Yes – that’s right – command line. So not for everyone. Also: this is bare bones and pre-alpha. So don’t expect wonders. It basically provides a simple interface for searching a folder full of PDFs. That’s all for now!

Key features (or lack of)

First impressions

Pretty good. Was concerned I was gonna miss things like collections or tags. But I found a workaround: first, identify the papers I am interested in. Then, create a folder in the same directory and symlink them in there (= create an alias).

It’s not quite like uncarved wood, but it definitely feels simple enough.

This article discusses the impact and methods of ‘science analytics’ that is the quantitative analysis of scientific outputs.

Full Article Available here: http://barabasi.com/f/939.pdf

The science of science (SciSci) offers a quantitative understanding of the interactions among scientific agents across diverse geographic and temporal scales: It provides insights into the conditions underlying creativity and the genesis of scientific discovery, with the ultimate goal of developing tools and policies that have the potential to accelerate science.
[…]
For example, measurements indicate that scholars are risk-averse, preferring to study topics related to their current expertise, which constrains the potential of future discoveries. Those willing to break this pattern engage in riskier careers but become more likely to make major breakthroughs. Overall, the highest- impact science is grounded in conventional combinations of prior work but features unusual combinations.

Related links

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a text I’ve worked with already in the past.

This time I was intrigued by the simple yet super cool typed.js javascript library, which simulates animated typing.

After testing it out a bit I realised that this approach allows to focus on the text with more attention that having it all displayed at once.

Since the words appear one at a time, it feels more like a verbal dialogue than reading. As a consequence, also the way the meaning of the text gets perceived changes.

Slower, deeper. Almost like meditating. Try it out here.

Credits

Barry Smith is a prominent contributor to both theoretical and applied research in ontology. He is the author of many publications on ontology and related topics. In particular, the Basic Formal Ontology is a widely used top level model in the scientific community.

I’m a bit surprised that there was no mention whatsoever of the work I did a while back in the context of the PhiloSURFIcal project. Built as part my PhD, the PhiloSURFIcal software tool allowed to navigate a philosophical text, taking advantage of a map of the concepts relevant to the text. The map, in this case, relied on a rather generic ontology for philosophy, which I instantiated using concepts from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

At the time I could not find evidence for any other ontology modelling the philosophical domain, and still to this day I haven’t seen any that provides the same level of detail in modeling out the various nuances of philosophical ideas.

Admittedly, the OWL formalization wasn’t very good (in fact I originally implemented the ontology using a KR language called OCML). Maybe though I should take this as an incentive to revive this work and publish it again using a more modern Linked Data approach!

A detailed summary of the modeling approach can be found here:

Michele Pasin, Enrico Motta. Ontological Requirements for Annotation and Navigation of Philosophical Resources – Synthese, Volume 182, Number 2, Springer September 2011 .

In any case, here’s a few interesting links and slides from Barry Smith’s presentation:

It’s an alpha release, still much untested and rough around the edges, so I’d encourage anyone interested in the topic to play with it and get in touch with questions or feedback or even proposals to collaborate so to make it better.

Why?

These days anyone who’s reading and studying as part of their daily routine is probably doing it via some digital device too. May that be an e-reader like the Kindle, or just the default pdf viewing software that comes with a mac or pc. Digital reading saves lots of time, in many cases, but also makes it very cumbersome to annotate texts and especially keep track of these annotations.

Resquotes.com comes out of this experience: I needed a way to save and organise the important snippets I read and wanted to be able to get back to, sometime in the future, even if I didn’t know when.

This is the same spirit (I assume!) that made Chomsky write these words in one of his latest works:

..reading a book doesn’t just mean turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.
Noam Chomsky

Likewise, all the hours spent reading PDF files and Kindle books felt to me not as beneficial as they could have been – unless I had a way to collect and get back to the quotes that caught my attention in the first place.

How it works

In a nutshell, ResQuotes currently allows to import text snippets, either from the web or from your Kindle, and use them to create collections of related content via topics and folders.

A topic is like the main gist a quote is about. Topics can (and are supposed to) be reused and provide a basic organising mechanism for the quotes one saves. So, you can have many quotes on the topic of ‘science teaching in the 20th century’, or on ‘information architecture’.

So you can have a Topic page which collects together a bunch of quotes which focus on the same idea or concept.

Quotes and topics can be added to the application in two main ways. Either by filling out a web form…

…or by extracting it directly from your Kindle.

Once you’ve imported a bunch to stuff into the system you will be able to search for it or organize it further using collections.

That allows also to automatically create ‘topic maps’ based on the relatedness and similarity between quotes and topics.

What’s next

Difficult to say what is going to happen next. I’d like to add more import mechanisms, download options, improvements to the way collections are created. But really, I’d like to get more feedback from real users!

So please please please – send me comments if you have any (by the way, next week I’ll be in Oxford (UK) giving a demo of the app at the Force11 conference in Oxford).

Happy reading with resquotes.com!

I had a quick go at it, it’s maybe a bit fiddly to do some of the annotations but the app is definitely feature rich and with lots of potential uses, especially within an education scenario.

Here’s how an annotation webpage would look like using the Google Chrome bookmarklet:

Various other tools for creating annotations are made available too:

See also:

These are the slides from my talk, titled “Exploring highly interconnected humanities data: are faceted browsers always the answer?“.

Essentially, this is a slightly revised version of the paper I presented a couple of years ago at the Digital Humanities conference in Stanford. It centres around the notion of ‘pivoting‘ in faceted browsers, the use of these tools in the digital humanities and some practical examples based on DJFacet, an implementation of a customizable faceted search engine written in Python/Django.

Traditionally, digital humanities projects that produce historical databases tend to present their data using a classic tabular format, which is roughly the equivalent of a bibliographic record (e.g. as used in library softwares) only for historical data (e.g. so to present information about persons, documents, facts).

This approach has the advantage of offering a wealth of information within a clean and well organised interface, thus simplifying the task of finding what we are looking for during a search. However, by combining all the data in a single view, this approach also hides some of the key dimensions used by historians in order to make sense of the materials at hand. For example, such dimensions could be deriving from a higher-level analysis that focuses on spatio-historical, genealogical or socio-political patterns.

The limitations of the tabular format become even more evident when we consider that the PoMS database contains more than 80000 facts about 20000 people/institutions active in medieval Scotland. How were these people connected? Can we explore this network in a more interactive, game-like manner than the classic database-like structures? In other words, how can we help users see the ‘big picture’?

PoMS Laboratories

PoMS researchers have sifted through more than 8000 charters and have extracted a pretty amazing amount of information from them. Now that the database is online and can be searched via the usual mechanisms (keywords, facets) historians can investigate aspects of the making of Scotland in a small fraction of the time it would have taken them otherwise.
However, almost paradoxically, by making available such a large quantity of data in structured format new problems are arising too. Information overload is one of them: how can this wealth of data can be compared, correlated and organized into more meaningful units? How can we present the same data in a more piecemeal fashion, according to predefined pathways or views on the dataset that aim at making explicit some of the coherence principles of the historical discourse?

In order to investigate further these questions in the last months I developed the PoMS Labs, a section of the PoMS website that contains a number of prototypes usable to interact with PoMS data in innovative ways. In general, with these tools we aimed at addressing the needs of both non-expert users (e.g., learners) – who could simultaneously access the data and get a feeling for the meaningful relations among them – and experts alike (e.g., academic scholars) – who could be facilitated in the process of analysing data within predefined dimensions, so to highlight patterns of interest that would be otherwise hard to spot.

What follows contains more information about three of these prototype tools, which I think will give you a pretty good idea of what the concept of highlighting pathways in the data means (by clicking on launch you can try out the tools for yourself – which is probably the best way to discover what this is all about!).

Note: currently the only platforms we tested the Labs on are desktop computers running the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Apple Safari.

1. Dynamic Connections Cloud (launch)

This experimental app lets you browse incrementally the network of relationships linking persons/institutions to other persons/institutions.
Since each of them is normally participating in more than one event (e.g., a transaction or a relationship factoid), we can attempt to reconstruct the network of interconnections by examining the appearance of individuals within the same event or situation.

The software lets you choose an individual and start building a ‘chain of connections‘ departing from him/her/it. Each name in the resulting connections-cloud is rendered using a different font and color, depending on the sex and on the number of common factoids being shared with the previously selected items.
At any time it is possible to go back to the main PoMS database pages in order to find out more about the individuals or factoids emerging from the connections-cloud exploration. Just click on the individual icons, or move the mouse over the links provided in order to discover more options.

The screenshot below illustrates the main functionalities of the software, and is based on a sample connection chain that starts from a rather unknown person (‘A. wife of Normam son of Malcolm‘) and arrives to a more famous institution (‘Arbroath Abbey‘).

Note: You can see a live version of the connection chain displayed above by following this link.

2. Relationships explorer (launch)

The individuals and institutions in the PoMS database are often interconnected by participating to the same events (e.g. transactions or relationships). In particular, the database contains detailed information circa the varying roles agents are playing within such events. Can we discover any interesting pattern by examining these roles? For example, do agents tend to appear always in the same role, of are there exceptions to this rule?

This visualization tool allows you to compare the different roles played by two agents played in the context of their common events. The software makes use of the D3 Sankey diagrams plugin, kindly made available by Mike Bostock. In general, Sankey diagrams are designed to show flows through a network (and are sometimes called flow diagrams).
In our case the network is always composed by three steps (person-role, event, person-role) and is relatively simple, so the Sankey diagram is mainly used in order to group nodes of the same type (e.g. roles) and provide an overview of relationships between persons and events (i.e. the ‘flow’).

The screenshot below illustrates the main functionalities of the software; in particular, it represents all existing relationships between Edward I, king of England (d.1307) and William Fraser, bishop of St Andrews (d.1297) (obviously, based on the information PoMS makes available).

Note: you can play with a live version of the specific visualisation displayed above by following this link.

3. Transactions and Witnesses (launch)

In PoMS witnesses are very important as they the persons who have witnessed a charter and are given in the witness list. Charters are usually describing some form of transaction, which is the most important type of event (‘factoid’) represented in the database. This interactive visualization lets you browse iteratively transactions and the witnesses associated to them.

Each graph starts from a transaction of choice (the ‘focus point’), and displays two levels of information: (1) all the witnesses of the transaction (normally persons or institutions), and (2) for each of these agents, all the other transactions they have witnessed.
The new transactions emerging from this network can be selected and brought to the center of the visualization (which is recalculated), thus facilitating a process of interactive exploration of the interconnections and commonalities among PoMS’s recorded transactions.

The visualization has been created thanks to the freely available JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit.

The screenshot below illustrates the main functionalities of the software; the graph is centered around a transaction (‘Agreement between Alwin, abbot of Holyrood, and Arnold, abbot of Kelso, over the Crag of Duddingston in Edinburgh‘) that has five witnesses in total.

Note: click here to see a live version of this graph.

Any feedback?

Then please do get in touch, either through this blog or the official PoMS contact page! This is all very much a work in progress, so we’re eager to hear from you.

The javaScript InfoVis Toolkit includes a number of pretty cool libraries that work in the browser and can be customised to your own needs. Some of these visualisations are specifically designed for trees and graphs, so I always wondered how a dynamic tree-rendering of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus would look like.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Latin for “Logical-Philosophical Treatise”) is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. It was an ambitious project: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. It is recognized as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century.
[…] The Tractatus employs a notoriously austere and succinct literary style. The work contains almost no arguments as such, but rather declarative statements which are meant to be self-evident. The statements are hierarchically numbered, with seven basic propositions at the primary level (numbered 1–7), with each sub-level being a comment on or elaboration of the statement at the next higher level (e.g., 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12).

The final result is available here (warning: it’s been tested only on Chrome and Firefox): http://hacks.michelepasin.org/witt/spacetree

Some more details

I’ve played around a little with one of the visualisation libraries the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit makes available, the Radial Graph, to the purpose of transforming the Tractatus text into a more interactive platform. The Radial Graph is essentially a tree-rendering library built over a circular area (hence called also space-tree).

I liked the idea of making the tree-like structure of the text explorable one step at a time, within a framework that suggests a predefined order of the text-units but also allows for lateral steps or quick jumps to other sections. However I’m still trying to figure out what the advantages of looking at the text this way can be, once you go past the initial excitement of playing with it as if it was some sort of toy!

Some of the pros seem to be:

On the other hand, here are some cons:

I wonder how all of this could be developed further and/or transformed into a useful tool.. if you have any comment or suggestion please do get in touch !
I’m also planning to release the source code for the whole app as soon as a I clean it up a little; for the moment, here is the javascript bit that renders the graph:

Prism is presented as

… a tool for “crowdsourcing interpretation.” The concept emerged from a decade-long conversation on categories of textual interpretation which took place at the University of Virginia, and specifically from transparency mark-up games designed by Bethany Nowviskie for her Media Studies students and her colleagues in SpecLab.

The concept of crowdsourcing interpretation is definitely a fascinating one; maybe the end result of Prism a little less so, at the moment. Simply merging different people’s highlights can be visually interesting, but at the same time not very useful from a scholarly point of view I think. Overall, it seems to me like an indiscriminate association of possibly very different viewpoints.

..the end goal of Prism is to produce aesthetic provocations, that is, visualizations which provoke further discussion. Prism expands upon current notions of crowdsourcing to allow for more meaningful interaction with “the crowd.” Users interact subjectively with a text and contribute to a collective interpretive energy that has infinite possibilities beyond the highlighting exercise itself

Despite the fact it’s still early days for Prism, it seems to me that this is potentially the beginning of a new research field (cf. this post too: Future possibilities for Prism), so I’m really curious to see how it’ll develop. I have the feeling that just by adding a few more controls (e.g. filtering highlights/annotations by users group, or mechanisms for tagging/categorising passages) the final visualisation of the text could become a really powerful tool for exploration and learning.

Think for example of a classroom scenario: groups of students could focus on different facets of an author, annotate what’s relevant with respect to that facet, and eventually explore what the other groups have annotated in the text (and how it overlaps with their own annotations). All of this could be achieved just by playing with the interactive controls of the final visualization .
Another interesting scenario could be a single-user context: when you study a text, it’s not uncommon to find new elements of interest each time you read the text, maybe because your goals have changed, or simply because you are in a completely different mood. Using an enhanced version of Prism it’d be possible to see the evolution of your notes chronologically, and maybe re-consider them in association to other contextual information you might have stored elsewhere (e.g. about other readings you were doing at the time).

In conclusion: will crowd-sourced interpretations change the way we read texts? We’re not really there yet, but definitely going in the right direction!

Related work