Situating Interlinked Cultural Heritage Data on the Web

This presentation —also available at https://julsraemy.ch/prezi/sts-ch-2023.html — focuses on situating data produced by humans and nonhumans engaged in the cultural heritage field and published on the Web in line with the Open Science and Citizen Science movements.It aims to map the associations among various communities of practice, particularly within libraries, archives and museums, and the precarious balance between exhaustiveness and a rigid structure of data description versus the potential for multiplying assertions, bypassing cataloguing rules and their underlying postcolonial constructs. The openness and interconnection of data makes it possible to examine the form of description as well as the method of publication, and inevitably to analyse the biases linked to the associated vocabularies, For instance, the Web, which has claimed to be a Semantic Web for several years now, has a centrepiece known as Resource Description Framework (RDF), a general method for describing and exchanging graph data and a Web standard since 2004. The Semantic Web offers major opportunities for the Humanities because it allows data to be reasoned together, to be understood by machines via RDF-based ontologies, a formal way to represent human-like knowledge. Developing infrastructures, or sites of assemblage, capable of creating and maintaining RDF statements and other related technologies or building on this standard to interconnect online records is not straightforward and requires a fair amount of socio-technical elements to be implemented. As a demonstration, I will look at the practices of two community-driven initiatives, mainly active in the cultural heritage field, through an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) lens, namely the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and Linked Art, which have developed shared specifications and related services on agreed-upon design principles