This repository collects materials (papers, presentations, diagrams) related to a research project initiated by Dr Karin de Wild and Lozana Rossenova. Materials are organized into folders corresponding to events where the research was presented. The repository will grow as the research develops in scope and scale.
When a scholar, curator or archivist is researching an artwork, they need provenance, an essential piece of information that can help them evaluate as to whether a source can be trusted. Describing provenance information and encoding it as metadata forms an important part of the work of archivists, curators, scholars and other cultural heritage professionals. Standardized methods and procedures have been developed to facilitate provenance description of traditional cultural heritage. However, born-digital cultural heritage poses new challenges to established standards.
This research project originated with an intention to address a specific problem – how to express the provenance of Internet art as linked data. To do so, we looked towards the fields of computer and data science. One of the standards that has emerged to describe the provenance of digital data is the W3C PROV. It provides a model which facilitates description of the entities, agents and processes involved in producing data. This generic model has proven to be applicable in various contexts, including the cultural heritage domain. However, its potential to describe the provenance of Internet art is not yet fully explored. In the first output of this research project – a paper for the iPRES 2019 conference – we demonstrate how the PROV model can be used to describe the provenance of Internet art by applying it to a case study from Rhizome’s ArtBase, an online archive dedicated to preserving works of Internet art.
We consider this project to be of relevance to digital art conservators, digital curators, Web archivists and art historians.
We take advantage of GitHub’s native Wiki utility, to develop a guide to using PROV for cultural heritage scholars and professionals. The guide will expand on the research presented at conferences, clearly present case studies that can be used as models for other cultural heritage projects, and will track relevant events, workshops, and presentations organized alongside this project.
Dr Karin de Wild is a lecturer in contemporary museum and collection studies at Leiden University (The Netherlands) with a particular interest in digital collections. Before joining Leiden University, she was a digital fellow at the University of Leicester investigating digital literacies in museums. She has a past life as curator and collaborated with a range of museums from Tate and de Young Museum to SFMOMA.
Lozana Rossenova is a digital designer and researcher. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University and her research is a collaborative doctoral partnership project with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organization based in New York.
Anisa Hawes is researcher and web archivist with an interest in critical curatorial practice and using open-source tools to preserve digital cultural memory. She has extensive experience working in national museums and collaborated with a range of heritage institutions, including the British Library/UK Web Archive, Digital Preservation Coalition, and Rhizome. As embedded researcher at the V&A, she led a collaborative project which investigated the challenges of ‘Collecting and Curating Digital Posters'.