The curious identity of Michael Field and its implications for humanities research with the semantic web

Abstract

This paper uses the case of author Michael Field, the shared writing identity of two late Victorian women, to consider the implications of embracing the semantic web for humanities research. It is argued that the ontologies prevalent today reveal a lack of nuance when it comes to the complex relationships that are the focus of much humanities research, such as the connection of names to persons, particularly with respect to authorship. Further, the current state of ontology use aside, even the sophisticated use of OWL, SKOS, or ontology alignment techniques for linking big semantic web collections stands to hinder humanities research by hiding rather than exposing difference. We use the outlier Michael Field to highlight what much of the valuable work of the humanities is about and in doing so bring to the fore the challenge of formalizing complex social meanings that can otherwise be overlooked or dismissed as a trivial technicality. As a solution the humanities community is encouraged to begin engaging more directly in the construction of semantic web tools and infrastructure.

Nitpicking online knowledge representations of governmental leadership. The case of Belgian prime ministers in Wikipedia and Wikidata.

“…Such details and problems can easily be overlooked in 'big data' approaches. In this regard, the outcomes of our case study align with previous research on the problem of formalising humanistic knowledge conducted by Brown and Simpson (2013).…”

“…One might for instance choose to analyse the technological particularities of MediaWiki implementations such as Wikipedia or Wikidata as software platforms (MediaWiki, 2020a,b), investigate systemic bias (Martin, 2018;Oeberst, von der Beck, Cress, & Nestler, 2019), discuss the philosophical, sociological or economic foundations and impact of a free, open software movement (Tkacz, 2015), or explore the whole of Wikipedia or Wikidata content supported by big data approaches (Farda-Sarbas & Müller-Birn, 2019;Schroeder & Taylor, 2015). While each of these avenues is worth exploring, our approach instead draws inspiration from the epistemological criticism of information technologies and databases for humanistic knowledge in Oldman, Doerr, and Gradmann (2015), and the detailed analyses of online representations of humanistic (biographical) data and personhood in Brown and Simpson (2013). The latter effectively show how semantic web technologies, including the more sophisticated uses of ontologies such as OWL and SKOS fail to capture the nuance, complex relationships and social meanings that characterise humanities scholarship -complexities that 'might otherwise be overlooked or dismissed as a trivial technicality' (idem, p. 77).…”

Zen and the Art of Linked Data

“…Knowledge engineering becomes a major concern in its own right. The shortcomings of the prevalent idea, that collections of intuitive lists of predicates (such as the so-called application profiles 12 ) and terminology form a sufficient interface between technology and the humanists' discourse and epistemology, are reflected by the relative stagnation of developing "metadata vocabularies" and the poor results of applying reasoning methods to them, despite the continuing promises (Brown and Simpson, 2013). Humanists on their own will not be able to harness the expressive power latent in the tools without an interdisciplinary collaboration with technologists and managers in which all parties have a common understanding of the possibilities of Semantic technologies and the structure and complexity of the humanists' discourse.…”

The Changing Culture of Humanities Scholarship: Iteration, Recursion, and Versions in Scholarly Collaboration Environments

“…What is happening, however, is that we are moving toward tantalizing prospects of interoperability as a result of the increasing uptake of Linked Open Data approaches beyond and within academic research projects (Brown & Simpson, 2013), without having thought through the implications of versioning in a linked data environment. To take a fairly straightforward example, what happens if a scholar annotates a portion of a webpage using a linked data tool such as Pundit, and the page subsequently changes?…”

“…More than just a pseudonym, Michael Field was intended to represent an artistic collaboration around the fusion of two people into a single whole. So successful was their attempt that it led to friends referring to the pair as "both of him, " and even with modern digital tools like the Semantic Web, it can look like it was Field who was real and Cooper and Bradley only pseudonyms (Brown & Simpson, 2013).…”