Susan Brown

Image: Woman punch card operators working on Roberto Busa’s Index Thomisticus. Back left: Rosetta Rossi Bertolli; bottom right: Livia Canestraro. CC-BY-NC. Thanks to Melissa Terras, “For Ada Lovelace Day,” 2015.

I am surprised and thrilled that someone thought it worth nominating me for the Roberto Busa Prize, and overwhelmed to have been placed by ADHO in such illustrious company, fully aware that there is so much superb work in our community deserving of this recognition.

All knowledge is relational. It is fabulous to have recognition of scholarship that emerges from an intersectional perspective and is embedded in process: from making things that try to leverage technology in new ways, trying and failing, and yet continuing to try to make a difference to how we work and to enable us to create and share knowledge together, in better ways, in a changing world. For such work, collaboration is essential, which is to say it’s all about people.

My absolutely stellar colleagues here at LINCS gelled into a phenomenal team, even though we came together remotely, many of us for the first time, at the height of the pandemic, to build an infrastructure for linking scholarly knowledge across disciplines. The core LINCS team is at the heart of a growing network of scholars, students, and professionals who are, thanks to the combined efforts of these brilliant people, able to engage in serious exploration of the capacity of linked data to enhance cultural research and cultural experiences. The CWRC virtual research environment has involved 200+ wonderful people (and counting, since our credits need updating before we launch this spring as an instance of the LEAF software framework). And my belief in the magic of producing knowledge collaboratively in new digital ways grew out of formative experience as a new scholar in the Orlando Project, whose sterling participants include as active contributors ~150 students.

The core of the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) project is the simple proposition that making Linked Open Data (LOD) out of the stuff scholars use to understand and analyze culture will make a difference. LINCS hopes to make a difference to how we can make sense of the human past and present. It aims to enable such work within and beyond academic contexts, and in so doing to improve how things cultural can be presented and circulated on the World Wide Web.

I say stuff and things to demystify the notion of data. Those who make culture seldom think of themselves as creating data, and neither do those who collect, celebrate, curate, and analyze cultural objects, processes, and events. But everything we make and do can be represented as data and circulated on the Web, and a large part of contemporary culture is Web culture...