Computational Approaches for Addressing Problematic Terminology in Museum Catalogues: A Knowledge Graph of Museum Critical Cataloguing Guidelines
摘要
Many museums are interested in addressing the presence of problematic terminology in their catalogue data but are uncertain of what they should look for and what do to when a problematic term is encountered. There is an opportunity to address the lack of guidance and scarcity of resources available for museums looking to engage with this work through the use of linked open data in order to create a knowledge graph that links together machine-readable versions of terminology guidance from multiple sources and then further connects them to additional lexicographical resources. The resulting knowledge graph can then be leveraged to support critical cataloguing tasks—namely confirming a term as problematic in a given context and making a decision of how to proceed—by providing cataloguers with the information they need to perform their work. This approach seeks to meet the needs of museum professionals to have access to domain best practice while allowing for localization of recommendations. This research seeks to understand what kinds of language museums are concerned with, how museums are thinking about what makes a term problematic, what possible reparative actions museums feel are appropriate given different contexts, and what kinds of information museum professionals look for to make a decision about which action to take. This work is taking place as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship co-supervised by the University of Oxford and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and as such the Victoria and Albert Museum serves as the case study for the exploration of this research area.