# Presentation: 831098

## Building a Hypertextual Digital Library in the Humanities: A Case Study on London

*Gregory Crane, David A. Smith, Clifford E. Wulfman*
- Perseus Project
- Eaton Hall
- Tufts University
- Medford MA 02155

## “Humanities” DL Issues

- The DL *is* the laboratory
- Citation PLUS page # standard
- Very fine grained citation schemes
- Documents rule, style sheets serve
- Descriptive rather  than prescriptive

## Maturity of Print Matter

- Little innovation in Print Form  since 1900
- Advantage: PD Materials useful as testbed
- Disadvantage: Little work on the *form* of documents
- Inadequate knowledge base for innovation
- Worse: little place for thinking about such problems in the academy
- (Humanist Critical traditions weak in this area.)

## Designing a Hum DL

- The Critic vs. the Editor
- Production of scholarly infrastructure complex
- Editions/Commentaries/Ref Works Crucial
- The Problem:
- How to design long term docs until we know what DLs can and should do?
- DL challenges us to rethink:
- Documents and what they can do
- Our Audience: Other researchers? General Public?

## Depth First Approach

- Perseus Greco-Roman Collections
- Major work begun in 1987
- Portability: CD ROM 1992, WWW 1996
- Language Analysis, Complex Citation Mining
- “Hard” problems but obvious wins
- Sparsity of Data: “Desert agriculture”
- Popular: 67m pages, 6.7m sessions in 2000

## Slide 6

## Breadth Second Study

- DLI2: Case Studies in Humanities DLs
- Ancient Egypt with Boston MFA
- History of Mechanics: MPI Berlin (NSF/DFG)
- History of Recent Science: MIT Dibner
- New Variorum Shakespeare Series: MLA
- American Memory Collections: LOC
- Domain Specific vs. General Problems

## A DL on London: Preliminary Results

- Edwin Bolles Collection at Tufts
- Intensive Discourse / Limited Spatial Focus
- Centuries of Data
- Largely Monolingual
- Books, Images, Historic Maps
- Paper Hypertext, Geo-referencing of maps

## ProtoWeb BrowserNote: Blue “Links”

## Scholarly Reading

- Reading as Information Extraction
- Decoding and absorbing well-defined msgs
- Reading as Literary Play
- Postmodern theory: popular in HT work
- The historicist scholar
- Partakes of **both **extremes at once
- Active tension rather than simple balance

## Scholarly Reading

- Documents are NOT transparent
- We read *against*  the grain of the documents
- E.g., Civil War songs as sources on Gender
- Even historians are themselves objects of study
- Constant shifting between fast/intensive reading
- Contextualization is crucial
- Look up the footnotes, read the sources, find new sources

## Consequences for HUM DLs: 1

- DLs not aimed at short-term return
- Persistence of Reference paramount
- Corporate repositories problematic
- Design for widest possible audience
- Good structure rather than oversimplification
- Size Matters:  We need LOTS of data
- Need fine granularity of reference

## Consequences for HUM DLs: 2

- We need  dense, flexible networks of links
- We  need *automatic *linking technologies
- We need the ability to *refine* auto-links
- Critical Question in the Humanities:
- How far can the machines bring us?
- Where does scarce labor begin?
- How do the machines change the goals of labor
- E.g., Do we need a new “narrative” dictionary or semantic browser?

## Links in the London DL

- Latin (and Greek) Sections
- DL automatically applies language tools
- Searching, indexing, lexicon links
- Benefit of a single extensible environment
- Named Entity Id#: People/Places/Money etc
- Plenty of research on this problem
- But how to bootstrap authority lists?
- Yes, “Oliver Cromwell” is a person, but which one?
- Semantic vs. Encyclopedic Reference!

## Bootstrapping Authority Lists

- Cruchley 1843; Bartholemew 1999
- 48,000 of 90,000 (53%) Streets in Bolles in Barth.
- Dictionary of National Biograpy Summary
- Wheatley’s Encyclopedia of London
- Various guides and surveys:
- Headwords of Chapters and Sections Mined
- Image Captions

## Mapping Various Structures

- Headwords: DNB etc.
- “Smith, Sir John Evelyn” etc.
- Chapter and Section Headings:
- “Chapter 2: Tower of London”
- Embedded Keywords
- “Now we turn to the *Tower of London* as we..”
- Italics used to mark subject strings

## Applying Authority Links

- Simple Pattern Matching to Add  Links
- Assumes coherence of patterns and docs
- Naïve application surprisingly effective

## Bottom Up 1: Automatic Links

- There were certainly rough doings in _Fleet Street_ in the Middle Ages, for the City chronicles tell us of much blood spilt there and of many deeds of violence. In 1228 (_Henry III_.) we find, for instance, one Henry de Buke slaying a man named Le Ireis, or Le _Tylor_, of _Fleet Bridge_, then fleeing to the _church of St. Mary_, _Southwark_, and there claiming sanctuary. In 1311 (_Edward II_.) five of the king’s not very respectable or law-fearing household were arrested in _Fleet Street_ for a burglary;

## Bottom Up 2: Aggregation

| Fleet Street” is in descriptions of... |
| --- |
| 1 Hare Chapter |
| By Fleet Street to St. Paul’s., Fleet Street |
| 95 Images  |
| 2 London sites  |
| 1.Fleet Street |
| 2.Fleet Street Hill |
| 10 Thornbury chapters |
| 1.Fleet Street (Northern Tributaries--Shire Lane and Bell Yard). |
| 2.Fleet Street (continued). |
| 3.Fleet Street (continued). |
| 4.Fleet Street (Northern Tributaries--Chancery Lane). |
| 5.Fleet Street (Northern Tributaries--continued). |
| 6.Fleet Street--General Introduction. |
| 7.Fleet Street Tributaries--Shoe lane. |
| 8.Fleet Street Tributaries--South. |
| 9.Fleet Street Tributaries. |
| 10.Fleet Street (Tributaries--Crane Court, Johnson’s Court, Bolt Court). |
| Wheatley, London Past and Present (1891) |
| 1.Fleet Street, |

## Bottom Up 3: Aggregation

## Top Down 1: Time & Space

## Top Down 2: Automatic Timeline

## Top Down 3: Book Timeline

## Top Down 4: Mapping

## Geospatial Links: GIS to Map

## Future Work

- Other sources of link data: Arguments and Conventional Indices
- Quotes and Citation Linking
- Tabular Information
- Monetary sums
- Temporal Spatial Querying
- Providing Link Services to External Datasets

## Conclusions

- Bootstrapping a Hum DL:
- Start with a knowledge base
- Convert Ref Works and Structured info first
- Dictionaries/encyclopedias/etc. first
- Integration of Knowledge Sources Essential
- Automatic disambiguation
- Editing Environment needed
- Determining the Form of Cultural Heritage Information is key to any comprehensive DL