Living texts: interdisciplinary approaches and
methodological commonalities in biology and
textual analysis'
16-17 October 2008 E-Science Institute, Edinburgh
Stuart Dunn
Centre for e-Research, King’s College London
What is e-Science?
•
"e-Science is about global collaboration in key
areas of science and the next generation of
infrastructure that will enable it."
- Sir John Taylor, Former Director General of Research Councils,
2000
“[n]ot only [to] provide unprecedented access to a variety of cultural
artifacts but also [to] make it possible to see these artifacts in
completely new ways … digital technology [that] can offer us new
ways of seeing art, new ways of bearing witness to history, new ways
of hearing and remembering human languages, new ways of reading
texts, ancient and modern.’
- ‘Our Cultural Commonwealth, ACLS, 2006
• “the development and deployment of a networked
infrastructure and culture through which resources – (…) – can
be shared in a secure environment, and in which new forms of
collaboration can emerge, and new and advanced methodologies
explored.” (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/scoping-survey)
- Sheila Anderson, Director, Centre for e-Research, King’s College
London, 2007
Arts and Humanities e-Science in the UK
2005:
AHRC-JISC e-Science Initiative begins
2006:
- AHeSSC begins, hosted by Arts and Humanities Data Service
- EPSRC joins initiative
- 3 small scale demonstrator projects funded by EPSRC
- 6 research workshops funded by AHRC
2007:
7 research projects and 4 PhD studentships announced
- AHDS funding discontinued, KCL’s Centre for e-Research
formed
Arts and Humanities e-Science in the UK - 2007 - 2009
http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/research-projects
• Helen Bailey: Relocating Choreographic Process: The impact of Grid technologies and
collaborative memory on the documentation of practice-led research in dance
• Alan Bowman: Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents
• Tim Crawford: Purcell Plus: Exploring an eScience Methodology for Musicologists
• Vincent Gaffney: Medieval Warfare on the Grid: The Case of Manzikert
• Sally MacDonald, E-Curator: 3D colour scans for remote object identification and
assessment
• Julian Richards, Archaeotools: Data mining, facetted classification and E-archaeology
• monica schraefel, musicSpace: Using and Evaluating e-Science Design Methods and
Technologies to Improve Access to Heterogeneous Music Resources for Musicology
Themes
“The aim of a Theme is to achieve new insights
into a specific topic by investigating it in depth
over a sustained period.”
Theme 1: Information Services for Smart
Decision Making
Themes
Theme 2: Exploiting Diverse Sources of
Scientific Data
Theme 3: Adoption of e-Research
Technologies
Theme 4: Spatial Semantics for Automating
Geographic Information Processes
Theme 5: Distributed Programming
Abstractions
Theme 6: e-Science in the Arts and
Humanities
Theme 7: Neuroinformatics and Grid
Techniques to Build a Virtual Fly Brain
Theme 8: Trust and Security in Virtual
Communities
Theme 9: Principles of Provenance
Theme 10: Communicating the e-Science of
Climate Change
Theme 1: Information Services for Smart
Decision Making
Themes
Theme 2: Exploiting Diverse Sources of
Scientific Data
Theme 3: Adoption of e-Research
Technologies
Theme 4: Spatial Semantics for Automating
Geographic Information Processes
Theme 5: Distributed Programming
Abstractions
Theme 6: e-Science in the Arts and
Humanities
Theme 7: Neuroinformatics and Grid
Techniques to Build a Virtual Fly Brain
Theme 8: Trust and Security in Virtual
Communities
Theme 9: Principles of Provenance
Theme 10: Communicating the e-Science of
Climate Change
Lectures - 2007
• A potential for all: e-Science for the Arts and Humanities
• Methods and Technologies for Enabling Virtual Research Communities
• Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability for Humanities Data
• Collaborative Text Editing
• Grid Enabling Humanities Datasets
• E-Science and Performance
• Aspects of Space and Time in Humanities e-Science
Space and Time: Methods in Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past
Scoping new applications of GIS
GDS
* Application of biological cladistic analysis to stemmatic studies in textual
criticism
* Application of parsing methods (linguistics) to protein folding (biology)
* Comparing ageing of organisms with concept evolution in literary text
* Comparing DNA transcription with complex textual structures
* Commonalities in the use of ontologies in biology and textual information
retrieval
* Application of biological methods for dealing with very large textual corpora
* The role of Virtual Research Environments in supporting and facilitating such
research
stuart.dunn@kcl.ac.uk