Webinar: Heritage Connector: Findings, Demonstrators and Potential (3 December 2021)

At 14.30–16.30 on 3 December 2021, the Heritage Connector project hosted a free, public webinar to share the findings from the project.

The webinar featured:

• Technical overview of the project’s approach,
• A set of demonstrators which have been developed by the project team and through a hackathon held with digital agency Cogapp,
• Reflections on the project from a digital humanities and curatorial perspectives.

Speakers

‘Heritage Connector Webinar Introduction’ - John Stack, Science Museum Group

‘Transforming Text into Data to Extract Meaning and Make Connections’ - Kalyan Dutia and Jamie Unwin, Science Museum Group

• Kalyan Dutia and Jamie Unwin: Technical Presentation (PDF)

‘Digital Humanities and Heritage Connector’ - Professor Jane Winters, School of Advanced Study, University of London

• Jane Winters: Heritage Connector and Digital Humanities Presentation (PDF)

‘Heritage Connector Hacks: Cogapp Hack Day’ - Tristan Roddis, Cogapp

• Tristan Roddis: Heritage Connector Hacks Results from the hack day with Cogapp Presentation (PDF)

‘Curatorial Reflections’ - Dr Tim Boon, Science Museum Group

• Tim Boon: Curatorial Reflections Presentation (PDF)

Chat

• 96,081,997 entities in Wikidata as of now
• http://heritageconnector.sciencemuseum.org.uk/3_visualisation/index.html
• Heritage Connector Knowledge Graph visualisation link above
• https://openrefine.org
• https://www.wikidata.org/
• https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/blog/
• http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/
• https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/
• https://spacy.io/
• http://heritageconnector.sciencemuseum.org.uk/
• Demo link above
• Q: are the URLs which you derive from the CSV fed back into the CMS, or do they only live in the knowledge graph?
• Q: are the links typed, i.e. what properties are you specifying? CIDOC CRM?
• Would you mind pasting your questions into the Q&A, to make sure they don’t get missed?
• Cool thanks!
• Both museum collections (SMG + V&A) visualisation here: http://heritageconnector.sciencemuseum.org.uk/4_visualisation_vanda/index.html
• Metadata explorer: http://34.240.58.30:8010/view_connections
• there have been contributions to Wikidata as part of the Wikimedian in Residence project, but not extensively
• So you were using Wikidata Q IDs as persistent identifiers
• https://cidoc-crm.org/
• Yes, Wikidata was largely used as a persistent identifier and though WD allow us to find other persistent ID’s in other catalogues.
• In the next project we plan to add two major history of science and technology bibliographies into its knowledge graph
• Isis and SHOT bibliographies
• More on the technical work:
• https://thesciencemuseum.github.io/heritageconnector/post/2020/11/06/knowledge-graphs-machine-learning-and-heritage-collections/
• https://doi.org/10.1002/ail2.23
• https://thesciencemuseum.github.io/heritageconnector/post/2021/09/10/demos-announcement/
• DH research hub @SAS: https://www.sas.ac.uk/digital-humanities
• Write up of the workshop with curators: https://thesciencemuseum.github.io/heritageconnector/events/2021/04/01/workshop-report-22-March-2021/
• Heritage connector: A machine learning framework for building linked open data from museum collections: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ail2.23
• HISTORY, AI AND KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS - Kalyan Dutia & Tim Boon: https://thesciencemuseum.github.io/heritageconnector/post/2021/03/17/history-ai/
• Zotero library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2439363/heritage_connector
• HC YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzO6jroIvj-JbFuiQ9BpZdQ
• GitHub repository: https://github.com/TheScienceMuseum/heritage-connector/
• Write up of workshop with curators: https://thesciencemuseum.github.io/heritageconnector/events/2021/04/01/workshop-report-22-March-2021/
• Project page: https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/project/heritage-connector/
• TANC website: https://www.nationalcollection.org.uk/
• I imagine the recording and/or chat log will be posted on the projects website or blog? :)
• Yes, we plan to post today’s recording! and hope to include links and anonymised chat as John said
• Great, thank you!
• Whoops, I forgot to talk about the SPARQL endpoint and interface. It’s here http://34.240.58.30/, and our pieced-together ontology is here https://github.com/TheScienceMuseum/thor-docker/blob/main/SCHEMA.md
• There are blog articles with lots more details for most of these projects at https://blog.cogapp.com/tagged/coghack
• Nitin’s Blog: https://blog.cogapp.com/heritage-connector-link-race-904770982938
• Sotirios’ Blog: https://blog.cogapp.com/good-neighbours-2525e59a0b82
• Heritage Connector Map Visualisation Demo: https://github.com/TheScienceMuseum/heritage-connector-demos/blob/main/5_map_visualisation/README.md
• https://timeline.knightlab.com/
• Link to the slides for the hack day demos, which in turn contain direct links to the blog posts: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1R25IaGbWvXx8VNnLLNcVv337Io9WdeI9F4ouEMM0xbY/edit#slide=id.g105f7ba34da_0_280
• A conversation between Tim Boon and Kalyan Dutia: https://thesciencemuseum.github.io/heritageconnector/post/2021/03/17/history-ai/
• The Congruence Engine a TANC discovery project: https://www.nationalcollection.org.uk/Discovery_Projects
• THE CONGRUENCE ENGINE: DIGITAL TOOLS FOR NEW COLLECTIONS-BASED INDUSTRIAL HISTORIES: https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/project/the-congruence-engine/
• Great session, thank you all!
• Very interesting looking at ways forward
• Thanks so much everyone. Some of the tech side went over my head (!) but still a really useful session. Great work you’re all doing, congrats.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rhiannon Lewis for organising the event; Sameena Allie for technical setup and support; Jamie Unwin, Kalyan Dutia, Professor Jane Winters, Tristan Roddis and Dr Tim Boon for presenting.