Knowledge Graphs for Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (so-called GLAMs) as well as digital humanities researchers are more and more publishing and sharing digital data, information and knowledge online. This opens new opportunities for cross-institute, cross-researcher and cross-project collaborations and analyses of such (multi-modal) data. Semantic Web principles and technologies and more specifically Knowledge Graphs are excellent models for representing and integrating heterogeneous data while allowing for standardized access and querying. However, several challenges remain in the modelling, enriching and linking such cultural knowledge graphs, as well as making them usable for a variety of real-world user tasks. In this talk, I discuss the promises and challenges of designing, constructing and enriching knowledge graphs for cultural heritage and digital humanities. I will talk about semantic interoperability and how connecting previously unconnected data and knowledge presents new opportunities for historians, media scholars and other researchers. User-centric challenges include how such integrated and multimodal data can be browsed, queried or analysed using for state of the art machine learning. I will also address the issue of polyvocality, where multiple perspectives on (historical) information is to be represented. Especially in contexts such as that of (post-)colonial heritage, representing multiple voices is crucial. I will show ongoing research on how knowledge graphs can provide excellent vehicles for this.