OHOS 2023 Blog Series – Introduction

The OHOS team in York for our Year 2 Kick-Off Workshop (October 2022)

Over the coming months, we will be using this blog space to share some of our discoveries and progress with you. We’ll also be out and about meeting people, talking about OHOS at conferences for example (see our twitter @OHOS_NatColl and the ‘events’ page of the website).

In the blogs – we will release one a month starting in February – we’ll update you on what’s been going on in each of the project strands, or ‘Labs’.

Our Archives Lab will get us started, with a blog discussing what exactly we mean by the term ‘community-generated digital content’ (CGDC). This is a central concern for our project: CGDC is the heritage that we are seeking to discover, link and preserve, but the term encompasses a wide range of very different types of material, and defining what we will include and exclude is not straightforward.

The History Lab will share some ideas about the kinds of historical themes and problems that CGDC opens up – among other topics, the History Lab’s blogs will look at the ‘post-memory’ of the Second World War, disability rights activism, and the hidden significance of amateur music-making.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab will report on their work building and testing a ‘pipeline’ which will be used to identify and process relevant CGDC so that it can be searched and integrated with other forms of digital content. So far, a prototype has been successfully run on a sample of CGDC identified from the National Archives’ ‘Manage Your Collections’ resource.

The Linguistics Lab will present a blog considering how our project might accommodate and showcase the variety of languages and dialects which constitute the CGDC resource we are seeking to preserve.

The Observatory Lab will report on progress developing an exciting user interface and a ‘remixer suite’ of tools through which researchers will be able to search, integrate and remix CGDC, as well as the technical infrastructure and data model which underpin these.

We hope that you will find these insights into our work interesting and useful; please keep in touch with any comments or questions about the project via our Twitter account @OHOS_NatColl or by email at: contact@ohos.ac.uk.