The Humanities in a Global e-Infrastructure A Shopping-List

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The Humanities in a Global e-InfrastructureA
Shopping-List

• Gregory Crane, Perseus Project, Tufts
• Brian Fuchs, Internet Centre, Imperial College
• Dolores Iorizzo, Internet Centre, Imperial
  College

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Why e-infrastructure?

• Data-driven Science
• Global not regional models
• Interactive and Intelligent Digital Libraries
• Collaboration in Arts, Humanities and Sciences
• Pre-Enlightenment Europe - Mash-up technologies
• Epistemic Networks

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Why services?

• Synergy
• Build super-corpora
• Economy of scale
• Leverage existing services
• Possibilities of scale
• Analyze a document against the entire corpus of
  19 c. newspapers in English

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Global Grid Efforts in the Humanities

• Cyberinfrastructure ACLS/NSF
• DELOS
• DARIAH
• DRIVER
• D-GRID (Text Grid)
• OAI-ORE

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The Big Picture

• Leverage power of global grid networks in the
  science for the Humanities - EGEE
• Interrogation of large digital resources
• Metadata standards that work across the sciences,
  arts and humanities
• Semantic interoperability
• Web 2.0 (3.0) and GRID
• Web Services

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Services for the Humanities

• Catalogue services
• Named entity services
• Customisation services
• User-contribution services

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Catalogue ServicesSo far ...

• FRBR
• Document-granularity in collections, allowing us
  to ....
• identify and organize all editions, translations,
  commentaries, indices, and other documents
  related to a single text.

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Catalogue Services
Document chunk
Related Documents
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Catalogue Services What we need...

• Intra-document citation
• Ability to cite text-chunks
• Citation management
• Understand standard citation schemes
• E.g. Bekker and Stephanus
• Version analysis
• Compare versions of an historical text over its
  lifespan
• e.g. Lucretius
• Canonical text service
• Provide a benchmark text for each author

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Named Entity Services
Automatically Extracted Named Entities
Intra-document chunk
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Named Entity Services--Data Sources

• Language models
• Does est he is or he eats?
• Language models should give probabilities.
• Print gazetteers
• Historical gazetteers
• Dictionaries
• Digitized the Perseus LSJ
• Digital Wordnet
• Training sets for machine learning...
• Documents with labelled features.

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Customization / Personalisation
Personal Vocabulary Profile
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Customization--Data sources

• Personal profiles
• How often have I accessed features XYZ?
• What importance do I assign features XYZ?
• Voting / Recommendation
• readers who looked up words X, Y, and Z, also
  were interested in words M, N. and O.

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Structured User Contributions

• Resolution
• Is this Berlin, New Hampshire or Berlin, DE?
• Correction
• est means is here, not eat
• Annotation and Labelling
• This paragraph discusses gravity.

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Research Assessment Classicists rewarded for
digital projects

• A community of tenured faculty
• Chris Blackwell, Furman
• Gregory Crane, Tufts
• Helma Dik, Chicago
• Bruce Robertson , Mount Allison
• Jeff Rydberg-Cox, Missouri
• Charlotte Roueché, Kings College
• Ross Scaife, Kentucky
• Mark Schiefsky - Harvard
• Neel Smith, Holy Cross

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A Humanities e-infrastructurethe benefits

• Cross-semination in IR, authority services,
  personalization
• Basis for web 2.0 applications
• Better, more participatory interfaces for
  students
• Open academic and educational markets to wider
  audiences
• Link Cultural Heritage material to science,
  industry and tourism.