If you’re involved in Pelagios Commons at all, we’re pretty sure you have a lot of opinions. About your discipline. About the digital humanities. About semantic annotation. About how all these things relate to each other.
And if you’re involved in Pelagios Commons at all, we’re also pretty sure those opinions are well-developed. Richly nuanced.. Born of a concern for your discipline and for scholarship generally – what it’s doing now, what it should be doing now. What it can do in future.
So if you have opinions, we need you to share them. The purpose of the Linked Pasts Working Group is to help make sure digital humanists have the infrastructure they need to support the work they want to do – at least in our little corner of the digital humanities, semantic annotation. And that means sharing a sense of what the vision for that work in the end is.
Of course, any scholarly infrastructure has to be broad enough to support a range of uses, a plurality of visions. And that means our question to you is also pretty broad: why are you here, on Pelagios Commons? What piece of scholarship or vision of the future got you interested in the digital humanities? Were you inspired by a digital platform, like papyri.info? By an article, like Digital Geography and Classics? By the questions asked in Graphs, Maps, Trees? Or simply by discovering a tool that did what you needed it to do, in the right way, at the right time?
And, more concretely: what are you working on right now? What are you planning to do? What specific needs do you have – ‘I’d like to be able to navigate to a web service where I can upload X, download data in form Y, so I can do task/analysis Z’ – that you can’t meet right now? And, given that part of the purpose of Linked Pasts is to grow our historical graph beyond Place data, into Agents, Time Periods, Events … what kinds of things are you linking together now – and how do you think you’ll be doing that in two, five, ten years?
If this set of questions seems broad and vaguely formulated, that’s okay – we don’t want to presuppose too many answers. Some of you might be coming to digital humanities for the first time with questions that are likewise broad and vaguely formulated; others will already be working on advanced technical infrastructures; and most will probably fall somewhere in between – confronting a mix of clear solutions with uncertain opacities, technical frustrations and technological breakthroughs.
But we won’t know until this conversation gets started. Answers in any form will be useful, from narratives to bullet lists, descriptions of current problems to vision statements for the future. So help us start building this community in ways that support your practice: click Reply, and start typing!
