25: Models and Tools

Wed 6 Jun, 16:00-17:30
Session 25: Models and Tools

Citation Networks: A New Humanities Tool?
Almila Akdag, Zoe Borovsky

Modeling, Explanation, and Ontology in the Cultural Sciences: An Example
Allen H. Renear

Thinking about Interpretation: Pliny and Scholarship in the Humanities
John Bradley


Z. Borovsky talked about some projects that’ve emerged from UCLA’s DH Incubator Group, then spotlighted Akdag’s doctoral work on electronic art as it does / doesn’t fit within the artistic canon. Borovsky related Akdag’s focal question of whether a citation network can model an interdisciplinary path.

Currently they’re exploring Semaspace, designed to build semantic networks. Borovsky commented that citations are a relatively closed set: they tend to cite each other on a particular topic. It wasn’t entirely clear how this contributes to the art-historical field, in which Akdag works primarily. . . . Perhaps it would’ve been clearer had she been here to comment for herself.

I asked whether Akdag has looked comparatively at other software as well, for example, to see how results in Semaspace would differ from RefViz. (Yes.)

Someone asked whether 2000 citations weren’t a relatively small set πŸ™‚ and suggested creating a static map to help with noise reduction.

Someone else asked about dimensionality and whether increasing it would aid visualization, to test whether 2D and 3D are plausible representations at all. Borovsky acknowledged that adding time would be worthwhile.

Someone asked what the viz image tells one. (A relatively large box shows that a person’s name has been cited many times.)


A. Renear informed us that the presentation is an illustration of his abstract. He asserted that humcomp should make conceptual modeling one of its defining activities—ER diagrams as well as semantic networks and ontologies—to make humcomp “become something more than ‘a bag of tricks'” and to enable computational support. The emerging role of ontologies in bioinformatics suggests how things might go; conceptual modeling, for Renear, is a computationally oriented variant of scientific explanation and, more broadly, interpretation and understanding in general.

Transcribers use <p> to assert that a paragraph exists, whereas authors use <p> to create paragraphs. To put it another way, consider two domains, logical and renditional, in which might be a typesetting function (imperative) or a transcriptive one (indicative); might be transcriptional (indicative) or authorial (performative!). <bold> and <title> are in a table, which means two blank spots (where logical/imperative and renditional/performative overlap), which prompted further thought.</p> <p>To which <a href="http://www.frbr.org/">FRBR</a> Group 1 category do XML documents belong? There’s four entity types: work (distinct intellectual or artistic creation), expression (int/art realization of a work), manifestation (physical embodiment of an expression of a work—compare “edition”), item (single exemplar or copy). These types are related by “inherent relationships” (e.g., works are realized by expressions), and each type has a set of attributes (works have subject and genre, expressions have a language, manifestations have typeface(s), items have condition and location). That means that an item doesn’t have language(s), technically. However—an XML doc is an expression as well as a manifestation, depending.</p> <p>[As occurred yesterday, my brain is a bit tired to listen <i>and</i> type.]</p> <p>A Guarino/Welty meta-property is rigidity: a rigid property is one that is essential to its instances (none can lack the property or they’ll cease to exist). Then we ran out of slides, since Renear’s file died yesterday and he’d reconstructed (most of) it. In short: FRBR needs to be refactored.</p> <hr width="50%"/> <a href="http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/">Project home</a>. A report from the 2005 Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities claims that only about 6% of humanist scholars go beyond general-purpose IT and use more complex digital tools in their research. Two ways of thinking about interpretation development: transformation / presentation / visualization (text analysis tools, text mining, etc.—TACT and numerous successors), and recording an interpretation as it develops (less attention—XML/<a href="http://www.tei-c.org/">TEI</a>, <a href="http://www.qsrinternational.com/">NVivo</a>, <a href="http://www.atlasti.com/">Atlas.ti</a>, Pliny).</p> <p>So: scholars read digital and non-digital materials, across a broad range of primary and non-pri sources; they read some of those intensively; they annotate. At the other end of the process is an article or some sort of argument. Between, scholars develop an interpretation and figure out how to describe it. (These observations were backed up by usability studies.)</p> <p>Pliny is a personal application, so it runs on the desktop; it works with Web as well as offline resources during the reading/annotating stage. One can indicate a segment of an image on the screen and add a note (or notes, plural) corresponding to its location; notes can be minimized. For Web pages one cannot attach notes directly because the browser won’t tell Bradley where something is πŸ™‚ but notes can go alongside. Notes can be nested and correlated by theme.</p> <p>Over to the interp-dev stage: how does Pliny help? 2D space, containment (nesting), naming, reference, type, and gesture—2D space includes img anchors and physical proximity / grouping: one may not know what the ontological links are yet, but one can add containment and color-coding later. Rather than making a note belong to a parent, notes can refer to other notes, which means that if A refers to C, something else might refer to C as well, which the system can find and use for contextualization. One can create one’s own types. Pliny exports notes, but some juggling is needed to represent the links that’ve been mapped on-screen. . . . 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