Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Medieval Manuscript Research

Medieval manuscript research is a complex, fragmented, multilingual field of knowledge, which is difficult to navigate, analyse and exploit. Though printed sources are still of great importance and value to researchers, there are now many services on the Web, some commercial and many in the public domain. At present, these services have to be consulted separately and individually. They employ a range of different descriptive standards and vocabularies, and use a variety of technologies to make their information available on the Web. This chapter proposes a new approach to organizing the international collaborative infrastructure for interlinking knowledge and research about medieval European manuscripts, based on technologies associated with the Semantic Web and the Linked Data movement. This collaborative infrastructure will be an open space on the Web where information about medieval manuscripts can be shared, stored, exchanged and updated for research purposes. It will be possible to ask large-scale research questions across the virtual global manuscript collection, in a quicker and more effective way than has ever been feasible in the past. The proposed infrastructure will focus on building links between data and will provide the basis for new kinds of services which exploit these data. It will not aim to impose a single metadata standard on existing manuscript services, but will build on existing databases and vocabularies. The article describes the architecture, services and data which will comprise this infrastructure, and discusses strategies for making th challenging and exciting goal a reality

Towards a Political Theory of Openness

A review of: Nathaniel TkaczWikipedia and the Politics of OpennessUniversity of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015ISBN 9780226192307 US$25.0

Manuscripts of Sir Thomas Phillipps in North American Institutions

The manuscript collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps was almost certainly the largest private collection ever assembled. Its dispersal during the century after his death in 1872 scattered his manuscripts into public and private collections around the world. These included many collections in North America, several of which now count former Phillipps manuscripts among their greatest treasures. This paper examines the extent to which Phillipps manuscripts are now held in institutional collections in North America and traces the history of their acquisition

Sharing humanities data for e-research: conceptual and technical issues

The humanities, as defined by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, encompass the following disciplines: Archaeology; Asian Studies; Classical Studies; English; European Languages and Cultures; History; Linguistics; Philosophy, Religion and the History of Ideas; Cultural and Communication Studies; the Arts. Researchers in some of these fields employ quantitative and qualitative methodologies similar to those used in the sciences and social sciences, but most research in the humanities is perceived as distinctive and different from research in other fields, both in its methodologies and in its approach to data. Archiving and sharing humanities data for reuse by other researchers is crucial in the development and application of e-research in the humanities. There has been considerable debate about the applicability of e-research in the humanities, particularly around the relevance of programmes to digitize source materials on a large scale. Conceptualized and designed properly, however, a humanities data archive can provide the platform on which data-intensive e-research can be based, and to which e-research processes and tools can be applied. This paper looks at the distinctive characteristics of humanities data, and examines how various models of the humanities research process help in understanding the meaning of 'data' in the humanities. It reviews existing services and approaches to building data archives and e-research services for the humanities, and the assumptions they make about the nature of data. It also analyses some conceptual and technical frameworks which could serve as the basis for future developments, focusing particularly on the place of Linked Open Data in building large-scale humanities e-research environments.PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

Sharing humanities data for e-research: conceptual and technical issues

The humanities, as defined by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, encompass the following disciplines: Archaeology; Asian Studies; Classical Studies; English; European Languages and Cultures; History; Linguistics; Philosophy, Religion and the History of Ideas; Cultural and Communication Studies; the Arts. Researchers in some of these fields employ quantitative and qualitative methodologies similar to those used in the sciences and social sciences, but most research in the humanities is perceived as distinctive and different from research in other fields, both in its methodologies and in its approach to data. Archiving and sharing humanities data for reuse by other researchers is crucial in the development and application of e-research in the humanities. There has been considerable debate about the applicability of e-research in the humanities, particularly around the relevance of programmes to digitize source materials on a large scale. Conceptualized and designed properly, however, a humanities data archive can provide the platform on which data-intensive e-research can be based, and to which e-research processes and tools can be applied. This paper looks at the distinctive characteristics of humanities data, and examines how various models of the humanities research process help in understanding the meaning of 'data' in the humanities. It reviews existing services and approaches to building data archives and e-research services for the humanities, and the assumptions they make about the nature of data. It also analyses some conceptual and technical frameworks which could serve as the basis for future developments, focusing particularly on the place of Linked Open Data in building large-scale humanities e-research environments.PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

Linking and sharing data in the humanities and creative arts: building the HuNI Virtual Laboratory

The Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) is one of the national Virtual Laboratories that are being developed as part of the Australian government\u27s National e-Research Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) programme. This paper examines the methodologies and technical architecture being deployed by HuNI to link and share Australian data in the humanities and creative arts

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Building and Using a Linked Open Data Environment for Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Studies

“Mapping Manuscript Migrations” is a digital humanities project that brings together three distinct data sets about the histories of more than 215,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for browsing, searching, and visualization. Four leading institutions from Great Britain, France, Finland, and the United States collaborated on this project, pooling their expertise in Semantic Web technologies and medieval manuscript curation and research, as well as contributing their own data from the three contrasting datasets. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, the Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and the Bibale database from the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes--are brought together in a Linked Open Data environment, constructed by the team members from the e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the Semantic Computing Group at Aalto University in Finland, to aggregate, enhance, and present the data, with a data model based on the CIDOC-CRM and FRBROO ontologies. While also considering the challenges and successes of this international collaboration, Dr Lynn Ransom (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania) will show how the project builds on the data and functionality of the source datasets and enables new approaches to research in manuscript history and provenance

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Digging into Data for the History and Provenance of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Mapping Manuscript Migrations is a new two-year project funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform in the fourth round of its Digging into Data Challenge. The project is a collaboration between four international partners: the University of Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT) in Paris, and Aalto University in Helsinki. The project aims to combine data from various different sources to enable the large-scale analysis of the history and provenance of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts

Roundtable on Australian National Data Service

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) (http://ands.org.au/index.html) provides funding to foster partnerships and build infrastructure to enable better local data management in Australian universities and research institutions. Begun in 2008, ANDS has received $72 million of Commonwealth funding. ANDS aims to establish infrastructure and services for an Australian research data commons in which research data with enduring value and the potential for reuse, is preserved and managed for continuing accessibility