Democratisation of Collections through Digitisation.

@SimonTanner
Democratisation of
Collections through
Digitisation
Simon Tanner
Department of Digital Humanities,
King’s College London
Twitter: @SimonTanner
05/02/2015 01:25 ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 1

Digital Humanities:
the application of digital technology to humanities disciplines
reflection upon the impact of digital media upon humanity
> 50 academics & researchers
~ £2.5 million research income per annum
>5 million digital objects, 130+projects
200+million hits over 5 years: 2009-2013
www.kcl.ac.uk/ddh/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp4y-_VoXdA
Digital Humanities methods for historical analysis of
Irish Immigrants in 19th Century London, England

@SimonTanner@SimonTanner
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/us-art.html
Charging Models & Rights Strategy for Images in Museums

www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html
Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship

www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html
The Balanced Value Impact Model

The purpose of digitisation:
to educate, enlighten & entertain
Memory organisations are where a
community nourishes its
memory, imagination & creativity.
Where it connects with the past
& invents its future.

“Old Bailey Online reaches out to communities, such as family
historians, who are keen to find a personal history, reflected in a
national story... Digital resources both create a new audience, and
reconfigure our analysis to favour the individual.”
Professor Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire
“Digitised resources allow me to discover the hidden lives of
disabled people, who have not traditionally left records of their
lives. I have found disability was discussed by many writers in the
Eighteenth Century and that disabled men and women played
an important role in the social life of the time.”
Dr David Turner, Swansea University
New areas of research enabled

Effective, efficient and world leading

Bringing
collections out
of the dark

Digitising the
Dead Sea Scrolls

Spectral Classification
Use of complete spectrum separates
ink, parchment, backing and background

Bestowing economic & community benefits
In 2008 National Museums Liverpool did a full economic impact assessment.
They found that: "during the Capital of Culture period, 25% of all visitors to Liverpool
visited the Walker Art Gallery, 24% visited the Merseyside Maritime Museum and 15%
visited World Museum, while about 5% of visitors only visited a National Museums
Liverpool venue and no other attraction during their visit.
In total, National Museums Liverpool is reliably estimated to be worth
£115 million to the economy of the Liverpool city region, a spend that supports 2,274
full-time jobs“
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/about/corporate/reports/EIS_summary_2008.pdf

“The Freeze Frame archive is
invaluable in charting changes
in the polar regions. Making the
material available to all will help
with further research into
scientific studies around
global warming and
climate change”
Pen Hadow,
Polar Explorer
Interdisciplinary & collaborative

http://simon-tanner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/when-crowdsourcing-was-called.html
Telecrofting - a tale of Puffins
Shetland Isles Museum and Archives
http://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk/

“You want a massive digital collection: SCAN THE STACKS!...
You agonize over digital metadata and the purity thereof...
And you offer crap access.
If I ask you to talk about your collections,
I know that you will glow as you describe the amazing treasures
you have. When you go for money for digitization projects, you talk up the incredible
cultural value...
But then if I look at the results of those digitization projects,
I find the shittiest websites on the planet.
It’s like a gallery spent all its money buying art and then just stuck the paintings in
supermarket bags and leaned them against the wall.”
Nat Torkington (@gnat) http://bit.ly/rNHMVr
“Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong” 2011
On the other hand...

“Michelle Pickover, curator of manuscripts at the
University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa,
argues that ‘Cyberspace is not an uncontested domain.
The digital medium contains an ideological base – it is a site of struggle.’
The real challenges in collection digitisation in national memory institutions,
she argues, are not technological or technical
but social and political.
Librarians and archivists are ‘agents of social change’ who,
through their appraisal, selection, arrangement and retention of material,
are able to become active participants in the production of social memory,
and who, by the nature of their work, cannot help but
‘privilege certain narratives and silence or marginalise others’
Kahn, R and Tanner, S (2014) Building Futures: The Role of Digital Collections in
Shaping National Identity in Africa (chapter in African Studies in the Digital Age)
Contested Spaces

Discovering
Annotating
Comparing
Referring
Sampling
Illustrating
Representing
Scholarship
From John Unsworth’s Scholarly Primitives

Reason 1: digital humanities digital
research resources are
recognised
Reason 2: digital humanities
enhances the research
environment
Reason 3: digital humanities has impact
3 Reasons to say YES to DH
http://simon-tanner.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/3-reasons-ref2014-was-good-for-digital.html

@SimonTanner
Democratisation of
Collections through
Digitisation
Simon Tanner
Department of Digital Humanities,
King’s College London
Twitter: @SimonTanner
05/02/2015 01:25 ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 22

Democratisation of Collections through Digitisation.

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