event: Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities 3 (SOCH3)
Since software services, and the innovative software architectures that they require, are becoming widespread in their use in the Digital Humanities, it is important to facilitate and encourage problem and solution sharing among different disciplines to avoid reinventing the wheel. This workshop will build on two previous Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities events held in 2006 and 2007(under the auspices of SOSERNET and the AHRC ICT Methods Network).
The workshop is structured around four invited presentations from different humanities disciplines. These disciplines are concerned with (e.g.) archaeological data, textual data, the visual arts and historical information. The presentations will approach humanities data, and the various uses of it, from different perspectives at different stages in the research lifecycle. There will reflection on the issues that arise at the conception of a research idea, through to data gathering, analysis, collaboration and publication and dissemination. A further presentation from Computer Science will act as a ‘technical response’ to these papers, showcasing different tool types and how they can be applied to the kinds of data and methods discussed.
The presentations will be interspersed with scheduled discussion sessions and The emphasis throughout is on collaboration, and what the humanities and computer science communities can learn from one another: do we have a common agenda, and how can we take this forward? The day will conclude with a moderated discussion that will seek to identify and frame that agenda, and form the basis of a report.
The workshop is organized by Stuart Dunn (Centre for e-Research, King's College), Nicolas Gold (Computing Science, King's College), Lorna Hughes (Centre for e-Research, King's College), Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen (English, University of Oulu) and Tapio Seppänen (Information Engineering, University of Oulu).
Outline programme:
9:30 coffee
10:00 welcome
10:15 Presentation 1
10:45 Presentation 2
11:15 coffee
11:45 Presentation 3 and short discussion
12:30 lunch
13:30 Presentation 4
14:00 Presentation 5 (response)
14:30 coffee
15:00 Concluding discussion panel
16:30 close
blog from the workshop
We are live at SOCH3 in Oulu.
More or less overcoming some technical issues, we had a introductory video presentation from mc schraefel, followed by a Q&A on Skype live from San Fransisco. The main points riased were
* structuring of information by topic (ontologically) rather than by strictly descriptive metadata (taxonomically). mc's project, mSpace, is seeking to do the former for music, to enable a user to think 'I like this kind of music, where can I find more like it', without having to have detailed or even technical knowledge of the music in question.
* How can domains be modelled bilingually? This is likely to be highly significant area in the future.
* How can these methodologies be applied in the humanities more generally? How do user needs for ontological approaches differ across disciplines?
* Provenance and sourcing of data - who 'owns' an object (e.g. a map), and how does that affect what is being displayed?
Re: blog from the workshop
For information, mc's research is described at : http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mc/
There's a m-space demo at: http://mspace.fm/whatis/
Barriers
Elpiniki Fragkouli is describing a JISC-funded research project, Enabling Uptake of e-Resources (http://www.e-researchcommunity.org/projects/e-uptake/). It's really a really important practical point to note that any meaningful application of service-oriented computing must be backed up by institutional support, training, embedding of tools, and so on.
Re: Barriers
One of the very interesting things that came out of the initial research was the notion of 'continuum of use' - the idea that scholars have different engagement with e-infrastructure and digital resources at different stages of their research (and indeed, different stages in their career). This is something I hope we can discuss a little more later, and something that needs a bit more research....
Re: Barriers
After presentation discussion: The audience found very interesting most of all the view that if researchers need to use the services they Will use them overcoming any barriers...
Re: Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities 3 (SOCH3)
John Bradley's Pliny project: http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/
Re: Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities 3 (SOCH3)
I would be interested to know what other software does this kind of thing. I know there are many mind-mapping programs which do certain parts of this (and probably in a better way), but they do one aspect of Pliny. But what bothers me is this seems to be crying out to be a web app of some sort rather than a standalone (or plugin) program which is fairly complicated for an average researcher to install.
Re: Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities 3 (SOCH3)
Yes, I certainly agree the usability aspect is really important. There seems to be a valid distinction to be drawn between *representing* the research process - and the information within it - and *interacting* with that process. SOC has a role in both surely, but it's the latter which this discussion seems to be focusing on.
Re: Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities 3 (SOCH3)
Yes, I certainly agree the usability aspect is really important. There seems to be a valid distinction to be drawn between *representing* the research process - and the information within it - and *interacting* with that process. SOC has a role in both surely, but it's the latter which this discussion seems to be focusing on.
Re: Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities 3 (SOCH3)
I know that the web-page orientation is very strong these days. Part of what Pliny is about is to challenge what it seems to me to be our tendancy to tailor our thinking about Digital Humanities applications and what is possible specifically so that applications can be delivered as web pages, and seem uninterested in exploring things that web browsers don't do that might interest our community.
To me, at least, annotation is rather similar to markup. We use markup editors rather than the browser to create TEI documents rather than the browser and expect, say, people taking up TEI to load one (say, Oxygen) and install it (no complaints about the process then!) so that they can participate in the act of creating TEI documents.
I'm afraid, James, that I am not convinced that Pliny needs be complex to install. On a PC it is set up to use a standard installer like most other pieces of software use. It is no more complex to install than Oxygen is. On the Mac it has been bundled like a Mac application that one simply puts in the applications folder. What is complicated about it?
So, perhaps I don't really understand James's points yet!