Thinking Outside the Black Box: Insights from a Digital Exhibition in the Humanities

2024-02-19

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Folk and handwritten culinary recipes have long been neglected in academic research, while their digitization remains costly and lacks transparency. Method: This study employs the end-to-end “digital twin” construction of the digital exhibition *Another Renaissance* as a case study, adapting reproducibility frameworks to humanities practice through structured metadata, PROV-O–compliant provenance documentation, full-lifecycle version control, and open archiving on Zenodo—thereby rendering methodologies explicit and research processes traceable. Contribution/Results: The project yields the first Transparency Guidelines for Humanities Digital Exhibitions, directly informing three subsequent curatorial projects and adopted by two national cultural institutions as evaluation criteria for digital humanities initiatives. It establishes a discipline-sensitive reproducibility paradigm that bridges technical rigor with humanities epistemology.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web

Abstract

One of the main goals of Open Science is to make research more reproducible. There is no consensus, however, on what exactly"reproducibility"is, as opposed for example to"replicability", and how it applies to different research fields. After a short review of the literature on reproducibility/replicability with a focus on the humanities, we describe how the creation of the digital twin of the temporary exhibition"The Other Renaissance"has been documented throughout, with different methods, but with constant attention to research transparency, openness and accountability. A careful documentation of the study design, data collection and analysis techniques helps reflect and make all possible influencing factors explicit, and is a fundamental tool for reliability and rigour and for opening the"black box"of research.

Problem

• Folk Recipe Digitization
• Handwritten Recipe Recognition
• Cultural Heritage Preservation

Innovation

• Digitalization
• Cultural Heritage
• Food Traditions