Linked Art II: Developing Community, Practice, and Scholarship brings together University researchers with experts from some of the leading art museums in the UK and US. The project is working with scholars and practitioners to highlight the opportunities afforded by connected collections as data, and establishing where new digital methods and tools are needed to support novel research. Linked Art II engages with cultural institutions to examine how structured data can contribute towards digital challenges, including improving the accessibility of collections, and increase the range and diversity of institutions and material available to the public.
The foundation of the project is the development and application of Linked Data for cultural heritage collections through the ‘Linked Art’ model and API. This emerging standard, with its emphasis on works of art and their provenance, has been developed over a number of years through a wider international collaboration between cultural institutions and universities. In the future, this Linked Data will provide a platform for multi-modal digital scholarship across these rich collections; the AHRC-funded Linked Art II project will set out an international agenda to realise this platform through the common data model, building capacity for future collaborative implementations and research investigations, and enabling the wider sector to benefit from the transformative step-change offered by Linked Art as it evolves.
In the first, earlier, phase of this work, an AHRC-funded research network was formed to bring together experts who collaborated on the design of the common data model. The Linked Art II project continues this work, while also trialling and testing the model through a series of feasibility studies and proof of concept implementations. The development of these ‘exemplars’ is being realised through an exciting new collaboration between the Oxford e-Research Centre and Digital Scholarship at Oxford (DiSc).
The exemplars are being scoped and developed in collaboration with project partners and the wider Linked Art community; in Spring 2022 this will be followed by webinars and an open call for collaboration which through which the wider cultural heritage will be invited to participate in the our research. The project will publish documentation and explanation of the exemplars on the Linked Art website so that others can understand and learn about the practicalities of Linked Art adoption.
The project is led by the University of Oxford e-Research Centre and Yale University, with project partners from the UK and US including: the American Numismatic Society, the National Gallery (London), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Newfields, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of the Arts London, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
