Playing Well With Others The Social Edition and Co
Playing Well With Others The Social Edition and Co
Playing Well With Others The Social Edition and Co
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Playing Well With Others: The Social Edition and Computational Collaboration
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Raymond Siemens
University of Victoria
Implementing New
Knowledge Environments
(INKE) is a collaborative
research intervention
exploring electronic text,
digital humanities, and
scholarly communication. e
international team involves
over 42 researchers, 53 GRAs,
CISP Press 4 staff, 19 postdocs, and 30
Scholarly and Research Communication partners. Website: inke.ca
Volume 6, Issue 3, Article ID 0301111, 9 pages
Journal URL: www.src-online.ca
Received June 22, 2015, Accepted July 13, 2015, Published October 23, 2015
Crompton, Constance, Mash, Cole, & Siemens, Raymond. (2015). Playing Well with Others: e Social
Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
© 2015 Constance Crompton, Cole Mash, & Raymond Siemens. is Open Access article is
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca), which permits unrestricted non-commercial
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1
Scholarly and Research Collaboration between scholars drives large research projects and can increase a
Communication project’s reach by bringing together a wider group of engaged traditional and citizen
volume 6/ issue 3 / 2015 scholars to collaborate. is article investigates the use of microdata formats to extend
that reach, with the goal of bringing in a wider group of engaged researchers and
editors. At the 2013 INKE Birds of a Feather gathering, William Bowen and Constance
Crompton made a case for selecting a publication content management system for
collaboration, based on the preferences of the community (in our case the preferences
expressed by the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript advisory group).1 In
response to community preferences, the Devonshire Manuscript Editorial Group
(DMSEG)2 turned to CommentPress, a WordPress plug-in by the Institute for the
Future of the Book, which leaves the manuscript’s poems static but lets community add
commentary, in keeping with the advisory group’s preferences. is new iteration of the
Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript has been launched in Iter Community, a
social space and publication platform for Early Modern and Renaissance scholarship,
at http://dms.itercommunity.org .
e DMSEG, however, is not solely encoding for direct collaborators and editors
interested in adding commentary. e project not only aims to engage human readers,
but also provide readily parsable data about the content of the edition. In the interest of
serving machine readers3 (search algorithms, inferencing engines, etc.) and the human
readers who employ them, this current phase incorporates Resource Description
Framework in Attributes (RDFa) into the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript
not only to allow for structured data extraction and algorithmic inferencing about the
relationships between the texts and contributors to the Devonshire Manuscript
(BL MS Add. 17, 492), but also to build new knowledge from information in both the
social edition and other digital scholarship about the sixteenth century. is article
explores another facet of collaboration in a digital age, the adoption of standards that
let machine readers disambiguate real-world entities referenced in the text from other
entities (e.g., people or places) with the same names. Motivated by the INKE Modelling
and Prototyping team’s guiding research question about the implications and impact of
real-time applications in relation to traditionally static knowledge objects, we argue
that, far from stifling creativity, adopting linked data standards, like RDFa, even at the
prototyping stage, creates the conditions to bring texts into communication with other
texts, allowing virtual collaboration across projects, even when the scholars behind the
projects do not know one another. Machine readers can extract connections between
the content in disparate RDFa encoded projects, in short allowing one project’s texts to
“play well” with other encoded texts. Following an outline of the process that led to the
selection of WordPress and CommentPress in the creation of the social edition within
Iter Community, we reflect on the promise of RDFa, describe the process of using
RDFa microdata to meet the needs of machine readers, and conclude by providing the
results of our experiments in engaging with RDFa while attempting to address the
advice of our advisory group and suggested directions for future research.
2 Crompton, Constance, Mash, Cole, & Siemens, Raymond. (2015). Playing Well with Others: e Social
Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
seeking direction from the advisory group to work out the best ways to meet the needs Scholarly and Research
of the community of Early Modern and Renaissance scholars that the group represents Communication
(Siemens et al., 2012). e advisory group applauded both the content and uptake of volume 6/ issue 3 / 2015
the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript in Wikibooks, but expressed
reservations about both the mutability of the text and, for scholars outside of the
Digital Humanities, the participation barrier created by having to learn to write
wikicode in order to contribute to the edition.
Crompton, Constance, Mash, Cole, & Siemens, Raymond. (2015). Playing Well with Others: e Social 3
Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
Scholarly and Research sure that machine readers can aggregate information about real-world entities from
Communication various locations on the Web (people, places, and events, in the case of the Social
volume 6/ issue 3 / 2015 Edition, the sixteenth-century contributors to the Devonshire Manuscript) (Berners-
Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001). RDFa encoding is conceptually well suited to digital
academic projects, since RDF’s purpose is reminiscent of traditional scholarship. As
Allemang and Hendler remind their readers,
when two (or more!) viewpoints come together in a web of knowledge, there
will typically be overlap, disagreement, and confusion before there is synergy,
cooperation, and collaboration. If the infrastructure of the Web is to help us to
find our way through the wild stage of information sharing, an informal notion
of how things fit together, or should fit together, will not suffice. (2011, p. 22)
Allemang and Hendler recommend the use of RDF to formalize statements about
entities on the Web in a way that machine readers can parse, allowing them to become
collaborators with human readers in the discovery of new connections between
entities, even when the RDFa encoded information about those entities is on different
websites. Following Allemang and Hendler’s lead, the UBC Okanagan team has taken
up the RDFa standard, with its formal modelling principles and ready crosswalks
between ontologies, as a prototype for digital publishing that continues to serve
computer and machine readers in pursuit of what scholars do best: discovering,
comparing, evaluating, annotating, and, in a digital publishing context, collaborating
(Unsworth, 2000).
Encoding for the semantic Web is the means of building that integrated, consistent,
deep Internet through the use of Web standard languages. e user experience of the
semantic Web may already be familiar to those who have seen the information boxes in
the upper-right-hand corner of Google search results, or who have used research tools
and portals such as Europeana, Out of the Trenches, or Linked Jazz. However, as John
Simpson noted at the 2014 INKE Birds of a Feather gathering, semantic data makes up
only 1% of the Web (Simpson & Brown, 2014). And yet, as the Web grows, the need for
semantic data grows. In order to address this demand, “search engines have started to
provide richer search results by extracting fine-grained structured details from the Web
pages they crawl” and “publishers are producing increasing amounts of structured data
within their Web content to improve their standing with search engines” (Herman,
2010). One of the “key enabling technologies” in this rich result production domain is
RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes), markup that adds structured
data directly to HTML pages in the form of ontology declarations and specific HTML
attributes (Herman, 2010).
4 Crompton, Constance, Mash, Cole, & Siemens, Raymond. (2015). Playing Well with Others: e Social
Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
the RDFa Content Editor (RDFaCE), a WordPress plug-in that allows us to add RDFa to Scholarly and Research
WordPress pages and direct parsers to attend to the RDFa within CDATA, rather than Communication
ignore it. RDFaCE was developed and is maintained by the AKSW research group at the volume 6/ issue 3 / 2015
University of Leipzig, by Ali Khalili and Sören Auer. e purpose of the plug-in is to
support “different views for semantic content authoring and [using] existing semantic
Web APIs to facilitate annotating and editing of RDFa contents” (RDFaCE, n.d.). Built
on the TinyMCE rich text editor, it enables users to annotate blog posts with RDFa and
microdata through a series of user-friendly GUI fields. In adopting RDFaCE, we hoped
to offer editors and commenters an interface as easy to use as CommentPress, allowing
content experts outside of the Digital Humanities to contribute their expertise to the
semantic Web. Ideally, editors and commenters using RDFaCE can highlight the parts of
the text they wish to mark up with RDFa, and, with the click of a button, open a list of
optional RDF attributes to add to the text. is allows users to classify the selected text
as a type of entity (e.g., person, place) and mark it up with metadata about that entity
(e.g., parents, siblings, birth and death date). e RDFaCE plug-in then adds the
annotations directly into the page’s code, and most importantly, exposes the RDFa to
machine readers, resolving the parsing problems that may be introduced by CDATA.
Although our final goal is to mark up all the poem commentary in the Social Edition
of the Devonshire Manuscript in such a way that would let us trace contemporary
citation networks as well as sixteenth-century authoring and annotating habits, we
started with a test markup of the edition’s biography page. With so many familial
relations and overlapping names in Henry VIII’s court (omas Howard, Devonshire
Manuscript contributor, ought not, for example, be confused with his uncle omas
Howard or his half-brother omas Howard), we had a modelling challenge suitable to
semantic Web markup, designed, as it is, to disambiguate Web content and connect to
existing ontologies and authorities.
On our first experimental pass we encoded person entities and their relations,
disambiguated using schema.org’s ontology and Ian Davis’ relationship ontology in
combination with the URIs provided by the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF),
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), and GeoNames. Schema.org’s
Person, for example, offered us the following attributes: @name; @uri, which we pointed to
each person’s Virtual International Authority File; @sameAs, which included their Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography permalink; @affiliations; @birthDate; @deathDate;
@children; @nationality, which we pointed to GeoNames; @parent; @sibling; and finally,
@spouse, which we pointed to URIs and permalinks. Finally we used Ian Davis’
relationship ontology, also pointing to ODNB and VIAF URIs and permalinks, to clarify
the relationships between affiliated Devonshire Manuscript contributors. For example
<span resource=“http://viaf.org/viaf/29521340” class=“r_person r_entity_h r_entity”
typeof=“schema:Person”>Anne Boleyn</span> makes it clear to a machine reader that the
letters A-n-n-e B-o-l-e-y-n refer to a person entity as defined by schema.org at
https://schema.org/Person and that this particular person is Anne Boleyn as defined at
http://viaf.org/viaf/29521340 and not some other woman of the same name.
As part of the team’s test markup, DMSEG research assistant Cole Mash marked up a
private, purpose-built sample page that had examples of all the entity types, fields, and
Crompton, Constance, Mash, Cole, & Siemens, Raymond. (2015). Playing Well with Others: e Social 5
Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
Scholarly and Research relationships in the manuscript. His goal was to test the RDFaCE plug-in, still in beta,
Communication to assess whether it would be suitable for long-term use by the social edition project.
volume 6/ issue 3 / 2015 RDFaCE was supposed to mark up the sample page with all of the RDFa for Cole,
saving him from having to enter each piece of code himself; however, the plug-in did
not work as planned. He found that RDFaCE would not save all of the attribute values
he entered. e only property that RDFaCE would preserve was the URI field.
Furthermore, RDFaCE would also not let him cross-reference the entities already
entered. Each time he came across an entity RDFaCE would treat it as a completely
new one, failing to offer a list of entities he had already entered. Fortunately, of all the
things that RDFaCE could have saved, @uri is the most important, connecting the
entity to an authority record. Not being able to record anything other than a URI is
suitable provided that the authority the @uri points to contains all information the
encoder wants to reference. e DMSEG, however, wants to record affiliations that are
central to the Devonshire Manuscript’s production and circulation, but which are not
captured by the VIAF or ODNB.
6 Crompton, Constance, Mash, Cole, & Siemens, Raymond. (2015). Playing Well with Others: e Social
Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
He designed a macro for each attribute. Using macros and working from a spreadsheet Scholarly and Research
containing all the known Devonshire Manuscript contributors sped up his encoding Communication
process considerably. volume 6/ issue 3 / 2015
Figure 3: e biography of Anne Boleyn, showing which stretches of text are augmented with RDFa
Crompton, Constance, Mash, Cole, & Siemens, Raymond. (2015). Playing Well with Others: e Social 7
Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
Scholarly and Research Notes
Communication 1. Members of the advisory group: Robert E. Bjork (Director, Arizona Center for
volume 6/ issue 3 / 2015 Medieval and Renaissance Studies; Arizona State University); William R. Bowen,
chair (Director, Iter; University of Toronto Scarborough); Michael Ullyot
(University of Calgary); Diane Jakacki (Georgia Institute of Technology); Jessica
Murphy (University of Texas at Dallas); Jason Boyd (Ryerson University); Elizabeth
Heale (University of Reading); Steven W. May (Georgetown College); Arthur F.
Marotti (Wayne State University); Jennifer Summit (Stanford University); Jonathan
Gibson (Queen Mary, University of London); John Lavignino (King’s College
London); and Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr College).
3. We use the term machine readers to refer to what others have productively called
the algorithmic or computer readers/reading, ever mindful, however, of Ian
Bogost’s admonition not to use the terms algorithm, machine, and computer to
obfuscate the human and material systems that produce the products of those
terms (from financial markets to server farms, from security guards union
representatives to Chinese factory labourers) (Bogost, 2015; Manovich, 2013;
Ramsay, 2011).
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Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.
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Edition and Conceptual Collaboration. Scholarly and Research Communication, 6(3): 0301111, 9 pp.