Welcome to webinar 2. Ancient
itineraries - exploring digital art history
Stuart Dunn is Senior Lecturer and
Head of the Department of Digital Humanities
at King's College London. He's
the principal investigator of the
ancient itineraries project. He's an
archaeologist with interests in the
history of cartography, digital approaches to landscape studies and spatial humanities
He works on projects
in spatial narrative theory, critical GIS
Cypriot cultural heritage and
archaeology of mobility
First of all thank you Asa and everyone else very
much for the invitation to participate in this webinar
This presentation is essentially the work 
of this wonderful team here
Arianna Ciula of
the King's digital lab, my colleague
professor Graeme Earl of digital
humanities, Anna Foka who we heard from earlier
and Will Wootton also from King's
College London the department of classics
The ancient itineraries project was funded
by the Getty Foundation very generously
and it was one of their advanced
Institute projects so our remit was to
bring together an international
collaboration of scholars for two long meetings
two-week meetings in each case
in autumn 2018 and spring 2019
to discuss the idea of digital art history
and to think about what sort of problems
the field is facing and what sort of solutions 
technical or or epistemological
or theoretical we might come up with
to some of those problems
We were very
fortunate to pull together this
tremendous slate of international
scholars from all over the place
so this presentation is as I say very much the
product of this hive mind
that that we were able
to bring together in the last 18 months or so
so I think that this question
reigned very much in terms of the debate
that Anna opened her presentation with
earlier. Which she framed in terms of the
disparity or the opposition should I say
the dichotomy between digitalization and
digitization. And this is a aspect that
was picked up by Johanna Drucker who is
a scholar I'm sure that many of us have
read and interacted with it one way or another
So in 2013 she made exactly this
distinction. She says the distinction has
to be made between the use of online
repositories and images which is
digitized art history and the use of
analytic techniques which he cause
digital artistry. I think this
digitized versus digitalized is very important
it's a distinction between
making resources available online or
widely available using the web and using
computational modes of thinking to do
something with that data. Drucker goes
on to say we have to take into account
the ways digital humanities more broadly have taken up computational techniques
sort of the specificity of digital art objects and their particular requirements and points of resistance
So this point about the specificity
of visual art objects is an extremely
important one and it's one that I'm
going to pick up a little later
I think this is very useful to just 
restate that distinction between
the availability of resources and what
you do with them
so an opposing view was put forward two years ago
by Claire Bishop who argues essentially that
the use of digital techniques digitization and
by the extension in this passage digitalization
is perhaps not so useful
in art history simply because by
crunching material information that has
being digitized in some way you will
never be able to explore the original
material in a more creative or a more
discursive or a less abstract fashion
and I think this is a very important
stance that she takes when she puts out
this quotation that empirical findings
never before highlighted in our history
as a kind of aim of digital art history
you know to do digital art history there
has to be some kind of Eureka moment
I put a bunch of data through a
computer and find out something about
the history of art that I didn't know
before. Now I happen to agree with both
of these positions to differ in degrees
I think this is since I became a manager
a year ago I have to hedge and sit on
the fence all the time and I'm now
starting to do that in my research but I
think that there are two very
valid and valuable viewpoints here
and what I'm going to try and explore is
how our thinking in the ancient
itineraries project employed models
around the Semantic Web and the linking
of various different aspects can help us
navigate a path between those two
Let's have a little bit of a think about
this distinction between the digital and
digitalized. So this is of course an
extremely famous painting by Jan van Eyck, 
the Arnolfini portrait
It is absolutely iconic there are
reproductions of it everywhere
It is probably among the most famous visual
items of visual arts that have ever been produced
Now of course the web comes along
in 2000 or whatever - no earlier that wasn't it 
I teach the history of the Internet
I should know these things. But there are
now multiple, thousands, tens of thousands
probably hundreds of thousands of
different representations
different digitization of the Arnolfini wedding
online in all different corners of the internet
Now some you can just see from
this google image search here you know
there are differences in the way these
digitizations are treated
1997 was when the internet web was founded
well this is actually a question I set
my students so I think we'll come
back to that one later
Some focus on the mirror in the background there
which really focuses in on particular
details and around the edges here this
is quite a famous aspect to the portrait
There are sort of miniatures actually
painted into the frame of the mirror
But you know this doesn't really, I think it
is fair to say, tell us anything
about the history of the object, the
connoisseurship surrounding the object
why it might be interesting.
That is because we are looking here at
I guess Google level metadata. Of course
if we go in a bit further
So using a framework like Europeana
for example this gets us to a next level
because here we have structured, much
more curated metadata which will allow
us to explore the concepts around
a particular artwork like the Arnolfini wedding
So what I've just given as an
example here is an example of
exploring the concept of the wedding in
Europeana so there's all different
objects, different types of objects,
there's different levels of detail that
I can borrow into the subject using a
platform like this without then
having to go through the laborious
process of manually exploring a
Google images search
So obviously this level of
enrichment definitely takes us one stage
further and it's the basis
of a lot of I guess what Drucker
would call digitized art history
There have been other
initiatives of course the Flickr Commons
I don't know if anyone has used it but
back in the days when Flickr was a thing
and the Commons website provided a forum
for cultural heritage institutions and
galleries to make digitized surrogates
of their collections available online
under a Creative Commons license
where copyrights allowed them to do so
So again this is another little bit of a
step forward I think you know this is a
different level of metadata structure
being given but it's one that depends on
pre-existing metadata structures those
of the participating heritage organizations
and Anna in her talk spoke
a little bit about these different
competing models and mentioned sort of
crowdsourcing as another aspect of this
and crowdsourcing and you know Flickr is
in a sense a
crowdsourcing platform because the users
could in a way go in
and add their own metadata tags to it
So again there is another kind of metadata enrichment going on there
So I think it's useful in the context of
this dichotomy, both between digital art
history and digitalized art history and
different levels of metadata enrichment
to think about the concept of provenance
which is absolutely the bread
and butter for the profession of art history
But I think one issue
which comes across or which has come
across in the course of our ancient
itineraries meetings is that whereas
provenance has one particular meaning in
art history
it means slightly different things in
other contexts. Particularly when we move
into the more technical end of things
This I think is an interesting sort of
interdisciplinary issue for how we
tackle digital art history
From the French 'provenir' which to means "to come
from, to originate from"
the history of ownership of a valued object, such as a
work of art etc etc
There is an expectation that a full provenance will
provide a full background
a full sort of informational profile of a valued object
But as with the examples of platforms I've just talked through there are different levels of detail and
completeness and verisimilitude
that metadata can offer as a vehicle of provenance
Provenance is of course absolutely critical not only to the field of professional art history but also
to the profession of art sales and so it's
extremely important that any art object
that is offered for sale in a suitably
licensed forum like Christie's or London
which have their own approaches
and their own standards given to provenance
so this is very important to ensure
that the artwork in question has been
ethically sourced, that it hasn't been stolen
that its financial valuations are
sound, that any competing cultural claims
are dealt with in an ethical and
transparent manner
This kind of intersects with the way that
museum collections deal with all these things as well
So there seems to me to be quite 
a lot of crossover
between different ideas of what
provenance is.
Metadata is one way that is expressed
Of course
this allows us to think in more detail
about those digital quantitative
approaches to provenance which many
organizations and institutions have come
up with over the last few years
One of the most important examples for the field,
I would suggest
is the Getty Research Institute's 
provenance index, the GPI
which is a kind of field wide professional standard for documenting the provenance of artworks
Taking quite a metadata like view of that.
So I'm going to come back to that in a moment. 
But this I think drives us to those
slightly more technical
framings of the concept of provenance
So if like the GPI for example, the great Getty
provenance index, you know you are
framing provenance as a networked
collective of quantitative metadata labels
This I think takes us to a space
that is at least between those
art historical ideas of provenance and more
web based ideas of provenance
So the W3C Consortium for example
describes provenance as a record that describes the peoples, institutions, entities and activities
involved in producing, influencing or delivering a
piece of data or a thing
So the concept of provenance, the concept
of metadata can be applied
to both artworks and to data on the web
I really think it is not hugely useful to break 
those down too much.
And then as it says there good curation on the web demands good provenance.
Provenance is no longer merely a nicety 
of artists academics and winemakers
It is an ethic we expect
So just to illustrate that, this is the
Getty provenance index
I though might try and see if I could be very
brave and actually share a webpage
Can you see my screen still? Can you see the network?
Let me just see if I can do
something about that because it does
work way better on the zoomable web
page.
Okay I'm not going to spend too long fooling about with this
Your mic is going off sometimes a little bit
Can you hear me now
This is the equivalent of the adapter not working isn't it
Yeah so what we have here in this 
network visualization of the
provenance index that the Getty has provided us with 
is a set of connections
between art dealerships and some of the
main art markets in the first 20 years
of the 19th century. So London, Paris,
Rotterdam, various Dutch ports and so forth
This is incredibly useful
because this gives us a very clear
overview of where is particularly
important. Where there are most connections
between nodes like Amsterdam
for example and particular dealers and
that shows you which particular dealers
are dealing most with which particular markets.
But I think in a sense the limitation of this sort of visualization and this is just
a general comments on network visualization, 
not on the Getty provenance index,
is that in a sense it
amplifies and entrenches very structured
bottles of metadata that were there
already. And I think it implicitly limits
our way to looking outside what is
really obvious in those connections
within the network. I think one of the
key ideas for me that came out of our
ancient itineraries project is how can we,
within a network based visualization
how can we look for what is not obvious in that? 
How can we pick up the
kind of things that a discursive art
historian might be interested in?
I know there have been other initiatives
working with the Getty and others like
the Linked.Arts Initiative looking at this
That's another set of 
conversations that we're having
This takes us on to the little case study 
I would like to look briefly at
which is a particular artwork which we spent 
quite a lot of time looking at
which is the statue of the dancing faun 
at Leighton House in West London
No doubt this is bringing about many 
happy memories for Anna
So Leighton house was the residence of 
sir Frederic Leighton
who was a grand tourer,
a collector, a philanthropist.
He was all of these things and he amassed this 
amazing art collection which now functions as a
domestic museum under the stewardship of the 
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
One of the centerpieces of this collection is 
this statue of a dancing faun
This is interesting for a number of reasons
It is a copy of an original that was originally 
discovered in Pompeii in the House of the Faun
So this particular image
goes through various different iterations
From 80, 79 or whenever right through 
to the present day in West London
As you can see on
the left hand side there this is from
the Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea's online catalogue
where it documents the Leighton art collection.
This is I think a fairly standard,
a fairly robust metadata catalog of what 
this statue is all about
But when you start digging into the history of
the object and the history of the
objects around the object, then this
starts to bring out some of
these interesting networked sort of
networked questions
So what we started doing, and we did this
completely manually in the first instance
we just thought of what kind of metadata 
both relating to the object and relating to
abstract ideas which described things related to the object could we document?
The chronology for example,
when when was it created?
In what time window did it exist, 
where did it come into existence?
Where did it end its existence?
There was a discussion in the previous presentation about CIDOC. You can plug CIDOC links into this.
You can plug place types into this and
you can then link sort of more
conventional art history metadata headings, 
like the ULAN, the the Getty names list
So we built up a set of what we
call these segments that document the history of
the image of the dancing faun, basically from 
Pompeii to Leighton House
and framed these almost as a narrative, with the sections of the narrative
consistently described according to that 
metadata list as it were
And I'll have another go at sharing my screen
I'm not going to waste too much time doing this
because it would be quite nice
So using the Neo4j Platform we kind of
hacked these sort of
DIY provenance lists into a network graph
which contains not just objects
or literals such as places, but also concepts, 
also ideas, also references to styles
I mean you can have all sorts of fun 
just it's pulling these around
but essentially it starts with this 'literal' in the
middle here the Pompeii form
which you can list as you
know, we can just express, or the links
So we start with the original object but we link that to 
an abstraction a conceptual object
which is basically a linked data reference 
to the idea of the dancing faun in general
because dancing fauns are a mythological motif throughout Greek mythology
Then we look at what other instances there 
have been of dancing faun
we look at where those instances 
have been displayed
so there was a representation in the 
British Museum for example
so you can pull out all the links to 
the British Museum representation etc
And I'm not quite mad enough to try and do 
a complete demonstration live
So I am just going to do the rest 
through screen grabs
So let me just share my slides
Ok hopefully you have my slides back now? 
- Yes
So just as to talk you through this a little bit
There were a total of six instances of the 
abstract dancing faun
There is the Pompeii dancing faun off to the right there,
an example in the Uffici gallery, and the British Museum
There is one in the Royal Academy Gallery in
London and also the Leighton House faun
Now this as I mentioned also allowed us to 
build events into this model as it were
Just to give two examples here
abstractions of the move of the original
faun from Pompeii to the Naples Museum
and a completely separate event, the original creation of the Pompeii faun
which of course we can abstract as CIDOC CRM
entity types, entity clusters
That again allows us to be consistent about the way that we describe those segments of information
Same goes for time
periods so we used basically a variety
of different literals for referencing
time periods.
Wiki data was one so we have a literal representing the 19th century
So we have a two events linked to the 19th century
And also the PeriodO, the gazetteer of time periods, which was was very useful certainly
for the earlier periods that we were dealing with in the history of this object
We are also able
to use abstract representations of styles,
using for example the Getty's Art
and Architecture thesaurus
This is a link representing the 
Imperial Roman cultural period
That's not as a time period, that's as a period of cultural
homogeneity as it were
Not a statement that we are making. 
A statement that we are relying on
the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus to make.
Again this is very much relying on other 
institution's authorities
And also, this was discussed 
in the previous presentation,
there is of course places, for which we have 
primarily used the Pleiades gazetteer
Now this is where I
think it gets a little bit interesting
because of course we can simply point to
a URI for Pompeii as in this example
and say well this is a representation of that
one point on the Earth's surface which is Pompeii
But what if we wanted to dig into
that in a bit more detail?
What if we wanted to say there was a less well-known place, a less well attested place?
How would we be able to capture
those sorts of authorities?
This I think is where I would go back to a previous project that I've worked on
which is the gazetteer project in Cyprus.
In this, rather than testing places at the top level 
we attested the names of places
and of course the spellings of place names
can change and do change over time
and they change quite dramatically in some cases, 
particularly in the Mediterranean
so for example, for all
these spellings of Pafos here for example
we have an attestation link. So we have
one kind of abstract place that is Pafos
but it has multiple different attestations.
So this I think is the next stage of the project
We integrated it with the now deprecated Peripleio platforms, and it's just an example of that
But this I think is an example of where 
ends in or other nodes
in semantic networks should
never be the end of the story.
There are always further ways in which
you can break down attestations for those nodes
and that's the kind of thing that 
art historians are really interested in
So I'm coming up to the end of 
my allotted 30 minutes
so I'm going to conclude with what I think are 
two really important questions
to come out of the ancient itineraries Institute, which I
think can inform a range of options going forward
Be that through existing
initiatives such as Linked.Arts,
such as the Getty and so forth.
The first is, do objects have a particular type of significance when they are artworks?
Is there a way in which an object, that is an
artwork, is significant or complex
in a way that any other kind of object isn't?
This gets to much more fundamental and philosophical questions about what is an artwork
To give you an example: Here we have a photo of a 
19th century photo of a set of pots
from Cyprus, which I bought 
when I was there a few years ago
The photo that is not the pots. 
Just from looking at this I can tell
that there's at least one Bronze Age pot 
on the back left there
There's white slip ware, there are 
sort of geometric period and so forth
Now when I was researching 
this kind of thing as a PhD student
looking at East Mediterranean
archaeology, I was always inhabiting a
world where by looking at the morphology
and the typology and the decoration of
these sorts of objects were described as
art history.
Now the Arnolfini portrait is also an art object and 
most definitely the subject of art history
So I guess my question is, 
what sort of significance
do these types of objects share by
virtue of the fact that they are artworks,
that they are susceptible to the
epistemologies of art history, or of digital art history?
Because I mean, I guess,
it's got a Cyprus example there
We wouldn't necessarily
think of pottery ceramic vessels like this
in terms of connoisseurship of taste 
or fluctuations in taste
We might, but I think in a
much less granular level
than the words and objects 
like the Arnolfini portrait
My second question is, does history have a particular type of significance when it is art history?
We all know what a history is right? 
You know it is about books and manuscripts
most of the time.
Also about events and characters and so forth.
so what I would really like to do going forward 
as the next phase of this project
is look at ways of integrating this kind of 
network approach with
more conventional historical / art historical ways of
looking at things.
For example, integrating the kinds of 
network analysis I have been showing
with text for example. On platforms like
the Pelagios Recogito platform
Or the annotation of objects, all that kind of
thing.
So I guess just to sum up
What I have learned from the
ancient itineraries project
is that we have to think about metadata 
and provenance interchangeably
if we are going to steer
that difficult pathway between
the Claire Bishop way of looking at things, 
and the Johanna Drucker way of looking at things
and that really I think is the ultimate question 
for me of enriching metadata
So I think I'm gonna stop there. Thank you 
very much for your attention
and I will now hand back to Asa.
So Stuart the first comment is
from Alexander Huber of Oxford
Thanks Stuart do you have any thoughts on how
to get from small hand coded examples
like the faun one which have been
around for a few years now to linked
open data on scale for thousands and
millions of Records?
Yeah I mean I guess that
would depend you know why you're wanting
to make the information available I mean
are you wanting it to be made available
in order to link to other collections or
are you wanting to use it to interrogate
the history of one particular object?
Because I mean I think those two
slightly different ways of using network
analysis and as I say what
I found really interesting about the way
the example of the faun kind of emerged
was that this was about representing an
individual object. One object as a
network rather than about representing
you know networks of objects networks as connections
So to try and sort of creep towards 
an answer to that question
I mean yes I suppose you have
to look at creative ways of integrating
those small-scale hand-coded examples
with the larger scale linked open data
at scale frameworks that the Semantic Web
already provide and I think that's
something that you know there
is a lot of potential for looking at in the future
So I guess the second
question there is, is it the
responsibility of institutions to turn
their catalogs into LOD catalogs?
Is it a responsibility with digitization
projects to build "semantic integration” into their bids?
That's a really interesting question. 
I mean I don't know if it's a
responsibility but I certainly think
it's a very good idea because you know
if you don't do it somebody else will.
You know by our wiki data or you know
some other publicly available source of
information. So yes one certainly should.
You know whether we get into the realms
of it being an ethical requirements
well who knows, I mean I'm not sure
There could actually be quite an
interesting discussion in itself and
something for a good workshop.
Giving access to collections
and archives, should there be
some sort of mutual beneficiary
built into this to make sure that both
parts get something out of it? But of
course this will bring a lot of extra
requirements for humanities researchers
to think and to get good networks where
people can help them do things like this
We can move on, think on this for a while
and I'm gonna ask a few
questions about that myself. But we can
ask another question now from Carlotta Capurro: 
Thank you for an interesting presentation
I would like to know if in
tracing the provenance of the art object
and describing it with metadata you
considered to provide also information
of its context and its variations that
often is crucial information for artwork
Yes absolutely
I think this is one of
the really powerful potentials of the
linked open data approach in this space
and I think you know linked.art
which I've mentioned a couple of times
is demonstrating this really
successfully.
In Semantic Web, linked open data, you don't have to make an assertion
that one particular version of
events is true. All you have to do
is make an assertion and you can then
attach as many different interpretations
as you possibly can. I think that is
a really interesting set of
possibilities therefore you know
carrying over these art history
exceptions of provenance into the more
web-based perceptions of provenance.
That's definitely something that I would like 
to try and do more of in the future
We also
have a question from Natalie Thibault
In our museums we often
have a large number of unknown artists.
How to properly represent the works of
these unknown artists in the
Semantic Web where there's little data
from authorities? The iconography of
these works is a good basics for the
Semantic Web (subjects, periods, styles).
Have you considered other possibilities?
Again I mean I think this is another really
I think this goes back to
you know to some extent what Anna was
talking about this mornin. Which is that
there is a danger that some of these
type of quantitative networks amplify
voices that are already loud.
Artists who are already well known, the van
Eyck's of the world and the Arnolfini
portraits of the world. Which you know
already have a lot of exposure
I would say that I would probably
fall back on the same sort of answer
I mean if you don't have a means of 
representing those unknown artists
yourself as linked open data then you
can use other sources like
you can create your own references in 
Wikidata for example
Have a targeted Wikidata sprint about those artists.
This has been done in various different contexts
For example there is another Wikipedia editing group
which focuses on women and
classics for example and making sure
that female classicists
throughout history have Wikipedia pages
I think it's very much the same sort of
principle because you know an end point
a node for linked data can be
anywhere you like on the web. It doesn't
have to be in your official museum
presence. But you then have to have a
conversation of what sort of control you
need to have of that data
So I think it's as much about your own
institutional policies as the profile of
the people or the objects that
you're wanting to represent
We have a question from Michael Neiß:
As an archaeologist with a focus on the
Viking Age animal art, mostly fibulae, I am
interested in certain features/data (workshop attribution) that are not
necessarily anticipated by museum
curators who instigate their databases
Who instigate the databases more interesting to other researchers
There have been attempts by certain
museums to let their informed and also
not so informed public to participate in
gathering data but there is also the
managing aspect. There's a heavy workload
to curators and limited resources
Do you have suggestions for manageable
strategies for expert / public participation
when designating and
expanding those databases?
That's pretty much the question I was going to
ask so very good for Michael for asking it
So that's kind of the perennial question
with crowdsourcing any aspect of
cultural heritage information I guess.
This was very much a question that
we came up against with that Cyprus
gazetteer project that I briefly
mentioned that I thought could continue
some of these chains of attestation in
terms of place. So when we started that
project the idea was that it should be a
kind of open platform that anyone could
contribute Cypriot place names to or
spellings of Cypriot place names to and
you know there would be an editorial
process and you know we would make sure
that nothing too political happened with
Greek and Turkish names and that
kind of thing. But we found that model
really didn't work at all. Mainly because
the general public didn't care enough
about Cypriot place names to start making lots of contributions, which is fair enough I guess
Also kind of access to source material 
and that kind of thing
and there's very much the
issue of the quality control of
information which you mentioned
The way we addressed that is we got a series of
workshops together
Actually with students who were working the
texts. We sort of got them to
discuss and create content based on
texts they were working with
I think that kind of targeted approach is much
more successful for this kind of project
I mean again there are ethical questions
because you know unless there is some
benefit to the people doing the
contributing there is the possibility
that it could be seen as exploitative so
there has to be some kind of quid pro quo
Some kind of benefits I guess.
I think we sort of stopped thinking 
of it as crowdsourcing
and more thinking of it
as community sourcing
You know getting information 
from as you say in
the question there, sort of 
free expertise from peers
The question is sort of finding those peers, who will not be very large in number usually
and setting up some kind of relationship 
with them to to get that information
I'm just gonna jump in here 
before we move on to the next question
because one of the things that I
personally feel like
when there is some 
miscommunication sometimes it's like
certain information for the museum
collections they have to be restricted
they can't fill up with
everything that everyone could ever want
Like for instance if
you are a specialized researcher and you
are very interested in in fibulae.
But the researcher can create their own
they can take the data from all these
various collections where there are
remains of fibulae. And they can create
and enrich a database
of their own. And this will
of course require getting extra help
from specialists but you can make that
database available to others if you have
added it properly with proper standards
you can upload it to research database repositories
You can even as
you have done in your project ancient itineraries
build your own
visualization of these data
Kind of like working hand in hand, saying 
ok when I'm doing a research project
I'm gonna create a lot more data than
the museum is going to use but by making
sure that you have some sort of key, when
I'm talking about this object it's this
particular object in the museums, you
can sort of create an additional
database and that's perhaps the
power of linked open data
that both parties can get what they want.
How common is it in England for researchers to share
their databases would you say?
I suppose this is another perennial
problem because you know a lot of people
a lot of researchers don't necessarily
want to share data that they perceived
to be incomplete and therefore of not 
sufficient quality for their
work to be judged as being good.
There is a long old debate about this
certainly in the UK. I mean we used to
have various repositories where academic
data was deposited up to about 15 years ago
when the funding was cut. Which you
know is another issue that we always
come up against. I suppose the
the issue is that sharing data,
sharing useable data is never 
a cheap or easy process
despite what the web might trick you 
into thinking sometimes
Exactly. We can move on to a
question by Karin Tetteris.
Her question: I'm the curator of a
collection of military flags taken as
war booty and would love to find a
digital way to visualize their
itineraries for histories. I'm thinking of linking the
information about them to historical
maps, but also to biographical data on
historical persons available online. Aany ideas any suggestions for her?
I don't know if Anna would like to jump in
but that sounds like the sort of thing
that you can do in Recogito with an
image of a historic map
In fact that sounds conceptually like the sort of
work you've been doing recently Anna
I allowed to respond?
Yes please Anna
I think this is something that you can very
easily do with a very easy platforms
that are open source and open to for
everybody to use. The first question is
what kind of structured data do you have
about place and what kind of maps do
you have and how would you like to
annotate them?
I would be really happy to 
hear more about this and help you.
You can shoot me an email and we can if that
if that is of help we can discuss about
it more. Asa is sharing the
global instance of Recogito which is the
platform we use at the moment.
This is enriched with several different data
sets for space to say the least
Gazetteers as Stuart would refer them to
and that structured data about space and
also it enables you to free tag things. 
But of course the options that are in
the global instance pertain to the
ancient world. There's also GeoNames
which is not very perfect when it comes
to structured temporal data if anything
If anything you know
most gazetteers have still their
infidelities that you have to work
around but it pretty much depends on
what your data looks like if you can do
this with maps or I just have to see
that question again. Military Flags
taking as war booty
Yes you can totally do this with Recogito. 
You might have to tweak it a little bit
and add your own sort of structural
vocabularies that have
to do with the military flags' spatial
and temporal data. So what did the world
look back then and when they were moved
and what would you know because the
world changes.I think I have to
we quote each other all the time Stuart
I have seen today but I think that 
brings back to the key idea that you ask
that if we are to visualize a
network how can we pick up what's
important and the first question to ask
is what is important?
What exactly is the kind of information that you have
and how would you map it?
Is it copies, is it digital
pictures of the flags themselves?
How would you symbolize them? What kind
of symbologies would you use?
What kind of information would you like to enrich
those flags with? Place, time, space?
It all depends on whether or not you
can structure data basically to make sense
It strikes me as like all
these ideas are good and I can
understand it can be a bit overwhelming
because when you start thinking,
for instance this was a very clear and
specific project. It was great as an example.
But then the question is, okay so
we need someone who knows the collections,
we need someone who knows flags and 
knows from different countries at these times,
someone who understands different types 
of historical maps that are available
Of course sometimes you can start, and you can say okay this is good enough
but for me what I would just like to say that I would like to see for the future is perhaps
thinking that okay we have this great, we
at this museum have this great idea,
we have this great
material, so are there Master students and
researchers who would like to, they
can do specific things in different
parts and say can you help us add this
information, can you help us
double-check this information? This is
something that you can use as a very
interesting case study in a way because
to get help that is kind of
I really liked what you said Stuart
about community sourcing instead,
putting together specific individuals
that you know, that you can have a more
direct contact with, and maybe start with
a good basic knowledge and maybe even
very advanced knowledge on a very
specific topic. What really is needed
then is a project leader that can keep the
threads together.
It would be interesting to see more
cases of involving students, involving
younger researchers to help adding.
Because no one can do everything 
by themselves anymore
If I am to summarize?
I just want to ask Stuart do you want to
add something before Anna makes a bit of
a summary?
Just to thank you very much for all the questions 
and discussion . Very helpful.
I think from Stuart's excellent talk, and
I'm looking forward to the rest of our
excellent talks that are coming up in
the next few days, I would like to start
with the two important questions of the
end. Do objects have a particular
kind of significance when they are
artworks and whether or not the style
for example one could say yes, 
we can talk about style, we can talk
about materials, we can talk about
provenance, we can talk about
art catalogues. And then the second
question, does history in particular has
a significance?
In what ways? And when it is history?
Just to wrap this up I would like to say
that what the talk has taught me at
least today, was that we are 
talking about artifacts that are made by
humans and when we talk
about humans we don't really necessarily
talk about the complexity of
representing humans, but we talk about
the the complexity of
representing humans not as like some
description but as affinities. And
holding on to those affinities of what
it means to be an artwork or a human
or you know the Adolfini wedding
and all of the things that come with 
it is a very interesting question
and if we are to
enrich any set of data with additional
information it has to take into
consideration those affinities
That's a really good point.
If there are no more comments or suggestions?
Larissa, if you have anything you want to 
add you can join in
Thank you very much, it was a
lovely workshop and I'm looking very
forward to our next events tomorrow and
on Tuesday next week
So I hope to see you all again there too
Yes we certainly hope so 
So tomorrow we will have Koraljka Golub
who is in information science and
library science who is going to talk about
standards for the humanities and trying to find  information in the humanities.
And also Karin Glasemann 
from the Nationalmuseum
the National Gallery in
Sweden who is going to talk about what
they went through digitizing their
collections and making them,
which meant working a lot with metadata
so it's a really interesting project
We hope to see you tomorrow and thank
you very much for asking questions and
participating and being patient with us
when everything wasn't working and we
will make these recordings available as
soon as possible afterwards as well
Thank you very much
