Persons, documents, models: organising and structuring information for the Web

Jodi SchneiderMoore Institute Visiting Fellow

jschneider@pobox.com@jschneider

Moore Institute for HumanitiesNational University of Ireland, Galway4PM Tuesday June 23rd, Room G010

• Examples of persons and documents that we might want to represent on the Web

• What to think about when organising and structuring documents for the Web.

• Using identifiers & Linked Data• How is Linked Data different from other

structured data used in digital humanities? (e.g. TEI, XML)

Objectives

People

http://columbanus2015.eu/2012/02/09/hello-world/

http://aransongs.blogspot.ie/2012/10/don-gcead-bhlag-seo-uaim-thograios.html

http://www.nuigalway.ie/mooreinstitute/people/

http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie:8080/LandedEstates/jsp/family-show.jsp?id=490

Documents

What counts as a document?

http://demo.ossianonline.org/texts/1/fragments-of-ancient-poetry

What counts as a document?

What counts as a document?

• "A document is evidence in support of a fact." - Suzanne Briet

What counts as a document?

• "A document is evidence in support of a fact." - Suzanne Briet

http://aransongs.blogspot.ie/2012/10/don-gcead-bhlag-seo-uaim-thograios.html

"an image I found in the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, an image showing a man from Cill Mhuirbhigh, Pat Pheaidí Hernon (1903-1989), singing a song while his neighbour Neain Mhaidhc Mhóir Hernon sits in the fireplace of the ‘Man of Aran’ cottage." - Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

"an image I found in the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, an image showing a man from Cill Mhuirbhigh, Pat Pheaidí Hernon (1903-1989), singing a song while his neighbour Neain Mhaidhc Mhóir Hernon sits in the fireplace of the ‘Man of Aran’ cottage." - Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

Documents we have: • the blog post• the image

"an image I found in the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, an image showing a man from Cill Mhuirbhigh, Pat Pheaidí Hernon (1903-1989), singing a song while his neighbour Neain Mhaidhc Mhóir Hernon sits in the fireplace of the ‘Man of Aran’ cottage." - Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

Documents we have: • the blog post• the image

Potential documents:• a song recording• the cottage

"an image I found in the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, an image showing a man from Cill Mhuirbhigh, Pat Pheaidí Hernon (1903-1989), singing a song while his neighbour Neain Mhaidhc Mhóir Hernon sits in the fireplace of the ‘Man of Aran’ cottage." - Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

Documents we have: • the blog post• the image

Potential documents:• a song recording• the cottage

And documents

ABOUT any of these!

Documents ABOUT a document

• Provenance• Oral history• …

People as documents?

• To the extent that people serve as "evidence", they could be ALSO be modelled as documents.

Organising and Structuring Documents

Aspects to consider

• Document type• Document features• What the document evidences

Aspects to consider

• Document type– Text– Image– Sound– Audiovisual– Map– If a combination of one or more of these – can it be

broken down further?• Document features• What the document evidences

Aspects to consider

• Document type• Document features

– Natural structure?– Affordances?

• What the document evidences

Linked Data for Modeling Documents

Where Linked Data is used

• Mass Media– BBC– New York Times– Guardian

• Scholarly Publishers– Nature– CrossRef

• Data Publishers– USData.gov– Data.gov.uk– Central Statistics Office

• Libraries

• Using identifiers• to enable access• to add structure • to link to other stuff

What is Linked Data?

Identifiers

http://aransongs.blogspot.ie/2012/10/don-gcead-bhlag-seo-uaim-thograios.html

"an image I found in the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, an image showing a man from Cill Mhuirbhigh, Pat Pheaidí Hernon (1903-1989), singing a song while his neighbour Neain Mhaidhc Mhóir Hernon sits in the fireplace of the ‘Man of Aran’ cottage." - Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

Places

"an image I found in the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, an image showing a man from Cill Mhuirbhigh, Pat Pheaidí Hernon (1903-1989), singing a song while his neighbour Neain Mhaidhc Mhóir Hernon sits in the fireplace of the ‘Man of Aran’ cottage." - Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

People

"an image I found in the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway, an image showing a man from Cill Mhuirbhigh, Pat Pheaidí Hernon (1903-1989), singing a song while his neighbour Neain Mhaidhc Mhóir Hernon sits in the fireplace of the ‘Man of Aran’ cottage." - Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

Types of things

Why use identifiers?

• Make what you are talking about unambiguous

• Pull in information from elsewhere– images, descriptions, …– from works describing the same people, places,

types of things

Large, growing body of linked data

How is Linked Data different from TEI & XML

– Using identifiers– to enable access– to add structure – to link to other stuff

What is Linked Data?

What does TEI make explicit?

structural divisions within a texttitle-page, chapter, scene, stanza, line, etc

typographical elementschanges in typeface, special characters, etc

other textual featuresgrammatical structures, location of

illustrations, variant forms, etc

Slide credit: Susan Schreibman

XML as a tree

Document

Paragraph

Sentence Sentence Sentence

Paragraph

Sentence Sentence

Remember, everything must nest properly!

We use family tree terms: parent, child, sibling, ancestor, and descendent.

Slide credit: Susan Schreibman

Linked Data: Graphs are more than trees

• Examples of persons and documents that we might want to represent on the Web

• What to think about when organising and structuring documents for the Web.

• Using identifiers & Linked Data• How is Linked Data different from other

structured data used in digital humanities? (e.g. TEI, XML)

Objectives