- Projet de Développement-Partenariat CRSH dirigé par Suzanne Brown (Université de Guelph).
- Année de réalisation : printemps 2022-2026.
- Pour le pilote réalisé à l'Udem : 2025
Forward Linking: Building Relationships within the Cultural Data Ecosystem envisions an online future where cultural data is interlinked to serve research and the public good.
Materials on websites of galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAM) are woefully siloed from each other and from scholarly contexts. Missing links hamper interpretation, shackle researchers, and perpetuate biases and colonial legacies from older systems. Linked data allows researchers to address individual cultural artifacts via the web and to reference, annotate, and embed them within machine-readable scholarly conversations. Forward Linking brings the largest providers of online cultural heritage-Library and Archives Canada & Canadiana--and other GLAM institutions together with information professionals and digital scholarship experts to create a path towards a vibrant, sustainable ecosystem in which cultural data in Canada is more amenable to research and scholarly insights interweave with cultural content.
The benefits are manifold for researchers and for the culture, heritage, and arts sectors that bring $57 billion to the Canadian economy. The insights, data, and workflows generated will make cultural artifacts online more findable and accessible. Empowering researchers to link to those artifacts will allow arts organizations to enhance their services for the public, contextualize problematic historical content, and decolonize collections. Researchers will gain more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data, opening new modes of cultural inquiry. Partners, policymakers, and scholars will gain from analysis of the infrastructural conditions needed to sustain scholarly contributions to linked cultural knowledge. Tackling these problems will also work towards countering ills--such as disinformation, amplified inequities, and biased algorithms--that threaten civil society.
Adoption of semantic linking by GLAM and scholars has been uneven and uncoordinated, hence this partnership emerging from infrastructural challenges. A successful semantic web for cultural data requires
- the ongoing development of web identifiers for people, artifacts, and other entities; so as to
- link them through models informed by scholarly nuance; using
- inclusive tools for semantic web data creation and use.
Forward Linking promotes these conditions through research clusters on Identifiers, Modelling, and Mobilizing. Major results are cluster reports that feed into an extensive ecosystem analysis, journal articles, 2 conferences, training events and materials.
Forward Linking will strengthen the Canadian cultural data ecosystem, inform a sustainability strategy for a national investment in scholarly infrastructure, and elucidate into how linked data can advance representational and epistemological justice through relationality, context, and provenance.
Forward Linking's 14 partners and 28 researchers from across sectors will:
- exchange knowledge to surface shared needs and potential synergies in linking data, taking as foundational the need to decolonize and inclusion;
- collaborate on innovative, hight-impact projects to pilot ways of building diversity and decolonization into workflows;
- evaluate the infrastructure landscape to identify gaps, challenges, and models, and investigate how to sustain scholarly infrastructure in the Canadian context ; and
- build a partnership framework to advance interlinking ethically and respectfully within the cultural data ecosystem.
The partnership wild build relationships amongst datasets, researchers and data holders, and infrastructural systems and workflows to demonstrate data linking as the way forward for digital scholarship and cultural memory institutions in Canada.
Consulter le projet déposé au CRSH
Le projet est très lié au projet de cyber-infrastructure LINCS. Il résulte de la volonté de poursuivre le projet avec une recherche Partenariale soutenue par le CRSH. Celle-ci n’ayant pas été financée, Suzanne a initié ce projet de Développement-Partenariat pour collecter des données préliminaires au sujet de la justice sociale et les données afin de préparer un nouveau projet de Partenariat LOD3 (depuis les plans ont changé).
L’UdeM est l’un des partenaires, elle se charge de deux pilotes :
- l’un d’entre-eux est porté par Marcello Vitali-Rosati avec Michael Sinatra portant sur l’indexation contextuelle des publications savantes
- l’autre par Emmanuel et Michael Sinatra avec Violaine Debailleul (responsable de la collection), portant sur l’ouverture des données (CollectiveAccess to LOD) de la collection d’objets ethnographiques du Département d’anthropologie de l’Université de Montréal
CollectiveAccess to LOD: LINCS will create LOD for publication to advance repatriation, decolonization, and social empowerment by mapping fields from CollectiveAccess, a widely used open database system, to the CIDOC-CRM ontology. Staff; E. Château-Dutier; and M. Sinatra (UdeMontréal) will extend the reach of the Collection ethnographique du département d’anthropologie de l’Université de Montréal drawing on vocabularies including CHIN’s Nomenclature, and J. Bath (USask) and j. moore (USask Galleries) will attend to the complexities associated with various BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists-in-residence and recent acquisitions at the USask Galleries (Capacitor; Ohpinamake; Manacihitowin). Work will involve outreach and consultation with users about whether the mapping enables the desired uses of the data, and will be informed by the Indigenous Advisory Circles and appropriate Indigenous Protocols.