Discussion of readings for session 6: linked geographical data

[gabrielbodard]

1. Chiara Palladino. 2016. "New Approaches to Ancient Spatial Models: Digital Humanities and Classical Geography." In Digital Approaches and the Ancient World. Edd. G. Bodard, Y. Broux & S. Tarte. BICS 59.2, 56-70. Available: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12038.x/full
2. Vitale, V., Soto, P. D., Simon, R., Barker, E., Isaksen, L., & Kahn, R. (2021). Pelagios–Connecting Histories of Place. Part I: Methods and Tools. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 15(1-2), 5-32. Available https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ijhac.2021.0260

[molmay]

The paper by Vitale et al provides an overview of the history and methodologies of the Pelagios initiative. The project was inspired by a series of previous initiatives and born of the desire to make data more readily discoverable, enabling both the easier formation of narratives and the uncovering of potential areas of research within the classical Greek and Roman world. The paper includes a great amount of self-reflexivity, making the limitations of each phase of the initiative clear and outlining how that inspired the development of subsequent versions: the second version of Pelagios made it easier to adopt semantic annotations by providing guides and instructions, whilst the third version expanded outside of the Mediterranean to include early Christian, Islamic, and Chinese evidence and consider how far Pelagios could aid the understanding of pre-Cartesian modes of geographic representation. This 3rd version of the initiative emphasised the issues posed by a lack of specialist historical gazetteers relevant to these places and periods, thus encouraging the development of the Pelagios Gazetteer interconnection format - allowing the alignment of URI-based gazetteers with minimal specification. Following this, the Recogito platform was developed to make the production of linked open geodata easier for non-specialists, an issue that had realistically persisted since the first iteration of Pelagios, and also attempted to make the process enjoyable. Recogito 2.0 opened up the use of the platform to anybody and allowed for the greater facilitation of community interaction, which in itself is credited for later improvements to the platform. For example, community interaction uncovered a desire for the platform to be able to annotate relationships which was subsequently enabled, and allowed for communities to uncover absences of global authorities on certain fields and thus develop them for use. The use of these systems for teaching and introducing pupils/students to the world of digital scholarship is then investigated towards the end of the paper.

The key idea of this paper that jumped out to me is the emphasis on community and communal engagement. The very premise of Pelagios is to enable the connection of data, not only to benefit the individuals who initially study those pieces of data but subsequent individuals interested in specific objects, places or concepts etc. Community is stressed in the emphasis on making the initiative more accessible with every version developed, but also in the importance of certain concepts, such as language or the hosts of URIs, being universally accepted within a community. To this extent, I was really reminded of a lot of the themes and ideas raised by crowdsourcing - the need to create and utilise systems for the benefit of the many and in a way that is also accepted by the many. I was especially reminded of this by the repeated references to the 'Goldilocks problem' - ensuring that things are 'just right' as opposed to being to in-depth or too scant, as when creating or editing wikipedia pages for example.

[Ghilaevansky]

I agree with Molly here, in regards to the Vitale article: it is indeed an effort to make data more readily discoverable. It is clear that the contents of this paper value community engagement. Personally, I found the Vitale article fascinating how Linked Open Geodata (LOG) and Recogito allow for annotators to control their workflow and viewers accessibility to it. The power of geoannotation of images creates visualisation of and analysis of maps. These can then be compared with texts. "Recogito can be an effective way to learn about the physical and cultural roles that particular places and landscapes have played in shaping historical events. Thanks to the features that enable collaborative annotation, it is well suited to group assignments where students can collectively define annotation and tagging criteria and determine their own research questions. A rich set of sharing options allows users to choose the level of access to others they deem suitable for their work."

The Chiara Palladino article explained how texts are greatly varied in relation to literature, genre, period and purpose. Their main aim is to "suggest a new exploratory pattern, by entirely addressing an existing problem through digital research. Ancient geography is an especially interesting case, because it represents an almost unknown world: the challenge is, therefore, to verify whether digital methods can provide a complete research framework, from the very initial stages of exploration, data gathering, and analysis, to the formalization of a model, required for advanced applications and within a purely ‘digital’ perspective. Ultimately, the main goal is to see how an entirely born-digital approach is able to change, and to challenge, our horizons and our attitude to research."

[katie-goodman]

The Palladino article presents us with a Digital Humanities approach to the study of Graeco-Roman geography, using instances of geographical information in primary Graeco-Roman texts. Following a helpful introduction to the concept of ancient geography, Palladino goes on to outline some of the most significant contributions to the study of Graeco-Roman geography made within the past two decades or-so, as made by Digital Humanities projects, noting the field has been ‘especially willing to engage with new methodologies’. Moving on to primary focus of the paper, digital humanities and ancient geography, the article then introduces the basic concepts involved when addressing ancient geography as a ‘system of knowledge’, namely ‘Distances’, ‘Orientation’ and ‘Spatial Semantics’. No attempt is made to define any of these concepts, rather, the intention is to be able to distinguish between the three. The empiric and/or linguistic origins of each concept is addressed, as are the problems posed by each within both digital, and so-called ‘traditional’ scholarship. One that leaps out, across all three concepts, is the lack of standards. Palladino uses the concepts and their respective problems to argue for ‘a crucial need for formalisation and standards, in order to achieve an effective representation and a reasonable framework for investigation’ in Digital Humanities. This ‘lack of standards’, it is continued, forces what Palladino describes a ‘bottom-up approach’ when studying ancient geography within digital humanities. This requires the establishment of an ‘analytical and exploratory methodology’, reliant on primary sources and the ability to categorise them into two different general datasets, language-centred within the context of linguistic analysis – a corpus-driven approach, using treebanking and linguistic annotation –, and concept-centred within the framework of semantic annotation – here, the Pelagios project is introduced. Described as ‘a community-driven initiative strongly connected to Linked Open Data: it aims to facilitate linkage between online resources and by sharing common references rather than a common vocabulary’. The idea central to Pelagios is that ‘a complete picture of the past can emerge from the combination of a variety of research perspectives’, and this has led to Pelagios Commons, a formal network for geospatial research focussing on ‘the problem of annotating, linking, and indexing place references in ‘early geospatial documents’. The web-based tool Recogito was developed to support the collaborative work in Pelagios, with Recogito maintaining ‘a large database of texts and maps, where users can tag and geo-reference instances of place references by working directly on the sources’. Ultimately, through the study of ancient geography within the context of digital humanities, Palladino questions the extent to which digital methods can provide a ‘complete research framework’ within a ‘purely digital perspective’; ‘the main goal is to see how an entirely born-digital approach is able to change, and to challenge, our horizons and our attitude to research.’

On the whole, I quite enjoyed reading this paper; I found the theme of ancient geography particularly interesting, especially within the context of digital humanities. It is a coupling I’d previously not given much to but can now understand how obviously valuable such technology can be for research in this field. I did find some of the text to be a little jargon-dense for me, so I I’ll give it another read following Thursday’s lecture and try to adjust this summary accordingly!

[RuiRRR]

As can be seen from Valeria Vitale's article, 3D visualization of cultural heritage based on archaeological excavation has the characteristics of record and digital preservation. The scanned cultural heritage buildings and cultural relics maximize the visual results that can't be detected by vision, which makes scientific research more accurate. But 3D visualizations are "opaque," making it impossible for academia to assess the accuracy of visual results, and most museums still use opaque digital products, making 3D visualizations a communication tool rather than actually adding anything to learning.

[JasNewtonRae]

I found Palladino's article very interesting with the different ideas about how language works and how this impacts things such as digital humanities. It lead me to think about how this could be something to possibly think about in terms of texts that fall under the genre of paradoxographies (I think that's more or less how its spelt). Indeed, I think there is a chance that Pseudo-Aristotle's 'de Mirabilibus Auscultationibus' would be an interesting text to look at in this way.