Summary of Proposal

The Internet is recognised as a vital component of our political information systems.  Although extensively used by governments and civil society groups, its effects upon political processes; particularly deliberative political processes, currently remains relatively unknown.  Emerging research suggests that the Internet’s capacity to easily produce information has also led to data overload, undermining its deliberative potential.  With the advent of the National Broadband Network the ‘data deluge’ promises to intensify increasing the need for political information—in its various guises—to be delivered in much more meaningful ways.[1] This is especially important for younger audiences who are increasingly abandoning broadcast media in favour of online political information[2].

This project is an iterative study and design of an online ‘Political Issues Analysis System’ (PIAS) to assist users’ research and analyse political issues. It will deliver information about important political topics (ie. environmental issues, socio-economic issues, immigration, government policy etc.) using important data sources within a coherent ‘deliberative’ framework.  It will evaluate the needs of users to comprehend political issues through the application of a number of semantic indexing and data matching tools and design a prototype system.  It will do this in part through five public workshops using the University of Melbourne’s Usability Lab; each workshop focussing on a particular issue utilising particular tools and methods.[3] It will in tandem uncover recommendations to assist in the design of a unique software tool that fosters user-driven processes to effectively filter and visualise online political information obtained from government data-sets (partly within the ‘Government 2.0’ policy framework), the media, NGOs, historical data, and other user-generated online sources; (blogs, video etc).

The outputs of the research will be a working prototype as well as a report documenting the research outcomes with a series of recommendations for further research. This project may lead to the first major study of online deliberative processes within Australia; competitive within the ARC’s Linkage or Discovery scheme. The work will be of benefit to governments, community groups and other major producers of political sites and the users of such sites. The project is within IBES’s Social Infrastructures and Community theme and in particular, adheres to IBES’s and VeRSI’s shared aspirations ‘to make existing and available data more accessible’. In summary the broad aims of the project are:

• To explore the evolving applications of online political information tools in an Australian and International context (especially in the analysis of broadband-enabled video and audio)
• To examine deliberative processes with a number of stakeholder groups using semantic indexing methods and various communication tools at the University’s IDEA Lab.
• To build, test and provide further recommendations for a ‘Political Issues Analysis System’ (PIAS)

Through these processes we address the following research questions:

• How can we better understand online deliberation in the international and Australian context and what tools need to be developed to assist this?
• How can we better design deliberative ‘ideas’ using data and online analysis tools that will involve people in a meaningful and inclusive way in consequential goal-orientated political processes?

Approach and Outcomes:

The combination of theoretical groundwork, empirical study, and the design and implementation of the PIAS, will make an important contribution to the emerging body of research on the nature of political information on the Internet and in particular, the use of government data within it. Of chief significance is that the research will make explicit and open up to critical analysis the dichotomy between the availability of government and other data sources and effective online deliberative design. By consciously foregrounding information abundance as a condition of the present ‘information revolution’—through a unique fusion of political theory with semantic analysis and clustering tools—new perspectives will emerge and fresh research areas in design will open up.

The approach, then, is both innovative and unique because it combines the theoretical sophistication of Politics and Media Studies with the technical proficiency of Humanities Computing, eDemocracy, and Information Systems to expose important issues of online political information to critique in ways that were previously unavailable. [4] The work will open up theoretical and technological pathways towards a more genuinely identifiable (and sustainable) online political engagement and democratic structuring.

Technology and potential collaborators:

Potential collaborators for this work include the UK’s mysociety.org. They have developed some of the UK’s most well-know sites including TheyWorkForYou.com and its local derivative, OpenAustralia.org.  The open source solutions, API, raw data and results will be collaboratively developed and shared with mysociety and OpenAustralia to complete the PIAS. Likewise, solutions developed through the ‘inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data’ as well as the Federal ‘e-Government Strategy’ will be investigated and may provide potential collaborators. In essence the PIAS is a ‘parsing’ project; to parse structured government and other data sets to extract and deliver meaningful political information to a general audience. It will explore ways to crawl, cluster and analyse unstructured data contained in blogs and other ‘unofficial’ sources including video and audio (perhaps using XPROC processing).

The broad samples obtained through the PIAS iterative design workshops and subsequent prototype will provide a unique model to analyse web-based dialogue, agenda setting, and responses to official government positions on important political topics. This work may be up-scaled at a later date to include other collaborators; particularly the Pollsters who may be eager to invest in such a system.

[2] See: Clare Kurmond, Readership Decline Continues for Papers, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 14 Mat, 2010

< http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/readership-decline-continues-for-papers-20100513-v1tk.html> (Accessed 14 May, 2010).

[3]Interaction Design Evaluation Analysis (IDEA), Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne,

< http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/research/interactiondesign//usability_lab.html> (Accessed 14 May 2010).

[4] Carson, L ‘Avoiding ghettos of like-minded people: Random selection and organisational collaboration’ in S. Schuman, (ed) Creating a Culture of Collaboration, ed. Jossey Bass/Wiley.pp.418-423.

Registration is now open for the 2010 Summer School. Please see the registration page for further details.

The Digital Humanities Observatory in conjunction with NINES and the EpiDoc Collaborative is pleased to offer the DHO Summer School 2010. It will bring together 60 Irish and International humanities scholars undertaking digital projects in diverse areas to explore issues and trends of common interest. Workshops and lectures will offer attendees opportunities to develop their skills, share insights, and discover new opportunities for collaboration and research. Activities focus on the theoretical, technical, administrative, and institutional issues relevant to the needs of digital humanities projects today.
The full summer school package offers participants four week-long workshop strands to choose from, a second day–long workshop and two lectures all on innovative topics by leading experts and theorists in digital humanities with additional options of private consultation time with a digital humanities specialist and evening social activities.
For those unable to attend the full Summer School, it is possible to register for the one-day workshop and/or one or both of the lectures (link)

New York University professor Clay Shirky, an expert on social media, kicked off Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day NYC 2009 with a thoughtful keynote on what motivates people to participate in online communities (Thanks to Leigh B. for the link)

Joris van Zundert from the Huygens Institute in The Hague spoke first about moving humanities tools towards ‘networked services’. Many tools are developed for individual projects and are not often re-usable within other projects. By providing  tools online (or ‘micro services’ that can be plugged into a generic software frameworks), other projects may use them to say, parse TEI XML texts, tokenise texts, or apply other methods required to transcribe and annotate text. His vision,  shared by many projects, is for scholars to obtain their text from digital repositories, pipe it through a number of micro-services, and then end up with annotated and transcribed data. The particular content that Zandert is working with is critical editions of Middle Dutch; not easily automated through Optical Character Recognition Systems (thus a collaborative translation system is required).

Dot Porter, the Metadata Manager at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin spoke about her TILE project for linking image and text. Similar to the other projects presented, TILE will be ‘beautifully modular’ in that existing tools and services will be able to be plugged into it creating ‘a system where existing tools work well together’. She described it as ‘a community of projects not a single project’. Similar to Zundert’s project, this system will be able to make use of data once it is stored in a digital repository and provide the tools to work with it. The plan is to provide a suite of tools and collections of (critical editing) tools to display and annotate images.

Roger Osborne spoke about the Aus-e-lit project that provides collaborative integration and annotation services for Australian literature scholars. The original project originated in 1980 from a card index of Australian authors and list authors from 1788 to the present. It contains 650, 000 citations that are entered by a team of specialists from around Australia. The services the Aus-e-lit project provides includes data integration, empirical reporting, collaborative annotation and publishing services. The system includes a Firefox add-on to enable users to add Dublin core and other relationships to the digital works and citations stored. Osborne also mentioned that a large digitisation fund was becoming available in Australia involving the National Library, the National Archives, and the Film Archive. If large digitisation projects along with their data are available in Australia, then just like Britain who leads in this field, Australian scholars will be in a position to add-value to this data through collaborative annotation and editing systems such as Aust-e-Lit.

Yin Liu and Geoff Rockwell presented some of their work in Canada. Yin Liu was one of the few presenters to raises issues of ‘scholarly culture’; especially in terms of authoring scholarly editions (perhaps the core intellectual endeavour of the Digital Humanities field). She posed the question ‘is the single author edition the best way to do things or is it a function of the traditional model of what an edition might be?’ Although she did not attempt to answer the question; it is extraordinary important to pose questions such as this as poorly implemented ‘solutions’ in scholarly culture can undermine scholarship.

Geoff Rockwell talked about the projects TAPOR and JITR. Similar to the TILE project, TAPOR is a portal for tools; a broker for web services. He discussed how to turn tools into web-services (and also emphasised that it is OK at times to ‘re-invent the wheel’; in part because of the diversity of approaches in the humanities). TAPOR is a way of importing text and listing tools to work with the text. It has a section called TAPORware that lists tools, explains what they do, then allows users to apply the tools (interestigly, the innovative online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly uses one of TAPOR’s tools). Rockwell also briefly discussed JITR which is an integration testing system for the interoperation of tools. The tools to gather, edit, and analyse text may need to be ‘interoperate’ to accommodate scholarly work flows. JITR is a system to test if they work well together (the tools, not the scholars!)

Other projects discussed at the workshop included Neel Smith’s The Cite Architecture for identifying and retrieving objects (US) , TextGrid; a large German project for collecting, organising and analysing texts (or an extensible community architecture). Peter Robinson and Federico Meschini (UK) discussed ontologies (or the ‘semantic digital humanities’) and called for projects to reveal their ontologies and make them available to other projects. Tamara Lopez from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities discussed the new project TextVRE which is an extension to the German TextGrid projects so that TextGrid can work with English texts and UK national services. The final project presented was by Karsten Kynde from the Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen who discussed the Kierkegaard online edition and his fairly traditional critical edition approach.

Overall, many of the participants stressed the need to design tools to target architecture, not isolated research tasks. Infrastructure has no value in itself and must have good tools, services and significant data resources to work with it. There needs to be a deep understanding of scholarly research processes and modular, extensible, and flexible systems are needed to accommodate the myriad of scholarly approaches and heterogeneous data resources in the humanities. There was also much discussion of ontologies as ontologies provide the basis for finding digital texts on line in their rich and meaningful context so that they can be linked/compared/integrated with others.  Plus, turn your tools into web services!

The projects discussed at the workshop include:

• T.I.L.E Text Image Linking Environment (US and Ireland)
  http://mith.info/tile/
• The Cite Architecture for Identifying and Retrieving Objects (US)
  http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/cite
• e-Laborate: Virtual Workspace for Social Sciences and Humanities (Netherlands)
  http://www.e-laborate.nl/nl/
• Pinakes (Italy)
  http://www.pinakes.org/
• Aust-e-Lit: Collaborative Integration and annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities (Australia)
  http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/projects/aus-e-lit/
• Heurist Scholar (Australia)
  http://heuristscholar.org/heurist/
• Editing Modernism in Canada (Canada)
  http://editingmodernism.ca/
• MARGOT: Moyen Age et Renaissance (Canada)
  http://margot.uwaterloo.ca/
• The Grub Street Project: Topographies of 18th Century London
  http://grubstreetproject.net/ (Canada)
• TAPOR: Text Analysis Portal for Research (Canada)
  http://grubstreetproject.net/
• JITR (Joint Integration Test Runner (Canada)
  http://www.jitr.org/
• TextGrid: Networked Research Environment for the Humanities (Germany)
  http://www.textgrid.de/en.html
• FRBR, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (Ontology framework; UK)
  http://www.frbr.org/
• CIDOC CRM (ontology) (Greece etc.)
  http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/
• TextVRE (UK, Germany)
  http://textvre.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/
• The Kierkegaard Edition Online (Denmark)
  http://www.sk.ku.dk/eng.asp

(Dot Porter from the DHO discussing the TILE Project)

This workshop will review and address the making of tools for collaborative scholarly editing over the web. The workshop leaders joins partners in the COST-ESF Interedition project (http://www.interedition.eu), which is focussing – as is the JISC-funded Virtual Manuscript Room project — on Europe-wide creation of infrastructure and tools for collaborative scholarly editing. The Australian Aust-e-Lit project will bring advanced experience of the making and working of collaborative tools with in for a national scholarly digital library. The workshop will allow key participants in Interedition, Aust-e-Lit, and in similar enterprises outside Europe to exchange information with UK scholars active in the area, and to explore common problems and possibilities for further collaboration (link).

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Abstract

MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. It supports both micro analyses of the verbal texture of an individual text and macro analyses that let you locate texts in the context of a large document space consisting of hundreds or thousands of other texts. Shuttling between the “micro” and the “macro” is a distinctive feature of the MONK environment, where you may read as closely as you wish but can also practice many forms of what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading.”

Website

http://www.monkproject.org/

Principal Investigator
John Unsworth
Funding
$999,883, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

“…a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an an online framework of collaborative tools and resources that allow researchers to share and re-use data, combine services, and undertake tasks to promote new collaborative research practices….”

The VRE Collaborative Landscape Study project is one of several studies commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to research on-line research collaboration in Virtual Research Environments (VREs). The focus of our study is to scope developments in VREs around the world and set them in relation to the activities in the UK.

The study aims to stimulate debate about the benefits of research collaboration facilitated by Virtual Research Environments so as to assist the JISC to provide services and strategies to support it.

The project is being undertaken by the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London and the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

If you are a user, developer, or provide technical support for VREs, your input would be most welcome .

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/kcl/vrelandscape

Christine Borgman gave an interesting lecture at OII (Oxford Internet Institute)  recently (she is one of the Keynote speakers at this years Digital Humanities Conference.  One of the major points that I retained from this talk is that Data is not objective fact. Data is simply the ‘alleged evidence’ as one researchers observations may differ from anthers (this is almost always the case in the humanities). The lecture is available online.

Capturing and curating data for reuse is a key challenge of cyberinfrastructure: Christine Borgman compares developments in scholarly information infrastructure and cyberlearning, reflecting on the implications for scholarship in the digital age (link).