[Crm-sig] cfp: NedDiMAH workshop “Ontology based annotation" July 17th 2012 in connection with DH2012,

[Christian-Emil Ore]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Preconference workshop “Ontology based annotation” July 17th 2012 in 
connection with DH2012 in Hamburg, Germany

The Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH) , 
www.nedimah.eu, is a research network running from 2011 to 2015, funded 
by the European Science Foundation, ESF. The network will examine the 
practice of, and evidence for, advanced ICT methods in the arts and 
humanities across Europe, and disseminate findings in a series of 
outputs and publications.

The NeDiMAH WG3, Linked data and ontological methods, will organise a 
half day preconference workshop “Ontology based annotation” in 
connection with the conference Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg.
Workshop format:  Short presentations 15 – 20 minutes including discussion.

Deadline  for submission April 30th.  We will endeavour to decide on the 
final workshop programme by May 15th.
Submission format:  Extended abstract, ca 1000 – 1500 words

Contact address: c.e.s.ore at iln.uio.no

Presenters of accepted papers will have their workshop fees covered. 
Successful contributors will also be considered for having their travel 
and accommodation expenses covered by NeDiMAH. The full papers should be 
circulated before the workshop.


Motivation and background

The use of computers as tools in the study of textual material in the 
humanities and cultural heritage goes back to the late 1940s, with links 
back to similar methods used without computer assistance, such as word 
counting in the late nineteenth century and concordances from the 
fourteenth century onwards. In the sixty years of computer assisted text 
research, two traditions can be seen. One is that which includes corpus 
linguistics and the creation of digital scholarly editions, while the 
other strain is related to museum and archival texts. In the former 
tradition, texts are commonly seen as first class feasible objects of 
study, which can be examined by the reader using aesthetic, linguistic 
or similar methods. In the latter tradition, texts are seen mainly as a 
source for information; readings concentrate on the content of the 
texts, not the form of their writing.  Typical examples are museum 
catalogues and historical source documents.

In the end of the 1980s the historian Manfred Thaller developed Kleio, a 
simple ontological annotation system for historical texts. Later in the 
1990s hypertext with inline links, not databases, became the tool of 
choice for textual editions (Vanhoutte 2010).  In the last decade the 
stand-off database approach has been reintroduced, this time in the form 
of ontologies (conceptual models) often expressed in the RDF formalism 
to enable its use in the linked data world, and the semantic web.

A basic assumption is that reading a text includes a process of creating 
a model in the mind of the reader. Reading a novel and reading a 
historical source document both result in models. These models will be 
different, but they can all be manifested as explicit ontologies 
expressed in computer formats. The external model stored in the computer 
system will be a different model from the one stored in the mind, but it 
will still be a model of the text reading.  By manipulating the computer 
based model new things can be learned about the text in question, or it 
can be compared to other similarly-treated texts.

An objective of the workshop is to throw light on  consequences and 
experiences of the renewed database approach in computer assisted 
textual work, based on the development in text encoding over the last 
decade as well as in ontological systems.

Short discussion papers are invited on any topic that looks at the 
theory or practice of ontology-based annotation, including (but not 
limited to):

•	How do we create models, and what ontologies should we use?

•	To what extent can new insight be gained by linking together the 
models based on information from the texts?

•	How do we relate models back to the source text?

•	Can we manage an ontology-based annotation of a text in different 
editions and translations?

•	How do we model uncertainty in annotation, and multiple annotations?

•	Can ontology based annotation be combined with crowdsourcing, and does 
this ask for special types of crowds?


Programme Committee

Øyvind Eide, Kings College, London  UK
Faith Lawrence, Kings College, London  UK
Sebastian Rahtz, University of Oxford UK
Christian-Emil Ore, University of Oslo Norway
Alois Pichler, University of Bergen, Norway