At what point does the sheer scale of the available open data itself obstruct openness? Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums are digitising at an increasing pace, and with a growing awareness of the importance of licensing issues and open access. Europeana, long at the forefront of these efforts in the EU context, recently passed the 50millionitem mark in its collections, and other national and international infrastructures are achieving similar milestones. But digitisation and aggregation at this scale mean that modelling richness is in effect often lost. Data heterogeneity across collections, and individual datasets curated to support only certain, very specific, scenarios within them, often combine so that only the very minimal metadata needed for information exchange is available to endusers. Ironically, volume and cataloguing criteria thus potentially combine to put open culture proponents in the position of those intelligence agencies that ‘open’ their miles of archive shelfspace to investigators, but fail to provide an index. Attention at Europeana and similar organisations has accordingly turned recently to adding structure and semantics to digital open data in a way that makes it more usable, transparent, and comprehensible to endusers. The technologies used and the way they are applied vary with organization, domain, and usecase, and include but are not limited to: semantic enrichment and datamining; personalisation features; crowdsourcing and annotation frameworks; and the creation of knowledge graphs. These technologies all have their own particular advantages and limitations, as will be discussed in brief casestudies. In particular, a strong division is evident between datadriven, empirical approaches such as datamining and usercentric technologies such as crowdsourcing and personalisation. In the ideal case, however, these two tendencies converge on the notion of a ‘user community’ a group, it will be argued, that not only ‘uses’ or ‘consumes’ open data, but shapes it, gives it meaning, and endows it with value.

1. An Embarrassment of Riches:
Crowds, Communities, and Curation
in Digital Open Culture
Timothy Hill | EEXCESS 2016
Netherlands, Public Domain
1660 - 1625, Rijksmuseum
Anonymous
Arrival of a Portuguese ship

2. Title here
CC BY-SA
Europeana
Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
CC BY-SA
Europeana Collections homepage
Europeana| CC BY-SA
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture

3. Title here
CC BY-SA
Title here
CC BY-SA
Europeana aggregation infrastructure
Europeana| CC BY-SA
Europeana
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture

4. Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
CC BY-SA
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
Cultural Heritage Aggregation: A Global
Perspective (I)
lDigital Public Library of America (DPLA)

5. Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
CC BY-SA
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
Cultural Heritage Aggregation: A Global
Perspective (II)
lHumanities Network Infrastructure (HuNI)

6. Metadata flattening: sparse records
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture

7. CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
Metadata flattening: three views of inscription Voskos, E28
(Europeana Portal)

8. Metadata flattening: three views of inscription Voskos, E28
(Aggregator)
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture

9. Metadata flattening: three views of inscription Voskos, E28
(Transcription / translation)
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture

10. CC BY-SA
Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
Big Data, Small Data
l“Will the use of digital methods lead to an erosion of our most unique facility in the
humanities, the aptitude for fine-grained and careful interpretive observation?”
l“Humanities scholars make theoretical and practical advances … by forwarding
carefully observed, exquisitely described jewel-box examples. Our small data add
nuance and offer counter-narratives ... The finest contribution of the past several
decades of humanities research has been to broaden, contextualize, and challenge
canonical collections and privileged views. Scholars do this by elevating instances of
neglected or alternate lived experience.”
lBethany Nowviskie, Capacity Through Care
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture

11. CC BY-SA
Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
Data as document(s)
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
Voskos, E38
Subject: Aphrodisia (of Cyprus)
Date: 7
th
- 6
th
century BCE
Title: Aphrodisia's Epigram
Findspot: Amathus, Cyprus
[ … ]

12. CC BY-SA
Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
Data as graph ('things not strings')
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
Voskos, E38
Start: -750
Title: Aphrodisia's Epigram
Stop: - 600
https://test.perio.do/#m63njp6pz
Label: Cypro Archaic I
https://base.europeana.eu/agent/123
Label: Aphrodisia (of Cyprus)
Object Type: Agent
http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/707462
Label: Amathous, Cyprus
Type: Settlement

13. CC BY-SA
Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
Applying Controlled Vocabularies and NER
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
Voskos, E38
Start: -750
Title: Aphrodisia's Epigram
Stop: - 600
https://test.perio.do/#m63njp6pz
Label: Cypro Archaic I
https://base.europeana.eu/agent/123
Label: Aphrodisia (of Cyprus)
Object Type: Agent
http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/707462
Label: Amathous, Cyprus
Type: Settlement
Sex: Female

14. CC BY-SA
Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
User-driven linking (I) – User sets
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
EP112. Deeds of the
Deified Augustus
VC96. Epitaph of
Caracalla
EP631.
In Memoriam for
Livia
Voskos E38.
Aphrodisia's Epigram
Sappho, frag. 94:
“Honestly, I wish I were
dead”
Imperial Epitaphs
Women and Mourning

15. CC BY-SA
Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
User-driven linking (II) – Annotations
CC BY-SA
An Embarrassment of Riches: Crowds, Communities, and Curation in Digital
Open Culture
EP112. Deeds of the
Deified Augustus
VC96. Epitaph of
Caracalla
EP631.
In Memoriam for
Livia
Voskos E38.
Aphrodisia's Epigram
Sappho, frag. 94:
“Honestly, I wish I were
dead”
Imperial Epitaphs
Women and Mourning

16. 28 April 2016
With input slides from
Valentine Charles, Antoine Isaac & Hugo Manguinhas,
Europeana R&D team