Partners: Robin Boast (UvA), Jan Hein Hoogstad (UvA), Katja Kwastek (VU), Sabrina Sauer (UvA), Ginette Verstraete (VU)
Additional partners:
How can cultural and governmental data sets (APIs) be transformed into new kinds of collections that are no longer intrinsically linked to the original objects and the institutions in which they are displayed?
This research works towards a large international exhibition where students, scholars, artists, developers, data scientists, and curators collaborately create and display collection based upon publicly available data sets. We aim to involve researchers that work on the 'coding the humanities' platform, but the exhibition is also a possibility to attract others (artist, developers, curators, etc.) to work with and on our platform.
The goal of this exhibition will be to create and display collections that did not exist as such before. This is made possible by the fact that many cultural institutions now make their collections publicly available through so-called API's (Application Programming Interfaces). In the events that we have planned, the participants are encouraged to create and curate their own colllectons. In order to facilitate this project, we will offer workshops, data events, speakers, art installations, and presentations on relationship between technology, art, business, and cultural heritage.
This entirely new kind of exhibition uses coding skills to make an intervention in areas that are crucial to the past, present, and the future of the humanities: politics, literacy, culture, and knowledge production.
There are not only dramatic geographic differences in accessibility to and user skills of ICT but also socio-economic and demographic gaps. Vast societal groups face the problem of digital exclusion. Accessibility to and digital literacy about ICTs determine whether a person is included into economic, social and cultural life, and whether they can participate in decision making processes within the democratic realm. In other words, using and comprehending ICT is about agency and inclusion. With regard to the growing impact of ICT not only on economic productivity but also within the cultural, social and political realm, this exclusion forms a challenge in terms of equality, inclusion and chances of participation.
One area in which the challenge of digital literacy and exclusion is prominent is within humanities research. Academia is increasingly confronted with large amounts of data. In order to turn this data into information and into knowledge, researchers and students need tools that allow to structure, search, correlate, analyze, but most importantly, present and visualize this data.
The same argument also holds for working fields related to the humanities: museums, libraries and archives are challenged to make the huge data sets that result from digitization of the cultural heritage they foster, accessible and understandable for as many people as possible. Despite the opportunities provided by these mass resources, generated in numerous digitization projects, humanities researchers and students are – due to a lack of skills - reluctant to exploit these troves.
Nonetheless, this project is not reducible to a political or didactic agenda. Our primary goal is to show that APIs can lead to new forms of knowledge production. By treating collections primarily as data sets, we believe that the artworks, cultural artifacts, and policy documents can be recontextualized in new and exciting ways. Thereby not only reconfiguring the relation between the collection and the institution in which it is displayed, but also between the institutions amongst each other, their relation to the visitors/user, and finally, the user to the artwork.
This research will serve as a testbed for new forms of collaboration between public and private partners, bringing the humanities into non-academic realms.
The role of the expert (curator or scholar) will be decentralized in the creation, curation, and exhibition of collections. It will generate the creation of new tools which are specifically aimed at humanities scholars and will prove useful to them in their research. It will explore creating new kinds of interfaces in the museum space. This research will also experiment with new types of (crowd) funding.
This research will discover new forms of exhibitions and citizen research. New cultural data set and links between existing data sets and items will be created. Visualisations of many relations between heterogeneous and distributed data sets will lead to new knowledge and new questions. Online projects leave a trace of how a new type of exhibition develops.
Our private partners in this project (Cast Your Art, Weyeser, and Tulip Interactive) are excellently equiped to push this agenda forward, because ...
- visualization
At the same time, governments, municipalities and cultural institutions increasingly share their data openly online. A good example of this development in the field of cultural heritage is our partner in this project the Europeana network. But also in the political field a lot of open data sets wait be explored by dedicated citizens. The skills to compile graspable information from big data sets therefore become more important on the level of politics and social agency. It allows civic movements but also single citizens to understand political and social processes, identify problems and develop solutions – that can be software based.
- 1 post-doc position
- 2 PhD positions
The major deliverable of this research will be the interdisciplenary coding fair, where students, researchers, developers, and business people can come together. The fair will demonstrate results of the research, in the forms of models for new types of collaborative exhibitions and tools and libraries for data acquisition and manipulation.
The Augmenting Masterpieces project of Johanna Barnbeck and Jan Hein Hoogstad investigates interactive ways to experience the physical and digital collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, with the aim to develop a prototype and map interaction scenarios. This research will complement Augmenting Masterpieces in that it also examines the relationship between the user, the tools available, and their experience of the collection.
We will also build on the work of the Virtual Museum Transnational Network (http://www.v-must.net/) and Material Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage (http://mesch-project.eu/).
The project Users as Muse (VU), which explores a changing relationship between museums and their visitors, due to tremendous changes in audience empowerement, especially in an online environment. Consumers become prosumers, but museum institutes are still struggling to cope with the developments in social media and consumer technology.
Additionally, the VU University project Perspective and Perception, which explores how graphical projections commonly used in interactive digital environments influence our perception.
Robin Boast's project Assemblage and Diversity: Working with Incommensurability in Distributed, Emergent Knowledge Networks is also closely related to this research. It creates a network of objects that are normally placed in museums and moves them to locations that are directly relevant to their meaning.
Robin Boast, professor at the University of Amsterdam, has been working in what we now call the Digital Humanities for over 30 years.
Jan Hein Hoogstad, Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam in Cultural Analysis and Comparative Literature, has extensive coding experience and a background that connects programming to the humanities.
Katja Kwastek is a professor in Art History at the VU University in Amsterdam and researches crossroads between art and new media.
Sabrina Sauer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Her research combines approaches from Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies.
Ginette Verstraete, Professor at the VU University, researches the way mobile (location-based) technologies and their applications (such as GPS on iPhones) have transformed mobility through urban space.These sociotechnical transformations raise new substantive issues for the study of movement in cities, but also for a humanities-based study of media usage.