Linked Data in the Digital Humanities: Examples, Projects, and Tools

Harnessing the potential of semantic web technologies to support and diversify scholarship is gaining popularity in the digital humanities. This talk describes a number of projects utilising Linked Data ranging from musicology and library metadata, to the representation of the narrative structure, philological, bibliographical, and museological data of ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions.

An integrated library system on the CERN document server

O CERN - a Organização Europeia para a Investigação Nuclear - é um dos maiores centros de investigação a nível mundial, responsável por diversas descobertas na área da física bem como na área das ciências da computação. O CERN Document Server, também conhecido como CDS Invenio, é um software desenvolvido no CERN, que tem como objectivo fornecer um conjunto de ferramentas para gerir bibliotecas digitais. A fim de melhorar as funcionalidades do CDS Invenio foi criado um novo módulo, chamado BibCirculation, para gerir os livros (e outros itens) da biblioteca do CERN, funcionando como um sistema integrado de gestão de bibliotecas. Esta tese descreve os passos que foram dados para atingir os vários objectivos deste projecto, explicando, entre outros, o processo de integração com os outros módulos existentes bem como a forma encontrada para associar informações dos livros com os metadados do CDS lnvenio. É também possível encontrar uma apresentação detalhada sobre todo o processo de implementação e os testes realizados. Finalmente, são apresentadas as conclusões deste projecto e o trabalho a desenvolver futuramente. ABSTRACT: CERN - The European Organization for Nuclear Research - is one of the largest research centers worldwide, responsible for several discoveries in physics as well as in computer science. The CERN Document Server, also known as CDS Invenio, is a software developed at CERN, which aims to provide a set of tools for managing digital libraries. ln order to improve the functionalities of CDS Invenio a new module was developed, called BibCirculation, to manage books (and other items) from the CERN library, and working as an Integrated Library System. This thesis shows the steps that have been done to achieve the several goals of this project, explaining, among others aspects, the process of integration with other existing modules as well as the way to associate the information about books with the metadata from CDS lnvenio. You can also find detailed explanation of the entire implementation process and testing. Finally, there are presented the conclusions of this project and ideas for future development.

The Coming of Post-reflexive Society: Commodification and Language in Digital Capitalism

Language is a unique aspect of human communication because it can be used to discuss itself in its own terms. For this reason, human societies potentially have superior capacities of co-ordination, reflexive self-correction, and innovation than other animal, physical or cybernetic systems. However, this analysis also reveals that language is interconnected with the economically and technologically mediated social sphere and hence is vulnerable to abstraction, objectification, reification, and therefore ideology – all of which are antithetical to its reflexive function, whilst paradoxically being a fundamental part of it. In particular, in capitalism, language is increasingly commodified within the social domains created and affected by ubiquitous communication technologies. The advent of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ implicates exchangeable forms of thought (language) as the fundamental commodities of this emerging system. The historical point at which a ‘knowledge economy’ emerges, then, is the critical point at which thought itself becomes a commodified ‘thing’, and language becomes its “objective” means of exchange. However, the processes by which such commodification and objectification occurs obscures the unique social relations within which these language commodities are produced. The latest economic phase of capitalism – the knowledge economy – and the obfuscating trajectory which accompanies it, we argue, is destroying the reflexive capacity of language particularly through the process of commodification. This can be seen in that the language practices that have emerged in conjunction with digital technologies are increasingly non-reflexive and therefore less capable of self-critical, conscious change.