Linked Data for Digital Humanities

“Publishing, querying, and linking on the Semantic Web”

Convenor: Dr Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller

Hashtag: #LD4DH and #DHOxSS

Computers: Please bring your own laptop (no tablets please)

Abstract

The work of a digital humanities researcher is increasingly informed by the possibilities offered by digital resources discovered and accessed through the internet. Given this context, the Semantic Web can be seen as a framework to enable a new approach to information publication, sharing, and linking for and by researchers.

This workshop introduces the concepts and technologies behind Linked Data and the Semantic Web. Participants will learn how to publish their research so that it is available in machine-readable forms enabling reuse by other humanities scholars, as well as to access and manipulate Linked Data resources already available online. They will become familiar with the tools and methods used to represent services, data collections, and workflows. Topics covered will include: the RDF format; modelling your data and publishing to the Web; Linked Data; querying RDF data using SPARQL; and choosing, designing, and evaluating vocabularies and ontologies.

The workshop comprises a series of lectures and hands-on tutorials. Lectures introduce theoretical concepts in the context of Semantic Web systems deployed in and around the humanities, many of which are introduced by their creators. These lectures are paired with practical sessions in which participants are guided through their own exploration of the topics covered, gaining valuable practical experience of technologies, tools, and methods.

The workshop is aimed at any and all learners interested in gaining skills and expertise in the Linked Data publication paradigm. No prior experience is necessary.

Please install the following software on your machine prior to the Summer School:

Protege - https://protege.stanford.edu/
Open Refine - http://openrefine.org/
Web Karma - https://github.com/usc-isi-i2/Web-Karma/wiki/Installation
Blazegraph - https://www.blazegraph.com/

Please note that participants who have a Windows machine (rather than Linux or Mac) might find it difficult to install some of this software: if you encounter problems please contact us prior to the workshop.

Convenor

Dr Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller is a lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University. Her research involves the use of Linked Data and semantic web technologies to support and diversify scholarship across a range of topics in the Digital Humanities.

She says, "Our aim for LD4DH is to equip our learners with a theoretical understanding, some hands-on experience, and a set of methods and resources for future investigation and learning. The week is an intense experience, tailored specifically to an interdisciplinary audience and taught by people who have, like the participants, come from a humanities background, or otherwise worked extensively on Digital Humanities projects.

The Summer School is a wonderful place to teach because it gives me the chance to talk all week long about a specific niche in the digital humanities that I’m very passionate about. I think the Summer School is an amazing, really in many ways unique, opportunity for members of the digital humanities global community to get together. The workshops promote a sense of comradery and community with people which goes beyond the experience of trying to network at a conference ".

"Terhi and John were both excellent, enthusiastic teachers, who clearly cared

that we get as much out of the week as possible."

DHOxSS 2017 participant

TIMETABLE

Timetable

The Linked Data workshop will be held in one of the Sloane Robinson seminar rooms.

Link to overview of the week's timetable including evening events.

Monday 2nd July

08.15-09.15

Registration (Sloane Robinson building)

Tea and coffee (ARCO building)

09.30-10.30

Opening Keynote (Sloane Robinson lecture theatre)

10.30-11.00

Refreshment break (ARCO building)

11.00-12.30

Introduction to Linked Data at the DHOxSS

This session will introduce the participants to the conveners, the key topics, and each other. We will describe the structure for the week, explaining how different sessions fit into the over-all scheme of the week, and how the topics covered relate to one another. This session sets the scene for the motivations behind adopting the Linked Data publication paradigm, and addresses the practical considerations for setting up a Linked Data project.

12:30 -14:00

LUNCH (Dining Hall)

14:00 - 16:00

Acronyms galore: LD, LOD, RDF, TURTLE, SPARQL, OWL, RDFS

In this session we introduce the key concepts behind Linked Data, and get participants comfortable with the jargon used in this field. The session includes some theoretical background information on projects that participants will encounter later on in the week, but the majority of the hands-on exploration carried out in this session will consist of getting familiar with RDF triples using existing interfaces and tools, completing 'Follow Your Nose' excercises, and learning to read Turtle.

16:00-16:30

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

16:30-17:30

Sharing the wealth, Linking Discipline: Linked Open Data for numismatics

This talk by Professor Andrew Meadows (University of Oxford) will describe the creation and progress of Nomisma.org, a namespace and ontology for numismatic concepts. It will also introduce some of the exciting new tools that are being built within the world of numismatic Linked Open Data.

Tuesday 3rd July

09:00 -10:30

Ontologies

Ontologies are structural frameworks, which are used to map the "truth" of a given domain. These structures determine possible relationships between entities within the dataset, and are essential for reasoning and inference. In this session, participants will encounter examples capturing a wide range of specialisms within the Humanities (CIDOC-CRM, Bibframe) and for other types of more generic (meta)data (DublinCore, PROV-O).

10.30-11.00

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

11:00 - 13:00

Building your own ontology

In this practical session participans will collaborate to create their own ontologies to capture and represent a given subject domain. The session will give participants the opportunity to engage in all the stages of ontology development, including design, implementation, reiteration, and documentation.

13:00 -14:30

LUNCH (Dining Hall)

14:30-15:30

Linked Data for Digital Musicology

This talk will introduce applications of Linked Data to Digital Musicology, illustrated through four case studies. The first shows how RDF can help structure the complexity of a complete live annotation of Wagner's Ring, while the second addresses the challenges and benefits of linking and reconciling independent resources describing Early Music. Our third project uses SPARQL to combine metadata and computational audio analyses of the Internet Archive Live Music Archive, while our final example uses Linked Data annotations to realise a contemporary classical composition and performance. This session will be run by Dr Kevin Page.

15:30-16:00

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

16:00-17.00

Lectures (various venues)

Wednesday 4th July

09:00 -10:30

SPARQL

In this session, the SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language will be described and explained. The session will focus on the RDF query language, learning appropriate syntax and examining existing examples, debugging errors, and deconstructing queries.

10.30-11.00

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

11:00-13:00

I don't sweat, I SPARQL

Partipants will use existing projects to discover information encoded as RDF using SPARQL through a combination of pre-designed queries, and those they construct on their own.

13:00 -14:30

LUNCH (Dining Hall)

14:30-15:30

Linked Data and Digital Libraries

In this session, Professor Stephen Downie will provide an insight into projects that combine Linked Data methodologies and technologies with data from Digital Libraries.

15:30-16:00

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

16:00-17.00

Lectures (various venues)

Thursday 5th July

09:00-10:30

Defining the Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

This session will be run by Dominic Oldman and Dr Diana Tanase (British Museum), introducing the participants to novel and interesting approaches for knowledge capture and representation.

10.30-11.00

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

11:00-13:00

Connecting researchers, data and practices with ResearchSpace

This session will be run by Dominic Oldman and Dr Diana Tanase, getting participants to engage in information retrieval and discovery using ResearchSpace and RDF representing the collection at the British Museum.

ResearchSpace is an open source platform designed at the British Museum to help establish a community of researchers where their underlying activities are framed by data sharing, active engagement in formal argumentations, and semantic publishing. Traditional methods of research in humanities and cultural heritage that are closed to scrutiny in terms of process and output fail to enable long-term cumulative knowledge building within and across research fields. This workshop is designed to introduce the digital scholarship principles key for research in the complex world we live in and to showcase a particular use of Semantic Web technologies through a graph-based representation of information that supports the growth of knowledge and the integration of multiple perspectives.

Participants using discussions and hands-on exercises will learn:

How a graph-based representation of information can capture research processes
How our modes of thinking can be changed using a combination of text, data and visualisations
How to create structured arguments that challenge or defends existing data encoded using ontologies and Linked Data
How digital systems can support epistemological processes

13:00-14:30

LUNCH (Dining Hall)

14:30-15:30

Connecting researchers, data and practices with ResearchSpace

15:30-16:00

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

16:00-17.00

Lectures (various venues)

Friday 6th July

09:00 -10:30

Problem Solving and Q&A

This session is an opportunity for participants to get answers to project-specific and idiosyncratic problems. Discussion will cover the types of practical and pragmatic decisions that need to be made in the building and developing of projects using Linked Data, and participants will be asked to brain-storm ways in which these technologies will apply to their existing work. We will also recap on practical advice and revisit free and readily available tools which participants can use to support their future endeavours in Linked Data.

10.30-11.00

Refreshment break (ARCO Building)

11:00-13:00

Linked Open Geodata with Recogito

This session, run by Valeria Vitale (University of London) will show the use of Recogito, an online tool developed by Pelagios Commons, to annotate named entities and, in particular, to georesolve place references in text, images and tabular data. The participants will be walked step by step through the creation of semantic annotations: from the choice of the sources, to the use of automatic recognition; from disambiguation to the different options to visualise, download and further process the data produced.

13:00-14:00

LUNCH (Dining Hall)

14:00-15:00

OxLOD

The final session of the workshop is a talk by Dr Athanasios Velios (University of Oxford) on the OxLOD (Oxford Linked Open Data) project.

15:00-16:00

Closing plenary (Sloane Robinson lecture theatre)

Tutor biographies:

J. Stephen Downie is the Associate Dean for Research and a Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Downie is the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). Downie is the leader of the Hathitrust + Bookworm (HT+BW) text analysis project that is creating tools to visualize the evolution of term usage over time. Professor Downie represents the HTRC on the NOVEL(TM) text mining project and the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project, both funded by the SSHRC Partnership Grant programme. Professor Downie is also the Principal Investigator on the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis + Data Capsules (WCSA+DC) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. All of these aforementioned projects share a common thread of striving to provide large-scale analytic access to copyright-restricted cultural data. Stephen has been very active in the establishment of the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community through his ongoing work with the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conferences. He was ISMIR's founding President and now serves on the ISMIR board. In the recent past, Professor Downie worked with Dunhuang Academy on the "Digital Dunhuang" project to help connect Digital Humanities scholars with the high-resolution digital materials capturing the Mogao Caves. Professor Downie holds a BA (Music Theory and Composition) along with a Master's and a PhD in Library and Information Science, all earned at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

Andrew Meadows is a Professor in Ancient History, Faculty of Classics, and Tutorial Fellow at New College. He is editor of the American Journal of Numismatics, a past-editor of Coin Hoards, Co-director of the Online Coins of the Roman Empire project and currently the international Director of the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum project. He is also the co-founder of the nomisma.org namespace, and is particularly interested in the application of Linked Open Data approaches to the publication of all forms of evidence for the ancient world.

Dominic Oldman is Head and Principal Investigator of the ResearchSpace project at the British Museum, and a Senior Curator in the department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan. He is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in cultural heritage information systems and produced the Museum's first collection online system and Semantic data interface. He has researched and developed Semantic Web applications and their underlying theoretical frameworks for the last 7 years. He is co-deputy chair of the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group and is currently a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, History Department.

Dr Kevin Page is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, where he applies Linked Data to the Digital Humanities through several research projects. He is PI of the AHRC 'Unlocking Musicology' project and a Co-I of 'Digital Delius', 'Mapping Manuscript Migrations', and 'Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis'. As Technical Director of Oxford Linked Open Data (OXLOD) he works with collections across the Gardens, Libraries, and Museums of the University, and has participated in W3C activities including the Linked Data Platform (LDP) working group. From 2012-15 he convened the Linked Data workshop at DHOxSS, where he now runs the Digital Musicology course.

John Pybus works at the University of Oxford's e-Research Centre where he has been part of many projects building technology to support research in the Humanities, with a particular interest in the application of semantic web technologies.

Dr Diana Tanase is a computer scientist and a Senior Curator at the British Museum working on the development of the ResearchSpace platform. Her research expertise is situated in the domain of artificial intelligence in particular knowledge representation of expert domains. She has previously taught at the School of Design, Royal College of Art (2005-2017) and University of Westminster (2004-2012) running workshops and courses that ranged from mathematics fundamentals, programming, to Social and Semantic Web languages and technologies. Some of her other projects include development work on the The Webby Award winner Computational Science Education Reference Desk and a number of web-based collaborative tools for teaching.

Dr Athanasios Velios works at the University of Oxford's e-Research Centre as OxLOD Data Architect, developing a workflow for data integration across the collections in Oxford. He was trained as a conservator and has worked in the field of museum documentation with particular interest in conservation documentation for the last 15 years. He was part of the St. Catherine's Library conservation project, led the development of the Language of Bindings Thesaurus and was the webmaster of the International Institute for Conservation from 2009 until 2017.

Valeria Vitale is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies (University of London). Her research focuses on the use of Linked Open Data to enhance transparency in academic research and, in particular, 3D visualisation of ancient heritage. She has also worked on several projects about digital ancient geography and is currently part of the Pelagios Commons team.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday