Scaling Digital Humanities on (and utilising) the Web

Abstract

The work of a humanities e-researcher is scoped by the possibilities offered in digital artefacts: in their ever increasing number and their distribution and access over the Internet. This is recognised through a shift to an increasingly data-intensive method characterised as the "fourth paradigm" of e-Research and enabled by the new computational tools and techniques that characterise e-Science and e-Research. To realise these systems we propose an approach built upon the defining properties of the Web: adopting the REST style and Linked Data principles to enable the radical publication, sharing, and linking of data for, and by, researchers. Within this Resource Oriented architecture we utilise distinct but interwoven models to represent services, data collections, workflows, and -- so to simplify the rapid development of integrated applications to explore specific findings -- the domain of the application. We illustrate this conceptual framework in a prototype system for enhancing the application of Music Information Retrieval workflows, driven by several related aims: to enable MIR researchers to utilise these datasets through incorporation in their research systems and workflows; to publish MIR research output on the Semantic Web linked to existing datasets; and to present MIR research output, with cross-referencing to other linked data sources, for manipulation and evaluation by MIR and musicology researchers and re-use within the wider Semantic Web and Digital Humanities communities. As an illustration of a specific domain-driven application with which to explore findings, we gather and publish metadata describing audio collections derived from the country of an artist. Genre analysis over these collections, and integration of this analysis with collection metadata enables us to ask: "how country is my country?".

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Identifiers

ORCID for David De Roure: orcid.org/0000-0001-9074-3016

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