In March 2012, a three-day workshop was held at Brown University on data modeling in the humanities, sponsored by the NEH and the DFG, and co-organized by Fotis Jannidis and Julia Flanders. Attended by approximate 40 experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, the event included theoretical presentations, case studies, panels, and wide-ranging open discussion. What we present here is a record of the event, with links to slides, video footage, and transcriptions of all presentations and discussion. In order to open up the conversation to a broader audience, the transcriptions have been extensively annotated to elucidate informal references, and to provide links and glosses on the many projects, tools, standards, people, and specialized terms that were referenced in discussion.
March 14
Keynote presentation: Wendell Piez, “Data Modeling for the Humanities: Three Questions and One Experiment” (paper, slides, video, transcription)
Panel discussion: Data models in humanities theory and practice (video, transcription)
Stephen Ramsay, Laurent Romary, Kari Kraus, Maximilian Schich, Desmond Schmidt, Andrew Ashton; Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis (moderators)
Theoretical perspectives I
- Paul Caton, “Towards an Ontological Model of Text” (video, transcription)
- Allen Renear, “Taking Modeling Seriously” (video, transcription)
Case studies: Critical editions
- Kari Kraus, “Preserving Virtual Worlds” (slides, video, transcription)
- Gregor Middell, “On the Value of Comparing Truly Remarkable Texts” (video, transcription)
March 15
Open discussion: Key themes (video, transcription)
Case studies: Research ontologies
- Daniel Pitti, “EAC-CPF” (video, transcription)
- Stefan Gradmann, “Objects, Process, Context in Time and Space – and how we model all this in the Europeana Data Model” (slides, video, transcription)
- Trevor Muñoz, “Discovering our models: aiming at metaleptic markup applications through TEI customization” (slides, video, transcripition)
Panel discussion: Data modeling and humanities pedagogy (video, transcription)
Elisabeth Burr, Elizabeth Swanstrom, Susan Schreibman, Elena Pierazzo; Julia Flanders, moderator
Theoretical perspectives II
- Julia Flanders, “Modeling Scholarship” (paper, slides, video, transcription)
- Jan Christoph Meister, “Tagging in the cloud. A data model for collaborative markup” (video, transcription)
- Patrick Sahle, “Modeling Transcription” (slides, video, transcription)
Discussion
March 16
Open discussion: Key themes (video, transcription)
Case studies: Historical archives
- Douglas Knox, “What is the Thing that Changes?: Space and Time through the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries” (paper, slides, video, transcription)
- Thomas Stäcker, “Data modeling for early modern emblems” (slides, video, transcription)
- Alexander Czmiel, “The Person Data Repository” (slides, video, transcription)
Theoretical perspectives III
- Fotis Jannidis, “Digital Literary History and its Discontent” (video, transcription)
- Elke Teich, “Analyzing linguistic variation: From corpus query towards feature discovery” (slides, video, transcription)
- Stephen Ramsay, “Where Semantics Lies” (paper, video, transcription)
Closing keynote presentation: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (video, transcription)
datasymposium 