Call for participation: Workshop "Developing NeMO: the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology"
The ESF Research Network, NeDiMAH, is developing an ontology of digital research methods in the arts and humanities (NeDiMAH Methods Ontology: NeMO), in order to support the classification and understanding of digital humanities research methods. NeMO will provide evidence of the use of digital resources for scholarship to support visibility and sustainability of digital collections and scholarship. It will enable the critical evaluation of digital humanities by providing an evidence base that is transparent; well-‐documented; reviewable across disciplines, making visible multi-‐disciplinary, multi-‐technology initiatives. It will be a means of documenting partnerships across disciplines and organizations, demonstrating the collaborative, scholarly, and human infrastructures of digital humanities, as well as technical infrastructures.
Part of the research development of NeMO is developing the basis of a “knowledge base” of the “content illustrating digital methods use in humanities research”. A series of case studies will feed into this content. The aim of this workshop is to develop some case studies of digital humanities methods and activities that will feed into a detailed working methods analysis exercise. NeMO will be launched in May 2015. The workshop is open to participants who wish to contribute to this important aspect of the ontology development work.
Call for participation
We invite participation in this workshop by people who can come along with one case of digital humanities work fully described, based on the template of description to be filled in below. See at the end for information in order to better prepare for the workshop. The workshop will also explore the potential benefit of the ontology as a guide and learning tool for the scholarly community, working with representatives from DARIAH VCC2. This workshop is aimed at humanities researchers, not necessarily digital humanists, who would be interested in analyzing and codifying the scholarly activity per se.
Programme
Monday, 15th December
09:00-‐10:00 A presentation by NeMO research team on the current status of the ontology, the incorporation of other taxonomies into it, and example use cases.
10:00-‐12:00 Elaboration of the use cases of the participants, making sure that in the end they are expressed in terms of the ontology (thus feeding the knowledge base).
12:00-‐13:00 Lunch
13:00-‐17:00 Discussion of case studies, and modelling exercise.
Tuesday, 16th December
09:00-‐10:30 Continuation of modelling exercise
10:30-‐12:00 Consolidation and conclusion
Provisional list of proposed speakers/participants
Lorna Hughes , Panos Constantopoulos, Costis Dallas, Agiati Benardou, Stavros Angelis, Vayianos Pertsas, Susan Schreibman, Manfred Thaller, Stef Scagliola, Ingrida Vosyliute, Louise Borek, Walter Scholger, Elli Mylonas.
(others to be selected via an open call).
NeMO: Background and scientific summary
NeMO is an important research project that is bringing together empirical work on scholarly practices (carried out by the Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Institute, Greece, and , DARIAH-‐EU); the Scholarly Research Activity Model developed by DARIAH-‐GR, and the expansion of existing taxonomies of digital humanities methods. NeMO will include classifications of scholarly disciplines, research techniques, procedures, research data and resources, epistemic information objects, projects, research actors, environments, mechanisms, tools, systems, infrastructures. It will combine this with empirical evidence of practice drawn from NeDiMAH Working Group activities.
NeMO will advance significantly the state of the art established by earlier initiatives in the field of digital research methods formal representation work, such as manifested in the AHDS digital research methods taxonomy , the Oxford methods taxonomy, the methods taxonomy/ontology currently under development by DARIAH-‐DE, as well as the information organization schemes applied in the DHO, arts-‐humanities.net and DH-‐Commons portals.
The outcome of the project will be an ontology delivered in both document and machine readable forms, and a Web service comprising a database containing the ontology definition and the appropriate functionality to support access to and evolution of the ontology. The ontology will be an explicit specification of a shared conceptualization of digital research methods and their context of scholarly use. It includes types of objects and/or concepts, and their properties and relations, which can be used to adequately represent the domain of arts and humanities scholarly practice in the digital age. The scope of abstract entities encompassed by the methods ontology may include classifications of scholarly disciplines and fields, methodologies, theoretical approaches, research techniques, procedures, research data and resources, epistemic objects, research actors, as well as research environments, mechanisms, tools, systems, services, and infrastructures. Entities representing particulars, such as concrete digital methods, research procedures, and tools, will be defined on the basis of the specification of abstract entities, the property slots employed for their definition, and the relations between them. In this framework accounts of empirically attested scholarly practice, such as the use of a particular research method by a specific digital humanities research project to process a dataset or body of scholarly evidence into an interpretive model, syllogism, or publication, will be represented as instances of relevant entities and properties of the ontology. In terms of structure, the ontology will comprise a basic network of concepts associated with various semantic relations and a number of taxonomies capturing systematic specialisations of those concepts and relations. This formalization assures that the ontology will adhere to principles of scientific rigour, and it will be amenable to operationalization, e.g. to produce a schema for systems such as digital research practice portals, and methods and tools registries. In document form, the ontology will include definitions of entities and properties, and examples of occurrence and use after the model of ISO standard 21127 CIDOC CRM, the dominant ontology for documentation in the cultural domain. Moreover, compatibility with this standard will be ensured at the appropriate level. In machine readable form, the ontology will be defined in RDF/S (RDF Schema), in order to support its use in a wide range of applications accessing registries and knowledge bases that contain information about methods and their context of use. Furthermore the taxonomic parts of the ontology will comply with SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System).
The compliance with standards indicated above caters for syntactic as well as semantic interoperability between future registries and applications employing this methods ontology and other CIDOC CRM – and SKOS – compliant information systems in the arts and humanities and in libraries, museums and archives.
Applications for participation should be made to Prof. Lorna Hughes at the following email address: lmh@llgc.org.uk
