ABSTRACT
The past 20 years have seen an enormous investment in the digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage. Over 10 percent of the collections of European museums, archives and libraries has been digitised, a total of over 300 million items. It will take over 30 years to digitise the rest, much of which is twentieth- and twenty-first-century material, either moving image, audio or born-digital. A growing number of organisations have developed digital strategies to address this. However, there is still very little understanding of how this content – much of it including valuable sources for language research – is used in research. Among researchers, there still exists limited awareness of how to integrate this material into the research life cycle, especially for analysis and linking. This chapter will draw on research undertaken for three collaborative European research projects, Europeana Research, Europeana Cloud and the ESF Research Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH), to explore the potential of this the use of digital heritage for research. Specifically, it will address access to and knowability of digital content, opening up content for use and reuse and creating better environments for drawing together multimedia content from a variety of sources for analysis and publication.
The chapter will therefore address the ‘datafication’ of cultural heritage content (tangible and intangible) and the use and reuse of this content for research. This process is highly collaborative, drawing into partnership researchers from scientific and other humanities disciplines, computational and technical fields, as well as cultural heritage organisations. It also relies on underlying technical infrastructures. One of the huge advantages of digital access is making the invisible visible in archives and heritage collections and creating new resources for scholarship. This chapter will discuss the importance of a “digital commons” for language research as the basis for future production as new research emerges, new ways of working with the content are perfected and new communities of practice are fostered.
