Integrating and Visualizing Humanities and Heritage Science Data

摘要

The capture of digital data for cultural heritage includes multidisciplinary data types, analyses and formats from many diverse fields; including materials science, archeology, botany, biology, engineering, physics and chemistry, to name but a few. The continued challenge for digital data in any discipline is sustainable access and the capacity for a more integrated approach to linked data, including high level metadata to enable searchability. Many related fields and disciplines have begun to focus on the need to integrate and assess approaches from other scientific disciplines while also engaging with humanities colleagues who utilize the same information from different perspectives. An initiative for linked scientific data generated from heritage materials has been developed within the Library of Congress Preservation Research and Testing Division. This database integrates multiple scientific analyses all linked back to the original heritage object. For ease of access, a visualization interface integrating humanities and heritage science creates a "digital cultural object" with layers of integrated and linked data. These digital initiatives include, the Center for Linked Analytical Scientific Samples – Digital (CLASS-D) – an infrastructure enabling the unique capability to link a range of types of scientific instrumental analyses back to original source materials, expanding the capability for managing web-accessible access to heritage collections; and the Data Visualization Project (DVP) visual interface.