May 8, 2024
Tools of Knowledge: Revitalising a Legacy Database of Scientific Instrument Makers
- 11:00 to 12:00
- Lecture
- Dept. IIIResearch IT
- Rebekah Higgitt
This talk presents some reflections on the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project, “Tools of Knowledge,” which has remodeled a legacy database of scientific instrument makers in the UK and Ireland from 1550–1914 as a semantic database (i.e., one structured to create relationships and reveal implicit meaning within data). An introduction to the new database will be followed by a discussion of the ways in which the project experimented with data visualization and linking to additional sources about instruments to represent their individual "lives," or itineraries. Some lessons learned will be shared, including issues common to other digital humanities projects related to labor and credit. Consideration will also be given to possible audiences and to the potential for public engagement around the project’s work.
Dr. Rebekah Higgitt is a historian of science and Principal Curator of Science at National Museums Scotland. She has been a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and Curator of Science at the Royal Museums Greenwich.
Contact and Registration
This lecture series is open to the public. We welcome both internal and external guests. To register, please click here and choose which event you would like to attend. You can register for multiple events but must do so separately.
For questions on registration please contact event_dept3@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de and for further information about the series please contact rbrentjes@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
About This Series
The VoH Working Group in cooperation with Research IT presents a series of lectures titled "Overcoming Obstacles, Learning from Experiences: A Transdisciplinary Conversation about Computer Vision, 3D Models, Preservation, and Outreach in Digital Humanities projects,” running from May–July 2024. The series features speakers from multiple disciplines in the Humanities – History of Science, History, Art History, and Archaeology – who will focus on methods that can be utilized in the systematic DH-related analysis of objects. Topics covered include databases, their development, preservation, and dissemination, computer vision and its components, such as classification, annotation, and vectorization, as well as 3-D modeling.
For a full description of the series, please click here.