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Recordkeeping Roundcasts Episode 4: AI, accountability and archives

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Recordkeeping Roundcasts Episode 4: AI, accountability and archives

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Cassie Findlay talks to Ellen Broad, author of Made by Humans: The AI Condition, about the adoption and implication of artificial intelligence and machine learning (2018)

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In this latest episode of Recordkeeping Roundcasts, we talk to Ellen Broad, author of Made by Humans: The AI Condition, about the way that rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are being deployed in business, government and society, and the wide ranging implications of their adoption. Ellen and the Roundtable's Cassie Findlay discuss on real world results flowing from machine decision making, accountability for the use of these systems, the role of recordkeeping and archives, and changing perceptions of privacy in the data economy.

Made by Humans is available from Melbourne University Press, or from all the big online book retailers. You can read Ellen's bio after the transcript.

https://recordkeepingroundtable.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/episode-4.mp3
Transcript
CF: I am thrilled to be talking to Ellen Broad today. Ellen is the author of Made By Humans: The AI Condition. There's a link available from the site too. There's information about the book and where to buy it. I heartily recommend it. It's very timely. Look at the ethics and the societal implications really of what seems like ever increasing gallop towards the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in so many different aspects of our lives. And of course, for the recordkeeping people like myself and hopefully people who follow this series of recordings, there are lots of things about the adoption of this technology that make us think about what our jobs are and potentially what our jobs might be in the future as far as keeping evidence in the way that these systems are set up through to trying to promote accountability around decisions to deploy the technology. So, first of all, hello Ellen, and thank you very much for joining me.

EB: Thank you very much for having me.

CF: So I've got three questions. And I think the first one is probably an opportunity for you to help our listeners just understand what it is we're talking about a little bit because not all of us come at this with lots of background knowledge. And so, the first of my three questions is, in your book, you talk about how we seem to be moving from lower stakes AI systems to higher stakes AI systems. I was just wondering if you could explain a little bit more about what you mean by that and give us some examples of those higher stakes systems.

EB: Sure. So perhaps it's worth walking it back a little bit to talk about the context in which I refer to lower stakes and higher stakes systems because the book isn't about artificial intelligence in general because there are many, many different technologies that seat under that umbrella, there's virtual reality, robotics, drones, what I'm interested in, in the context of the book, is the increasing use of data to make predictions and decisions about people. And we have started doing this more and more in our day-to-day lives. So the lower stakes systems that I talk about are systems helping us choose what we watch next on Netflix for example, or the information Google uses to shape what it is that we see in search results.

These are in some context, even those examples, are not what you would call lower stakes. There's a lot of discussion, increasing discussion, around how Google shapes the information that we see in the world, for example, but we're moving from these systems that essentially are used to make individual predictions to us about content, what we might like to watch, what we might like to buy, if we've just purchased this book, we might be interested in this one over here into starting to use the same techniques to make what I would call higher stakes decisions. These are decisions about the kind of person that we might be. So whether we're trustworthy, whether we're a good fit for a job that we're applying for, whether we should be accepted to university and the types of degrees that we should study.

And the reason I call these higher stakes decisions is they have real world implications. I mean Netflix recommending me a terrible movie and not understanding my preferences doesn't shape me in the same way that being mischaracterized for a job does so the consequences are more significant and these predictions are just genuinely quite hard to make. Predictions like the jobs that we might be interested in or be suitable for are shaped by a range of factors and our kind of past preferences and experiences are only one part of that. So that's kind of where I'm coming from in lower stakes systems and why I think we need to focus on those higher stake systems more.

CF: I think I know from reading your book that you did travel around the world, and you talked with a lot of people, and you mentioned a lot of very specific examples, could you mention an example of one of those systems that has been put in place where it is something as serious as a job or a decision or a university application that is in place now?

EB: So one of the really key ones that I talk about in the book that has been getting a lot of focus and has really drawn attention to the complexities in these kinds of systems is the COMPAS sentencing algorithm, which is used to predict who is most likely to be recommitting a crime, and that's an example of a probabilistic system that's using hundreds of variables to estimate a person's likelihood of re-offending but in practice was discovered to skew certain ways in its output. So it overpredicted on African American defendants being likely to recommit a crime and underpredicted on white defendants being likely to recommit a crime.

And the reasons for that are complex and difficult to unpick and solutions to that problem are also complex. And a lot of discussions in machine learning have started to focus on how you quantify those kinds of outputs from a system and how you try to change them or at least articulate why it is that that is the outcome. I talked a little bit about the growing use of predictions in job recruitment, but COMPAS is probably the most scoped out example of a high stake system in the book.

CF: And, I mean, this does come get us sort of fairly rapidly to what is I think for me one of the really key issues in this and so I'm happy to go there quite rapidly, which is around the lack of accountability, the lack of transparency for the algorithms that are making the decisions that have such significant effects. I don't know who created the COMPAS application, it was a proprietary company?

EB: Previously called Northpointe but I think they're now called Equivant.

CF: Yeah, and all the sort of complexity that you mentioned that goes into how that algorithm arrives at its decisions and what data is it analyzing, where does it come from, what's the provenance of it, what biases went into it, and we just don't know in most cases, I think is fair to say. Do you wanna speak a little bit to that?

EB: Yeah, absolutely and definitely the one thing that I'd preference talking about the opaque nature of a lot of these systems is that sometimes our human decision making is even harder to unpick and has similar effects and all these systems have to learn from those previous kind of human decisions and human patterns. So, in sentencing contexts, for example, judges, parole officers, policy makers have tried to predict who is likely to recommit a crime in a variety of ways for decades, nearly a century, in fact, because it's a really crucial part of criminal justice and policing is you wanna make sure that you are releasing people quickly and expediently into the community where they serve no further risk while trying to identify and kind of protect the community from genuine risk in your population.

EB: And that's a very emotional issue. I talked a little bit in the book about that this is a genuinely hard problem to solve, and we've been trying to solve it for a long time. And so the Northpointe/Equivant algorithm is really just a kind of a manifestation of the same type of decision making except this time it's in software. And so while it's opaque on purpose in certain ways as you say, it was very hard to uncover exactly what variables Northpointe/Equivant used for their prediction algorithm. It was hard to unpick what the training data was, information about testing that had been undertaken, the range of the kind of accuracy that the system had. That's all proprietary information that's been quite difficult to extract over time. Some of it is increasingly being extracted, but it was essentially black box on purpose, but because it is software we can actually at least quantify and identify the sources or the reasons for certain kinds of bias and decision making that in humans we have a feel for but can't quite systematically unpick.

So COMPAS, what was really interesting about the COMPAS algorithm was not only that, yes, it's an example of a proprietary algorithm that is being designed to have real world impact, it makes decisions or it helps I should say, helps judges and parole officers make decisions, so they're relying on it to help them make other decisions, and it's difficult to scrutinize. But what I found also particularly interesting about the Northpointe example is that follow-up research has indicated that the complexity of the algorithms, so they promote it as having these hundreds of variables to make its predictions and some follow-up research that I say in the book has indicated that they can achieve exactly or close to the same levels of accuracy using just five or six variables about individuals that adding all of these extra data points doesn't necessarily improve the quality of your system. And I think that's a crucial kind of point to keep coming back to particularly as we talk about big data is that these more complex algorithms, these algorithms that use lots and lots of inputs are may not be any better than a survey with five questions.

CF: That's so interesting. And, yeah, I think that when we look at your earlier point around that humans have been making these decisions with all of the information that they have at their disposal and with all of the sort of potential for error that comes with it, brings to mind the way that we kind of scrutinize and try to validate that decision making in the old world, which is through things like FOI, examining the evidence behind decision making but with the increasing adoption of, you know, the increasing partnerships with the private sector in government, some of those opportunities to scrutinize the data, even if it was back in the day it was a sort of analog data, but now are being cut off. Have you sort of seen any evidence of better practices in government about trying to force accountability in partners where they're performing a public service?

EB: So specifically in relation to predictive systems and kind of AI in Australia, not so much, but in the US, there's some really interesting developments emerging around regulating automated services provided by private companies and partnership with government. I've been watching New York cities algorithmic task force with interest. They are looking at how they might hold the providers of automated services for New York City accountable and what that might include. What I think we can look at is like we use a variety of mechanisms and structures, rules, laws, principles, expectations to shape the way that private sector companies partner with government to deliver services in other areas. If you are providing medical tools for example or medical services on behalf of a government provider, you have to comply with a range of rules that shape how you deliver that service.

We have rules around how employees acting as government public servants utter, act, and operate. It's never been a kind of free for all. It's never been unfettered. There's never been absolute freedom for private sector partners to government. And I found the discussion of IP in relation to automated systems kind of a red herring. We have never... The origin of intellectual property law has never been absolute. It has always been a balance between information that needs to be accessible in the public interest and information that should be protected and we manage that balance in every sector using both explicit exceptions on the intellectual property laws and rules that are just supposed to shape responsible conduct in that sector.

Pharmaceutical companies, for example, can't keep absolutely secret everything they do in relation to the pharmaceuticals that they offer to the public because they have a responsibility to protect the public from harm and part of that is exposing information about their products undergoing testing, being audited, having to demonstrate accountability, so I find the emphasis on IP in relation to technology a total red herring because IP has never been intended to prevent information being accessible because it benefits the public and helps us make sure that people are protected from harm and able to make informed choices about what's going on around them.

CF: Yeah. And I mean, I know from my own background working in government recordkeeping that the sort of negotiations and arrangements that go into government agency outsourcing a public function of some sort would touch on recordkeeping. But even as recently as sort of five years ago when I was still working in government, it was very sort of old-fashioned type of, oh at the end of the contract, you will give us all your records sort of thing rather than building in mechanisms for sharing of real-time information or at least expectations for a greater transparency where there were programs that were directly affecting government by proxy decision making. So I suppose what you're saying is that there needs to be a kind of some more levers, some more mechanisms, start to become normal in the way that government strikes these agreements?

EB: Yeah, I would classify our procurement in relation to software, which is this is all software. When I talk about artificial intelligence and predictive systems, they're all still software products being developed, and I think we're still pretty immature in how we procure software and that's partly because there's a relatively lower understanding of kind of how software works and what you need to know and understand if you're procuring software in order to make sure that you can understand how it works and build on it and get someone else to fix it. I used to do a lot of work in the UK around procurement of data. And quite often one of the real challenges that we would run into is kind of in a similar way when you say a lot of the requirements in procurement in relation to information is give us your records at the end and similarly in the kind of datasets, there might just be a clause saying you should, you must give over all of the data that you collect at the end, but they wouldn't specify.

Sometimes you would see language like you must give over and anonymize the dataset at the end of the project, but actually what is really useful for an organization to have are the methodologies that went into collecting data. So if you wanna repeat the process, it's easily repeatable so that you can understand how data was collected. You want to know where it was collected from, who it was collected from in case you need to go back and recreate it. You don't just want the end result typically. And even getting the end result may not even give you the necessary rights you need to be able to do whatever you want with that anyway. So it's just I think we're still figuring out exactly what it is that we need in procurement.

CF: Yeah, and you make the point in the book I think around understanding the mechanisms and the methodologies behind the data collection from the point of view of fairness and the point of view of the kind of silences in the data that go back to the way archives have had silences around particular groups in society, particularly marginalized groups, and so sort of having some way to have a greater involvement as the public body that has hopefully society's interest at heart in sort of engaging with those collection methods upfront is a much more appropriate way to go, I would have thought.

EB: I remember I actually think you had John (Sheridan) share it in on your podcast before. I haven't really judged it from...

CF: Yes.

EB: Yes, but he and I always have fascinating mindblowing conversations about data in archives. I remember one conversation we had that was both about preservation of data and decision making but also the impact of that kind of privacy preserving technology and changing relationships to privacy has on kind of future preservation. But on government records, I remember we were talking about the consequence of having outsourced lots of data related functions is that it can take preservation of that information out of scope for the recordkeeping authority. And that it's kind of like, you know, when you are trying to do some research on a project and you can find a report that references some research and that's what you have, but you have no access to the actual research underpinning it, you can't look at the data for yourself. And that's increasingly what I find with bumping up against is we can get the outputs, we can archive reports, we can archive snapshots.

EB: But the preservation of data that's collected by private companies, but essentially acting as public services, it has been really difficult. It feels ? about privacy in a really interesting way, but that's kind of a separate...

CF: Oh don't worry. I will have a quick question about privacy before we finish.
In the next episode we talk do indeed talk about data and privacy, and Ellen offers some thoughts on where this is all heading. About Ellen Broad
Ellen is Head of Technical Delivery, Consumer Data Standards for CSIRO's Data61. She returned to Australia from the UK in late 2016, where she was Head of Policy for the Open Data Institute (ODI), an international non-profit founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt. While in the UK Ellen became an expert adviser to senior UK government minister Elisabeth Truss on data. She has also held roles as Manager of Digital Policy and Projects for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (Netherlands) and Executive Officer for the Australian Digital Alliance.

Ellen's written and spoken about AI, open data and data sharing issues in places like the New Scientist and the Guardian, for ABC Radio National's 'Big Ideas' and 'Future Tense' Programmes and at SXSW. Unrelated to her job, Ellen built an open data board game, Datopolis together with ODI CEO Jeni Tennison, which is being played in 19 countries.

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Recordkeeping Roundcasts Episode 4: AI, accountability and archives

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In this latest episode of Recordkeeping Roundcasts, we talk to Ellen Broad, author of Made by Humans: The AI Condition, about the way that rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are being deployed in business, government and society, and the wide ranging implications of their adoption.

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Oral History and Open Access: Fulfilling the Promise of Democratizing Knowledge by Elise Chenier

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Oral History and Open Access: Fulfilling the Promise of Democratizing Knowledge by Elise Chenier

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by Elise Chenier

published July 2014

The digital humanities and the open access movement that followed might well be the natural offspring of the 1970s oral history movement. Oral history has existed as long as humans have spoken, but here I am referring specifically to the activist oriented, community-based practice of oral history that emerged in the early 1970s. The oral history movement aimed to counter formal, elite knowledge with organic knowledge-to break through the walls of academe and the scholarly world, to legitimate and create a place and space for the knowledge that arises from everyday experience. In so doing, the oral history movement democratized knowledge and empowered citizens. The relationship oral history shares with digital humanities is obvious: both make "data" accessible to broad publics, both encourage and facilitate people to become "content creators," not passive consumers, and both regard these practices as having transformative potential.

The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (A LOT) is an online digital archive of lesbian oral/aural testimonies housed at the Simon Fraser University Library. A LOT began as a simple preservation project. Many people who interviewed women in the 1980s and 1990s about their experiences as lesbians had not archived their analog tapes. I had access to a lab and funding that would allow me to convert analog tapes to .wav (digital sound) files, and it was this modest task I set out to do in 2010. The deeper I read into the literature on digital humanities, however, the more complex and exciting the project became. In this note I present the ideas that have shaped my thinking about building this archives, the concept for the archives that has evolved, and our overall objectives.

A LOT Screenshot Image

Oral interviewing is a popular research method in the social sciences, yet interviews are rarely archived, and even when they are, they can be difficult for others to locate and access. Interviews generate rich and valuable research material but have limited benefit if they are not preserved and accessible. A LOT aims to develop an active collection strategy, and to collaborate with existing archives and researchers, to make interviews with and about lesbians available for use by scholars and non-scholars in an open access online archive. The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony will provide access to a rich database of original material not available elsewhere, and will facilitate research in oral interviewing methodologies, in women's history and the history of sexuality, in communication and memory studies, and in lesbian, women's, and queer studies. It will, we hope, benefit educators and student researchers at the secondary and postsecondary levels. Because the archive also makes this data available to those who originally shared it with researchers, it also serves wider community interests (Snider).

Over the past three decades, researchers have collected thousands of hours of data, but little has been donated to publicly accessible archives or libraries (Chenier). Part of the reason is because oral interviewers often fail to make plans to archive their oral research data. Furthermore, most lesbian and gay archives tend to focus on gay male material, thus lesbian researchers do not always see those archives as the best place to preserve their data (Nestle). Hours and hours of research material about a relatively hidden area of historical experience is at risk of being lost forever, and because many of the narrators have died, there is little possibility of reclaiming these stories a second time. That which has been preserved, such as Becki Ross' tapes from her research on Toronto's 1970s lesbian community now at the University of Ottawa, is not easily accessible. Furthermore, with the exception of the high-profile Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York, collections of interviews for lesbian-focused research projects are known only to a small group of specialists and are almost completely out of reach of the general public.

Despite almost thirty years of lesbian oral history data collection in Canada and the United States, my research has identified two major obstacles to the long-term preservation of this valuable historical data: the high cost of preservation and the failure of interviewers to plan for the long-term preservation of their material. By launching an active collection strategy and reaching out to researchers who possess un-archived collections, and by assuming the costs of digitization, storage and dissemination, The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony can provide a solution to both problems.

As a digital, open access archive, A LOT can reach a much wider audience than a traditional archive. Physical distance can be a significant barrier between researcher and public, and between researcher and material in traditional archives; A LOT's collection will be available anywhere there is internet access and to those who know how to navigate the web-and who have access to privacy, should they need it, to view the site. Third, online archives can facilitate access for people with disabilities. There is no requirement to travel to inaccessible buildings, and tools are available to assist those with vision and hearing impairments. The sound archive will be accessible to the blind, and transcripts to the deaf. Partnering with an institutional library allows us to leverage the software and systems already in use at the library for a wide variety of similar digital collections. The underlying digital content management platform () provides much of the desired discovery functionality (such as search and browse). It is also based on widely used metadata standards such as Dublin Core. The project will also develop extensive and specialized description metadata that expressly reflects the key topics and concepts represented by the A LOT content. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that online archives have barriers, too. Users must have access to an internet connection, basic knowledge of how the web is used, and in some cases, the privacy needed to explore a topic still considered taboo.

The 1993 award-winning Canadian documentary film Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives demonstrated the value of lesbian oral testimonies to multiple audiences. Filmmakers Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie used oral testimonies to reveal histories of lesbianoppression and survival in postwar Canada. It has been screenedinternationally, is used by scholars for research purposes, and is used in educational curricula to thepresent day. Similarly the recent "It Gets Better" campaigninvited everyday people to share stories of surviving homophobia, and post them online as a way tocounter depression and suicide that resulted from queer oppression. Like Forbidden Love, " It Gets Better" demonstrates how oral testimonies of sexually marginalized peoples contribute to buildingcommunity and improving the quality of life for everyday people. Asan online archive that makes stories of everyday lesbian experience and survival widely available, A LOT serves similar purposes for scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. In a 2010 survey distributed principally through academic email networks, with 365 respondents evenly distributed across all 18+ age categories, more than half indicated that they would use the website for general interest, and almost fifty percent indicated they would use the site for doctoral research and curriculum development. It also showed that this research tool would attract people who have never before used archives or oral interview data. Respondents overwhelmingly indicated that having this material accessible online is very important

Putting oral narratives online does more than create a new home for old materials. When digital humanities first emerged it was called "humanities computing" and seen largely as a new tool to support humanities scholars existing research practices. As technology expanded and became more essential to the research process, "computational technology has become the very condition of possibility required in order to think about many of the questions raised in the humanities today" (Berry 3). As Burton, Onderdonk, and Appleford point out, new technologies' collaborative promise means that digital humanists "are uniquely positioned to liberate information, making it available to all citizens and creating a culture of what is coming to be known as ubiquitous learning," but, it's success depends on teams of skilled curators (197). Curating research material online has led to the blurring of disciplinary lines-for example, where in the past historians were dependent upon, but produced scholarship independent of, archivists, such separations are no longer desirable. Collaboration across the disciplines is necessary, and is changing the nature of our fields of study.

The ability to work across various platforms and with more diverse materials has also led to the rapid emergence of new research methods and approaches. According to N. Kathryn Hayles, open access databases such as the one used by A LOT "shifts the emphasis from argumentation...to data elements" (55). This shift has significant implications. Past practices of restricting access to artifacts and primary sources (so that one might lay sole scholarly claim to them) are being challenged by "web dissemination mechanisms [that] allow for increased diversity of interpretation and richness of insights" (Hayles 55). A LOT contributes to this growing trend in a number of ways. For example, currently, most studies of lesbian experience are local, and focus on either a rural or urban region. This is because the researcher is limited to collecting data within a geographic area that she can reasonably travel in order to complete the research. A searchable database will allow researchers to undertake comparative studies, and to analyze a much wider range of data than ever before possible. It will allow for different, more narrowly focused questions than conventional data collection methods can answer. Putting oral testimonies online will also facilitate collaborative research projects among scholars in different disciplines, and between students in different geographical locations. Finally, it will also encourage studies beyond the social sciences, where such data is most commonly employed, in fields such as performance studies, psychology, health studies, and documentary film production.

Over the past five years scholars, administrators, and government bodies alike have expressed serious concerns about the fact that private, for-profit companies own more and more of the data that scholars produce. Critics have argued that publicly funded research should be public, not private, knowledge. An especially powerful example of the commercialization and monetization of records is lesbian and gay periodicals published from the 1950s through to the present day. Some of these materials were produced by volunteer labor as part of a political commitment to build gay community and advance gay rights, yet currently these are only accessible with a costly subscription to a digital content provider. The commodification of culture undermines democratic society and takes history out of the hands of those who made it. Using institutional resources and public funds to disseminate lesbian oral testimonies in an open access environment ensures that oral testimony data collection benefits the largest possible audience. In this way, digital humanities and open access can help current and future social scientists conducting oral interview work on lesbian topics meet new requirements to archive publicly funded research data.

A LOT and similar archives can also facilitate collaborations with community organizations. Open access makes "ownership" almost irrelevant; however, both data management and responsible institutional commitment to the records will be significant responsibilities. This allows A LOT to be unique in the world of archives in that we will work in concert, not competition, with existing archives, with established and emerging scholars, and with other generators and collectors of oral testimonies. Our objective to develop new ideas for thinking about how to transition oral testimony collections from bricks-and-mortar to online archives includes acting as a research hub rather than just an owner of research materials. As a non-proprietary collaborative project we hope to bridge the resource gap between community and small archives by utilizing Simon Fraser University's resources and expertise.

The digital environment also provides solutions to long-standing issues that trouble oral historians. First, as scholar Michael Frisch has argued, in traditional archives researchers rarely listen to original records, preferring instead the written transcript (107). Yet it is aural history, that is, original sound recordings, that bring material alive and add rich layers of meaning to the text (Thomson). The internet allows us to put the "aural" back in oral history. Now, meanings can be gleaned not just in word, but in tone, gesture, and affect, thus facilitating new research methods.

Another problem we must address is that copyright ownership is unclear in the area of oral testimony data. Most researchers request that interviewees sign over their rights to the researcher in order that they be able to proceed with publication of the research, but as Dougherty and Simpson point out, asking informants to relinquish rights violates the principle of empowerment. Concern about the use of creative and intellectual property once put online has led to an innovative solution: creative commons licensing. It allows the creator to indicate the ways their material can be used by others. Some oral historians have adopted this tool as a way to guard the interests of both interviewer and interviewee, and A LOT will use the same system, thus ensuring that both the rights and interests of all parties are fully protected.

Anonymity is another concern. Individuals who offer their oral testimonies often request it. This creates an additional barrier in traditional archival settings since these records can only be accessed under special conditions. Digital technology provides editing tools that can assist in making testimonies anonymous, thus increasing access to the data. Permission and donation forms completed by narrators and researchers will determine the level of public access assigned to testimonies. When restricted access is requested, online archives can use password-protection in place of bricks-and-mortar archives' locked cabinets.

The same digital technology will allow researchers to conduct keyword data searches. This will facilitate the emergence of new research questions. For example, questions of identity are often the focus of scholarly interest concerning lesbian experience. In the past, listening to hours and hours of recorded conversation, or reading pages and pages of transcript in the occasional instances that they are available, was impossible. Both aural and transcribed records can be searched by keyword allowing for work that compares much larger data sets.

Just as the web provides new solutions, it generates new problems. While on the one hand oral history has long been about open access, posting interviews on the web has created new anxieties about privacy. In the past, traditional archives limited access to people keenly interested in, and presumably sympathetic to, the content of an interview and the topic of discussion. Usually only those with some training in and sensitivity toward the oral interview process would seek this material out. Putting interviews online changes this dramatically. Now, anyone can access these narratives. While few will, it nevertheless may leave both interviewee and interviewer feeling exposed and vulnerable. Moreover, a heightened sense of concern about internet privacy means that even putting materials behind a firewall does little to dissipate real concerns about having the most intimate and private aspects of one's life accessible to anyone who stumbles upon it.

Oral historians are the leading thinkers around issues concerning ethical use of research data. Since the 1970s they have led the way in liberatory and progressive research methods that challenge traditional structures of knowledge. They seem natural allies of the open access movement, yet they err on the side of caution when it comes to privacy protection. This is because the oral historian's practice includes deep reflection on their relationships with informants. They give careful consideration to the narrator's role in the production of research. Because oral historians are interested in empowering narrators, they want to ensure that narrators have decision-making power over what happens to their stories. From a legal standpoint, researchers who obtain a consent form from their narrators own copyright of the interview, but in practice few, if any, would share their material with others without the narrator's consent. On the matter of the ethics of data dissemination, people working in other areas of digital humanities could learn a great deal from the oral history community. Questions about the role of participants in data collection are only now just emerging in other research fields. They would benefit from the rich literature in oral history research. A LOT's operating model is based on ethical practices that preceded the digital revolution. Ironically, the digital archives are resurrecting "the closet" that oral history so successfully helped to dismantle. Sharing your story with a community group or researcher, even when it was to be donated to a bricks-and-mortar archive, seemed a low risk activity. The widespread access the internet allows makes these stories more accessible, but conversely, it makes researchers and informants alike uneasy about the way these interviews might be used.

In terms of the potential problems of oral history and the digital revolution, Ron Grele recently has stated that "the future does not look bright. The only interviews that will be placed online will be very, very 'safe' or innocuous. We will soon be back to vanity interviews of movers and shakers." Here, Grele is referring to the first university-based oral history program, established by Allan Nevins in 1948 at Columbia University in New York City. Its earliest interview subjects were elites chosen largely on the basis that they might become financial donors. Interviews produced under these conditions may have been interesting, but were a far cry from critical history (Sharpless).

Grele is right. Unless we solve the privacy problem that open access creates, the democratic and transformative potential in online oral/aural history archives will be lost. The oral history community tends to follow best practices that evolve out of practitioners' experience, but best practices have yet to emerge on this vexing question. It will be through traditional modes of collaborative consultation that we will resolve this very human problem, and undoubtedly digital technologies will provide us with a unique set of tools to implement the creative solutions the situation demands.

Works Cited

Berry, David M. Understanding Digital Humanities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Bolick, Cheryl Mason. "Digital Archives: Democratizing the Doing of History." International Journal of Social Education 21.1 (2006): 122-134. Print.

Burton, Orville Vernon, James Onderdonk, and Simon J. Appleford. "History: The Role of Technology in the Democratization of Learning." Ubiquitous Learning. Eds. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. 197-205. Print.

Chenier, Elise. "Hidden from Historians: Preserving Lesbian Oral History in Canada." Archivaria 68 (2009): 247-270. Print.

Cohen, Daniel J, and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. Print.

Dougherty, Jack, and Candace Simpson. "Who Owns Oral History? A Creative Commons Solution." Oral History in the Digital Age. Eds. D. Boyd et al. Institute of Library and Museum Services. 2012: n. pag. Web. 10 July 2013.

Fernie, Lynne, and Ann Weissman. Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives. National Film Board of Canada, 1992. VHS.

Frisch, Michael. "Oral History and the Digital Revolution: Toward a Post-documentary Sensibility." The Oral History Reader. Eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson. Routledge, 2006. 102-114. Print.

Grele, Ron. "The future does not look bright." Message to Rob Perks. 16 Aug. 2013. E-mail.

Hayles, N. Katherine. "How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies." Understanding Digital Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 42-66. Print.

Haythornthwaite, Caroline. "Participatory Transformations." Ubiquitous Learning. Eds. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. 31-48. Print.

High, Steven. "Telling Stories: A Reflection on Oral History and New Media." Oral History Society Journal 38.1 (2010): 101-112. Print.

Mul, Jos de. Cyberspace Odyssey: Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Print.

Nestle, Joan. "The Will to Remember: The Lesbian Herstory Archives of New York." Feminist Review 34 (1990: 86-93). Print.

Rosenzweig, Roy. Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print.

Ross, Becki. The House That Jill Built: A Lesbian Nation in Formation. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995. Print.

Sharpless, Rebecca. "The History of Oral History." History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology. Eds. Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless. Lanham, MD: AltaMira P, 2007. 86-93. Print.

Snider, Lisa. Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (A LOT) Survey Report. Burnaby, B.C: Simon Fraser UP, 2011. Print.

Soren, Barbara J, and Nathalie Lemelin. "'Cyberpals!/Les Cybercopains!': A Look at Online Museum Visitor Experiences." Curator: The Museum Journal 47.1 (2004): 55-83. Print.

Svensson, Patrik. "The Landscape of Digital Humanities." Digital Humanities Quarterly 4.1 (2010): n. pag. Web. 22 Jan. 2012.

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Thomson, Alistair. "Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History." Oral History Review 34.1 (2007): 49-70. Highwire 2.0. Web. 24 Jan. 2012.

Image:

"Homepage." alotarchives.org. Archives of Lesbian Oral History. Screenshot. 6 July 2014.

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Oral History and Open Access: Fulfilling the Promise of Democratizing Knowledge by Elise Chenier

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by Elise Chenier published July 2014 The digital humanities and the open access movement that followed might well be the natural offspring of the 1970s oral history movement. Oral history has existed as long as humans have spoken, but here I am referring specifically to the activist oriented, community-based practice of oral history that emerged in the early 1970s.

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Revamping Traditional Archival Processing (2005)

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Delivering Australian Archives to Researchers

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[DC] Making Metadata Into Meaning: Digital Storytelling With IIIF

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[DC] Making Metadata Into Meaning: Digital Storytelling With IIIF

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This paper shows how to blend cutting-edge image technology with creative curatorship to deliver engaging digital stories

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Tristan Roddis, Cogapp, UK

Abstract
This paper shows how to blend cutting-edge image technology with creative curatorship to deliver engaging digital stories using a COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) content strategy. An increasing number of cultural heritage organizations are adopting the API standards provided by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to disseminate their images and associated metadata. However, the focus so far has largely been on the technical and data challenges that this represents, with very little attention paid to how these systems can be leveraged to provide enhanced experiences for users online. In this paper, we look at ways that IIIF APIs can be radically repurposed to go beyond the simple descriptive representations of an image for which it is largely used by museums (e.g. catalog metadata, transcribed document text). Instead, we explore the idea of using them to present a continuous narrative (i.e. story) focussing on various regions within images. We will take stories modelled in IIIF, and present them in a variety of exciting digital imaginings, using both established and bleeding-edge browser technology. These include the following: - Linear Web page ("blog" style) - Social media feed (deliberately delayed information) - Slow looking (deliberately removing text) - Interactive image (previous/next, plus freeform exploration) - Automated image (using text-to-speech) - Human storyteller (back to basics, with a digital twist) We will demonstrate the range of potential uses with a variety of stories taken from different organizations, including the National Gallery, London, the Endangered Archives Programme, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and even a poem commissioned especially for Museums and the Web. From this session, participants will be inspired to think of novel and innovative ways of telling stories using their collection images, as well as appreciating the potential of IIIF to make delivering these experiences that much easier.
Keywords: iiif,story,collection

Motivation

At Cogapp we have been using the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) for several years, and during this time, we have seen an increasing number of cultural heritage organizations adopt the IIIF standards to disseminate their images and associated metadata.

However, the focus so far has largely been on the technical and data challenges that this represents, with very little attention paid to how these systems can be leveraged to provide enhanced experiences for users online.

In response to this, we set ourselves the challenge of reimagining how these IIIF standards can be radically repurposed to go beyond the simple descriptive representations of an image for which they are largely used. Instead, we look at several different ways in which the exact same metadata can be used to present collection images, and their associated textual content, as digital stories experienced via the Web browser.

This work builds on work documented in a previous publication (White, 2017), and is accompanied by a demonstration site with interactive examples of most of the experiments detailed below ( http://storiiies.cogapp.com/ ).

Background

IIIF

The International Image Interoperability Framework ( http://iiif.io/ ) defines a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for the presentation of images and their associated metadata online. In the experiments we discuss below, we made use of two key APIs: the Image API (Appleby et al., 2017a) and the Presentation API (Appleby et al., 2017b).

The IIIF Image API provides raw image data in Web-friendly formats, with the ability to easily crop and zoom (and combine the two to produce the tiles required for zoomable images). This forms the underpinnings of all of the different image display mechanisms detailed below.

The IIIF Presentation API allows arbitrary metadata to be associated with one or more images, in a JSON-format document known as a IIIF manifest. It also allows metadata to be associated with specific regions or an image, via the mechanism of Annotation Lists (Appleby et al., 2017c).

To date, the main use of the Presentation API has been to associate images and text by their real-world characteristics; for example, a series of images in a IIIF manifest that correspond to scanned pages from a book, or another manifest that lists normal and X-ray photographs of a painting. Equally, annotation lists are often used to simply repeat information from the source image in textual format, such as OCR transcriptions of each word of a printed page.

Figure 1: presentation manifests usually encode real-world characteristics, such as these annotations that represent the transcription of handwritten content (Crane, 2016)

In the experiments described in this paper, we tried to think differently about IIIF manifests, and to consider them as a way of relating sort of textual content to one or more images or regions of an image.

Stories

For our purpose, we consider a story to be a linear narrative: something with a beginning, middle, and end. By taking the content from the IIIF manifests in a strict sequence, we can therefore create a story, illustrated by one or more images, and define it once in a known format. This data can then be repurposed in a variety of different ways; for each story considered, we are using exactly the same IIIF manifest, but choosing to express the information in very different ways. In effect, we are leveraging the IIIF protocols and data formats to provide enhanced experiences for users online.

Figure 2: all the annotations used for the sample story, as shown in the Mirador viewer (White, 2017)

Results

In this section we discuss the different experiments we conducted using a single manifest and annotation list as described above. Most of these versions can be seen online on the demonstrator site ( http://storiiies.cogapp.com/ ).

Experiment one: linear Web page

For the first and most basic example, we illustrate the result of rendering the combined annotation list and manifest into a basic HTML webpage to tell a story. The text that describes each image, region, or group of image regions is simply presented next to the appropriately cropped image region.

This version of the story is not very exciting, but is deliberately clear and familiar: any user of the Web will understand an interface where you just have to scroll to read the illustrated narrative.

Experiment two: delayed gratification with social media

Given that each story can be broken down into a small fragment of text and one or more cropped images, this could, instead of being presented all at once on a Web page, be drip-fed over social media by using a bot to post at scheduled intervals to social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram.

Figure 4: mockup of a Twitter-bot version

Despite presenting exactly the same information as the linear Web page shown above, it is clear that the reader's experience of this information will feel very different due to the deliberately slow delivery.

Experiment three: interactive viewer

Giving the user the ability to freely explore IIIF images by zooming and panning is trivial using Javascript viewers such as OpenSeadragon ( https://openseadragon.github.io/ ) and Leaflet ( http://leafletjs.com/ ). In this experiment, we enhance an OpenSeadragon viewer by providing a text overlay with previous/next buttons to move through the story. As each button is pressed, the image automatically moves to the correct image region and zoom level, and the text updates as well.

This interface provides a good balance between a directed experience and allowing the user to discover more on their own; the story navigation moves the viewer to focus on a particular feature of the image, but the user is free to take over control and explore other areas of the image if they wish.

Experiment four: slow looking

Slow looking is the practice of taking time to explore an artwork or image in a particular way in order to gain a deeper understanding of the piece (Tishman, 2017; Clothier, 2018). While this is traditionally something that is used in-gallery, it can be approximated online by taking a high-resolution image that is zoomed in until its detail can be observed, and then panning slowly around to take in new areas of the painting. It is a feature that Cogapp has previously implemented for the Clyfford Still Museum's online collection ( https://collection.clyffordstillmuseum.org ) and the motivation for this is discussed elsewhere (Mallory, 2017). In this experiment, we use the image regions defined in the annotation list as targets for the viewer to pan to, before displaying text and then moving on to the next region.

In this scenario, we deliberately take away control from the user to create a passive, immersive, and reflective experience. The user has no control, and instead must watch as the story of the painting slowly unfolds (ideally in full-screen mode to remove distractions). It would also be possible to convert this to a purely image-led experience by going so far as to hide the text panels: In that case, the annotations merely provide a list of interesting regions for the viewer to slowly pan towards.

Experiment five: passive story with speech synthesis

Extending the idea of removing control from the user, this next experiment takes the format of the interactive viewer, but removes the previous/next buttons and instead automatically moves the image only after it has completed reading out the associated text using the browser's text-to-speech capability.

This version forces the user to only experience the narrative in the way that it is intended (like listening to any other story read aloud). However, the synthetic voice is quite jarring and will mispronounce specialist words and abbreviations.

Experiment six: human storyteller

For this final experiment, we tried to overcome the limitations of the artificial storyteller mentioned above by putting a real human back into the mix, and returning to the age-old pattern of having one storyteller recount to multiple listeners.

To do this we created two interfaces: The first, for the narrator only, works exactly like the interactive viewer (i.e. text prompts, previous/next buttons, free ability to zoom and pan). The second, for everyone who wants to listen to the story, has no controls at all; it simply shows whatever region of the image is currently visible on the narrator's screen, without the text. The narrator then has complete control of what the listeners see. She can choose to follow the text or ad lib; to speed up the story, or slow it down; or to make digressions to look at other parts of the image if she so wishes.

Figure 8: human storyteller: narrator interface with a range of audience devices. Video at https://vimeo.com/223270820

This version forces users to listen along, and to only see what the narrator wants them to see: a passive, receptive experience. We can imagine this being used in the same physical space (e.g. a curator talking to children with individual tablet devices) or remotely (e.g. a radio program that is accompanied by listeners following along on their own computers, tablets or phones). Having a human to interpret and enhance the base content encapsulated by the IIIF manifest feels like an interesting avenue to explore.

Other sources of content

All of the examples above can be applied to multiple different types of content. In all of the screenshots and videos above we have used a single example, based on a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. However, when you consider the wider idea of a story illustrated by one or more images, there are many other possibilities for using museum content in this way. For example, we hope to commission the following in time for Museums and the Web 2018, and to display these on the demo site ( http://storiiies.cogapp.com/ ):

Highlights from documents about slavery from the Endangered Archives Programme

Terrifying features of a magnified parasite from the Booth Museum, Brighton

Telling the stories of the characters in a nineteenth-century painting from the National Portrait Gallery, London

A poem commissioned especially for Museums and the Web, using photography from Wikimedia

Conclusions

All the examples discussed above use the same manifests and annotation lists-the only differences are the way we presented the data to engage with the audience. This Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) content strategy means that authors can see a radically different variety of outputs from a single source of content.

We hope that by presenting these experiments we have inspired you to think of novel and innovative ways of telling stories using your collection images, as well as to appreciate the potential of IIIF to make delivering these experiences that much easier.

References

Clothier, P. (2018). "The Case for Spending an Hour with One Work of Art." Last updated Jan 8, 2017. Consulted January 25, 2018. Available https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-case-spending-hour-one-work-art

Crane, T. (2016). IIIF Search API 1.0 An introduction to the International Image Interoperability Framework, Web Annotations, and how we might search them. Consulted January 25, 2018. Available https://www.dropbox.com/s/ogw9dj259uwvnek/Search-API%20copy%202.pptx?dl=0

Mallory, G. (2017). "Deeper, more meaningful art-experiences with digital." Last updated September 20, 2017. Consulted January 25, 2018. Available https://blog.cogapp.com/deeper-more-meaningful-art-experiences-with-digital-8afd7bdeb35b

Tishman, S. (2017). Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation . London: Routledge.

White, J. (2017). "Innovatively repurposing content across multiple platforms - Storytelling with IIIF." Last updated July 4, 2017. Consulted January 25, 2018. Available https://blog.cogapp.com/iiif-for-storytelling-1e36ce277f48
Cite as:
Roddis, Tristan. "Making metadata into meaning: Digital storytelling with IIIF."MW18: MW 2018. Published January 31, 2018. Consulted .
https://mw18.mwconf.org/paper/making-metadata-into-meaning-digital-storytelling-with-iiif/

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Making metadata into meaning: Digital storytelling with IIIF

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Tristan Roddis, Cogapp, UK This paper shows how to blend cutting-edge image technology with creative curatorship to deliver engaging digital stories using a COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) content strategy. An increasing number of cultural heritage organizations are adopting the API standards provided by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to disseminate their images and associated metadata.

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Read more: out of the box standards - https://docs.collectiveaccess.org/wiki/Metadata_Standards

Read more: basic tables  - https://docs.collectiveaccess.org/wiki/Basic_Tables

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CollectiveAccess is open-source collections management and presentation software designed for museums, archives, and special collections also increasingly used by libraries, corporations and non-profits. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats.

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KATE MURRAY: Welcome to Networked Society Stories, where we explore and uncover how our increasingly connected world is changing, well, everything. From our daily routines, to how we run our cities. The rise of robots, and 3D printed body parts. We'll be exploring all of those topics and so much more in upcoming episodes. But today we're starting at square one and asking, what is the Networked Society?

ADAM LODDERS: If you look at historically you know society has actually been marked by its technology. What we're seeing here is actually a transition from industrial sort of based technologies, where machines were sort of more prevalent, through to actually computing and information-based technologies. Hence, this is where the Networked Society comes from, basically, it's a move from the mechanical through to the digital kind of representations.

KATE MURRAY: This is Adam Lodders, he's the Executive Officer at the University of Melbourne's Networked Society Institute, where he has supervised research in this area for over five years. I asked Adam, so what? Why should we care about the Networked Society?

ADAM LODDERS: Well I think it's important to be familiar with the concept of the Networked Society, given how the ever-increasing amount of objects that are being connected to the internet are having an increasing role in shaping and controlling our daily existence.

KATE MURRAY: Say what? Adam might be playing it cool here but what he just said was epic. Let's hear it again.

ADAM LODDERS: An increasing role in shaping and controlling our daily existence.

KATE MURRAY: Connected objects, shaping and controlling our daily existence. It sounds like a dystopian future until you feel a buzz on your wrist and realise your smartwatch is prompting you to take a short walk or make an appointment. When you think about the smartphone in your pocket, which is probably putting this audio in your ears, already has computing capabilities beyond the mainframes that sent the first people to the moon.

If it's anything like my phone it probably directs you through traffic, keeps you entertained, tells you when appointments are, what to eat, where to shop, has all your family photos, your social connections and ... objects shaping and controlling our daily existence. It's already here.

KEN CLARKE: The other important thing around the Networked Society concept is allowing people to realise the scale of the Networked Society and what the ramifications might be.

KATE MURRAY: This is Ken Clarke, he is Deputy Director at the NSI Lab at the Institute.

KEN CLARKE: On the positive side you know new services being delivered in new areas in new ways. But the downside is potential privacy and security breaches. So again, we've seen around the security angle in recent times, there's been a massive hit. Particularly in the UK and Europe, the National Health Service Hospitals being offline for days on end because their systems were encrypted by a virus.

So people have to understand that this connectivity has downsides, you have to be able to control your privacy, look after your own security in many situations. So it actually gives us a way of actually making people more aware of positives, but also potential negatives.

ADAM LODDERS: In agreeance with Ken, the role for government in actually mandating these things is problematic. I think you know, what we actually need to see and what we try and focus on is how some of these sorts of technologies can be used to deliver positive social benefits, which is one aspect, which is generally a voluntary kind of thing. But also these things have a negative kind of side, the increased capture of data, the increase use of that in surveillance by states and corporations, actually poses a very fundamental risk. In that sort of you know, it's a decision that has not really been made, it happened by stealth, where actually all this data is actually being captured and processed by governments and private corporations. There's never been really any conversation about whether or not this is the right thing to do, or whether or not there are certain policy kinds of things.

I think these are some of the issues as these technologies and tools become more part of our daily existence, we're actually going to have to sit down as a society and address, well which paths do we want these to take? If we're happy for the benefits, how do we manage those in an appropriate way?

KATE MURRAY: Okay, so the Networked Society is what emerges through the increasing connectivity of objects and people via the internet. It's the digital world that we take for granted now, but it's grown so quickly we don't always have the legal structures in place to govern it effectively. So what does the Networked Society Institute do?

ADAM LODDERS: So we're an interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Melbourne. We're one of five interdisciplinary research institutes. Our main mission is actually to drive collaborations across campus. So what we do is actually facilitate the interactions between researchers from their disciplines, to actually come together and work on a variety of projects. The key for that is...the key organizing principle of that is connectivity. So we pretty much play in anything that has to do with the internet, or can be connected to the internet, that's our scope. 'Cause it's quite a wide area to actually play and exist in.

KATE MURRAY: What does that look like on the ground? Can you give me an example of the Institute's research?

KEN CLARKE: The thing for me that's provided the most delight from the Networked Society has been our Music Therapy project, where we're using virtual reality to provide the music therapy for quadriplegic patients. Their reaction to being in that virtual environment was just amazing, they were really stunned to be out in space, or around a campfire by night. The particular worlds that we put them into. For a lot of the quadriplegics of course, they've been limited mobility, they haven't been able to experience the great outdoors. One guy when he took the VR headset off he said, "that's the first time I've been camping in about 10 or 12 years". He actually thought he'd been out camping in the bush. So that was a fantastic reaction.

KATE MURRAY: So just for those who aren't familiar with virtual reality technology, can you explain a bit more about it?

KEN CLARKE: Virtual reality is for us as an Institute, the Networked Society Institute, is actually very important from a health and therapy point of view. With virtual reality you actually literally go into an alternative world, and you do not see the real world in front of you, you're actually embedded in another scene of another world. These things can be used for a range of scenarios. So we have a few projects in that space looking at youth mental health for example, and music therapy for quadriplegia. Using the virtual environment as a way to reach out to these people and provide some therapeutic benefit to them.

Actually the virtual reality experience provides a bit of privacy, they can appear as an avatar, and so they actually lose their inhibitions, and in particularly when it comes to singing, as you can imagine. Most people actually have a hangup about singing in public, but when you're in that virtual environment you don't have that feeling that people are watching or listening to you. So it's a bit like being in the shower, you're suddenly able to sing your heart out, and actually enjoy the experience.

Similarly, for mental health, you can provide alternative environments but in a safe way, a controlled way. A clinician can actually drive the creation of that virtual environment to provide some therapeutic effect.

KATE MURRAY: Thanks Ken, and thank you Adam. So let's recap on what we've learned. The Networked Society is the increasing amount of connected objects, from your humble smartphone to a whole smart city. It's all about how they are shaping and controlling our daily existence. There is potential for mismanagement, as the Networked Society has grown faster than the governance structures around it can adapt. But there are also the positive potentials.

University of Melbourne's Networked Society Institute are trying to harness the power of this connectivity, to create positive social change. How do they do this? Well through things like using VR for health applications, and we heard about the Music Therapy in Virtual Environments. That's a project I'm sure you'll hear about in later episodes. Keep tuning in to learn more about the research going on at the Networked Society Institute and how we are helping to understand and create the connected future.

For more information you can visit our website, networkedsociety.unimelb.edu.au

Or find us on Twitter, we're @MelbNSI

My name is Kate Murray, thanks for listening.

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Back to basics - What is the Networked Society?

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KATE MURRAY: Welcome to Networked Society Stories, where we explore and uncover how our increasingly connected world is changing, well, everything. From our daily routines, to how we run our cities. The rise of robots, and 3D printed body parts. We'll be exploring all of those topics and so much more in upcoming episodes.

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A framework for contextual information in digital collections (2011)

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A framework for contextual information in digital collections (2011)

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A broader perspective on records as seen by Records-in-Contexts(2016)

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A broader perspective on records as seen by Records-in-Contexts(2016)

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an archival description draft standard (2016)

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Recent projects and initiatives at Toyota Archives (2016)

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Recent projects and initiatives at Toyota Archives (2016)

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the model of archive, library and museum services at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections(2016)

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Presentation: Records in Contexts (RiC):

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Presentation: Records in Contexts (RiC):

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a standard for archival description developed by the ICA Experts Group on Archival Description(2016)

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SESSION 7.8 STANDARDS PART 2

Chair: Daniel PITTI (USA)

Summary

The standard has two parts: a conceptual model (RiC-CM) and an ontology (RiC-O). In its work the EGAD is building on more than twenty years of successful standards development by the ICA, as well as national or project-based modeling work in the archival community alongside that of allied professional communities. The EGAD is also informed by established and emerging communication technologies, particularly semantic technologies that are more expressive than the more established markup and database technologies, and are increasingly used to interconnect description in disparate descriptive systems to provide integrated access to resources across cultural heritage domains. The four existing ICA standards (ISAD(G), ISAAR, ISDF, and ISDIAH) are intended to work in relation to one another to form a complete model for archival description. They were developed in succession over a twenty-year period, by different experts with new and emerging understandings of archival description, and against a backdrop of rapidly developing communication technologies that offered an expanding range of opportunities as well as the challenge of electronic records. It is thus no surprise that the standards are not consistent and complete in describing how they are to be used together. It is within this context that the EGAD is developing RiC, reconciling and integrating the four existing standards, reorienting them to take advantage of developments in communication technologies, and recognizing that the challenge of describing and managing electronic records requires that archival description be more closely aligned with the management of records in their context of origin and use, while at the same time accommodating traditional archival materials and the existing predominant method of archival description, fonds-based multilevel description. RiC-CM will resemble the existing four standards, defining the major archival descriptive entities and their properties, and the interrelations among them. RiC-O will be expressed as a W3C OWL (Ontology Web Language), and will have as its primary focus enabling archival description to be expressed in semantic technologies. In this presentation, three members of the EGAD will provide background and an overview of both RiC-CM and RiC-O.

Introduction to ICA-Records in Contexts

General Presentation by Daniel Pitti

Daniel PITTI, University of Virginia, USA

Daniel Pitti is Chair of the ICA Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD). Pitti is Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. From 1993-2010, Pitti served as the chief technical architect of Encoded Archival Description (EAD, a standard for encoding archival guides, and Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), a standard for encoding archival identity descriptions. He currently serves on the SAA Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Standards. Pitti is project director of Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative, a new international cooperative hosted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. At IATH, Pitti collaborates with fellows and other faculty in humanities research projects that employ innovative research employing computational and network methods. Among the many humanities projects are the William Blake Archive; the Walt Whitman Archive; Leonardo's Treatise on Painting; Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive; and Collective Biographies of Women.

Presentation of the Conceptual Model by Bill Stockting

Bill STOCKTING, United Kingdom

Bill Stockting is an acknowledged expert on archival processing, description, and its digital automation. At the UK National Archives, he was a member of the team that developed the first online catalogue system (PROCAT) and operationally managed the ground breaking Access to Archives (A2A) Programme. At the British Library, he led the development of the Integrated Archives and Manuscripts System (IAMS) which has provided single cataloguing and access environments for the Library's archive and manuscript collections for the first time. Bill was also responsible for the processing of all Special Collections at the Library. He is a former chair of the then Society of Archivists' Data Exchange Group and has trained fellow professionals in description standards, automation and access in the UK, Ireland and across Europe. Bill is a member of the Society of American Archivists' Technical Sub-committee on Encoded Archival Standards (EAS) and of the International Council on Archives' (ICA) Expert Group on Archival Description, which is developing a conceptual data model for the archives domain - Records in Context.

Presentation of the Ontology by Florence Clavaud

Florence CLAVAUD, Archives nationales, France

Archiviste-paléographe, conservateur en chef du patrimoine. Successivement responsable du service de reproduction des documents puis du service des nouvelles technologies aux Archives nationales (centre parisien) de 1990 à 2004, puis consultante (salariée d'une petite société privée) de 2004 à 2007, responsable pédagogique du Master 2 " Technologies numériques appliquées à l'histoire " et responsable de projets d'humanités numériques à l'École nationale des chartes de 2007 à 2013. Aujourd'hui responsable des référentiels documentaires (vocabulaires et référentiel des producteurs) aux Archives nationales. Également membre de l'équipe de recherche de l'École nationale des chartes, responsable de plusieurs projets numériques centrés sur l'édition critique numérique de textes. Membre de plusieurs groupes de travail nationaux et internationaux, en particulier membre du groupe d'experts EGAD du CIA sur la description archivistique (responsable de la réalisation de l'ontologie). Membre de l'Association des archivistes français, du Consortium TEI et de l'association francophone Humanistica.
Florence Clavaud is an archivist, chief curator, Authority records and vocabularies project leader at the Archives nationales de France (ANF) since 2013. She was in charge of Records Reproduction service then of Information Technologies service at the ANF (Parisian centre) from 1990 to 2004, then a consultant within a small private company from 2004 to 2007. From 2007 to 2013 she was the main lecturer and the person in charge of the second year of the master's degree " history and new technologies " at the École nationale des chartes. Apart from her main function at the ANF, she is now a member of the research team of the École nationale des chartes (see http://www.enc-sorbonne.fr/fr/florence-clavaud), actively involved in several digital humanities projects including scholarly editions, responsible for their digital features (see for instance http://saint-denis.enc.sorbonne.fr and http://thalamus.huma-num.fr). She is a member of several national standardisation groups. She is also a member of SAA Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards, and an executive member of ICA Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD) of ICA, responsible of the ontology ; and a member of the TEI Consortium and of the Francophone Humanistica association.

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Records in Contexts (RiC): a standard for archival description developed by the ICA Experts Group on Archival Description

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SESSION 7.8 STANDARDS PART 2 Chair: Daniel PITTI (USA) The standard has two parts: a conceptual model (RiC-CM) and an ontology (RiC-O). In its work the EGAD is building on more than twenty years of successful standards development by the ICA, as well as national or project-based modeling work in the archival community alongside that of allied professional communities.

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from Project to Cooperative Archival Program (2014)

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Pitti et al. - 2014 - Social Networks and Archival Context From Project.pdf

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Encoded Archival Context (EAC) and Archival Description: 

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Encoded Archival Context (EAC) and Archival Description: 

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Rationale and Background (2006)

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BA and MA - 2006 - Encoded Archival Context (EAC) and Archival Descri.pdf

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Principles for Archive Information Services in the Public Domain(2012)

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Principles for Archive Information Services in the Public Domain(2012)

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Principles for archival information services in the public domain (1).pdf