Department of Digital Humanities

As semantic markup becomes ubiquitous, it will become important to be able to ask queries and obtain answers, using natural language (NL) expressions, rather than the keyword-based retrieval mechanisms used by the current search engines. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontology as input and returns answers drawn from the available semantic markup.

What does it mean for a student to come to an understanding of a philosophical standpoint and can the explosion of resources now available on the web support this process, or is it inclined instead to create more confusion? We believe that a possible answer to the problem of finding a means through the morass of information on the web to the philosophical insights it conceals and can be made to reveal lies in the process of narrative pathway generation.

Abstract This report is about the intersections between narrative hypermedia and semantic web technologies for eLearning. Although various research has enhanced the hypermedia field by making use of semantic web technologies, there is little work in order to pitch this approach to an educational perspective. Actual eLearning technologies, focusing on the definition and re-use of learning objects (LO), often sacrifice the expressiveness of the metadata descriptors to the reusability of a resource.

The semantic web offers new possibilities in the eLearning area, which are dependent at least on two factors: the increasing availability of resources on the web and the semantic power of their meta-descriptions. This paper looks at this second issue, and tries to determine the general framework and the important features of the metadata for a specific domain, philosophy.

Abstract. As the Semantic Web is increasingly becoming a reality, the availability of large quantities of structured data brings forward new challenges. In fact, when the content of resources is indexed, not just their status as a text document, an image or a video, it becomes important to have solid semantic models which avoid as much as possible the generation of ambiguities with relation to the resources' meaning.

Use of the Semantic Web for e-Learning (SWEL) 1 brings great advantages by the accurate description of the semantics of a domain, in order to enhance the navigation and retrieval of the related resources. Even though much work has already been done in relation to scientific areas of research (biology, physics, computer science), in the humanities there has not been the same urgency of delivering the advantages of the new technologies to the classroom or scholars. In this paper, we sum up the research we are pursuing for an e-Learning approach to the field of philosophy, based on ontological engineering and narrative studies.

As semantic markup becomes ubiquitous, it will become important to be able to ask queries and obtain answers, using natural language (NL) expressions, rather than the keyword-based retrieval mechanisms used by the current search engines. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontology as input and returns answers drawn from the available semantic markup. We say that AquaLog is portable, because the configuration time required to customize the system for a particular ontology is negligible. AquaLog combines several powerful techniques in a novel way to make sense of NL queries and to map them to semantic markup. Moreover it also includes a learning component, which ensures that the performance of the system improves over time, in response to the particular community jargon used by the end users. In this paper we describe the current version of the system, in particular discussing its portability, its reasoning capabilities, and its learning mechanism.

In this paper we highlight the importance of an interpretation of the learning process from a narrative perspective and show how Semantic Web technologies, in particular ontologies, can serve to represent the key dimensions of this approach and to support an intelligent navigation of learning resources. Here we introduce our initial work in order to formalize the structure of these "learning narratives" in the domain of philosophy.

"S 786 is one of the so-called Orthodoxorum charters, a group of documents which provide important evidence about the Anglo-Saxon chancery, the development of charters in the tenth century, and the history of Pershore Abbey and the tenth-century Benedictine reforms. The document has therefore received a great deal of attention over the past century or so, but this attention has been focussed on the surviving tenth-century single sheet, and so a second,
significantly different version of the text has lain unnoticed. This second version is preserved in a copy made by John Joscelyn, Latin Secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker. Among the material uniquely preserved in this copy are Old English charter bounds for Wyegate (GL), Cumbtune (Compton, GL?) and part of the bounds probably for Lydney (GL), as well as a reference to a grant by Bishop Werferth of Worcester. In this paper both versions of the document are discussed and are presented together for the first time, and a translation of the single sheet is provided. The history of the two versions is discussed in some detail, and the text of a twelfth-century letter which refers to the charter is also edited and translated."

Scribbles on the back flyleaf of London, British Library, Royal 2.B.v (the 'Regius Psalter') are examined and the case put forward that they include notes relating to charters in favour of Christ Church Canterbury in the mid-eleventh century and not a lost copy of a ninth-century document as proposed by O'Neill.

The field of digital palaeography has received increasing attention in recent years, partly because palaeographers often seem subjective in their views and do not or cannot articulate their reasoning, thereby creating a field of authorities whose opinions are closed to debate. One response to this is to make palaeographical arguments more quantitative, although this approach is by no means accepted by the wider humanities community, with some arguing that handwriting is inherently unquantifiable. This paper therefore asks how palaeographical method might be made more objective and therefore more widely accepted by non-palaeographers while still answering critics within the field. Previous suggestions for objective methods before computing are considered first, and some of their shortcomings are discussed. Similar discussion in forensic document analysis is then introduced and is found relevant to palaeography, though with some reservations. New techniques of “digital” palaeography are then introduced; these have proven successful in forensic analysis and are becoming increasingly accepted there, but they have not yet found acceptance in the humanities communities. The reasons why are discussed, and some suggestions are made for how the software might be designed differently to achieve greater acceptance. Finally, a prototype framework is introduced which is designed to provide a common basis for experiments in “digital” palaeography, ideally enabling scholars to exchange quantitative data about scribal hands, exchange processes for generating this data, articulate both the results themselves and the processes used to produce them, and therefore to ground their arguments more firmly and perhaps find greater acceptance.

This report documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 ‘Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits’. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and medieval documents, with computerized tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide ecient solutions to time-consuming and laborious palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specializing in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective fields, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community.

This manifesto documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 `Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits'. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and medieval documents, with computerized tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide efficient solutions to time and labor consuming palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specializing in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective fields, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community.