Outcome Type Menu
Knowledge base:
The main output of the project is the digital platform, the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base, a rich interconnected knowledge graph structure, including natural history and pharmaceutical specimens, books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, coins and other objects from across the world.
The digital platform aggregates enriched and, in some cases, newly digitised datasets, available through the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base and through the repositories of respective institutions (via the Sloane Lab platform, data is also published as Linked Data, via a SPARQL end point). It includes:
• Miscellanea (seven catalogues)
• Fossils I (six catalogues)
• Fossils V (four catalogues)
• Intaglios, Cameos & Rings (three catalogues)
• Amuleta Mahumetica (one catalogue)
• Manuscripts (one catalogue)
• Printed Books (one catalogue)
• Historia Plantarum Vol. 1
• Historia Plantarum Vol. 2
• Vegetable Substances (one catalogue in three volumes)
• Contemporary Datasets
• British Museum
• British Library Manuscripts;
• Natural History Museum Vegetable Substances
• Folio-level inventory of the Sloane Herbarium
The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base is accessed via the project’s central hub sloanelab.org which is an up-to-date resource, featuring all the project’s dissemination and public engagement activities. This includes all of the project’s participatory workshops and events, which are organised within the top-level menu item ’Participatory Co-Design & Research’. Material from the technical team and other activities are organised by format and author(s), accessible through the ’Sloane Lab Framework’. All activity can be browsed through ’News & Updates’, which is an up-to-date feed of all the project’s public-facing activities. ’Resources & Publications’ provides direct links to project-specific resources, e.g., YouTube and video recordings, as well as to other external resources. Newsletters issued by the project are also accessible.
Sloane Lab Fellows were invited to present their work at the Sloane Lab and Humanities Data Science & Methodology Darmstadt Seminar Series 2024: Critical and creative engagement with historical data. Recorded sessions are available through the Sloane Lab YouTube channel.
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Presentations:
Sloane Lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [August 27, 2024]
Invited by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Technical Co-I of the Sloane Lab Associate Professor Andreas Vlachidis delivered a seminar on Sloane Lab at CUHK’s Digital Scholarship Lab, hosting also a workshop on the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base. Video recordings of both the seminar and the workshop are available on the Sloane Lab YouTube…
Sloane Lab Seminar Series 2023: (Re)connecting heritage collections as data, infrastructure and participatory engagement [Video Presentations] [December 8, 2023]
The video presentations of the Sloane Lab Seminar Series 2023 have now been released and you can watch them below. From the 25th of May to the 22nd of June the Sloane Lab organised the seminar series (Re)connecting heritage collections as data, infrastructure and participatory engagement: big dreams, big challenges. The series welcomed a range…
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Video-Lectures:
Towards a Network Analysis of Hans Sloane’s Collection: A Preliminary Study [September 27, 2022]
Daniele Metilli (they/them) is a Research Fellow in Advanced Data Architectures for Digital Humanities at UCL Department of Information Studies. In the Sloane Lab project, they are working to manage the collected knowledge, model it through Semantic Web technologies, and publish it as Linked Data for further exploration and reuse. On the 14th of September…
Collections as Data infrastructures: Perspectives from the United Kingdom [Video Lecture] [February 5, 2024]
On 30th November 2023, Dr Marco Humbel, Research Fellow at the Sloane Lab, was invited to speak at the ETH Library’s 17:15 Colloquium in Zurich. In this talk Marco explores the question of what kind of infrastructures are needed to reap the potential of collection data. The presentation introduces the Sloane Lab project and the TaNC programme.…
Digitality workshop: Loss, absence and contestation in Digital Humanities through the lens of the collection of Hans Sloane [Video Lecture] [March 3, 2023]
In this lecture Prof. Julianne Nyhan (Principal Investigator) presents an introduction to some of the big questions to be grappled with during the AHRC towards a National Collection-funded project “The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections” (2021-24). Our project aims to devise automated and augmented ways, of mending the broken links between…
Data for the Digital Historian: The Sloane Lab Experience [Video Lecture] [February 2, 2023]
In this lecture, taught as part of the course “Concepts and Context of Digital History” at TU Darmstadt, Dr Daniele Metilli, Research Fellow at the Sloane Lab, introduces students to the use of data as a source for historical research, looking at different kinds of data and forms of scholarship that Digital Humanities (DH) projects…
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Media Engagement:
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Publications:
The project has published a number of papers in international, peer-reviewed journals and conference publications:
Under Peer Review
• Metilli, D., Vlachidis, A., MacDonald, I., Nyhan, J., Lippolis, A.S., Sadek, J., Hughes, A., Li, J., Flinn, A., Terraciano, A. Multivocality in the Collection of Everything: Towards a Sloane Lab Data Model. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
• Carine, M. Digitisation and the History of Botanical Collections and Collecting. Journal of the History of Collections.
In progress
• Vlachidis, A., MacDonald, I., Valeonti, F., Sloan, K., Nyhan, J. Data Atlas as a Method for Mapping Cultural Heritage Collections.
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Youtube Channel:
Project videos are available on the projects YouTube channel.
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GitHub Repositories:
An important research outcome of the project are the methodologies and instruments that the project has devised not only for the technical aspects of pursuing collections as data research but also for working with diverse communities. Accordingly, the project has closely documented its code and workflows for use by others on the Sloane Lab Git Hub.
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Project reports:
Final Report – Sloane Lab: Looking Back to Build Future Shared Collections 42Public Engagement
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Touring Exhibition:
A British Museum and Sloane Lab Touring Exhibition “For the Curious and Interested” exhibition was open from January to July 2024.
The main physical outputs of the project included a British Museum National Programmes touring exhibition at two UK partner museums and a new permanent case display in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum. This format best conveyed the work of the project and the stories about objects that can only be told because of bringing the collection together again. Developed in collaboration with partner museums and their communities, it also showcased the participatory work of the Sloane Lab project by conveying the voices, interests and responses that such groups had while working with the Sloane collection. This approach fed into the changes made to the permanent display around Hans Sloane, empire, slavery and colonialism in the Enlightenment Gallery, providing a permanent physical legacy for the Sloane Lab project in an institution visited by over six million people a year.
Further information about the exhibition:
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Community Fellowships:
The Sloane Lab awarded Community Fellowships to contribute to “The Sloane
Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections”, led by University College London (UCL) in partnership with the Technische Universität Darmstadt, British Museum (BM) and Natural History Museum (NHM). The fellows undertook creative, critical, practice and/or research-led projects with the Sloane Lab’s Knowledge Base and data, demonstrating the new forms of analysis and interpretation the project unlocked.
Sloane Lab Fellows were invited to present their work at the Sloane Lab
and Humanities Data Science & Methodology Darmstadt Seminar Series
2024: Critical and creative engagement with historical data. Recorded
sessions are available through the Sloane Lab YouTube channel.
