Ryan Shaw

Event Representation in Temporal and Geographic Context

Linking digital resources that refer to the same people or places is becoming common. Events are another kind of entity that might be used to link resources in this way. We examine a number of standards for encoding of archival, historical, genealogical, and news information to compare the tools they offer for representing events.

Supporting creative acts beyond dissemination

In this workshop, we describe and expose the mysterious creative process. We discuss models (both classical and contemporary) of creative practice and experience and their potential application to new media arts and technology. Models that connect the roles of creator and viewer/participant are of particular interest. The goal is to catalyze new ideas and foster creative collaboration across disciplines.

Mapping life events: temporal and geographic context for biographical information

Digital Libraries often fail to connect their contents to the wider context of information resources available that are about the same persons, related persons, places, or time periods and the events that happen to those persons, at those places and in a given time period. This demostration will show prototype systems that can perform these tasks, linking the user to relevant contextual information.

Event gazetteers for navigating humanities resources

In history and the other humanities, events and narrative sequences of events are often of primary interest. Yet while named events sometimes appear as subject headings, systems for knowledge organization generally do not provide facilities for identifying and disambiguating events as they do for person or place names. As a result opportunities for collocating resources that pertain to specific events have been limited, and support for navigating among related resources by way of the various relationships represented by events has been weak. The accelerating digitization of document and artifact collections and the ongoing development of digital metadata infrastructure make this an excellent time to address this oversight. This paper describes ongoing research to develop gazetteers for representing events and their relationships and best practices for using such gazetteers to enhance digital resources and information services.

Biography as events in time and space

In digital humanities projects, particularly for historical research and cultural heritage, GIS has played an increasingly important role. However, most implementations have concentrated on displays which ignore the temporal dimension or express it as multiple snapshots for fixed or periodic points in time. Our project concentrates on historical biography and expresses a biography as a sequence of life events with in time and space. We utilize named entity recognition and extraction to automatically mark up biographies so that they can be displayed as dynamic maps. In so doing, contextual features and related happenings and people can be overlaid to facilitate serendipitous discovery of unanticipated and seemingly unrelated connections.

Bringing lives to light: lives and event representation in temporal and geographic context

Our demonstration system consists of a set of tools for identifying life events in biographical texts and linking them to relevant contextual resources.

Finding explanations online: Easy queries AND trustworthy answers

Web search engines provide easy access to a huge range of web-accessible resources but the most trustworthy explanations are often in hard-to-search resources in the deep web. The literature on information literacy reflects widespread concern that people tend not to use complex online digital versions of traditional reference works and instead depend heavily on easy-to-use resources of questioned reliability, notably Google and the Wikipedia. The proper response lies in better design to combine ease of search with trustworthy resources. We will report on efforts to demonstrate how that could be done.

Narratives, facts, and events in the foundations of information science

This session explores three basic notions: events, facts, and narratives. Events play a large role in our lives. Our sense of identity is largely shaped by events we have experienced. Our understanding of history is a narrative of events in the past. The humanities and social sciences are concerned with the human experience, with actions and interactions. The sciences also deal with events: changes, processes, and experiments. Events may be described factually and themselves be regarded as facts. Facts, in turn, assume their full meaning only in relation to narratives, which provide the contextual frameworks for understanding them. In our daily lives we have little difficulty thinking and talking about events, facts, and narratives. However, information systems operate on objects (bits, data, documents). Events, facts, and narratives are not objects and difficulties arise when we try to analyze formally what they are. Three related papers address these issues. First, a direct examination of the nature of events; second, an account of two contrasting ways of contextualizing facts; and, third., an attempt to encode events in biographical narratives.

Finding and providing context online

Knowing the context and relationships involved makes the difference between seeing and understanding. In a print environment the reference collection of the library provides a carefully constructed environment of auxiliary resources well-designed for exploring context. In the digital environment the need for an easily-used, well-stocked, well-organized reference collection has been neglected. We report on a project to demonstrate techniques to enable anyone to easily use reliable sources to find the background for topics, places, events, institutions, and persons encountered in online reading of biographical texts and journals on Irish culture and history.

Open identification and linking of the four Ws

Platforms for social computing connect users via shared references to people with whom they have relationships, events attended, places lived in or traveled to, and topics such as favorite books or movies. Since free text is insufficient for expressing such references precisely and unambiguously, many social computing platforms coin identifiers for topics, places, events, and people and provide interfaces for finding and selecting these identifiers from controlled lists. Using these interfaces, users collaboratively construct a web of links among entities.