Breaking down barriers: the integration of research data, notes and referencing in a Web 2.0 academic framework

paper
Authorship
  1. 1. Ian R. Johnson

    University Of Sydney

Work text
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In this paper I argue that the arbitrary distinction between
bibliographic data and research data – which we see in the
existence of specialised library catalogues and bibliographic
systems on the one hand, and a multitude of ad hoc notes,
digitized sources, research databases and repositories on the
other – is a hangover from a simpler past, in which publication
and bibliographic referencing was a well-defi ned and separate
part of the research cycle.
Today published material takes many different forms, from
books to multimedia, digital artworks and performances.
Research data results from collection and encoding of
information in museums, archives, libraries and fi eldwork, as
well as output from analysis and interpretation. As new forms
of digital publication appear, the boundary between published
material and research data blurs. Given the right enabling
structures (eg. peer review) and tools (eg. collaborative
editing), a simple digitized dataset can become as valuable as
any formal publication through the accretion of scholarship.
When someone publishes their academic musings in a personal
research blog, is it analogous to written notes on their desk
(or desktop) or is it grey literature or vanity publishing?
The drawing of a distinction between bibliographic references
and other forms of research data, and the storing of these data in
distinct systems, hinders construction of the linkages between
information which lie at the core of Humanities research. Why
on earth would we want to keep our bibliographic references
separate from our notes and developing ideas, or from data
we might collect from published or unpublished sources? Yet
standalone desktop silos (such as EndNote for references,
Word for notes and MSAccess for data) actively discourage
the linking of these forms of information.
Bespoke or ad hoc databases admirably (or less than admirably)
fulfi ll the particular needs of researchers, but fail to connect
with the wider world. These databases are often desktopbased
and inaccessible to anyone but the user of their host
computer, other than through sharing of copies (with all the
attendant problems of redundancy, maintenance of currency
and merging of changes). When accessible they often lack multiuser
capabilities and/or are locked down to modifi cation by a
small group of users because of the diffi culties of monitoring
and rolling back erroneous or hostile changes. Even when accessible to the public, they are generally accessible through
a web interface which allows human access but not machine
access, and cannot therefore be linked programmatically with
other data to create an integrated system for analyzing larger
problems.
For eResearch in the Humanities to advance, all the digital
information we use – bibliographic references, personal notes,
digitized sources, databases of research objects etc. – need
to exist in a single, integrated environment rather than in
separate incompatible systems. This does not of course mean
that the system need be monolithic – mashups, portals and
Virtual Research Environments all offer distributed alternatives,
dependant on exposure of resources through feed and web
services. The ‘silo’ approach to data is also breaking down
with the stunning success of web-based social software
such as the Wikipedia encyclopaedia or Del.icio.us social
bookmarking systems. These systems demonstrate that – with
the right level of control and peer review – it is possible to
build substantial and highly usable databases without the costs
normally associated with such resources, by harnessing the
collaborative enthusiasm of large numbers of people for data
collection and through data mining of collective behaviour.
To illustrate the potential of an integrated Web 2.0 approach
to heterogeneous information, I will discuss Heurist
(HeuristScholar.org) – an academic social bookmarking
application which we have developed, which provides rich
information handling in a single integrated web application
– and demonstrate the way in which it has provided a new
approach to building signifi cant repositories of historical data.
Heurist handles more than 60 types of digital entity (easily
extensible), ranging from bibliographic references and internet
bookmarks, through encyclopaedia entries, seminars and
grant programs, to C14 dates, archaeological sites and spatial
databases. It allows users to attach multimedia resources
and annotations to each entity in the database, using private,
public, and group-restricted wiki entries. Some entries can be
locked off as authoritative content, others can be left open to
all comers.
Effective geographic and temporal contextualisation and linking
between entities provides new opportunities for Humanities
research, particularly in History and Archaeology. Heurist
allows the user to digitize and attach geographic data to any
entity type, to attach photographs and other media to entities,
and to store annotated, date-stamped relationships between
entities. These are the key to linking bibliographic entries to
other types of entity and building, browsing and visualizing
networks of related entities.
Heurist represents a fi rst step towards building a single point
of entry Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities.
It already provides ‘instant’ web services, such as mapping,
timelines, styled output through XSLT and various XML feeds
(XML, KML, RSS) allowing it to serve as one component in a
decentralized system. The next version will operate in a peerto-
peer network of instances which can share data with one
another and with other applications.
The service at HeuristScholar.org is freely available for
academic use and has been used to construct projects as varied
as the University of Sydney Archaeology department website,
content management for the Dictionary of Sydney project (a
major project to develop an online historical account of the
history of Sydney) and an historical event browser for the
Rethinking Timelines project.

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Conference Info

Complete

ADHO - 2008

Hosted at University of Oulu

Oulu, Finland

June 25, 2008 - June 29, 2008

135 works by 231 authors indexed

Conference website: http://www.ekl.oulu.fi/dh2008/

Series: ADHO (3)

Organizers: ADHO

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  • Language: English
  • Topics: None