This paper describes several aspects of a formal digital semantic model that expresses some issues presented by medieval charters. Surprisingly, perhaps, this model does not deal directly with a charter’s text and is not mark-up based. Instead, it draws on the authors’ experience with the construction of three highly structured fac…[Read more]

In this keynote presentation to the DARIAH Experts Workshop “Practices and Context in Contemporary Annotaiton Activities” I explore where annotation fits into traditional and contemporary humanities scholarship practice, and show what aspects of this annotation practice is represented in my Pliny software.

Pliny is a piece of software that is meant to stimulate discussion within the Digital Humanities (DH) about how tools might be built that could find greater acceptance within the wider humanities community; something that has eluded the DH to date. Unlike many other tool projects within the DH, which are meant to show new and novel ways to apply…[Read more]

In the early days the Digital Humanities (DH) focused on the development of tools to support the individual scholar to perform original scholarship, and tools such as OCP and TACT emerged that were aimed at the individual scholar. Very little tool-building within the DH community is now aimed generally at individual scholarship. The Pliny project…[Read more]

The emergence of formal ontologies into the World Wide Web has had a significant effect on research in certain fields. In parts of the Life Sciences, for example, key research information has been captured in formal domain ontologies, like those mentioned in the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBABO) website. Annotating texts to link…[Read more]

The emergence of formal ontologies into the World Wide Web has had a profound effect on research in certain fields: in the Life Sciences, for example. We will call the activity of linking references in a domain literature directly to entities in one or more domain ontologies “direct semantic annotation”. Although direct semantic annotation to a…[Read more]

Compressed abstract from conference proceedings: One of the current issues within DH is the wish to break down “silos” between different applications, usually based on the observation that it is difficult to bring two separately developed applications together even on kinds of data that they might actually share. Scholarly notetaking has not bee…[Read more]

The presentation focused on four ways in which the Pliny project was a research project:
(1) Pliny is a piece of software that I developed over the past few years as a kind of thought-piece about tools for humanities scholarship, including and Engelbartian approach to considereng some of the potential that arises out of developing software that…[Read more]

Compressed from DH 2009 proceedings:
In Bradley 2008a the software Pliny is described as a tool to support traditional scholarship, which, in turn, is assumed to be based on the reading of primary and secondary texts and the eventual writing of new secondary texts that describe an interpretation that has emerged in the scholar’s mind as s/he w…[Read more]

Since software services, and the innovative software architectures that they require, are becoming widespread in their use in the Digital Humanities, it is important to facilitate and encourage problem and solution sharing among different disciplines to avoid reinventing the wheel. The Pliny presentation within the workshop described how the…[Read more]

Tools have been an issue since the foundation of Humanities Computing, and building modular tools that work together has been recognised as important since at least the CETH meetings in 1995. Geoffrey Rockwell and I first raised issues of modularity in our paper given at the Canadian Learned Societies Conference in June 1992 entitled “Towards n…[Read more]

Shortened abstract from DH 2006 proceedings: For a number of years now the WWW has acted as the dominant paradigm for the delivery of digital resources for the humanities. At King College London’s CCH and indeed at other computing humanities centres with which I am familiar, a “digital project” is in almost all cases equated to a project that…[Read more]

The Factoid Model arose out of various prosopographies undertaken in partnerships with King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities (KCL DH). It first appeared in a rudimentary form in the 1990s, but in more recent times has stimulated significant interest from historians who are trying to apply formal data structures such as RDF to…[Read more]