Informatics for cultural heritage instruction: an ontological framework
| Pages | 230-246 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2018-0035 |
| Published date | 06 March 2019 |
| Date | 06 March 2019 |
| Author | Sonia Yaco,Arkalgud Ramaprasad |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Informatics for cultural
heritage instruction: an
ontological framework
Sonia Yaco
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, and
Arkalgud Ramaprasad
University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework that creates a common language to enhance
the connection between the domains of cultural heritage (CH) artifacts and instruction.
Design/methodology/approach –The CH and instruction domains are logically deconstructed into
dimensions of functions, semiotics, CH, teaching/instructional materials, agents and outcomes. The elements
within those dimensions can be concatenated to create natural-English sentences that describe aspects of the
problem domain.
Findings –The framework is valid using traditional social sciences content, semantic, practical and systemic
validity constructs.
Research limitations/implications –The framework can be used to map current research literature to
discover areas of heavy, light and no research.
Originality/value –The framework provides a new way for CH and education stakeholders to describe and
visualize the problem domain, which could allow for significant enhancements of each. Better understanding
the problem domain would serve to enhance instruction informed from collections and vice versa.
The educational process would have more depth due to better access to primary sources. Increased use of
collections would reveal more ways through which they could be used in instruction. The framework can help
visualize the past and present of the domain, and envisage its future.
Keywords Higher education, Digital libraries, Information-seeking behaviour, Ontologies, Curriculum,
Information literacy, Digital humanities, Academic libraries –relations with faculty, Galleries, libraries,
archives and museums, Primary source instruction
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
Archives and other cultural heritage (CH) repositories thrive when used in the classroom.
Archivists increasingly see education as a key role of archives (Maher, 2001; Visser, 2003; Carini,
2009). The educational process, in turn, has more depth when primary sources are included. Lois
Hendrickson (2016) describes some benefits of using CH artifacts and other primary sources in
education. “Artifacts, material culture objects from the past, fascinate students. […]Atthesame
time, engaging students with artifacts and special collections enriches student learning,
stimulates critical thinking, and increases historical literacy. Students gain skills in solving
problems, analyzing and synthesizing evidence, and communicating the results”(p. 1).
This speculative paper suggests a framework that creates a common language to
enhance the symbiotic relationship between CH artifacts and instruction domains.
The intellectual space in which the domains connect, the problem domain, is logically
deconstructed into dimensions of functions, semiotics, CH, teaching/instructional materials,
agents and outcomes. The elements within those dimensions can be concatenated to create a
natural-English sentence that describes one aspect of the problem domain. The ontological
framework meets traditional social sciences validity constructs for content, semantic,
practical and systemic validity. One use of the framework is to map current research
literature to discover areas of heavy, light and no research. The framework can help
visualize the past and present of the domain, and envisage its future.
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 75 No. 2, 2019
pp. 230-246
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-02-2018-0035
Received 28 February 2018
Revised 11 October 2018
Accepted 17 October 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
230
JD
75,2
Informatics for Cultural Heritage Instruction
The education domain and the CH domain have strong interests in, and face barriers to,
using primary sources in classrooms. Education literature abounds with discussions of the
benefits of and techniques for teaching subjects from history to biology with original
documents. Despite advances in discovery tools, finding relevant sources to include in
instruction can be challenging. Teachers must first locate, and then navigate, the multiple
electronic search tools that describe CH resources –manuscript collections, university
archives, audiovisual holdings, electronic databases, digital collections, museum holdings
and so on. While catalogs typically describe resources by subject, teachers are looking for
primary sources that will fulfill course learning objectives and that can be used in courses
objectives. CH professionals at archives, libraries and museums strive for more use of their
holdings, whether physical holdings or digital surrogates, in education. Archivists,
librarians, or and curators trying to find courses that could utilize their holdings face access
permission and rights barriers. Few have access to rich course metadata in course proposals
and syllabi. Archivists’only access may be to the brief descriptions of courses contained in
catalogs and program guides. Search capability of these listings varies from school to
school; even simple keyword searches of course metadata may not be possible.
How can we facilitate the Informatics for Cultural Heritage Instruction (ICHI)? How can
we create a path to the overarching goal of integrating primary sources into curriculum? We
must begin by understanding the intellectual space in which the domains of instruction and
cultural heritage connect, the problem domain. The problem domain is described almost
entirely in natural-English, rather than with formulas or graphics, in the form of research
articles, policies and reports. Discussion about the domain is voluminous and distributed
across many disciplines, including library science and informatics. The domain’s
development is mostly incremental, sequential and local to the respective discipline.
To understand informatics of cultural heritage instruction requires sifting through the
research in each discipline. Creating a structure to describe the problem domain can help to
better integrate primary sources into education.
A structured natural-language framework, an ontology, can provide a systemic view of
the domain. It can help advance the knowledge about the domain and its application
systematically. The ontology simply organizes the terminologies, taxonomies (Gruber, 2009)
and narratives of the domain. By doing so, it articulates and makes visible the core logic of
the domain in structured natural-English –sometimes a little awkward grammatically –but
understandable. Thus, it can be used to present the core logic of the domain concisely and
clearly. Subsequently, it can be used to develop a roadmap for research in domain based on
an understanding of the past emphasis on the different aspects of the domain and the needs
of the future.
The proposed ontology is different from CIDOC-CRM (Xrysoula, 2017) in a number of
ways. The focus of CIDOC-CRM is to define the data structure of the domain; that of our
ontology is to explicate the logical structure of the domain. The two are complementary but
are at different levels of abstraction. CIDOC-CRM addresses the data elements; our ontology
addresses the conceptual elements. The former emphasizes semantic interoperability; the
latter semantic interpretability. Thus, in the future, CIDOC-CRM can be informed by an
ontological framework such as ours, and our ontological framework can be informed by
(and use) the CIDOC-CRM framework.
Deconstructing the problem domain using research literature
Deconstructingcurrent research can helpto identify linguistic and conceptual building blocks
of the problem domain. Theapproach is aligned with the present approach to analyzing “big
text”data using domain-specific dictionaries and ontologies. (Chandrasekaran et al., 1999;
Gruber, 2009).Some domains, such as medicine, have well-specified and continuously updated
231
ICHI
To continue reading
Request your trial