B-CAP Event 2: Interdisciplinary Symposium in Boston, MA; November 13-14, 2024.
Symposium on Disciplinary Experiences and Challenges with Provenance Research and Documentation
This two-day event has four parts: (1) presentation and conversation; (2) design fiction activities to speculate, explore, and create solutions; (3) affinity breakout sessions; and (4) recommendations or goal-setting to realign subsequent events. We will focus on these guiding questions:
- How are provenance needs in history, memory institutions, sciences, computer science, commerce, metadata, curation, sociology, arts, agriculture, and others similar and distinct?
- What can we learn from each other?
The planning intensive event aims to investigate provocations relating to the inter- and pan- disciplinary concerns of provenance documentation. This planning intensive will feature presentations from speakers from different fields. In particular, speakers will discuss definition(s) of provenance from their respective fields and their provenance documentation practices. We will experiment with existing tools to model provenance in their domains, with a crosswalking activity to determine what fell short with these models and tools.
The Provenance of Provenance: ARIST, 2024
Documenting provenance is a core concern in information science. In archives, functional provenance documents the origins of materials. In metadata, provenance elements and properties document process information about digital objects to ensure long-term accessibility. In data curation, provenance helps establish trust in data as it is (re)used. In other fields like forestry, provenance can have different meanings, like determining the sources of seeds. While provenance is a pan-disciplinary concern and practice, it lacks collective conversation and scholarship. Moreover, provenance is often tied to history, it invokes other temporal dimensions, bridging understandings from the past into the future. Current models and tools address prospective and retrospective provenance, but how these temporal dimensions can be used in documentation practices also warrants further discussion.
To date, there is no comprehensive review on provenance to discuss its nuances in terms of interdisciplinarity and temporality. In this work, we will use a 5-step systematic review process (Kelly & Sugimoto, 2013) to examine research articles on provenance:
- Step 1: Identifying sources
- Step 2: Developing inclusion and exclusion criteria
- Step 3: Validating search and selection processes
- Step 4: Developing a coding scheme for analysis
- Step 5: Applying the coding scheme to articles
This systematic review is critical in understanding the broader picture of what notions of provenance there are, and enable us to define provenance more precisely.
iPres 2023 – Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
We are so excited to be able to return to our academic home, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for iPres 2023.
We are grateful to Karin Bredenberg, Dr. Alex Chassanoff, and Dr. Zack Lischer-Katz for joining us in yet another Prov Jam! to discuss the nexus of digital preservation and provenance.
Check out the conference proceedings to see our short paper I got a letter from my past self: (un)managed change and provenance.
Paper Abstract: Significant properties (sigProps) research often focuses on the preservation targets. Yet research consistently shows that what is significant about an object is not necessarily inherent to objects. Simultaneously, sigProps research does not adequately attend to temporality. Time is built into the concept of sigProps: they are about what ideally should not change over time. This paper centers temporality in relation to sigProps to explore challenging case studies.