Words / blog / 28 September 2011

Event: THATcamp Kansas and Digital Humanities Forum

#conference #ontology #paper #travel #xml

THATcamp Kansas and the Digital Humanities Forum took place last week at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, which is part of the University of Kansas in beautiful Lawrence. I had the opportunity to attend and give a talk about some recent work I've been doing on digital prosopography and computer ontologies, so in this blog post I'm summarizing some of the things that caught my attention at the conference.

The event took place on September 22-24 and consisted of three separate components:

Bootcamp Workshops: a set of in-depth workshops on digital tools and other DH topics (http://kansas2011.thatcamp.org/bootcamps/)
THATCamp: an "unconference" for technologists and humanists (http://kansas2011.thatcamp.org/)
Representing Knowledge in the DH conference: a one-day program of panels and poster sessions (schedule | abstracts)

The workshop and THATcamp were both packed with interesting content, so I strongly suggest you take a look at the online documentation, which is very comprehensive. In what follows, I'll highlight some of the contributed papers that a) I liked and b) I was able to attend (needless to say, this list reflects only my individual preferences and interests). I hope you'll find something of interest here too!

A (quite subjective) list of interesting papers

The Graphic Visualization of XML Documents, by David Birnbaum (abstract): a quite inspiring example of how to employ visualizations to support philological research in the humanities. Mostly focused on Russian texts and XML-oriented technologies, but its principles are easily generalizable to other contexts and technologies.
Exploring Issues at the Intersection of Humanities and Computing with LADL, by Gregory Aist (abstract): the talk presented LADL, the Learning Activity Description Language, a fascinating software environment that provides a way to "describe both the information structure and the interaction structure of an interactive experience" for the purpose of "constructing a single interactive web page that allows for viewing and comparing multiple source documents together with online tools."
Making the most of free, unrestricted texts–a first look at the promise of the Text Creation Partnership, by Rebecca Welzenbach ( abstract ): an interesting report on the pros and cons of making available a large repository of SGML/XML encoded texts from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) corpus.
The hermeneutics of data representation, by Michael Sperberg-McQueen ( abstract ): a speculative and challenging investigation of the assumptions at the root of any machine-readable representation of knowledge - and their cultural implications.
Breaking the Historian's Code: Finding Patterns of Historical Representation, by Ryan Shaw (abstract): an investigation of the use of natural language processing techniques for 'breaking down' the 'code' of historical narrative. In particular, the sets of documents used are related to the civil rights movement, and the specific NLP techniques being employed are named entity recognition, event extraction, and event chain mining.
Employing Geospatial Genealogy to Reveal Residential and Kinship Patterns in a Pre-Holocaust Ukrainian Village, by Stephen Egbert (abstract): this paper showed how it is possible to visualize residential and kinship patterns in the mixed-ethnic settlements of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe using geographic information systems (GIS), and how these results can provide useful materials for humanists to base their work on.
Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: towards a formal representation of the 'factoid' model by means of CIDOC-CRM, by me and John Bradley (abstract): this is the paper I presented (shameless self-plug, I know). It's about the evolution of structured prosopography (i.e., the 'study of people' in history) from a mostly single-application, database-oriented scenario toward a more interoperable, linked-data approach. In particular, I discussed recent efforts to represent the notion of 'factoids' (a conceptual model commonly used in prosopographies) using the ontological language provided by CIDOC-CRM (a computational ontology commonly used in the museum community).