1 Minute Lecture: Why talk about open data in the media archive?
Open data, as the name suggests, are data which are available to everyone freely and free of charge. Why we should give special importance to the open data in the media archive is the subject of a short talk by Andres Kõnno, a research fellow at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of Tallinn University.
There is a huge amount of open data, and they vary in quality. For example, we all have weather apps on our phones. These apps source open data from meteorological points. There are various datasets about urban space and geo-information systems. The National Land Cadastre is essentially a set of open data. All these datasets make our lives a lot easier without us even noticing they’re doing so from one day to the next.
Media archives are a slightly different story. Media archive metadata essentially form a road map to our collective cultural memory. When we talk about media data as cultural and open data, we’re basically talking about that road map. This means that if we manage to combine media data as open data with open data from other memory institutions like the Estonian Film Archives, the National Archives, the National Library and the Estonian Literary Museum, then we’re essentially dealing with a new level of quality in the study of Estonia’s cultural history.