Week 3: Open Cultural Data and How We’re Not Using It

Mia Ridge’s article about Cultural Data in museums, and more importantly, the existence of open cultural data brings an interesting new commentary to the history behind many web sources we have today. The author breaks down the term ‘open cultural data’ to us step by step, as well as explaining to us what ‘linked data’ is. Essentially, open cultural data is data from cultural institutions that is made available for use in a machine-readable format under an open license. This means that it could simply be a PDF we have to read for a class. Linked data, on the other hand, is similar to open cultural data, but requires specific technical protocols to support connections in the ‘web of data.’

I related this article to my personal experiences with museums, namely the EMP (Experience Music Project) Museum in Seattle. Ridge states in her article that journalism ad politics were key drivers for the movement toward open data in the early to mid-2000s. However, it is quite interesting that museums followed journalism and politics into the era of open data in order to do a public service – share their knowledge of culture and history with the world.

The EMP museum website is no different. It is a beautifully designed website that provides access to information for all site visitors about the various exhibitions that the museum has. But aside from just logistical information, it also has historical and cultural commentary about the implications that certain exhibits had on the world. Unfortunately, these information pages, along with those about the programs and education that the EMP museum has, are rarely visited.

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Ridge, in her article, states that though there are many API libraries, galleries and archives, not every data set gets a lot of use. This is for a myriad of reasons: confusing/incompatible licenses, poor or inconsistent record quality within datasets, lack of images/interesting descriptions and undocumented/ambiguous vocabulary.

The EMP museum website tries to mitigate these reasons with aesthetically pleasing and modern design and easy-to-use layout. It goes to show that museums really are putting their best foot forward in creating an environment where learning is encouraged and welcomed—it’s not just a matter of whether or not the public will decide to make use of the resources available to them.

2 thoughts on “Week 3: Open Cultural Data and How We’re Not Using It”

  1. The user difficulty also comes from the sheer amount of data that can be found! The more data there is to sort through the more intimidating it is to do so. While it’s great that open culture data is there, it takes a brave soul to dive into all of it.

  2. From reading your post I came to think about what are the incentives for people to sort through all of the data. It is a bit sad how not all of the data is easily read because of what a mess some data sets can be but I also think that this is because no one has had the incentive to organize certain data sets. I’m sure that if there was a higher demand for these kinds of data sets (and indirectly museums) that more of these data sets would be better organized and sorted. I think the sorted data sets vs unsorted data sets can tell us about what we value or deem as important as a society as a whole.

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