den beiden Tagen, die durch die Vortragenden freigegeben wurden.
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In the era of digitisation, media studies research is increasingly both data-driven and data-generating. Media studies scholars not only work with external data that is generated in the course of developing and using digital media and technologies, but also produce data themselves as part of such work processes. Similar to the infrastructures and tools we use in the discipline, the data often remain in latency and their role in the research process is often not sufficiently reflected and made visible. In this regard, quite a bit hinges on the participation or collaboration of data in media studies research. Regardless of the subject matter, the transformation of media studies into digital media studies seems to be progressing.
On the one hand, this affects the discipline and its methods of working on a practical level: media scholars are increasingly concerned with the planning, organization, and implementation of research projects, reflecting on the legal or ethical implications of data collection and re-use, and increasingly considering the technical dimension of the research process as a data life cycle. On the other hand, the crucial question of how media studies deals with data affects the understanding of the discipline in a fundamental way. For this reason, in the future we will also have to address the question of what we as media studies scholars understand under the term data. This perspective, inspired not least by Johanna Drucker, can be seen as a reaction to the change in media studies working methods due to the entry of data and digital technologies into a primarily qualitative humanities discipline, which sees itself increasingly exposed to quantitative methods, which ultimately also affects media studies theory formation.
Against this background, NFDI4Culture will hold a panel discussion at the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (Society for Media Studies) in Halle (Saale), which is dedicated to the topic of "work" this year. Moderated by Prof. Dr. Malte Hagener (Institute for Media Studies at the Philipps University of Marburg, co-spokesperson of Task Area 6 of NFDI4Culture), the panel discussion will focus on addressing and identifying at which points in the research process and in which ways data play a role in media studies questions, methods, theories, objects, and findings. How does working with and on data change the ways of working in the discipline and what conditions of working in the sense of a "mental workload" must be created in order to be able to adequately conduct research with and on data in the future?
In the course of the discussion, different perspectives will be brought up: In addition to the participation of two working groups of the German Society for Media Studies (AG Daten und Netzwerke – Dr. Marcus Burkhardt, Universität Siegen; AG Medien und Kunst / Kunst und Medien – Dr. Irene Schütze, Kunsthochschule Mainz), there will be a consideration of legal aspects (PD Dr. Dr. Grischka Petri, FIZ Karlsruhe/NFDI4Culture), media studies approaches (Prof. Dr. Anna Tuschling, Institute for Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum), and a view from an infrastructural perspective (Dr. Dietmar Kammerer, Institute for Media Studies, Philipps University Marburg/NFDI4Culture).
The panel discussion will take place in presence on Sept. 30, 2022, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. (slot "Mental Workload 2.4") in Lecture Hall B at the Melanchthonianum, Universitätsplatz 9, 06108 Halle (Saale).
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1 Project overview
1.1 Aims
Within the framework of the project funded by NFDI4Culture, Task Area 3 - Research Tools and Data Services, measures were implemented to improve the usability and thus sustainability of the open source software ConedaKOR. ConedaKOR is a mature open source research software that has been used in the humanities research context for over twelve years and is constantly being further developed. ConedaKOR performs archiving, management and research of image and metadata on a common web-based interface. Developed at the Institute of Art History in Frankfurt in Main, ConedaKOR is now used in various universities and research institutions. Until now, the lack of easily understandable documentation limited the use of the software for users and system administrators. In addition, there was a lack of low-threshold installation options.
The project addressed the three desiderata with four work packages (WP), which were fully implemented.
WP 1: Tutorial videos (target group: users, administrators, developers) WP 2: Documentation I (target group: users) WP 3: Documentation II (target group: administrators, developers) WP 4: Container virtualisation of ConedaKOR using Docker
1.2 Timeframe
Approval: 20.04.2022 Implementation: 01.05.2022 - 31.12.2022
1.3 Partners and Implementers
The project was carried out jointly by the Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz (IEG) and the German Forum for Art History Paris (DFK Paris) in cooperation with the company Wendig OU (Estonia). The project was jointly managed by Anne Klammt (DFK Paris) and Thorsten Wübbena (IEG). For the DFK Paris, Deborah Schlauch supported the project as a research assistant.
1.4 Funding
The project was funded with a total of 10,000 €. Of this amount, 6,000 € went to the IEG, which was responsible for the implementation of WP 3 and 4 and worked on WP 1 and 2 in an advisory capacity. The DFK Paris received 4,000 € and carried out WP 1 and 2 and provided advisory support for WP 3 and 4.
1.5 Research data management
All products created in the project were freely accessible, openly licensed, documented and published in reusable form in trusted repositories in accordance with FAIR principles. In addition, the products were made publicly available via platforms with a wide reach (YouTube, GitHub) in order to achieve the broadest possible use. The data underlying the products are additionally archived in the IEG's archive repository to ensure long-term accessibility.
2. Work packages
2.1 Work package 1: Tutorial videos
A total of five videos were made and published on the AV portal of the TIB Hannover, YouTube and the ConedaKOR website. The videos were produced in English and also provided with English subtitles on YouTube. Three of the videos are aimed at users and provide an introduction to the installation with Docker and the use of the software. The focus here is on presenting its essential features and is linked with references to further documentation. Two other videos are aimed at system administrators and developers, with one providing a detailed introduction to the installation and configuration of ConedaKOR and the other demonstrating how data from a ConedaKOR instance can be used in a CMS (in this case WordPress) via API usage.
Products
Users
Installation of ConedaKOR with Docker" (04:28 min) TIB: https://doi.org/10.5446/60132 | YouTube: https://youtu.be/S7HrlhOMVkc Creating entity types, entities and relations in ConedaKOR" (06:27 min) TIB: https://doi.org/10.5446/60133 | YouTube: https://youtu.be/vAR8FjORVzg Creating fields and generators in ConedaKOR" (05:10 min) TIB: https://doi.org/10.5446/60134 | YouTube: https://youtu.be/801feeJ3Zuc
Administrators
"How to install ConedaKOR on Debian 11 "bullseye"" (11:54 min) TIB: https://doi.org/10.5446/60135 | YouTube: https://youtu.be/ejQngJ2Zp-Y
Developers
"Writing a UI component with ConedaKOR as a backend" (06:52 min) TIB: https://doi.org/10.5446/60136 | YouTube: https://youtu.be/0dWDk4LCl4I
2.2 Work package 2: Documentation I (target group: users)
Based on the preliminary work of the guide for the ConedaKOR instance at the Institute of Art History at the Goethe University Frankfurt, documentation was written that is generic and detached from the concrete implementation. The documentation is divided into three sections that relate to the tasks and needs of the database managers, the editors and the users. The documentation is published on GitHub, which simplifies future maintenance as a "living document" parallel to further developments of ConedaKOR.
Product
ConedaKOR documentation | Users, https://github.com/coneda/kor/blob/master/docs/user.md
2.3 Work package 3: Documentation II (Target group: Administrators, Developers)
Based on the existing readme file for ConedaKOR on GitHub, a documentation was developed that is generic and detached from the concrete implementation. The documentation is divided into two parts that relate to the tasks and needs of system administrators and developers. The documentation is published on GitHub, which simplifies future maintenance as a "living document" parallel to further developments of ConedaKOR.
Products
ConedaKOR documentation | System administrators, https://github.com/coneda/kor/blob/master/docs/ops.md ConedaKOR documentation | Developers, https://github.com/coneda/kor/blob/master/docs/dev.md
2.4 Work package 4: Container virtualisation of ConedaKOR using Docker
The aim of this WP was to enable a simplified installation of ConedaKOR by means of container virtualisation. In this case, the software "Docker" is used, for which - through the development work in WP 4 - images can now be created that contain all the system libraries, script languages, dictionaries, etc. that are needed for the process of a runnable ConedaKOR instance.
Product
ConedaKOR documentation | Installation (Docker), https://github.com/coneda/kor/blob/master/docs/docker.md
Authors: Anne Klammt (German Center for Art History Paris | DFK Paris), Thorsten Wübbena (Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz | IEG)
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On May 2nd 2022, the Task Area “Standards, Data Quality and Curation” of the NFDI4Culture consortium invited participants to its second public digital forum. It was focused on an open exchange of participants' experiences with regard to the quality of cultural data generated, used, or aggregated in their various contexts, and an attempt to find a targeted, concrete description of problems in the area of data-related quality management.
The forum obviously addressed a highly topical issue, as many of the 250 participants had already provided information in advance, in some cases very detailed, about their experiences in this regard in their professional contexts. In two blocks three presentations were held, each followed by the opportunity for exchange and questions. In the first block, different projects gave insights into their quality management: at the beginning Julia Rössel and Barbara Fichtl on the use of the LIDO standard in the KONDA project,,) followed by colleagues from the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, who explained their goal to make semantic Linked Open Data models FAIR. Before the break, Andrea Hammes and Sebastian Meyer from SLUB Dresden used the example of the "DFG Viewer for Musical Records" to describe the aspect of their work to rethink specific requirements of individual media types and adapt the connected metadata schema accordingly. In the afternoon, the focus was on portals and their experiences with the integration and aggregation of heterogeneous data. Julia Beck from the Fachinformationsdienst Darstellende Kunst highlighted aspects of the analysis and transformation of metadata as well as the reprocessing and repurposing of authority data, which serve to provide researchers with data that is as structured, searchable, and linked as possible. Stefan Dumont and Sascha Grabsch (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities) presented the CorrespSearch project, which has been aggregating correspondence metadata from print and digital editions and other scholarly publications since 2014, and the project's technical workflow using the Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF). Before the final discussion, Cosmina Berta (German National Library) presented her metadata quality management in the context of the German Digital Library and showed different perspectives and measures for quality control of cultural data in the future.
As expected, time was not sufficient to discuss all problems and questions of the participants. However, the manifold aspects and the individual approach to meaningful quality control, the strong awareness of data quality issues or their importance, and the diverse experiences in implementing them in very different projects and contexts will be further discussed in subsequent, rather smaller and thus more intensive exchange enabling formats.
The slides of the presentations are available for download as PDFs.
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On February 22, 2022, Dietmar Kammerer and Christoph Eggersglüß presented NFDI4Culture, its actors, data domains, services, and communities at the 67th annual conference "Conference Lab - Decentralized and Digital" of the German Communication Association (DGPuK). The presentation was part of the workshop „Research Infrastructures for Communication and Media Research“, which developed recommendations for action for the participating disciplines as well as strategies for further cooperation in this field. Based on a recent working paper, after input presentations by the participants and representatives of KonsortSWD and Text+, intensive discussions focused on the consortia's consulting services and helpdesks. In the process, challenges and networking opportunities were explored and considered beyond the individual disciplines in the sense of community participation.
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Lecture and discussion series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" (online)
Summer Semester Focus: 'Archiving Efforts' – Securing and Long-Term Archiving of Social Media Data
The working group 'Social Media Data', an initiative of NFDI4Culture together with BERD@NFDI, KonsortSWD and Text+ within the framework of the National Research Data Infrastructure, has been organising the lecture and discussion series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" since the beginning of 2022.
In the coming summer semester, we want to focus on archiving and look at problems from the perspective of archives and repositories as well as researchers. The focus will be on the time-critical capture and long-term archiving of text and image data from social media and the systematic preservation of dynamic and high-frequency content from distributed platforms and apps.
What does it mean to understand messages and threads, images and videos, layouts and designs not as more or less static data, weakly structured tables and lists, files and datasets, but also to include the respective interfaces, programming environments and contexts of their generation and presentation in the 'archiving effort'? How can this research data be sustainably secured and the knowledge gained from it be kept reproducible in the long term?
PROGRAMME
Summer Semester Focus: 'Archiving Efforts' – Securing and Long-Term Archiving of Social Media Data
Show & Tell VII (12.05.)
Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban History, Lviv): "Emergency Archiving – Telegram Archive of the War" (slides)
Being in the state of war – among many other things – means scrolling updates constantly. Telegram has become an everyday go-to app for millions of Ukrainians since the full-scale invasion. The social media platform does not only reflect on current developments but also affects the warfare and wartime experiences directly. As captured and documented, it creates evidence, covering all areas from the battlefield to the everyday routine across Ukraine on either side of the frontline. How do we capture, assess and make accessible such flows for future research, considering the legal and ethical complexity of documenting social media? With no definitive methodological answers but as an emergency effort, the Center for Urban History launched this archiving initiative to preserve the social media practices of the war in Ukraine as well as to document how Ukrainians learn, live, and share testimonies through Telegram.
Show & Tell VIII (26.05.)
Britta Woldering & Claus-Michael Schlesinger (DNB & Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): "Tweets archivieren in der DNB" (slides)
Twitter und das Twitter-Archiv sind für viele wissenschaftliche Disziplinen eine wichtige Forschungsquelle. Mit der Übernahme durch ein Investorenkonsortium ist die Plattform in Turbulenzen geraten. Twitter hat bereits mit dem Umbau der Plattform begonnen und weitere Änderungen sind zu erwarten. Nutzende haben sich in mehreren Wellen von Twitter distanziert oder ihre Accounts gelöscht. Aufgrund dieser Entwicklungen erscheint der wissenschaftliche Zugriff zunehmend unsicher. Aus kulturgeschichtlicher und archivarischer Sicht ist es dringend erforderlich, wenigstens einen Teil des Twitter-Archivs zu sichern und zu bewahren. Deshalb ruft eine Initiative aus dem Science Data Center for Literature und der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek zu einer konzertierten Aktion zum Herunterladen möglichst aller deutschsprachigen Tweets auf. Wir beschreiben die gemeinsame Initiative und den aktuellen Stand und stellen einige Punkte hinsichtlich der weiteren Perspektiven für die fortgesetzte Archivierung und künftige Bereitstellung zur Diskussion.
Show & Tell IX (23.06.)
Katrin Weller (GESIS / CAIS): "Data Sharing in Social Media Research: Insights to Researchers' Practices and Challenges" (slides)
Social media data can help to identify attitudes and opinions, behaviour, and characteristics of human users of digital technologies. Development of best practices is impacted by the changing nature of social media platforms and users. The talk presents some researchers‘ practices and experiences in data sharing as well as legal, ethical and archival challenges.
Please register here for the zoom room (on selected Fridays at 11:00 a.m. - preferably with an institutional address, the link will be sent shortly before): https://adwmainz.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwld-2qrjspHdOyIg3wjmEIRxYezQAVZ7Jm
The series is dedicated to tools in the field of social media research and wants to highlight best practices of selected projects. In addition to pragmatic solutions and technical possibilities (interfaces, repositories, metadata standards, interoperability ...), the focus is also on ethical and legal challenges (e.g. personal rights and copyrights) in the sustainable, secure and critical handling of this data (code and data literacy, FAIR & CARE principles). Last but not least, we would like to invite you to discuss interdisciplinary research approaches and teaching methods that strain traditional and subject-specific frameworks and tools.
The first talks and discussions of the Show & Tell series took place in the summer term 2022 on 'Twitter Tools', 'Social Media Corpora' and 'Multimodal Data'. In autumn/winter 2022/23 we dealt with 'Reddit Data', 'Memes, Platform Data, and Computer Vision' as well as 'Social Bots' and their detection. The focus of the series was on interfaces and customized tools for collecting, linking and analysing. The aim was to exhaust APIs such as terms of use and to identify intersections between the participating consortia and data communities.
A cooperation series of
BERD@NFDI – Consortium for Business, Economic and Related Data
KonsortSWD – Consortium for the Social, Behavioral, Educational and Economic Sciences
NFDI4Culture – Consortium for research data of tangible and intangible cultural assets
Text+ – Consortium for text- and language-based research data
If you are interested in presenting and discussing your project, repository or research project (probably in the coming semesters), please contact us with a short proposal for a contribution (title, links and a short abstract of three to four lines).
coordination: christoph.eggersgluess (at) uni-marburg.de
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This year, the 14th Edirom Summer School (ESS) took place from 31 May to 2 June 2023, in Paderborn. It had to be brought forward and shortened, because the joint conference of MEI and TEI entitled "Encoding cultures" will take place in Paderborn on the traditional September date.
In order not to cancel the ESS, it was held in the week after Pentecost, which complemented the traditional reading week at the University of Paderborn. It was necessary to move and shorten the ESS, because the organisational team of the joint conference and the circle of lecturers of the ESS overlap considerably. It was therefore decided to hold the ESS this time – in a nutshell – with only one course per day and to advertise all courses for beginners. The concept worked: Within a short period of time, the introductory courses on MEI and Edirom were fully booked with 20 participants each, and the TEI course could only be booked until the end because it was possible to acquire a second team of lecturers. Many participants booked all three days, but some also deliberately booked a single course. The atmosphere was – as always at the ESS – very good: interested participants and ambitious lecturers complemented each other well, especially since there was enough opportunity to answer individual questions during the courses and breaks. We would like to thank Text+ and NFDI4Culture for their financial support, all lecturers (exclusively members of the Virtueller Forschungsverbund Edirom, ViFE) for their willingness and especially Dennis Ried M. A. for the excellent organization.
The ViFE team is looking forward to seeing you again in September in Paderborn at "Encoding cultures" – the first ever joint conference of the TEI and MEI communities.
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Within the NFDI4Culture consortium, Task Area 4 (TA 4) is responsible for the domain of data publication and availability. In order to determine the current state of the community and to query any needs, the first forum was held on March 12, 2021. For this purpose, operators of already established repositories that offer their services independently of institutions in the field of material and immaterial cultural heritage were specifically invited. A total of 38 participants from 16 institutions took part in the event. In order to become familiar with the repository providers, the forum focused on the presentation of the respective offers and services with special attention to their problems and challenges. Furthermore, the participants were asked about their expectations regarding the collaboration with NFDI4Culture.
For this purpose, members of other Task Areas of the consortium also participated and presented their planned services, which are strongly linked to the area of data publication and archiving. On the one hand, Task Area 2 (Standards, Data Quality and Curation) presented the planned FAIR consulting agency as well as the plans for establishing guidelines for data quality management. When establishing and optimising standards, it is crucial that all data producers, data users, and data providers, such as repository providers, are involved. On the other hand, Task Area 3 (Research Tools and Data Services) informed about the work on the registry, which aims to provide an overview of research tools and data services for the cultural community. The goal is to register software and repositories based on the "OntoSoft" ontology to make them available for researchers. First entries in the registry will be tested with the services of the institutions involved in TA 4.
Based on the presentations, the final discussion summarised central aspects of the collaboration between TA 4 and the repository providers. These are: sustainable operating and business models, technical implementations of special functions, handling of very heterogeneous data and objects, growing demands of subject communities and their information literacy, data curation and quality assurance, licensing issues, certifications, and reuse or linkage with external resources. The participants hope that the collaboration with NFDI4Culture will provide them with support in community networking, for example through information events, providing an overview of existing offerings, and consultation on topics such as certification, data standards, data exchange, and long-term preservation.
Since long-term preservation and certification of repositories were of particular interest, follow-up events on these topics will take place in 2021.
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On 28 January 2022, the digital kick-off event for establishing a Performing Arts Forum in the GND took place, which was jointly organised by the task area "Standards, Data Quality and Curation" (Task Area 2), the working group ARCHIV of the Society for Theatre Studies, the German National Library (DNB), the Specialist Information Service for performing arts (FID DK), the Institute for Theatre Studies at the University of Leipzig, the Theatre Museum Düsseldorf and the Berlin State Library. The Integrated Authority File (GND) is managed by the German National Library (DNB) and is intended to enable research institutions as well as archives, collections and museums to reference entities such as persons, institutions, geographic information, work titles and subject-specific terms (keywords) in a permanent and unique manner.
After welcoming almost 100 participants, the introduction to the topic focused on how the performing arts community could contribute to expanding the cultural segment of the GND. For this purpose, it was particularly important to ask for the community‘s specific needs and wishes.
In the course of the event, the topic of indexing event data in the GND was examined from different perspectives. First, Patrick Primavesi (Leipzig University) and Alexandra Portmann (University of Bern) explained how the change in understanding of theatre and its corresponding practices over time has affected the metadata as well as the standardisation of terms such as staging and production. This led to the question of how flexible a data model needs to be in order to use it for documenting such processes in a meaningful way? Michaela Scheibe and Friederike Willasch (both Berlin State Library) then presented common data models for recording event announcements, using the example of a playbill as a manifestation in the Union Catalogue to highlight their limitations. Another aspect of the indexing process for event data was presented by Julia Beck and Franziska Voß (both Frankfurt University Library) from the Specialist Information Service Performing Arts (FID DK). Here, heterogeneous data from different sources are aggregated, modelled and, if necessary, enriched in order to offer a more structured starting point for searches. Authority files play an essential role in linking the different data holdings within the FID DK and make it possible to generate networks that had not yet been visible when the data was collected in the individual institutions. The last and missing perspective from the GND was presented by Renate Behrens and Chantal Köppl (both from the Standardisation Unit at the DNB). The presentations explained different possibilities and approaches on how the performing arts community can actively participate by indexing event data in the GND.
Following the lectures, breakout sessions provided room to discuss how the exchange between collection and research can be improved in the future, as well as which authority files and structures would be required for bothe areas.
Looking back to this successful opening event, it became clear that there is an immense need, yet at the same time also a great willingness among the forum participants to collaborate in the future. The exchange will continue on 16th May 2022 through the workshop "Using the GND" with specific use cases. Future plans also include regular meetings in order to develop data models for the performing arts, linking the community to the GND by forming interest groups, developing and setting up a staging or production database, and stronger networking between artists, producing institutions as well as committees and associations.
The detailed report and materials from the event can be found on the website of the AG Archiv.
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CollAna is a digital tool (a collation tool) that allows a quick and reliable comparison of printed music editions that at first glance appear to have been produced with identical print media (printing plates, lithographs, type printing, etc.), but which in a detailed comparison (collation) turn out to be variant print editions. In the 1940s, Shakespeare researchers developed an apparatus for comparing editions that used a complicated illumination process with the aid of mirrors to superimpose the pages of two printed copies in such a way that interventions in the plates were easily recognisable. The method patented by Charlton Hinman ("Hinman Collator") inspired the development of a music-related tool that allows the electronic comparison of multiple copies of historical printing plates, but can also be used in modern music notation in correction processes.
From August 2022 to December 2022, the CollAna tool was further developed within the framework of NFDI4Culture – Flex Funds. The work was supported by two WHB positions, one with a weekly working time of 9.5 hours from August 1, 2022 and a second with a weekly working time of 19 hours from August 22, 2022.
The main objective was to improve, optimise and future-proof the tool. Various measures were taken to achieve this, including updating all libraries, including the Angular framework, to ensure that CollAna remains compatible with the latest technologies in the future.
In addition to these measures, the source code of the tool was documented. Documenting the source code gives developers a deeper insight into how CollAna works and makes it easier for them to work on new features or bug fixes. The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/Edirom/CollAna as OpensSource.
A help page has been created to make it easier for users to use CollAna. The help page includes a video tutorial and written instructions on how to use the tool. The video tutorial guides users step by step through the various functions and options of CollAna. It shows how to upload different versions of a piece of music, compare them and analyse them. The help page can be found at https://collana.edirom.de/help.
In the course of numerous tests, various errors were discovered and documented. However, due to time constraints, not all identified errors could be fixed.
However, despite the difficulties in finding suitable people for the WHB positions, which led to delays in the implementation of the goals, most of the set goals were achieved and CollAna is now more stable and easier to use.
I would like to express my gratitude to NFDI4Culture Flex Funds for their support and funding in the further development of CollAna. I hope that the CollAna tool will find favour not only with musicologists, but also in other fields such as literary studies and art history. The ability to compare and analyse different versions of texts or works of art can provide valuable insights and offer new insights into these fields.
Author: Anastasia Wawilow (University Paderborn)
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Lecture Series: “Show and Tell - Social Media Data in Research Practice”
in cooperation with NFDI4Culture, KonsortSWD and Text+ as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI)
On 13 May, the working group "Social Media-Daten", initiated by NFDI4Culture in cooperation with KonsortSWD and Text+ as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI), met for the first public event of its lecture series. It kicked off with presentations by Carolin Gerlitz (Digital Media and Methods, Universität Siegen) and Johannes Breuer (GESIS, Köln / CAIS, Bochum). In short inputs, they presented software and interfaces for collecting and analysing data sets. The speakers introduced their research with TCAT, Jupyter notebooks, Git and the analysis of Twitter data with R. The short presentations were followed by a lively discussion among the 80 or so participants on the data analysis, other plattforms and further projects.
The lecture series "Show and Tell - Social Media Data in Research Practice" is dedicated to the tools in the field of social media research. In each zoom hour short input talks should aim to highlight best practices and selected research projects. In addition to pragmatic solutions and technical possibilities (software, interfaces, repositories, metadata standards, interoperability...), points of focus will lie on ethical and legal barriers (personal and individual rights, copyrights) in the creation and evaluation of data sets and corpora, as well as the sustainable, secure and critical handling of them (code and data literacy, FAIR & CARE). Last but not least, we would like to invite you to discuss interdisciplinary research approaches and teaching methods that stress both traditional and subject-specific frameworks and tools. We met on 13 May on the topic of 'Twitter Tools'. Further dates will follow on 10 June ('Sprachkorpora') and 1 July ('Immer Ärger mit den Bildern').
https://nfdi4culture.de/news-events/events/twitter-tools-daten-sammeln-aufbereiten-analysieren.html
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The task area Data Publication and Availability (Task Area 4) of the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage hosted their fifth event, an open online forum on the topic "Persistent Identifiers" (PIDs), on 17th November 2022, 9am - 2.30pm. It focused particularly on the question which types of persistent identifiers are suitable for repositories, data services or image galleries and how we can establish transparency for users and among infrastructure services within the Culture community.
A persistent identifier is a permanent and unique reference to a digital resource, thereby making it findable and citable. As there are different methods for referencing digital objects and resources, external service providers and initiatives specialising in permanent identification for digital research data and outputs presented their solutions in keynote lectures. Participants representing research, GLAM and infrastructure facilities took the opportunity to ask specific questions and to discuss the application and provision of PIDs in humanities and cultural studies.
After the two Co-Spokespersons Dr Maria Effinger and Dr Jens Bove opened the event, Robert Ulrich (KIT) gave an introduction on persistent identifiers and re3data, the registry of research data repositories. Persistent identifiers play an important role throughout the entire research data cycle, which explains the wide range of PIDs. However, the challenge for all of them is to enable unique and sustainable references to (digital and physical) objects as well as their interoperable use. Especially the combination of different identifiers creates additional value, e.g. DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for works, ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) for persons and ROR (Research Organization Registry) for institutions. re3data is a generic registry of research data repositories, which was created in a collaborative effort by an international working group and is managed by DataCite. An international team of editors assists with indexing repositories in re3data and reviews metadata as well as the implementation of the FAIR principles.
Afterwards, Paul Vierkant talked about the non-profit organisation DataCite, an international consortium with the goal to provide easier access to scientific data and to increase its citability. It focuses on the use of DOIs to uniquely reference (digital or physical) resources and making them discoverable in different repositories. A metadata schema with partially controlled values ensures that the relation between research data and publication remains traceable and that the data can be found via search engines. One such PIDs search service is DataCite Commons, which aggregates search results via the use of DOI, ROR and ORCID.
Another international consortium providing PID services for digital objects is ePIC, which was introduced by Hon. Prof Dr Philipp Wieder (GWDG). To ensure funding and infrastructure and be able to respond directly to research needs, its services are carried by large consortia. The so-called ePIC ID, like the DOI, is based on an international handle system that contains semantic information. For the publication of research data, a persistent ID can be created via a web form. The generated identifiers are machine-readable and can be retrieved via REST API. The corresponding working group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is currently looking into standardising metadata for PIDs.
Making digital objects permanently citable can also be achieved with the URN Service (Uniform Resource Name) of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library), which Uta Ackermann and Stephanie Palek presented. URNs for digital objects are closed units, as far as content is concerned, that are being archived for the long term. The advantage of this identifier is the link to the corresponding metadata located in the library catalogue. The DNB's legally defined collection mandate stipulates that all works in the form of text, image and sound must be handed in as legal deposits - this also includes digital publications. For this purpose, the DNB assigns static URNs that cannot be changed afterwards. Partner institutions, such as universities and publishers, can also assign URNs independently. However, these are dynamic as they can be changed under certain circumstances. In this case, the identifier's persistence strongly depends on the reliability of the respective institution. As several URLs can be hidden behind a dynamic URN, the DNB offers a URN resolver service.
Dr Janete Saldanha Bach (GESIS) then introduced the PID service da|ra by KonsortSWD. The consortium is part of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and develops services for research with data from social, behavioural, educational and economic sciences. In cooperation with the ZBW, GESIS operates the non-commercial registration agency da|ra to make social science research data permanently identifiable and available through DOIs. As PIDs usually refer to the entire digital object, it is difficult for researchers to directly cite individual parts of a data set. Therefore, it is possible to register variable PIDs in order to reference sub-elements and different levels of a data set. For this purpose, the service is being extended to ePIC's handle standard and uses DataCite's metadata standard. Another important feature is bulk processing for the registration of larger amounts of data.
Concluding the keynote lectures, Dr Melanie Gruß (Institute of Theatre Studies, Leipzig University) and Dr Desiree Mayer (SLUB Dresden) presented the significance of authority data in connection with PIDs. Authority data are structured data sets that are set up according to a set of rules and are scientifically verified. They have an unchangeable ID and are created for persons, corporate bodies, geographic names, events, concepts and works. It is recommended to use authority data curated and offered by national libraries. If research data publications include authority data, especially subject headings, in their metadata, these can be linked, thereby making the research output findable via its content.
The open plenary discussion that followed gave not only room for questions referring to the presentations, but further provided an opportunity to discuss issues and challenges around persistent identifiers. Topics included:
Use of several PIDs for a single object Permanent referencing of buildings and their components Transparency within the community about the PIDs used Experience with identifiers in relation to name referencing Dealing with changes in metadata due to new research findings Use of PIDs for different data types
The forum revealed that, depending on the need, there are already well-functioning digital solutions for permanently identifying, preserving and locating research data, objects and results. However, further action is needed to promote standardisation and dissemination of PIDs for research data and to enable research according to the FAIR principles. The strong interest in this particular subject was impressive and we would like to express our sincere thanks for the lively participation.
The minutes, including detailed information on the keynote lectures and the plenary discussion, as well as the released presentation slides can be found here. The slides on DataCite are also published on Zenodo.
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The FAIR principles are fundamental to good research data management. To help researchers apply the principles, several tools for assessing the FAIRness of data are already available (for an overview, see https://fairassist.org/#!/).
However, from the point of view of the cultural heritage disciplines, we found several aspects missing in these existing tools: on the one hand, they are usually quite generic and intended for all sciences and disciplines; on the other hand, the checks usually don't give concrete solutions how to improve the quality of a a certain data set. Additionally, research projects on tangible and intangible cultural heritage often face very specific situations due to work with different data formats, combined with legal and ethical challenges. A generic "ticking off" of the FAIR principles is therefore hardly possible; rather, an individual solution for the implementation of the FAIR principles is usually needed, which ideally also includes a personal discussion with experts.
Therefore, the FAIR self-check of NFDI4Culture is adapted to data from the cultural heritage sector. Links to the Guideline for a FAIR Cultural Studies Research Data Management (in German) provide more in-depth explanations and recommendations. As a result, our check does not offer a seemingly objective assessment, since the individual situation of each research project cannot be captured in form of percentages or traffic light colors. Instead, our questionnaire is intended to encourage reflection on one's own handling of research data and to point out where there are opportunities for improving data quality.
Another special feature of the FAIR Check is the integrated option to contact the NFDI4Culture Helpdesk directly with the results and questions that came up, in order to clarify specific problems in a face-to-face conversation.
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Last week, not only the many people from the NFDI4Culture network were able to look forward to a reunion at the Culture Community Plenary live in colour, but the Culture Information Portal also appeared in new clothes.
Version 1.6 of the portal was published on 28 March 2023. Thanks to a redesigned navigation and a new page structure, users have intuitive access to the portal's content and can obtain specific information about the consortium's work.
Instead of an extensive drop-down menu, a streamlined navigation and new overview pages on thematically grouped services and resources as well as the structure of NFDI4Culture offer improved user guidance. On detailed pages, users can find more in-depth information on individual services, such as the forums important for community exchange, the Flex Funds in the area of research funding and technical services such as Semantic Kompakkt, Wikibase4Research or RADAR4Culture. The steadily growing number of services and resources of the consortium will be integrated into this new structure in a continuous process.
A particularly important step for the further development of the portal as a central information point for the culture communities is the integration of the Registry for Software & Dataservices, which has now appeared in a first version with a comprehensive list of software used in the research communities of NFDI4Culture.
The new release was possible due to a close and very fruitful cooperation between the portal team, the registry team and all task areas which provided valuable input and feedback along the refactoring process. Special thanks goes to our NFDI4Culture colleagues Lozana Rossenova and Sarah Pittroff who continuously accompagnied the refactoring from a UX specialist perspective.
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2022 will be the first year of the NFDI4Culture Music Award, which recognises projects or undertakings in the field of music and musicology that contribute in a special way to the goals in the consortium's working programme. The award is given in two categories. In Category 1, qualification work from all music-related subject areas completed in 2021/22 could be submitted. In category 2, projects of various kinds by cultural workers and academics from all music-related disciplines could be submitted. The winners are Frauke Reglind Pirk (Category 1) and Ralf Martin Jäger, Michael Kaiser and Sven Gronemeyer from the project 'Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae' (Category 2).
The jury, consisting of representatives from NFDI4Culture, the Society for Music Research (GfM), the German Music Council and the Centre for Music - Edition - Media (ZenMEM), shortlisted the best projects from the submissions received. The two winners have now been selected and will receive the NFDI4Culture Music Award 2022. The award is linked to project funds of up to €1,500 and €3,000 respectively, which can be used to finance billable expenses that contribute to the goals of NFDI4Culture, such as travel costs, publication costs or expenses for the implementation of project-related workshops.
The award-winning projects will be presented to the public at the NFDI4Culture Plenary 2023 (29-31 March 2023) at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz.
For Dörte Schmidt, spokesperson of the Advisory Council of NFDI4Culture, the award for the community of music researchers "creates an anchoring of the infrastructures in the communities that generate and deal with these data. Data infrastructures need to be developed collaboratively to meet needs, so in the field of arts and culture they need the connection of subject sciences and the cultural landscape." Kathrin Kirsch, representative of the Society for Music Research on the Steering Board, sees the active engagement with the goals and the already existing offerings of NFDI4Culture as particularly positive and welcomed the diversity of the submissions, which ranged "from song text editions, to music analysis of mensurally notated vocal polyphony around 1500, to modern electronic dance music and the development of digital tools, but also to projects for networking and communicating digital music topics." In the process, "very concrete thoughts about the sustainability, mediation and implementation of many helpful developments also played a role. That's exactly what we want to promote and support."
Award winner category 1:
Frauke Reglind Pirk (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) is awarded for her Master's thesis (2021) 'Conception and prototypical development of an oXygen-based framework for the edition of Ottoman song texts'. The work, which is supported by a needs-oriented user survey in guided interviews, is technically concerned with the development of the possibility to edit song texts in XML in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. One question is how such tools can be successfully implemented in projects that originally worked primarily in analogue, in order to identify and remove possible hurdles.
Prize winner category 2:
Ralf Martin Jäger (WWU Münster), Michael Kaiser and Sven Gronemeyer (Max Weber Stiftung Bonn) receive the award for their inter-consortial networking workshop 'Critical Music and Text Edition of Ottoman Art Music'. The aim of the proposed workshop is to place the 'Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae' (CMO) project at the centre of an inter-consortial discussion between the NFDI4Culture and Text+ consortia in order to identify synergies and common goals and to develop strategies. The CMO project is particularly suitable for this purpose, as it includes tangible and intangible cultural assets as well as instrumental and vocal music, poetry and performative aspects, thus representing a cross-section of both consortia.
The official press release can be found here.
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NFDI4Culture aims to establish a research data infrastructure that meets the demands of the fields of art and media, architecture, music and performing arts. In our next forum on 15th September 2021, we would like to specify the needs of the academic communities in order to address these topics over the next four years. To achieve this, we require actual examples from your everyday research and would therefore like to invite you to share your experiences and approaches regarding sustainable preservation and long-term availability of research results.
We welcome participants to present their individual experiences and processes when it comes to publishing and archiving research data, based on real use cases, whatever stages they are at. Every project is unique! What were your experiences, e.g. in the application phase, during or after completion of a research project? What went well, where do you still see challenges and problems? We will look at each use case during the forum and are happy to discuss complex cases in more detail on an individual basis later on. Your contributions will help us to improve and expand existing services, especially for specific subject areas.
Please submit your use cases (max. 10 min) which you would like to present at the virtual forum on 15th September 2021 to Eva Bodenschatz, eva.bodenschatz[at]slub-dresden.de, by 6th August 2021.
We are looking forward to receiving your contributions. Please don’t hesitate to contact us should you have any further questions!
Team Data Publication and Availability (Task Area 4) of the Saxon State and University Library Dresden, Heidelberg University Library and FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure
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As announced, the second public community forum „(Further) development of Research Tools & Data Services in NFDI4Culture“ will take place on Thursday, 15th September 2022, 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. Like last year, the aim of this virtual forum event is to identify the needs of the community regarding research tools and data services in collaboration with you as researchers and members of the different academic societies. You are welcome to submit proposals for funding which will be discussed in plenary.
Proposals can refer to, for instance, the (further) development of features/ functionalities, improving interoperability of software or services, API implementation, porting to current technologies, code refactoring, documentation, designing or setting up a test environment, interlinking of tools and/ or services. Please note that measures which have already been funded have the opportunity to reapply. Within the task area "Research Tools and Data Services" a total of 120,000 EUR is available in 2023 for the realisation of the proposed projects.
Please submit your proposals by 29th August 2022.
The subimission is closed. Thank you for your participation.
In order for us to be able to discuss and evaluate the submissions in good manner, please provide as many concrete information as possible and outline the work packages of your proposal as planned, including expected cost and timeframe. Please note that proposals will need to be realised within 2023.
The schedule for the forum event as well as for the subsequent evaluation and decision procedure will be as follows:
29th August 2022: Submission deadline 1st September 2022: Submission review, programme announcement 15th September 2022, 9 a.m. – 12 p.m.: Community forum Last quarter of 2022: Analysis and selection of measures as well as decision by the Culture Steering Board, preparation for granting of funds for 2023
If you do not have a funding proposal but would like to participate in the forum discussion, we kindly ask you to register for the event by 14th September 2022.
You will then receive an email including all relevant information at the beginning of September. You can find more information about the event here.
We are very much looking forward to getting in touch and collaborating with you!
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As consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage within the National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI), NFDI4Culture represents the diversity of architecture, art, music, theatre, film and media studies. For these disciplines, FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, an important stakeholder within the consortium, now offers the new research data publication service RADAR4Culture. Based on the established research data repository RADAR, the service gets launched at the same time as its “sibling“ RADAR4Chem, which is tailored for the academic community in the field of chemistry.
RADAR, run by FIZ Karlsruhe for several years, is an excellent and cross-discplinary service for organisational management as well as for sustainable archiving and publication of research data for academic institutions. With RADAR4Culture, the Leibniz Institute now offers a repository for researchers within the NFDI4Culture community which is not only easy to use and secure, yet research data can also be published free of charge and independent of institutional affiliation. Like RADAR, RADAR4Culture enables the publication of any data type and format, thereby offering various application scenarios.
Dr Felix Bach, head of the department Research Data at FIZ Karlsruhe, states: “RADAR4Chem and RADAR4Culture expand the range of options for FAIR data publication in the disciplines of chemistry and the cultural sciences and humanities within the framework of the NFDI. Thus, we provide scientists with a low-threshold solution that enables them to publish digital data together with descriptive metadata and Digital Object Identifiers (DOI)."
The NFDI4Culture task area “Data Publication and Data Availability“, jointly led by Heidelberg University Library and the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) Dresden in collaboration with FIZ Karlsruhe, supports both repository providers and researchers of all disciplines and communities represented within NFDI4Culture regarding the storage, publication and long-term archiving of research outputs. Many publication services for research data tend to be subject-specific and only for institutional use. RADAR4Culture aims to close these gaps and to complement the existing repository portfolio by offering a service which meets the needs of the cultural heritage sector.
Dr Maria Effinger, Co-Spokersperson for the NFDI4Culture task area “Data Publication and Data Availability“ and director of the department Publication Services at Heidelberg University Library, explains: “RADAR4Culture fills a void in the current repository landscape of our research data infrastructure. We are pleased to offer this RADAR service to the communities ranging from architecture, art and musicology to theatre, film and media studies. Being a generic service, RADAR therefore is a great example for a basic service operating across consortia.“
Beyond the boundaries of the individual consortia, the NFDI are highly committed to take the needs of researchers into account. Thus, also existing, well-established infrastructures and services are being accumulated, and provided to the communities after they have been made interoperable, thereby making data collections reusable and easy to share.
In this regard, Prof Dr York Sure-Vetter, director of NFDI, points out: “To make data treasures availabe on a broad scale, research data management needs to consider the work of researchers themselves. The services RADAR4Chem and RADAR4Culture enable academics to share (meta)data with their communities and ensure their reusability. Both data repositories thus are an essential step towards a sustainable research data management and a crucial milestone for NFDI.“
Anyone interested in RADAR4Culture can find more information in the press release by FIZ Karlsruhe, on the information page for researchers or by contacting NFDI4Culture.
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