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 🙂 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.)

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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);