Reading the Readers: Modelling Complex Humanities Processes to Build Cognitive Systems

Terras, Melissa

doi:10.1093/llc/fqh042

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Small digital collections have, in general, been heavily curated relied heavily upon human intervention to ensure quality, and have therefore used time-intensive methods to maintain standards. Frequently, these projects also utilize intellectually intensive methods to ensure that digitized content is presented in its most suitable form: these include harnessing the expertise of the academic community (British Library 2010), the work done to represent texts in digital form that has been undertaken by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) (Text Encoding Initiative),and modelling complex research processes in the humanities (Terras 2005, Crane et al 2006. The timeconsuming nature of these methods renders them unsuitable for cost-effective digitization on a large scale (Holley 2009), meaning that large-scale digitization must LSDIs, on the other hand, rely upon scalable technologies such as page scanning and Optical Character Recognition to produce searchable text and retrieve metadata (Coyle 2009).…”

Section: Quantity Versus Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mass digitization and the garbage dump: The conflicting needs of quantitative and qualitative methods

Gooding

2012

Literary and Linguistic Computing

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There has been widespread excitement in recent years about the emergence of Large-Scale Digital Initiatives such as Google Book Search. While many have become excited at the prospect of a digital recreation of the Library of Alexandria, there has also been great controversy surrounding these projects. This paper looks at one of these controversies: the suggestion that mass digitization is creating a virtual rubbish dump of our cultural heritage. It discusses some of the quantitative methods being used to analyze the big data that has been created, and two major concerns that have arisen as a result. First, there is the concern that quantitative analysis has inadvertently fed a culture that favours information ahead of traditional research methodsa culture that looks to reject traditional research methods, in favour of new and unproven technologies. Second, little information exists about how LSDIs are used for any research other than quantitative methods. This has These problems have helped to fuel the idea that digitization is destroying the print medium, when in many respects it still closely remediates the bibliographic codes of the Gutenberg era. The paper concludes that more work must be done to understand what impact mass digitization has had on all researchers in the humanities, rather than just the vocal early adopters, and briefly mentions the work that the author is undertaking in this area.

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Section: Quantity Versus Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mass digitization and the garbage dump: The conflicting needs of quantitative and qualitative methods

Gooding

2012

Literary and Linguistic Computing

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“…Figure 2 presents the process model defined in (Terras 2005) to describe the different activities achieved by the experts while deciphering ancient documents. This process was defined to assist the experts through computer means.…”

Section: Caa2011 -Revive the Past: Proceedings Of The 39th Conference In Computer Applications Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-based Archaeological Registration Principles

Jensen¹

2012

Revive the Past

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The present volume consists of the peer-reviewed papers presented at the CAA2011 conference held in Beijing, China between April 12 and 16, 2011. The theme of this conference was "Revive the Past", which means retrieving our history and using it to help create a new civilization. It was a great honour to organize the conference where over 130 researchers made presentations; ten keynote speeches were given; and sixteen sessions covered a wide variety of topics: data acquisition and recording, conceptual modelling, data analysis, data management, digging with words, 3D models, visualizing heritage sites, digital spaces for archaeology, geophysics, GIS, graphics in archaeology, visualisation in archaeology, semantic technologies, spatial prediction, visualization and exhibition, and 3D object reconstruction. In addition, student papers and posters were presented. We held two successful seminars: "The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model as a Tool for Integrating Cultural Information" and "Creating Conceptual Models in Archaeology". Two round table discussions were equally stimulating: "The Virtual Silk Road: Reuniting and Recording Scattered Collections and Sites along the Chinese Silk Road" and "Towards an Integrated Geospatial Approach to Archaeological Prospection Data".As organizers, we want to thank the CAA Steering Committee for their great support and help. We would like to express our special thanks to Prof. Bernard Frischer for his consistent support and kind help. We express our deep gratitude to all participants and delegates for their contributions. We appreciate the generous support given by local institutions in Beijing, and we single out for special praise all of our volunteers for their hard work on behalf of the conference.

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“…A model of the detective work that papyrologists undertake when confronted with the task of interpreting a document was proposed by Terras (Terras, 2005). This model identifies several levels of reading, starting at the feature (or strokelet) level, going then to the character level, the sequence of characters level, the morphemic or word level, the grammatical level, the meaning of a word level, the meaning of a group of words level, and ending at the meaning of the whole document level.…”

Section: Building Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has the property of linking up the micro levels (feature, letter) and the macro levels (word, document), and it takes its place into a more general cognitive theory: connectionism. The word superiority effect model actually is the basis of Terras's model of papyrological reading and transcription (Terras, 2005), which we are attempting to refine by gaining an understanding of the thought processes that eventually yield interpretations of ancient texts. We have here identified some of the mechanisms that trigger the jumps between the levels of reading.…”

Section: Expertise Expectations Aspect-shifting and Oscillationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Papyrological investigations: transferring perception and interpretation into the digital world

Tarte

2011

Literary and Linguistic Computing

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Deciphering ancient and damaged documents is a complex investigative task that papyrologists routinely undertake to extract meaning from the script. Perception and interpretation play an essential role. In this paper, we present methods for transferring to the digital world some of the processes that experts draw upon when interpreting a text, with the ultimate aim of constructing an Interpretation Support System (ISS) for papyrologists. Image-capture and image-processing approaches that reflect real-world perceptual processes have been implemented. In addition, we propose an expansion of a previously built model of papyrological reading and transcription. We make explicit some of the implicit processes involved in an interpretation effort, using an example where papyrologists developed hypotheses for the identification of a puzzling letter form. Two distinct yet not mutually exclusive approaches to the interpretation task have been identified: the kinaesthetic/palaeographical strategy and the cruciverbalistic/philological strategy. The ISS will have to facilitate both approaches. Mechanisms triggering the emergence of working hypotheses of interpretation, which we call percepts, have also been pinpointed; they include skilled vision, scholarly expectations, aspect shifting and local-global oscillations. Working hypotheses being triggered by such mechanisms can then be exposed as an explicit network of sourced percepts; these mechanisms also confer a qualitative well-foundedness to the percepts and hence help us to retrace and assess the rationale leading to a specific interpretation.

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Reading the Readers: Modelling Complex Humanities Processes to Build Cognitive Systems

Cited by 14 publications

References 19 publications

Mass digitization and the garbage dump: The conflicting needs of quantitative and qualitative methods

Mass digitization and the garbage dump: The conflicting needs of quantitative and qualitative methods

Event-based Archaeological Registration Principles

Papyrological investigations: transferring perception and interpretation into the digital world

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