Digitalization profoundly impacts the humanities by transforming how knowledge is produced, accessed, and interpreted. Almost everything today is reduced to data, interconnected through processes of digitization, visualization, and publication. Culture and history are increasingly manifested in networked forms, a development greatly enhanced by digital technologies. In this context, data and metadata play essential roles. This lesson is developed as an introduction to the meaning of data and metadata in the Humanities. Learners will get familiar with concepts of data and metadata as well as formats such as XML and JSON and metadata standards.
This lesson is being developed specifically for researchers in the humanities and cultural studies, with the goal of becoming part of a future humanities curriculum within the Data Carpentry lesson program. It is designed for learners with no prior experience.
At this very early stage of lesson development, external contributions are not yet being processed. However, errors can be reported via issues. Once the first release is published, contributions will be warmly welcomed, and the contributing workflow will be shared here.
Contents of the already existing lesson on scientific metadata were reused: Fundamentals of Scientific Metadata
This lesson utilizes slightly modified sample from:
- Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access Initiative dataset. The original dataset is available as an Open Access CSV and is provided under the Creative Commons Zero license.
- The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Collection datasets. The original datasets are also available under the CCO licence.
- a xsd file as a draft for the Marburger Urkundenrepositorium - Datenbank des CAO und LBA, kindly provided by the author Mathias Gutenbrunner, University Library Marburg.
This lesson is being developed as part of the joint project HERMES – Humanities Education in Research, Data, and Methods. HERMES is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) by grants from the European Union.
Corinna Berg (Maintainer) responsible for contents of episodes 4 - 12.
Ksenia Stanicka-Brzezicka responsible for contents of episodes 1 - 3.
Lesson content is published with a CC-BY license.
Please get in touch with Corinna Berg with any questions about this lesson.