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Defining digital curation in the digital humanities context

Abstract

Digital curation, as represented through the digital content lifecycle model, involves the preservation, promotion, and long-term access to born-digital and digitized collections of heritage material, data, and publications supporting research with surviving (albeit considered obsolete), current, and emerging digital technologies. Social curation involves community and public feedback using various social media platforms; it aims to add meanings to collections and enrich public discourse on collection or exhibition themes. The definitions for curation, digital curation, digital preservation, and digital humanities data curation outline the scope of digital curation. There are multiple levels of curation, which vary by the institutional context, but this chapter emphasizes the principle that archives perform vital services to ensure accessibility to data used in digital humanities and sciences. This chapter focuses on digital curation as a practical framework for preserving and promoting cultural heritage collections, data, and other forms of digital content as well as discussing the various levels of curation aiming to preserve the quality and integrity of those collections and data. Although scholarly work in the digital humanities may extend beyond the physical archives, many projects will continue to use primary sources and data from archives and the digital repositories they maintain.

Keywords

Archives; Curation; Digital curation; Digital humanities data curation; Digital preservation; Levels of curation Digital curation involves the preservation, promotion, and providing long-term access to born-digital and digitized collections of heritage material, data, and publications supporting research with surviving (albeit considered obsolete), current, and emerging digital technologies. As with the term "archive," "digital curation" needs a semantic clarification, as it has different meanings in the context of archival profession and digital humanities, given also the distinct perspectives of collaborating archivists and digital humanists. Digital archivists focus on preserving digital content in the context of archiving whereas some digital humanists, on creating thematic collections to create new interpretations, theoretical frameworks, and knowledge. There is also social curation, which involves community and public feedback using various social media platforms; its aim is to add meanings to the collections and enrich public discourse on collection or exhibition themes. The overlap in the definitions and applications of digital curation in these related contexts brings archivists, digital humanists, and the public together, and thus enhances collaboration at various levels of curation. This chapter calls this collaborative framework the digital curation workspace because it expands the meaning of "digital curation" to represent the works of collaborating archivists, librarians, digital humanists, technologists, information architects, and the public in different-perhaps intersubjective-contexts. In his Introduction and Welcome talk at a Seminar in London titled "Digital Curation: Digital archives, libraries and e-science seminar" sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition and the British National Space Centre, Beagrie (2001) ascribed the emergence of "digital curation" to the continuing interdisciplinary dialogue between scientists and librarians. The association of digital curators with scientific work by Lord and Macdonald (2003) has placed digital curators in an active role of preserving and adding value to collections for the public good by promoting new science and maintaining a solid community of scientists. In the sciences, curation refers to the maintenance and publishing of databases containing knowledge and evidence, annotations, linkage, management, validation, and editorial input providing value to the digital library. In the digital humanities context, however, the definition of curation-rooted in fourteenth-century practices and associated primarily with museum artifacts-has undergone significant changes due to the influence of emerging technologies and the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship. "Digital curation has added a new dimensionality to the mix, which is technical knowledge, but even here technological knowledge is key but not a requirement" (Tebeau, 2011, "Digital Humanities Curation," para. 4). The interdisciplinary scope of digital humanities not only spans the humanities and technology, however, but as Flanders and Muñoz (2011) point out, it also covers archival science, library and information science, computer science, systems, and records management. The digital humanities have also introduced new methodologies for the analysis, interpretation, and visualization of humanities data, which present a separate and new level of curation in addition to existing practices. The mutual relationship between digital humanities and digital curation is explained by the digital humanities' role to provide an interdisciplinary framework to support collaboration among scholars, archivists, librarians, and technologists on the one hand and to promote the role of digital curation for the long-term preservation of and access to resources needed in the digital humanities on the other. This chapter focuses on digital curation as a practical framework for preserving and promoting cultural heritage collections, data, and other forms of digital content as well as discussing the various levels of curation aiming to preserve the quality and integrity of those collections and data. Although scholarly work in the digital humanities may extend beyond the physical archives, many projects will continue to use primary sources and data from archives and the digital repositories they maintain. The chapter first reviews foundational definitions of curation and digital curation, followed by discussions of the digital content lifecycle, levels of curation, and levels of representation essential to understanding the digital curation process. Then the chapter explicates digital humanities data curation and various aspects of treating and interpreting humanities data. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on linked open data, including curating heritage collections, archives, and libraries. Although mashups present both primary and secondary data to create new services, the curation of such data also serves an important purpose: to preserve the relationship of data and collections from multiple sources and to build a broader ontological framework for preserving knowledge. The preservation of metadata in this context not only enhances the lifecycle of digital contents but also the continued accessibility of humanistic and scientific data across multiple generations of data models, file types, and other obsolete material. To this end, archives may become the epistemic bridge between the world of print on one side and digital content on the other, ensuring a continuum of knowledge transfer from print and analog to digital. However, this model does not advocate abandoning nondigital collections for the sake of emerging popular technologies.

Foundational definitions for curation

The lexical definition for curation, offered in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), is "guardianship," which falls under the purview of the curator defined in Oxford as the "officer in charge of a museum, gallery of art, library; a keeper, custodian" (p. 625). While the online version of Oxford Dictionaries does not define curation per se, it is derived from curate, which means "select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition)" and "select, organize, and present (suitable content, typically for online or computational use)" (Oxford, 2013, "curate"). The Museum Curation Community (2013) Web site defines "museum curation" as "The practice of managing historically valuable collections of artifacts," but adds that "museum curators should not be confused with museum archivists; a museum archivist usually only works with valuable documents" ("museum curation," para. 1). The distinction applies to archivists in general but not to repositories that accept three-dimensional objects as part of a larger donation of private collections, historical manuscripts, and organizational records. The semantic clarification of curation, preservation, and archiving has been the work of Lord and Macdonald (2003) addressing the differences between these terms describing three curatorial activities:

Curation: The activity of, managing and promoting the use of data, from its point of creation, to ensure it is fit for contemporary purpose, and available for discovery and re-use. For dynamic datasets this may mean continuous enrichment or updating to keep it fit for purpose. Higher levels of curation (as in the Digital Humanities) will also involve maintaining links with annotation and with other published materials.

Archiving: A curation activity which ensures that data is properly selected, stored, can be accessed and that its logical and physical integrity is maintained over time, including security and authenticity.

Preservation (after Hedstrom): "An activity within archiving in which specific items of data are maintained over time so that they can still be accessed and understood through changes in technology."

As cited in Lord and Macdonald (2003, p. 12)

The Glossary of Archival and Records...