Rebecca Kahn, Dr.
Dr. Rebecca Kahn is an associated researcher in the Democratic Change and Knowledge research focus. She 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.
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 (9)
From Strings to Things: Using Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage
Connecting Collections: exposing objects in a Linked Data Search engine
Out of the Archives, and onto the Streets
Conference Presentation
Conference Presentation
Workshop Presentation
Digital Classicist Berlin Seminar
Conference Presentation: Digital Culture and Heritage, Berlin 2017
International Symposium of Information Science 2017 (Satellite Workshop on the Relationship of Information Science and the Digital Humanities)
Moderation of workshops and panels (1)
Swimming in (Linked) Data: Using the Semantic Web to make sense of Spatial Humanities
Organisation of events (1)
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
