2017-01-17 - Questions 1 (Lynn)
John Unsworth “Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?” http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html (Ben, re discovering: was your citation link purposfully not to the article itself?)
Discovering — reliance on description, categorization .. full text left to the power of google-like search of web contentas expressed in HTML. No reliable access to image content expressing text unless (often crudely) OCRs and/or turned into a full-test PDF at some cost. Poor lexical search power across “what’s out there”. Yet we see this successfully achieved in niches, e.g., song lyrics, perhaps because it is current /owned/cared-for content, ready to be promoted and appreciated by a wide fan base, strong commercial backing.
Annotating can be both a tool for illuminating and understanding but can also be a great too for expanding the discoverability of resources. The power of crowd sourcing …
With example of “annotation and comparison: biologists do it too”, would be interesting to ponder lists of equivalences across disciplines, e.g., Selecting vs Sampling) and Comparing
- manuscripts and maps : region of interest
- music : passages, movements — instrumental lines? comparing performances?
- audio/video : scenes, tracks, snippets
- scientific data : isolating groups by common factos, comparing against varied other criteria (e.g., same ethnicity, different decades)?
Representing:
- canonical primitives, like geo-rectification and overlays, word clouds, timelines, bar/line/pie charts
- vs uniquely revealing/artistic, like Dante visualization?
Apropos second reading “Disciplinary Impact and Technological Obsolescence in Digital Medieval Studies1”, primitives suggest enduring/evolving technolgy for representation, while specialized visualizations might suffer. How will the Dante 360-degree canto/line/word spiral be viewed in tomorrow’s browser or game console?