Digital Classicist Berlin

A past well hidden: tracing and visualizing Roman infrastructure in medieval charters

Mon Feb 19 00:00:00 +0100 2018

Talk: Mateusz Fafinski (FU), “A past well hidden: tracing and visualizing Roman infrastructure in medieval charters”.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11117/0000-0000-C629-3

Date: Monday, 19 February 2018

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gebäude Hausvogteiplatz (Raum 0319). Address: Hausvogteipl. 5-7, 10117 Berlin map

Abstract

This presentation will introduce a new approach to analyzing charter corpora on the example of Anglo-Saxon charters. The usage of combined scraping, analytical and visualizing capabilities of various R packages can not only give us insight into the place of Roman roads in the charter landscape but also give a chance for a new type of visualization that is user-driven and user-friendly. This can be achieved by presenting the results in the form of various shiny-package applications. Dynamic enriching of the data by combining it with archaeological and historical databases opens it up to other lines of enquiry. The project is not only an interdisciplinary endeavor but also a multi-epoch one. Tracing the elements of the classical past in the early medieval documents requires a flexible approach to time visualization that is difficult to achieve with GIS and much more practical with R. Moreover it makes use of existing databases of Anglo-Saxon charters on the web thus integrating them into the project.

At the center of the project stands the corpus of charter texts that can be dynamically changed into a database by applying tidytext principles of analysis. The aim of it is to reconstruct and analyze the Roman infrastructure in the texts of charters. By mapping them and looking into the density, distribution and correlation of mentions we can reconstruct the symbolic geography of Roman infrastructure in the Early Medieval landscape of Britain. Through combining textual and spatial visualizations we can make it visible and available. Unique ability of working in R environment allows simultaneous work on text and spatial analysis and allows for presentation of results in an interactive form that is also available to non-specialists and can be used e.g. in a classroom environment. The results are presented as static and interactive maps as well as various graphs and textual charts.

The scripts and methods can be potentially used also for other types of large medieval documental corpora, therefore the usability of the project does not end with just the Anglo-Saxon charters.

Literature

Burdick, Anne, ed. Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Gregory, Ian, and Paul S. Ell. Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies, and Scholarship. Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 39. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Kennedy, S. Wright. ‘The Potential of Historical GIS and Spatial Analysis in the Humanities’. 2 March 2017. https://southernspaces.org/2017/potential-historical-gis-and-spatial-analysis-humanities.

Silge, Julia, and David Robinson. Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach, 2017. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1533983.

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The iDAI.publications from open digital publishing to text mining

Mon Feb 05 00:00:00 +0100 2018

Talk: Francesco Mambrini (DAI), The iDAI.publications from open digital publishing to text mining

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11117/0000-0000-8B2A-5

Date: Monday, 5 February 2018

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: DAI, Wiegandhaus, Podbielskiallee 69-71, D-14195 Berlin (map)

Abstract

The iDAI.publications is the new Open Access publication platform of the Deutsches Archälogisches Institut (DAI) that aims to make the unique collection of scholarship published by the institute accessible to the public. At the same time, we intend to leverage our unique collection of scholarly articles and monographs to extract meaningful information, such as persons, places, canonical citations of ancient texts and mentions to archaeological artifacts. In this seminar we will present the two components of the iDAI.publications, the publication environment based on the Open Journal System and Open Monograph Press, and a series of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that we programmed to extract and structure the relevant information from the texts. We discuss the chief problems related to Open Access publishing present, and we present the current NLP pipeline, the evaluation of its components and the strategies adopted to improve the accuracy of our results.

Video

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Discussion

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Cataloguing Open Access Classics Serials

Mon Jan 22 00:00:00 +0100 2018

Talk: Simona Stoyanova & Gabriel Bodard (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London), “Cataloguing Open Access Classics Serials”.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11117/0000-0000-60EA-C

Date: Monday, 22 January 2018

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gebäude Hausvogteiplatz (Raum 0319). Address: Hausvogteipl. 5-7, 10117 Berlin map

Abstract

The catalogues of most research libraries offer access to electronic journals to which they subscribe, but rarely include the thousands of open access journals also of interest to their readers, hiding many of these publications from scholarly view, and slowing the acceptance and adoption of open access publishing. The Cataloguing Open Access Classics Serials project harvests bibliographic metadata of ca. 1500 open access journals (containing a little over 50,000 articles) in Classics and Ancient History, found in various sites that list or index open access publications, starting from the Ancient World Online (AWOL) index. This is comparable to the number of classics journals included in a silo such as JStor, with the added value that they are not only free but usually licensed for redistribution or reuse in some sense. Since the catalogue information for these journals is available in various formats (JSON, HTML, MARC), we transform them into a standard library metadata format (MARC). As a first test, we then ingest them into the Classics library catalogue of our institution, providing users with access from the search interface alongside print and subscription titles. A number of the journals expose their metadata in standard formats (OAI-PMH, MARCXML, Dublin Core) that can be easily transformed to the format best suited to a library catalogue. A significant number of them offer only basic bibliographic information in unstructured HTML, for which a different harvesting strategy is needed, to strip the content from the HTML, structure as JSON and transform into MARC. A certain amount of manual curation and trial- and-error-based iteration is involved in the harvesting process. By the end of the project we will have added around 1500 new records to our Classics library catalogue, contributing to the research practice of scholars and other library users, and enhancing the visibility and accessibility of open access materials. The bundle of JSON, MARCXML and MARC records will also be made available for other libraries to ingest and to facilitate reuse and further development of the data outside of the constraints of library catalogues. All code (Python using the JSON encoder and decoder, Beautiful Soup and pymarc libraries) for metadata harvesting and transformation will be published in an open source repository. We consider this project to be a pilot for future work, which might include access to the raw text of open access and open licensed scholarship for text mining, entity extraction and other linguistic and computational approaches.

Literature

An Integrated Approach to Metadata Interoperability: Construction of a Conceptual Structure between MARC and FRBR. Seungmin Lee, Elin K. Jacob, Library Resources & Technical Services, Vol 55, No 1 (2011) (https://journals.ala.org/index.php/lrts/article/view/5539/6818)

S. Bird, E. Klein and E. Loper, Natural Language Processing with Python, O’Reilly, 2009. Available at: http://www.nltk.org/book/: Ch. 1 “Language Processing and Python”: sections 1 & 2 (http://www.nltk.org/book/ch01.html)

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GIS tool for interdisciplinary landscape studies

Mon Jan 08 00:00:00 +0100 2018

Talk: Sabrina Pietrobono (MiBACT, Rome), “GIS tool for interdisciplinary landscape studies”

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1780-0000-002E-E69C-8

Date: Monday, 8 January 2018

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: DAI, Wiegandhaus, Podbielskiallee 69-71, D-14195 Berlin (map)

Abstract

Despite several projects on Ancient Roman towns carried out during the last decades, the understanding of some important points of central Italy’s social dynamics from the Roman Period to the Middle Ages has not improved much; this is probably due to the lack of a proper interdisciplinary and contextual approach, which may connect specialists in different fields (archaeologists; historians; etc) to the reality of the landscape and territory. This proposal aims to show the range of possibilities provided by a GIS method elaborated in the UK and recently applied to Italy contexts. It develops from a wider collaborative research project, which involves selected historical areas in Southern Lazio, Central Italy, previously included into a project carried out between 2012 and 2014; their study has been further advanced from 2015 to 2017, in order to answer yet unaddressed questions about the relationship between linguistic or historical sources and territories. During previous research focused on the analysis of the impact of medieval conquests in the UK and Italy through the study of landscapes, results had revealed significant potential for approaching the study of complex social landscapes by combining material and linguistic data relying on an advanced tecnological tool: in order to manage data coming from environments and textual sources, a relatively new GIS-based method was adapted to the Italian context for the first time; this method emphasises the importance of studying the landscape as a whole by identifying different historic land-uses (e.g. different types of fields, woodland, moors/heaths/grazing land, etc) and by analysing their origins, development and cultural/social characters, trying to understand the evolution of people’s identity and land exploitation. Of course, Central Italy is a vital area of study, expecially when considered since the mid- Republican period, when its natural environment was affected in numerous ways by human impact. However, other complex transformations within the same areas occurred over the centuries after the Roman dominion, especially in the Middle Ages. The whole of their consequences in the current landscape of Central Italy had to be equally studied and better understood in order to obtain a good knowledge of past historical phases and transformations. Initially developed by British institutions, this new GIS method has been tailored for selected Italian cases studies in order to correctly reconstruct even different landscapes by collecting data on transformation and/or continuity in the landscape, in Italy and the UK.

Literature

Fairclough, G.J. and Wigley, A. 2006: Historic Landscape Characterisation: An English approach to landscape understanding and the management of change, in del Arbo, M-R & Orejas, A.(eds) 2005, Landscapes as Cultural Heritage in the European Research, Proceedings of COST A27 Workshop, Madrid 2004, 87-106

Widgren, M. 2012: Landscape research in a world of domesticated landscapes: The role of values, theory, and concepts, in Quaternary International, 251: 117-124

Video

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Discussion

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Network analysis as a tool for studying early urbanisation in Italy

Mon Dec 11 00:00:00 +0100 2017

Talk: Lieve Donnellan (Uni Amsterdam), “Network analysis as a tool for studying early urbanisation in Italy” “.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1780-0000-002E-CC8C-8

Date: Monday, 11 December 2017

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gebäude Hausvogteiplatz (Raum 0319). Address: Hausvogteipl. 5-7, 10117 Berlin map

Abstract

The adoption of network analytic methods by archaeologists has significantly advanced the understanding of connected cultural and spatial phenomena in the past. Important contributions have shed light on a wide range of questions such as the functioning of regional exchange systems, the formation of hierarchic settlement systems, road systems and “global” connectivity ¹. A challenge for archaeologists remains, however, to address questions at a lower, i.e., local spatiotemporal scale². The author/applicant has developed a method to look at transformations in funerary contexts, to reconstruct ancient processes of urbanisation and the formation of sociopolitical complexity. By means of “translating” archaeological contexts into a so-called two mode network model, in-depth analysis with specialised social network analysis software (UCINET®)³ enables to trace patterns that the human mind would never be able to detect. Digital methods thus provide an important set of tools for the systematic and comprehensive analysis of large archaeological datasets and they contribute to the refining of the historiography of key phases in European history. The rise of the first densely inhabited and spatially contained cities in Europe is conventionally dated to ca. the late 8th century BCE. In Italy, seemingly quite suddenly, a number of dispersed settlements aggregate to form spatially unified entities. Very little is known about their physical appearance and the bad preservation of these early phases, due to continued habitation of the area, makes that archaeologists have only necropoleis at their disposition. Nevertheless, these tombs contain a wealth of information and archaeologists were able to advance a number of hypotheses about the social and political transformations of these communities. The application of new digital analytic methods, such as network analysis, to the study of these societies, allows - for the first time - a very detailed and systematic verification of past hypotheses. Network analysis significantly improves the understanding of the transformations that occurred in the tombs of the populations that lived through processes of early urbanisation. Excellent and detailed results could be obtained by studying a number of selected sites in the region of Campania, in Southern Italy. A relatively high number of settlements in this region lived through important transformations that resulted in the shaping of some of the earliest cities known in Europe. Digital analysis with network analytical software made it possible to shed light on important social, political and economic phenomena such as social competition, elite formation, the infrastructural power of the political classes, performance strategies and so forth. These new insights provide important new angles for the scholarly discussions on the urbanising phenomenon in Europe.

Collar et al. 2015, Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation, Journal of Archaeological Method & Theory 22, 1-32
Reference to author’s work
Borgatti, S.P., Everett, M.G. and Freeman, L.C. 2002. Ucinet 6 for Windows: 3. Software for Social Network Analysis. Harvard, MA: Analytic Technologies

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Hacking Sumerian. A Database Approach to the Analysis of Ancient Languages

Mon Nov 27 00:00:00 +0100 2017

Talk: Ainsley Hawthorn (LMU Munich), Hacking Sumerian. A Database Approach to the Analysis of Ancient Languages.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1780-0000-002E-C436-2

Date: Monday, 27 November 2017

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: DAI, Wiegandhaus, Podbielskiallee 69-71, D-14195 Berlin (map)

Abstract

The world’s oldest written dialects test the limits of our linguistic imaginations. In some cases, limited primary source materials and a dearth of bilingual evidence leave the scholar with few strategies for decipherment. Even when primary texts are plentiful, early written languages may present additional challenges. For Near Eastern isolates like Sumerian and Elamite, each of which is unrelated to any other known tongue, comparative evidence from cognate languages cannot be used to bridge gaps in our comprehension of either language’s grammar, semantics, or phonology, to name only one example. This presentation will use the Sumerian wordfield of vision as a case study to explore how database compilation and analysis can illuminate obscure aspects of ancient languages. While a variety of bilingual documents, including royal inscriptions and lexical lists, pair Sumerian texts with their translations in Akkadian, a more fully understood Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew, many grammatical and semantic features of Sumerian remain enigmatic. The case study to be presented in this seminar concerns an analysis of more than 700 instances of verbs of vision compiled from Sumerian literary texts (Reference to author’s work). Each vocabulary instance was tagged with its morphological and grammatical features, as well as aspects of its context, such as the identity of the verb’s subject and object. Sorting the vocabulary instances according to these attributes revealed characteristics of each verb’s usage that had previously been overlooked, leading to improved definitions for many of the verbs examined in the study and uncovering ideological and theological principles governing their use. Database technologies allow scholars to search for patterns across a much wider range of information than is feasible using traditional methods. Rather than being at odds with literary and linguistic research, data mining and database approaches allow for new observations that are missed in smaller datasets (Hayles 2007 and Kirschenbaum 2007), and database-oriented research is becoming more common in the study of modern languages (for example, Ktori et al. 2008). The proliferation of online text corpora like the Perseus Digital Library and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature allow for more comprehensive and sophisticated linguistic studies of ancient languages than ever before. This presentation offers a methodology for database-driven lexical analysis that is adaptable to other ancient languages and asserts that databases should be an integral part of our philological toolkit.

Literature

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts.” PMLA 122 (2007): 1603-608.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “The Remaking of Reading: Data Mining and the Digital Humanities.” In The National Science Foundation Symposium on Next Generation of Data Mining and Cyber-Enabled Discovery for Innovation, Baltimore, MD. 2007.

Ktori, Maria, Walter J.B. van Heuven, and Nicola J. Pitchford. “GreekLex: A Lexical Database of Modern Greek.” Behavior Research Methods 40 (2008): 773-783.

Video

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Family or Faction?

Mon Nov 13 00:00:00 +0100 2017

Talk: Gregory Gilles (KCL), “Family or Faction? Using Cicero’s Letters to Map the Political, Social and Familial Relationships Between Senators During the Civil War of 49-45BC” “.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1780-0000-002E-95A7-0

Date: Monday, 13 November 2017

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gebäude Hausvogteiplatz (Raum 0319). Address: Hausvogteipl. 5-7, 10117 Berlin map

Abstract

The civil war between Gaius Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (49-45 BC) has inevitably been categorised as the downfall of the Roman Republic. It eventually affected every Roman citizen and would ultimately shape the course of events that led to the creation of the first principate. Although this struggle for power has been well documented, and argued from various political angles, relatively few historians have debated the affiliations and/or support that these two aspiring autocrats would have needed in order to secure victory. The aim of this paper is to highlight these lesser discussed affiliations by using social network analysis to scrutinise Marcus Tullius Cicero’s letters so as to map the political, social and familial connections between Roman Senators at the time of the civil war. It is hoped that mapping such networks will enable patterns of relatedness to emerge and to distinguish whether Senators chose familial connections or political factions when deciding to support either Pompey or Caesar.

One of the most central problems for historians has to do with the question of social order and how individuals interacted and related with one another in order to form effective and enduring societies. Social network theory offers a coherent approach for examining numerous social phenomena, from the spread of cultural innovations to the rise and fall of different political institutions. As social network analysis produces an alternate view, where the attributes of individuals are less important than their relationships and ties with other actors within the network, its use on static historical texts can provide new insights and reinterpretations on the connections between the individuals discussed in these texts.

This study will use epistolary data to identify variable shifts in Cicero’s social and political networks with an aim to correlating these patterns with statements about the political affiliations of certain principal actors within the networks. Firstly, Cicero’s letters will be contextualised by briefly discussing the events leading to the civil war of 49-45 BC and its eventual outcome. This will then be followed by the methodology used in this study, along with its results. The resulting network maps will be discussed on a year-by-year status, as well as a combined collection covering the entirety of the study. Lastly, an analysis and appraisal of the suitability of social network analysis on historical texts, will be discussed.

As social network theory provides a common ground for investigating connectivity and facilitating analysis of very large datasets of varying degree of completeness, its accessibility and use must not only be limited to archaeological sites and artefacts. Historians from all fields, whether classical or modern, must be increasingly encouraged to consider this form of systematic analysis in their studies of social groups and political systems. This study aims to facilitate this by detailing how social network analysis can be used to scrutinise static historical texts.

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Approaches towards a genuin digital hermeneutic

Mon Oct 30 00:00:00 +0100 2017

Talk: Leif Scheuermann (ACDH, Universtät Graz), “Approaches towards a genuin digital hermeneutic”.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1780-0000-002E-7397-F

Date: Monday, 30 October 2017

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: DAI, Wiegandhaus, Podbielskiallee 69-71, D-14195 Berlin (map)

Abstract

Today Humanities are an agglomerate of several academic disciplines, which are subsumed under the generic term. Such a pragmatic classification may work for the administration, but not as a foundation of a new discipline, called „Digital Humanities“ (for the discussion of a self-definition of the Digital Humanities see: HOBOHM (2015); HERRMANN (2015)). Therefor it is essential to have a closer look at the original definition established in the 19th century – especially at Wilhelm Diltheys (1833–1911) „Abgrenzungen der Geisteswissenschaften“ (DILTHEY (1970)).

For Dilthey the Humanities try to understand human expressions of life, while natural sciences observe and explain nature (PALMER (1969) pp. 105). Its scope is „the experience, the comprehension of other experiences and judgements and terms, which express experienced and understood circumstances” (DILTHEY, Wilhelm (1970) S. 376. (translation Leif Scheuermann)) without neglecting the “objective perception of its subject” (Ebd. S. 379), and its methodology is the hermeneutics, which approaches it’s topic via these three steps - experience, expression, and comprehension.

What does this now mean for the “Digital Humanities”?

DH as a science of experience have to base on empiricism but have to exceed it
The central method of DH have to be digital hermeneutics, which means not to reconstruct or reproduce something “originally”, but to experience , to comprehend and to express it in new terms in a digital world.

DH is not the same as „Computer aided Humanities“. The whole process has to take place in digital media, which means it is not just the use of databases using data mining methods as a source for analogue texts. One major challenge for the DH is to find new ways of conception, of assessment as well as of expressing this process. Therefore the free combination of very different sources and analyses is indispensable. On the other hand the researcher is directly involved in the process and has to document it self-referentially. The presentation of the results of the process of research have to be genuine digital, which means that the primacy of text and the narrative has to be cancelled and replaced by a multimedia network structure. Topic of this lecture is it to go this way a step further and to evaluate ways of genuine digital hermeneutics. Two questions will be focused:

How to combine most different sources and analytical methods in one computer based system?
How to map / visualize the hermeneutic process? Furthermore approaches for the technical implementation of a collaborative genuine digital research framework will be presented.

For a more detailed exposition see SCHEUERMANN (2015).

Literature

DILTHEY, Wilhelm (1970), Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt a.M. Suhrkamp.

HERRMANN, Felix (2015), Group review Understanding/Debates in the Digital Humanities URL: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2015-1-012 (last seen 31-05-2016).

HOBOHM, Hans-Christoph(2015), Group review Digital Humanities: URL: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2015-1-001 (last seen 31-05-2016).

PALMER, Richard (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

SCHEUERMANN, Leif: Die Abgrenzung der digitalen Geisteswissenschaften. In: Digital Classics 2, Leipzig 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11588/dco.2016.1.22746

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An Introduction to Peripleo 2 – Pelagios Commons’ Linked Data Exploration Engine

Mon Oct 16 00:00:00 +0200 2017

Talk: Rebecca Kahn (HIIG), Leif Isaksen (Uni Exeter), Elton Barker (OU), Rainer Simon (AIT), Valeria Vitale (ICS), “An Introduction to Peripleo 2 – Pelagios Commons’ Linked Data Exploration Engine”.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1780-0000-002E-526F-D

Date: Monday, 16 October 2017

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gebäude Hausvogteiplatz (Raum 0319). Address: Hausvogteipl. 5-7, 10117 Berlin map

Abstract

Peripleo is one of a suite of tools produced by Pelagios Commons, alongside Recogito, a tool which allows users to create semantic web annotations of maps and texts, without requiring a background in or extensive knowledge of Linked Data. Peripleo is Greek for “to sail (or swim) around”. The tool embodies the notion of being able to freely navigate the “sea of open data”, collectively brought together by our partners (and allowing users to discover the treasures hidden in remote places and ancient times).

Peripleo enables users to explore the geographic, temporal and thematic composition of distributed digital collections in their entirety, and then to progressively filter and drill down to explore individual records. It was developed with the conviction that an interface which empowers users to tap into and navigate heterogeneous online collections is crucial in order to demonstrate the utility of lightweight linking approaches, and to make their benefits more tangible to end-users and non-technical specialists. On a technical level, we feel that the loose coupling that exists between Peripleo and the resources it makes searchable is very much in the spirit of Linked Open Data, in contrast to more tightly coupled traditional search frontends which are typically bound to a specific repository.

A key design goal was to provide, on the one hand, a familiar Google-Maps-like interface, with full-text search and auto-completion; while allowing free-form modes of exploration on the other. In this “exploration mode”, Peripleo conveys a sense of the scope, breadth and structure of the data as a whole, by representing geographic coverage on the map, showing temporal spread as a histogram; and graphically illustrating distribution across different thematic facets (such as document language or data source). This way, users can easily gain an overview first, and then filter and drill down according to their own interests. Peripleo also functions as a service, and provides an API that enables other sites to re-use Pelagios data, either by building their own mashups or by embedding and linking to Peripleo search results easily.

The new version of Peripleo features various user interface enhancements, and a transition to a more scalable backend technology (ElasticSearch). Other additions include: a new data model that supports search, filtering and linking along People and Time Period entities, rather than just Places; and ‘entity aware’ full-text search.

Peripleo was awarded ‘Best Visualisation Tool’ award at the 2016 DH awards, and we are excited to demonstrate the next version of the software – and encourage members of the Digital Classicist community to experiment with it for their own research, and provide us with feedback.

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From E19 to MATCH and MERGE. Mapping the CIDOC CRM to graph databases as an environment for archaeological network research

Tue Feb 21 00:00:00 +0100 2017

Talk: Aline Deicke (Mainz), “From E19 to MATCH and MERGE. Mapping the CIDOC CRM to graph databases as an environment for archaeological network research”.

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1780-0000-002C-E274-B

Date: Tuesday, 21 February 2017

Time: starting at 17:00 c.t. (i.e. 17:15)

Venue: TOPOI Building Dahlem, Hittorfstraße 18 D-14195 Berlin (map)

Abstract

Throughout the last decade, network analysis has become an increasingly popular method of archaeological research (Brughmans 2010; Brughmans u. a. 2012; Collar u. a. 2015; Knappett 2013), incorporating methods of sociology as well as mathematical network science. So far, a wide range of thematical subjects has been covered, from theories of trade and exchange (Brughmans/Poblome 2016; Sindbæk 2007) over spatial distributions of ethnic groups (Blake 2013) to mortuary remains (Donnellan 2016; Sosna u. a. 2012) and more. The diversity of these approaches is testament to the diverse nature of the archaeological record itself, and the questions we can ask from it.

This complexity also poses a fundamental challenge. Unlike sociological research, where from the very start studies are designed with network research in mind, scholars in archaeology often build their analyses upon already existing, detailed data sets. They can be comprised of hundreds or thousands of entities as well as several types of objects. This heterogeneity of the base material poses special challenges for the design of the study as well as to the tools used to conduct the actual analysis. For example, two-mode- or even multi-mode-networks are common, and at times it might be necessary to create and manage multiple networks between different types of objects to grasp the whole complexity and interactions of the source material. Therefore, an appropriate way of storing and querying data is a crucial first step essential to the design of network analytical studies.

For this purpose, graph databases are especially well suited. The storing of data as nodes and edges introduces relationship-based thinking already in the early stages of data preparation and acquisition and avoids the cognitive dissonance of e.g. relational or XML databases.

For archaeological use-cases concerned with material culture, the CIDOC CRM suggests itself as the ontology after which to model the structure of the database. Apart from the fact that it is an established standard in cultural heritage, its structure of classes and properties in itself already forms a graph and as such is easily adaptable to the requirements of such a model. Its use guarantees the semantic interoperability of the database with other data sets and facilitates exchange. At the same time, its capacity for extension allows for the irregularities and specifics of individual studies.

The talk will present a mapping of the CIDOC CRM to the model of a graph database containing Late Bronze Age elite graves. Through a closer look at the resulting structure as well as some exemplary queries, the possibilities of graph databases to archaeological network analysis will be explored in further detail.

References

Blake 2013: E. Blake, Social Networks, Path Dependence, and the Rise of Ethnic Groups in pre-Roman Italy. In: C. Knappett (Hrsg.), Network analysis in archaeology. New approaches to regional interaction (Oxford 2013) 203–221.

Brughmans 2010: T. Brughmans, Connecting the dots: Towards archaeological network analysis. Oxford Journal Arch. 29, 3, 2010, 277–303.

Brughmans u. a. 2012: T. Brughmans/L. Isaksen/G. Earl, Connecting the Dots: an Introduction to Critical Approaches in Archaeological Network Analysis. In: M. Zhou (Hrsg.), Revive the past. Proceeding of the 39th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Beijing, 12 - 16 April 2011 (Amsterdam 2012) 359– 369.

Brughmans/Poblome 2016: T. Brughmans/J. Poblome, Roman bazaar or market economy? Explaining tableware distributions through computational modelling. Antiquity 90, 2016, 393–408.

Collar u. a. 2015: A. Collar/F. Coward/T. Brughmans u. a., Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation. Journal Archeol. Method Theory 22, 2015, 1–32.

Donnellan 2016: L. Donnellan, A networked view on ‘Euboean’ colonisation. In: L. Donnellan/V. Nizzo/G.-J. Burgers (Hrsg.), Conceptualising Early Colonisation (Bruxelles- Roma 2016) 149–166.

Knappett 2013: C. Knappett (Hrsg.), Network analysis in archaeology. New approaches to regional interaction (Oxford 2013)

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Slides

The slides are also available online at https://cat0nmars.github.io/2017-DC-Berlin/.