Transcript Slides

Digital Media Technology
Week 14
Practical Experience and general
Principles
□ Why is TEI expressed in XML?
□ Why is it important to work with
open standards?
□ What are the main advantages of
working with a relational
database?
□ What is needed to develop
suitable and dynamic
webinterfaces for the presentation
of research information?
Knowledge representation
□ John Unsworth, “What is Digital
Humanities and What is not?”:
“[h]umanities computing is a practice
of representation, a form of modeling
or [...] mimicry. It is[...] a way of
reasoning and a set of ontological
commitments, and its
representational practice is shaped by
the need for efficient computation on
the one hand, and for human
communication on the other ”
Representation
Visualisation
TEI, Relational database
XSLT, SQL, PHP
□ The tools and techniques have an
ancillary function; innovation of
methodology
□ “one of the many things you can do
with computers is something that I
would call humanities computing, in
which the computer is used as tool
for modeling humanities data and our
understanding of it, and that activity
is entirely distinct from using the
computer when it models the
typewriter, or the telephone, or the
phonograph, or any of the many
other things it can be.”
□ Computers can be taught to do
anything that can be caught in an
algorithm.
□ The speed and the performance of
computers is increasing continuously
(Moore’s Law).
□ Impact on, for instance, the scope
of digitisation projects.
□ New kinds of digital editions.
□ Humanities scholars can actively
contribute to the development of new
applications
Research themes
(Counsil on Library and Information
Sciences)
□ “Scale and the poverty of abundance”
□ Representing places and dates
□ Social networking and social
software, virtual research
environments
□ Augmenting the scholarly record with
A machine-actionable substrate
PHP
http
HTML
HTML
db
SQL
SERVER
CLIENT
Digital Media Technology:
Evaluation
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Structure (lecture and seminars)
Number of ‘technologies’
Background reading, tutorials
Three general topics: text encoding,
databases, web programming