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Exemplar Projects in Humanities Grid Computing

Exemplar Projects in Humanities Grid Computing. Paul S. Ell Centre for Data Digitisation & Analysis Queen’s Belfast ISGC 2007. Summary. e-Science and the arts and humanities Vision of Britain exemplar Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative Virtual Vellum Irish Studies The way forward.

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Exemplar Projects in Humanities Grid Computing

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  1. Exemplar Projects in Humanities Grid Computing Paul S. Ell Centre for Data Digitisation & Analysis Queen’s Belfast ISGC 2007

  2. Summary • e-Science and the arts and humanities • Vision of Britain exemplar • Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative • Virtual Vellum • Irish Studies • The way forward

  3. Grid technologies In the UK the Arts and Humanities Research Council has argued “Grid technologies fall into three main strands, with different degrees of significance for the A&H:” The three aspects of e-Science are likely to have varying impacts in the humanities and arts • Access Gird: Is this really distance learning with a better internet connection? Are humanities scholars going to change the fundamental way they do research? • Computation Grid: Do humanities and arts scholars need high-powered computing power? • Data Grid: The key technology that will fundamentally change scholarship in the humanities and arts. Also the key challenges

  4. Unique challenges in the humanities and arts: The Data Grid • In the humanities the data grid is less concerned with moving large amounts of data around… • Heterogeneous, fragmented, partial, disparate e-resources • Information overload - the digital deluge • Resource discovery problems • Interface and data harvesting problems • Integratory difficulties • Data in ever more complex multimedia formats - not just text but numbers, images, objects, video, sound files • How to organise data - by subject, by chronology, by location - or all three… • But there are exemplars…

  5. The proof: early exemplars The Vision of Britain through time • Based on a ‘traditional’ HGIS of quantitative data and polygons • Supplemented with additional e-resources – historical gazetteers describing places in time, travellers tales, historical maps • Materials organised by place, time and subject

  6. Historical maps

  7. Census reports

  8. Historical Gazetteers

  9. Travellers’ Tales

  10. An integrated resource

  11. The proof: early exemplars The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative • UC Berkeley-based project with almost 1,000 humanities and arts academic affiliates from around the world holding spatially referenced e-resources • Metadata that allows registered distributed datasets to be retrieved on the fly at object level • Software – TimeMap – which allows retrieved data to be selected and visualised and exported

  12. The Proof: Virtual Vellum • Provides distributed access to research-quality digitisations of folios • Involves around 20 organisations around the world • Easy access and preservation

  13. The Proof: Irish Studies • Poorly defined subject area • No cohesive e-resources currently exist • But quite a lot of e-resources data our there - Database of Irish Historical Statistics, Act of Union Virtual Library, Historical Hansard, JSTOR journals • Challenge to bring these together

  14. e-Science infrastructural needs • Examples ‘fixed’ to a degree • Need for e-infrastructure – place name gazetteers (JISC EPNS Project); chronological gazetteers (‘Going Places in the Catalog: Time Periods’ from US National Leadership Grant for Libraries); subject indexes (ECAI ‘Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who’ – second NLGL grant) • Need for a subject based geo-temporal data browser?? How is the ‘stuff’ that’s retrieved going to be managed? • Enhanced metadata or context sensitive intelligent searching

  15. Conclusions • The Data Grid will be the key area of e-Science activity in the humanities and arts • Data Grid based e-Science in the humanities and arts is far more challenging than in the sciences • Key infrastructure is required together with enhanced search capabilities • Opportunity for fundamental change in humanities and arts research • Chance to fully exploit the vast array of e-resources already available • Humanities scholars will not need to change the way they work

  16. Integrating e-resources by place and chronology: GIS e-Science: statistics, maps, photographs, text, manuscripts, existing e-resources, websites, museum objects . . .

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