This document summarizes a presentation on using digital audio archives to promote performance studies. It discusses two projects - the Baudelaire Song Project and Visualising Voice. The Baudelaire Song Project analyzes French art songs set to the poetry of Baudelaire over four years with AHRC funding. Visualising Voice uses a Europeana Research Award to create a public-facing web interface for digital audio analysis. Both projects use open-access digital archives but face challenges regarding language barriers, audio quality, copyright and data storage.

1. Astronomers, by the Master of the
Mandeville Travels
1st quarter of the 15th century
British Library Add. 24189, Public Domain
Cultural Heritage Data for Research:
A Europeana Research Panel
Data Quality
Presenter: Marjolein de Vos (@marjolein442) | DH Benelux 2017

2. Title here
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Title here
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Europeana Essentials
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Data quality in Europeana
Europeana Essentials
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Designing extensive EDM records: the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg case study
CC BY-SA
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: A Europeana Research Panel
CC BY-SA

3. • Legacy data that is not
compliant anymore
• Images that are too
small (less than 400 px)
• Broken links
• Poor metadata
• Unique titles and
useful descriptions
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science: students
looking through microscopes in a laboratory
Ca. 1933, The Wellcome Library
United Kingdom, CC BY
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: A Europeana Research Panel
CC BY-SA
Issues

4. Cultural Heritage Data for Research: A Europeana Research Panel
CC BY-SA
Issues

5. • Dataset analysis
• Data Quality Breaks
• Data Quality Planning with
partners
• Data Quality Committee
Woman Reading a Letter | Johannes Vermeer
1663, Rijksmuseum
Netherlands, Public Domain
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: A Europeana Research Panel
CC BY-SA
Actions

6. • More meaningful metadata (either from the source or
cleaning)
• Increased amount of conceptual entities and agents
• More use of dereferenceable LOD vocabularies (f.e. Getty
AAT)
• Use of language attributes for literal values
• More spatial information
• Normalization of dates
Paar gouden 'wisselbellen', Noord-Beveland, 1880-1890
1880/1890, Nederlands Openluchtmuseum
Netherlands, CC BY
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: A Europeana Research Panel
CC BY-SA
Solutions

7. Title here
CC BY-SA
Title here
CC BY-SA
Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SA
Europeana Research
Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SA
● Data requirements for
Europeana Research -
addendum to the Publishing
Guide
● Studies done on researcher
needs
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: A Europeana Research Panel
CC BY-SA
f. 71, displayed as an open bifolium with f. 70v: diagrams
and sketches from BL Arundel 263 | Leonardo da Vinci
1478 - 1518, British Library
United Kingdom, Public Domain

8. 4 July 2017

9. Franciska de Jong
CLARIN ERIC
Europeana & research infrastructures
Utrecht, DH Benelux, July 2017

10. • Europeana Research - Objectives &
Achievements
• Relationship to other research networks and
infrastructures (DARIAH, CLARIN, EHRI,
Parthenos etc.)
• Researcher needs and community engagement
• Data aggregation and quality improvement
• Using Europeana / CH data in research
CLARIN 2

11. • Europeana Research - Objectives &
Achievements
• Relationship to other research networks and
infrastructures (DARIAH, CLARIN, EHRI,
Parthenos etc.)
• Researcher needs and community engagement
• Data aggregation and quality improvement
• Using Europeana / CH data in research
CLARIN 3

12. • Europeana Research - Objectives &
Achievements
• Relationship to other research networks and
infrastructures (DARIAH, CLARIN, EHRI,
Parthenos etc.)
• Researcher needs and community engagement
• Data aggregation and quality improvement
• Using Europeana / CH data in research
CLARIN 4

13. CLARIN in six bullets
• CLARIN is the Common Language Resources and Technology
Infrastructure
• ESFRI ERIC status since 2012, Landmark since 2016
• that provides easy and sustainable access for scholars in the
humanities and social sciences and beyond
• to digital language data (in written, spoken, video or
multimodal form)
• and advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate,
analyse or combine them, wherever they are located
• through a single sign-on online environment.
5

14. CLARIN:
Infrastructural support
for the study and use of
language as social and cultural data
6

15. CLARIN and data science
• Analytics for text and speech data
• Europe’s multilinguality as a basis for comparative
research of societal and cultural phenomena, and in
particular those that are reflected in language use;
some examples:
- Migration patterns
- Intellectual history
- Language variation across period and region
- Parliamentary discourse
• From tools for the study of lexical units to big data
analysis tools
7

16. Gaps and steps 1 (lessons DSI-project)
• CLARIN: harvester of metadata that can be explored through
the so-called VLO
• Interoperability with CLARIN tools sometime requires
metadata conversion
• Weak link between RI and Europeana: technical metadata
- Media type
- File size
• Step to be completed: unifying Europeana’s metadata sources
and making all relevant information available by means of the
widely adopted OAI-PMH protocol.
CLARIN 8

17. Gaps and steps 2 (lessons DSI-project)
• Researchers’ need:
direct access to machine processable data
• Obstacle:
providers of data all give access in specific ways;
or rather than access they offer viewers
CLARIN 9

18. see you @
www.clarin.eu
&
f.m.g.dejong@uu.nl
10
image by Kyle Bean

19. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Doing Research with Online European
Cultural Heritage
Dr. Dana Mustata
University of Groningen, NL
DH Benelux 2017, Utrecht

20. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
www.europeana.eu

21. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
www.euscreen.eu

22. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Challenges of Doing Research with Online Archives
› The online source becomes displaced from physical archives and
the archiving practices of archive institutions;
› The principles of origin and provenance that have been at the
core of archiving practices become obscured by online
infrastructures;
› The ‘authenticity’ of the source is further questioned and
challenged by the lack of approaches to assess online sources;
› Standardization of online sources conceals the different archiving
cultures of origins;

23. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Doing History Online?

24. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
The Analogue Historian in a Digital World
Results of user testing with media researchers in EUscreen (focus
group meetings; face-to-face interviews; survey among the
European Television History Network) revealed that:
- Online archival material is mostly used for illustration purposes;
- Research practices take place outside the web platforms and
preferably through archival institutions
- Most preferred online practices of TV historians include text-
based practice: searching; accessing metadata; saving search
results; embedding.
- Interest in securing links of cooperation with other researchers
working on similar research topics (e.g. expert communities)

25. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Expectations of metadata & contextual information for online archival
content*
› where a copy is stored in an archive/archival number; written
sources on programming and production; links to related
materials and information; keywords; examples of teaching
assignments; biographical information & full credits; background
information on programmes and channels; running time; original
vs. adaptation; funding; info on scheduling and audiences; rating
information; press & other reviews; publicity material; channel of
transmission; info on circulation (who else bought/aired a
programme); stills; relation of one programme to other
programmes; information on TV history in European countries;
original broadcasting time
*Results of a survey carried out among ETHN researchers with
the aim of optimizing the Euscree portal for research use.

26. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Limitations experienced/expected of online archival materials*
› IPR issues; incomplete programmes; exclusion of advertisements, trails,
teasers; few contextualization elements; language barriers; no full runs of
broadcasting magazines online; not enough complete material for longer
periods; no coverage of multichannel viewing environments; not much
analytical information; poorer quality than in an archives; no programme
context; impossibility to download for offline storage

27. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
‘Metadata is generally 1) too thin and 2) to historically bound, reflecting the interests
of its moment of genesis. Most of my work comes from looking outside the box…’
An ETHN researcher

28. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Access
+
Selection
-

29. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Analogue Research Practices versus Online Archives
› Research practices are outdated for the new online environments
hosting digital sources.
› Research is still guided by ‘analogue’ principles
› How can online archive infrastructures accommodate a new user
profile of the digital historian?

30. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Understanding Online Archive Infrastructures
Archival Text
•Searching
• Assessing result
hits
Archival Text
•Analyzing
metadata
•Analyzing the
item itself
Archival Text
•Saving search
results
•Bookmarking,
etc.
•Using for
illustrative
purposes

31. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Designing Research Online
Horizontal explorative research versus in-depth
knowledge acquisition:
 comparative explorations into macro
histories characterized by historical patterns and
processes versus highly specialized micro histories
Exploratory search versus specific information
retrieval
 bottom-up research design versus top-
down research design
Offline research complements online research

32. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Socio-Logics of Online Archive Infrastructures
In online environments, text and context are co-produced:
 contextualization no longer takes place (just) through metadata
critiques, but through methodological pursuits that help account for
and understand the practices of online archive collections (e.g.
transparency is key)
 the originating analogue context of online archives becomes
retranslated through content selection strategies, search filters &
thematic collections -> collaborative research practices across
countries and fields of expertise are key;
 online histories are constructed at the intersection of different
networks of expertise (academics, archivists, tools, technology
developers, users), which invites socio-constructivist understandings of
the production of historical knowledge;
 knowledge of analogue archives becomes a pre-requisite for online
search practices.

33. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
› Starting from the the premise that
the digital environment becomes a
platform where different players
(historians, archivists, users, etc.) interact
with one another in producing and
narrating history, the challenge of the
historian in the digital age becomes a
deconstructive as much as an
anthropological one, so as to take account
of and reflect on the agencies involved in
the construction of histories online.

34. |Date 29-05-2013
faculty of arts media and journalism studies
Doing History Online
Online historiography as 'social construction’, an interaction between
different actors (historians, archivists), working tools (the web) and
discourses:
 The need to decentralize the view on online archives as objects,
texts, apparatuses of perception or production processes and focus
also on what historians, archivists, tool developers are doing in
relation to online sources.
 The online source becomes a ‘linked environment’ in itself,
connecting one source to other online texts, and mediating
interactions between historians, archivists, users, etc.
 Historical knowledge in the online environment is constituted in
different spaces of expertise, and lends itself best to research
pursued by what Foucault called a 'method of discontinuity’.
 Accounting for these different spaces of practice – through a social-
constructivist approach - can be a way to restore context, origins
and authenticity to the online source.

35. Visualising Voices
Using digital audio archives to promote and
democratise performance studies?
Dr Caroline Ardrey, The University of Birmingham

36. Projects
The Baudelaire Song Project (AHRC-funded 2015 -2019) @baudelaireproj
Visualising Voice (Europeana Research Award, 2017)
• PI: Prof Helen Abbott (Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Co-I: Dr Mylène Dubiau (Musicology, Université Toulouse, Jean-Jaurès)
• External Consultant: Dr Caroline Potter (French Musicology, Kingston University)
• Research Associate: Dr Caroline Ardrey (Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Research Associate: Dr Caroline Ardrey (Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Software Developer: Tom Cowley (Ed tech specialist, Red Circle Software)

37. The Baudelaire Song Project
• 4 years of Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding
• Core team of 3 researchers
• Interdisciplinary – word & music studies
• Database  broad overview of reception of Baudelaire in song
• Analyses  close listening (cf. Nicholas Cook)
• Working with digital sources / resources (audio files)
• Analyses largely dealing with songs in original French
• Strategies for dealing with other languages

38. Visualising Voice

39. Visualising Voice
• Europeana Research Award (6 months)
• 1 researcher (me!) + 1 (main) software developer (non-academic)
• Public-facing focus
• Encourages users to engage with open-access digital archival materials
• Uses digital sources / resources (audio files)
• Simple, web-based interface for digital analysis
• Currently exploring strategies for working with other languages
• Potential for use in a pedagogical environment
https://visualisingvoice.eu

40. Paul Verlaine Arthur Rimbaud
Author: Otto Wegener (1849-1922)
Source: NYPL (CC-PD-Mark)
Author: Étienne Carjat (1828-1906)
Source: NYPL (CC-BY-2.0)

45. Challenges of using digital audio archives
• Public engagement  how to make multilingual material accessible to a
broad / non-specialist audience?
• How to “standardize” the methodology?
• Need to work together with academics from different languages, from
audio analysis, from performance studies and musicology
• Availability of a sufficient / suitable range of audio recordings
• Quality of recordings affects accuracy of output
• Ethical approval needed for user-generated content
• Storage issues – both legal / ethical and in terms of file sizes!
• Working with digital audio materials brings copyright / legal issues

46. https://visualisingvoice.eu
@carolineardrey
@baudelaireproj
Find out more about
Europeana and my research