Mia Ridge\u2019s article \u201cWhere next for open cultural data in museums\u201d brings up the history and usage of the open cultural data. Ridge highlights events such as the US and UK launching open data sites in 2009 and the Brooklyn museum\u2019s release of its data through an API as key moments in the wave towards digitizing and making cultural data available. As a short aside, API is an abbreviation of \u201capplication program interface\u201d even this definition is not very clarifying however and it is difficult to find a practical definition online.<\/p>\n
Ridges goes on to make the point that now\u00a0while many museums have made data available, the data is not used as much as the institution or organization might expect.\u00a0 She points to murky licenses and inconsistent data as potential reasons for this underuse.<\/p>\n
I resonate with this point as for my DH 101 project<\/a> my group was working with data collected from a series of menus in the New York Public Library collection<\/a>.\u00a0 The library has been working to digitize the menus in a series of ways they have, however, been relying on public volunteer support.\u00a0 This is problematic as it leads to inconsistent inputs such as in capitalization of names and the input of units.\u00a0 For my own group, this kept us from being able to take our research in particular directions.<\/p>\n We also experienced there being too much data available.\u00a0 While this may not seems like a problem it became overwhelming and the length of our project forced us to narrow our focus.\u00a0 This speaks directly to the museum\u2019s sentiments on their data not being used as much as they would have thought.\u00a0 Museums house many objects, each containing its own extensive metadata and data contained within the object itself.\u00a0 When we move to digitize this, the data produced is extensive and this makes it difficult for it all to be used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mia Ridge\u2019s article \u201cWhere next for open cultural data in museums\u201d brings up the history and usage of the open cultural data. Ridge highlights events such as the US and … Continue reading “Week 3: Open Cultural Data”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}