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New Directions in e-Science for the Arts and Humanities

Stuart Dunn

Tobias Blanke

Centre for e-Research, King’s College London

www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch

British Academy, 12th May 2010

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• "e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that

will enable it." - Sir John Taylor, Former Director General of Research Councils, 2000

• “the development and deployment of a networked infrastructure and culture through which resources – (…) – can be shared in a secure environment, and in which new forms of collaboration can emerge, and new and advanced methodologies explored.” (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/scoping-survey)

- Sheila Anderson, Director, Centre for e-Research, King’s College London, 2007

“[n]ot only [to] provide unprecedented access to a variety of cultural artifacts but also [to] make it possible to see these artifacts in completely new ways … digital technology [that] can offer us new ways of seeing art, new ways of bearing witness to history, new ways of hearing and remembering human languages, new ways of reading texts, ancient and modern.’

- ‘Our Cultural Commonwealth, ACLS, 2006

Old directions in e-Science

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Using networks to connect resources

• Grids to allow virtual computing across “admin domains”– Virtual digital libraries,

virtual museums, virtual observatories

• Technology that was first developed and adopted in the sciences…

People

Data

Computation

People

Data

Computation

Old directions in e-Science

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The complexity deluge: some questions• How do we deal with large data sets from automated simulations?

• How do we understand heterogeneous and distributed resources such as artworks, texts, artefacts?

• How can semantically different resources be linked and compared?

• What is/will be the impact of massive digitization programmes such as Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/) on cultural heritage research?

• Experiences - BVREH...

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HiTHeR

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Impact on Community

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Arts and Humanities e-Science in the UK: 2007 -

•Helen Bailey: Relocating Choreographic Process: The impact of Grid technologies and collaborative memory on the documentation of practice-led research in dance

•Alan Bowman: Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents

•Tim Crawford: Purcell Plus: Exploring an eScience Methodology for Musicologists

•Vincent Gaffney: Medieval Warfare on the Grid: The Case of Manzikert

•Sally MacDonald, E-Curator: 3D colour scans for remote object identification and assessment

•Julian Richards, Archaeotools: Data mining, facetted classification and E-archaeology

•monica schraefel, musicSpace: Using and Evaluating e-Science Design Methods and Technologies to Improve Access to Heterogeneous Music Resources for Musicology

http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/initiative-projects

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Mapping e-Science to the Digital Humanities

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The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

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Synchonicité

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A ‘reconstruction’ is process of decision making

Material reconstructions based on subjective interpretation of observation

Sir Arthur Evans and the Palace of Minos at Knossos

© Hellenic Ministry of Culture

Example 1: Reconstruction of archaeological features

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© Copyright Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum

...so can we enhance this by observing (contemporary) human movement through (historical) features...

Focus always on (extant) material features - and their documentation

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Motion in Place PlatformBedford, KCL, Reading, Sussex

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Capturing the ephemeral

• Application to other embodied practices

• New modes of cultural heritage reconstruction based on use of space

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Performing the Site

• Embodied performance of the site as palimpsest

• Performance of absent presence

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Example 2: Documentation of gallery experiences

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• Assumption that the camera (or the geovisualization) never lies (enforced crispness)

• Some attempts to improve this model, e.g. anchor theory, buffering procedures

Example 3: Geographic information extraction

• Most web mapping applications are vecctor based

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Gazetteer ID

Geometric location

ToponymFeature type

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From the parsed text From a reference gazetteer

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Problems:-

• Identification of place names (as opposed to [e.g.] person names)

• Disambiguation of place names (e.g. Belfast, Antrim versus Belfast, Maine)

• Document structure - inevitably affects how the Geoparser works with individual corpora

• Lack of standardized way of dealing with georeferencing

• Only point data

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• Projet Volterra: Access database with Perl script based publication; mainly text-based searches

• HGV: FileMaker Pro; German – use views to translate them

• InsAph XML database: XML data source in EpiDoc; overlap in time with Volterra

• Projet Volterra: Access database with Perl script based publication; mainly text-based searches

• HGV: FileMaker Pro; German – use views to translate them

• InsAph XML database: XML data source in EpiDoc; overlap in time with Volterra

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• Researcher investigating activities of individuals and patterns of relationships in a certain period by analysing the data from the Aphrodisias inscriptions and the legal legislation records.

• Query to search for text (name) across the datasets with dates in a particular range.

• Select all records from Volterra_DB and AIph_DB where Volterra_DB.Issuer (Actual) AIph_DB.translation = "Licinius“ and Volterra_DB.datum (preferred) between "200/01/01" AND "399/01/01", AIph_DB.notBefore > 0200 and AIph_DB.notAfter < 0399;

• Researcher investigating activities of individuals and patterns of relationships in a certain period by analysing the data from the Aphrodisias inscriptions and the legal legislation records.

• Query to search for text (name) across the datasets with dates in a particular range.

• Select all records from Volterra_DB and AIph_DB where Volterra_DB.Issuer (Actual) AIph_DB.translation = "Licinius“ and Volterra_DB.datum (preferred) between "200/01/01" AND "399/01/01", AIph_DB.notBefore > 0200 and AIph_DB.notAfter < 0399;

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Architecture

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Vision: Virtual Data Centre

Client

OGSA-DAI

HGV - MySQL

German-English

join table

Volterra – Access or

MySQL

…

JDB

C/

OD

BC

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Mapping e-Science to the Digital Humanities

Documenting ProcessDocumenting Process

Linking datasetsLinking datasetsDeveloping new

research questions

Developing new research questions

eSADE-Dance

MSpaceLAQUAT

Purcell

VERA

S. Dunn, S. Anderson and T. Blanke (forthcoming): ‘Methodological Commons: Arts and Humanities e-Science Fundamentals’. Phil Trans. A, Proceedings of AHM2009.

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- Technology provides new opportunities to document process

E-Science in the A&H

- Documentations of process thus produced can become part of the research outcome

- How?

- Processing data - not necessarily on Grids

- Linking data - (probably necessarily) in Clouds

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