Exploring scholarly data with Rexplore.

Despite the large number and variety of tools and services available today for exploring scholarly data, current support is still very limited in the context of sensemaking tasks, which go beyond standard search and ranking of authors and publications, and focus instead on i) understanding the dynamics of research areas, ii) relating authors ‘semantically’ (e.g., in terms of common interests or shared academic trajectories), or iii) performing fine-grained academic expert search along multiple dimensions. To address this gap we have developed a novel tool, Rexplore, which integrates statistical analysis, semantic technologies, and visual analytics to provide effective support for exploring and making sense of scholarly data. Here, we describe the main innovative elements of the tool and we present the results from a task-centric empirical evaluation, which shows that Rexplore is highly effective at providing support for the aforementioned sensemaking tasks. In addition, these results are robust both with respect to the background of the users (i.e., expert analysts vs. ‘ordinary’ users) and also with respect to whether the tasks are selected by the evaluators or proposed by the users themselves

Linking with Meaning: Ontological Hypertext for Scholars

The links in ontological hypermedia are defined according to the relationships between real-world objects. An ontology that models the significant objects in a scholar’s world can be used toward producing a consistently interlinked research literature. Currently the papers that are available online are mainly divided between subject- and publisher-specific archives, with little or no interoperability. This paper addresses the issue of ontological interlinking, presenting two experimental systems whose hypertext links embody ontologies based on the activities of researchers and scholars

Some thoughts on the importance of open source and open access for emerging digital scholarship

Both the open source and the open access movements have their roots in the ‘hard’ sciences rather than in the social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). They have been concerned, traditionally, with open access to source code for computational data processing and with open access to scienti?c information published as journal articles. Still, the basic assumption of the present contribution is that there is a specific open source and open access agenda within the SSH and that this may affect these disciplines—once such an agenda is fully in place — in a way hardly conceivable in the ‘hard’ sciences. However, understanding the full impact and potential of such approaches in the SSH requires reflection upon broader methodological issues. Two vectors or primary oppositions are of specific interest in this respect: the scholarly information continuum as a whole and its evolution from print based to electronic working paradigms and the revolutionary changes that can be foreseen as a consequence the speci?c difference of the SSH as opposed to the Science-TechnologyMedicine (STM) culture of relating signi?ers to signi?cates and the specific impact of the digital revolution resulting from this specific difference. Exploring these two vectors this contribution will try to indicate constituent elements of an ‘open’ agenda for the digital humanities

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10