• HC Visitor
Skip to content
Information Ecosystems
Information Ecosystems

Information, Power, and Consequences

Primary Navigation Menu
Menu
  • InfoEco Podcast
  • InfoEco Blog
  • InfoEco Cookbook
    • About
    • Curricular Pathways
    • Cookbook Modules

Museums

Research Software & Building Useful Data from Absence

2020-02-07
By: Jane Rohrer
On: February 7, 2020
In: Matthew Lincoln
Tagged: Curation, Data, data visualization, Information Ecosystems, Museums

On February 7th, one of the Seminar’s very own participants headed our lunchtime discussion; Dr. Matthew Lincoln, a research software engineer at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, talked with us about museum informatics, archive management, and computational approaches to humanities projects. Although his transition to software engineer is relatively recent, his experience with data modelling and analysis is definitely not—before his move to Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Lincoln earned a Ph.D. in art history from University of Maryland, where he used computational methods to study 16th-18th century Dutch printmakers. This, along with his work on data engineering at the Getty Research Institute’s Getty Provenance Index Databases, makes him uniquely attuned to multiple aspects of building data sets and archiving. As Dr. Lincoln himself articulated during his talk, using large data sets as a Ph.D. candidate—what he worded as the “available technology”—alerted him to particular data absences within library and museum holdings; in other words, researchers can only carry out the large-scale digital projects that data actually exist for. If you’ve ever searched for an eBook only to find that a digital version of this text does not (yet) exist, you know this feeling; it is, on a smaller scale, the same feeling a researcher might have if they, for example, wanted to compare one particular library system’s entire collection to another—but there is no usable data with which to do such a project. The project idea is there, the necessary data is not. This is where and why Dr. Lincoln’s job becomes so essential; his work has helped Read More

What you can see in museums is just the tip of the iceberg

2020-02-06
By: Erin O'Rourke
On: February 6, 2020
In: Matthew Lincoln
Tagged: Curation, Data, Information Ecosystems, Linked Open Data, Matt Lincoln, Museums

While all of the Sawyer Seminar speakers so far have been scholars or users of information ecosystems, Matt Lincoln is potentially unique in coding them. His Ph.D. in Art History, time as a data research specialist at the Getty Research Institute, and most recently, work as a research software engineer at Carnegie Mellon University have given him substantial knowledge about museums’ information systems, as well as the broader context of the seminar. For Lincoln, “data” consists of collections of art and associated facts and metadata. In his public talk, entitled “Ways of Forgetting: The Librarian, The Historian, and the Machine,” Dr. Lincoln focused on a case study from his time at the Getty, in which he was working on a project restructuring the way art provenance data were organized in databases. Lincoln argued that depending on who the creator or end-user of the information would be (whether librarian, historian or computer), the way the data are structured can vary. A historian would likely prefer open-ended text fields in which to establish a rich context with details specific to the piece, whereas a librarian would opt to record the same details about every piece, and a computer would prefer the data to be stored in some highly structured format, with lists of predefined terms that can populate each field. On top of balancing these disparate goals, Lincoln cited a particularly poignant Jira ticket, which asked: “Are we doing transcription of existing documents or trying to represent reality?” This question might well be answered with “both” since the Read More

Invited Speakers

  • Annette Vee
  • Bill Rankin
  • Chris Gilliard
  • Christopher Phillips
  • Colin Allen
  • Edouard Machery
  • Jo Guldi
  • Lara Putnam
  • Lyneise Williams
  • Mario Khreiche
  • Matthew Edney
  • Matthew Jones
  • Matthew Lincoln
  • Melissa Finucane
  • Richard Marciano
  • Sabina Leonelli
  • Safiya Noble
  • Sandra González-Bailón
  • Ted Underwood
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • EdTech Automation and Learning Management
  • The Changing Face of Literacy in the 21st Century: Dr. Annette Vee Visits the Podcast
  • Dr. Lara Putnam Visits the Podcast: Web-Based Research, Political Organizing, and Getting to Know Our Neighbors
  • Chris Gilliard Visits the Podcast: Digital Redlining, Tech Policy, and What it Really Means to Have Privacy Online
  • Numbers Have History

Recent Comments

    Archives

    • June 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • May 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019

    Categories

    • Annette Vee
    • Bill Rankin
    • Chris Gilliard
    • Christopher Phillips
    • Colin Allen
    • Edouard Machery
    • Jo Guldi
    • Lara Putnam
    • Lyneise Williams
    • Mario Khreiche
    • Matthew Edney
    • Matthew Jones
    • Matthew Lincoln
    • Melissa Finucane
    • Richard Marciano
    • Sabina Leonelli
    • Safiya Noble
    • Sandra González-Bailón
    • Ted Underwood
    • Uncategorized

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org

    Tags

    Algorithms Amazon archives artificial intelligence augmented reality automation Big Data Bill Rankin black history month burnout cartography Curation Darwin Data data pipelines data visualization digital humanities digitization diversity Education election maps history history of science Information Information Ecosystems Information Science Libraries LMS maps mechanization medical bias medicine Museums newspaper Open Data Philosophy of Science privacy racism risk social science solutions journalism Ted Underwood Topic modeling Uber virtual reality

    Menu

    • InfoEco Podcast
    • InfoEco Blog
    • InfoEco Cookbook
      • About
      • Curricular Pathways
      • Cookbook Modules

    Search This Site

    Search

    The Information Ecosystems Team 2023

    This site is part of Humanities Commons. Explore other sites on this network or register to build your own.
    Terms of ServicePrivacy PolicyGuidelines for Participation