15-20 Minute Paper
Adčle Barclay, Susan Brown, Jentery Sayers, and John Simpson
University of Victoria
Biography
INKE: The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project has been described, in brief, as an interdisciplinary initiative spawned in the methodological commons of the digital humanities that seeks to understand the future of reading through reading’s past and to explore the future of the book from the perspective of its history. For this essential work, INKE brings together researchers and stakeholders at the forefront of computing in the humanities, text analysis, information studies, usability, and interface design into a network comprised of those who are best-‐poised to understand the nature of the human record as it intersects with the computer.
The international INKE Research Group consists of 35 researchers across 20 institutions and 21 partner agencies, with work involving some 19 postdoctoral research fellows and 53 graduate research assistants over the life of the project. More: http://inke.ca/.
Abstract
Digital scholarly communications are increasingly dynamic, collaboratively-produced texts that emphasize interlinkages across unique, distributed resources. The now popular Resource Description Framework (RDF) offers considerable potential for supporting these aspects of digital scholarly production through the creation, publication, and harvesting of public RDF in the form of Linked Data.
However, RDF and Linked Data have been mobilized largely in the sciences, and very little humanities research has been conducted on either. As such, this INKE paper asks what the humanities have to learn from RDF and Linked Data, and—more specifically—how each may allow scholars to explore “the kinds of humanistic phenomena” that “appear only at scale” (Liu 2012). This paper surveys an array of existing humanities projects involving RDF, organizing them into the following categories: 1) domain-centric projects, which build upon previously established preservation projects and extend them online; 2) aggregator projects, which gather contextual information from disparate sites around the web and afford access to millions of scholarly materials, often through advanced visualization techniques; and 3) tools, which leverage the synergistic integrations promised by the growth of semantic web activities in the humanities and help scholars navigate, describe, and interpret large sums of data.
Based on this survey, the INKE Research Team has concluded that humanities applications of RDF and Linked Data generally differ from those in the sciences. Whereas science-based applications tend to privilege a single structure or ontology, humanities applications focus on user-based knowledge creation and customized ontologies and approaches.
Yet this conclusion also acts as a cautionary tale for the future of RDF and Linked Data in humanities projects, namely because customized ontologies and approaches pose a number of difficulties where accessibility and interoperability are concerned. Transparency of knowledge representation and ease of use will have a major influence on how effectively Linked Data will help humanities scholars explore phenomena that appear only at scale. As such, this paper ultimately recommends that digital humanities practitioners consider the “long now” of their RDF and Linked Data projects (Eno 2003). A form of long-term thinking and responsibility, working in the long now involves designing, building, and maintaining domain-centric collections, aggregation projects, and tools that think seriously about the audiences, developers, and archivists who are well off in the distance, in 2023 and beyond.
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