Lorna hughes 12 05-2013 NeDiMAH and ontology for DH

NeDiMAH: Network of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities

www.nedimah.eu

Prof. Lorna Hughes, University of Wales Chair in Digital Collections, National Library of Wales, NeDiMAH Chair

Digital Humanities LuxembourgDecember 5th 2013

NeDiMAH: Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities

Aims Research the practice of

advanced ICT methods in the arts and humanities

Develop activities, publications, and networking

Outputs

– Map of digital humanities in Europe

– A taxonomy of digital humanities

– A collaborative forum for Digital Humanities Methods in Europe

Support from 16 Member Organizations:

1. Bulgarian Academy of Science2. 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, GermanySusan Schreibman, Ireland

Digital Humanities: the challenge for researchers

• Disproportionate investment in creation, management and curation of digital resources versus use of digital content for scholarship (in the UK from 2000-8, AHRC funded approx. £43million of creation of digital projects, only £1.5 million into use of digital collections for research)

• Lack of accessible evidence for the transformative use of Digital Humanities

• Lack of consistency in description of Digital Humanities methods

• Inconsistent digital humanities research methods training for postgraduates

• Decreases in research funding: need to do more with less, international co-operation is key

• Networks needed to take existing work forward in broader context

• Risk of national and disciplinary fragmentation hiding good work

NeDiMAH

– ESF has funded a unique Network examining the use of digital methods in the arts and humanities

• Only similar activity: UK-only AHRC ICT Methods Network 2005-8

– Wide (and growing) interest by ESF Member Organisations (16 to date)

– Timing: Digital Humanities experiencing increased international attention

– Facilitates participation of established researchers and young scholars

– Provides evidence for scholars and policy makers

– NeDiMAH: • Inclusive in disciplinary, national and career-stage representation

• Developing a framework for common exchange of expertise and knowledge

• Linking researchers with their peers across the disciplines

• Enabling participants to develop, share and refine ICT methods as the core elements of digital scholarship and articulate these methods formally

• Investigating issues related to the scholarly publishing of ICT methods in the arts and humanities

4

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

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

(McCarty and Short)

The “scholarly primitives”: methods in digital humanities (Unsworth)

Taxonomy of Methods for the arts and humanities

http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/Methods/ICT-methodology.aspx

NeDiMAH Working Groups

Methodological Working Groups

1. Spatial and Temporal Modelling

2. Information Visualization

3. Linked Data

4. Building and developing Corpora

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

Key output: NeDiMAH ICT Methods Ontology

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

• Ontology will be developed with DARIAH VCC2 (understanding and expanding scholarly practice) and DARIAH research community, NeDiMAH ICT Methods Taxonomy WG (Lorna Hughes, Christian-Emil Ore, Costis Dallas, Matt Munson, Torsten Reimer, Erik Champion, Orla Murphy, Panos Constantopoulos); 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

An 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

Workplan outputs• An ontology delivered in both document and machine readable

forms• A Web service of a database containing the ontology definition and

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)

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

Benefit to scholarship

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

• Greater academic credibility for the use of Digital Humanities methods, and support for 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

• 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.