Ekaterina Karavelova with her eldest daughter Viola. Image in PD, NALIS Foundation. Ekaterina Karavelova (1860-1947) is the founder of the Bulgarian Women’s Union, chairwoman of the Bulgarian section of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, founder of the Committee for the Protection of Jews, wife of Petko Karavelov.

Enriching photographic heritage through citizen science.

If it is true that an image is worth a thousand words, the key issue with the mass of digitized photographic heritage that is published in online repositories is allowing users to find the images they’re looking for.

Good metadata, with rich keywords and links to authority files and official thesauri are necessary for search, retrieval and reuse of digital collections of cultural heritage relevance. A growing attention is therefore given to enriching existing digital resources which may have basic metadata, to make them more discoverable, multilingual, and meaningful.

This metadata improving activity can be done in various ways, also with support of Artificial Intelligence – but with photographic heritage the human factor is of the utmost importance to unveil the knowledge that historical images embed. Involving citizens in the loop is the best strategy for letting photography speak for themselves.

In this event, students of digital humanities from the University of Sofia successfully worked on metadata improvement, by annotating and enriching the beautiful digitized collection of early Bulgarian photography published by NALIS Foundation in Europeana.

The result is over 5.000 new tags added to ca. 700 heritage photographs!

DISCOVER THE EVENT:
https://www.citizenheritage.eu/citizen-science-workshops/sofia/