What I did. On Friday, 27 September, I attended the 2024 European Researchers’ Night in Piazza Antonio Scaravilli in front of the entrance of the University of Bologna. Together with other researchers from the University and the National Research Council, we have presented the initial outcomes of creating the digital twin of a temporary exhibition organised months before this event in the Museum of Palazzo Poggi. The temporary exhibition, which ended in May 2023, is no longer available for in-person museum attendance. Still, it has been recreated within a virtual environment. It will be published on the Web in the following months to enable citizens to discover still the marvellous world of Ulisse Aldrovandi, the primary topic of the temporary exhibition.

What to read. It is a bit self-referential, but we wrote a paper to introduce the acquisition and digitisation process we adopted to create the digital twin of the temporary exhibition mentioned above, which was published in the Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage journal a few months ago:

Balzani, R., Barzaghi, S., Bitelli, G., Bonifazi, F., Bordignon, A., Cipriani, L., Colitti, S., Collina, F., Daquino, M., Fabbri, F., Fanini, B., Fantini, F., Ferdani, D., Fiorini, G., Formia, E., Forte, A., Giacomini, F., Girelli, V. A., Gualandi, B., … Vittuari, L. (2024). Saving temporary exhibitions in virtual environments: The Digital Renaissance of Ulisse Aldrovandi – Acquisition and digitisation of cultural heritage objects. Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, 32, e00309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.daach.2023.e00309

What I did. In the following months, I have been involved with several people in creating a framework to exchange scholarly metadata, coordinated in the context of the RDA Working Group on Scientific Knowledge Graphs – Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF). In particular, after having worked on a JSON-LD context for serving the metadata described according to SKG-IF in Linked Open Data form, I’ve just provided a few examples of data based on sources downloadable by using the OpenCitations Meta API. All this material – which includes the JSON-LD context, toy examples of the entities described by the framework, graphs depicting the data model, data samples, and scripts for converting data across formats – is available on one of my GitHub repositories.

What to read. Peer reviewing is a crucial activity in academia since it is one of the primary means we use to assess the soundness of scholarly contributions. Being an activity done by humans, peer reviewing may be biased by subjective points of view, and, as such, it is not a perfect (and measurable, quantitatively) way to assess others’ work. However, it is probably our best (and time-consuming) tool for evaluating science. Being a subjective activity, may peer review be gamed – and, if so, why? Here is an article to start such a discussion:

Brainard, J. (2024). Suspicious phrases in peer reviews point to referees gaming the system. Science, 385(6714), 1150–1150. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.zz2zu81

What I did. At the beginning of August, we uploaded a paper describing the OpenCitations Index on arXiv, which has been accepted in Scientometrics. This work – coauthored with Ivan, Arianna and Marta – introduces the recent effort we have conducted at OpenCitations to revise the ingestion workflow of bibliographic metadata and citation data from five different sources (Crossref, DataCite, PubMed, OpenAIRE, JaLC) and integrate all their citations data into one collection, i.e. the Index, of over 2 billion unique citation links, which can be systematically accessed and queried through several services, including REST APIs and dataset dumps in various formats.

What to read. As an outcome of the first event of the series mentioned above, the University of Bologna has produced a position paper which highlights, enriched by the perspectives of international experts, the point of view and recommendation of the University on the reliability, transparency and reproducibility in research:

Credi, A., Masini, F., Diciotti, S., Forni, M., Peroni, S., Coppini, S., & Gualandi, B. (2024). Back to the Fundamentals of Research: Reliability, Transparency and Reproducibility. Position Paper [Position paper]. Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna. https://doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/7803

What I did. We have just received the news that the work (introduced in a previous w-log) describing our experience using and adapting an existing ontology development methodology, i.e. SAMOD, to create application profiles of given standards, i.e. CIDOC CRM and other related standards, has been accepted at the 23rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2024). The application profile developed, i.e. Cultural Heritage Acquisition and Digitisation – Application Profile (CHAD-AP), reuses 25 classes (out of 145), 28 object properties (out of 247, not counting inverse properties), 5 data properties (out of 26), and 81 individuals (out of 56,670) from the high-level standards considered, thus drastically reducing the number of ontological entities a user should know for understanding the data of the application context in consideration.

What to read. Five researchers involved in the PathOS project have just published a scoping review on existing studies that tried to measure the societal impact of Open Science in different contexts. From this analysis, they have noticed that a specific aspect of Open Science, i.e. Citizen Science, is the primary responsible for societal impact. In addition, they did not find evidence of societal impact from the availability of open methods, open evaluations, and open and FAIR data. The article is available in the Royal Society Open Science journal:

Cole, N. L., Kormann, E., Klebel, T., Apartis, S., & Ross-Hellauer, T. (2024). The societal impact of Open Science: A scoping review. Royal Society Open Science, 11(6), 240286. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240286

What I did. I was involved in an unusual lecture for the students of the PhD programme in Cultural Heritage in the Digital Ecosystem, which also saw the presence of several postdocs and early-stage researchers. The topic of the lecture was entirely dedicated to the mechanics of the Italian academic system, with a focus on the academic career and the process of the National Scientific Qualification, i.e. the mandatory requirement a scholar must have to become a professor in an Italian university. We have analysed such a scenario from three distinct perspectives, representing the related research and teaching areas of my Department: (a) antiquities, philology, literary studies, and art history; (b) history, philosophy, pedagogy and psychology; (c) mathematics and informatics. There were great discussions in the middle and end of the lecture, followed by some (informal) ethical considerations about the procedures introduced, with a final hope: that the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) can address, in some way, at least part of the problems in the current procedures.

What to read. Since I’ve just mentioned it, in case you did not have the chance to explore more about this topic, I would strongly suggest looking at the work done by CoARA with the development of the principles and commitments for reforming current research assessment practices within research-performing organisations:

Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. (2022). Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment [Policy]. European Science Foundation. https://coara.eu/agreement/the-agreement-full-text/

What I did. In the context of the AIUCD 2024 conference, there have been a few presentations of works (I am involved as a co-author) describing the research we are conducting around DH. Sebastian, Alice, and Bianca have presented a work that analyses reproducible research in the context of the humanities domain, presenting the creation of a digital twin of a temporary exhibition (which was already introduced in the previous log). Arcangelo has introduced HERITRACE, a semantic data management system tailored for the GLAM sector, based on SHACL for data modelling and the OpenCitations Data Model for provenance and change tracking. Last but not least, Arianna has shown a workflow she is implementing for creating replicable metadata schema crosswalks to facilitate the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage in the digital ecosystem based on the RDF Mapping Language (RML) and surveys for abstracting and reformulating domain-specific knowledge. In addition, I was also approached about possible uses of the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology (FaBiO) in the context of GLAM institutions. It was a very interesting intake, with exciting collaborations in the following months.

What to read. Among the various possible new readings to suggest as a consequence of the latest knowledge gained within the AIUCD 2024 conference, I would like to highlight an excellent open-access book, published by the wonderful Open Book Publishers, about DH and modelling, which was presented in one of the talks of the conference:

Ciula, A., Eide, Ø., Marras, C., & Sahle, P. (2023). Modelling Between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice (1st ed.). Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0369

What I did. As a consequence of my take-home messages from the event and the slides I prepared for a lecture I gave to second-year students of the Cultural Heritage in the Digital Ecosystem PhD programme, I spent several hours on the concept of transparency, which is strongly tied to reproducibility. In several meetings and papers, I’ve seen too many times that transparency is introduced as synonymous with quality. While I understand the rationale behind such a conclusion, I believe this claim is rather simplistic – and wrong, from my perspective. I would need to spend more effort (and words) to rigorously outline the whole rationale of my thoughts – at least more than a short paragraph in a blog post. Still, the main point here is that quality is a goal to achieve (e.g. to perform qualitatively sound work), while transparency is, in fact, a tool that enables others to check if we have reached that goal. In practice, quality can exist without transparency, but transparency is needed if we want people to scrutinise quality. Thus, transparency does not build quality; it builds trust.

What to read. With all this agitation about these topics I’ve been absorbed this week, the weekly suggestion is, indeed, about research reproducibility and shows how there is not one definition that fits all but, rather, a plethora of different lenses one may have to use, depending on contextual and/or disciplinary situations:

Goodman, S. N., Fanelli, D., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2016). What does research reproducibility mean? Science Translational Medicine, 8(341). https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf5027 – Open Access at https://osf.io/dw23g

What I did. The Creators Day 2024 was an event organised in Bologna, focused on sharing with society the effort and dedication that several institutions, including the University of Bologna, put into the Cultural and Creative Industries. I had the honour to be part of the programme as one of the speakers, bringing my personal experience gained in the past year thanks to plenty of researchers working at the University of Bologna and the Institute of Heritage Science of the Italian National Research Council, on the digitisation of museums and, more generally, cultural heritage.

What to read. Over the past years, thanks to several initiatives worldwide supported by several institutions, the Open Science community has often participated in discussions about research assessment and the importance of responsible use of quantitative indicators. One of the most recent contributions to this discussion was disclosed by DORA very recently. It is a short and pleasant reading on why to avoid the misuse of specific indicators – e.g. the Journal Impact Factor and the Hirsch Index – and how to guide interested communities in using such quantitative indicators in research assessment exercises:

Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). (2024). Guidance on the responsible use of quantitative indicators in research assessment. Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11156568

What I did. As the corresponding author, I’ve finalised the bureaucracy with the publisher for an open-access publication of a work co-authored with Andras, Clement, Emanuele, Fajar, Ivan, and Oscar, just published in Scientific Data. The article, entitled A maturity model for catalogues of semantic artefacts, is entirely focused on the key components that enable the implementation of semantic interoperability, i.e. semantic artefacts, that are a machine-actionable formalisation of a conceptualisation enabling sharing and reuse by humans and machines. In particular, we reflected on the catalogues where semantic artefacts are stored – i.e. web-based systems that foster the availability, discoverability and long-term preservation and maintenance of semantic artefacts – and provided a set of twelve dimensions for measuring the maturity of such catalogues.

What to read. Since its introduction, in the last lecture of my course on Open Science within the second-cycle degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, I invite an expert to talk about the current status of Open Science in Europe. This year, continuing with the tradition of the previous course editions, I had the pleasure of having a friend of mine, Elena Giglia, who gave a presentation entitled Open Science: in dialogue with society. My reading suggestion for this week is the slides of her talk that have been deposited on Zenodo:

Giglia, E. (2024, May 7). Open Science: In dialogue with society. Open Science course, a.a. 2023/2024, Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11127310

What I did. In the past weeks, I’ve worked with colleagues (Arianna, Ivan and Sebastian) to finalise a paper describing our experience using and adapting an existing ontology development methodology to create application profiles of given standards. The case scenario was entirely focused on a project that concerns the creation of a digital twin of a temporary exhibition (finished in May 2023) dedicated to the figure of Ulisse Aldrovandi. The goal, on our end, was to have a data model based on appropriate international standards that we can use to record descriptive information about the original physical objects included in the exhibition, the related digital models crafted, and the process followed for such digitisation.

What to read. A few days ago, I finished reading a lovely book on Open Science by Sabina Leonelli, which Ludo Waltman suggested a few months ago. It is a short, beautifully written book that introduces a new perspective on Open Science, suggesting using a philosophy of openness where “research is understood first and foremost as an effort to foster collective agency” instead of “openness as sharing” of the outcomes of research. Published by Cambridge University Press, the book is available in Open Access:

Leonelli, S. (2023). Philosophy of Open Science (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416368