The end of May marks the third anniversary of the RELEVEN project. It is really amazing how five years is not as much time as it feels like at the beginning! We have come quite far in the project, but the most exciting work is yet to come.
Over the last few months I have been mostly engaged in helping to shape the initial design of the website that will open our work to the world by the end of the project, as well as the work of making a final push for completing our data model. The website design piece is an interesting challenge - how can we express the information we have, shaped as it is into assertions and viewpoints, in a way that will make sense to a user of the website or a newcomer to the project? This is particularly challenging, since we are still building the model even as we think about how to present it.
For finishing the model itself, we have been privileged to enlist the services of George Bruseker, who is deputy chair of the CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group and who has been involved in the development of a great many related vocabularies. We have been meeting every couple of weeks with George to talk through how to model things as various as personal journeys (including involuntary ones such as captivity or exile, and including journeys that were interrupted), letter correspondence, authority over geographical areas, and attacks on (or indeed defences of) communities in specific places.
Soon we will be turning with George to the question of how to represent viewpoints - that is, collections of assertions that were either accepted or rejected by a particular author (or group of co-authors) at a particular time. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, both thanks to an article I’ve recently submitted to the Digital Medievalist on how we are handling the expression of information about Byzantine lead seals, and also thanks to a kind invitation I had to give the keynote lecture for the AIUCD conference last week. The conference in particular was a very nice environment to toss around these ideas in - it seems not only is Sicily a great location to have excellent meals, beautiful scenery, and fun conversation, but Italy at large is the place to be when it comes to semantic modelling in the digital humanities! Two of the possible solutions for how to express viewpoints are CRMinf, the CIDOC-CRM extension for argumentation, or the Nanopub data model. I’m looking forward to working through the pros and cons of either system over the next couple of months.
