Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling

Abstract

Large scale cultural heritage datasets and computational methods for the Humanities research framework are the two pillars of Digital Humanities (DH), a research field aiming to expand Humanities studies beyond specific sources and periods to address macro-scale research questions on broad human phenomena. In this regard, the development of machine-readable semantically enriched data models based on a cross-disciplinary “language” of phenomena is critical for achieving the interoperability of research data. This paper reports on, documents, and discusses the development of a model for the study of reading experiences as part of the EU JPI-CH project Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool (READ-IT). Through the discussion of the READ-IT ontology of reading experience, this contribution will highlight and address three challenges emerging from the development of a conceptual model for the support of research on cultural heritage. Firstly, this contribution addresses modelling for multi-disciplinary research. Secondly, this work describes the development of an ontology of reading experience, under the light of the experience of previous projects, and of ongoing and future research developments. Lastly, this contribution addresses the validation of a conceptual model in the context of ongoing research, the lack of a consolidated set of theories and of a consensus of domain experts.

Reading in Europe—Challenges and lessons learned from the case studies of the READ-IT project

“…expected generated data, competency questions, and issues related to the reuse of data outside the specific case study). The analysis of the case studies produced a set of requirements that were used in the development of a data model and a Reading Experience Ontology (Vignale et al, 2020;Antonini et al, 2021). The resulting model shifted the focus beyond the factual aspects of experience that were addressed in previous projects (who, where, when, and what), to the phenomenological aspects of reading, such as the reader's state of mind (habits, aims, emotions, and achievements) and the articulation of reading in terms of sessions and key turning points (experiences).…”

“…'Design of tools for multidisciplinarity' requiring the definition of a meta-language of reading , a novel approach to an agile ontology development (Antonini et al, 2021), a contribution ecosystem including paper postcards, a digital contribution portal 5 and a chatbot, 6 an ontology design pattern for experiential studies, 7 and an annotation tool for textual sources.…”

Digitizing Intangible Cultural Heritage Embodied: State of the Art

“…The Gesture Atlas is one such example. 7 It displays depictions of the Annunciation via the image-corpus clusters of poses and gestures learned from unsupervised learning [17], but still with no reference model to further organize them. Another project named Query-by-dancing [146] ofered a cross-media retrieval method by comparing pair-wise similarity from a massive hip-hop video collection.…”

“…Among the few, [23] signiies an ontological approach to describing visuals via iconographical representations. With regard to the dimension of experience, the projects of LED and READ-IT produced respective models to catalog the phenomenological aspects of listening and reading [1,7]. The latter also marks a case of interoperability sought with CIDOC-CRM and its extensions.…”