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

Sat Jan 17 20:34:36 GMT 2009

Thank you, Joseph, for your reaction. I did forget two essential
dimensions that are not present in these commercial endeavours :

1. It would be an Open Access project;

2. It would be built on a distributed basis, very much like free
software or Wikipedia. This means building defensive procedures which,
while leaving anyone free to intervene, make corrections easier than
defacement. Wikipedia could probably help us on this.

I am so steeped in the OA/distributed mindset that I forgot to mention
these crucial elements of the basic hypothesis.

Remember also the procedures aiming at evaluating the reliability of
various sources. The commercial offerings tout the number of volumes
they rely on but they say nothing about how they were chosen, how
reliable they and who did the work. It may have been done well, but then
it may be a slapdash kind of work. Also, the documentary base is meant
to evolve as well as the database itself as time goes on. In short, I do
not want this database to be just a collection of facts we consume if
our library subscribes to this particular set; I want it to become a
watering hole where everyone can also bring new stuff and discuss. In
short, I am aiming at a new form of scholarly communication. This,
incidentally will mean thinking about attribution rules.

A final point: my little text was meant to trigger reactions and for
this reason, thanks you, Joseph. It may end up being forgotten or
totally transformed if a real project should emerge.

I would love to hear more...

Best,

Jean-Claude

Le samedi 17 janvier 2009 à 11:08 -0800, Joseph Jones a écrit :

> I am aware of these three large-scale biographical indexes and 
> compilations:
> 
>    World Biographical Information System
>    http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/nw/nwWbisEn.cfm
>    (Completion projected for 2010)
> 
>    Biography and genealogy master index
>    http://www.gale.cengage.com/pdf/facts/bgmi.pdf
> 
>    Index bio-bibliographicus notorum hominum.
>    Osnabruck : Biblio Verlag, 1972-
> 
> How would this proposal relate to these projects?
> 
> Joseph Jones
> http://www.library.ubc.ca/jones
> 
> ************
> 
> On Sat, 17 Jan 2009, Jean-Claude Gudon wrote:
> 
> 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 
> > -------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Members mailing list
> > Members at lists.sdh-semi.org
> > http://lists.sdh-semi.org/mailman/listinfo/members
> 
> Jean-Claude Guédon
> Université de Montréal

Jean-Claude Guédon
Université de Montréal
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