Rebecca Kahn, Dr.
Dr. Rebecca Kahn completed her PhD in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College, London in 2016, with a study on how digital transformation manifests in the documentation, data models and internal ontologies of cultural heritage institutions, and how the identity of an institution can be traced and observed throughout their digital assets. Her current work explores digitisation in museums and archives, and the ways in which knowledge representation changes in these institutions as they and their materials become digital.
Her undergraduate studies were completed in her native South Africa, and prior to beginning her research, Rebecca worked for several years in the Open Access and Free Culture movement, and has a particular interest in scholarly open access in the Global South, open education and peer learning online and open web literacy.
Since January 2017 Rebecca has been Director of Collections for the Pelagios Project – a Mellon Foundation-supported research project that uses Linked Data and geodata to build connections between digital historical sources. Her focus is on working with museums, libraries and archives to develop linked data connections from their collections.
She is one of the 2018/19 Freies Wissen fellows, supported by Wikimedia Deutschland, the Stifterverband and the VolkswagenStiftung. Rebecca is also one of the co-coordinators of the DARAIH Geo-Humanities Working Group.
At the HIIG she is an associated researcher.
Videos
Science & education · Society & culturePelagios Network: Linking the places of your past
The project investigates new methodologies for using Linked Data to connect historical sources through common references using a variety of digital content including text,...
Journal articles and conference proceedings
Blagoev, B., Felten, S., & Kahn, R. (2018). The Career of a Catalogue: Organizational Memory, Materiality and the Dual Nature of the Past at the British Museum (1970–Today). Sage Journals. DOI: 10.1177/0170840618789189 Publication details
Gibson, L. & Kahn, R. (2016). Digital Museums in the 21st Century: Global Microphones or Universal Mufflers? Museological Review, 20, 39-52. Publication details
Book contributions and chapters
Kahn, R. (2019). The Nation is in the Network. In N. Brügger, & D. Laursen (Eds.), The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: The Case of National Web Domains (pp. 161-177). London, New York: Routledge. Publication details
Kahn, R., Tanner, S., Gibson, L., & Laycock, G. (2017). Choices in Digitization for the Digital Humanities. In Griffin, G. (Ed.), Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Publication details
Working paper
Fecher, B., Sokolovska, N., Völker, T., Nebe, P., Kahn, R. (2020). Making a Research Infrastructure: Conditions and Strategies to Transform a Service into an Infrastructure. SSOAR. Publication details
Other publications
Kahn, R. (2017). Smudges on the Glass: Locating and Tracing the Museum in the British Museum’s Digitised Collections. Doctoral Dissertation, King's College London. Publication details
Kahn, R. (2015). South Africa Might Get the Worst Internet Censorship Law in Africa. Huffington Post. Publication details
Lectures and presentations
From Strings to Things: Using Linked Open Data for Cultural HeritageSpring School LiSeH 2019 Linked Data and the Semantic Web for Humanities research. University of Graz. University of Graz, Graz, Austria: 24.04.2019 Further information
Rebecca Kahn
Connecting Collections: exposing objects in a Linked Data Search engineMuseums+Tech Conference. Museums Computer Group. National Gallery, London, London, United Kingdom: 19.10.2018
Rebecca Kahn
Out of the Archives, and onto the StreetsConnected Communities Conference. Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom: 27.09.2018
Rebecca Kahn
Connecting CollectionsICHG 2018: 17th Annual International Conference of Historical Geographers (Session: Linked Open Data for Linked Pasts). Polish Academy of Sciences. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland: 17.07.2018
Rebecca Kahn
Pelagios Commons: Decentralizing Knowledge Creation in the Web of Historical DataICHG 2018 International Conference of Historical Geographers (Session: Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing in Historical Geography – Projects, Ideas, Perspectives). Polish Academy of Sciences. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland: 16.07.2018
Rebecca Kahn
Recogito: Semantic Annotation Without the Pointy BracketsHybrid Narrativity: Annotating Comics Workshop (Session: Annotating Comics). University of Paderborn, University of Potsdam. Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany: 18.06.2018
Rebecca Kahn
Pelagios Commons: Linked Data without the Pointy BracketsDigital Classicist Seminar, Berlin (Session: Digital Classicist Berlin Seminar). Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Interdisziplinäre Forschungsverbund Digital Humanities in Berlin, DARIAH-DE. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany: 16.10.2017 Further information
Rebecca Kahn
Pelagios Commons: Decentralising the Web of Historical KnowledgeDigital Cultural Heritage. CODATA-Germany. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany: 30.08.2017
Rebecca Kahn
Semantic Annotation for Humanists: Linked Data Without the Pointy BracketsInternational Symposium of Information Science 2017 (Satellite Workshop on the Relationship of Information Science and the Digital Humanities). University of Regensburg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin School of Library and Information Science. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany: 15.03.2017
Rebecca Kahn
Moderation of workshops and panels
Swimming in (Linked) Data: Using the Semantic Web to make sense of Spatial HumanitiesAnnual Conference. DARIAH. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland: 15.05.2019 Further information
Rebecca Kahn
Organisation of events
Geo-LOD: Linked Open Data and GeoHumanities Research (Linked Data, Geodata and Humanities Research: More Than Semantics)Geo-LOD: Linked Open Data and GeoHumanities Research. with attending Vip: Geo-LOD: Linked Open Data and GeoHumanities Research. 22.05.2018. Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom (International)
Rebecca Kahn
Media appearances
Article (30.07.2021). wissenschaftskommunikation.de
Further information
Position
Associated Researcher: Knowledge & Society
