[SDH/SEMI Members] International Grant Opportunity: The Digging into Data Challenge (SSHRC/NEH/NSF/JISC)

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

This is an exciting challenge.

One of the trump cards we might play with if we ever wanted to compete
for this as an organization is the bilingual dimension of Canada. This
opens us immediately to one of the salient dimension of social sciences
and humanities: it is still linguistically fragmented and, as a result,
much remains hidden to anyone of us because it simply remains locked in
a language that is not easily accessed.

Just to get thoughts started on this, the humanities and social sciences
obviously start from human beings. Digitized biographical sources should
be collated and this would allow creating a worldwide collection of
names and, at the same time, would facilitate the correcting of the
information about these people (a kind of large-scale equivalent to the
"Copernican exercise on the astronomical treatises in the Ptolemaic
tradition that was made possible print). This collation could begin the
task of granting some reliability grade to each source which would
evolve as the work goes on.

The second step would be to mine through these millions of books for
these very names and link anything relevant to the names  already
gathered in the first pass. This would create a gigantic web of
knowledge that would evolve forever and that would foreground the fact
that the deeply-interlinked nature of documents is essential to their
existence and their value. This would be completed by building the
corresponding bibliography. Whenever texts would be identified that have
not yet been digitized, they would become priorities for further efforts
in this direction.

A third step could begin extending the same objective to sound and
visual documents.

A fourth step would be to design tools that would help identify the
simultaneous presence of people within a given distance. A first
approximation of this would be towns and cities, but more generic
classifications could be developed.

A fifth step would be to develop tools that would help classify all the
relevant tidbits of information in chronological order (granted that
some of these will have to be graded according to the reliability of the
source - see above) and generate a basic chronological text that could
be the starting canvas for the truly interpretative work of scholars.

Etc. etc.

I think we should seriously think about going for it. And we could
propose a Canadian-based pilot study that would certainly interest BAC,
SSHRC and quite a few other people.

Am I totally crazy?

Jean-Claude


Le vendredi 16 janvier 2009 à 09:34 -0800, Ray Siemens a écrit :
> <snip> [From neh-dhi-update at list.neh.gov, 16 January 2009]
> 
> The Digging into Data Challenge
> 
> The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition
> sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information
> Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National
> Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the
> National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the
> Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada. 
> 
> What is the "challenge" we speak of?  The idea behind the Digging into
> Data Challenge is to answer the question "what do you do with a
> million books?"  Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million
> photographs of artwork?  That is, how does the notion of scale affect
> humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access
> to huge repositories of digitized data -- far more than they could
> read in a lifetime -- what does that mean for research?  Check out the
> competition website:  http://www.diggingintodata.org/.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ------------------------------------------------
> Brett Bobley
> Chief Information Officer
> Director, Office of Digital Humanities
> National Endowment for the Humanities
> http://www.neh.gov/odh/
> (202) 606-8401
> bbobley at neh.gov 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
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Jean-Claude Guédon
Université de Montréal
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