Collective Intelligence And Digital Archives

Collective Intelligence and Digital Archives DIGITAL TOOLS AND USES SET Coordinated by Imad Saleh This book presents the most up-to-date research from different areas of digital archives to show how and why collective intelligence is being developed to organize and better communicate new masses of information. Current archive digitization projects produce an enormous amount of digital data (Big Data). Thanks to the proactive approach of large public institutions, this data is increasingly accessible. Despite the recent stabilization of technical and legal frameworks, the use of data has yet to be enriched by processes such as collective intelligence. By exploring the field of digital humanities, audiovisual archives, preservation of cultural heritage, crowdsourcing and the recovery of scientific archives, this book presents and analyzes concrete examples of collective intelligence for use in digital archives.

The digitalization of archives produces a huge mass of structured documents (Big Data). Due to the proactive approach of public institutions (libraries, archives, administrations ...), this data is more and more accessible. This book aims to present and analyze concrete examples of collective intelligence at the service of digital archives.

In the 21st era the devastating majority of newly created information is digital. With the birth and development of information technology, use of computers in offices and institutions, private life and the preservation of digital documents, the possibility of scanning and sending of this material among Internet has produced a new reality for the work of the archives. The digital collections of collecting institutions such as archives, libraries and museums consist of either digitized or 'born digital' content. This reality and this new technology have born digital archives. This means we have to preserve lots of digital information for a long time. Doing this work is, however, fundamentally different that preserving books, papers and other traditional forms of information. Digital content can be hard to capture, difficult to organize and use and prone to going obsolete due to changing technology. Challenges and issues regarding the long-term viability of and access to digital collections are common to all collecting domains, but the Archives Domain has put particular emphasis on finding solutions to digital archiving and digital preservation. In doing so it has become a leader in the field of the long-term preservation of digital objects and is thus in a position to provide advice to the cultural domain at large. This book entitled Digital Archives provides up-to-date studies that guide for creating digital collections, including examples and real-world cases. This book aims to present and analyze concrete examples of collective intelligence at the service of digital archives. This compendium offers a wide-ranging overview of how rapid technological changes and the push for providing wide access to digitized cultural heritage holdings are changing the landscape of archives. The book serves as valuable guide for archivists and information specialists working in cultural heritage institutions, including archives, libraries, and museums, providing detailed analyses of how metadata and standards are used to manage information securely.

Digital archives are transforming the Humanities and the Sciences. Digitized collections of newspapers and books have pushed scholars to develop new, data-rich methods. Born-digital archives are now better preserved and managed thanks to the development of open-access and commercial software. Digital Humanities have moved from the fringe to the center of academia. Yet, the path from the appraisal of records to their analysis is far from smooth. This book explores crossovers between various disciplines to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and use of born-digital archives and other cultural assets.

How does technology impact research practices in the humanities? How does digitisation shape scholarly identity? How do we negotiate trust in the digital realm? What is scholarship, what forms can it take, and how does it acquire authority? This diverse set of essays demonstrate the importance of asking such questions, bringing together established and emerging scholars from a variety of disciplines, at a time when data is increasingly being incorporated as an input and output in humanities sources and publications. Major themes addressed include the changing nature of scholarly publishing in a digital age, the different kinds of ‘gate-keepers’ for scholarship, and the difficulties of effectively assessing the impact of digital resources. The essays bring theoretical and practical perspectives into conversation, offering readers not only comprehensive examinations of past and present discourse on digital scholarship, but tightly-focused case studies. This timely volume illuminates the different forces underlying the shifting practices in humanities research today, with especial focus on how humanists take ownership of, and are empowered by, technology in unexpected ways. Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research is essential reading for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the changing culture of research practices in the humanities, and in the future of the digital humanities on the whole.

Experts describe the latest research in a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field, the study of groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. Intelligence does not arise only in individual brains; it also arises in groups of individuals. This is collective intelligence: groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. In recent years, a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: interconnected groups of people and computers, collectively doing intelligent things. Today these groups are engaged in tasks that range from writing software to predicting the results of presidential elections. This volume reports on the latest research in the study of collective intelligence, laying out a shared set of research challenges from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Taken together, these essays—by leading researchers from such fields as computer science, biology, economics, and psychology—lay the foundation for a new multidisciplinary field. Each essay describes the work on collective intelligence in a particular discipline—for example, economics and the study of markets; biology and research on emergent behavior in ant colonies; human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence; and cognitive psychology and the “wisdom of crowds” effect. Other areas in social science covered include social psychology, organizational theory, law, and communications. Contributors Eytan Adar, Ishani Aggarwal, Yochai Benkler, Michael S. Bernstein, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jonathan Bragg, Deborah M. Gordon, Benjamin Mako Hill, Christopher H. Lin, Andrew W. Lo, Thomas W. Malone, Mausam, Brent Miller, Aaron Shaw, Mark Steyvers, Daniel S. Weld, Anita Williams Woolley

Archiving has become an increasingly complex process. The challenge is no longer how to store the data but how to store it intelligently, in order to exploit it over time, while maintaining its integrity and authenticity. Digital technologies bring about major transformations, not only in terms of the types of documents that are transferred to and stored in archives, in the behaviors and practices of the humanities and social sciences (digital humanities), but also in terms of the volume of data and the technological capacity for managing and preserving archives (Big Data). Archives in The Digital Age focuses on the impact of these various digital transformations on archives, and examines how the right to memory and the information of future generations is confronted with the right to be forgotten; a digital prerogative that guarantees individuals their private lives and freedoms.

This book examines the use and re-use of digital archives in a unique manner, by combining theoretical and practical approaches to the contemporary digital archive. The book brings together a range of writers - specialising in media and cultural studies, contemporary art and art history, digital and networked culture, library and museum studies - to explore the cultural impact of digital archives. Several of the essays describe the process of constructing a digital archive as a specific case study – in digitising a physical archive and designing a searchable digital database as the core of the digital archive. Other chapters explore the cultural significance of digital archives in more general theoretical terms. These considerations include: the specific properties of the digital archive; its similarities and differences to the traditional paper-based archive; the ethical decisions made in the design of an archive; and the potential for creative re-use of online archived materials.