Digital Hermeneutics: Agora And The Online Understanding Of Cultural Heritage / quote 5 of 8
Events give collection objects their meaning
The main building blocks in the interpretation process of history and collection objects are historical events and the relations between these events and the objects. A collection object on its own, has no meaning; by adding events to the object’s description we provide its historical context. This gives the object meaning and makes it possible to interpret it. A single historical event often gives only a part of the whole historical context of an object, therefore narratives are important in the interpretation process. A narrative is formed by a chain of historical events. In principle, any sequence of historical events can form a narrative, however, we define a set of event-event-relationships from which nar- ratives follow that are meaningful from a historical perspec- tive. We call these narratives proto-narratives, as they are key to the interpretation process of users.
In this paper we aim to answer two questions: (i) what object-event-relations and event-event-relations support and enhance access to and interpretation of cultural heritage col- lections? and (ii) how can we model historical event descrip- tions to facilitate this access and interpretation?