Cultural geography on SearchCulture.gr

The National Documentation Centre (EKT) held the online event ‘12,000 places: Greek culture on the map of SearchCulture.gr’ on Friday 26 May 2023. The event was attended by more than 350 participants, including representatives of cultural institutions, museums, librarians, archivists, historians, museologists, archaeologists, as well as many primary and secondary school teachers, students and researchers, as well as interested citizens, and the comments were very encouraging.

The event was dedicated to cultural geography. Through presentations and use cases, the new version of the National Aggregator of Digital Cultural Content SearchCulture.gr, developed and made available by EKT, was presented. The new version highlights cultural heritage through interactive maps and illuminates the places, routes and stories of Hellenism. Utilising the geographical information accompanying the documents, EKT has brought together 12,000 places linked to Greek culture, with more than 550,000 items enriched with geolocation.

Introducing the event, the Scientific Lead and Principal Developer, Dr. Haris Georgiadis, presented the history of the aggregator's development and the added value offered by the extensive semantic enrichments to the content.

Subsequently, Georgia Angelaki, Network Development and Outreach, presented the new functionality, based on geospatial data, citing examples of navigation and search, use of advanced search filters and interactive maps as well as typical examples from various areas of Greece.

She pointed out that the enrichment of places has highlighted collections in which the location is a particularly important method of navigation, examples being proverbs from the collection of the Centre of Greek Folklore of the Academy of Athens and local costumes of institutions such as the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation, the Folklore Museum of Macedonia-Thrace, etc.

Elena Lagoudi, Digital Curation, presented the methodological framework of semantic enrichments of places, focusing on good practices regarding geographical and geospatial data in documentation. She described the challenges faced by the SearchCulture.gr curation team in identifying and clarifying place names, and the solutions provided on a case-by-case basis.

In the next presentation, E. Lagoudi talked about the use of digital maps as narrative generators through the example of the 10 new thematic exhibitions on Asia Minor. As she stressed, after the celebration for the 100 years since the Asia Minor Catastrophe, it was important to recognise and promote the centuries-old presence of Hellenism in Asia Minor, and the new thematic exhibitions document it in the most modern and interactive way.

Taking advantage of the extensive editing done on the place names of Asia Minor, the user can search and see all the previous place names of a settlement or a city, as these were collected in EKT's Geonames Vocabulary, as successive rewritings of the place name through time and are searchable as Alternate Names.

After this brief presentation of the exhibits and their development methodology, the webinar participants were invited to explore them for themselves, experiencing the almost tactile quality of discovering documents on a map.

The last presentation of the seminar was made by Agathi Papanoti, Data Ingestion and Semantic Enrichments, who presented usage scenarios. Using two very interesting examples, she took the participants on a journey through the world of SearchCulture.gr. The first concerned the circulation of ancient coins, their relationship with Greek cities and their colonies and suggested routes of discovery through maps.

The second example focused on Persons and Maps, following the life and work of an important personality, the composer Mikis Theodorakis, through documents that illuminate the places in which he lived and where he created his works.

The seminar concluded with a discussion on issues related to geographical documentation, the use of SearchCulture.gr for cultural diplomacy and cooperation with research institutions for the enrichment of the Vocabulary with more ancient place names for Greece.

It’s worth noting some of the participants’ comments:

 ‘Congratulations on the overall design and scope of the work. It will definitely be exploited.’

‘What a beautiful job! What "journeys" lie ahead!’

‘Amazing "trips" and especially that of coins and the biographical journey... Great ideas for educational scenarios! Well done indeed!

The programme of the event and the presentations of the speakers are available here, while the full video of the event can be found on EKT's YouTube channel and can be found here.

The video of the event

SearchCulture.gr

SearchCulture.gr, developed and made available by EKT, is the National Aggregator of Digital Cultural Content and the accredited national aggregator for the European digital library Europeana. It collects metadata and preview images of digital cultural resources from the websites and repositories of the participating institutions and publishes them enriched on the Search Portal.

The upgrade and expansion of the SearchCulture.gr aggregator with new functionalities is being carried out by EKT under the ‘National Research and Technology Information System: Infrastructure for the Aggregation, Documentation and Disemination of Digital Content ensuring interoperability, long-term preservation and open access’ action. The operation is implemented under the Operational Programme ‘Public Sector Reform’ (NSRF 2014-2020) and is co-financed by the European Union - European Regional Development Fund and national resources.