The Google Cultural Institute Platform 1 is a largescale system for ingesting, archiving, organizing, and interacting with digital assets of cultural material. This paper explains the components through which the platform contextualizes individual assets in order to enable storytelling. Contextualization is an inverse problem: given assets that are instances of cultural material, infer their precise context and use that as a way to support the storytelling process. The approach is based on three components: extraction, knowledge, and scale. Extraction is the inference of context from two sources of information: explicitly provided metadata, and automatically extracted features. Knowledge is the use of a large reference fact database for further contextualizing an asset based on its descriptors. And scale, achieved through global selfserve, enables massively expanded coverage of the knowledge database and crowdsource potential for metadata refinement. Together these components sustain a storytelling framework and a compelling user experience that has the potential to become the largest repository of cultural information and coherent narrative in history.
The digitization of primary sources has long emphasized facsimile as the primary goal. We show examples illustrating the shift from facsimile-focused to digitization as data collection, enabling a much broader set of goals: analysis, restoration, narrative construction, and visualization. While facsimile remains an important by-product, digitization as data collection enables new possibilities in digital restoration, context-preserving language translation, detection of change over time, and the construction of high-level narratives that provide a compelling interpretive framework. Each of these examples is made possible by acquiring more data than what may be necessary for facsimile alone, part of a necessary change in the mindset of conservators, curators, and digitization teams.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.