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Building  an  ontology  of  Digital  Methods  in  the  Humanities  Prof  Lorna  Hughes  University  of  Wales  Chair  in  Digital  Collections  National  Library  of  Wales    “Construc+ng  vocabularies  at  a  European  level:  Reference  lists,  thesauri,  and  ontologies  for  Digital  Humani+es"  Journée  DARIAH-­‐FR  November  27th  2013    

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What  is  Digital  Humanities?  

•  Enables  ‘Digital  Transformations’  -­‐  significant  new  type  of  ‘disruption’  

–  New  modes  of  collaboration  and  communication  –  Changes  new  paradigms  of  understanding  and  creates  new  knowledge  by:    

•  Enabling  research  that  would  otherwise  be  impossible:  addressing  research  questions  that  would  have  been  impossible  to  resolve  without  digital  

•  Asking  new  research  questions  i.e.  questions  that  are  driven  by  insights  that  were  only  achievable  through  the  use  of  new  tools  and  methods  

•  Facilitating  and  enhancing  existing  research,  by  making  research  processes  easier  via  the  use  of  computational  tools  and  methods  

•  Adds  value  to  digital  collections  

–  Digital  collections  that  are  used  for  scholarship  are  more  likely  to  be  sustained  

•  Involves  extended  communities  of  practice  

–  Stakeholders  include:  researchers  across  the  arts  and  humanities  and  scientific  disciplines,  librarians,  archivists,  cultural  heritage  staff,  funders,  technical  experts,  data  scientists….  

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Digital  humanities:  a  collaborative  workspace  

•   Digital  collections  and  project  with  digital  outputs  

•   Researchers  demand  high-­‐quality  content  • Freely  accessible  content  enables  greater  use  and  re-­‐use  

CONTENT  

•  “Scholarly  primitives”  to  gain  new  knowledge:    discovering,  annotating,  comparing,  referring,  sampling,  illustrating,  and  representing  digital  content  

METHODS  

•   Software  to  gather,  analyze  and/or  process  data  •   To  enable  existing  research  processes  to  be  

conducted  better  and/or  faster  •   To  enable  researchers  to  ask,  and  answer,  

completely  new  research  questions  

TOOLS  

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The  “scholarly  primitives”:  methods  in  digital  humanities  

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Examples  of  Digital  Humanities  projects    the  Research  Programme  in  Digital  Collections  at  NLW  

•  Bringing  Digital  Humanities  to  the  Digital  Library  •  Projects  exemplify  the  ‘methodological  commons’:  content,  tools,  methods  •  Involve  many  communities  of  practice:  researchers  across  the  disciplines,  

archivists,  librarians,  performers,  technical  exerts,  data  scientists,  etc.    •  Implements    the  convergent  practices  that  are  embedded  in  digital  

humanities  into  digital  collections  development    •  Developing  an  understanding  of  use  of  our  existing  digital  content,  to  make  

it  more  valuable  for  use  in  research,  teaching,  or  community  engagement  •  Building  sustainable  projects  that  develop  new  digital  content  that  addresses  

specific  research  or  education  needs,  in  partnership  with  academics  and  other  key  stakeholders  

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Welsh  Newspapers  online  www.welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk  

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DMS  Interoperability:  Digitally  Enabled  Scholarship  with  Medieval  Manuscripts  

•  PI:  Meg  Bellinger  and  Barbara  Shailor,  Yale  University,  co-­‐I:  Tom  Cramer,  Stanford  University  

•  Photospectral  imaging  of  medieval  manuscripts  

•  ‘Shared  Canvas’  image  annotaJon  plaKorm  for  manuscript  researchers  

•  ParJcipaJng  Libraries:  NLW,  BriJsh  Library,  HunJngdon,  Beineke  ,  Bodleian.    

NLW  Peniarth  392D  the  'Hengwrt  Chaucer"          

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‘The  snows  of  yesteryear:  narrating  extreme  weather’  

•  Identifies  accounts  and  representations  of  extreme  weather  events  as  they  occur  in  various  media  and  accounts  in  a  variety  of  locations,  academic,  institutional  and  public;  and  works  with  climatologists  to  explore  approaches  to  their  representation  and  integration  for  climate  research    

•  Will  digitally  connect  primary  and  secondary  that  reference  weather,  including  documents  that  include  aspects  of  meteorology,  geography,  natural  history,  folklore,  documentary  accounts  and  artworks  and  combine  them  with  the  detailed  and  first-­‐hand  experiences,  opinions  and  memories  of  local  people  

•  Community  involvement:  to  enhance  public  appreciation  and  understanding  of  extreme  weather  events  

•  Performative  aspect  communicates  outputs  and  impact    

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The  Cult  of  Saints  in  Wales:  Medieval  Welsh-­‐language  sources  and  their  transmission    •  Online  editions  of  digitised  medieval  

Welsh  Saints  lives  from  the  NLW  collections  will  be  developed  by  researchers  from  the  University  of  Wales  

•  King’s  College,  London  Department  of  Digital  Humanities  will  develop  KILN  XML  platform  for  digital  scholarly  edition  of  digital  manuscripts  

•   NLW  will  host,  implement  and  sustain  the  edition  

•  Output:  a  transferrable  tool  for  creating  online  editions  of  NLW  manuscripts  as  part  of  NLW  Digital  Library  

•  Supporting  annotation,  searching,  comparing  manuscripts  

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Atlantic  Europe  in  the  Metal  Ages    

•  A  geographic  representation  of  archaeological  finds,  mapped  by  place  and  date  

•  NLW  will  build  technical  platform  and  sustain  resources  

•   King’s  College,  London  will  build  geo-­‐humanities  platform  and  resources,  using  GIS  in  compiling  scientific  evidence  

•  Output:  a  geo-­‐humanities  resource  for  related  content  

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Wales1900  (launched  Oct.  2013!)  Developing  a  a  gazetteer    of  Welsh  place  names  from  OS  6  inch  maps  using  a  platform  developed  by  Galaxy  Zoo  

Crowdsourcing  Sourcing  tasks  tradiJonally  performed  by  specific  individuals  to  a  group  of  people  or  community  (crowd)  through  an  open  call:  e.g.,  to  help  capture,  systemaJze  or  analyse  large  amounts  of  data  (“ciJzen  science”)  

cymru1900wales.org  

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In  development:  New  technologies  and  collaborations  to  enhance  existing  digital  content  

•  Welsh  Wills  Online  Developing  transcriptions  and  search  interface  for  Welsh  wills  at  NLW  

•  Extensive  scoping  of  community  transcription  of  historical  records  

•  Investigating  feasibility  of  crowdsourcing  

•  Developing  markup  of  content  for  representation  and  analysis  

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Digital  Humanities:  a  “Methodological  Commons”  (McCarty  and  Short)  

(McCarty  and  Short)  

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Taxonomy  of  Methods  for  the  arts  and  humanities  

hXp://digital.humaniJes.ox.ac.uk/Methods/ICT-­‐methodology.aspx  

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NeDiMAH:  Network  for  Digital  Methods  in  the  Arts  and  Humanities  

§  Researching  the  practice  of  advanced  ICT  methods  in  the  arts  and  humanities  

§  Their  classification  and  expression  via  3  Outputs:    

–  Map  of  digital  humanities  in  Europe  

–  A  collaborative  forum  of  communities  of  practice  

–  An  ontology  of  digital  methods  in  the  humanities  

Support  from  16  Member  Organizations:    1.  Bulgarian  Academy  of  Science  2.  The  National  Foundation  of  Science,  Higher  Education  

and  Technological  Development  of  the  Republic  of  Croatia  (NZZ)  

3.  The  Danish  Council  for  Independent  Research  –  Humanities  (FKK),    

4.  The  Academy  of  Finland  –  Research  Council  for  Culture  and  Society  

5.  TGE  ADONIS  –  National  Centre  for  Scientific  Research  (CNRS)  

6.  Deutsche  Forschungsgemeinschaft  (DFG)  7.  Hungarian  Academy  of  Sciences,  (MTA)  8.  Irish  Research  Council  for  the  Humanities  (IRCHSS),    9.  Luxembourg  National  Research  Fund  (FNR)  10. Netherlands  Organisation  for  Scientific  Research  

(NOW)  11.  Research  Council  of  Norway  (NCR)  12. Portugal  Foundation  for  Science  and  Technology  (FCT)  13.  Romanian  National  Research  Council  (CNCS)  14. Swedish  Research  Council  (VR)  15.  Swiss  National  Science  Foundation  (SNF)  16. UK  Arts  and  Humanities  Research  Council  (AHRC)    

Chairs    Lorna  Hughes,  UK  (Chair)  Fotis  Jannidis,  Germany,  Susan  Schreibman,  Ireland  

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NeDiMAH  Working  Groups  Methodological  Working  Groups  1.  Spatial  and  Temporal  Modelling  2.  Information  Visualization  3.  Linked  Data  4.  Corpora:  Building  and  developing  5.  Using  Corpora:  Information  retrieval  and  modelling  6.  Scholarly  editions  7.  Scholarly  publishing  8.  ICT  Methods  Taxonomy    Charge  to  the  Working  Groups  –  Investigation  and  analysis  of  current  practice:  Documenting  the  practice  of  digital  

humanities  through  exemplars  –  Modelling  application  of  the  methods  in  scholarly  practice  across  the  disciplines    –  Producing  evidence  for  advancing  the  state  of  the  art  in  understanding  the  

scholarly  ecosystem  for  digital  humanities  

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ICT  Methods  Taxonomy  Working  Group  •  Objectives  •  Review  of  work  done  to  date  on  digital  humanities  taxonomies  •  To  explore  collaborations  with  other  partners  working  in  the  area,  for  

example,  DARIAH  •  To  discuss  what  we  have  discovered  to  date  about  ICT  Methods  from  the  

NeDiMAH  Working  Groups  •  To  develop  an  ontology  of  Digital  Humanities  •  Activities  •  Meetings:  Nov  2012  (London),  Jan  2013  (the  Hague),  June  2013  (Dublin)  •  Outputs  to  date  •  DH  Methods  developed  for  DARIAH  has  been  modified  for  NeDiMAH  •  Workplan:  collaborate  with  DARIAH,  e-­‐Cloud,  WG3.  All  WGs  to  be  represented  

on  group  to  deliver  the  ontology  with  Digital  Curation  Unit  (DCU)  and  DARIAH  VCC2  

•  Core  members  •  Lorna  Hughes,  Christian-­‐Emil  Ore,  Costis  Dallas,  Matt  Munson,  Torsten  

Reimer,  Erik  Champion,  Leif  Isaksen,  Orla  Murphy,  Panos  Constantopoulos    

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Building  a  NeDiMAH  ICT  Methods  Ontology  •  The  scholarly  ecosystem  for  Digital  Humanities  will  be  articulated  in  the  NeDiMAH  ICT  

Methods  Ontology  

•  Scoping  of  the  ICT  Methods  Ontology  by  the  NeDiMAH  ICT  Methods  Taxonomy  Working  Group  is  complete  

•  Ontology  will  be  developed  with  DARIAH  VCC2  (understanding  and  expanding  scholarly  practice),  NeDiMAH  Taxonomy  WG  members;    and  the  Digital  Curation  Unit-­‐IMIS,  Athena  Research  Centre,  Greece  

•  Gathering  data  from  all  NeDiMAH  activities  about  practice  of  Digital  Humanities  as  structure  for  ontology  layers  and  definition  of  schemas;  building  software  environment/database  tool  for  specifications  of  research  methods    

•  Build  on  existing  DH  taxonomies,  other  ontologies,  expanding  state  of  the  art  

•  To  be  completed  Feb.  2015  

•  Outcome:  a  formal  ontology  for  Digital  Humanities,  including  classification  and  a  shared  vocabulary  

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A  Taxonomy/ontology  of  Digital  Methods  in  the  Arts  and  Humanities:  Objectives    

•  Provide  evidence  of  the  use  of  digital  resources  for  scholarship  to  support  visibility  and  sustainability  of  digital  collections  and  scholarship  

•  Enable  the  critical  evaluation  of  digital  humanities:  projects  that  are  transparent;  well-­‐documented;    reviewable  across  disciplines  

•  Making  visible  multi-­‐disciplinary,  multi-­‐technology  projects,  nationally  and  internationally  

•  Explore  the  potential  benefit  of  the  ontology  as  a  guide  and  learning  tool  for  the  scholarly  community,  with  DARIAH  VCC2  

•  Documenting  partnerships  across  disciplines  and  organizations:  building  collaborative,  scholarly  infrastructures  as  well  as  technical  infrastructures  

 

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Workplan  

•  DCU  will  deliver  an  ontology  of  digital  research  methods  in  the  arts  and  humanities  as  the  NeDiMAH  database  output  

•  To  be  undertaken  in  collaboration  with  DARIAH-­‐EU  Task  2  –  Understanding  and  expanding  scholarly  practice  of  Virtual  Competency  Centre  2  (VCC2)  –  Research  and  education  liaison.    

•  Financial  support  for  project  coordination,  for  the  organization  of  meetings  and  the  publication  of  results,  will  be  provided  by  NeDiMAH  as  appropriate.  DARIAH-­‐EU  participants  will  offer  their  work  for  the  project  as  part  of  the  in-­‐kind  contribution  of  their  respective  DARIAH-­‐EU  organizations.  

•  This  will  advance  the  state  of  the  art  established  by  earlier  initiatives  to  formally  represent  digital  methods,  e.g.,  the    AHDS  digital  research  methods  taxonomy,  the  Oxford  methods  taxonomy,  the  methods  taxonomy/ontology  currently  under  development  by  DARIAH-­‐DE,  as  well  as  the  information  organization  schemes  applied  in  the  DHO,  arts-­‐humanities.net  and  DH-­‐Commons  portals.  

   

 

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Workplan  outputs  •  An  ontology  delivered  in  both  document  and  machine  readable  forms  •  A  Web  service  of  a  database  containing  the  ontology  definition  and  the  

appropriate  functionality  to  support  access  to  and  evolution  of  the  ontology.  

•  In  document  form,  the  ontology  will  include  definitions  of  entities  and  properties,  and  examples  of  occurrence  and  use  after  the  model  of  ISO  standard  21127  CIDOC  CRM.  Compatibility  will  be  ensured  

•  In  machine  readable  form,  the  ontology  will  be  defined  in  RDF/S  (RDF  Schema),  to  support  use  in  a  wide  range  of  applications  accessing  registries  and  knowledge  bases  that  contain  information  about  methods  and  their  context  of  use.    

•  The  taxonomic  parts  of  the  ontology  will  comply  with  SKOS  (Simple  Knowledge  Organization  System).  

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Workplan  outcomes  

•  The  compliance  with  standards  allows  syntactic  as  well  as  semantic  interoperability  between  future  registries  and  applications  employing  this  methods  ontology  and  other  CIDOC  CRM  –  and  SKOS  –  compliant  information  systems  in  the  arts  and  humanities  and  in  libraries,  museums  and  archives.  

•  The  Web  service  will  provide  (a)  access  to  the  ontology  for  research,  education  and  development  purposes  under  a  suitable  open  policy,  and  (b)  support  for  maintenance.    

•  Various  access  methods  are  foreseen,  e.g.,  faceted  classification  trees,  predefined  simple  and  complex  query  types,  form-­‐based  queries,  ad  hoc  SPARQL  queries,  and  browsing.    

•  The  ontology  will  be  “an  explicit  specification  of  a  shared  conceptualization”  of  the  domain  of  digital  research  methods  and  their  context  of  scholarly  use.  It  includes  types  of  objects  and/or  concepts,  and  their  properties  and  relations.    

•  The  service  will  be  sustained  by  DARIAH  over  the  long  term    

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Benefit  to  scholarship  

•  The  ontology  will  formalize  and  codify  the  expression  of  work  in  the  digital  arts  and  humanities  

•   Greater  academic  credibility  for  this  Digital  Humanities    and  support  peer-­‐reviewed  scholarship  in  this  area.    

•  Maximise  the  value  of  national  and  international  e-­‐research  infrastructure  initiatives  by  developing  a  methodological  layer  that  allows  arts  and  humanities  researchers  to  develop,  refine  and  share  research  methods  that  allow  them  to  create  and  make  best  use  digital  methods  and  collections  

•  The  ontology  will  have    potential  usefulness  for  eliciting  and  prioritizing    the  functional  requirements  for  planned  digital  infrastructures  in  the  A&H,  following  an  evidence-­‐based,  user-­‐centred  approach.  

•  The  development  of  a  commonly  agreed  nomenclature  in  the  nascent  field  of  Digital  Humanities:  something  that  typically  happens  with  the  maturing  and  consolidation  of  disciplines  /  research  domains.