Hi Robert
It's an interesting question and one that I've also been reflecting on
recently. Unfortunately I don't have any good articles to recommend
(and would be keen to hear of any) but a potentially interesting
statistic:
I've just completed a survey of projects utilising Semantic
technologies in archaeology and cultural heritage, which include a
handful of Classics projects as well. The survey covers about 50
projects (the majority of those undertaken in the field to date). One
of the questions was whether the projects were deemed to emphasise
'utility' vs 'integrity' of data. In other words, was a certain degree
of data corruption permissible if the overall dataset is easier to
make use of?
I had presumed that integrity would be foremost, leading to problems
in adopting many of the automated 'semantifying' services developed
for other sectors. It turns out however that 2/3 of respondents see
utility as more desirable (for their project) than data integrity.
Obviously there are many caveats that need to be taken into account
(the archaeological emphasis, the requirements of semantic
technologies, etc.) but the results certainly suggest that a lot of
researchers are willing to permit some wooliness and uncertainty when
trying to ascertain the Big Picture. It's also worth bearing in mind
that our sources are _inherently_ corrupt (and largely arbitrary) so
perhaps too great an emphasis on 'quality' would be meaningless in any
case.
A final thought is that these two trends play off each other. The
HESTIA project required us to do a lot of cleaning by hand, but this
was possible largely because the bulk of the work had already been
done automatically by Perseus. We intend to feed our results back to
Perseus in turn. Likewise, the hard work done by Pleiades in order to
provide a high quality and technically sophisticated gazetteer will
enable us to produce better (but still imperfect) results applying NLP
to the Google Corpus for our Google Ancient Places project. Thus,
while it remains meaningful to ask this question for a given project,
perhaps it is less so across the discipline as whole.
Best
Leif
On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Robert Barron <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Seeing as the list has erupted in a flurry of activity, I thought I'd
> ask a question :)
>
> I'm looking for material on the qualitative vs quantitative difference
> of the use of digital research in the classics.
> I'll explain with an example:
> Reading ancients texts on-line in, say, project Gutenberg, is a a
> difference of quantity compared to reading it in a Loeb book.
> You're seeing the same material, it's just faster/cheaper/easier to access.
>
> On the other hand, reading it on Perseus is a real difference - you
> are getting more context. If you add something like project Hestia for
> Herodotus then the difference is even more marked.
>
> I'll quote Wikipedia on "Digital Humanities" : Most researchers across
> the disciplines agree with Fr Roberto Busa's argument that the primary
> effect of computing is not to accelerate the pace of humanities
> research, but rather to provide new ways of approach and new paradigms
> for the enduring problems in the study of human cultural artifacts.
>
> I've found plenty of implicit material, but I wondered if there are
> any explicit articles on this subject (besides my future seminar
> paper, of course :) )
>
> Robert Barron
> Enterprise Management Specialist - IBM Israel
> http://classicarete.blogspot.com
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Matteo Romanello
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Dear members of the list,
>> As part of my PhD I'm working on a bibliography about "Classics and the
>> Computers".
>> I'm looking specifically at general surveys, studies and discussions about
>> the relationship between classics and the computers, also known as Digital
>> Classics.
>> I drafted a first list that I'd be happy to share with other Digital
>> Classicists or anyone else having an interest in this.
>> I'd also welcome additions to my initial list: I'm thinking in particular of
>> publications that I have unintentionally neglected and/or publications in
>> other languages that I was not aware of. Therefore I'd like to share it
>> using a tool that allows others to easily augment it.
>> Do you think that for this purpose it'd be better a group on Zotero or a
>> page on the DigitalClassicist wiki, or what else?
>> Best,
>> Matteo
>> ______________
>> Matteo Romanello
>> PhD candidate
>> Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH)
>> King's College, London
>> http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/User:MatteoRomanello
>> http://kcl.academia.edu/MatteoRomanello
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/matteoromanello
>
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