Not familiar with knowledge organisation? It provides the foundation for searching and retrieving arts and humanities information objects across digital collections and cultural heritage information systems. This course will give you introductory knowledge about:

• knowledge organisation systems and professional subject indexing, 
• social tagging as another approach to knowledge organisation, and
• automatic subject indexing as the third approach to knowledge organisation.

Starting from the case studies analysed in the course, you will be able to transfer the knowledge obtained to any digital humanities context anywhere in the world.


The course is divided into four units:


Unit I:  Knowledge Organisation: what is it?
Unit I will introduce you to the discipline of knowledge organisation (KO) and provide a brief historical overview of knowledge organisation systems and their typology, characterisation, and structures. Examples include thesauri, subject heading languages and classification systems.


Unit II: Knowledge Organisation in Action
Unit II will address the knowledge organisation processes, standardisation, and guiding principles.


Unit III: Going Automatic
This Unit describes how automatic methods work and their challenges.


Unit IV: The Big Picture
In Unit IV, you will learn about the pros and cons of the different approaches to knowledge organisation: intellectual by information professionals (manual), social tagging, and automatic. 

Course developers: 

Olívia Pestana (https://s.up.pt/u89m) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Information Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto. She is also a researcher at CITCEM -- Transdisciplinary Culture, Space and Memory Research Centre. Her current interests are in knowledge organisation systems, content analysis, and subject indexing in different domains. She has been involved in two projects funded by the FCT (Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology): "Letters in the Cloister: Monastic Libraries in Northern Portugal from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century" and "The reconstruction of monastic archives in Northern Portugal from the Middle Ages to the 19th century". She has also participated in the Erasmus+ project "Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH)".

Koraljka Golub (https://lnu.se/en/staff/koraljka.golub/) is the head of the iSchool at Linnaeus University, iInstitute. She is also co-leading a Digital Humanities Initiative at Linnaeus University. Her core research is in the field of digital libraries and information retrieval, with a particular focus on topics related to knowledge organisation, integrating existing knowledge organisation systems with social tagging and/or automated subject indexing, and evaluating resulting end-user information retrieval. She has authored over 100 academic publications, including journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and books. Lately, she has been involved in the Swedish Research Council's "HUMINFRA" infrastructure for humanities, a project aimed at Digital Humanities education, "Development of a new master programme in Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University" and a project on LGBTQ+ fiction searching, "Queerlit database". Lastly, she has been coordinating the Erasmus+ project "Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH)".

Contributors

Marwan Hassan (shakuhachi-shop.de) and Emily Hanscam (https://lnu.se/en/staff/emily.hanscam/) have significantly edited and formatted the OER content.