Research
Written work from operating LinkedCulture: a peer-visible paper series documenting what a live multi-institutional retrieval system actually does, and shorter working notes along the way. By Edward Monk.
RSS feed · Papers are archived on Zenodo with DOIs; the pages here are the canonical web editions.
The paper series
Paper No. 3 · June 24, 2026
Semantic Clusters and Language Partitioning
Multilingual retrieval is not cross-lingual representation: a 302,798-record embedding space stays 99.9% partitioned by cataloging language, and query translation — not model choice — bridges it.
Paper No. 2 · June 10, 2026
Embedding Cultural Heritage Metadata
The implementation record: how records from nine institutions become embeddable prose, how OpenSearch and Qdrant retrieval fuse, and where pipeline choices introduce bias.
Paper No. 1 · May 27, 2026
Discovery Architecture for Cultural Heritage
Keyword search alone cannot bridge the vocabulary gap between catalogers and searchers. The case for layered retrieval that keeps AI at the representation layer, never the interpretation layer.
Research notes
Working notes — shorter observations from running the platform — will appear here.