Linked Art to hold first public workshop at V&A Museum

The Oxford e-Research Centre’s Dr Kevin Page has been awarded an AHRC Research Network grant to support the work of an international collaboration bringing Linked Data to art and artworks. The network builds upon long standing interdisciplinary thinking from the digital humanities and information engineering, working with partners in cultural heritage institutions to identify focussed, practical information models which meet their requirements on a sustainable basis.

The network will soon hold its first outreach and engagement workshop for the wider cultural heritage community. “Linked Art: Networking Digital Collections and Scholarship” will take place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on the 1st October 2019, when an audience of over 90 people are expected, with tickets still available for registration.

The first half of the workshop will present an overview of work-to-date on the Linked Art data model, including its use, benefits, implementation, and the challenges of Linked Open Usable Data in an art museum environment. This will include examples of how the Linked Art model is being used to publish collections data from institutions in the Linked Art community.

This will be followed by an afternoon of group discussion considering topics such as art catalogues, provenance, exhibitions, citations, educational materials, and academic scholarship.

About Linked Art and the Research Network

Linked Art is an international community working together to create a shared Linked Data model to describe art and artworks. Within and supporting these wider activities, the Linked Art Research Network specifically brings together world-leading art museums and researchers from the UK and US, offering a potential step-change in transatlantic collaboration for digital scholarship across the combined cultural assets of the two countries.

Building upon his work in the earlier OXLOD project, the AHRC-funded Research Network is led by Dr Kevin Page, Senior Researcher and Associate Member of Faculty at the Oxford e-Research Centre, part of the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. Dr Rob Sanderson, Semantic Information Architect at the J. Paul Getty Trust, is the network’s US co-investigator and chair of the Linked Art Editorial Board. Other UK and US members include the The American Numismatics Society, The Frick Collection, Harvard University, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Gallery of Art (USA), The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, The Smithsonian Institution, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Yale University Center for British Art, and the Gardens, Libraries, and Museums of the University of Oxford.

Lead researcher Dr Kevin Page explains, “The primary activity of Linked Art is the development and application of Linked Data to cultural heritage collections, with an emphasis on works of art and their provenance. Linked Data will provide the foundation for future multi-modal digital scholarship across these rich collections; Linked Art will realise this foundation through a common data model, building capacity for future collaborative implementations and research investigations.”