Mixing web and digitized archivesThe future of digital heritage of the World War I

Valérie Beaudouin (Telecom ParisTech), Philippe Chevallier (BnF), Lionel Maurel (BDIC), Clément Oury (BnF)

IIPC – 19 mai 2014

CONTEXT & METHODOLOGY

OUR RESEARCH PROJECT’S STORY

A question for the Libraries & Archives: How is their digital heritage disseminated and re-used by the public on the web? Identification of a « non-traditional » use of the digitized heritage : Gallica’s (the BnF digital library) top feeder sites.Lauching a research program in the context of the Cluster of Excellence (labex) “Pasts in the Present: history, heritage, memory”, Investissements d’avenir, ANR-11-LABX-0026-01

2 Libraries: Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) & Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine (BDIC).2 Research Institutes: Télécom Paris-Tech & Institut des sciences sociales du politique (ISP).

The future of online digitized heritage: the case of the World War I (2013-2016)

A NEW DEVICE

… to allow us to adress three problems: •epistemological : how to constitute a corpus of websites? •technical : how to collect the web to analyse it? •juridical : what legal framework for conducting such a work?

MAPPING THE WEB OF WORLD WAR I

• Building a corpus– List of web sites dedicated to WWI established by

librarians – Archiving the web sites on a regular basis

• Exploring the web archives of WWI– Detection of links between websites– Identification of documentary ressources cited (public vs

private archives)• Linking with Gallica audience measurement– What are the websites dedicated to WWI which generate

traffic on Gallica ?

FORUM : A SPACE FOR DISCUSSION ON WWI

Pages 14-18 A space for discussion on WWI

Forum as a space for discussing documents

– Which types of sources? : public institutions (Gallica, Mémoire des hommes, BDIC) vs individual mementos

– How are these documents shared, cited, commented?

– Who is in charge of transmitting the digitized archives?

« ALBUMS VALOIS » : TRACKING THE DISSEMINATION OF THIS COLLECTION

« Albums Valois » : a case study

• BDIC : 539 albums gathering pictures taken on the front lines during the Great War– Digitization in progress– Uploading in nov 2014

How will the images spread on the Web? Definition (in progress) of the protocol

Definition of an experimental protocol

• Corpus– Samples of photographs of similar content

• Kinds of dissemination modalities according to :– Locus : social network, organizations’ websites, etc.– Editorializing : metadata, comments, etc.

• Tools for observation and analysis:– Quantitative : metrics– Qualitative : observation

Conclusion• A research protocol steering clear of both Big data approach

and subjective evaluation:– A research question– Careful methodology : corpus definition , selection and

evaluation of tools. • A reactive and collective process : – Requiring computer and social sciences competences– Requiring cooperation between researchers and librarians– Scalable

• Hope : to be able to share experimental results and protocols with other teams working on other corpora.