Reading and Writing Knowledge in Scientific Communities

Digital Humanities and Knowledge Construction

Gérald Kembellec, Evelyne Broudoux, Gérald Kembellec, Evelyne Broudoux

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781786301253
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119384397
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Practices associated with the culture of "scholarly" reading have been developed over many centuries and annotations themselves have become the subject of study, either as additional elements in connection with the original texts or as documents in their own right.

The first "scholarly" reading techniques, seen historically from the 12th Century onwards, combine reading and writing in a process known as lettrure, involving both attentive reading and commentary. The Internet has transformed this activity, adding technical layers that relate both to the reading and writing process as well as to the circulation of texts; their potential and effective augmentation, diffusion, and reception.

This book examines digitized reading and writing by focusing primarily on the conditions for the co-construction of scientific knowledge and its augmentation. The authors present numerous examples of studies and personal feedback concerning the intellectual process, open critical spaces, collaborative scholarly publishing, methods for the circulation and mediatization of knowledge, as well as the techniques and tools employed. 

1
Introduction to Scientific Reading and Writing and to Technical Modalities of Augmentation

1.1. Introduction

This collective work is the result of a project begun in 2015, the fruit of reflection carried out by members of the haStec Laboratory of Excellence¹. The project started with a seminar², from which some of the participants agreed to contribute or evaluate chapters for this book. This work brings together original contributions, selected and reviewed by at least two members of our scientific committee, to whom we are greatly indebted. Our introduction aims to synthesize the broad outlines of the seminar and to provide tools for understanding the rest of the book.

The purpose of this chapter is to situate digital reading and writing in the context of digital humanities, in order to better understand how the procedure is connected to, and involved in, the disciplinary movement. Reading and writing, from a scientific as well as a more general perspective, are ancient practices; the procedures involved have developed in parallel with the tools available, existing and structuring the thought processes of generations, well before the development of new theories of thought during the 20th Century.

Nevertheless, in terms of the history of scientific writing, new schools of philosophical thought emerged in the first half of the 20th Century, which established normative positions in scientific thought, through which thought may be described and categorized. The possibility of using tools to connect human knowledge was explored via the idea of the Memex³, at the end of the Second World War, although it only began to take concrete form in the final decade of the 20th Century: the Web was initially envisaged as a scientific, writable entity. In this section, we shall provide a brief overview of the digital humanities and their connection with the reading and writing process, externalized through dynamic forms of reception. We shall also take the opportunity to present models for structuring information, particularly those used for data linked to the semantic web; this will be useful in understanding certain chapters in this book.

1.2. The digital humanities

1.2.1. Field of practice

The “digital humanities” have progressively gained territory over the last decade or so, as an interdisciplinary field of research which encompasses a set of practices currently coming into use in the humanities and social sciences. The first phase consisted of making use of available computer technology to digitize documents. Objects of study in the fields of history, literature, arts, and the museum and archive sectors have been digitized, offering a wealth of new and unprecedented research opportunities, with simplified access to sources generated by the construction of new databases.

Visual representations of statistical calculations carried out on quantitative data are now accessible to all, thanks to algorithms used in graphical interfaces. In e-books, augmentation takes the form of multi-entry summaries [TRE 14], and map-style representations make it easier to search for information. Finally, narration and hypermedia illustrations add new elements to the experience, as shown in the example below, taken from a prosopographic knowledge base for history of art, which represents a chronological frieze generated by a search in a database.

Figure 1.1. Chronological frieze for the display and examination of content taken from a bibliographic database, linked to external content (LOD). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/kembellec/reading.zip

The first phase in the emergence of the digital humanities was thus the incorporation of digital techniques into methods for the analysis and interpretation of corpora, languages, research terrains and archives, alongside a major focus on editorial digitization projects, with the aim of broadening access for researchers and the general public to historic works, authors and documents.

A second, more reflexive phase, corresponding to the arrival of native digital research objects, highlighted the need for training, corresponding to a form of digital literacy [LED 12], which Emmanuel Souchier [SOU 13] prefers to call digital “lettrure”⁴. In parallel, a need to consider the ongoing transformation of research and analysis methods became apparent [RRIE 12], with shifts taking place in the borders between disciplines and professions [DAC 115].

1.2.2. A disciplinary movement

An explanation for this movement can be found in another characteristic of the “digital humanities”, their self-description as a form of disciplinary shift. The origins of this movement can be traced back to efforts to break down barriers in the “humanities”, as they were seen in North American circles, as non-viable disciplines, without the connections to social sciences such as sociology and anthropology, which were already widespread in Europe, where humanities and social sciences tend to be grouped together. This movement has now had effects far beyond the boundaries of the humanities, posing fundamental questions concerning the theoretical basis of the new inter-discipline.

A movement results from a combination of federating elements, which communicate shared points of view, without being directed by an entity specifically charged with this function. Knowledge of the digital humanities spread through somewhat unconventional meetings, such as BarCamps⁵, then through the THATCamp⁶; these events disseminated principles and ideas for action, resulting in the production of manifestos designed to describe situations and define solutions.

The first manifesto, published on December 15, 2008 by Jeffrey Schnapp, Peter Lunenfeld, Johanna Drucker and Todd Pressner on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) servers, was unusual in that it was the product of a seminar (Mellon) and of a collective writing process, incorporating 124 comments (filtered by invitation). It made use of the WordPress platform and the dedicated CommentPress plugin⁷, which can be edited by readers. The contents of the manifesto are intended to be subversive and radical (it states, for example, that anything which is not “open” should be considered to be “the enemy”), provoking critical comments. The main objective of the manifesto, whilst not stated explicitly, was to “free” the humanities from the confines of universities; disciplines and departments were perceived as systems of domination, perpetuating rules designed to legitimize competitive advantages and blocking the progress of change.

A second manifesto, version 2.0, was published in 2009, ratifying the first edition, notably in terms of insertion into the “wiki-economy” and the fight against the “naturalization” of print culture. In this manifesto, the digital humanities are seen as “an array of convergent practices”, rather than as a unified field. There is a special focus on curation, as an “augmented scholarly practice”, and to openness to actors from outside of the scientific sphere.

In France, the Digital Humanities International monitoring blog⁸, financed by a TGE Adonis project⁹, published 568 posts on this theme between 2008 and 2012; this was followed by a major upsurge, triggered by Open Edition with the launch of the first European THATCamp on the subject of digital humanities in 2010. This resulted in the publication of a manifesto, this time in French, with certain marked differences from those published on the UCLA website. Specifically:

• – the “modification of the conditions of production and diffusion of knowledge”;
• – the formation of the field of digital humanities from the “convergence of interests of communities” with regard to practices, tools and a variety of transversal tools (coding of textual sources, geographical information systems, lexicometry, digitization of cultural, scientific and technical heritage, web mapping, data mining, 3D, oral archives, digital and hypermedia arts, literatures, etc.).

The actors involved stated their intention to create a “supportive, open, welcoming and freely accessible community of practice”. The document places an emphasis on free access to data and meta-data, alongside sharing and collective working.

Digital humanities projects have also been encouraged by public infrastructures that aim to provide technical support for digitization initiatives. In France, equipment has been provided (through TGE Adonis then TGIR Huma-Num) alongside a digital scientific library (BSN, bibliothèque scientifique numérique). At European level, the Dariah-EU infrastructure¹⁰ has also been created.

The dynamic nature of the movement is evident in the information published on the DH list, a French-language discussion list on the digital humanities, created in March...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: Reading and Writing in New Systems of Digital Documentality
• 1 Introduction to Scientific Reading and Writing and to Technical Modalities of Augmentation
• 2 Ecrilecture and the Construction of Knowledge within Professional Communities
• 3 “Critical Spaces”: A Study of the Necessary Conditions for Scholarly and Multimedia Reading
• 4 “Annotate the World, and Improve Humanity”: Material Imageries in a Web Annotation Program
• 5 Construction of Ecrilecture Standards for Collaborative Transcription of Digitized Heritage
• 6 The Challenge of Platform Interoperability in Constructing Augmented Knowledge in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• 7 The XML Portal for the symogih.org Project
• 8 Issues of “Hypermediating Journals” for Scientific Publishing
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement