Last week I attended the Digital Humanities 2011 international conference at Stanford. This is arguably the most important event for researchers and academics who employ digital methods to tackle questions and problems normally associated with 'humanities' disciplines. In this blog post, I'll start by summarizing the things I was invited to talk about, and in the near future I'll try to integrate this article with other reflections and pointers to interesting materials I encountered at the conference.
I presented two papers: one by myself and one with Matteo Romanello, a talented PhD student at DDH whom I'm co-supervising (well, sort of—the college hasn't formally recognized me in that role yet).
The first paper is about DJFacet, a faceted search engine I created and already discussed elsewhere, so I won't bore you with the technical details here. The aspect of it I discussed at the conference deals with the specific employment of DJFacet with complex humanities databases.
DJFacet lets you easily build a search interface consisting of many entry points (facets). In particular, thanks to an advanced functionality called 'pivoting', it's possible to switch the main perspective of a search dynamically (that is, the main result type you're searching for) while still keeping the search parameters previously chosen. This means, for example, that when searching for 'people' using facets such as 'surname' or 'age', you could change the result type to 'documents' and keep using the same 'surname' or 'age' facets. This is made possible by the implicit connections existing in the database between, for example, objects of type 'people' and objects of type 'document' (e.g., 'authors of').
However, despite the fact that this approach proved to be completely feasible from the logical and computational points of view, it also opened up a number of research questions regarding the meaning of these multifaceted searches across different result types. In other words, we realized that the accumulation of filters ontologically distant from each other could often be difficult for end users to translate into real-world questions. Conversely, simple types of searches may be impeded by the highly structured architecture of a faceted browser. The paper attempted to address these problems and provide some initial solutions. Here are the slides:
DH11: Browsing Highly Interconnected Humanities Databases Through Multi-Result Faceted Browsers
The second paper (headlined by Matteo) is about HuCit (available at www.purl.com/net/hucit), a formal ontology we're developing together that is aimed at the formal representation of humanities citation structures.
The key idea here derives from the fact that while in the sciences a citation is normally represented as a relation between two publications (and often that's all that's needed, e.g., to generate all sorts of interesting citation network analysis algorithms), in the humanities (and especially in classics) citations are typically analyzed by scholars with much greater attention to detail.
For example, citations may exhibit a particular style that scholars want to study and classify (especially when dealing with ancient citations) for the purpose of better understanding and contextualizing the meaning of a citation. Secondly, in classics we have interesting 'phenomena' like canonical citations: these are citations that do not point to any publication in particular, but to an idealized version of a classic text (e.g., Homer's Iliad) that is used as a reference system for all subsequent editions of that text. Canonical citations fundamentally act as a reference to a point in a (textual) coordinate system agreed upon by the scholarly community—and thus need to be followed to facilitate discussion within that community. In a nutshell, the HuCit ontology provides the representational primitives needed to support computational reasoning about the 'humanistic' way of working with citations. Here are the slides from the talk:
An Ontological View of Canonical Citations
All in all, I had a really good time at the conference. The campus and weather at Stanford are amazing, and the DH community is down-to-earth and approachable. I'll try to update this post in the coming weeks with more information about people and projects that stimulated my imagination. Stay tuned!
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2015
2013
New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (forthcoming). (part of the 'Envisioning REED in the Digital Age' collection)
2012
NeDiMaH workshop on ontology based annotation, held in conjunction with Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg, Germany, Jul 2012.
2011
paper Semantic Web Approaches in Digital History: an Introduction
Lecture slides from the Course on digital history, part of the master in Digital Humanities at King's College, London., Oct 2011.
paper Browsing highly interconnected humanities databases through multi-result faceted browsers
Digital Humanities 2011 , Stanford, USA, Jun 2011.
2010
paper Review of Interontology conference 2010
Humana Mente, Journal of Philosophical Studies, 13, May 2010. Issue 13
2009
paper Laying the Conceptual Foundations for Data Integration in the Humanities
Proc. of the Digital Humanities Conference (DH09), Maryland, USA, Jun 2009. pp. 211-215
2007
2006
Poster paper presented at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-06), Budva, Montenegro, Jun 2006.