2018 |
Saving the Centenary’s digital heritage: recommendations for digital sustainability of First World War community commemoration activities (Technical Report) Benardou, Agiatis; Hughes, Lorna; Konstantelos, Leonidas 2018. @techreport{Benardou2018c, title = {Saving the Centenary’s digital heritage: recommendations for digital sustainability of First World War community commemoration activities}, author = {Agiatis Benardou and Lorna M. Hughes and Leonidas Konstantelos }, url = {http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/190714/1/190714.pdf}, year = {2018}, date = {2018-00-00}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {techreport} } |
2017 |
Scholarly Ontology: modelling scholarly practices. (Journal Article) Constantopoulos, Panos; Pertsas, Vagianos International Journal on Digital Libraries, Volume: 18 (3), Pages: 173–190, 2017, ISSN: 1432-5012. @article{Constantopoulos2016b, title = {Scholarly Ontology: modelling scholarly practices.}, author = {Panos Constantopoulos and Vagianos Pertsas}, doi = {10.1007/s00799-016-0169-3}, issn = {1432-5012}, year = {2017}, date = {2017-09-01}, journal = {International Journal on Digital Libraries}, volume = {18}, number = {3}, pages = {173–190}, publisher = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, abstract = {In this paper we present the Scholarly Ontology (SO), an ontology for modelling scholarly practices, inspired by business process modelling and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. The SO is based on empirical research and earlier models and is designed so as to incorporate related works through a modular structure. The SO is an elaboration of the domain-independent core part of the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology addressing the scholarly ecosystem of Digital Humanities. It thus provides a basis for developing domain-specific scholarly work ontologies springing from a common root. We define the basic concepts of the model and their semantic relations through four complementary perspectives on scholarly work: activity, procedure, resource and agency. As a use case we present a modelling example and argue on the purpose of use of the model through the presentation of indicative SPRQL and SQWRL queries that highlight the benefits of its serialization in RDFS. The SO includes an explicit treatment of intentionality and its interplay with functionality, captured by different parts of the model. We discuss the role of types as the semantic bridge between those two parts and explore several patterns that can be exploited in designing reusable access structures and conformance rules. Related taxonomies and ontologies and their possible reuse within the framework of SO are reviewed.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {article} } In this paper we present the Scholarly Ontology (SO), an ontology for modelling scholarly practices, inspired by business process modelling and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. The SO is based on empirical research and earlier models and is designed so as to incorporate related works through a modular structure. The SO is an elaboration of the domain-independent core part of the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology addressing the scholarly ecosystem of Digital Humanities. It thus provides a basis for developing domain-specific scholarly work ontologies springing from a common root. We define the basic concepts of the model and their semantic relations through four complementary perspectives on scholarly work: activity, procedure, resource and agency. As a use case we present a modelling example and argue on the purpose of use of the model through the presentation of indicative SPRQL and SQWRL queries that highlight the benefits of its serialization in RDFS. The SO includes an explicit treatment of intentionality and its interplay with functionality, captured by different parts of the model. We discuss the role of types as the semantic bridge between those two parts and explore several patterns that can be exploited in designing reusable access structures and conformance rules. Related taxonomies and ontologies and their possible reuse within the framework of SO are reviewed. |
DiMPO - a DARIAH infrastructure survey on digital practices and needs of European scholarship (Presentation) Dallas, Costis; Clivaz, Claire; and Chatzidiakou, Nephelie; Hadalin, Jurij; Gonzalez-Bianco, Elena; Immenhauser, Beat; Maryl, Maciej; Schneider, Gerlinde; Scholger, Walter; Tasovac, Toma; Vosyliute, Ingrida Presentation at the 6th AIUCD Annual Conference, Rome: Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale. , 2017. @misc{Dallas2017, title = {DiMPO - a DARIAH infrastructure survey on digital practices and needs of European scholarship}, author = {Costis Dallas and Claire Clivaz and and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Jurij Hadalin and Elena Gonzalez-Bianco and Beat Immenhauser and Maciej Maryl and Gerlinde Schneider and Walter Scholger and Toma Tasovac and Ingrida Vosyliute}, url = {https://www.conftool.net/aiucd2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&print=head&form_session=2}, year = {2017}, date = {2017-01-25}, abstract = {In 2015, the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO) Working Group of DARIAH-EU conducted a European survey on scholarly digital practices and needs, which was translated into ten languages and gathered 2’177 responses from humanities researchers residing in than 20 European countries. A project website is in preparation: http://observatory.dariah.eu (opening in January 2017). The summary of the main results is to be launched at the end of 2016 in a highlights report, presently being translated into the diverse languages of the team (French, German, Greek, Polish, Serbian, Spanish and perhaps more). The survey, the first of its kind in Europe, is a perfect case of multiculturalism and multilingualism, as well as transcultural and transnational collaboration and communication, in full alignment with the 2016 topic of the EADH day. In the next edition - scheduled for 2017 - we envisage the incorporation of questions specific to certain regions or countries so as to address the diversity of different cultural contexts. Our presentation will also underline the main results of the survey with the aim of encouraging debate on the current state of digital practice in the humanities across Europe, and to get vital feedback for the preparation of the next survey. The survey questionnaire consists of twenty-one questions designed to be relevant to researchers from different European countries and humanities disciplines. The main focus is on of specific research activities, methods and tools used by the researchers. After filtering and normalizing the dataset, the results were statistically analyzed using descriptive statistics, although simple tests of two-way association were also performed, to assess the relationship of particular responses to the respondents’ country of residence, discipline, academic status and other relevant factors. In addition to the consolidated European results, six national detailed profiles have been produced, namely for Austria, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and Switzerland. The findings suggest that the use of digital resources, methods, services and tools is widespread among European Humanities researchers. Used across the scholarly work lifecycle from data collection to publication and dissemination. Results add to our understanding of how users of digital resources, methods, services and tools conduct their research, and what they perceive as important for their work. This is important to ensure appropriate priorities for digital infrastructures, as well as activities and strategies for digital inception, which will shape future initiatives regarding the diverse communities of researchers in the arts and humanities. Ultimately, the analysis of digital practices can provide original data and information to strengthen our understanding of how humanists work, and of Humanities proper. Stanford University defines the humanities “as the study of how people process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world”. Understanding the needs of humanists, the main purpose of the DiMPO European survey, is a sine qua non condition to ensure that the fundamental purpose of the arts and humanities continues to be served in the digital era.}, howpublished = {Presentation at the 6th AIUCD Annual Conference, Rome: Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } In 2015, the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO) Working Group of DARIAH-EU conducted a European survey on scholarly digital practices and needs, which was translated into ten languages and gathered 2’177 responses from humanities researchers residing in than 20 European countries. A project website is in preparation: http://observatory.dariah.eu (opening in January 2017). The summary of the main results is to be launched at the end of 2016 in a highlights report, presently being translated into the diverse languages of the team (French, German, Greek, Polish, Serbian, Spanish and perhaps more). The survey, the first of its kind in Europe, is a perfect case of multiculturalism and multilingualism, as well as transcultural and transnational collaboration and communication, in full alignment with the 2016 topic of the EADH day. In the next edition - scheduled for 2017 - we envisage the incorporation of questions specific to certain regions or countries so as to address the diversity of different cultural contexts. Our presentation will also underline the main results of the survey with the aim of encouraging debate on the current state of digital practice in the humanities across Europe, and to get vital feedback for the preparation of the next survey. The survey questionnaire consists of twenty-one questions designed to be relevant to researchers from different European countries and humanities disciplines. The main focus is on of specific research activities, methods and tools used by the researchers. After filtering and normalizing the dataset, the results were statistically analyzed using descriptive statistics, although simple tests of two-way association were also performed, to assess the relationship of particular responses to the respondents’ country of residence, discipline, academic status and other relevant factors. In addition to the consolidated European results, six national detailed profiles have been produced, namely for Austria, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and Switzerland. The findings suggest that the use of digital resources, methods, services and tools is widespread among European Humanities researchers. Used across the scholarly work lifecycle from data collection to publication and dissemination. Results add to our understanding of how users of digital resources, methods, services and tools conduct their research, and what they perceive as important for their work. This is important to ensure appropriate priorities for digital infrastructures, as well as activities and strategies for digital inception, which will shape future initiatives regarding the diverse communities of researchers in the arts and humanities. Ultimately, the analysis of digital practices can provide original data and information to strengthen our understanding of how humanists work, and of Humanities proper. Stanford University defines the humanities “as the study of how people process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world”. Understanding the needs of humanists, the main purpose of the DiMPO European survey, is a sine qua non condition to ensure that the fundamental purpose of the arts and humanities continues to be served in the digital era. |
2016 |
Digital Methods in the Humanities: Understanding and Describing their Use across the Disciplines (Book Chapter) Constantopoulos, Panos; Hughes, Lorna; Dallas, Costis Schreibman, Susan; Siemens, Ray; Unsworth, John (Ed.): A New Companion to Digital Humanities, Chapter 11, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016, ISBN: 9781118680599. @inbook{Constantopoulos2016, title = {Digital Methods in the Humanities: Understanding and Describing their Use across the Disciplines}, author = {Panos Constantopoulos and Lorna Hughes and Costis Dallas }, editor = {Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens and John Unsworth}, doi = {doi: 10.1002/9781118680605.ch11 }, isbn = {9781118680599}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-11-25}, booktitle = {A New Companion to Digital Humanities}, publisher = {John Wiley & Sons, Ltd}, chapter = {11}, abstract = {This chapter considers the impact and reach of digital methods in the humanities. Digital methods are a core element of what has been called the “methodological commons”: the intellectual, disciplinary, and methodological framework that underlies the conceptualization and understanding of digital humanities. The term “method” is used to refer to the computer-based (also called information and communications technology, or ICT) techniques for the creation, analysis, communication, and dissemination of digital research. This chapter revisits the theory of computer-based methods as a core construct (or “scholarly primitive”) of the digital humanities. It reviews two significant collaborative research support initiatives to investigate the use of ICT methods in the humanities, and explores the interdependencies between digital methods and the content and computer-based tools they are used with across these disciplines. The chapter also discusses recent initiatives to formalize the expression of ICT methods in the humanities, exploring how an emerging ontology of digital methods might contribute to wider adoption and understanding of digital humanities.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inbook} } This chapter considers the impact and reach of digital methods in the humanities. Digital methods are a core element of what has been called the “methodological commons”: the intellectual, disciplinary, and methodological framework that underlies the conceptualization and understanding of digital humanities. The term “method” is used to refer to the computer-based (also called information and communications technology, or ICT) techniques for the creation, analysis, communication, and dissemination of digital research. This chapter revisits the theory of computer-based methods as a core construct (or “scholarly primitive”) of the digital humanities. It reviews two significant collaborative research support initiatives to investigate the use of ICT methods in the humanities, and explores the interdependencies between digital methods and the content and computer-based tools they are used with across these disciplines. The chapter also discusses recent initiatives to formalize the expression of ICT methods in the humanities, exploring how an emerging ontology of digital methods might contribute to wider adoption and understanding of digital humanities. |
MORe : A micro-service oriented aggregator (Paper in Conference Proceedings) Gavrilis, Dimitris; Nomikos, Vagelis; Kravvaritis, Konstantinos; Angelis, Stavros; Papatheodorou, Christos; Constantopoulos, Panos Volume: 672 of the series Communications in Computer and Information Science Springer International Publishing, 2016, ISBN: 978-3-319-49157-8. @inproceedings{Gavrilis2016, title = {MORe : A micro-service oriented aggregator}, author = {Dimitris Gavrilis and Vagelis Nomikos and Konstantinos Kravvaritis and Stavros Angelis and Christos Papatheodorou and Panos Constantopoulos }, url = {http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319491561}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-49157-8}, isbn = {978-3-319-49157-8}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-11-22}, issuetitle = {Metadata and Semantics Research 10th International Conference, Proceedings}, volume = {672}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, series = {Communications in Computer and Information Science}, abstract = {Metadata aggregation is a task increasingly encountered in many projects involving data repositories. The small number of specialized software for this task indicates that in most cases customized software is used to perform aggregation, which in turn relates to the highly complex tasks and architectures involved. In this paper, the metadata and object repository aggregator (MORe) is presented, which has been effectively used in numerous projects and provides an easy and flexible way of aggregating metadata from multiple sources and in multiple formats. Its flexible and scalable architecture exploits cloud technologies and allows storing content into different storage systems, defining workflows dynamically and extending the system with external services. One of the most important aspects of MORe is its curation/enrichment services which allow curation managers to automatically apply and execute enrichment plans employing enrichment micro-services in order to aggregated data.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } Metadata aggregation is a task increasingly encountered in many projects involving data repositories. The small number of specialized software for this task indicates that in most cases customized software is used to perform aggregation, which in turn relates to the highly complex tasks and architectures involved. In this paper, the metadata and object repository aggregator (MORe) is presented, which has been effectively used in numerous projects and provides an easy and flexible way of aggregating metadata from multiple sources and in multiple formats. Its flexible and scalable architecture exploits cloud technologies and allows storing content into different storage systems, defining workflows dynamically and extending the system with external services. One of the most important aspects of MORe is its curation/enrichment services which allow curation managers to automatically apply and execute enrichment plans employing enrichment micro-services in order to aggregated data. |
Do you remember the first time?: Case Studies on digital content reuse in the context of Europeana Cloud (Presentation) Benardou, Agiatis; Garnett, Vicky; Papaki, Eliza Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress , 2016. @misc{Benardou2016, title = {Do you remember the first time?: Case Studies on digital content reuse in the context of Europeana Cloud}, author = {Agiatis Benardou and Vicky Garnett and Eliza Papaki}, url = {https://www.hrionline.ac.uk/dhc/2016/paper/84}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-09-01}, abstract = {This poster presents work on documenting user needs in the Humanities and Social Sciences as illustrated through Case Studies in the context of the Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’ project. Conducted as part of a wider methodological effort including desk research, expert fora and a web survey, methodology and findings of actual use of innovative digital tools and services will be visually represented. This work will form the basis of the Europeana Research Case Studies which will seek to gather and process an evidence-based record of the information practices, needs and scholarly methods in the respective communities.}, howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } This poster presents work on documenting user needs in the Humanities and Social Sciences as illustrated through Case Studies in the context of the Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’ project. Conducted as part of a wider methodological effort including desk research, expert fora and a web survey, methodology and findings of actual use of innovative digital tools and services will be visually represented. This work will form the basis of the Europeana Research Case Studies which will seek to gather and process an evidence-based record of the information practices, needs and scholarly methods in the respective communities. |
Integrating data for archaeology (Paper in Conference Proceedings) Gavrilis, Dimitris; Fihn, Johan; Sebastian,; Olsson, Olof; Afiontzi, Eleni; Felicetti, Achille; Niccolucci, Franco 22nd Annual Meeting of EAA , Pages: 339-340, Saulius Jokuzys Publishing-Printing House, 2016. @inproceedings{Gavrilis2016c, title = {Integrating data for archaeology}, author = {Dimitris Gavrilis and Johan Fihn and Sebastian and Olof Olsson and Eleni Afiontzi and Achille Felicetti and Franco Niccolucci}, url = {http://eaavilnius2016.lt/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Book-Abstract-A4_08-23_net.pdf}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-07-30}, booktitle = {22nd Annual Meeting of EAA }, pages = {339-340}, publisher = {Saulius Jokuzys Publishing-Printing House}, abstract = {In the past years, infrastructure projects in the Archaeology domain have focused on data aggregation in order to bring to the end users the vast amount of information gathered from various organizations and stakeholders. The typical processes found in a data aggregation infrastructure include: ingestion, normalization, transformation and validation processes that mainly focus on the homogenization and cleaning of heterogenous data. A portal is usually employed to present this information to the end users and is met with limited success due to the vast information contained. In order to increase the quality of services that are provided to end users, the European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims at integrating this data by modelling the underlying domain and providing the technical framework for automatic integration of heterogeneous resources. The heart of the infrastructure lies in the underlying domain model: Ariadne Catalog Data Model (ACDM), a DCAT derived model which models a large number of entities such as Agents, Language resources, datasets, collections, reports, services, databases, etc. With the help of a of micro-service oriented architecture and a set of powerful enrichment micro-services all aggregated data are transformed into XML and RDF, annotated over subject, space and time with the help of AAT, Geonames and Perio.do thesauri (thus establishing a common reference) and interlinked with each other based on their structural or logical relationiships. The data integration services can mine for links among resources, link them together and against language resources such as vocabularies. Complex records can be split into their individual components, represented, enriched and stored separately while maintaining their identity using semantic linking. Each integrated resource is assigned a URI and published to: a) Virtuoso RDF Store in RDF which provides a SPARQL interface b) to Elastic Search in JSON which provides a powerful indexing mechanism that can help present and associate resources accurately in real-time. This approach can provide developers and creative industries with the means to create innovative applications and mine information from the RDF store. End users ranging from simple visitors to domain researchers can access this data through the infrastructure’s portal which is capable of hiding the complexity of this plethora of data, filter the results using a plethora of filters and present connected resources in a way that can help guide the user instead of confusing him/her. The technical infrastructure has been developed using various programming languages such as Java, PHP, Javascript, it is distributed spanning multiple virtual machines and brings together different established technologies and components. Both the technical infrastructure and the portal will be presented and demonstrated. }, howpublished = {In 22nd Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists: Conference Abstracts}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } In the past years, infrastructure projects in the Archaeology domain have focused on data aggregation in order to bring to the end users the vast amount of information gathered from various organizations and stakeholders. The typical processes found in a data aggregation infrastructure include: ingestion, normalization, transformation and validation processes that mainly focus on the homogenization and cleaning of heterogenous data. A portal is usually employed to present this information to the end users and is met with limited success due to the vast information contained. In order to increase the quality of services that are provided to end users, the European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims at integrating this data by modelling the underlying domain and providing the technical framework for automatic integration of heterogeneous resources. The heart of the infrastructure lies in the underlying domain model: Ariadne Catalog Data Model (ACDM), a DCAT derived model which models a large number of entities such as Agents, Language resources, datasets, collections, reports, services, databases, etc. With the help of a of micro-service oriented architecture and a set of powerful enrichment micro-services all aggregated data are transformed into XML and RDF, annotated over subject, space and time with the help of AAT, Geonames and Perio.do thesauri (thus establishing a common reference) and interlinked with each other based on their structural or logical relationiships. The data integration services can mine for links among resources, link them together and against language resources such as vocabularies. Complex records can be split into their individual components, represented, enriched and stored separately while maintaining their identity using semantic linking. Each integrated resource is assigned a URI and published to: a) Virtuoso RDF Store in RDF which provides a SPARQL interface b) to Elastic Search in JSON which provides a powerful indexing mechanism that can help present and associate resources accurately in real-time. This approach can provide developers and creative industries with the means to create innovative applications and mine information from the RDF store. End users ranging from simple visitors to domain researchers can access this data through the infrastructure’s portal which is capable of hiding the complexity of this plethora of data, filter the results using a plethora of filters and present connected resources in a way that can help guide the user instead of confusing him/her. The technical infrastructure has been developed using various programming languages such as Java, PHP, Javascript, it is distributed spanning multiple virtual machines and brings together different established technologies and components. Both the technical infrastructure and the portal will be presented and demonstrated. |
dariahTeach: online teaching beyond MOOCs (Presentation) Schreibman, Susan; Benardou, Agiatis; Clivaz, Claire; Durco, Matej; Huang, Marianne; Papaki, Eliza; Scagliola, Stef; Tasovac, Toma; Wissik, Tanja Paper presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference , 2016. @misc{Schreibman2016, title = {dariahTeach: online teaching beyond MOOCs}, author = {Susan Schreibman and Agiatis Benardou and Claire Clivaz and Matej Durco and Marianne Huang and Eliza Papaki and Stef Scagliola and Toma Tasovac and Tanja Wissik}, url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/292}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-07-11}, abstract = {Over the past few years innovation in the online teaching landscape had centred around MOOCs. The rhetoric around MOOCs has moved from an open platform providing free access to high-quality educational resources for millions around the world, to a for-profit model working with businesses to train prospective employees for today’s jobs (Manjoo, Selingo) #dariahTeach is adopting a different model in the production, dissemination, and promotion of high-quality, freely-available educational resources in DH for third-level. This paper will present the results of preliminary research carried out through a user study, a workshop on open educational resources, module, and platform design.}, howpublished = {Paper presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } Over the past few years innovation in the online teaching landscape had centred around MOOCs. The rhetoric around MOOCs has moved from an open platform providing free access to high-quality educational resources for millions around the world, to a for-profit model working with businesses to train prospective employees for today’s jobs (Manjoo, Selingo) #dariahTeach is adopting a different model in the production, dissemination, and promotion of high-quality, freely-available educational resources in DH for third-level. This paper will present the results of preliminary research carried out through a user study, a workshop on open educational resources, module, and platform design. |
Playing With Cultural Heritage Through Digital Gaming: The New Narrative of the ARK4 Project (Presentation) Benardou, Agiatis; Angeletaki, Alexandra; Chatzidiakou, Nephelie; Papaki, Eliza Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference , 2016. @misc{Benardou2016, title = {Playing With Cultural Heritage Through Digital Gaming: The New Narrative of the ARK4 Project}, author = {Agiatis Benardou and Alexandra Angeletaki and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Eliza Papaki }, url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/184}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-07-11}, abstract = {ARK4 aimed at investigating new paths of disseminating archival content using technology in order to create an interactive dialogue with the general public (Galani 2003, Tonta 2008), create engagement with collections and support learning (Prensky 2005). The project started with a pilot study, through a series of educational workshops already established by the institutions involved and a digital game to supplement the workshop design in which specific interactive digital platforms were explored by students. In its new phase, ARK4 will develop an interactive web platform incorporating all different types of digital gaming produced and also new content drawn from digital collections provided by the partners and Europeana repository. In this poster we illustrate the impact of digital technology gaming in the field of the contemporary museum and cultural heritage practice using empirical evidence collected from educational workshops held by the project ARK4. This is a project that is initiated by the NTNU University library in Trondheim, in collaboration with the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C. in Athens, Greece and financed by the National Library of Oslo, Norway and NTNU.}, howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } ARK4 aimed at investigating new paths of disseminating archival content using technology in order to create an interactive dialogue with the general public (Galani 2003, Tonta 2008), create engagement with collections and support learning (Prensky 2005). The project started with a pilot study, through a series of educational workshops already established by the institutions involved and a digital game to supplement the workshop design in which specific interactive digital platforms were explored by students. In its new phase, ARK4 will develop an interactive web platform incorporating all different types of digital gaming produced and also new content drawn from digital collections provided by the partners and Europeana repository. In this poster we illustrate the impact of digital technology gaming in the field of the contemporary museum and cultural heritage practice using empirical evidence collected from educational workshops held by the project ARK4. This is a project that is initiated by the NTNU University library in Trondheim, in collaboration with the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C. in Athens, Greece and financed by the National Library of Oslo, Norway and NTNU. |
Curating Community: Building a Communications Strategy For The European Association For Digital Humanities (Presentation) Papaki, Eliza; O’Sullivan, James; Rojas, Antonio Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference , 2016. @misc{Papaki2016, title = {Curating Community: Building a Communications Strategy For The European Association For Digital Humanities}, author = {Eliza Papaki and James O’Sullivan and Antonio Rojas}, url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/279}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-07-11}, abstract = {This poster will seek to illustrate the enhanced communications presence of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) since 2014, and measure the impact of its action in building a community of geographically-dispersed members. It will outline the strategies undertaken by the EADH in furthering its communications initiative, for which a number of Communications Fellows have been activated on the organisation’s communications policy in an effort to promote the work of digital scholars across the European region. Accounts of this activity will be further contextualised by theoretical discussion on the evolution of social media and Web-based communications across academia.}, howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } This poster will seek to illustrate the enhanced communications presence of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) since 2014, and measure the impact of its action in building a community of geographically-dispersed members. It will outline the strategies undertaken by the EADH in furthering its communications initiative, for which a number of Communications Fellows have been activated on the organisation’s communications policy in an effort to promote the work of digital scholars across the European region. Accounts of this activity will be further contextualised by theoretical discussion on the evolution of social media and Web-based communications across academia. |
Reflecting On And Refracting User Needs Through Case Studies In The Light of Europeana Research (Presentation) Benardou, Agiatis; Dunning, Alastair; Ekman, Stefan; Garnett, Vicky; Jordan, Caspar; Lace, Ilze; Papaki, Eliza Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference , 2016. @misc{Benardou2016, title = {Reflecting On And Refracting User Needs Through Case Studies In The Light of Europeana Research}, author = {Agiatis Benardou and Alastair Dunning and Stefan Ekman and Vicky Garnett and Caspar Jordan and Ilze Lace and Eliza Papaki }, url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/329}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-07-11}, abstract = {This poster presents work on documenting user needs in the Humanities and Social Sciences as illustrated through Case Studies in the context of the Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’ project. Conducted as part of a wider methodological effort including desk research, expert fora and a web survey, methodology and findings of actual use of innovative digital tools and services will be visually represented. This work will form the basis of the Europeana Research Case Studies which will seek to gather and process an evidence-based record of the information practices, needs and scholarly methods in the respective communities.}, howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } This poster presents work on documenting user needs in the Humanities and Social Sciences as illustrated through Case Studies in the context of the Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’ project. Conducted as part of a wider methodological effort including desk research, expert fora and a web survey, methodology and findings of actual use of innovative digital tools and services will be visually represented. This work will form the basis of the Europeana Research Case Studies which will seek to gather and process an evidence-based record of the information practices, needs and scholarly methods in the respective communities. |
Scholarly Research Activities and Digital Tools: When NeMO met FLOSS (Presentation) Benardou, Agiatis; Charles, Valentine; Chatzidiakou, Nephelie; Constantopoulos, Panos; Dallas, Costis; Sáez, Ana Isabel González; Gordea, Sergiu; Hughes, Lorna; Karavellas, Themistoklis; Marcus, Gregory; Papachristopoulos, Leonidas; Pertsas, Vayianos Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference , 2016. @misc{Benardou2016d, title = {Scholarly Research Activities and Digital Tools: When NeMO met FLOSS}, author = {Agiatis Benardou and Valentine Charles and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Panos Constantopoulos and Costis Dallas and Ana Isabel González Sáez and Sergiu Gordea and Lorna M. Hughes and Themistoklis Karavellas and Gregory Marcus and Leonidas Papachristopoulos and Vayianos Pertsas }, url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/180}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-07-11}, booktitle = {Digital Humanities 2016}, abstract = {While there has been a significant investment in the development of digital tools that can be used in the humanities, information about their use is frequently located in disciplinary silos, with little transfer of knowledge about the features of specific tools that make them valuable for research across the humanities. This poster shows the collaboration between two initiatives, the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO) and the EuropeanaTech FLOSS Inventory Task Force. The aim was to carry out research in order to align the FLOSS Inventory against the Activity Types in NeMO, the Ontology of Digital Methods for the Humanities developed by the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), IMIS-ATHENA R.C with the ESF Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH). The FLOSS Inventory is an effort undertaken by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and EuropeanaTech to raise awareness of, share access to, and improve the overall status of Open Source software available for cultural heritage developers internationally. The Inventory contains over 200 well-documented, active and relevant OS tools and is actively updated and maintained. NeMO provides a conceptual framework for representing scholarly practice in the Humanities. This is the main output of NeDiMAH, a Network that ran from 2011- 15 and brought into collaboration 16 countries to document the practice of Digital Humanities across Europe in a series of Methodological Working Groups. Building on earlier expertise in digital taxonomies for the digital humanities, NeDiMAH facilitated a research project carried out by DCU, building upon earlier work on scholarly activity modeling in projects including DARIAH, EHRI and Europeana Cloud. NeMO is a formal ontology which enables the representation and codification of scholarly work by providing a controlled vocabulary of interrelated concepts. NeMO offers a flexible tagging system through a taxonomy of Activity Types, structured in five hierarchies that correspond roughly to scholarly primitives (Unsworth, 2000), and incorporates existing taxonomies and related work such as TadiRAH, Oxford ICT, and DH Commons. The research teams working on FLOSS and NeMO collaborated to map each tool in the FLOSS inventory against NeMO Activity Types. According to the structure established by NeMO, scholarly research practices are divided into five core Activity Types within a scholarly research lifecycle: acquiring, communicating, conceiving, processing and seeking, which encompass narrower terms accounting for further detail and specialization. This study allows the integration of the information about tools gathered by FLOSS into a uniform conceptual framework for expressing knowledge about scholarly work. By doing so, it also validates the ability of the NeMO ontology to act as a sound framework for the conceptual representation of digital tools and services in one important area of the humanities. This mapping enables the categorisation of available tools according to the function they serve, and could permit researchers in the Humanities - even those without a technical background - to consult an authoritative list of tools covering their needs according to the type of activity they wish to undertake. Availability and the role that each tool can play in the research practice may increase its overall use by the community. The representation of the FLOSS Inventory using NeMO adds value to digital research, and the visualization of categorization ratios it provides facilitates an important debate about software development trends, probing the question whether development is weighted towards software tools that address researchers’ needs, a major topic of research in Research Infrastructures across Europe and beyond.}, howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } While there has been a significant investment in the development of digital tools that can be used in the humanities, information about their use is frequently located in disciplinary silos, with little transfer of knowledge about the features of specific tools that make them valuable for research across the humanities. This poster shows the collaboration between two initiatives, the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO) and the EuropeanaTech FLOSS Inventory Task Force. The aim was to carry out research in order to align the FLOSS Inventory against the Activity Types in NeMO, the Ontology of Digital Methods for the Humanities developed by the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), IMIS-ATHENA R.C with the ESF Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH). The FLOSS Inventory is an effort undertaken by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and EuropeanaTech to raise awareness of, share access to, and improve the overall status of Open Source software available for cultural heritage developers internationally. The Inventory contains over 200 well-documented, active and relevant OS tools and is actively updated and maintained. NeMO provides a conceptual framework for representing scholarly practice in the Humanities. This is the main output of NeDiMAH, a Network that ran from 2011- 15 and brought into collaboration 16 countries to document the practice of Digital Humanities across Europe in a series of Methodological Working Groups. Building on earlier expertise in digital taxonomies for the digital humanities, NeDiMAH facilitated a research project carried out by DCU, building upon earlier work on scholarly activity modeling in projects including DARIAH, EHRI and Europeana Cloud. NeMO is a formal ontology which enables the representation and codification of scholarly work by providing a controlled vocabulary of interrelated concepts. NeMO offers a flexible tagging system through a taxonomy of Activity Types, structured in five hierarchies that correspond roughly to scholarly primitives (Unsworth, 2000), and incorporates existing taxonomies and related work such as TadiRAH, Oxford ICT, and DH Commons. The research teams working on FLOSS and NeMO collaborated to map each tool in the FLOSS inventory against NeMO Activity Types. According to the structure established by NeMO, scholarly research practices are divided into five core Activity Types within a scholarly research lifecycle: acquiring, communicating, conceiving, processing and seeking, which encompass narrower terms accounting for further detail and specialization. This study allows the integration of the information about tools gathered by FLOSS into a uniform conceptual framework for expressing knowledge about scholarly work. By doing so, it also validates the ability of the NeMO ontology to act as a sound framework for the conceptual representation of digital tools and services in one important area of the humanities. This mapping enables the categorisation of available tools according to the function they serve, and could permit researchers in the Humanities - even those without a technical background - to consult an authoritative list of tools covering their needs according to the type of activity they wish to undertake. Availability and the role that each tool can play in the research practice may increase its overall use by the community. The representation of the FLOSS Inventory using NeMO adds value to digital research, and the visualization of categorization ratios it provides facilitates an important debate about software development trends, probing the question whether development is weighted towards software tools that address researchers’ needs, a major topic of research in Research Infrastructures across Europe and beyond. |
Contextualized Integration of Digital Humanities Research: Using the NeMO Ontology of Digital Humanities Methods (Presentation) Constantopoulos, Panos; Hughes, Lorna; Dallas, Costis; Pertsas, Vayianos; Papachristopoulos, Leonidas; Christodoulou, Timoleon Paper presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference , 2016. @misc{Constantopoulos2016, title = {Contextualized Integration of Digital Humanities Research: Using the NeMO Ontology of Digital Humanities Methods}, author = {Panos Constantopoulos and Lorna M. Hughes and Costis Dallas and Vayianos Pertsas and Leonidas Papachristopoulos and Timoleon Christodoulou }, url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/134}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-07-11}, abstract = {The advent of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities research calls for deeper understanding of how humanists work with digital resources, tools and services as they engage with different aspects of research activity: from capturing, encoding, and publishing scholarly data to analyzing, visualizing, interpreting and communicating data and research argumentation to co-workers and readers. Digitally enabled scholarly work, and the integration of digital content, tools and methods, present not only commonalities but also differences across disciplines, methodological traditions, and communities of researchers. A significant challenge in providing integrated access to disparate digital humanities (DH) resources and, more broadly, in supporting digitally-enabled humanities research, lies in empirically capturing the context of use of digital content, methods and tools. This paper presents recent and ongoing work on the development of NeMO, an ontology of digital methods in the humanities, and its deployment for the development of a knowledge base on scholarly work. Several attempts have been made to develop a conceptual framework for DH in practice. In 2008, a project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the AHRC ICT Methods Network, based at King’s College, London, developed a taxonomy of digital methods in the arts and humanities. This was the basis for the classification of over 200 digital humanities projects funded by the AHRC in the online resource arts-humanities.net. This taxonomy was subsequently modified by Oxford University as the basis for the classification of digital humanities initiatives at the University ( Digital Humanities at Oxford). Other initiatives to build a taxonomy of Digital Humanities include TaDiRAH and DH Commons. From 2011 to 2015 the European Science Foundation funded the Network for Digital Humanities in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH). This Network was established to develop a better understanding of the practice of DH across Europe, and ran over 40 activities structured around key methodological areas in the humanities (digital representations of space and time; visualisation; linked data; creating and using large scale corpora; and creating editions). Through these activities, NeDiMAH gathered a snapshot of the practice of digital humanities in Europe, and the impact of digital methods on research. A key output of NeDiMAH is NeMO: the NeDiMAH Ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities. This ontology of digital methods in the humanities has been built as a framework for understanding not just the use of digital methods, but also their relationship to digital content and tools. The development of an ontology, rather than a taxonomy, stands in recognition of the complexity of the digital humanities landscape, the interdisciplinarity of the field, and the dependencies that impact the use of digital methods in research. NeMO was developed by the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), IMIS-Athena Research Centre, in collaboration with NeDiMAH, as a conceptual framework capable of representing scholarly work in the humanities, addressing aspects of intentionality and capturing the diverse associations between research actors and their goals, activities undertaken, methods employed, resources and tools used, and outputs produced, with the aim of obtaining semantically rich structured representations of scholarly work. It is grounded on earlier empirical research through semi-structured interviews with scholars from across Europe, which focused on analysing their research practices and capturing the resulting information requirements for research infrastructures. Its intellectual foundations lie in earlier work of the DCU on conceptualizing and modelling scholarly activity in the arts and humanities, conducted within the Preparing DARIAH, DYAS / DARIAH-GR, and EHRI projects, and manifested in the Scholarly Research Activity Model (SRAM), an ontological representation of scholarly information activity drawing from cultural-historical activity theory and process modelling, and compatible with CIDOC’s Conceptual Reference Model ( CIDOC CRM, ISO 21127:2006). Architecturally, NeMO adopts a three layer structure, spanning from abstract/general to concrete/special concepts, to provide a flexible framework suitable to the multidisciplinarity of DH. Its top tier concepts (Actor, Activity, Object) provide a general reasoning frame, and function as semantic links to reference ontologies such as CIDOC CRM. These abstract notions are specialized in the second layer by way of domain-specific concepts covering every aspect of scholarly work: Methods employed in activities of various degrees of complexity or taught in Courses, Tools used, Information Resources taken as input or produced as output, Groups/Organizations or Persons participating in various roles, Goals addressed, Topics covered, etc. Furthermore, in this second layer, several semantic relations capturing the context of the aforementioned core concepts allow for modeling scholarly work through four complementary perspectives: (1) Process-related, centered around the concept of Activity and capturing temporal and spatial aspects; (2) Methodological, centered around the Method concept and capturing "how" aspects; (3) Agency-related, centered around the Actor and Goal concepts and capturing "who" and "why" aspects; and (4) Resource-related, centered around the Information Resource concept and covering "what" aspects of scholarly work. Ιn the third layer of NeMO, fine-grained notions supporting domain-specific detailed descriptions are represented as specializations of second layer concepts. Respective vocabularies are organized as SKOS thesauri. More specifically, controlled vocabularies of lexical terms are structured hierarchically under the concepts of ActivityType, MediaType, InformationResourceType, TopicKeyword, ActorRole, SchoolOfThought and Discipline, which are specializations of the Type concept of the second layer, and are used for characterization/classification in parallel to ontological classification. The role of these taxonomies is, thus, twofold: (1) as a vocabulary of terms that can be used for flexible tagging of the objects of interest; (2) as entry points for the alignment, or mapping, of terms from NeMO to terms from other existing taxonomies. The latter enables integration with related work, as well as effective use of these taxonomies as documentation instruments or entry points for content in NeMO knowledge bases. For instance, the ActivityType taxonomy is organized in five hierarchies roughly corresponding to Unsworth's "cholarly primitives", and offers a flexible tagging system for modelling the intentionality of actors, scope adherence of activities, or purpose of use of tools and methods. On the other hand, mappings through broader/narrower term relations from the ActivityType terms to terms of other method taxonomies, including TaDiRAH, Oxford ICT and DH Commons, allow using those taxonomies transparently within NeMO. The development of NeMO contributes to the work of the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory Working Group of DARIAH (DiMPO), as well as of Europeana Research within the Europeana Cloud project, providing an intellectual foundation for the analysis of evidence on arts and humanities scholarly activities and needs with regard to digital resource access across Europe. The relevance of the ontology to the DH community was validated through interviews and web surveys, to elicit information needs and patterns in working practices among humanities researchers, as well as two workshops in which these patterns were explored through use cases contributed by researchers. The evidence collected demonstrates that NeMO addresses adequately the knowledge representation needs manifested there. A variety of complex associative queries articulated by researchers in these workshops were also collected, demonstrating the potential of NeMO as an effective mechanism for information extraction and reasoning with regard to the use of digital resources in scholarly work; queries were encoded in SPARQL, a language appropriate for exploiting the serialization of NeMO in RDF Schema (RDFS), thus highlighting the benefits of its potential use as a knowledge base schema. A prototype implementation of the above functionalities provides an easy to use demonstration of NeMO's potential. Users can articulate queries in structured English, without prior knowledge of any specific query language, using an intuitive user interface offering dynamic feedback of suggestions based on the conceptual schema. Input to the knowledge base is also supported by the same mechanism, guiding the user according to relations and classes provided by the model. A use case will be presented by way of example. In sum, NeMO offers a well-founded conceptualization of scholarly work, which can function as schema for a knowledge base containing information on scholarly research activity, including goals, actors, methods, tools and resources involved. NeMO can thus be useful to researchers by (a) helping them find information on earlier work relevant for their own research; (b) supporting goal-oriented organization of research work; (c) facilitating the discovery of yet uncharted paths with regard to resources, tools and methods suitable for particular contexts; and, (d) promoting networking among researchers with common interests. Additional benefits for research groups include support for better project planning by explicitly representing links between goals, actors, activities, methods, resources and tools, as well as assistance for discovering methodological trends, future directions and promising research ideas. Furthermore, for funding organisations, research councils, etc., NeMO can (a) provide a bird’s eye view of funded scholarly activities; (b) enable the systematic documentation of research projects; (c) support evaluation of proposals, monitoring and control of project work, and validation of project outcomes. Planned improvements include the development of mechanisms for providing recommendations based on semantically related instances and for the semi-automatic population of the knowledge base, as well as specialization of core classes and addition of new terms in Type taxonomies to reflect developments in DH scholarship.}, howpublished = {Paper presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } The advent of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities research calls for deeper understanding of how humanists work with digital resources, tools and services as they engage with different aspects of research activity: from capturing, encoding, and publishing scholarly data to analyzing, visualizing, interpreting and communicating data and research argumentation to co-workers and readers. Digitally enabled scholarly work, and the integration of digital content, tools and methods, present not only commonalities but also differences across disciplines, methodological traditions, and communities of researchers. A significant challenge in providing integrated access to disparate digital humanities (DH) resources and, more broadly, in supporting digitally-enabled humanities research, lies in empirically capturing the context of use of digital content, methods and tools. This paper presents recent and ongoing work on the development of NeMO, an ontology of digital methods in the humanities, and its deployment for the development of a knowledge base on scholarly work. Several attempts have been made to develop a conceptual framework for DH in practice. In 2008, a project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the AHRC ICT Methods Network, based at King’s College, London, developed a taxonomy of digital methods in the arts and humanities. This was the basis for the classification of over 200 digital humanities projects funded by the AHRC in the online resource arts-humanities.net. This taxonomy was subsequently modified by Oxford University as the basis for the classification of digital humanities initiatives at the University ( Digital Humanities at Oxford). Other initiatives to build a taxonomy of Digital Humanities include TaDiRAH and DH Commons. From 2011 to 2015 the European Science Foundation funded the Network for Digital Humanities in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH). This Network was established to develop a better understanding of the practice of DH across Europe, and ran over 40 activities structured around key methodological areas in the humanities (digital representations of space and time; visualisation; linked data; creating and using large scale corpora; and creating editions). Through these activities, NeDiMAH gathered a snapshot of the practice of digital humanities in Europe, and the impact of digital methods on research. A key output of NeDiMAH is NeMO: the NeDiMAH Ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities. This ontology of digital methods in the humanities has been built as a framework for understanding not just the use of digital methods, but also their relationship to digital content and tools. The development of an ontology, rather than a taxonomy, stands in recognition of the complexity of the digital humanities landscape, the interdisciplinarity of the field, and the dependencies that impact the use of digital methods in research. NeMO was developed by the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), IMIS-Athena Research Centre, in collaboration with NeDiMAH, as a conceptual framework capable of representing scholarly work in the humanities, addressing aspects of intentionality and capturing the diverse associations between research actors and their goals, activities undertaken, methods employed, resources and tools used, and outputs produced, with the aim of obtaining semantically rich structured representations of scholarly work. It is grounded on earlier empirical research through semi-structured interviews with scholars from across Europe, which focused on analysing their research practices and capturing the resulting information requirements for research infrastructures. Its intellectual foundations lie in earlier work of the DCU on conceptualizing and modelling scholarly activity in the arts and humanities, conducted within the Preparing DARIAH, DYAS / DARIAH-GR, and EHRI projects, and manifested in the Scholarly Research Activity Model (SRAM), an ontological representation of scholarly information activity drawing from cultural-historical activity theory and process modelling, and compatible with CIDOC’s Conceptual Reference Model ( CIDOC CRM, ISO 21127:2006). Architecturally, NeMO adopts a three layer structure, spanning from abstract/general to concrete/special concepts, to provide a flexible framework suitable to the multidisciplinarity of DH. Its top tier concepts (Actor, Activity, Object) provide a general reasoning frame, and function as semantic links to reference ontologies such as CIDOC CRM. These abstract notions are specialized in the second layer by way of domain-specific concepts covering every aspect of scholarly work: Methods employed in activities of various degrees of complexity or taught in Courses, Tools used, Information Resources taken as input or produced as output, Groups/Organizations or Persons participating in various roles, Goals addressed, Topics covered, etc. Furthermore, in this second layer, several semantic relations capturing the context of the aforementioned core concepts allow for modeling scholarly work through four complementary perspectives: (1) Process-related, centered around the concept of Activity and capturing temporal and spatial aspects; (2) Methodological, centered around the Method concept and capturing "how" aspects; (3) Agency-related, centered around the Actor and Goal concepts and capturing "who" and "why" aspects; and (4) Resource-related, centered around the Information Resource concept and covering "what" aspects of scholarly work. Ιn the third layer of NeMO, fine-grained notions supporting domain-specific detailed descriptions are represented as specializations of second layer concepts. Respective vocabularies are organized as SKOS thesauri. More specifically, controlled vocabularies of lexical terms are structured hierarchically under the concepts of ActivityType, MediaType, InformationResourceType, TopicKeyword, ActorRole, SchoolOfThought and Discipline, which are specializations of the Type concept of the second layer, and are used for characterization/classification in parallel to ontological classification. The role of these taxonomies is, thus, twofold: (1) as a vocabulary of terms that can be used for flexible tagging of the objects of interest; (2) as entry points for the alignment, or mapping, of terms from NeMO to terms from other existing taxonomies. The latter enables integration with related work, as well as effective use of these taxonomies as documentation instruments or entry points for content in NeMO knowledge bases. For instance, the ActivityType taxonomy is organized in five hierarchies roughly corresponding to Unsworth's "cholarly primitives", and offers a flexible tagging system for modelling the intentionality of actors, scope adherence of activities, or purpose of use of tools and methods. On the other hand, mappings through broader/narrower term relations from the ActivityType terms to terms of other method taxonomies, including TaDiRAH, Oxford ICT and DH Commons, allow using those taxonomies transparently within NeMO. The development of NeMO contributes to the work of the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory Working Group of DARIAH (DiMPO), as well as of Europeana Research within the Europeana Cloud project, providing an intellectual foundation for the analysis of evidence on arts and humanities scholarly activities and needs with regard to digital resource access across Europe. The relevance of the ontology to the DH community was validated through interviews and web surveys, to elicit information needs and patterns in working practices among humanities researchers, as well as two workshops in which these patterns were explored through use cases contributed by researchers. The evidence collected demonstrates that NeMO addresses adequately the knowledge representation needs manifested there. A variety of complex associative queries articulated by researchers in these workshops were also collected, demonstrating the potential of NeMO as an effective mechanism for information extraction and reasoning with regard to the use of digital resources in scholarly work; queries were encoded in SPARQL, a language appropriate for exploiting the serialization of NeMO in RDF Schema (RDFS), thus highlighting the benefits of its potential use as a knowledge base schema. A prototype implementation of the above functionalities provides an easy to use demonstration of NeMO's potential. Users can articulate queries in structured English, without prior knowledge of any specific query language, using an intuitive user interface offering dynamic feedback of suggestions based on the conceptual schema. Input to the knowledge base is also supported by the same mechanism, guiding the user according to relations and classes provided by the model. A use case will be presented by way of example. In sum, NeMO offers a well-founded conceptualization of scholarly work, which can function as schema for a knowledge base containing information on scholarly research activity, including goals, actors, methods, tools and resources involved. NeMO can thus be useful to researchers by (a) helping them find information on earlier work relevant for their own research; (b) supporting goal-oriented organization of research work; (c) facilitating the discovery of yet uncharted paths with regard to resources, tools and methods suitable for particular contexts; and, (d) promoting networking among researchers with common interests. Additional benefits for research groups include support for better project planning by explicitly representing links between goals, actors, activities, methods, resources and tools, as well as assistance for discovering methodological trends, future directions and promising research ideas. Furthermore, for funding organisations, research councils, etc., NeMO can (a) provide a bird’s eye view of funded scholarly activities; (b) enable the systematic documentation of research projects; (c) support evaluation of proposals, monitoring and control of project work, and validation of project outcomes. Planned improvements include the development of mechanisms for providing recommendations based on semantically related instances and for the semi-automatic population of the knowledge base, as well as specialization of core classes and addition of new terms in Type taxonomies to reflect developments in DH scholarship. |
A data integration infrastructure for archaeology (Presentation) Gavrilis, Dimitris; Afiontzi, Eleni; Fihn, Johan; Olsson, Olof; Cuy, Sebastian; Felicetti, Achille; Niccolucci, Franco Presentation at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA 2016) , 2016. @misc{Gavrilis2016, title = {A data integration infrastructure for archaeology}, author = {Dimitris Gavrilis and Eleni Afiontzi and Johan Fihn and Olof Olsson and Sebastian Cuy and Achille Felicetti and Franco Niccolucci}, url = {https://caa2016a.sched.com/event/6RvV/s11-12-a-data-integration-infrastructure-for-archaeology}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-03-30}, abstract = {Most infrastructure projects, both recent and ongoing, involve a data aggregation task in order to bring together the heterogeneous information one expects to see in a typical EU landscape. The main reason for this is the plethora of technologies, standards, languages and practices that is found in the EU. Data aggregation typically includes the homogenization of heterogenous data through some kind of process that includes: ingestion, normalization, transformation and validation processes. The European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims at true integration of data by modelling the underlying domain and providing the technical framework for automatic integration of heterogeneous resources. This infrastructure, comprises of a set of heterogeneous technologies such as: a metadata aggregator, including a set of enrichment and data integration micro-services, an RDF store with reasoning capabilities (through SPARQL), and a powerful indexing mechanism. The output of this process is published to a portal which can provide useful information to a variety of potential users ranging from simple visitors to domain researchers. The data integration services can mine for links among resources, link them together and against language resources such as vocabularies. Complex records can be split into their individual components, represented, enriched and stored separately while maintaining their identity using semantic linking. These individual components are represented in the underlying model (ACDM) and include agents, language resources, datasets, collections, reports, databases, etc. Each integrated resource is assigned a URI and is published in RDF. This practice enables knowledge mining, semantic queries and reasoning engines which are provided within the project (e.g. SPARQL engine and Jena). The technical infrastructure has been developed using various programming languages such as Java, PHP, Javascript, it is distributed spanning multiple virtual machines and brings together different established technologies and components. The portal is based on the Laravel PHP framework and uses ElasticSearch search engine to collect and browse through the data. Both the technical infrastructure and the portal will be presented and demonstrated in more detail. }, howpublished = {Presentation at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA 2016) }, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } Most infrastructure projects, both recent and ongoing, involve a data aggregation task in order to bring together the heterogeneous information one expects to see in a typical EU landscape. The main reason for this is the plethora of technologies, standards, languages and practices that is found in the EU. Data aggregation typically includes the homogenization of heterogenous data through some kind of process that includes: ingestion, normalization, transformation and validation processes. The European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims at true integration of data by modelling the underlying domain and providing the technical framework for automatic integration of heterogeneous resources. This infrastructure, comprises of a set of heterogeneous technologies such as: a metadata aggregator, including a set of enrichment and data integration micro-services, an RDF store with reasoning capabilities (through SPARQL), and a powerful indexing mechanism. The output of this process is published to a portal which can provide useful information to a variety of potential users ranging from simple visitors to domain researchers. The data integration services can mine for links among resources, link them together and against language resources such as vocabularies. Complex records can be split into their individual components, represented, enriched and stored separately while maintaining their identity using semantic linking. These individual components are represented in the underlying model (ACDM) and include agents, language resources, datasets, collections, reports, databases, etc. Each integrated resource is assigned a URI and is published in RDF. This practice enables knowledge mining, semantic queries and reasoning engines which are provided within the project (e.g. SPARQL engine and Jena). The technical infrastructure has been developed using various programming languages such as Java, PHP, Javascript, it is distributed spanning multiple virtual machines and brings together different established technologies and components. The portal is based on the Laravel PHP framework and uses ElasticSearch search engine to collect and browse through the data. Both the technical infrastructure and the portal will be presented and demonstrated in more detail. |
A catalog for archaeological resources (Presentation) Gavrilis, Dimitris; Debole, Franca; Aloia, Nicola; Papatheodorou, Christos; Meghini, Carlo Presentation at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA 2016) , 2016. @misc{Gavrilis2016b, title = {A catalog for archaeological resources}, author = {Dimitris Gavrilis and Franca Debole and Nicola Aloia and Christos Papatheodorou and Carlo Meghini}, url = {https://caa2016a.sched.com/event/6RwX/s11-06-a-catalog-for-archaelogical-resources }, year = {2016}, date = {2016-03-30}, abstract = {The European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims to develop an infrastructure to aggregate, enrich, integrate and make available the data and services so far developed by the international archaeology research communities. The project enriches and integrates data resources – such as descriptions of datasets, collections, metadata schemas, vocabularies, etc. - and services in order to create a universally accessible shared knowledge base for the archaeology domain. In the context of Ariadne a crucial concept to integrate and manage different resources is the catalog, or registry. The catalog of Ariadne lists and describes what is available from the project partners, and more generally the whole community of archaeologists, to identify, through refined search mechanisms, the candidate resources for integration. Data registries is in effect a well-known data organization and management approach that provides an environment in which datasets, collections, metadata schemas and vocabularies along with their mappings would be hosted and described by a common schema. Actually, the data registries enhance the accessibility and re-usability of the (research) data. This paper presents the data model of the Ariadne catalog named Ariadne Catalog Data Model (ACDM) that extends the existing data registry standards. The central notion of the model is the class ArchaeologicalResource, specialized in the classes: (i) DataResource, whose instances represent the various types of data containers (e.g. collections, GIS, datasets) owned by the ARIADNE partners and lent to the project for integration; (ii) LanguageResource, having as instances vocabularies, metadata schemas, gazetteers and mappings (between language resources); (iii) Services, whose instances represent the services owned by the Ariadne partners and lent to the project for integration. The paper presents the aggregation service that is based on the ACDM model and enables the partners to upload huge volumes of metadata to the Catalog as well as the main functionalities of the Ariadne portal (http://ariadne-portal.dcu.gr/).}, howpublished = {Presentation at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA 2016) }, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } The European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims to develop an infrastructure to aggregate, enrich, integrate and make available the data and services so far developed by the international archaeology research communities. The project enriches and integrates data resources – such as descriptions of datasets, collections, metadata schemas, vocabularies, etc. - and services in order to create a universally accessible shared knowledge base for the archaeology domain. In the context of Ariadne a crucial concept to integrate and manage different resources is the catalog, or registry. The catalog of Ariadne lists and describes what is available from the project partners, and more generally the whole community of archaeologists, to identify, through refined search mechanisms, the candidate resources for integration. Data registries is in effect a well-known data organization and management approach that provides an environment in which datasets, collections, metadata schemas and vocabularies along with their mappings would be hosted and described by a common schema. Actually, the data registries enhance the accessibility and re-usability of the (research) data. This paper presents the data model of the Ariadne catalog named Ariadne Catalog Data Model (ACDM) that extends the existing data registry standards. The central notion of the model is the class ArchaeologicalResource, specialized in the classes: (i) DataResource, whose instances represent the various types of data containers (e.g. collections, GIS, datasets) owned by the ARIADNE partners and lent to the project for integration; (ii) LanguageResource, having as instances vocabularies, metadata schemas, gazetteers and mappings (between language resources); (iii) Services, whose instances represent the services owned by the Ariadne partners and lent to the project for integration. The paper presents the aggregation service that is based on the ACDM model and enables the partners to upload huge volumes of metadata to the Catalog as well as the main functionalities of the Ariadne portal (http://ariadne-portal.dcu.gr/). |
Jean-Claude Gardin on Archaeological Data, Representation and Knowledge: Implications for Digital Archaeology (Journal Article) Dallas, Costis Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume: 23 (1), Pages: 305–330, 2016. @article{Dallas2016, title = {Jean-Claude Gardin on Archaeological Data, Representation and Knowledge: Implications for Digital Archaeology}, author = {Costis Dallas}, doi = {doi:10.1007/s10816-015-9241-3}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-01-01}, journal = {Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory}, volume = {23}, number = {1}, pages = {305–330}, abstract = {This paper presents Jean-Claude Gardin’s distinctive approach to archaeological data, representation and knowledge in the context of his early engagement with semiotics and structural semantics and his grounding in fields as diverse as documentation, classification theory, material culture studies, argumentation theory and the philosophy of the human sciences. Pointing at Gardin’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the promises of automated classification and machine reasoning in archaeology, it shows that his approach goes beyond a normative, positivist conception of archaeological research, recognizing the contextual, theory-laden nature of archaeological data constitution, the priority of focusing on actual archaeological interpretation practices and the complementarity between narrative and formal representations of archaeological reasoning. It connects his early development of archaeological descriptive and typological metalanguages with his later elaboration of a theoretically informed approach to archaeological argumentation, analysis and publication, situates his logicist programme as a relevant contribution to the development of an archaeological “theory of practice”, grounded on reflexivity and modesty vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge and the limits of scientism, and highlights aspects of Gardin’s work that point to potentially fruitful directions for contemporary research and practice in the field of archaeological informatics and digital humanities communication.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {article} } This paper presents Jean-Claude Gardin’s distinctive approach to archaeological data, representation and knowledge in the context of his early engagement with semiotics and structural semantics and his grounding in fields as diverse as documentation, classification theory, material culture studies, argumentation theory and the philosophy of the human sciences. Pointing at Gardin’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the promises of automated classification and machine reasoning in archaeology, it shows that his approach goes beyond a normative, positivist conception of archaeological research, recognizing the contextual, theory-laden nature of archaeological data constitution, the priority of focusing on actual archaeological interpretation practices and the complementarity between narrative and formal representations of archaeological reasoning. It connects his early development of archaeological descriptive and typological metalanguages with his later elaboration of a theoretically informed approach to archaeological argumentation, analysis and publication, situates his logicist programme as a relevant contribution to the development of an archaeological “theory of practice”, grounded on reflexivity and modesty vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge and the limits of scientism, and highlights aspects of Gardin’s work that point to potentially fruitful directions for contemporary research and practice in the field of archaeological informatics and digital humanities communication. |
2015 |
Cultural Heritage in an interactive landscape: User experience workshops at Norwegian Museum of Technology and Sciences, Norway, and the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C., Greece (Presentation) Benardou, Agiatis; Angeletaki, Alexandra; Papaki, Eliza Paper presented at the 2015 EAA Glasgow Conference , 2015. @misc{Benardou2015, title = {Cultural Heritage in an interactive landscape: User experience workshops at Norwegian Museum of Technology and Sciences, Norway, and the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C., Greece}, author = {Agiatis Benardou and Alexandra Angeletaki and Eliza Papaki}, year = {2015}, date = {2015-09-01}, abstract = {In this paper we seek to investigate the impact of digital technology applications in the field of the contemporary museum and cultural heritage practice using data from workshops held in the last 4 years at our 3D laboratory in Trondheim as well as in the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C., in Athens. Digitization of cultural heritage collections, gaming and interactive use of cultural information on the Web has established digital heritage as a new field of theory and practice, but has also created new challenges and opportunities. Users seem to be increasingly involved in the digital landscape of their immediate interest field. Different kinds of devices have been used effectively in public spaces such as museums. Our main question is whether the use of technology by a wider range of specialists has created a new set of relations between them. Does a digital visit realize itself differently in an immersive cultural landscape where the person visiting a site or an exhibition is active in seeking knowledge? Our paper is based on workshops organized in collaboration with museums and schools in Norway and Greece. In our study we analyze data on how school children interact, work and learn in the context of educational workshops, through observation, discussions, and direct surveys, interviews of the students, system log-files and performance tests. The broader impact of the study contributes to the discussions on issues pertaining to educational activities from the users’ perspective. }, howpublished = {Paper presented at the 2015 EAA Glasgow Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } In this paper we seek to investigate the impact of digital technology applications in the field of the contemporary museum and cultural heritage practice using data from workshops held in the last 4 years at our 3D laboratory in Trondheim as well as in the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C., in Athens. Digitization of cultural heritage collections, gaming and interactive use of cultural information on the Web has established digital heritage as a new field of theory and practice, but has also created new challenges and opportunities. Users seem to be increasingly involved in the digital landscape of their immediate interest field. Different kinds of devices have been used effectively in public spaces such as museums. Our main question is whether the use of technology by a wider range of specialists has created a new set of relations between them. Does a digital visit realize itself differently in an immersive cultural landscape where the person visiting a site or an exhibition is active in seeking knowledge? Our paper is based on workshops organized in collaboration with museums and schools in Norway and Greece. In our study we analyze data on how school children interact, work and learn in the context of educational workshops, through observation, discussions, and direct surveys, interviews of the students, system log-files and performance tests. The broader impact of the study contributes to the discussions on issues pertaining to educational activities from the users’ perspective. |
Curating archaeological knowledge in the digital continuum: from practice to infrastructure (Journal Article) Dallas, Costis Open Archaeology, Volume: 1 (1), Pages: 176–207, 2015. @article{Dallas2015b, title = {Curating archaeological knowledge in the digital continuum: from practice to infrastructure}, author = {Costis Dallas}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2015-0011}, year = {2015}, date = {2015-06-29}, journal = {Open Archaeology}, volume = {1}, number = {1}, pages = {176–207}, abstract = {As a “grand challenge” for digital archaeology, I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled global digital infrastructures, and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and meaning making. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology, viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence. This is exemplified in contemporary practices of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, in epistemological reflexivity and in pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity “from the field to the screen” in a variety of archaeological situations. I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive, epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods, and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. It has a potential value in helping to establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agencyoriented and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {article} } As a “grand challenge” for digital archaeology, I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled global digital infrastructures, and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and meaning making. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology, viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence. This is exemplified in contemporary practices of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, in epistemological reflexivity and in pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity “from the field to the screen” in a variety of archaeological situations. I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive, epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods, and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. It has a potential value in helping to establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agencyoriented and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology. |
Exploring user requirements through the use of digital tools in Humanities and Social Sciences’ research in the light of Europeana Research (Presentation) Garnett, Vicky; Jordan, Caspar; Lace, Ilze; Papaki, Eliza Poster presented at the First Early Career Digital Humanities Conference, King’s College London , 2015. @misc{Garnett2015, title = {Exploring user requirements through the use of digital tools in Humanities and Social Sciences’ research in the light of Europeana Research}, author = {Vicky Garnett and Caspar Jordan and Ilze Lace and Eliza Papaki}, year = {2015}, date = {2015-06-01}, abstract = {This poster reports on work conducted during 2013 in the context of the project Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’. Its purpose is to present the methodology followed in documenting actual use of innovative digital tools and services in the Humanities and Social Sciences research communities illustrated in three main Case Studies in the disciplines of Education, Art History and Sociology, further complemented by satellite cases.}, howpublished = {Poster presented at the First Early Career Digital Humanities Conference, King’s College London}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } This poster reports on work conducted during 2013 in the context of the project Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’. Its purpose is to present the methodology followed in documenting actual use of innovative digital tools and services in the Humanities and Social Sciences research communities illustrated in three main Case Studies in the disciplines of Education, Art History and Sociology, further complemented by satellite cases. |
Documenting and reasoning about research on ancient Corinthia using the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO) (Presentation) Angelis, Stavros; Benardou, Agiatis; Chatzidiakou, Nephelie; Constantopoulos, Panos; Dallas, Costis; Hughes, Lorna; Papachristopoulos, Leonidas; Papaki, Eliza; Pertsas, Vayianos Paper presented at the CAA 2015 Conference , 2015. @misc{Angelis2015, title = {Documenting and reasoning about research on ancient Corinthia using the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO)}, author = {Stavros Angelis and Agiatis Benardou and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Panos Constantopoulos and Costis Dallas and Lorna Hughes and Leonidas Papachristopoulos and Eliza Papaki and Vayianos Pertsas}, url = {http://nemo.dcu.gr/resources/usecases/UseCaseCAA2015.pdf}, year = {2015}, date = {2015-04-01}, abstract = {Analyzing and modeling research processes is a major component of the endeavor of understanding and charting the digital humanities practice, which broadly involves content, tools and methods. The need for a formal model of scholarly research activity was identified as early as the preparatory phase of DARIAH. An evidence-based model based on grounded theory analysis of researcher interviews was proposed, subsequently validated, and extended in EHRI (Benardou et al., 2013). This work is now taken forward in NeDiMAH, through development of the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO). NeMO is CIDOC CRM - compliant, and represents explictly dimensions of agency (actors and goals), process (activities and methods) and resources (information resources, tools, concepts) in scholarly research. It incorporates existing relevant taxonomies of scholarly methods and tools (TaDIRAH, Oxford ICT, DHCommons, CCCIULA-UPF and DiRT) through appropriate mappings a semantic backbone of NeMO concepts. It thus enables integration of different perspectives, vocabularies and documentation on scholarly methods and practice (Hughes et al. forthcoming). This paper introduces NeMO, applies it on the documentation of scholarly research conducted in the course of a synthetic study of the social and economic history of Classical Corinthia (Benardou 2007), and discusses how NeMO can support both a structured documentation of, and reasoning about, archaeological and historical research practice. The case study concerns the functions of the urban centre of Corinth as part of its surrounding countryside. It addresses Corinthian society throughout the 5th century BC. On the basis of geographical and temporal parameters, it examines settlement patterns and networks, and relates them with cultural and economic factors. Using NeMO, we demonstrate how research activities of specific types, organized in methodological steps, use, produce and curate specific information resources as they are carried out with specific methods and tools. Our study highlights the importance of overall goals and research questions in shaping scholarly process. Generation of semantic paths connecting concepts in NeMO enables support for associative queries and reasoning about the research activities, methods followed, and their context. Indexing terms are drawn from taxonomies incorporated in NeMO. This work contributes to methodological reflexivity, better understanding of the research process, and improved communication on research methods in archaeology. Future work includes the streamlining of interaction processes using NeMO and semantic publishing of related information. }, howpublished = {Paper presented at the CAA 2015 Conference}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {presentation} } Analyzing and modeling research processes is a major component of the endeavor of understanding and charting the digital humanities practice, which broadly involves content, tools and methods. The need for a formal model of scholarly research activity was identified as early as the preparatory phase of DARIAH. An evidence-based model based on grounded theory analysis of researcher interviews was proposed, subsequently validated, and extended in EHRI (Benardou et al., 2013). This work is now taken forward in NeDiMAH, through development of the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO). NeMO is CIDOC CRM - compliant, and represents explictly dimensions of agency (actors and goals), process (activities and methods) and resources (information resources, tools, concepts) in scholarly research. It incorporates existing relevant taxonomies of scholarly methods and tools (TaDIRAH, Oxford ICT, DHCommons, CCCIULA-UPF and DiRT) through appropriate mappings a semantic backbone of NeMO concepts. It thus enables integration of different perspectives, vocabularies and documentation on scholarly methods and practice (Hughes et al. forthcoming). This paper introduces NeMO, applies it on the documentation of scholarly research conducted in the course of a synthetic study of the social and economic history of Classical Corinthia (Benardou 2007), and discusses how NeMO can support both a structured documentation of, and reasoning about, archaeological and historical research practice. The case study concerns the functions of the urban centre of Corinth as part of its surrounding countryside. It addresses Corinthian society throughout the 5th century BC. On the basis of geographical and temporal parameters, it examines settlement patterns and networks, and relates them with cultural and economic factors. Using NeMO, we demonstrate how research activities of specific types, organized in methodological steps, use, produce and curate specific information resources as they are carried out with specific methods and tools. Our study highlights the importance of overall goals and research questions in shaping scholarly process. Generation of semantic paths connecting concepts in NeMO enables support for associative queries and reasoning about the research activities, methods followed, and their context. Indexing terms are drawn from taxonomies incorporated in NeMO. This work contributes to methodological reflexivity, better understanding of the research process, and improved communication on research methods in archaeology. Future work includes the streamlining of interaction processes using NeMO and semantic publishing of related information. |