Social Networks and Networked Data:

A View from the Humanities

Toby Burrows

ActivitiesActivities Collaborative Grant Programs Symposia International conferences Co-sponsored events Postgraduate/ECR Digital agenda

ARC Network for Early European ARC Network for Early European Research (NEER)Research (NEER)

Scope: Australian research into the culture and history of Europe between the 5th and early 19th centuries

Funded by Australian Research Council Networks Programme (2004-2010) Enhance the scale and focus of research Encourage more inter-disciplinary approaches Facilitate collaborative & innovative approaches

Programmes for Australian participants Collaborative grant programmes: Research Clusters Symposia, conferences, events Publications

Participants & PartnersParticipants & Partners 350+ individual researchers

Australian universities and industry partners Universities: Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney, UWA State Library of New South Wales State Library of Victoria Australians Studying Abroad Western Australian Museum University of Western Australia Press Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group St George’s Cathedral Woodside Valley Foundation

International linkages: CARMEN (EU), CARA (US)

Postgraduate and Early Career Postgraduate and Early Career ProgrammeProgramme

Postgraduate and Advanced Training Seminars (PATS)

Funding to attend conferences and seminars

E-consult scheme Internships & work placements –

Brepols (Belgium) Personal Web spaces

Digital InitiativesDigital Initiatives Communication

Web site, e-mail lists Collaborative working tools and

workspaces: Confluence Shared resources

Commercial databases: ProQuest (EEBO), Brepols (5 databases)

Skills and training: Brepols internships Electronic publication: Parergon / Project

Muse Research repository: PioNEER Heritage collections: Europa Inventa

NEER ConfluenceNEER Confluence Collaborative software Commercial Wiki product

(Atlassian) Hosted at University of W.A. Communication, discussion,

annotation, collaborative writing News and blogs Personal spaces & group spaces Searchable Security and access controls Web-based Plug-ins

PioNEERPioNEER

NEER’s digital repository of research outputs Representative and retrospective Not just “publications” – other types of outputs

and data

DigiTool software Hosted by UWA Library Available from September 2009

Links to institutional repositories Self-archiving + central deposit

Europa Inventa Europa Inventa (“(“Europe discoveredEurope discovered”)”)

A discovery service for Early European items in Australian collections: manuscripts, artworks, historic objects in museums, galleries, libraries

Initial focus is on unique items and those with specific associations – about 1,700 items so far

Link from descriptive catalogue records to digitized images held on the servers of the holding institutions (rather than storing copies of images centrally)

Rubens, Self-portrait(National Gallery of

Australia)

Where are the data?Where are the data? Defining “data” in the humanities Primary sources and secondary sources Publications: what data does PioNEER

contain? Metadata: what data does Europa

Inventa contain? Social media: what data does

Confluence contain?Dosso Dossi,

Lucrezia Borgia (?)(National Gallery of

Victoria)

Humanities data archivesHumanities data archives

Quantitative and qualitative humanities data, e.g. HCCDA

DANS and UKDA (History Data Service)

Digital library services, e.g. ECHO – are they data archives?

Text collections, e.g. TextGrid – are they data archives? Tiepolo, The Banquet of Cleopatra

(National Gallery of Victoria)

Modelling humanities data IModelling humanities data I Data sources: texts, objects,

secondary works (digital libraries, collections etc.)

Publications: analysis of the results What scholars do in-between:

annotate, extract, link, categorize, describe, represent, etc. John Unsworth’s “Scholarly Primitives” Project Bamboo’s modelling

Modelling humanities data IIModelling humanities data II

Data: annotations, representations, links and so on, connected with identified entities

Entities can include concepts, persons, creative works, places, events, objects

Linked Data RDF Triple Store + annotation, visualization, analysis, links to sources and objects

Automating the extraction of entities and links (e.g., text mining) – Perseus

Further information

NEER Web site www.neer.arts.uwa.edu.auConfluence confluence.arts.uwa.edu.au ASSDA www.assda.edu.au

Toby Burrows toby.burrows@uwa.edu.au