Venue: University of Vienna
Modelling the Scholarly Process
The idea of connecting our knowledge, or networking information, has been a desideratum of digital scholarship since its beginnings. As these networks lend themselves very easily to expression as graphs, our tools of choice have followed: many libraries, archives, museums, and other repositories of data in the humanities make their goods available via Linked Open Data, following the principles of the Semantic Web. Many other research projects in the humanities have adopted graph models and even graph databases as their base, as these lend themselves naturally to collections of information where the link, the connection, or the relationship is paramount.
The 2019 conference celebrated the breadth of application of graph-based approaches in the humanities. For 2020 we would like to follow up with a more focused theme, whose central question is: To what extent are our scholarly processes reflected in our data models, and how (if at all) do graph technologies allow us to capture these processes in the digital realm? That is to say, when we choose to link items of information together (say, the identification of a person in an inscription or of a place in a text), are we adequately capturing the process that led us to make this choice? What mechanisms are (or should be) available to enable fact checking and to reconstruct the provenance of information?
Call for Papers
Key topics arising from the main theme Modelling the Scholarly Process include:
- Provenance and source criticism – While Linked Open Data, in the form of RDF, has (outside of textual criticism) become something of a standard for repositories of humanities data, there is a certain hesitation around its reuse outside of the project in which it was created. The perception is that the RDF data will not be complete enough, accurate enough, or nuanced enough for use outside its original context. How can we address these questions of source critique, making the data maximally useful, either in an RDF-based project or in any other form of linked data?
- Validation – One of the points of resistance to the adoption of graph models more widely in the humanities is the lack of a validation framework as well-known as XML schemas. Insofar as validation is a necessary part of the scholarly process, how do we do this with graph models?
- Visualization – One of the acknowledged strengths of networked models is that they lend themselves very easily to visualization, which is a pivotal part of explaining the results and the scholarly process to our peers; at the same time, the “hairball” of a densely-connected network graph has become something of a cliché within the digital humanities. The urgent question thus arises: which visualization methods there are beyond the “hairball”? How can visualization techniques support the analytic richness of graph complexity while at the same time reduce it to the point of comprehensibility? Which modes are there to interact with graph data and how can visualization contribute to manipulation and editing of graph data?
We welcome proposals for theoretical papers that engage substantially with any of these key topics, as well as for practice-based papers that describe the practical application of graph technologies to humanities research work and/or present practical engineering solutions and approaches to these key questions or related topics such as:
- Graph-based data models, theoretical and practical explorations
- Applications of graph technologies in the humanities
- Solutions for query and comparison of different graph models
- Strategies for, or demonstration of, various kinds of (computational) access to humanities data and information represented as graphs
- Graph representation of specific networks of persons, objects, and information relating to humanities research questions
- Interacting with graphs and graph interaction design
- Graphs as a solution for information and data annotation in the humanities
- Graphs as models for representation of provenance and transmission of information
- Graphs as models for historical data and information, above and beyond social network analysis
- Engineering solutions to analysis, traversal, querying graph structure data in specific humanities research contexts
- The comparison and interpretation of graphs, subgraphs, and traversals
Submission Details
Proposals (between 300 and 500 words, exclusive of bibliographic references) should be submitted to graphentechnologien@adwmainz.de by 21 October 2019.
– Extended Deadline until 28 October 2019 –
Abstracts may be submitted in English or German.
Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent out on 15 November 2019. Authors of successful submissions will be allotted 20 minutes for their presentations, as well as a few minutes for discussion thereafter.
The organizers of the conference have a limited amount of funding to support travel costs for the presenters of each accepted paper (one bursary per paper). If you would like to apply for funding, please indicate this along with your submission.
Presented papers will be published online at the very least, however the program committee intends to publish selected papers in a suitable peer reviewed publication.
Program Committee
Prof. Dr. Tara Andrews (University of Vienna)
Franziska Diehr (Prussian Heritage Foundation, Berlin)
Dr. Thomas Efer (University of Leipzig)
Dr. Andreas Kuczera (Academy of Science and Literature, Mainz/Gießen)
Drs. Joris van Zundert (Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, Amsterdam)