This project aims to address the tensions created by the mass digitisation of cultural heritage data. While scholars using museum, archive and library collections now have increasing access to networks of highly complex, rich and heterogenous data, the process of creating these interlinked collections from legacy databases and paper records is not trivial. At the same time, the nature of historical sources and humanistic approaches including the need to manage complexity and ambiguity, mean that rigid data models which power the much of the web do not always provide enough contextual data for the evidentiary reasoning that is essential to humanities research. Questions of authorship, provenance, and perspective add complexity to collections, and computers do not yet have the ability to read between the lines.

TSLIM will address these difficulties by developing an evaluation framework for humanities data, with a specific focus on the sustained linking of ethnographic materials from anthropological or ‘world’ museums, which pose particular technical and ethical dilemmas for museum professionals and data scientists, due to their complex histories and provenance. At the same time, the research also contributes to increasingly urgent discussions about how to manage this vast and growing body of data. In a context where searching for digital content is increasingly taken to mean ‘just Google it’, it will be crucial for the data producers, (such as museums) and data consumers, (such as researchers) of the future to be able to find what they need. To do this, it is essential to devise new approaches to how the data is stored, categorised and made available.