Dr. Ksenia Stanicka-Brzezicka graduated from the Institute of Art History of the University of Wrocław. From 2004 to 2013 she was employed as an associate professor at the Historical Institute of the University of Wrocław. She also conducted her research in Digital Humanities, including her involvement in the project “Słownik hierarchiczny pojęć dla dziedzictwa kulturowego – narzędzie wspomagające tworzenie i wykorzystanie baz danych obejmujących zabytki sztuki”, carried out at the Institute of Art History. She currently collaborates with Herder-Institut in Marburg, where she coordinates the international project “Forschungsinfrastruktur Kunstdenkmäler in Ostmitteleuropa” (“Scientific infrastructure for art-historical monuments in East Central Europe”) (2014-2018). Its aim is to build an interactive research platform for documenting art-history monuments and photographic documentation. She is also preparing her own research project “Netzwerkanalyse für eine Wissens- und Objektgeschichte der Schlesischen Moderne. Ästhetische Diskurse, technologischer Wandel, Akteure als Gegenstand der Digitalen Kunstgeschichte” “Network analysis for a knowledge and object history of Silesia in the modern age”).

Lecture summary

Material culture heritage as a subject of research in Digital Humanities: the project “Forschungsinfrastruktur Kunstdenkmäler in Ostmitteleuropa (FoKO)”

Dr Ksenia Stanicka-Brzezicka (Herder-Institut, Marburg)

One of the main problems encountered in the digital documentation of cultural heritage and its presentation on the Internet is linking collections and objects of different character within one repository of resources as well as exactly defining a documented object, which can be both a medium (e.g. a photograph) and a represented object itself (e.g. a building represented in the photograph). So far, various systems applied in libraries, archives, museums, conservation offices and universities have been used to record this data, which has resulted in applying different metadata standards and using unstable terminology in the description of the same objects (e.g. a map has been described in different ways by a librarian, an archivist and a museum employee). The problem with an inconsistency of descriptions is encountered not only by institutions but also by people carrying out projects, in which more and more simple databases are replaced with complex digital infrastructures. They offer forms for structural data of different kinds of objects as well as the way of managing work cycle, the possibility of publishing annotated texts and good-quality photographs etc. In relation to this practical challenge and taking into account the development of the semantic Internet, within Digital Humanities, such ontologies – i.e. sets of concepts and categories that show relations between them – as CIDOC CRM, are more and more intensively discussed. Applying ontologies in describing cultural heritage phenomena is a challenge first of all at the level of creating a data model, including a searching model, whereas in the context of Linked Open Data these ontologies stimulate reflections over the changes in conducting research and the value added that results from digitization. The issues listed above will be discussed with reference to the project “Forschungsinfrastruktur Kunstdenkmäler in Ostmitteleuropa” (“Scientific infrastructure for art-historical monuments in East Central Europe”) supervised by the lecturer in Herder-Institut, Marburg.

Presnentation