Transcript Digital Humanities - University of North Dakota

Digital Humanities
Databases
a system that allows for the
efficient storage and retrieval of
information
 Campus Connection
 ODIN Library Catalogue
Relational database management
systems (RDBMS)
E.F. Codd
 It was Codd's very great insight that a
database could be thought of as a set of
relations, that a relation in turn could be
thought of as a set of propositions ﾉ,
and hence that all of the apparatus of
formal logic could be directly applied to
the problem of database access and
related problems.
Database Issues
 The inclusion of certain data (and the attendant
exclusion of others), the mapping of relationships among
entities, the often collaborative nature of dataset
creation, and the eventual visualization of information
patterns, all imply a hermeneutics and a set of possible
methodologies that are themselves worthy objects for
study and reflection.
 Redundancy (the need to enter information in every
field, even if it is the same) and inconsistency (Mark
Twain/Samuel Clemens)
Database Design
 The purpose of a database is to store information about
a particular domain (sometimes called the universe of
discourse) and to allow one to ask questions about the
state of that domain.
 The populated database is properly conceived of as a set
of tables with rows and columns, in which each row
corresponds to the entities and each column to the
attributes in the ER diagram. These rows are usually
referred to as records and the intersection of rows and
columns as fields.
Relationships and Data
 The usual method for establishing this uniqueness is to create
a primary key for each record ﾐ a unique value associated with
each individual record in a table
 In order to capture the one-to-many (1:M) relationship between
authors and works, we introduce a second key attribute to the
entities on the "many" side of the relationship ﾐ one that can
hold a reference (or pointer) back to the entity on the "one"
side of the relationship. This reference is, like the primary key,
simply another attribute called a foreign key.
 However, the more apt solution is to abstract the relationship
into a new entity called an association (or junction table). An
association is simply a new table which contains the two
related foreign keys
Implementation & Datatypes
 need to translate our design into a representation intelligible to the
machine. This representation is usually referred to as a database
schema, and is created using Structured Query Language (SQL)
 Datatype declarations help the machine to use space more efficiently
and also provide a layer of verification for when the actual data is
entered.
 VARCHAR (80) character data of varying length (not to exceed 80
characters).
 INTEGER Number
 DATE (for day, month, and year data)
 TEXT (for large text blocks of undetermined length)
 BOOLEAN (for true/ false values)
Commands--Logic and Syntax
INSERT
DELETE
SELECT
FROM
>=, <, >, =, <=
Digital Collection Management
Systems
 CONTENTdm
 Dublin Core metadata (http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/)
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Contributor
Coverage
Creator
Date
Description
Format
Identifier
Language
Publisher
Relation
Rights
Source
Subject
Title
Type
WHY DO I NEED TO KNOW
THIS?! <eyes glazing over>
 Computers only know what you tell them. Someone has to explain the
data.
 While computers might assist in recognizing patterns, a human has to
find it first and tell the computer what to look for.
 Dealing with patterns necessarily implies the cultivation of
certain habits of seeing; as one critic has averred: "Recognizing
a pattern implies remaining open to gatherings, groupings,
clusters, repetitions, and responding to the internal and
external relations they set up"
 Databases are everywhere…it benefits you to know what they
do and how they do it.
Comic relief…
http://www.homestarrunner.com/s
bemail152.html
Textual Markup
 to store objects (in the case of TEI,
textual objects) so that they can be
quickly accessed and searched for their
informational content ﾐ or more strictly,
for certain parts of that informational
content (the parts that fall into a
hierarchical order modeled on a
linguistic analysis of the structure of a
book)
Types of Bibliography
 Reference (Works Cited Pages)
 Historical (history of the book; economics and
technology of book production/book trade history)
 Analytical (book as physical object, process that
brought it into being)
 Descriptive (physical object, describing it accurately)
 Textual Criticism (study of the transmission of texts)
Jerome McGann--Background
Textual Scholar, specializing in 19th
century British
At the University of Virginia, very active
in the E-text center.
http://www.speculativecomputing.org/
Board of Advisors ELO
Jerome McGann--What?!
 Traditional textual conditions facilitate textual study at an inner
standing point because all the activities can be carried out ﾐ can be
represented ﾐ in the same field space, typically, in a bibliographical
field. Subject and object meet and interact in the same dimensional
space ﾐ a situation that gets reified for us when we read books or write
about them. Digital operations, however, introduce a new and more
abstract space of relations into the study-field of textuality. This
abstract space brings the possibility of new and in certain respects
greater analytic power to the study of traditional texts. On the
downside, however, digitization ﾐ at least to date, and typically ﾐ
situates the critical agent outside the field to be mapped and redisplayed. Or ﾐ to put this crucial point more precisely (since no
measurement has anything more than a relative condition of
objectivity) ﾐ digitization situates the critical agent within levels of the
textual field's dimensionalities that are difficult to formalize
bibliographically.
McGann What?! Part 2
 To exploit the power of those new formalizations, a digital
environment has to expose its subjective status and operation.
(Like all scientific formalities, digital procedures are "objective"
only in relative terms.) In the present case ﾐ the digital
marking of textual fields ﾐ this means that we will want to build
tools that foreground the subjectivity of any measurements
that are taken and displayed. Only in this way will the
autopoietic character of the textual field be accurately realized.
The great gain that comes with such a tool is the ability to
specify ﾐ to measure, display, and eventually to compute and
transform ﾐ an autopoietic structure at what would be, in
effect, quantum levels.
McGann, part 3
 Patacriticism, or the theory of subjective
interpretation. The theory is
implemented through what is here called
the dementianal method, which is a
procedure for marking the autopoietic
features of textual fields.
 transaction, connection, resonance.
McGann in layperson’s terms
 Draws attention to the fact that we read
on a number of different levels (he lists
6) and that making a text conform to a
hierarchical encoding like TEI could be
problematic. He proposed IVANHOE as
an alternative, but…
 Model of text-processing that is openended, discontinuous, and nonhierarchical.
THE END (for today)