Historical TEI: Developing a Portfolio of Common Practice

Historical TEI:DEVELOPING A PORTFOLIO OF COMMON PRACTICEM. H. BealsLoughborough University

@[email protected] 0000-0002-2907-

3313

Primary Source Analysis

Understand the context of source

Disentangle ‘facts’ from ‘argument’

Place it within a historiographical context

@mhbeals www.scissorsandpaste.net

The Thorny Problem of Bias

Sourcing (Wineburg, 1991)The source is examined, making use of contextual knowledge of its creator and a close reading of the language used, to determine the 'truth' of any claims or arguments made

Bias (Mabbett, 2007)“A bias is a built-in tendency to lean to one side, a preference that inclines one to favour one side in an argument. […] It is important to avoid confusing prejudice or bias with the mere possession of an opinion. We all have opinions; what matters is the extent to which we are ready to let our opinions be changed by examination of the evidence”


A Pedagogical Experiment

120 First-Year Students Transcribing a Single Text

XML Encoding in Simplified TEI Standards

Critically Analysing People, Places, and Claims

XSL Output as Interactive HTML Website with Index


Negro Slavery; or, A View of Some of the More Prominent Features of that State of Society, as it Exists in the United States of America and in the Colonies of the West Indies, Especially in Jamaica

https://sites.google.com/a/my.shu.ac.uk/negro-slavery/home


Encoding for Bibliographical Precision

Bibliographic Details Author, Date(s), Title, Publisher, Printer, Language, Subject

Physical Details Dimensions, Weight, Media Type

Holder Details Location, Shelf Number, Access Restrictions

Rights Details Copyright, Photographic Reproduction, Reuse in Publications

Provenance Version of Consultation, Method of Digitisation


Encoding for Bibliographical Precision

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org/documents/2012/06/14/dcmi-terms/?

v=terms#

Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) http://d-nb.info/standards/elementset/gnd

Library of Congress MARC Code List for Relators http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators


The Perennial Problem of Periodicals

Enumeration and Chronology of Periodicals Ontology (ECPO) http://cklee.github.io/ecpo/ecpo.html

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Record (FRBR) http://www.sparontologies.net/ontologies/frbr

FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology (FaBiO) http://www.sparontologies.net/ontologies/fabio

Publishing Roles Ontology (PRO) http://www.sparontologies.net/ontologies/pro/source.html


Encoding for Nouns Time

Period-O (http://perio.do/technical-overview)

Place Geonames (http://www.geonames.org/ontology) JUSS (http://rdfs.co/juso/latest/html) DBPedia (http://dbpedia.org)

Persons HISCO (https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hisco) DBPedia (http://dbpedia.org/) Library of Congress Name Authority (http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names.html)


The Text Encoding Initiative

<persName> @when, @notBefore, @notAfter, @from, @to,

@datingPoint, @datingMethod, @evidence, @role

<placeName> @when, @notBefore, @notAfter, @from, @to, @precision,

@cert

<interp> @cert, @source


Contextual Ambiguity

Which ‘roles’ should be listed? Contemporary Heretofore Comprehensive

How should historical places be defined? Modern combinations Pelagios Gazetteer Interconnection Format


A Warning to Post-Modernists

You Aren’t Going to Like the Next Few Slides@mhbeals www.scissorsandpaste.net

Encoding for Historiographical Meaning

“Historians (and students studying history) are interested instead in ‘why’ types of questions. A typical historical question would be: ‘How and why did the cultural image of the Jews change in medieval Europe?’ However, as the goal of the ontology was to support the contextualization process, and not to provide an ontology which is interesting for historians (or for students) per se, we did not try to encode the answers to why questions into the ontology.

Even if we tried to do it, it would be impossible, as there are not clear answers to those questions which can be captured using logical formalisms. […] Therefore this aspect will be ignored in this paper from now on.”

– Gábor Nagypál “History Ontology Building: The Technical View”, 2007


Encoding for Historiographical Meaning

AnnotationA footnote describing additional contextual information and interpretation about a text

Truth ValuesA flag indicating the likelihood that statement is true or false, a lie or mistake


Variants on a Common Theme

StructureA common means of framing an argument in terms of actors, relationships, actions, causality and correlation

VocabularyA common set of terms to describe actors, relations and actions


Variants on a Common Theme

Actor A was in relationship A with Actor B Actor A murdered Actor B Actor A lied about Murder A Lie A appears in Affidavit A Lie A is countered in Letter R Murder A took place in Location D Murder A contributed to Riot C

Translatable into Linked Data Triplets!


Concluding Thoughts

Rather than simply building a library of interpretations, a digital library of critical analyses on historical texts, we can create a network of historiographical arguments that are

Linked to specific primary and secondary texts Well defined Open to computational analysis


Historical TEI:DEVELOPING A PORTFOLIO OF COMMON PRACTICEM. H. BealsLoughborough University

@[email protected] 0000-0002-2907-

3313

Education

Historical TEI: Developing a Portfolio of Common Practice