NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop
Malcolm Hyman and Jürgen Renn
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
April 6, 2007
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This paper is an outcome of a longstanding cooperation with
Peter Damerow and Mark Schiefsky
dealing with the implications of the new information technologies
for scholarly research in the
humanities. On the background of our joint experience we feel
that time has come for directing
work towards the creation of a new implementation of the World
Wide Web. This should not be
entirely surprising. The original invention of the Web was
the result not of technical
improvements nor was it the work of a committee. It rather
emerged from reactions to
challenging problems posed by the enterprise of scientific
work, that is, from an innovative usage
scenario. The Web of the future will similarly be the response
to challenging intellectual and
practical problems and not just grow out of accelerating technical
developments. In view of the
obvious role that understanding the representations, structures,
contexts, and developmental
processes of knowledge will play in this process, the humanities
and, in particular fields like the
history of science, cognitive science and linguistics, must
bring their competence to this
endeavor. The future Web will be an Epistemic Web, connecting
not just texts but knowledge and
people. It will grow out of the research challenges of the
humanities which are ever more closely
related to the problems posed by transforming the present Web
of garbage information into a
Web of science and culture.
For this reason, we shall begin by formulating some of the
challenges, needs, and ideals of
humanistic research, in order to then discuss the obstacles
facing such research. Next, we shall
confront our vision of a future Web with those that are currently
discussed. The architecture of a
future Epistemic Web will then be discussed, as well as some
of the obstacles impeding its
construction. We close by indicating some developmental pathways
that may lead to the
realization of our vision.
Research Challenges
A discussion of research challenges confronting the sciences
and, in particular, the humanities is
naturally shaped by the experience with traditional media.
In order to discuss the potential of the
new media for future research perspectives, it seems helpful
to formulate these challenges first
with a view to intellectual goals in order to then assess their
attainability in a particular
environment.
Creating dynamic representations of knowledge
Knowledge in the humanities as well as in
science generally is collectively produced and steadily
changes both in quantity and structure. External knowledge
representations should therefore
ideally have themselves a dynamic character, serving, at the
same time, as a reliable collective
storage and a convenient medium for the communication of knowledge.
Even more importantly,
any external representation of knowledge typically becomes
itself the object of higher-order
thinking (as when numbers representing arithmetical knowledge
become the objects of higherorder
mathematical thinking), thus engendering an iterative process
of representation and
reflection. The crucial role of representations for shaping
the historical development of
knowledge derives from this iterative process. Creating dynamic
representations of knowledge
could optimally support this process.
Integrating research and
dissemination
Research and dissemination are but two
aspects of the process of generating shared knowledge,
involving an equilibration process between private and public
dimensions at each stage. Their
neat separation is largely an artifact of traditional media
with high latency. Producing new
knowledge in individual research involves actively accessing
the available knowledge of mankind
in ways that change both, the individual and the shared knowledge.
The reflectivity generated in
such interchanges is ultimately the only source of the reliability
and “objectivity” of scientific
knowledge. Integrating research and dissemination could thus
enhance both knowledge
production and quality control.
Facilitating the recursiveness of scholarship
Scholarship is intrinsically recursive in that new knowledge
can only be generated by preserving
and changing prior knowledge. Knowledge is always also self-referential,
a characteristic that is
only to a very limited extent embodied in traditional citation
networks, fulfilling diverse
functions at the same time, from linking chunks of knowledge
via ensuring reliability of
information to attributing or pretending merit. Facilitating
the recursiveness of scholarship
beyond such ambiguous networks could therefore support the
self-organization of knowledge
without imposing artificial constraints on its structure such
as those inherent in the traditional
publication format.
Integrating conceptual models and data
Scholarship is typically directed at understanding epistemic
objects such as the medieval city, the
globalization of knowledge or climate change. For this purpose
ever new heterogeneous data are
related to ever changing conceptual models of these epistemic
objects which, in turn, may
themselves be modified during the process. Limited access and
linking capabilities together with
a traditional division of labor have, however, tended to keep
the relation between conceptual
models and data rather opaque, resulting in a dominance of
idiosyncratic expertise and a lack of
synthetic research. Integrating conceptual models and data
could instead foster the study of
overarching questions, avoiding the unfortunate alternative
of speculation without empirical
support and nitpicking without theoretical perspective.
Incorporating intelligence into working environments
Scholarly research makes continuously use of
earlier results transformed into instruments of
further investigation – another way of looking at the
recursiveness of scholarship. The
transformation of the consequences of research into presuppositions
of further work materially
embodying the intelligence earlier invested becomes most clear
when research results enter the
construction of ever more sophisticated laboratory equipment.
But the same process takes place
also in the humanities. Publications may become sources of
information or evidence in ongoing
investigations; some scholarly results enter handbooks, dictionaries,
lexicons, or other reference
works specifically serving as research tools. The quality of
scholarly working environments
crucially depends on both, the effectiveness with which earlier
results are transformed into
instruments of further work and the seamless availability of
these instruments. Incorporating
intelligence into working environments can thus be seen as
a crucial factor enabling good
scholarship.
Research Obstacles
Considering the challenges, needs, and ideals
associated with scholarly research helps to
distinguish unavoidable limitations imposed by a historically
specific state of development from
unnecessary obstacles due to inadequate use of existing potentials.
Often these obstacles are also
related to external interests overlaying and interfering with
those of scholarly research, such as
greed for power and money.
Data locked into static representations
As long as data are locked into static representations,
they can only indirectly reflect the process
of the accumulation of knowledge, let alone its restructuration
in the course of major conceptual
advances. Under this condition, connecting new to old data
is a process that resists
automatization because it involves individual activities outside
the primary medium of
knowledge representation such as looking up references in a
library or paying for an information
service on the Web. The Web offers, on the other hand, the
potential for overcoming the static
and insular character of traditional knowledge representations
in favor of a seamless and visible
connectivity. But the present Web can realize this potential
only to a limited degree. While the
hyperlinks of the Web represent structures of meaning that
transcend the meaning represented
by individual documents, these structures of meaning can so
far hardly be made themselves the
object of interventions by the Web community. Due to the static
distinction between servers and
clients, there is at present no way to construct complex networks
of meaningful relations
between Web contents. In fact, the providers have no influence
on the links to the contents
provided by them and the users have no impact on the available
access structures to the content,
except by becoming content providers themselves.
Superficial representations of research results
Just as much of the epistemic connectivity of
research remains invisible in the traditional
medium so does the information hinterland of research results,
from observational data,
computer models, visual material, to archaeological records
and manuscript material. The
established publication system amounts to a very limited, superficial
representation of the
underlying knowledge which remains largely concealed or implicit
in the social interactions and
material techniques of research. The Web has altered the preconditions
for communicating
research, not only with regard to speed and connectivity but
also with regard to depth. Exploiting
this potential could contribute to the reliability and transparency
of scientific knowledge but also
to a more effective sharing of resources. Instead the lack
of openness of the present Web – in the
humanities e.g. the lack of open access to cultural heritage – as
well as some aspects of the career
system of science favor the privatization of knowledge and
its superficial representation in public
communication.
Fragmentary character of knowledge representations
The hallmark of the traditional publication system
is the fragmentary character of knowledge
representation. Indeed, the traditional publication system
and the disciplinary organization of
the sciences are sustaining a knowledge explosion which is
at the same time a knowledge
fragmentation. In periods of normal science, the integration
of these fragments into a meaningful
whole is largely taken for granted rather than being made itself
the objective of research. Since
the mechanisms of knowledge integration tend to remain rather
implicit, problems that might
engender a reorganization of knowledge may thus remain inconspicuous.
The competitiveness of
the academic system further contributes to the fragmentation
of knowledge and the neglect of
integrative ventures. The Web has so far hardly offered new
perspectives of integration but has
rather made the puzzle even more complex by dramatically increasing
the availability of nondescript
fragments of knowledge.
Lack of structural correspondence between content and representation
The standardization of publication formats is part of the well
established traditional information
circuit, from research, via refereeing and publication, to
archiving and retrieval as a
presupposition of further research. Standardization refers
both to external formats (monographic
and edited books, research and review papers, abstracts, etc.)
as well as to internal formats (table
of contents, footnotes, index, bibliography, etc.). The fact
that these formats are largely contentindependent
makes the traditional publication system robust and seemingly
contributes to its “objectivity” as
counting publications and citations can be taken as a measure
of scientific productivity and academic advancement. The abstraction
from content has, however, also serious
drawbacks. Quantitative success in the publication system (as
measured by the impact factor) is
ever more becoming a value in itself, leading to an impact
fetishism. What is more important, the
implicit network of publications referring to each other can
hardly be considered an adequate
representation of the epistemic network of the contents they
are dealing with, while such a
structural correspondence is quite conceivable in the electronic
medium, as innovative
knowledge representations such as Google Earth demonstrate:
While the relation between a text
and a footnote is devoid of any content, the link between an
electronic map and information
about a particular place is part of a structure that itself
carries a meaning. Even in the present
Web, the embedding of a publication within a network of links
is much more telling than the
traditional counting of its citations, as this network embodies
(often immediate) qualified
reactions to the contribution of a given piece of research
to the developing shared knowledge. But
this is hardly more than a glimpse at the potentially far-reaching
consequences of the selfreflecting
character of the new information system.
Missing links between media
In the traditional system the media of research and the media
of dissemination are separated
from each other, as are individual sites of research and individual
publications. The Web has
facilitated the transfer of content between the worlds of research
and dissemination but its
potential for overcoming the insular character of research
sites and individual publications has
largely remained unused. Different types of software are being
used to pursue research, to write a
paper and to make it available on the Web. The seamless integration
of texts, images, films and
sound in research publications seems an obvious request but
is still not accomplished. Powerful
technologies for analyzing and processing images or natural
and formal language content such as
mathematical expressions have long been available offline but
are still not available on the Web.
For mathematical content even elementary facilities for the
transfer of content between the Web
and offline resources are missing.
Conventional Vision
The conventional vision actually corresponds to a sequence
of attempts at understanding the new
medium according to expectations rooted in experiences with
traditional knowledge
representations. They are evolving because of their emerging
incapacity to cope with the radical
nature of the break constituted by establishing the Internet
as a potentially all-encompassing
representation of human knowledge. Yet they are not evolving
adequately because they focus on
what seem to be deficits of the new medium with regard to the
old that need compensation, a
framework for a well-structured division of intellectual labor
in the sense of the traditional
information circuit, an orderly universe of meaning allowing
to relate the pieces of the
information puzzle to each other, and niches like speaker’s
corner for free-wheeling discussions.
The innovative power with which the compensatory measures are
being undertaken can hardly
distract from their impotence to accomplish the profound transition
to a new information age the
Web is piloting.
Replicating the traditional knowledge economy in the new medium
The easiest way to establish a framework for a well-structured
division of intellectual labor on the
Web is certainly to emulate in the new medium the traditional
information circuit from research,
via refereeing and publication, to archiving and retrieval
as a presupposition of further research.
In this way, scholars, publishers, and librarians could maintain
their well-defined roles as well as
their respective sources of recognition, revenue, and respect.
The stability of this traditional
system is, however, endangered: due to the increase in the
number of publications and their
rising costs, adequate access to research results is becoming
ever more difficult; due to the novel
economics of the Web, the traditional distribution of labor
is collapsing. Nevertheless, there is a
natural tendency by all stake holders to map the traditional
system into the new medium,
ignoring rather than exploring its novel possibilities or to
rethink the implications of research
challenges when pursued in a new context. The prevalence of
such a conservative vision is
characteristic of all technological revolutions; it is like
building cars according to the model of
horse carriages. In the case of the Web, however, the pursuit
of this vision is expensive, the
investments having to be subtracted from those necessary for
building up a more adequate
infrastructure optimizing the new technological potentials
for addressing research challenges.
Creating toll-access structures to scientific knowledge thus
hampers research twice, impeding connectivity by blocking access and by preventing the creation
of connective working
environments.
Solving the problem of semantics on the Web by central planning
If the Web only knew what it is talking about, it would understand
itself much better – but who is
going to teach it? Evidently, the potential of the Web as a
universal representation of human
knowledge and communication would be greatly enhanced if its
sites could “speak” to each other
in the sense of recognizing if two figures refer to the same
date whatever the format or if two
texts refer, say, to soccer whether the word occurs or not.
The Web’s semiotic connectivity would
thus be transformed into a semantic connectivity. One of the
strategies of adding meaning to data
is using metadata establishing the data’s significance,
for instance by referring to ontologies
offering common frames of semantic reference. Historically,
attempts of creating such a second
world of meaning with a claim to universal validity are familiar
from the Catholic Church and the
Soviet Union. They typically involve a great deal of central
planning and are characterized by the
rule of technocrats as well as the incapacity to cope with
developmental dynamics. Providing
meaning to the Web with the help of metadata created by expert
groups and committees
ultimately amounts to an Orwellian vision of the Web in which
adopting Newspeak is obligatory
for being part of the accepted community. Natural language
works differently in that meaning
emerges rather than being predefined – as dangerous as
that may be for any classificatory order.
It would thus be better to learn from natural language: One
of the reasons for the power of
natural language in representing and furthering human thinking
is its inbuilt reflexivity: natural
language is its own metalanguage. The separation of language
and metalanguage makes it to a
certain degree possible to fix the semantics clarifying communication
and avoiding paradoxes but
severely limits the potential of creating new meaning.
Moving from a textual network
to a social network; but not yet a
knowledge network
Web 2.0 is the protestant version of the Semantic Web: where
central authorities have failed in
mediating between the real world of data and the transcendental
world of meaning, smaller, selforganized
groups feel that they are called upon to open up direct access
to this transcendental
world in terms of their own interpretations of the Great Hypertext.
The traditional separation
between providers/priests and clients/laymen is thus modified
in favor of a new social network in
which meaning is actually created bottom up. The unrealistic
idea of taxonomies inaugurated by
top-down measures is being replaced by the more feasible enterprise
of “folksonomies” spread by
special interest groups. As their scope remains, however, rather
limited and the separation
between data and metadata essentially unchallenged, the chances
for developing such a social
network into a knowledge network fulling coping with the real
world of data are slim.
Alternative Vision
Creating a universe of knowledge on the Web that parallels
human
knowledge
After a lifetime of laborious memorization and study, some
individuals manage to obtain a rich
internal (mental) representation that provides good overall
coverage of knowledge in a single
domain. A relevant example is a traditional Sanskrit pandit — an
orally-trained scholar who is able
to quote Pāṇinian sutras, provide instances of their
application, and refer to many centuries of
commentary and meta-commentary on them. We might consider also
a Latinist who has
internalized the universe of Latin letters; for instance, a
scholar of Vergil, who can
instantaneously identify allusions to Ennius and Lucretius,
who can note the places in which
Vergil is echoed by Silver Latin epicists, and who can discourse
seemingly ad infinitum on any
word of the Vergilian text. The scholar who has internalized
such knowledge is happy indeed —
able immediately to summon from memory a daunting quantity
of information. The scholar’s
memory is random access — providing quick and flexible
recall of virtually anything at anytime, ad
libitum. It takes a lifetime to gain such fluency; and, even
in a lifetime, few manage. The
Renaissance ideal of the memory palace is a persisting dream
for scholars; yet for all but a handful
of agèd and wise savants, it remains beyond reach.
Today’s digital technology offers new hope. Scholars
don’t need to scroll through long papyri, or
flip endlessly through codices. Powerful search tools will — we
emphasize will, because the Web as
a place for research still lacks much — allow virtually
instantaneous random access to a wealth of
information: primary sources, secondary sources; echoes and
commentary; critiques and
response. Ideally, a gifted young scholar of tomorrow will
possess tools that in the past were the
exclusive property of senior magistri.
The mental resources of the traditional scholar are formidable:
but how much more formidable if
transferred from internal mens to external machina — and
combined with resources of countless
other scholars? The private domain of the sage then becomes
part of a public domain that
represents in external form, accessible to all, the collective
knowledge of humanity.
Turning (private) reading into the (public) creation of information
Today’s
digital economy of knowledge is strikingly atavistic — incorporating
anachronistic
survivals from the age of print publication, stretching back
to Gutenberg, and indeed to the
medieval scriptorium. An author decides to publish, and in
so doing presents a freeze-frame of
active, dynamic research to the world; to host this publication
on a server requires complex
technical and social infrastructure, often beyond the means
of individual scholars. Once the work
is published, the public or audience (these terms are not rigorously
defined) have the “luxury” of
browsing the publication — an activity that in some ways
is even more passive than reading.
In the future Web that we envision, users will not read,
and a fortiori will not browse. Instead, they
will federate documents: that is, choose which documents to
view together, choose (according to
their interests) which document will provide an access point
into the universe of digital
knowledge, and which documents will be displayed as subsidiary
documents of the master
document. These decisions will not remain private. Future scholars
will not follow the model of the
erudite gentleman who sits in front of his fireplace and annotates
personal volumes. Rather,
private reading becomes public federation — in choosing
which documents to view, and in
establishing the relationship between these documents, the
scholar of tomorrow will be creating
public, shareable information. Such views will be made available
to, and will serve as a starting
point for the work of, other scholars.
Allowing all data to be metadata and all documents to be
windows into
the universe of knowledge
(Digital) librarians are enamored of metadata — they
see metadata as a canonical set of structured
vocabulary that can be used to describe the content held by
a (digital) library. This view is shortsighted.
On our model, documents can contain enriched links — links
along the lines of the XLink
standard of the W3C. That is: incoming as well as outbound
links, idirectional links, links that
can be followed transitively, links that are semantically labeled,
and links whose behavior is
explicitly specified. Since any document can refer to any other
set of documents, a document may
be understood as a projection of the universe of data (or content,
or knowledge) that is
instantiated in the Web. That is to say, it systematically
maps a subset of the total knowledge that
is represented on the Web. Each document has the potential
of serving as a window into the total
universe of knowledge; and the richness of the view through
this window is a simple function of
the richness of the controlling document. Thus the Epistemic
Web offers two (compatible) models
that define the relation of a single document to the sum of
all documents. First, the process of
federating documents allows for the novel bringing-together
of a set of arbitrary documents. From
such federated documents, we may expect emergent properties.
Second, the process of projecting
documents allows for the specification of how any single document
provides a window into the
entire universe of knowledge. Obviously, the richer the set
of links in a document, the richer this
document is (potentially) as a projection of the entire docuverse.
Since any document allows
outgoing as well as incoming links, any document is potentially
about one or more other
documents. This aboutness is the quintessence of intentionality;
thus any document in the universe
is open to being construed as metadata about one or more foreign
documents.
Architecture
The Epistemic Web will demand a new architecture,
which builds on the architecture of the
current Web, and incorporates elements of certain “alternative
Webs” (both those that exist only
in theory, and those that are in statu nascendi): the semantic
Web, the social Web, and the geospatial
Web.
Moving from servers and browsers to interagents
that allow people to
interact with information
The current paradigm of the Web — in which
the user browses, leaving behind a click-trail that is
of interest primarily to marketers — falls far short
of the needs of scientists and scholars.
Browsing the Web is scarcely more interactive than surfing
television channels. The Web server —
and the server administrator —, in turn, are survivals
from the traditional print economy. True
interactivity — which will allow the Web finally to achieve
its potential as a medium for scholarly,
political, and social dialogue — demands something other
than the current browser/server
paradigm. A new approach will be needed, here developers recognize
that information
consumers are also information producers. In fact, the salient
individual here is the prosumer, a
term invented by Don Tapscott to describe the individual who “co-innovates
and coproduces the
products they consume.”[1]
Although the democratizing of information
production (and not just consumption) is emerging in
the “Web 2.0” paradigm, true interactivity demands
a new tool: not a browser, but an interagent.
Such a tool will allow the user of the future Web to annotate
existing publications and create new
publications with the same facility that she or he currently
enjoys in browsing or reading existing
publications. The interagent, like the Roman god Janus, looks
in several directions: it is the
software that mediates interactivity; it allows information
production as well as information
consumption; and it it blurs the role of the Web browser and
Web server. We see the interagent as a
thin client that runs on a user’s computer, but that
is radically extensible through Web services. In
other words, it brings not just a world of data, but also a
world of services to the user’s desktop,
leveraging the increasingly service-oriented architecture (SOA)
of the new Web. In practical
terms, the interagent can extend its repertoire of behaviors
by discovering and utilizing services
available on the Web — for instance, when it encounters
a new document type, or a new natural
language, or a new set of technologies for working with data
of a particular type.
Replacing browsing and searching with projecting and federating
information
Browsing, as we have argued, is passive and private.
In the Epistemic Web, the user does not
aimlessly surf. Rather she or he actively chooses which documents
to view. But in this model
documents are not information islands, but rather something
akin to Leibnizian monads. Each
document is potentially a projection of some part of the entire
universe of knowledge. Any
document supports both outgoing links (familiar from HTML)
and incoming links (an XLink
technology, the potential of which is only beginning to be
realized.) We might propose a new
motto: information wants to connect. A further key concept
in this new model is the federation of
documents. A group of documents (we call these federated documents)
is brought together by means
of a federating document. For example, a collection of geographical
data sets may be federated into
a mappa mundi. Or several editions, translations, and commentaries
on a literary work may be
federated into a synoptic edition. Powerful linking facilities
will allow one document to serve as a
viewpoint for multiple other documents.
Enabling automated federation through an extensible
service architecture
Current Web browsers are constructed according
to an essentially monolithic architecture. To be
sure, they allow for “plugins,” but the very term
suggests an afterthought, an appendage. The
interagent, by contrast, is a thin software application (one
might call it a “kernel”) than runs
locally and discovers richer behaviors through a Web-services
architecture. The interagent
doesn’t know how to segment Thai words? It finds a Web
service for that. It doesn’t know how to
transliterate Tibetan? It finds a Web service for that too.
It can’t handle “Ruby” annotation of
Japanese? It can learn. It can’t lemmatize Sanskrit inflected
word forms? It finds a Web service for doing that too.
But such extensibility is only one aspect of the problem.
Future Web techniques will depend on
new software — and also on old software that is ported
to the Web. Why not allow documents to
be indexed by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)? Why not provide
a powerful Web-accessible
statistics toolkit, which can be applied to any data on the
Web? Surely the infrastructure can be
accommodated to allow automatic linking to lexica, thesauri,
specialized references, and so on.
Data should be effortlessly pluggable into specialized tools.
For example, if I have quantitative
data, I should be able to drag-and-drop it into Mathematica,
or Maple, or R (or SPSS). If I have
visual data, I should be able to apply domain-specific image
enhancement. Why shouldn’t OCR
work over the Web? Where are the tools that allow us to perform
flexible searches on multimedia
data, such as sound, video, and still images?
Extending current hypertext architecture
with granular addressing and
enriched links
Key to the architecture that we envision are
two extensions to the current architecture of the
Web. First, we need granular sub-addressing of documents, which
is independent of the explicit
structure of those documents. For XML documents, we can obtain
arbitrary document fragments
through standards such as XPath, XPointer, and XQuery. But
to do so, we must know how the
document is marked up. We need a layer of indirection that
allows us to abstract from document
structure. In particular, four means of sub-addressing XML
documents are needed: (1)
specification of a structural division of an XML document,
without knowing the specific grammar
of the XML document; such abstraction depends on a translation
layer that maps the markup
vocabulary of the XML document to a lingua franca; (2) reference
to a particular word in an XML
document, where the word may either be explicitly tagged, or
where NLP technology segments
words automatically; (3) specification of an arbitrary range
from word1 to word2 (inclusive), where
the range is specified in terms of words referenced according
to the scheme described above; (4) a
set of structural sub-addresses, drawn from the four enumerated
items, which may include an
ordered combination of {structural divisions, words, ranges,
sets}. These, we emphasize, are the basic
requirements for core humanistic disciplines such as history
and literary studies. Certain
disciplines, such as philology and linguistics, will need more
powerful and granular techniques for
subaddressing documents.
The second requirement is enriched links. The XLink recommendation
of the W3C is a considerable
move in this direction. Links as implemented in (X)HTML are
notably impoverished. For all
practical purposes, there exists only a single kind of link
(the anchor element with the href
attribute, and this link has a single specified behavior: when
the user activates the link (in a
implementation-specific way), the current document view is
replaced by the view of the link
target. Enriched linking standards such as XLink suggest a
great variety of alternatives: links that
are displayed inline, rather than as a replacement of the current
view; incoming as well as
outgoing links; specification of whether links are to be automatically
followed or only followed by
user interaction (as in the (X)HTML model); specification of
the semantics and behaviors of links;
amalgamation of a set of links; links that may be followed
transitively. These new linking
behaviors, especially combined with a mechanism for granular
sub-addressing of document
structure, promise the basic building blocks for the Epistemic
Web.
The foregoing discussion has concentrated on links within
textual resources, primarily those
represented in XML. But the principles are readily extensible
to other sorts of resources: image
data, which may be sub-addressed by Cartesian coordinates;
geospatial data which may be subaddressed
by geospatial coordinates; and audio and video data which may
be sub-addressed by
temporal ranges. Other types of media propose new challenges,
and we call for basic research in
these areas.
Development Obstacles
The ideas and technologies for transforming
the Web from a data whisk to a knowledge
representation clearly exist. The realization of this potential
suffers, however, from a number of
development obstacles, ranging from the growing gap between
scholars and developers, closely
connected with the lack of modular working environments and
authoring tools, via the confusion
due to the maze of possible directions opened by the explosion
of technology, to the tyranny of
information technocrats and the unremitting lack of openness
due to the persistence of
proprietary interests.
The growing gap between scholars and developers
While an emerging tradition of computational humanities has
achieved remarkable
breakthroughs, it has largely remained at the level of pilot
ventures that have failed to bring
along the mainstream. The gap between research practice and
technological potentials
characteristic of the humanities is actually growing. The bulk
of cultural heritage representing
the object of humanistic studies is still not openly available
online, nor do electronic tools for its
analysis belong to the standard methodology of the humanities.
Most scholars in the humanities
are not involved in bringing their experience to bear on forging
the cultural techniques of the
future appropriate to the Web, nor are they even familiar with
the existing standard methods for
extracting and encoding text structures in the electronic medium.
Developers, on the other hand,
are usually not involved in innovative usage scenarios, focusing
instead – driven by uninformed “needs analyses” – on
emulating traditional practices in the new medium. Scholars
and developers thus form an unholy alliance of ignorance: scholars
fail to see the technological
potentials and developers are blind to the intellectual visions
these potentials may give rise to.
The lack of modular working environments and authoring tools
The developmental potential inherent in the combination of
new technologies with intellectual
visions might be freed if scholars were able to quickly learn
about and flexibly use the rapidly
developing new technologies. Making new tools broadly available
requires, however, to decouple
the knowledge necessary to invent and construct such tools
from that necessary to use them, just
as knowing how to use a refrigerator should not depend on mastering
thermodynamics. The tools
should, on the other hand, be suitable for being customized
and combined in innovative ways so
as to avoid just replicating standard working environments.
What are needed are thus modular
working environments functioning according to the box of blocks
principle as the optimal
synthesis of the competencies of the block builders and the
block users. Such working
environments should, in particular, also include authoring
tools allowing for the seamless
integration of individual research and “knowledge weaving” on
the Web.
The maze of possible directions opened up by the explosion
of
technology
While the spreading of the new information technologies within
scholarly communities requires
a certain standardization and black-boxing of tools, any such
channeling is risking, on the other
hand, to go astray and to miss new opportunities brought about
by the rapid technological
development. The explosion of technology opens up a maze of
possible directions for creating a
new scholarly infrastructure, an embarras de richesse that
itself has become an obstacle of
development. Therefore, while scholars do not have to be familiar
with all the technical details,
they nevertheless better keep a critical eye on the general
development, accumulating, if possible,
a reflective knowledge keeping them from missing opportunities
but also from falling into the
traps of false technological promises.
The tyranny of information infrastructure
technocrats
The challenges associated with the transition
to a new medium of knowledge representation have
begun to trigger a new distribution of labor. Nevertheless,
the old structure shapes the new one
according to its own image, as each group – scholars,
librarians, publishers, developers – tends to
somehow preserve its role by looking for “new tasks” rather
than altogether dropping its original
identity. Another ugly imprint left by the old structure on
the incipient new one is the focus on
the deficits rather than on the potentials of the new medium
when compared to the print world,
such as the lack of reliability, stability, ranking and order
of the available information. The spell of
the old under which the new information world is born is embodied
in the emergence of a new
class of specialists who represent technological competence
to the scholarly world and scholarly
competence to the world of developers but does actually not
possess either one. To everybody
they offer both, the exciting impression of being part of an
unavoidable revolution and the
tranquillizing feeling that nothing really will change. No
doubt, the arrival of the infrastructure
technocrats follows a historical logic. As it became ever more
clear that a new continent of
information could not be settled by scout solutions and pilot
ventures, colonial officers were
called upon to create an infrastructure. Its promise are reliable
repositories, stable references,
transparent data structures, seamless interfaces, and maybe
even a self-sustaining dynamics of
transition to the new medium. But building infrastructures
quickly became an end in itself, also
as a raison d'être of the infrastructure architects.
They have actually come to dominate the
discourse about the transition to the new medium due to the
resources they administer, the
committees they rule, and the time they can invest into the
enterprise. The infrastructures they
conceive are accordingly administration oriented rather than
research driven, focusing on issues
of authentification, standards, and metadata rather than on
innovative usage scenarios. They are
typically developer rather than user oriented, they tend to
decouple technical developments from
research and to be over-engineered, risking to quickly become
obsolete. A dynamic synthesis of
scholarship and technology will only become possible once the
tyranny of the infrastructure
architects is broken.
The persistence of proprietary interests and the unremitting
lack of
openness
The quest for open access is not a matter of content communism.
Without open access the Web is
bound to replicate the insular structure of information in
the print world. Lack of open access
constitutes one of the main obstacles to the full exploitation
of the innovative potential of the
Web for research and scholarship. In the sciences open access
refers to publications as well as
their hinterland of data, simulations, software etc.. In the
humanities open access should
similarly refer not only to publications but also to testimonies
of cultural heritage, to historical
works of art, literature, and science, to image, film and sound
collections, to statistical data, etc. There is, however, a
major difference between the humanities and the sciences: while
in science
the raw data constituting the hinterland of research are typically
produced and kept by the same
people who write the publications, authors in the humanities
are as a rule not those who collect
and preserve cultural heritage or provide access to it. Research
institutions and cultural heritage
institutions tend to perceive their interests in different
ways. While most research institutions see
their mission only half accomplished if they are not employing
the optimal tools for granting
access to their output, holders of cultural heritage tend to
conceive electronic reproductions not
as a new way of preserving and sharing the memory of mankind
but merely as a new source of
revenue they can use in compensation of dwindling public funds
to fulfill their traditional function. The
duplication of the world of cultural heritage in the electronic
medium has actually triggered a gold rush. It motivates museums,
libraries, archives as well as private companies to
stake out proprietary claims in this new territory. They tend
to speculate on the quick
commercial exploitation of resources rather than fostering
their integration into a global
representation of human knowledge. Unfortunately, they are
assisted in this exclusive policy by
those humanists who are all too willing to compromise open
access in the interest of their own
exclusive, academic niches. The arduous goal of open access
in the humanities can only be
achieved when public institutions no longer invest into endeavors
with proprietary output.
Pathways
The alternative vision that we have developed
is ambitious. We believe, however, that it is
realistic; to stress its feasibility, we close by discussing
some concrete pathways to the Epistemic
Web.
Establishing an ecology for innovation by
fostering research-driven developments, opening creative niches,
and creating positive network
externalities
Much technology is developer-centric; developers
code what they want, and they employ the
concepts that they know. Sometimes developers engage in a “needs
analysis”: they go around to
(potential) users and ask open-ended questions about what users
would like. Users often have no
understanding of the realities of large-scale technology development,
and so what comes out of
the “needs analysis” procedure is all too often
a laundry list of desiderata, some of which may
well be mutually incompatible. We propose a model that is based
on a virtuous circle in which
researchers and technical developers provide each other with
feedback. Research in the
humanities and sciences opens up challenges for technical developers,
while technical developers
can offer researchers new perspectives on, and tools for, their
work. The cycle works iteratively to
improve the quality of both technical tools and scholarly research.
Ideally, however, we should work to close the gap between
technical developers and “users.”
Individuals engaged in many areas of research would benefit
from basic yet extensible tools, as well
as a modicum of technical know-how. They need not be — in
fact, no one expects them to be —
experts in software development. Yet insights that arise in
the course of their research projects
may allow them to build innovative tools. We might call such
people technically informed scholars.
In the past we have seen powerful and useful creations arise
from such technically informed scholars — often developed
with systems such as HyperCard, or FileMaker, or scripting
languages. The power of these systems is considerable; yet
we have no real equivalents for the technically informed
scholar who wishes to create innovative tools on the Web. Somebody
who felt comfortable writing
a small program ten or twenty years ago is likely to feel overwhelmed
by today’s technologies. Yet
technically informed scholars are crucial to innovation in
scholarly computing. The architects of the
next-generation Web must provide them with powerful, flexible,
modular tools that are easy to
learn, easy to use, and guaranteed simply not to disappear
one day. The creation of such tools is
an ideal task for the ever-growing community of open source
software developers that are
strongly committed to contributing their expertise to the public
good.
Moreover, if innovative developments are to flourish, they
must be adopted. The value of software
systems increases with the number of users — the relevant
economic term is positive network
externalities. As more people use Linux and Firefox, these
tools become increasingly valuable. A
fortiori the value of the Internet increases as more people
use it. The free software and open
source movements are replete with evangelists. The scholarly
computing community is less well-
served — in reality, it is often a dangerously isolated
niche in academic and research institutions.
If we build an Epistemic Web, we must make sure that scholars
understand its benefits, and that
the barriers to entry are low. Furthermore, we must put our
money where our mouth is; we
cannot blithely continue to publish our research primarily
in traditional paper journals and
books.
Ensuring sustainability through an innovation-stabilization
cycle,
focusing on open-access content as mediator between research
and
technology
Open-access content is key to the viability of the Epistemic
Web. If knowledge is locked in the box
of outmoded intellectual property rights, it cannot be accessed,
augmented, or modified in the
ways we envision here. It is incumbent upon public institutions
that possess a wealth of
intellectual property to make it available under an open-access
scheme. Universities and research
centers are public institutions; as such, they should eschew
private property rights. Just as the value
of the Epistemic Web increases with the number of users, so
it increases with the amount of
content that it includes. Without content, researchers cannot
do research. At the same time,
content is critical to the technological developments that
will lead to the Epistemic Web. Content
is not just data — things that are given, what is already
there. Content is not streams of bytes: we
will not measure the value of the Epistemic Web by counting
gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes.
Nor is content merely such things as digitized books, digitized
paintings and photographs, or
numerical climate data acquired over the past century. Content
includes scholarly annotations;
relationships between places, persons, and events; semantic
maps; mathematical models; and
conceptual structures of all kinds. We have less experience
in dealing with content of these kinds,
because so much effort has been invested in digitizing the
Gutenberg universe. As a result, work is
needed to develop schemas for the representation of additional
sorts of documents, and technical
developers will have to work hand-in-hand with researchers.
The Epistemic Web will not be built all
at once. There will be no launch date. Rather its
development will depend on an innovation-stabilization cycle.
We have already argued that an
ecology for innovation is needed, and that researchers themselves
will play a crucial role in
innovation. Some innovations will showcase powerful new ideas;
these will need to be generalized
and reimplemented by professional developers. Some innovations
will serve the purpose for
which they were constructed well; all that is needed in this
case is an infrastructure that ensures
their longevity. Some innovations will be dead ends; they can
be forgotten, or remembered only
as negative examples. But innovation — the revolution — must
continue. The Epistemic Web must
not develop into a static system with a frozen function set.
Besides innovation, stabilization is the
other key phase of the development cycle. We don’t want
a Web that is cobbled together from
prototypes, experimental software, and unfinished projects.
What is learned from innovation
must be reused and reimplemented with maximum generality and
robustness. Yesterday’s
innovation become tomorrow’s infrastructure. And it is
this stable (but evolving!) infrastructure
that will provide the platform for further innovation.
Launching Web 3.0 techniques for core resource types
Digitized texts, images, audio, and video, as
well as formal language content and numeric datasets
together account for much of the material that scholars will
draw on for their research. Early
work on the Epistemic Web should give priority to addressing
improved ways of working with this
content.
First, more computation needs to be brought
onto the Web. A wide variety of tools that enhance
the usability of content are either presently available or
actively being researched. But most of
these tools are only available offline, and it is not easy
to apply them to resources on the Web. For
textual content, we urgently need more NLP technologies brought
to the Web: especially
technologies for lemmatization, morphological analysis, transliteration,
term extraction, and
cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Language technology
on the Web should provide
extensive coverage of both modern and ancient languages and
demands standard interfaces and
middleware, as well as mechanisms for resource discovery. For
formal language content,
manipulable interfaces and visualization technologies are needed,
which will allow such actions
as: plugging numeric values into a formula; translating between
variant notational systems;
graphing a function; or displaying a three-dimensional, rotatable
model of an organic molecule.
For image data, enhancement tools are needed (not just the
general purpose filters available in
software such as Photoshop or the GIMP, but algorithms tuned
to specific purposes, such as
enhancing illegible or barely legible manuscripts) as well
as powerful search engines for images
(e.g. word spotting or Supervised Multiclass Labeling (SML)).
New and more sophisticated means for representing
quantitative information need to be fostered,
and online visualization toolkits would provide an ideal way
of disseminating better techniques.
Scholarly articles are often full of what Edwin Tufte calls “chartjunk.” Sometimes
scholars present
data in tabular format, simply because they are unfamiliar
with the software to present it in a
more “readable” way. Few scholars are familiar
with such techniques as sparklines (“intense,
simple, word-sized graphics”).[2] Few use mapped pictures,
despite the fact that they constitute a
powerful way of combining images with textual and/or quantitative
data. As researchers begin
systematically to explore new large-scale topics, such as the
comparative study of globalization
processes in history, they will need new representations for
such phenomena as layered time
developments within a geospatial context.
Finally, we believe it is time to create new models for federating
documents. Current models such
as the encyclopedia model (exemplified by Wikipedia) and the
geospatial model (exemplified by
Google Earth) are powerful structures for organizing a large
quantity of information. But really
they are only incremental improvements on content models that
have been used for more than a
millennium. This is not to disparage the models; and certainly
not to deny the impressiveness and
usefulness of their Web-based reincarnations. But it is symptomatic
of stale thinking that one can
find such a limited number of federating models on the Web.
New ways of organizing knowledge
are needed, and the Epistemic Web is where they will flourish.
References
- Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams,
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Portfolio
(2006), p. 126.
- Edwin Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, Graphics
Press (2006), pp. 7–19.
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