The Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS): Bridging the Research/Heritage Collection Gap

Susan Brown and Kim Martin, University of Guelph (Canada)

Culture operates increasingly as data, as does scholarship. While GLAM institutions create highly standardized and generalized metadata for their collections, scholars embed deep knowledge of those items within collections through their research. Web annotations, via the Web Annotation Data Model (Sanderson et al., 2017), are one way to bring together the data about these items and point to the expert contextualization, scholarly debates, and situated knowledge created about them. Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) is an infrastructure to allow scholars to transform or create linked open data (LOD) about cultural materials. LINCS is working with GLAM institutions in Canada to build relationships between people; between data; between people and data, cultural organizations, and machines. The LINCS team chose the CIDOC-CRM and the WADM as complementary ontologies (Application Profile). CIDOC is increasingly used by cultural heritage organizations, but the WADM offers a flexible W3C standard for linking data to various resources on the web, including and beyond projects related to LINCS (Canning et al., 2022). In this respect, LINCS is aligned with Europeana, which has adopted elements of both CIDOC-CRM and the WADM in their Annotations API (https://pro.europeana.eu/page/annotations). This paper will reflect on the implications, benefits, and challenges that LINCS has encountered to date from creating and publishing data that combines these two ontological structures.

Susan Brown is Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship and Professor of English at the University of Guelph. She engages from an intersectional feminist perspective with the use of semantic technologies for cultural scholarship through the Orlando Project in women’s literary history. Her critical infrastructure work explores how online systems for creating, enhancing, and sharing cultural knowledge can advance collaborative knowledge production, diversity and inclusivity, respectful data creation and dissemination, sustainable access to cultural scholarship, and research data management and preservation. She directs the multi-institutional Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS). She founded with colleagues at Guelph an interdisciplinary major in Culture and Technology Studies and The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration (THINC) Lab. She is the past-President (2022-23) of the governing board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (2013-2019).

Kim Martin is an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Guelph. In this position, she works to create community around digital humanities by organizing workshops, speaker series, and hands-on events (like Programming Historian meet-ups and Wikipedia Edit-a-thons). She is also the Associate Director of The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration Lab (THINC Lab), a research space in the McLaughlin Library that provides space and expertise for graduate students and faculty working on digital, interdisciplinary projects.