Humanities GRID Workshop (30-31 Jan; Imperial College London)

By way of the Digital Classicists List:

Epistemic Networks and GRID + Web 2.0 for Arts and Humanities
30-31 January 2008
Imperial College Internet Centre, Imperial College London

http://www.internetcentre.imperial.ac.uk/events

Data driven Science has emerged as a new model which enables researchers to move from experimental, theoretical and computational distributed networks to a new paradigm for scientific discovery based on large scale GRID networks (NSF/JISC Digital Repositories Workshop, AZ 2007). Hundreds of thousands of new digital objects are placed in digital repositories and on the web everyday, supporting and enabling research processes not only in science, but in medicine, education, culture and government.  It is therefore important to build interoperable infra-structures and web-services that will allow for the exploration, data-mining, semantic integration and experimentation of arts and humanities resources on a large scale.  There is a growing consensus that GRID solutions alone are too heavy, and that coupling it with Web 2.0 allows for the development of a more light-weight service oriented architecture (SOA) that can adapt readily to user needs by using on demand utility computing, such as morphological tools, mash-ups, surf clouds, annotation and automated workflows for composing multiple services.  The goal is not just to have fast access to digital resources in the arts and humanities, but to have the capacity to create new digital resources, interrogate data and form hypotheses about its meaning and wider context.  Clearly what needs to emerge is a mixed-model of GRID + Web 2.0 solutions for the arts and humanities which creates an epistemic network that supports a four step iterative process: (i) retrieval, (ii) contextualisation, (iii) narrative and hypothesis building, and (iv) creating contextualised digital resources in semantically integrated knowledge networks.  What is key here is not just managing new data, but the capacity to share, order, and create knowledge networks from existing resources in a semantically accessible form.

To create epistemic networks in the arts and humanities there are core technologies that must be developed.  The aim of this expert METHNET Workshop is to focus on developing a strategy for the implementation of these core technologies on an inter-national scale by bringing together GRID computing specialists with researchers from Classics, Literature and History who have been involved in the creation and use of electronic resources.  The core technologies we will focus on in this two day work-shop are: (i) infrastructure, (ii) named entity, identity and co-reference services, (iii) morphological services and parallel texts, (iv) epistemic networks and virtual research environments.  The idea is to bring together expertise from the UK, US, and European funded projects to agree upon a common strategy for the development of core infra-structure and web-services for the arts and humanities that will enable the use of GRID technologies for advanced research.

DAY ONE- 10:00 – 6:00

SESSION I: GRID + Web 2.0 Infrastructure

SESSION II: Computational and Semantic Services: Named Entity, Identity and Co-reference

  • Paul Watry: Named Entity and Identity Services for the National Archives www.liv.ac.uk
  • Greg Crane –  Co-Reference (Perseus)
  • Hamish Cunningham/Kalina Bontcheva: AKT and GATE: GRID-WEB Services AKT/GATE
  • Martin Doerr – Co-Reference and Semantic Services for Grid + Web 2.0 (FORTH)

DAY TWO: 10:00 – 6:00

SESSION I:  Morphological, Parallel Texts and Citation Services

  • Greg Crane – “Latin Depedency Treebank”, Perseus Project
  • Marco Passarotti – “Index Thomisticus” Treebank
  • Notis Toufexis – ‘Neither Ancient, nor Modern:  Challenges for the creation of a Digital Infrastructure for Medieval Greek’
  • Rob Iliffe – Intelligent Tools for Humanities Researchers, The Newton Project

SESSION II: Epistemic Networks and Virtual Research Environments

Registration fee is £60 and places are limited.

Please contact Dolores Iorizzo (d.iorizzo@ic.ac.uk) to secure a place or for further information.  Please send registration to Glynn Cunin (g.cunin@imperial.ac.uk).

The Imperial College Internet Centre would like to acknowledge generous support from the AHRC METHNET for co-hosting this conference.

About Tom Elliott

Associate Director for Digital Programs and Senior Research Scholar, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University
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