The Agora project is a collaboration between the History and Computer Science departments at the VU University Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Dutch national audiovisual archive Beeld en Geluid. The aim of Agora is to develop a social platform in which museum objects can be placed into an explicit (art)historic context. Through the (art)historic context, objects from highly diverse museum collections can be related, resulting in a more complete and illustrated description of historical events. End-users will also be allowed to create their own personal narratives which will lead to theoretical reflection on the meaning of digitally mediated public history in contemporary society. Check out our website http://agora.cs.vu.nl/ and our twitter feed @agora_project

1. Digital
Hermeneu.cs
AGORA
eventing history

2. Outline
•
•
•
•
•
•
Overview
&
Background
(Susan)
Events
in
Agora
(Chiel)
Agora
Demonstrator
(Lora)
Agora
Wireframes
(Lora)
Discussion
ValorizaCe
(Susan)

3. VU History department
Geertje Jacobs
Susan Legêne
Chiel van den Akker
VU Computer Science
Guus Schreiber
Lora Aroyo
Lourens van der Meij Marieke van Erp
Johan Oomen
Lizzy Jongma

4. AGORA Students
2 BSc students
4 MSc students
1 history intern at Rijksmuseum
1 PhD Student, Beeld&Geluid

5. External cooperation
• Piek Vossen, Semantics of History
• Roxane Segers, PhD student Semantics of History
• Matje van de Camp, PhD student HiTime
• Yiling Lin, PhD studentUniversity of Pittsburg
• Oana Inel, MSc IBM

7. Johan Oomen, PhD student
Crowdsourcing & user-generated content
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User participation in cultural heritage
•
Video Tagging: Waisda? Game
•
Oorlogsmonumenten crowdsourcing
•
Content selection & curation infrastructure
•
Open Content
–
CT 2011
–
WebSci 10, Ashgate chapter
–
MW2011
–
Semantic Digital Archives 2011

8. Johan Oomen, PhD student
•
•
Symbiosis between the TRECVid benchmark and video libraries at the Netherlands
Institute for Sound and Vision
International Journal on Digital Libraries, March 2013,Volume 13, Issue 2, pp 91-104
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Sound of the Netherlands: Crowdsourcing the Dutch Soundscape
Museums and the Web 2013
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Open Culture Data: Opening GLAM Data Bottom-up
Museums and the Web 2013
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Personalized access to cultural heritage: multimedia by the crowd, for the crowd
October 2012, MM '12: Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on
Multimedia
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Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage: Waisda?: Making Videos Findable with
Crowdsourcing Annotations, Ashgate (to appear)

9. AGORA in a nutshell
• VU University Amsterdam
– Dept. Computer Science
– Dept. of History
• Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
• Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
• develop a social platform in which museum objects can
be placed into an explicit (art)historic context and can
be further related, resulting in a more complete and
illustrated description of historical events

10. Evaluation Framework for
Cultural Heritage Online
Expert
generated
support
automated
User
generated
manual
provision
information
interpretation

11. Storehouse of Information
provide information:
• manual: metadata, links (e.g. wikipedia)
• automatic: entities and event extraction,
mining
support information:
• manual: users tag, add comments and links
• automatic: search & browse

12. Method to Model Historical Events
12

13. Communication &
Interpretation Device
provide interpretation:
• manual: add stories, links between objects
• automatic: generating narrative relations
between events and objects (e.g. protonarratives in Agora)
support interpretation:
• manual: favorites, personal spaces
• automatic: supporting (narrative) relations
between events and objects

14. Method for Historical Narrative Generation

16. AGORA Pilots
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VU History students Pilot 2011
Bronbeek Pilot 2012
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Gymnasium Pilot 2012
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Object Recommendation & Semantic Search Pilot 2012
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Crowdsourcing Events Pilot 2013 (ongoing)
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Wireframe Pilot 2013 (ongoing)
•
Findings
– event- & narrative-driven browsing are useful structures to explore
– object & event information in Agora browser was too limited
– Need for links to external sources
– Need to distinguish between information & interpretation (narrative)
– Need to serve different types of users
– Need for chronological ordering of the timeline
– Need to distinguish different perspectives
– MSc Thesis: Ardjan van Nuland
– MSc Thesis: Ardjan van Nuland
– BSc Thesis: Marco Boom (recommendations)
– Collaboration with Crowd-Watson Project (IBM, VU)
– MSc Thesis: Shary Kock

17. AGORA Demos

25. 25

26. AGORA Wireframes Pilot

36. AGORA Valorization

37. Our Valorization
Vision
• Embed Agora data & tools
– in B&G and RMA environments
– Agora demos or each organization
• Use Agora demo with other
collections
– e.g. Troppenmuseum, etc.
• Promote Digital Hermeneutics
– via Video
– via Publications
• Use Agora in Education

38. What did we
do so far …
• Agora data in other projects
– BiographyNet - develop a virtual
society of people in the Netherlands
– Verrijkt Koninkrijk – gathering data on
De Jong's perception 'verzuiling’
• Exploitation within CATCH
– Informal collaboration with HiTime
project - people relations
– Open SKOS
• Follow-up project proposals
submitted/accepted
– DIVE & Digging into Data
• Participating in white paper on
digital hermeneutics
– KNAW Center for Advanced eHumanities

39. Planned
Education
• Using Agora demo in VU
History Lab
• Using Agora data in VU
Digital Humanities Minor
• MSc & BSc students and
interns @CH institutions

40. Planned
Publications
• Chiel van den Akker
– Historical Consciousness in the Age of New
Media, in Grever, Tangible Pasts
– Mechanical Reproduction and the Concept of
History, in Figuring Walter Benjamin
– History and Reproduction
– Curiosity and the Fate of Chronicles and
Narratives, in Touched by Code
• Chiel van den Akker, Lora Aroyo,
Lourens van der Meij, Susan Legêne,
and Guus Schreiber
– The Online Museum and its Contribution to
E-humanities
• Chiel van den Akker, Susan Legêne
– Touched by Code (editors)

41. Planned
Demo Work
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•
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Integrating Social Aspects
Wireframe testing
GUI Implementation & testing
Agora Social Platform Pilot
Continuous Use in History Lab
– Continuous feedback collection
– Demo improvement cycles
• Integration with BiographyNet
• Integration with DiVE & CrowdWatson

42. Use of Agora Events
in Online Video Search
Use of Agora Narratives
ONZE
In Search Results Clustering
MISSIE
Use of Agora Crowdsourcing
for Events Collection

43. Leerlingen
kunnen
zoeken

44. …
naar
authen.eke
bronnen

45. Project:
DIVE

47. Rijksmuseum
Intranet
for
Researchers

48. Agora
Events
&
NarraCves
for
Rijksmuseum
Researchers

49. Rijsmuseum
Website

50. agora.cs.vu.nl

51. @agoraproject

52. Thank you for your attention
http://agora.cs.vu.nl
@agoraproject