Social Networks and Networked Data: A View from the Humanities Toby Burrows

Activities  Collaborative Grant Programs  Symposia  International conferences  Co-sponsored events  Postgraduate/ECR  Digital agenda ARC Network for Early European 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 ( )  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 & 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 Programme  Postgraduate and Advanced Training Seminars (PATS)  Funding to attend conferences and seminars  E-consult scheme  Internships & work placements – Brepols (Belgium)  Personal Web spaces

Digital Initiatives  Communication  Web site, 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 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

PioNEER  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 (“Europe 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?  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 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 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 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 Confluence confluence.arts.uwa.edu.au ASSDAwww.assda.edu.au Toby