Mark Hedges

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers increasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are underexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data practices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic collections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract semantic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, enhancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other's work.

Introduction to extended abstract (see Papers section for full extended abstract):

The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project explores and analyses the tradition of wisdom literatures in ancient Greek, Arabic and other languages, by presenting the texts digitally in a manner that enables linking and comparisons within and between anthologies, their source texts, and the texts that draw upon them. We are also creating a framework through which other projects can link their own materials to these texts via the Semantic Web, thus providing a ‘hub’ for future scholarship on these texts and in related areas. The project is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) as part of a programme to investigate cultural dynamics in Europe, and is composed of teams at the Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for e-Research at King's College London, The Newman Institute Uppsala in Sweden, and the University of Vienna.

Researchers in digital humanities have for many years been producing online editions of texts based on TEI XML, a widely-adopted standard for marking up textual resources with semantic content. However, this has led to a certain isolation of information, the so-called ‘digital silo', and such modes of digital publication have not always made best use of the possibilities of digital technologies. The model is also challenged by the need to model texts that are by their very nature interconnected. The paper describes a collaborative environment of tools and techniques for working with texts that allows scholars to work with such highly- interconnected material.

"Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers increasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts,
particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online
publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are underexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing
and communication of research information. The Sharing
Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data practices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these
digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic collections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to
each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract semantic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples.
This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks
that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS
project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, enhancing rather than replacing current workflow processes,
for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and
collectively benefit from each other's work."

Introduction to extended abstract (see PDF for full extended abstract):

The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project explores and analyses the tradition of wisdom literatures in ancient Greek, Arabic and other languages, by presenting the texts digitally in a manner that enables linking and comparisons within and between anthologies, their source texts, and the texts that draw upon them. We are also creating a framework through which other projects can link their own materials to these texts via the Semantic Web, thus providing a ‘hub’ for future scholarship on these texts and in related areas. The project is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) as part of a programme to investigate cultural dynamics in Europe, and is composed of teams at the Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for e-Research at King's College London, The Newman Institute Uppsala in Sweden, and the University of Vienna.

Most textual analysis in archaeology has focused on the digitization and retrieval of secondary or tertiary literature. This means that there has been little examination of how the use of methods of marking-up and linking primary material culture can be used to inform primary textual analysis, and vice versa, despite many conceptual similarities. Like archaeological contexts, discrete and philologically significant sections of manuscripts require skill both to identify and to record, and defining them using quantitative means is not always easy. Like text editors, archaeologists link pieces of related information. For example the Harris Matrix describes links between contexts, and the stratigraphic sequences between them. Database management systems have long been used to link information about artefacts and features across sites, and to enable cross-searching. More recently, semantic-oriented approaches such as the CIDOC CRM and Semantic Web have been used to link defined entities of archaeological or cultural heritage information identified by URIs and described and linked using controlled standards such as RDF. This paper will examine the use of such standards and methods in archaeology, and focus on their transference to defining and linking related units of text in original manuscripts, using primary textual case studies from Sharing Ancient WisdomS (SAWS). SAWS comprises three teams, at King's College London, The Newman Institute Uppsala in Sweden, and the University of Vienna. The aim is to present and analyse the tradition of wisdom literatures in Greek, Arabic and other languages. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, anthologies of extracts from larger texts, containing wise or useful sayings (gnomologia) were created and circulated widely, since few complete texts were available in manuscript form. Focusing on original manuscripts of gnomological texts (not editions), SAWS uses a bespoke TEI XML schema to mark up individual segments identified by expert editorial intervention. These include (for example) translations of individual sayings, derivations from a saying in one tradition to another, references to the same subject across traditions, authorship of sayings, and so on. Segments are then linked according to their significant properties, described according to an ontology that extends the CIDOC CRM, and linked using RDF.

The parallels with archaeological information and sequencing are thus pronounced. It is possible to regard such segments as artefacts, albeit of textual, rather than material, nature. While it would be facile to impose a straight metaphor of ‘textual artefacts’ on this material, the theory that they are connected in complex ways owes much to material culture, and the latter’s language provides clues for deeper interrogation: what typologies and common attributes can be applied to segments, how do these evolve over time, can one class of gnomic saying be demonstrated to have evolved in response to (and/or under the influence of) another. This paper will provide concrete examples from SAWS to demonstrate how the combination of XML, RDF and CIDOC are being employed; and thus delve deeper than existing secondary literature approaches to archaeological text mining, by comparing methodologically the informatics of complex primary texts with the informatics of cultural heritage.