Siemens on REKn
Ray Siemens is a computing humanist and Renaissance scholar working at the University of Victoria. The full title of his paper is “Knowledge management and textual cultures? Work toward the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn, pron. “reckon”) and its professional reading environment (PReE).”
REKn seems to be aiming to amalgamate and integrate knowledge in its area. Its implementation is based in the study of disciplinary activity of, and professional interaction among, those in the humanities. It’s founded in concepts of knowledge representation and modeling. A short description of the project can be found here.
Knowledge representation: draws on the field of AI and seeks to produce models of human understanding that are tractable to computation. Modeling: REKn/PReE model data, intellectual processes, and beyond.
Key elements of REKn’s model:
- representation of archival materials
- analysis/critical inquiry originating in those materials
- the communication of the results of these tasks (the dissemination of primary and secondary materials)
REKn’s assumptions: all of the above are interrelated and inseparable, and electronically representable.
They’ve collected primary and secondary sources, and have built tools for working with them (the tool-building process seems to have been multi-stage: many tools built and discarded as inadequate). They’re looking to long-term partnerships with Renaissance materials providers in the future. Right now REKn has about 13,000 primary sources and over 80,000 secondary sources. About 1500 of these resources are currently available for public use, but the majority are not open-access.
So that’s REKn, the text base. What about PReE, the reading environment? It’s a rudimentary document viewer, and analysis and communication facilitator. Currently the UI is a “down-and-dirty prototype,” as they’ve been concentrating on making things work in the back end. [vz: he's showing PReE in Windows; I wonder what it's written in.] They’ve made several analytical tools for the encoded texts. Primarily, though, analysis will be carried out using TAPoR tools.
Communication facilitated electronically: they’re attempting to provide a system by which people can manage their professional interaction.
Short-term goals:
- integrate better with TAPoR and the Public Knowledge Project reading tools
- conduct usability studies
- consult with “contextual” stakeholders, including acad. publishers
- move prototype to a web environment
- scale up!
And that’s Ray’s talk, the last talk of this conference. Next is the panel discussion, titled “Humanities computing science?”. The panel will consist of the five keynote speakers. I’m not sure whether I’ll be taking notes on this; it’ll be video recorded, and there’s little probability that I’d do it justice. Again, I’ll update when the webcasts are up.