TM4DH (Topic Maps for Digital Humanities): Examples and an Open Source Toolkit

My paper will discuss the use of Topic Maps to explore
literary topics and navigate TEI-encoded literary texts.
The presentation will include a brief introduction to Topic Maps
and the XML Topic Map (XTM) syntax; an argument for the
benefits of Topic Maps and similar metadata and ontology
formats in electronic text and textual analysis applications;
examples of fully-developed topic maps describing poetic
genres and verse forms as well as the life and work of an
individual author, Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.
The presentation will conclude with a demonstration an open
source Topic Map toolkit, developed by the author and
consisting of a Java-based web application and XSLT
stylesheets for the presentation and navigation of XML-based
Topic Maps.
Topics Maps have been the subject of recent attention in the
digital humanities community. They are discussed briefly in
John Bradley's "A Model for Text Analysis Tools" in a recent
issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing. And at Digital
Resources for the Humanities (DRH) 2003 and the 2003 TEI
Members Meeting, Stuart Brown gave presentations on Topic
Maps as a means for navigating the TEI Guidelines and
comparing different sets of local TEI extensions. At DRH 2004,
the author presented a paper on "Topic Maps and TEI-Encoded
Literary Texts". The current paper will build on this previous
work by exploring more fully developed and generally
applicable topic maps in conjunction with the open source
toolkit that can be used by others in the digital humanities
community to deliver their own Topic Map applications.
Topic Maps are a powerful XML metadata format that may be
used to create multi-dimensional indices and interfaces to
humanities resources and TEI-encoded data. The basic building
blocks of Topic Maps are topics. A topic may represent any
subject or concept. A Topic Map about a poetry collection, for
instance, may contain topics representing "poetry," "sonnet,"
"lyric," "poet," "Wordsworth, William," and "The Solitary
Reaper." Topics may have multiple names and may be
connected via associations. For instance, one poet may
"influence" another, a poet may "author" a poem, or a poet may
"mourn" a historical figure in an elegy. Topics may also be typed and may have multiple types. So "Hamlet" may be an
instance of the topic "play." Or "Rossetti, Dante Gabriel" may
be an instance of both the "poet" and "painter" topics. Topic
Maps allow one to build lists of concepts important to a
collection or to a particular area of research and link those
concepts to electronic resources, including TEI documents and
individual elements within TEI documents. Topic Maps are
powerful research and pedagogical tools that facilitate the
organization, presentation, navigation, and visualization of
conceptual and factual data.
To illustrate the discussion, I will use Topic Maps and TEI
texts being developed as part of the The Swinburne Project, a
digital collection of works by Victorian poet Algernon Charles
Swinburne. Swinburne was an important cultural figure whose
impact was felt beyond the domains of literature and poetry.
He is an ideal central figure for the study of a wide range of
nineteenth-century cultural and historical topics. Swinburne
was an incredibly learned poet, and his range of form and
allusion is extensive. His works include numerous and often
obscure allusions to the bible, classical mythology, and
Arthurian legend. He wrote a number of political poems
addressing contemporary events. He wrote parodies of other
contemporary poets, including Tennyson, Browning, and
Rossetti. As Jerome McGann has noted, "[n]o English poet has
composed more elegies than Swinburne." To address the breadth
and range of form and allusion in Swinburne's work, the
Swinburne Topic Maps include extensive lists of genre forms,
people, biblical figures, mythological figures, Arthurian figures,
as well as events and works by other artists and poets. These
lists may then be used to build elaborate indices, navigation
mechanisms, and data visualizations. The combination of
TEI-encoded texts and XML Topic Maps allows the
construction of a complex database of nineteenth-century British
culture with Swinburne at its center. Supplementing the
Swinburne-specific Topic Maps will be a more generally
applicable Topic Map on poetic genres, meters, and verse forms.
Swinburne was a versatile versifier who wrote in a great variety
of forms. This "genre map," begun as a description of forms
used by Swinburne, and since extended to include additional
forms, may be used in conjunction with other digital collections.
The TM4DH (Topic Maps for Digital Humanities) open source
topic map toolkit consists of a configurable Java-based Web
application and bundled XSLT stylesheets for the presentation
and navigation of topic maps conforming to the XTM 1.0
specification ( <http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1
.0/> ), which describes an XML grammar for interchanging
Web-based topic maps. TM4DH generates a homepage for the
topic map. This homepage includes general metadata for the
topic map (author, title, date, etc.) and a listing of major topic
categories. From this homepage users can navigate to pages
for individual topics, including detailed information about the
topic along with its occurrences (internal to the Topic Map or
external on the Web) and associated topics.
Bibliography
[No source references provided. Eds.]