Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 12, 2015

BHO – British History Online

Filed under: History,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 7:15 pm

BHO – British History Online

The “news” from 8 December 2014 (that I missed) reports:

British History Online (BHO) is pleased to launch version 5.0 of its website. Work on the website redevelopment began in January 2014 and involved a total rebuild of the BHO database and a complete redesign of the site. We hope our readers will find the new site easier to use than ever before. New features include:

  • A new search interface that allows you to narrow your search results by place, period, source type or subject.
  • A new catalogue interface that allows you to see our entire catalogue at a glance, or to browse by place, period, source type or subject.
  • Three subject guides on local history, parliamentary history and urban history. We are hoping to add more subject guides throughout the year. If you would like to contribute, contact us.
  • Guidelines on using BHO, which include searching and browsing help, copyright and citation information, and a list of external resources that we hope will be useful to readers.
  • A new about page that includes information about our team, past and present, as well as a history of where we have come from and where we want to go next.
  • A new subscription interface (at last!) which includes three new levels of subscription in addition to the usual premium content subscription: gold subscription, which includes access to page scans and five- and ten-year long-term BHO subscriptions.
  • Increased functionality to the maps interface, which are now fully zoomable and can even go full screen. We have also replaced the old map scans with high-quality versions.
  • We also updated the site with a fresh, new look! We aimed for easy-to-read text, clear navigation, clean design and bright new images.

​Version 5.0 has been a labour of love for the entire BHO team, but we have to give special thanks to Martin Steer, our tireless website manager who rebuilt the site from the ground up.

For over a decade, you have turned to BHO for reliable and accessible sources for the history of Britain and Ireland. We started off with 29 publications in 2003 and here is where we are now:

  • 1.2 million page views per month
  • 365,000 sessions per month
  • 1,241 publications
  • 108,227 text files
  • 184,355 images
  • 10,380 maps​

​We are very grateful to our users who make this kind of development possible. Your support allows BHO to always be growing and improving. 2014 has been a busy year for BHO and 2015 promises to be just as busy. Version 5.0 was a complete rebuild of BHO. We stripped the site down and began rebuilding from scratch. The goal of the new site is to make it as easy as possible for you to find materials relevant to your research. The new site was designed to be able to grow and expand easily, while always preserving the most important features of BHO. Read about our plans for 2015 and beyond.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new site! If you want to stay up-to-date on what we are doing at BHO, follow us on Twitter.

Subscriptions are required for approximately 20% of the content, which enables the BHO to offer the other 80% for free.

A resource such as the BHO is a joyful reminder that not all projects sanctioned by government and its co-conspirators are venal and ill-intended.

For example, can you imagine a secondary school research paper on the Great Fire of 1666 that includes observations based on Leake’s Survey of the City After the Great Fire of 1666 Engraved By W. Hollar, 1667? With additional references from BHO materials?

I would have struck a Faustian bargain in high school had such materials been available!

That is just one treasure among many.

Teachers of English, history, humanities, etc., take note!

I first saw this in a tweet by Institute of Historical Research, U. of London.

January 25, 2015

Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction

Filed under: Humanities,Manuscripts — Patrick Durusau @ 4:52 pm

Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction edited by: Alessandro Bausi (General editor), et al.

The “homepage” of this work enables you to download the entire volume or individual chapters, depending upon your interests. It provides a lengthy introduction to codicology, palaeography, textual criticism and text editing, and of special interest to library students, cataloguing as well as conservation and preservation.

Alessandro Bausi writes in the preface:

Thinking more broadly, our project was also a serious attempt to defend and preserve the COMSt-related fields within the academic world. We know that disciplines and fields are often determined and justified by the mere existence of an easily accessible handbook or, in the better cases, sets of handbooks, textbooks, series and journals. The lack of comprehensive introductory works which are reliable, up-to-date, of broad interest and accessible to a wide audience and might be used in teaching, has a direct impact on the survival of the ‘small subjects’ most of the COMSt-related disciplines pertain to. The decision to make the COMSt handbook freely accessible online and printable on demand in a paper version at an affordable price was strategic in this respect, and not just meant to meet the prescriptions of the European Science Foundation. We deliberately declined to produce an extremely expensive work that might be bought only by a few libraries and research institutions; on the other hand, a plain electronic edition only to be accessed and downloaded as a PDF file was not regarded as a desirable solution either. Dealing with two millennia of manuscripts and codices, we did not want to dismiss the possibility of circulating a real book in our turn.

It remains, hopefully, only to say,

Lector intende: laetaberis

John Svarlien says: A rough translation is: “Reader, pay attention. You will be happy you did.”

We are all people of books. It isn’t possible to separate present day culture and what came before it from books. Even people who shun reading of books, are shaped by forces that can be traced back to books.

But books did not suddenly appear as mass-printed paperbacks in airport lobbies and checkout lines in grocery stores. There is a long history of books prior to printing to the edges of the formation of codices.

This work is an introduction to the fascinating world of studying manuscripts and codices prior to the invention of printing. When nearly every copy of a work is different from every other copy, you can imagine the debates over which copy is the “best” copy.

Imagine some versions of “Gone with the Wind” ending with:

  • Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. (traditional)
  • Ashley and I don’t give a damn. (variant)
  • Cheat Ashley out of his business I suppose. (variant)
  • (Lacks a last line due to mss. damage.) (variant)

The “text” of yesteryear lacked the uniform sameness of the printed “text” of today.

When you think about your “favorite” version in the Bible, it is likely a “majority” reading but hardly the only one.

With the advent of the printing press, texts took on the opportunity to be uniformly produced in mass quantities.

With the advent of electronic texts, either due to editing or digital corruption, we are moving back towards non-uniform texts.

Will we see the birth of digital codicology and its allied fields for digital texts?

PS: Please forward the notice of this book to your local librarian.

I first saw this in a tweet by Kirk Lowery.

January 23, 2015

DiRT Digital Research Tools

Filed under: Humanities,Software — Patrick Durusau @ 2:21 pm

DiRT Digital Research Tools

From the post:

The DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
…

Interesting concept but the annotations are too brief to convey much information. Not to mention that within a category, say Conduct linguistic research or Transcribe handwritten or spoken texts, the entries have no apparent order, or should I say they are not arranged in alphabetical order by name. There may be some other order that is escaping me.

Some entries appear in the wrong categories, such as Xalan being found under Transcribe handwritten or spoken texts:

Xalan
Xalan is an XSLT processor for transforming XML documents into HTML, text, or other XML document types. It implements XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0.

Not what I think of when I think about transcribing handwritten or spoken texts. You?

I didn’t see a process for submitting corrections/comments on resources. I will check and post on this again. It could be a useful tool.

I first saw this in a tweet by Christophe Lalanne.

January 16, 2015

Humanities Open Book: Unlocking Great Books

Filed under: Funding,Government,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 8:38 pm

Humanities Open Book: Unlocking Great Books

Deadline: June 10, 2015

A new joint grant program by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks to give a second life to outstanding out-of-print books in the humanities by turning them into freely accessible e-books.

Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to “unlock” these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States. Working together, NEH and Mellon will give grants to publishers to identify great humanities books, secure all appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a Creative Commons license.

The new Humanities Open Book grant program is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ agency-wide initiative The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, which seeks to demonstrate and enhance the role and significance of the humanities and humanities scholarship in public life.

“The large number of valuable scholarly books in the humanities that have fallen out of print in recent decades represents a huge untapped resource,” said NEH Chairman William Adams. “By placing these works into the hands of the public we hope that the Humanities Open Book program will widen access to the important ideas and information they contain and inspire readers, teachers and students to use these books in exciting new ways.”

“Scholars in the humanities are making increasing use of digital media to access evidence, produce new scholarship, and reach audiences that increasingly rely on such media for information to understand and interpret the world in which they live,” said Earl Lewis, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is delighted to join NEH in helping university presses give new digital life to enduring works of scholarship that are presently unavailable to new generations of students, scholars, and general readers.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will jointly provide $1 million to convert out-of-print books into EPUB e-books with a Creative Commons (CC) license, ensuring that the books are freely downloadable with searchable texts and in formats that are compatible with any e-reading device. Books proposed under the Humanities Open Book program must be of demonstrable intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers.

Application guidelines and a list of F.A.Q’s for the Humanities Open Book program are available online at www.NEH.gov. The application deadline for the first cycle of Humanities Open Book grants is June 10, 2015.

What great news to start a weekend!

If you decided to apply, remember that topic maps can support indexes for a book or across books or across books and including other material. You could make a classic work in the humanities into a portal that opens onto work prior to its publication, at the time of its publication, or since. Something to set yourself apart from simply making that text available.

January 3, 2015

The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing

Filed under: Digital Research,Humanities,Publishing — Patrick Durusau @ 2:52 pm

The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing By Michael Eisen.

Michael made this presentation to the Commonwealth Club of California on March 12, 2013. This post is from the written text for the presentation and you can catch the audio here.

Michael does a great job tracing the history of academic publishing, the rise of open access and what is holding us back from a more productive publishing environment for everyone.

I disagree with his assessment of classification:

And as for classification, does anyone really think that assigning every paper to one of 10,000 journals, organized in a loose and chaotic hierarchy of topics and importance, is really the best way to help people browse the literature? This is a pure relic of a bygone era – an artifact of the historical accident that Gutenberg invented the printing press before Al Gore invented the Internet.

but will pass over that to address the more serious issue of open access publishing in the humanities.

Michael notes:

But the battle is by no means won. Open access collectively represents only around 10% of biomedical publishing, has less penetration in other sciences, and is almost non-existent in the humanities. And most scientists still send their best papers to “high impact” subscription-based journals.

There are open access journals in the humanities but it is fair to say they are few and far in between. If prestige is one of the drivers in scientific publishing, where large grant programs abound for some times of research, prestige is about the only driver for humanities publishing.

There are grant programs for the humanities but nothing on the scale of funding in the sciences. Salaries in the humanities are for the most part nothing to write home about. Humanities publishing really comes down to prestige.

Prestige from publication may be a dry, hard bone but it is the only bone that most humanities scholars will ever have. Try to take that away and you are likely to get bitten.

For instance, have you ever wondered about the proliferation of new translations of the Bible? Have we discovered new texts? New discoveries about biblical languages? Discovery of major mistakes in a prior edition? What if I said none of the above? To what would you assign the publication of new translations of the Bible?

If you compare the various translations you will find different “editors,” unless you are looking at a common source for bibles. Some sources do that as well. They create different “versions” for different target audiences.

With the exception of new versions like the New Revised Standard Version, which was undertaken to account for new information from the Dead Sea Scrolls, new editions of the Bible are primarily scholarly churn.

The humanities aren’t going to move any closer to open access publishing until their employers (universities) and funders, insist on open access publishing as a condition for tenure and funding.

I will address Michael’s mis-impressions about the value of classification another time. 😉

January 2, 2015

The Machines in the Valley Digital History Project

Filed under: Digital Research,History,Humanities,Social Sciences — Patrick Durusau @ 4:42 pm

The Machines in the Valley Digital History Project by Jason Heppler.

From the post:

I am excited to finally release the digital component of my dissertation, Machines in the Valley.

My dissertation, Machines in the Valley, examines the environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts over suburbanization and industrialization in California’s Santa Clara Valley–today known as Silicon Valley–between 1945 and 1990. The high technology sector emerged as a key component of economic and urban development in the postwar era, particularly in western states seeking to diversify their economic activities. Industrialization produced thousands of new jobs, but development proved problematic when faced with competing views about land use. The natural allure that accompanied the thousands coming West gave rise to a modern environmental movement calling for strict limitations on urban growth, the preservation of open spaces, and the reduction of pollution. Silicon Valley stood at the center of these conflicts as residents and activists criticized the environmental impact of suburbs and industry in the valley. Debates over the Santa Clara Valley’s landscape tells the story not only of Silicon Valley’s development, but Americans’ changing understanding of nature and the environmental costs of urban and industrial development.

A great example of a digital project in the humanities!

How does Jason’s dissertation differ from a collection of resources on the same topic?

A collection of resources requires each of us to duplicate Jason’s work to extract the same information. Jason has curated the data, that is he has separated out the useful from the not so useful, eliminated duplicate sources that don’t contribute to the story, and provided his own analysis as a value-add to the existing data that he has organized. That means we don’t have to duplicate Jason’s work, for which we are all thankful.

How does Jason’s dissertation differ from a topic map on the same topic?

Take one of the coming soon topics for comparison:

“The Stanford Land Machine has Gone Berserk!” Stanford University and the Stanford Industrial Park (Coming Soon)

Stanford University is the largest landholder on the San Francisco Peninsula, controlling nearly 9,000 acres. In the 1950s, Stanford started acting as a real estate developer, first with the establishment of the Stanford Industrial Park in 1953 and later through several additional land development programs. These programs, however, ran into conflict with surrounding neighborhoods whose ideas for the land did not include industrialization.

Universities are never short on staff and alumni that they would prefer being staff and/or alumni from some other university. Jason will be writing about one or more such individuals under this topic. In the process of curation, he will select known details about such individuals as are appropriate for his discussion. It isn’t possible to include every known detail about any person, location, event, artifact, etc. No one would have time to read the argument being made in the dissertation.

In addition to the curation/editing process, there will be facts that Jason doesn’t uncover and/or that are unknown to anyone at present. If the governor of California can conceal an illegitimate child for ten years, it won’t be surprising to find other details about the people Jason discusses in his dissertation.

When such new information comes out, how do we put that together with the information already collected in Jason’s dissertation?

Unless you are expecting a second edition of Jason’s dissertation, the quick answer is we’re not. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

The current publishing paradigm is designed for republication, not incremental updating of publications. If new facts do appear and more likely enough time has passes that Jason’s dissertation is no longer “new,” some new PhD candidate will add new data, dig out the same data as Jason, and fashion a new dissertation.

If instead of imprisoning his data in prose, if Jason had his prose presentation for the dissertation and topics (as in topic maps) for the individuals, deeds, events, etc., then as more information is discovered, it could be fitted into his existing topic map of that data. Unlike the prose, a topic map doesn’t require re-publication in order to add new information.

In twenty or thirty years when Jason is advising some graduate student who wants to extend his dissertation, Jason can give them the topic map that has up to date data (or to be updated), making the next round of scholarship on this issue cumulative and not episodic.

December 23, 2014

Announcing Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments

Filed under: Humanities,Learning,Teaching — Patrick Durusau @ 8:26 pm

Announcing Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments by Rebecca Frost Davis.

From the post:

I’m elated today to announce, along with my fellow editors, Matt Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers, and in conjunction with the Modern Language Association Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, an open-access, curated collection of downloadable, reusable, and remixable pedagogical resources for humanities scholars interested in the intersections of digital technologies with teaching and learning. This is a book in a new form. Taken as a whole, this collection will document the richly-textured culture of teaching and learning that responds to new digital learning environments, research tools, and socio-cultural contexts, ultimately defining the heterogeneous nature of digital pedagogy. You can see the full announcement here: https://github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master
/announcement.md

Many of you may have heard of this born-digital project under some other names (Digital Pedagogy Keywords) and hashtags (#digipedkit). Since it was born at the MLA convention in 2012 it has been continually evolving. You can trace that evolution, in part, through my earlier presentations: http://rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/tag/curateteaching/

For the future, please follow Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities on Twitter through the hashtag #curateteaching and visit our news page for updates. And if you know of a great pedagogical artifact to share, please help us curate teaching by tweeting it to the hashtag #curateteaching. We’ll be building an archive of those tweets, as well.

After looking at the list of keywords: Draft List of Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, I am hopeful those of you with a humanities background can suggest additional terms.

I didn’t see “topic maps” listed. 😉 Maybe that should be under Annotation? In any event, this looks like an exciting project.

Enjoy!

December 9, 2014

Digital Humanities in the Southeast 2014

Filed under: Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 3:32 pm

Digital Humanities in the Southeast 2014

Big data is challenging because of the three or four V’s, depending on who you believe. (Originally, volume, variety, and velocity. At some later point, veracity was added.) When big data fully realizes the need for semantics, they will need to add a capital S.

If you want to prepare for that eventuality, the humanities have projects where the data sets are small compared to big data but suffer from the big S, as in semantics.

A number of workshop presentations are listed, most with both audio and slides. Ranging from Latin and history to war and Eliot.

A great opportunity to see problems that are not difficult in the four Vs sense but are difficult none the less.

I first saw this in a tweet by Brian Croxall.

July 30, 2014

JudaicaLink released

Filed under: Encyclopedia,History,Humanities,Linked Data — Patrick Durusau @ 3:07 pm

JudaicaLink released

From the post:

Data extractions from two encyclopediae from the domain of Jewish culture and history have been released as Linked Open Data within our JudaicaLink project.

JudaicaLink now provides access to 22,808 concepts in English (~ 10%) and Russian (~ 90%), mostly locations and persons.

See here for further information: http://www.judaicalink.org/blog/kai-eckert/encyclopedia-russian-jewry-released-updates-yivo-encyclopedia

Next steps in this project include “…the creation of links between the two encyclopedias and links to external sources like DBpedia or Geonames.”

In case you are interested, the two encyclopedias are:

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, courtesy of the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, NY.

Rujen.ru provides an Internet version of the Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, which is published in Moscow since 1994, giving a comprehensive, objective picture of the life and activity of the Jews of Russia, the Soviet Union and the CIS.

For more details: Encyclopediae

If you are looking to contribute content or time to a humanities project, this should be on your short list.

July 27, 2014

Digital Humanities and Computer Science

Filed under: Computer Science,Conferences,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 3:19 pm

Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science

Deadlines:

1 August 2014, abstracts of ~ 750 words and a minimal bio sent to martinmueller@northwestern.edu.

31 August 2014, Deadline for Early Registration Discount.

19 September 2014, Dealing for group rate reservations at the Orrington Hotel.

23-24 October, 2014 Colloquium.

From the call for papers:

The ninth annual meeting of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) will be hosted by Northwestern University on October 23-24, 2014.
…

The DHCS Colloquium has been a lively regional conference (with non-trivial bi-coastal and overseas sprinkling), rotating since 2006 among the University of Chicago (where it began), DePaul, IIT, Loyola, and Northwestern. At the first Colloquium Greg Crane asked his memorable question “What to do with a million books?” Here are some highlights that I remember across the years:

  • An NLP programmer at Los Alamos talking about the ways security clearances prevented CIA analysts and technical folks from talking to each other.
  • A demonstration that if you replaced all content words in Arabic texts and focused just on stop words you could determine with a high degree of certainty the geographical origin of a given piece of writing.
  • A visualization of phrases like “the king’s daughter” in a sizable corpus, telling you much about who owned what.
  • A social network analysis of Alexander the Great and his entourage.
  • An amazingly successful extraction of verbal parallels from very noisy data.
  • Did you know that Jane Austen was a game theorist before her time and that her characters were either skillful or clueless practitioners of this art?

And so forth. Given my own interests, I tend to remember “Text as Data” stuff, but there was much else about archaeology, art, music, history, and social or political life. You can browse through some of the older programs at http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/dhcs/.

….

One of the weather sites promises that October is between 42 F for the low and 62 F for the high (on average). Sounds like a nice time to visit Northwestern University!

To say nothing of an exciting conference!

I first saw this in a tweet by David Bamman.

July 9, 2014

SAMUELS [English Historical Semantic Tagger]

Filed under: Humanities,Linguistics,Semantics,Tagging — Patrick Durusau @ 1:13 pm

SAMUELS (Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches)

From the webpage:

The SAMUELS project (Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches) is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in conjunction with the Economic and Social Research Council (grant reference AH/L010062/1) from January 2014 to April 2015. It will deliver a system for automatically annotating words in texts with their precise meanings, disambiguating between possible meanings of the same word, ultimately enabling a step-change in the way we deal with large textual data. It uses the Historical Thesaurus of English as its core dataset, and will provide for each word in a text the Historical Thesaurus reference code for that concept. Textual data tagged in this way can then be accurately searched and precisely investigated, producing results which can be automatically aggregated at a range of levels of precision. The project also draws on a series of research sub-projects which will employ the software thus developed, testing and validating the utility of the SAMUELS tagger as a tool for wide-ranging further research.
….

To really appreciate this project, visit SAMUELS English Semantic Tagger Test Site.

There you can enter up to 2000 English words and select low/upper year boundaries!

Just picking a text at random, ;-), I chose:

Greenpeace flew its 135-foot-long thermal airship over the Bluffdale, UT, data center early Friday morning, carrying the message: “NSA Illegal Spying Below” along with a link steering people to a new web site, StandAgainstSpying.org, which the three groups launched with the support of a separate, diverse coalition of over 20 grassroots advocacy groups and Internet companies. The site grades members of Congress on what they have done, or often not done, to rein in the NSA.

Some terms and Semtag3 by time period:

1500-1600:

  • congress: C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; E07e16 [Inclination]; E08e12 [Movement towards a thing/person/position]
  • data: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • thermal: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • web: B06a07 [Disorders of eye/vision]; B22h08 [Class Arachnida (spiders, scorpions)]; B10 [Biological Substance];

1700-1800

  • congress: S06k17a [Diplomacy]; C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; E07e16 [Inclination];
  • data: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • thermal: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • web: B06a07 [Disorders of eye/vision]; B22h08 [Class Arachnida (spiders, scorpions)]; B10 [Biological Substance];

1800-1900

  • congress: S06k17a [Diplomacy]; C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; O07 [Conversation];
  • data: H55a [Attestation, witness, evidence];
  • thermal: A04b02 [Spring]; C09a [Sexual desire]; D03c02 [Heat];
  • UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • web: B06a07 [Disorders of eye/vision]; B06d01 [Deformities of specific parts]; B25d [Tools and implements];

1900-2000

  • congress: S06k17a [Diplomacy]; C09d01 [Sexual intercourse]; O07 [Conversation];
  • data: F04v04 [Data]; H55a [Attestation, witness, evidence]; W05 [Information];
  • thermal: A04b02 [Spring]; B28b [Types/styles of clothing]; D03c02 [Heat];
  • UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • web: B06d01 [Deformities of specific parts]; B22h08 [Class Arachnida (spiders, scorpions)]; B10 [Biological Substance];

2000-2014

  • congress: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • data: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • thermal: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • UT: 04.10[Unrecognised]
  • web: 04.10[Unrecognised]

I am assuming that the “04.10[unrecognized]” for all terms in 2000-2014 means there is no usage data for that time period.

I have never heard anyone deny that meanings of words change over time and domain.

What remains a mystery is why the value-add of documenting the meanings of words isn’t obvious?

I say “words,” I should be saying “data.” Remembering the loss of the $125 Million Mars Climate Orbiter. One system read a value as “pounds of force” and another read the same data as “newtons.” In that scenario, ET doesn’t get to call home.

So let’s rephrase the question to: Why isn’t the value-add of documenting the semantics of data obvious?

Suggestions?

July 2, 2014

Palladio

Filed under: Humanities,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 1:53 pm

Palladio – Humanities thinking about data visualization

From the webpage:

Palladio is a web-based platform for the visualization of complex, multi-dimensional data. It is a product of the "Networks in History" project that has its roots in another humanities research project based at Stanford: Mapping the Republic of Letters (MRofL). MRofL produced a number of unique visualizations tied to individual case studies and specific research questions. You can see the tools on this site and read about the case studies at republicofletters.stanford.edu.

With "Networks in History" we are taking the insights gained and lessons learned from MRofL and applying them to a set of visualizations that reflect humanistic thinking about data. Palladio is our first step toward opening data visualization to any researcher by making it possible to upload data and visualize within the browser without any barriers. There is no need to create an account and we do not store the data. On the visualization side, we have emphasized tools for filtering. There is a timeline filter that allows for filtering on discontinuous time periods. There is a facet filter based on Moritz Stefaner's Elastic Lists that is particularly useful when exploring multidimensional data sets.

The correspondence networks in the Mapping the Republic of Letters (MRofL) project will be of particular interest to humanists.

Quite challenging on their own but imagine the utility of exploding every letter into different subjects and statements about subjects, which automatically map to other identified subjects and statements about subjects in other correspondence.

Scholars already know about many such relationships in intellectual history but those associations are captured in journals, monographs, identified in various ways and lack in many cases, explicit labeling of roles. To say nothing of having to re-tread the path of an author to discover their recording of such associations in full text form.

If such paths were easy to follow, the next generation of scholars would develop new paths, as opposed to making known ones well-worn.

June 16, 2014

Digital Mapping + Geospatial Humanities

Filed under: Geographic Data,GIS,Humanities,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 3:59 pm

Digital Mapping + Geospatial Humanities by Fred Gibbs.

From the course description:

We are in the midst of a major paradigm shift in human consciousness and society caused by our ubiquitous connectedness via the internet and smartphones. These globalizing forces have telescoped space and time to an unprecedented degree, while paradoxically heightening the importance of local places.

The course explores the technologies, tools, and workflows that can help collect, connect, and present online interpretations of the spaces around us. Throughout the week, we’ll discuss the theoretical and practical challenges of deep mapping (producing rich, interactive maps with multiple layers of information). Woven into our discussions will be numerous technical tutorials that will allow us to tell map-based stories about Albuquerque’s fascinating past.

This course combines cartography, geography, GIS, history, sociology, ethnography, computer science, and graphic design. While we cover some of the basics of each of these, the course eschews developing deep expertise in any of these in favor of exploring their intersections with each other, and formulating critical questions that span these normally disconnected disciplines. By the end, you should be able to think more critically about maps, place, and our online experiences with them.

We’ll move from creating simple maps with Google Maps/Earth to creating your own custom, interactive online maps with various open source tools like QGIS, Open Street Map, and D3 that leverage the power of open data from local and national repositories to provide new perspectives on the built environment. We’ll also use various mobile apps for data collection, online exhibit software, (physical and digital) historical archives at the Center for Southwest Research. Along the way we’ll cover the various data formats (KML, XML, GeoJSON, TopoJSON) used by different tools and how to move between them, allowing you to craft the most efficient workflow for your mapping purposes.

Course readings that aren’t freely availabe online (and even some that are) can be accessed via the course Zotero Library. You’ll need to be invited to join the group since we use it to distribute course readings. If you are not familiar with Zotero, here are some instructions.

All of that in a week! This week as a matter of fact.

One of the things I miss about academia are the occasions when you can concentrate on one subject to the exclusion of all else. Of course, being unmarried at that age, unemployed, etc. may have contributed to the ability to focus. 😉

Just sampled some of the readings and this appears to be a really rocking course!

May 8, 2014

Avoid Philosophy?

Filed under: Humanities,Philosophy,Semantics — Patrick Durusau @ 2:00 pm

Why Neil deGrasse Tyson is a philistine by Damon Linker.

From the post:

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be a gifted popularizer of science, but when it comes to humanistic learning more generally, he is a philistine. Some of us suspected this on the basis of the historically and theologically inept portrayal of Giordano Bruno in the opening episode of Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

But now it’s been definitively demonstrated by a recent interview in which Tyson sweepingly dismisses the entire history of philosophy. Actually, he doesn’t just dismiss it. He goes much further — to argue that undergraduates should actively avoid studying philosophy at all. Because, apparently, asking too many questions “can really mess you up.”

Yes, he really did say that. Go ahead, listen for yourself, beginning at 20:19 — and behold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. He proudly proclaims his irritation with “asking deep questions” that lead to a “pointless delay in your progress” in tackling “this whole big world of unknowns out there.” When a scientist encounters someone inclined to think philosophically, his response should be to say, “I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind, and you can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by deep questions you’ve asked of yourself. I don’t have time for that.”

“I don’t have time for that.”

With these words, Tyson shows he’s very much a 21st-century American, living in a perpetual state of irritated impatience and anxious agitation. Don’t waste your time with philosophy! (And, one presumes, literature, history, the arts, or religion.) Only science will get you where you want to go! It gets results! Go for it! Hurry up! Don’t be left behind! Progress awaits!

There are many ways to respond to this indictment. One is to make the case for progress in philosophical knowledge. This would show that Tyson is wrong because he fails to recognize the real advances that happen in the discipline of philosophy over time.

….

I remember thinking the first episode of Tyson’s Cosmos was rather careless with its handling of Bruno and the Enlightenment. But at the time I thought that was due to it being a “popular” presentation and not meant to be precise in every detail.

Damon has an excellent defense of philosophy and for that you should read his post.

I have a more pragmatic reason for recommending both philosophy in particular and the humanities in general to CS majors. You will waste less time in programming than you will from “deep questions.”

For example, why have intelligent to the point of being gifted CS types tried repeatedly to solve the issues of naming by proposing universal naming systems?

You don’t have to be very aware to know that naming systems are like standards. If you don’t like this one, make up another one.

That being the case, what makes anyone think their naming system will displace all others for any significant period of time? Considering there has never been a successful one.

Oh, I forgot, if you don’t know any philosophy, one place this issue gets discussed, or the humanities in general, you won’t be exposed to the long history of language and naming discussions. And the failures recorded there.

I would urge CS types to read and study both philosophy and the humanities for purely pragmatic reasons. CS pioneers were able to write the first FORTRAN compiler not because they had taken a compiler MOOC but because they had studied mathematics, linguistics, language, philosophy, history, etc.

Are you a designer (CS pioneers were) or are you a mechanic?

PS: If you are seriously interested in naming issues, my first suggestion would be to read The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco. It’s not all that needs to be read in this area but it is easily accessible.

I first saw this in a tweet by Christopher Phipps.

April 2, 2014

DH Tools for Beginners

Filed under: Digital Research,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 4:17 pm

DH Tools for Beginners by Quinn Warnick.

A short collection of tutorials for “digital humanities novices.”

It is a good start and if you know of other resources or want to author such tutorials, please do.

I don’t know that I was ever entirely comfortable with the phrase “digital humanities.”

In part because it creates an odd division between humanists and humanists who use digital tools.

We don’t call literature scholars who use concordances “concordance humanists.”

Any more than we call scholars who use bibliographic materials “bibliographic humanists.”

Mostly because concordances and bibliographic materials are tools by which one does humanities research and scholarship.

Shouldn’t that be the same for “digital” humanities?

That digital tools are simply more tools for doing humanities research and scholarship?

Given the recent and ongoing assaults on the humanities in general, standing closer together and not further apart as humanists sounds like a good idea.

March 21, 2014

Citizen Science and the Modern Web…

Filed under: Crowd Sourcing,Humanities,Science — Patrick Durusau @ 7:01 pm

Citizen Science and the Modern Web – Talk by Amit Kapadia by Bruce Berriman.

From the post:

Amit Kapadia gave this excellent talk at CERN on Citizen Science and The Modern Web. From Amit’s abstract: “Beginning as a research project to help scientists communicate, the Web has transformed into a ubiquitous medium. As the sciences continue to transform, new techniques are needed to analyze the vast amounts of data being produced by large experiments. The advent of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey increased throughput of astronomical data, giving rise to Citizen Science projects such as Galaxy Zoo. The Web is no longer exclusively used by researchers, but rather, a place where anyone can share information, or even, partake in citizen science projects.

As the Web continues to evolve, new and open technologies enable web applications to become more sophisticated. Scientific toolsets may now target the Web as a platform, opening an application to a wider audience, and potentially citizen scientists. With the latest browser technologies, scientific data may be consumed and visualized, opening the browser as a new platform for scientific analysis.”

Bruce points to the original presentation here.

The emphasis is on astronomy but many good points on citizen science.

Curious if citizen involvement in the sciences and humanities could lead to greater awareness and support for them?

March 18, 2014

Web Scraping: working with APIs

Filed under: Data Mining,Humanities,R,Social Sciences,Web Scrapers — Patrick Durusau @ 7:16 pm

Web Scraping: working with APIs by Rolf Fredheim.

From the post:

APIs present researchers with a diverse set of data sources through a standardised access mechanism: send a pasted together HTTP request, receive JSON or XML in return. Today we tap into a range of APIs to get comfortable sending queries and processing responses.

These are the slides from the final class in Web Scraping through R: Web scraping for the humanities and social sciences

This week we explore how to use APIs in R, focusing on the Google Maps API. We then attempt to transfer this approach to query the Yandex Maps API. Finally, the practice section includes examples of working with the YouTube V2 API, a few ‘social’ APIs such as LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as APIs less off the beaten track (Cricket scores, anyone?).

The final installment of Rolf’s course for humanists. He promises to repeat it next year. Should be interesting to see how techniques and resources evolve over the next year.

Forward the course link to humanities and social science majors.

February 25, 2014

Web Scraping part2: Digging deeper

Filed under: Humanities,Web Scrapers — Patrick Durusau @ 5:29 pm

Web Scraping part2: Digging deeper by Rolf Fredheim.

From the post:

Slides from the second web scraping through R session: Web scraping for the humanities and social sciences.

In which we make sure we are comfortable with functions, before looking at XPath queries to download data from newspaper articles. Examples including BBC news and Guardian comments.

Download the .Rpres file to use in Rstudio here.

A regular R script with the code only can be accessed here.

A great part 2 on web scrapers!

February 21, 2014

Web-Scraping: the Basics

Filed under: Humanities,Web Scrapers — Patrick Durusau @ 9:22 pm

Web-Scraping: the Basics by Rolf Fredheim.

From the post:

Slides from the first session of my course about web scraping through R: Web scraping for the humanities and social sciences

Includes an introduction to the paste function, working with URLs, functions and loops.

Putting it all together we fetch data in JSON format about Wikipedia page views from http://stats.grok.se/

Solutions here:

Download the .Rpres file to use in Rstudio here

Hard to say how soon but eventually data in machine readable formats is going to be the default and web scraping will be a historical footnote.

But it hasn’t happened yet so pass this on to newbies who need advice.

February 18, 2014

Research Opportunities and …

Filed under: Digital Research,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 1:57 pm

Research Opportunities and Themes in Digital Scholarship by Professor Andrew Prescott.

Unlike death-by-powerpoint-slides, only four or five of these slides have much text at all.

Which makes them more difficult to interpret, absent the presentation. (So there is a downside to low-text slides.)

But the slides reference such a wide range and depth of humanities projects that you are likely to find them very useful.

Either as pointers to present projects or as inspiration for variations or entirely new projects.

Enjoy!

January 20, 2014

Digital Humanities?

Filed under: Humanities,Humor — Patrick Durusau @ 3:32 pm

xkcd on digital humanities

I saw this mentioned by Ted Underwood in a tweet saying:

An xkcd that could just as well be titled “Digital Humanities.”

Not to be too harsh on the digital humanists, they have bad role models in programming projects, the maintenance of which is called “job security.”

January 9, 2014

More digital than thou

Filed under: Digital Research,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 8:22 pm

More digital than thou by Michael Sperberg-McQueen.

From the post:

An odd thing has started happening in reviews for the Digital Humanities conference: reviewers are objecting to papers if the reviewer thinks it has relevance beyond the field of DH, apparently on the grounds that the topic is then insufficiently digital. It doesn’t matter how relevant the topic is to work in DH, or how deeply embedded the topic is in a core DH topic like text encoding — if some reviewers don’t see a computer in the proposal, they want to exclude it from the conference.

Michael’s focus on the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), XML Schema at the W3C, and other projects, kept him from seeing the ramparts being thrown up around digital humanities.

Well, and Michael is just Michael. Whether you are a long time XML hacker or a new comer, Michael is just Michael. When you are really good, you don’t need to cloak yourself in disciplinary robes, boundaries and secret handshakes.

You don’t have to look far in the “digital humanities” to find forums where hand wringing over the discipline of digital humanities is a regular feature. As opposed to concern over what digital technologies have, can, will contribute to the humanities.

Digital technologies should be as much a part of each humanities discipline as the more traditional periodical indexes, concordances, dictionaries and monographs.

After all, I thought there was general agreement that “separate but equal” was a poor policy.

August 4, 2013

Interesting times for literary theory

Filed under: Computer Science,Humanities,Literature — Patrick Durusau @ 3:16 pm

Interesting times for literary theory by Ted Underwood.

From the post:

(…)
This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I realize a marriage between machine learning and literary theory sounds implausible: people who enjoy one of these things are pretty likely to believe the other is fraudulent and evil.** But after reading through a couple of ML textbooks,*** I’m convinced that literary theorists and computer scientists wrestle with similar problems, in ways that are at least loosely congruent. Neither field is interested in the mere accumulation of data; both are interested in understanding the way we think and the kinds of patterns we recognize in language. Both fields are interested in problems that lack a single correct answer, and have to be mapped in shades of gray (ML calls these shades “probability”). Both disciplines are preoccupied with the danger of overgeneralization (literary theorists call this “essentialism”; computer scientists call it “overfitting”). Instead of saying “every interpretation is based on some previous assumption,” computer scientists say “every model depends on some prior probability,” but there’s really a similar kind of self-scrutiny involved.
(…)

Computer science and the humanities could enrich each other greatly.

This could be a starting place for that enrichment.

October 16, 2012

Data Curation in the Networked Humanities [Semantic Curation?]

Filed under: Curation,Humanities,Literature — Patrick Durusau @ 4:29 am

Data Curation in the Networked Humanities by Michael Ullyot.

From the post:

These talks are the first phase of Encoding Shakespeare: my SSHRC-funded project for the next three years. Between now and 2015, I’m working to improve the automated encoding of early modern English texts, to enable text analysis.

This post’s three parts are brought to you by the letter p. First I outline the potential of algorithmic text analysis; then the problem of messy data; and finally the protocols for a networked-humanities data curation system.

This third part is the most tentative, as of this writing; Fall 2012 is about defining my protocols and identifying which tags the most text-analysis engines require for the best results — whatever that entails. (So I welcome your comments and resource links.)

A project that promises to touch on many of the issues in modern digital humanities. Do review and contribute if possible.

I have a lingering uneasiness with the notion of “data curation.” With the data and not curation part.

To say “data curation” implies we can identify the “data” that merits curation.

I don’t doubt we can identify some data that needs curation. The question being is it the only data that merits curation?

We know from the early textual history of the Bible that the text was curated and in that process, variant traditions and entire works were lost.

Just my take on it but rather than “data curation,” with the implication of a “correct” text, we need semantic curation.

Semantic curation attempts to preserve the semantics we see in a text, without attempting to find the correct semantics.

October 6, 2012

Perseus Gives Big Humanities Data Wings

Filed under: Humanities,Marketing,Semantics — Patrick Durusau @ 1:23 pm

Perseus Gives Big Humanities Data Wings by Ian Armas Foster.

From the post:

“How do we think about the human record when our brains are not capable of processing all the data in isolation?” asked Professor Gregory Crane of students in a lecture hall at the University of Kansas.

But when he posed this question, Crane wasn’t referencing modern big data to a bunch of computer science majors. Rather, he was discussing data from ancient texts with a group of those studying the humanities (and one computer science major).

Crane, a professor of classics, adjunct professor of computer science, and chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University, spoke about the efforts of the Perseus Project, a project whose goals include storing and analyzing ancient texts with an eye toward building a global humanities model.

(video omitted)

The next step in humanities is to create that Crane calls “a dialogue among civilizations.” With regard to the study of humanities, it is to connect those studying classical Greek with those studying classical Latin, Arabic, and even Chinese. Like physicists want to model the universe, Crane wants to model the progression of intelligence and art on a global scale throughout human history.

… (a bit later)

Surprisingly, the biggest barrier is not actually the amount of space occupied by the data of the ancient texts, but rather the language barriers. Currently, the Perseus Project covers over a trillion words, but those words are split up into 400 languages. To give a specific example, Crane presented a 12th century Arabic document. It was pristine and easily readable—to anyone who can read ancient Arabic.

Substitute “semantic” for “language” in “language barriers” and I think the comment is right on the mark.

Assuming that you could read the “12th century Arabic document” and understand its semantics, where would you record your reading to pass it along to others?

Say you spot the name of a well known 12th figure. Must every reader duplicate your feat of reading and understanding the document to make that same discovery?

Or can we preserve your “discovery” for other readers?

Topic maps anyone?

September 1, 2012

NEH Institute Working With Text In a Digital Age

Filed under: Humanities,Text Corpus,Text Encoding Initiative (TEI),Text Mining — Patrick Durusau @ 12:37 pm

NEH Institute Working With Text In a Digital Age

From the webpage:

The goal of this demo/sample code is to provide a platform which institute participants can use to complete an exercise to create a miniature digital edition. We will use these editions as concrete examples for discussion of decisions and issues to consider when creating digital editions from TEI XML, annotations and other related resources.

Some specific items for consideration and discussion through this exercise :

  • Creating identifiers for your texts.
  • Establishing markup guidelines and best practices.
  • Use of inline annotations versus standoff markup.
  • Dealing with overlapping hierarchies.
  • OAC (Open Annotation Collaboration)
  • Leveraging annotation tools.
  • Applying Linked Data concepts.
  • Distribution formats: optimzing for display vs for enabling data reuse.

Excellent resource!

Offers a way to learn/test digital edition skills.

You can use it as a template to produce similar materials with texts of greater interest to you.

The act of encoding asks what subjects you are going to recognize and under what conditions? Good practice for topic map construction.

Not to mention that historical editions of a text have made similar, possibly differing decisions on the same text.

Topic maps are a natural way to present such choices on their own merits, as well as being able to compare and contrast those choices.

I first saw this at The banquet of the digital scholars.

The banquet of the digital scholars

Filed under: Humanities,Text Corpus,Text Encoding Initiative (TEI),Text Mining — Patrick Durusau @ 10:32 am

The banquet of the digital scholars

The actual workshop title: Humanities Hackathon on editing Athenaeus and on the Reinvention of the Edition in a Digital Space


September 30, 2012 Registration Deadline

October 10-12, 2012
Universität Leipzig (ULEI) & Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) Berlin

Abstract:

The University of Leipzig will host a hackathon that addresses two basic tasks. On the one hand, we will focus upon the challenges of creating a digital edition for the Greek author Athenaeus, whose work cites more than a thousand earlier sources and is one of the major sources for lost works of Greek poetry and prose. At the same time, we use the case Athenaeus to develop our understanding of to organize a truly born-digital edition, one that not only includes machine actionable citations and variant readings but also collations of multiple print editions, metrical analyses, named entity identification, linguistic features such as morphology, syntax, word sense, and co-reference analysis, and alignment between the Greek original and one or more later translations.
…

After some details:

Overview:
The Deipnosophists (Δειπνοσοφισταί, or “Banquet of the Sophists”) by Athenaeus of Naucratis is a 3rd century AD fictitious account of several banquet conversations on food, literature, and arts held in Rome by twenty-two learned men. This complex and fascinating work is not only an erudite and literary encyclopedia of a myriad of curiosities about classical antiquity, but also an invaluable collection of quotations and text re-uses of ancient authors, ranging from Homer to tragic and comic poets and lost historians. Since the large majority of the works cited by Athenaeus is nowadays lost, this compilation is a sort of reference tool for every scholar of Greek theater, poetry, historiography, botany, zoology, and many other topics.

Athenaeus’ work is a mine of thousands of quotations, but we still lack a comprehensive survey of its sources. The aim of this “humanities hackathon” is to provide a case study for drawing a spectrum of quoting habits of classical authors and their attitude to text reuse. Athenaeus, in fact, shapes a library of forgotten authors, which goes beyond the limits of a physical building and becomes an intellectual space of human knowledge. By doing so, he is both a witness of the Hellenistic bibliographical methods and a forerunner of the modern concept of hypertext, where sequential reading is substituted by hierarchical and logical connections among words and fragments of texts. Quantity, variety, and precision of Athenaeus’ citations make the Deipnosophists an excellent training ground for the development of a digital system of reference linking for primary sources. Athenaeus’ standard citation includes (a) the name of the author with additional information like ethnic origin and literary category, (b) the title of the work, and (c) the book number (e.g., Deipn. 2.71b). He often remembers the amount of papyrus scrolls of huge works (e.g., 6.229d-e; 6.249a), while distinguishing various editions of the same comedy (e.g., 1.29a; 4.171c; 6.247c; 7.299b; 9.367f) and different titles of the same work (e.g., 1.4e).

He also adds biographical information to identify homonymous authors and classify them according to literary genres, intellectual disciplines and schools (e.g., 1.13b; 6.234f; 9.387b). He provides chronological and historical indications to date authors (e.g., 10.453c; 13.599c), and he often copies the first lines of a work following a method that probably goes back to the Pinakes of Callimachus (e.g., 1.4e; 3.85f; 8.342d; 5.209f; 13.573f-574a).

Last but not least, the study of Athenaeus’ “citation system” is also a great methodological contribution to the domain of “fragmentary literature”, since one of the main concerns of this field is the relation between the fragment (quotation) and its context of transmission. Having this goal in mind, the textual analysis of the Deipnosophists will make possible to enumerate a series of recurring patterns, which include a wide typology of textual reproductions and linguistic features helpful to identify and classify hidden quotations of lost authors.

The 21st century has “big data” in the form of sensor streams and Twitter feeds, but “complex data” in the humanities pre-dates “big data” by a considerable margin.

If you are interested in being challenged by complexity and not simply the size of your data, take a closer look at this project.

Greek is a little late to be of interest to me but there are older texts that could benefit from a similar treatment.

BTW, while you are thinking about this project/text, consider how you would merge prior scholarship, digital and otherwise, with what originates here and what follows it in the decades to come.

July 2, 2012

One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences…

Filed under: Humanities,Social Sciences — Patrick Durusau @ 5:45 pm

One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, A Report on the Experiences of First Respondents to the Digging Into Data Challenge by Christa Williford and Charles Henry. Research Design by Amy Friedlander.

From the webpage:

This report culminates two years of work by CLIR staff involving extensive interviews and site visits with scholars engaged in international research collaborations involving computational analysis of large data corpora. These scholars were the first recipients of grants through the Digging into Data program, led by the NEH, who partnered with JISC in the UK, SSHRC in Canada, and the NSF to fund the first eight initiatives. The report introduces the eight projects and discusses the importance of these cases as models for the future of research in the academy. Additional information about the projects is provided in the individual case studies below (this additional material is not included in the print or PDF versions of the published report).

Main Report Online

or

PDF file.

Case Studies:

Humanists played an important role the development of digital computers. That role has diminished over time to the disadvantage of both humanists and computer scientists. Perhaps efforts such as this one will rekindle what was once a rich relationship.

December 3, 2011

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities…

Filed under: Classification,Digital Culture,Digital Library,Humanities,Tagging — Patrick Durusau @ 8:22 pm

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes by JackAmmerman, Vika Zafrin, Dan Benedetti, Garth W. Green.

Abstract:

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.

Truly remarkable piece of work!

Just to entice you into reading the entire paper, the authors challenge the assumption that knowledge is analogue. Successfully in my view but I already held that position so I was an easy sell.

BTW, if you are in my topic maps class, this paper is required reading. Summarize what you think are the strong/weak points of the paper in 2 to 3 pages.

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