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Theory Breakout Session

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Saved by Ryan Shaw
on July 17, 2012 at 2:20:17 pm
 

THEORY

 

What do we mean by theory and how do think it might be useful?

 

How do we demarcate and define the work we do, in time and space and cyberspace? What are the theories that we can use that can help us better work with these concepts?

 

Is there utility in, or an imperative to, adopt or connect digital tool-building with the discourse of the humanities? How might that work? What translation is necessary? There is a long tradition of theorizing space and time in the humanities. How does that complex body of work get taken up, and criticized, by the digital humanities?

 

theory is an entrance to a world you want to represent; there are different kinds of entrances

 

useful theories: levi-strauss' levels/scales of history; lessing - laocoon; bakhtin's chronotope; philosophy of history; aristotle's poetry vs. history

 

need to distinguish between theory and concept. theory is a whole context of cultural influences, concept is just directed to a special instance... disagreement that theory is an entrance. theory not necessarily practical

 

theory is separable from observation

 

we have a theory of time that is modeled in the ontology... difference between classifications and nomenclatures. the OWL-TIME ontology is grounded in a particular theory of time, while a nomenclature like the Julian calendar is not?

 

 

TOOLS THAT NEED THEORIZING

 

What are some of the practical tool-building and tool-using problems we face that we think theory might shed light on?

 

trying to create real tools that can help historian to work with space, visualize relationships, social background, processes like processions... etc.

 

what tools do we have, and what questions can we ask that we couldn't ask without them, what predictive power do our models have.

 

what don't we have a platform for better understanding territories, places, scales and networks... relations among these different layers are extremely complex, need digital tools for managing complexity.

 

extracting entities from oral histories; how to visualize them spatially and temporally, showing relationships across multiple timelines, identifying triggering or causal relations. how are tools for social sciences combining GIS and statistical tools applicable in the humanities? 

 

trying to provide a laboratory for mediavel historians to try out different theories about e.g. the movement of kings, addressing problems with placenames

 

dealing with locations and dates between asia and europe; encoding of place and time is a problem; identification of places over time is problematic

 

modeling and sharing geohistorical information; understanding experiences of other projects

 

 

MEDIUM SPECIFICITY

 

space time and "placeness," how that connects to sound archives, how to use these archives for social history, to enrich the cultural richness of place, while maintaining the media-specificity as it relates to time and place?

 

video as a medium particularly suited for representing space and time in a unified way.

 

video can potentially make a better connection between planning and social aspects. how to represent relation between platial and spatial history?

 

how to integrate media archives into spatial/placial/temporal analysis. how data and manuscripts from different places can be used in virtual environments.

 

environments for working with video, captions and related texts simultaneously. toolbox for working with archives and transcribing audio & video

 

multimodality, video, etc. split between time/space of what is actually shown vs. what is supposed to be shown (e.g. vancouver and cardiff are filmed so much as "other places" and times)

 

games as yet another medium which present a different experience of place and time

 

 

TEXTS

 

geographic information in texts: texts and maps can express different things about geography, modeling document excerpts in a conceptual model, how the information from the texts cannot be expressed as maps.

 

trying to visualize how to bring together scanned texts, e-texts, research database with bibliography, biographical DB and geographical DB (everything in tibetan)

 

people working with texts vs. people working with cultural heritage, the latter involves both memory and history (present and past)

 

working with texts as representations of space and time; space and time of text production vs. the space and time created by the text. reading: we read for different purposes, do we accept the author's authority, if we are reading for different purposes, we can't agree on what should be modeled? texts leave out information, describe things at different levels of granularity... however to do comparative analyses, we need some common properties. people want to find historical reality behind mythological stories. nonlinear patterns within texts: hypertextual novel set in london, links among characters are spatial and temporal (e.g. sitting next to people on the tube), 253 by jeff ryman

 

 

NARRATIVE

 

visualization of narrative, how can we consider not only time and space, but also objects and characters?

 

narrative, esp. fiction, ontologies for describing time and events in narrative, time and space in fiction, where is the fiction/fact boundary and how can that be addressed?

 

 

REPRESENTATION

 

not treating place names and objects the way we should be. just attaching names to geo objects. place is more complex, layers of abstraction on top of that. what is a place, and how does it relate to physical geography?

 

museum documentation: CIDOC-CRM and the modeling of place and time

 

how the brain interprets space and place, need to consider the audience and their perception

 

paradox of platial history, place as a proxy for all kinds of cultural difference; yet every individual perceives place in a different way, how to accomodate varying spatial perception, can't assume that places are proxies for things "everyone knows" (see Gould & White, Mental Maps)

 

extracting structured knowledge from documents... lots of people creating timelines, but the data tends to get embedded in specific tools, hard to share with others. need standards for publishing data so others can use it. exporting data from GIS systems. tools die, can we ensure that the data/content doesn't die with it? what about when tools are tightly integrated with inquiry and co-developed with it? 

 

what is your data? you can't document the playing of a computer game. limits to documentation. 

 

difficult problems, e.g. sensors: precise time and coarsely dividing space into regions, vs. very precise locations and coarsely dividing time. tradeoff between representing time and space. this brings problems when you wish to combine data that makes different tradeoffs.

 

"deducing event chronology in a cultural heritage documentation system" computer applications and archaeology (CAA) 2009 proceedings, using CIDOC-CRM timespans to model archaeology. make start point and endpoint fuzzy. each point in time mapped to a 4-tuple. supports reasoning about ordering of events despite uncertainty. works for locations as well, things can be located relative to their containing objects, people within buildings, buildings within cities, cities within countries.

 

are encoding schemes and data structures theories? people use the word theory differently in different disciplines. are time ontologies, space ontologies theoretical or practical? ontology is another word used in many different ways...

 

 

UNCERTAINTY & AMBIGUITY & VAGUENESS

 

How do you deal with uncertainty, inconsistency, ambiguity, and vagueness. but still manage to have a distant view on the whole archive, despite this fuzziness?

 

fuzziness and uncertainty; memories start to fade, looking for inconsistencies or differences among remembered stories ... lots of emphasis on this in humanist theorizing, how can we make demarcations and boundaries. tools require precision or clarity, how do we reconcile that, is there space for recognition of ambiguity? probabilistic theories, fuzzy logic... neatline solution is purely visual (a gradient), but how can you have a debate about that? not just uncertainties and ambiguities but political biases, etc. fuel debate... the logic of the geographical grid and the relationships it defines is not in question? we can be certain of it and put it into geographical databases... if we have that underlying framework we can combine many different perspectives. a contrary view: chronicle may be more important than geography. perhaps Bahktin's chronotope is a more suitable model/framework in that case. spectrum from "pure" fiction to "factual" history, with plenty of stuff in the middle, on one end there are facts but truth is unknown, on the other there are no facts of the matter.

 

Are there tools for assigning place in a fuzzy way? The modifiable areal unit problem: if you name a country, state, locality, neighborhood, places look different at different scales. Analogous problem exists for time (Levi-Strauss's levels of history), and also there is the problem of absolute vs. relative times.

 

Archeological models and how to represent uncertainty: panorama bubbles (Paul Bourke), fuzziness (Arcadia 2003 or VAST 2005), understanding virtual environments based on what they draw... lifeClipper, Swiss augmented reality project that tries to build in fuzziness into its representations.

 

EDTF: proposed standard from the Library of Congress for encoding approximate/uncertain/imprecise times and dates.

 

Once we start defining what place is, we remove information. Vagueness is useful in that it carries (the potential for?) information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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