This document summarizes a presentation given by Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann at WWW 2012 in Lyon on April 20, 2012 about the use of semantics in digital humanities. The presentation discusses how digital humanities projects use semantic technologies like aggregation, modeling, and digital heuristics. It provides examples of projects like Discovery Corpus, HyperNietzsche, Talia, SemLib, and Shared Canvas. The presentation raises issues around modeling meaning, context, interpretation and logic in digital humanities and questions how semantic the semantic web is from a digital humanities perspective.
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Semantic Web research anno 2006:main streams, popular falacies, current statu...Frank van Harmelen
This keynote at the Cooperative Intelligent Agents Workshop was a good opportunity to give my view on the current state of Semantic Web research: what is it about, what is it not about, what has been achieved, what remains to be done. (Includes the now infamous slide "What's it like to be a machine")
Solid: An Ecology of Digital Being [@SLA Europe October 28, 2020]Teodora Petkova
This talk is about Solid and our digital footprint. It will walk through the conceptual underpinnings of Solid, its socio-technical implications and a couple of possible and plausible future Solid might hold for libraries.
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Also, you may like to check out the youtube playlist I assembled im preparation to this talk & workshop: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhXEPPnT87bzAUEuPZvXy4vC6xuIH8hoZ
Many schools have shown in the past years to have a clear understanding of what digital sustainability and data sovereignity really mean.
The use of Free Software for education of free software web tools and data in data centers located on our territory, South Tyrol, are the base ingredients for a real cloud for learners.
Nextcloud, LibreOffice, Moodle, ILIAS, Chamilo, Big Blue Button are just a few of the main ingredients used.
We are not re-inventing the wheel.
We are just doing and trying to spread an idea of cloud for schools that other countries and cities are also doing:
E.g. the city of Barcelona with its Plan for the Democratic Digitalisation of Education where Xnet and a group of families presented the first version of the DD digital educational infrastructure, a pioneering comprehensive workspace that aggregates free and auditable software tools in a single suite offering data sovereignty and protecting the digital rights of students and teachers.
This important project is one example of great effort which deserves to be spread all over Europe, reused and supported by public administrations.
Linked Open Data and data-driven journalismPia Jøsendal
A keynote held at the Media 3.0 seminar in Bergen. It is an introductionary presentation of simple key elements of linked open data. It adresses media and journalists, what data driven journalism can look like and why they should care about what linked open data can offer.
Walking Our Way to the Web - Fabien Gandon
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The prospect of Walking our Way to the Web may sound strange to contemporary readers of this article for whom the Web is omnipresent. However, the slogan of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been, for years, and remains today, to lead “the Web to its full potential” meaning we haven’t reached that potential yet, whatever it is. The first architect of the Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee, said in an interview in 2009: “The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past”. And he is still very active, together with the W3C members and Web experts world-wide, in proposing evolutions of the Web architecture to improve its growing usages and applications. In this article we will review the path that led us to the actual Web, the shape it is taking now and the possible evolutions, good and bad, we can identify today. This will lead us to consider the distance that we witness between the initial vision and the reality of the Web today, and to reflect on the possible divergence between the potential we see in the Web and the directions it could take. Our goal in this article is to reflect on how we could walk the delicate path to the full potential of the Web, finding the missing links and avoiding the one too many links.
Breaking Out of the Walled Garden: Lessons Learned in Moving Library Linked D...OCLC
Presented by Jean Godby at the Minitex Technical Services Symposium, December 6, 2017, St. Paul, MN
For the past seven years, OCLC has conducted research and participated in standards initiatives whose goal is to pave the way for the adoption of the Linked Data paradigm as a next-generation solution for the description of resources managed by libraries. With this experience as a backdrop, I will try to tell the story of the library sector's experience with Linked Data. In early experiments, the library community’s legacy data stores were re-imagined as inventories of real-world Things, which could be mechanically converted to RDF and published as Linked Data. But we soon learned that the publication of data in a different format is not enough, and progress stalled. To achieve a higher level of acceptance, we are being asked to demonstrate more rigorously how Linked Data is an improvement over the status quo. At the end of this talk, I will describe promising results from new projects now underway.
Poetry can be found nearly everywhere you look in the tech world. It can certainly be found in the cloud and today’s thriving open technology communities. Never have there been such an abundance and sophistication among open source projects. These communities are producing some of today’s most important and sophisticated technology that will serve as the backbone for an exciting future in cloud, cognitive and data/analytics. It is in this spirit that we decided to pose the #CloudHaiku challenge to some of today’s most brilliant minds in cloud and open tech. Enjoy the result!
Digital and Post-digital Conditions: Challenges for Nexts Arts EducationsBenjamin Jörissen
Keynote, Int. Winterschool "Spectra of Transformation", Akademie für Schultheater und performative Bildung, Nürnberg, 21.2.2017
Also, you may like to check out the youtube playlist I assembled im preparation to this talk & workshop: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhXEPPnT87bzAUEuPZvXy4vC6xuIH8hoZ
Many schools have shown in the past years to have a clear understanding of what digital sustainability and data sovereignity really mean.
The use of Free Software for education of free software web tools and data in data centers located on our territory, South Tyrol, are the base ingredients for a real cloud for learners.
Nextcloud, LibreOffice, Moodle, ILIAS, Chamilo, Big Blue Button are just a few of the main ingredients used.
We are not re-inventing the wheel.
We are just doing and trying to spread an idea of cloud for schools that other countries and cities are also doing:
E.g. the city of Barcelona with its Plan for the Democratic Digitalisation of Education where Xnet and a group of families presented the first version of the DD digital educational infrastructure, a pioneering comprehensive workspace that aggregates free and auditable software tools in a single suite offering data sovereignty and protecting the digital rights of students and teachers.
This important project is one example of great effort which deserves to be spread all over Europe, reused and supported by public administrations.
Linked Open Data and data-driven journalismPia Jøsendal
A keynote held at the Media 3.0 seminar in Bergen. It is an introductionary presentation of simple key elements of linked open data. It adresses media and journalists, what data driven journalism can look like and why they should care about what linked open data can offer.
Walking Our Way to the Web - Fabien Gandon
The Web: Scientific Creativity, Technological Innovation and Society
XXVIII Conference on Contemporary Philosophy and Methodology of Science
9 and 10 March 2023
University of A Coruña
The prospect of Walking our Way to the Web may sound strange to contemporary readers of this article for whom the Web is omnipresent. However, the slogan of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been, for years, and remains today, to lead “the Web to its full potential” meaning we haven’t reached that potential yet, whatever it is. The first architect of the Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee, said in an interview in 2009: “The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past”. And he is still very active, together with the W3C members and Web experts world-wide, in proposing evolutions of the Web architecture to improve its growing usages and applications. In this article we will review the path that led us to the actual Web, the shape it is taking now and the possible evolutions, good and bad, we can identify today. This will lead us to consider the distance that we witness between the initial vision and the reality of the Web today, and to reflect on the possible divergence between the potential we see in the Web and the directions it could take. Our goal in this article is to reflect on how we could walk the delicate path to the full potential of the Web, finding the missing links and avoiding the one too many links.
Breaking Out of the Walled Garden: Lessons Learned in Moving Library Linked D...OCLC
Presented by Jean Godby at the Minitex Technical Services Symposium, December 6, 2017, St. Paul, MN
For the past seven years, OCLC has conducted research and participated in standards initiatives whose goal is to pave the way for the adoption of the Linked Data paradigm as a next-generation solution for the description of resources managed by libraries. With this experience as a backdrop, I will try to tell the story of the library sector's experience with Linked Data. In early experiments, the library community’s legacy data stores were re-imagined as inventories of real-world Things, which could be mechanically converted to RDF and published as Linked Data. But we soon learned that the publication of data in a different format is not enough, and progress stalled. To achieve a higher level of acceptance, we are being asked to demonstrate more rigorously how Linked Data is an improvement over the status quo. At the end of this talk, I will describe promising results from new projects now underway.
Poetry can be found nearly everywhere you look in the tech world. It can certainly be found in the cloud and today’s thriving open technology communities. Never have there been such an abundance and sophistication among open source projects. These communities are producing some of today’s most important and sophisticated technology that will serve as the backbone for an exciting future in cloud, cognitive and data/analytics. It is in this spirit that we decided to pose the #CloudHaiku challenge to some of today’s most brilliant minds in cloud and open tech. Enjoy the result!
1. The Web & Digital Humanities:
What about Semantics?
Lyon, WWW 2012
20 April 2012
Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / School of Library and Information Science
stefan.gradmann@ibi.hu-berlin.de
1
2. Overview
What are 'Digital Humanities'?
How do they use 'semantic' technology?
Issues
Signification and Meaning
Text, Context, Subtext
Interpretation
Logic
How 'semantic' is the Semantic Web – as seen
from the DH perspective?
“Thinking in the Graph” - will Digital Humanists
ever do so?
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 2
3. What are 'Digital Humanities'?
A new discipline? Old disciplines turning 'digital'?
“a field that is endlessly wrestling with its self-
definition” (Tara L. Andrews)
Or again Stephen Ramsay on “Who's in and Who's
Out?” (http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/08/whos-in-and-whos-out.html)
All scholarly efforts concerned with 'understanding'
and 'interpretation' (e. g. literary criticism) in the
digital and making use of digital instruments (e.
g. digital narratology)
As opposed (?) to empirically grounded scientific
approaches (there are no “digital sciences”!)
Risk of regression into sterile discourse of “two
cultures” (C. P. Snow)
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 3
4. … and how do they use
'semantic' technologies?
3 examples
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 4
5. Processing of source data in the
Humanities: aggregation ...
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 5
6. ... modeling ...
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 6
7. ... and Digital Heuristics?
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 7
8. Good Practices and Better Practices
COST A32, Discovery, SemLib, Shared Canvas
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
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13. Talia: Refactoring Hyper with
Semantic Web Technology
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 13
14. Generating Stemmata
based on Inferencing (1)
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 14
15. Generating Stemmata
based on Inferencing (2)
Abandoned!
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
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16. Interpretation: Muruca
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
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17. SwickyNotes: Ontology Based
Annotation as Linked Open Data
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
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18. SwickyNotes:
Selecting Ontologies
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 18
19. “Cretans are always Liars”
… annotated
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 19
20. SemLib
SemLib (http://www.semlibproject.eu/) is a
continuation of Discovery in a EU funded project under
FP7 working on
A Tool to export existing metadata in RDF and publish it
as Linked Data (Web of Data);
A Semantic Annotation System, to exploit user-
generated RDF metadata and publish it as Linked
Data;
A Semantic Recommender System, to use Linked Data
to improve searching and browsing in the DLs.
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 20
21. Shared Canvas
Shared Canvas (http://www.shared-canvas.org)
is about annotation again – but in a much
more sophisticated data model enabling
multiple and potentially concurrent
layered annotations.
Demo at http://www.shared-canvas.org/impl/demo1/
Common traits
Use of RDF as underlying technology
Emulation of well known annotation functionality on the
Web
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 21
22. Scholarly Use of Semantic Technology
… beyond Emulation of Annotation
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 22
24. Digital Humanities Functionality
(WP3)
Can we enable digital scholarship building on combined
EDM metadata and digital surrogates ...
… building on an ontological, granular representation of
John Unsworth's scholarly primitives (or their successors
according to Blanke/Hedges 2011)?
And what is the use of the resulting increasingly complex
social semantic scholarly graph that extends the EDM
data with RDF statements such as
VersionA – isSuccessorOf – VersionB
ScribeY – copiedFrom – ScribeZ
Statement1 – contradicts - Statement2
→ what do you obtain from on inferencing on this graph …
→ and which are the limitations of such an approach?
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 24
25. WP3: Digital Humanities Related
Engineering
Goal: lower the barriers for digital content curation by
providing an integrated, flexible, semantic based environment
targeted to digital humanities scholars
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 25
26. Contextualisation
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
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27. For Discussion
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 27
28. Modelling Documents as RDF Aggregations
generates new questions ...
B
Where do resource
A aggregations 'start'?
Where do they 'end'?
And what constitutes
document
boundaries??
And which node was
connected to which
one at a given
C time???
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 28
29. Aggregations and Context:
Calculating Closeness
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 29
30. How 'semantic' is it – as seen
from the DH perspective?
„I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it
should have been Giant Global Graph!“ (TBL,
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215)
From a DH perspective, there is not much semantics here
…
… but the attribute has already been burnt, anyway :)
“Thinking in the Graph” (TBL) - will DH ever do so?
Our breakfast will not be in the Graph, nor other essentials
But the bulk of our scholarship will be there quite soon, and we
start realizing this
→ Time for the Linked Data Community to prepare for new
challenges
The discussion should not be about infrastructure but
about epistemological foundations: this is where the
issues are located!
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Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 30
31. Issues
Signification and Meaning
... much more than just names pointing to things
How to model diachronous aspects?
Text, Context, Subtext
What about the explicit, the implicit and the things that
are not said at all?
Interpretation
Is inherently non-deterministic!
Logic: the AI rathole has never been appealing for DH
Need of support for non-monotonous, non-
deterministic, modal reasoning strategies
Linked Data Quality, Versioning, Provenance ...
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 31
32. Thank you!
The Web & Digital Humanities: What about Semantics?
Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 32
33. Selected Reading
Martin Doerr, Stefan Gradmann, Steffen Hennicke, Antoine Isaac, Carlo
Meghini, Herbert van de Sompel (2010): The Europeana Data Model.
IFLA 2010 (Gothenburg). Session on „Libraries and the Semantic Web“.
http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/149-doerr-en.pdf
Stefan Gradmann (2010): Knowledge = Information in Context: on the
Importance of Semantic Contextualisation in Europeana. Europeana
White Paper 1.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32110457/Europeana-White-Paper-1
John Unsworth (2000): Scholarly Primitives. What methods do
humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools
reflect this? In the seminar on Humanities Computing, King's College,
London.
http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html
Tobias Blanke, Mark Hedges (2011): Scholarly primitives. Building
institutional infrastructure for humanities e-Science. Future Generation
Computer Systems, Available online 13 July 2011,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X11001178
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Stefan Gradmann. Lyon / WWW 2012. 20 April 2012 33