Archives, linked data and the digital humanities: increasing access to digitised and born-digital archives via the semantic web

Abstract

Mass digitisation and the exponential growth of born-digital archives over the past two decades have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and archival data being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the Digital Humanities. However, current digitisation approaches fall short of the requirements of digital humanists for structured, integrated, interoperable, and interrogable data. Linked Data provides a viable means of producing such data, creating machine-readable archival data suited to analysis using digital humanities research methods. While a growing body of archival scholarship and praxis has explored Linked Data, its potential to open up digitised and born-digital archives to the Digital Humanities is under-examined. This article approaches Archival Linked Data from the perspective of the Digital Humanities, extrapolating from both archival and digital humanities Linked Data scholarship to identify the benefits to digital humanists of the production and provision of access to Archival Linked Data. It will consider some of the current barriers preventing digital humanists from being able to experience the benefits of Archival Linked Data evidenced, and to fully utilise archives which have been made available digitally. The article argues for increased collaboration between the two disciplines, challenges individuals and institutions to engage with Linked Data, and suggests the incorporation of AI and low-barrier tools such as Wikidata into the Linked Data production workflow in order to scale up the production of Archival Linked Data as a means of increasing access to and utilisation of digitised and born-digital archives.

Frontiers of Transdisciplinary Knowledge Management in Digital Humanities

“…A survey from Hawkins (2022), indicated that the utilization of Linked Data is a promising approach to enhancing the accessibility of digitized and born-digital archives, resulting in the creation of enriched, interoperable, and integrated large-scale archival datasets that can be utilized in various ways (Hawkins, 2022). Presently, the primary focus of Archival Linked Data endeavours is the publication of archival metadata as Linked Data.…”

An investigation of linked data catalogue features in libraries, archives, and museums: a checklist approach

“…URI-based serendipitous discovery. Link-in and link-out linkages to the same URI can be aggregated as a networked relationship for information serendipity (Gracy, 2015;Hawkins, 2021;Hyvönen, 2012;Lemmens, 2020;Niu, 2016) to facilitate the discovery of useful or interesting information by chance or accident (Agarwal, 2015;Erdelez, 1999). By "following one's nose", link-in and link-out linkages can be regarded as semantic pathways to facilitate toURIsm (Baker et al, 2011)-based information navigation across various LD sources.…”

“…As linkages are given semantic relationships explicitly, users' query and navigation can be expanded to encounter relevant information that exceeds expectations, such as related corporate bodies, persons families (CPFs), events, temporal and spatial contexts. Furthermore, link-in and link-out linkages also assemble various perspective meanings to build up contextual knowledge clues for interpretation (Ali and Warraich, 2018;Cole et al, An investigation of linked data catalogues 2013; Gracy, 2015;Hawkins, 2021;Klic et al, 2018). Therefore, semantic serendipitous discovery can be achieved through toURIsm-based connections and their assemblage from diverse heterogeneous LD sources.…”

“…Therefore, no matter whether an URI is designated with subject, predicate or object, all URIs are given clear semantic meanings. All relationships between entities expressed by predicates can be regarded explicitly as “semantic links” (Ali and Warraich, 2018; Alvite-Díez, 2021; Douglas et al ., 2018; Gonzales, 2014; Hawkins, 2021; Klic et al ., 2018; Niu, 2016; Oomen et al ., 2012; Styles et al ., 2008) and can be discoverable (Ali and Warraich, 2018; Niu, 2016). In addition to SPARQL query, all meaningful relationships can be used to facilitate semantic guidance, navigation and limitation during users’ querying and browsing LD traversing over disparate sources.…”

Providing public access to archival materials and the problem of fact‐checking in the post‐truth era

“…However, the content of digital and digitized records opens up the greatest potential for researchers. This becomes necessary attributes of the activities of archival services to collect data about their collections (Hawkins 2022).…”