Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities

Ramsay, Stephen; Rockwell, Geoffrey

doi:10.5749/minnesota/9780816677948.003.0010

Cited by 77 publications

(40 citation statements)

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“…Mentioned by Ramsey and Rockwell in the context of the Digital Humanities domain, the term refers to the difficulty of adequately describing the value of the implementation of a technology. When presenting research,"[…] either the technique is encapsulated inside the black box of magical technology or it is unfolded in tedious detail obscuring the interpretationtedious detail which ends up being a black box of tedium anyway" (Ramsay and Rockwell, 2012).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The fallacy of the multi-API culture

Verborgh

Hooland

Cope

et al. 2015

Journal of Documentation

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to revisit a decade after its conception the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style and analyzes its relevance to address current challenges from the Library and Information Science (LIS) discipline. Design/methodology/approach -Conceptual aspects of REST are reviewed and a generic architecture to support REST is presented. The relevance of the architecture is demonstrated with the help of a case study based on the collection registration database of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Findings -The authors argue that the "resources and representations" model of REST is a sustainable way for the management of web resources in a context of constant technological evolutions. Practical implications -When making information resources available on the web, a resource-oriented publishing model can avoid the costs associated with the creation of multiple interfaces. Originality/value -This paper re-examines the conceptual merits of REST and translates the architecture into actionable recommendations for institutions that publish resources.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The fallacy of the multi-API culture

Verborgh

Hooland

Cope

et al. 2015

Journal of Documentation

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“…Theory plays a role in coordinating and integrating individual contributions to the scholarly knowledge produced by a disciplinary community (Whitley, 2000), thus making it a key element of articulation work. Prominent scholars have argued that DH have been too much concerned with creating digital artifacts such as tools and analytical applications, and not enough with underpinning these activities theoretically (Ramsay and Rockwell, 2012). As a side effect of this neglect of theory, critics such as Johanna Drucker suggest, the DH risk buying into a new form of digital positivism that is tacitly imported together with datacentric methods and tools for quantitative analysis (case #3).…”

Section: Methodology and Case Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructural Inversion as a Generative Resource in Digital Scholarship

Kaltenbrunner

2014

Science as Culture

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Digital humanities scholarship has regularly challenged characteristic organizational features of academic life in the humanities. For example, it is typically practiced in larger collaborative projects that produce output very different from the traditional scholarly monograph. Digital humanists often present their work in strikingly reflexive accounts that are reminiscent of what science and technology studies scholars have called infrastructural inversion, a method that defamiliarizes the socio-material infrastructure of research to expose the inner workings of knowledge production. At first sight, infrastructural inversion might seem to constitute the opposite of the older concept of articulation work, which designates the situated activity of coordinating and managing cooperative work processes. It is more useful, however, to think about infrastructural inversion as a specific form of articulation work. The inversions performed by digital scholars serve to highlight and problematize established ways of streamlining articulation work, for example, through the established model of peer review, or by using conventional forms of scholarly output. In turn, such systematic defamiliarization opens up new and potentially competing ways of imagining the organization of articulation work.

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“…Linked Data has become an important topic for digital humanists, but the use of NER has been limited to large-scale projects. Ramsay and Rockwell (2012) recently underlined the importance of hands-on experimentation in order to come to grips with technology and to work towards an epistemology of building the necessary tools and research infrastructures. If the Digital Humanities truly want to foster such an epistemology, tools need to be made more accessible for humanities scholars, but also the methodologies to assess the outcomes of those tools.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring entity recognition and disambiguation for cultural heritage collections

Hooland¹,

Wilde²,

Verborgh³

et al. 2013

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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Unstructured metadata fields such as 'description' offer tremendous value for users to understand cultural heritage objects. However, this type of narrative information is of little direct use within a machine-readable context due to its unstructured nature. This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of Named-Entity Recognition (NER) and Term Extraction (TE) to mine such unstructured metadata for meaningful concepts. These concepts can be used to leverage otherwise limited searching and browsing operations, but they can also play an important role to foster Digital Humanities research. In order to catalyze experimentation with NER and TE, the paper proposes an evaluation of the performance of three third-party entity extraction services through a comprehensive case study, based on the descriptive fields of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. In order to cover both NER and TE, we first offer a quantitative analysis of named-entities retrieved by the services in terms of precision and recall compared to a manually annotated gold-standard corpus, then complement this approach with a more qualitative assessment of relevant terms extracted. Based on the outcomes of this double analysis, the conclusions present the added value of entity extraction services, but also indicate the dangers of uncritically using NER and/or TE, and by extension Linked Data principles, within the Digital Humanities. All metadata and tools used within the paper are freely available, making it possible for researchers and practitioners to repeat the methodology. By doing so, the paper offers a significant contribution towards understanding the value of entity recognition and disambiguation for the Digital Humanities.

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Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities

Cited by 77 publications

References 0 publications

The fallacy of the multi-API culture

The fallacy of the multi-API culture

Infrastructural Inversion as a Generative Resource in Digital Scholarship

Exploring entity recognition and disambiguation for cultural heritage collections

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