LIS60010, Assignment 3: Case Study on Data Consumption and Repurposing

Digital Humanities Project: HistoryPin, https://www.historypin.org/en/

Katie Feldkamp

Our group chose to explore a digital humanities website called HistoryPin. As a group,
we answered the questions in relation to our website together – bouncing ideas off each other and
adding our own insights. For the most part, the questions were easily answered after getting
through this week’s articles and understanding the terminology being used. We mostly just had
fun delving into something new because none of us had heard of this site before.

The website HistoryPin makes it possible to easily find information about the recorded
history of where you live. It is a social networking site bringing people and organizations
together so that anyone can share photos and stories that tell the history of their local community.
While the site is still gaining popularity among the public, HistoryPin is already working with
libraries, archives, and museums around the world to obtain images, maps, video, and official
documents. The people of the community itself are also able to add their own photos, memories,
and experiences, thus allowing everyone the opportunity to work collectively in order to piece
together community histories. All information pins are linked together allowing users to easily
navigate and search the website. In this sense, HistoryPin takes advantage of open linked data
which is the coding of data with semantic meaning for machine use (Hastings, 2015). This
allows computers to find meaning in the text displayed on a webpage. With the use of open
linked data, many people who are not connected to libraries can find the data and be inspired to
create services and applications that are useful and unique (Hastings, 2015).

In order for information to provide valuable insights, it must be interpretable, relevant,

and novel (Stikeleather, 2013). With so much information available, it’s hard to know if any of it
has value. As described by Oomen and Aroyo (2011), HistoryPin does add value to its data
through crowdsourcing, which is gaining information by enlisting the services of a large number
of people. HistoryPin works with a number of libraries, museums, and archives to obtain certain
historical documents and images but relies heavily on the everyday user to add a personal touch
to the site by including experiences and memories. Crowdsourcing has the potential to help build
a more open, connected, and smart cultural heritage with involved consumers and providers
(Oomen, 2011).

Who, then, is being enlisted to add to the information to HistoryPin? The main
contributors to the site are meant to be the individuals of each community, mainly the younger
generation and their grandparents, both of whom have stories to share. Technology is breaking
down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them
with the ethos of collaboration and transparency (De Saulles, 2015), allowing for HistoryPin to
connect to every person who wants to add to their local history. While users are still finding and
learning about the website, the main providers of information at this time are the libraries and
museums who contribute historical documents.

The value and impact that HistoryPin can have on the future of libraries, archives, and
museums can only be beneficial. The connections between information organizations and
individuals already exist with the use of HistoryPin, and this can impact how people view these
kinds of institutions. If the library uses linked data as HistoryPin does, to present its materials on
the web, a search for a book could bring up information about the book and its availability in the
library, among other things, at the moment of searching (Hastings, 2015). Libraries already
collect and manage this type of information – making it useful for a searcher on the web is an
obvious next step (Hastings, 2015).

References

De Saulles, M. (2015). Chapter 6: Conclusion. In Information 2.0: New models of information

production, distribution and consumption (2nd ed., pp. 131-144). London: Facet
Publishing.

Hastings, R. (2015, November). Linked data in libraries: Status and future directions. Computers
in Libraries 35(9), 12.

Oomen, J., & Aroyo, L. (2011). Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities
and challenges. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and
Technologies (pp. 138–149). ACM. Retrieved from
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2103373

Stikeleather, J. (2013, March 27). When data visualization works—and when it doesn't. Harvard
Business Review.