Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

Inscriptions

Digital Humanities: Some Updates

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Over the last few years, attempting to ease myself into the field of “digital humanities,” I have attended a few related conferences.  The largest was DH2019 in Utrecht, which I frankly found inspiring.  The conference kicked off for me a year that I heavily devoted to learning DH related skills, such as network graphing and Python programming.  With collaborators, I submitted two proposals to present at DH2020, which was to be in Ottawa this year.  Both were accepted.  And then, of course, the conference was shut down.

I opted not to “present” digitally in the virtual version of the conference (the format was a bit unusual and intriguing, but I just couldn’t find the energy to participate).  The abstracts of the two papers, however, were accepted and are now available.

The first is on my ongoing project, “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine“.  While we have produced several papers already about various aspects of this project, this presentation, with Elli Mylonas, was to focus on the way use Linked Open Data (LOD).  The abstract can be found here, although as of now the second image appears not to be displaying properly.

The second project, with Michael Sperling, is called “The Rabbinic Network.”  We have developed a visualization and quantitative analysis of the rabbinic citation network in the Babylonian Talmud.  We hope to soon have further news about publications relating to this project and a website and Github site devoted to it.  For now, the abstract can be seen here.

Inscriptions and FAIR Archiving

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I direct on online project that seeks to collect, analyze, and make accessible the inscriptions of Israel/Palestine from roughly the sixth century BCE to the seventh century, CE.  The site can be accessed here.  Over the past few years the team working on this project has had to confront a wide variety of technical and architectural challenges, and we have been producing presentations on those challenges and our approach to them.  We (although I was not there!) recently presented at TEI2019, a meeting devoted to the Textual Encoding Initiatives.  In this presentation, we discussed our approach to archiving our data according to the best current framework, known as FAIR, which seeks to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.  We will soon be submitting the paper for publication, but the abstract and slides of the presentation are now available.  The slides can be found here and the abstract is below:

The Inscriptions of Israel Palestine Project is an online corpus of inscriptions from Israel and Palestine, written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic, dating roughly from the Persian Period to the Arab Conquest. As of spring 2019, it has collected and encoded more than 4000 inscriptions, out of some 10000 relevant texts: we aim to create an exhaustive and easily accessible collection and to enable users to carry out a variety of searches and extensive textual analysis.

The FAIR Principles aim to enhance the ability of machines to automatically find and use digital objects, in addition to supporting their reuse by individuals. The principles are organized under four areas intended to ensure digital objects are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable. Following epigraphy.info’s mission statement we are applying the FAIR Principles to guide our development of archival formats and processes for our corpus.

As IIP prepared to deposit files in the Brown Digital Repository, we defined formats for ensuring that our files will be as informative, self-documenting and re-usable as possible. Each inscription is contained in a single, XML file, encoded in the well-documented Epidoc subset of the TEI. These files, however, linked to externally maintained controlled vocabularies (using the xi:include feature) and bibliography (using Zotero), in order to facilitate the work of our encoders and ensure consistency.  One of our challenges was to incorporate these external data into the robust, stand-alone, archival format.

We will introduce the FAIR Guiding Principles and FAIR Metrics as they apply to epigraphic corpora and TEI encoding, discuss the roadmap for implementation, and look at archival practices beyond FAIR when it comes to preservation of data as well as re-use. While the first steps to making a digital corpus findable and accessible seem straightforward—IIP texts have been ingested into the Brown Digital Repository, have unique and persistent identifiers, rich metadata, and are freely available, we can still improve on both facets. Simple interoperability and re-usability are available through the IIP API in both the production and the archival versions of the corpus, however, it will be important to do further work on controlled vocabularies, shared concepts, and encoding practices in order to enhance both of these facets.

The “Isaiah Seal”

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Biblical Archaeology Review just published this new, tiny find from the excavations at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem: a clay seal (or bulla) that seems to contain the name Isaiah with (a little more doubtfully) the word “prophet” written underneath.  The top register of the seal seems to depict an animal, perhaps a doe.  The article, “Isaiah’s Signature Uncovered in Jerusalem:  Evidence of the Prophet Isaiah”  can be accessed here and has been picked up quickly by a number of news sites.  Paleojudaica also has a nice write-up about this.

How significant is the find?

Popular media tends to keep rewriting the same story for finds of this sort: they prove the veracity of the Bible.  In this case, however, nobody seriously doubts the existence of Isaiah, who is also attested outside of his own book in the Bible in some of the more historical writings (2 Kings 18).  Finding the a seal of the biblical prophet Isaiah would indeed be interesting but the fact that it would then attest to his actual existence is perhaps the least interesting thing about it.  (The headline, incidentally, is slightly misleading.  It is the seal that is the “signature,” not the writing on it, which was probably carved on the stamp by someone else.)

To my mind, there are instead three things of genuine interest about this seal:

  1. It attests to the formal, institutionalized nature of “the prophet.”  Seals tended to go on official correspondence and the fact that Isaiah would have one with his title strongly suggests that he holds some kind of official position, like “court prophet.”  This confirms other evidence from the Bible that prophets were not only, as we tend to think of them, random people who were believed to have received divine communication but that they also could hold official jobs in the court or temple.
  2. It suggests that either Isaiah or (probably more likely) his retinue was literate.  Prophecy was usually an oral phenomenon.  Other biblical books contain examples of prophecies being put into writing (e..g, Baruch writes down Jeremiah’s prophecies in Jeremiah 36) or otherwise thematizing writing (Ezekiel 3) but the process by which the prophet’s words became text is enigmatic.  Some time ago, a seal that may have belonged to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch, was found (there remain questions about its authenticity).  This seal, if authentic, would show the prophet sending correspondence in his own name, not that of his scribe.  This has potential implications for understanding the interplay of the oral and written in prophetic circles.
  3. Finally, I’m intrigued by the iconography.  Why would the prophet Isaiah use a doe?  Is there anything significant about this choice or, for that matter, any of the iconography that appears on ancient Israelite seals (of which we have many)?

The seal is hardly earth shattering, but it is also not insignificant.  If it really is what it is being claimed to be.

Create, Process, Link: Some Final Thoughts on The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference

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Now back home it will take me a while to process what I’ve learned at The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference, and even longer to work through my new, vastly expanded, to-do list.  Here I want only to sketch out a few thoughts.  I don’t think that any of them are particularly original but having the intellectual space and dialogue to focus on them helped me to work through and articulate them for myself.

First, I think that it is heuristically useful to think of digital humanities (DH) projects as being of three types: data creation, processing tools, and aggregators or linkers.  The data creators (some of the more impressive representatives at the conference were Nomisma, Open Philology, Corpus Scriptorium, and the emerging and impressive Digital Latin Library) make digital data.  The tools, such as those that do social network analysis (e.g., Gephi), natural language processing (xrenner), or plotting make that data not just accessible but also useful.  And the linkers (Trismegistos, Pleaides) link different sorts of data, most often from different sites, for a variety of purposes.  I find that thinking about DH projects this way is useful even if some projects fall between these cracks and most do more than one of these things.

While I think that the “linkers” are some of the more exciting DH sites, it all starts with the data.  Data creation isn’t sexy.  It also is of limited use if they are created for only one site or purpose.  If one is going to go through the laborious process of creating digital data, one may as well try to make them not just accessible but useful.  That requires structuring data in a way that existing tools can, with minor modifications, process them; including URIs so that linkers can reuse them; creating APIs to give computing access to them; and encoding them in an open rather than proprietary format so that they will be accessible when software standards change.  This also applies, mutatis mutandis, to tools and aggregators.  Tools should be designed to apply to a wide swath of structured data and aggregators function at their best when they can harvest or scrape data from a large number of sites.

For Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine, the road has been long and slow in large measure because the site was created ahead of the standard structures and the very existence of URIs.  Over the two decades of the projects existence, we have had to transform our data several times.  The transformations from SGML to XML and from our schema to EpiDoc were some of the more traumatic ones.  Each required not only the custom development of an automated process but also manual cleaning and refining of the data (some of which we are still doing).  Now we must add URIs to allow geographical and chronological linking.  Each of these transformations was costly and I predict – despite assurances that we now have stable standards – that there will be more to come.  These projects, even the data collections, are never fully complete or stable.  I’m not sure how one prepares for this but it is an inevitable, and for the scholar frustrating, part of any DH project.

This brings me to a second thought.  In the past DH often fell somewhere between the administrative cracks of IT and the library.  In recent years the weight has shifted to the library and it has become increasingly clear to me that that is a good thing.  Each of these projects – whether a data collection, a tool, or an aggregator – carries within it new knowledge.  Hence, it requires preservation.  We preserve in an accessible format almost all printed scholarly materials, no matter how useless or bad.  The same principle needs to apply to digital projects.  With the creation of digital repositories and the low cost of storage this should not be overly difficult.  This includes software: Github, now a favorite place to store code and DH data, will eventually disappoint us.  Similarly, just as libraries preserve new knowledge so too do they have methods for cataloging and finding it.  There are already a bewildering array of digital projects and they are not systematically cataloged, whether they are active, on the “way back machine”, or mothballed.  Cataloging and the development of finding aids are desiderata.  In the interim, for those who work in classical antiquity. two lists, here and here, are useful although incomplete and imperfect are useful.

A third issue is the very definition of scholarship.  Although I am now part of several overlapping conversations that are wrestling with the nature of DH scholarship I cannot say that I am much closer to an answer.  Data collection, on its face, shouldn’t be “scholarship” – but then isn’t the creation of print critical editions of texts, which largely involves collation, considered scholarship?   Digital tools – programs – are at heart intellectual models: just as in a monograph, you input data and you emerge with a synthesis or intellectual product.  One of the key differences, in fact, is that scholars writing books are often not as rigorous or explicit about their assumptions and methodologies as is a computer program.  Linkers bring together, even if they don’t synthesize, data in new ways that create research questions and drive our conversations – doesn’t theory do this?  I am not claiming that these should all count a priori as “scholarship”, but it points to a critical need for scholars (especially those in positions of power who hire and tenure) to wrestle seriously with possibility that the meaning of scholarship is shifting in a sharp but recognizable way, and that that is not necessarily bad.

A final thought in an already too-long blog post.  The issue of audience needs to be taken seriously.  A scholarly DH project might justifiably be directed at just a few hundred kindred scholars, just as journal articles or monographs are.  I think for most scholars engaged in DH, though, that seems unsatisfying.  We recognize the enormous potential of these projects not just to speak to specialists but also to teach students and engage a wider public in intellectual pursuits in which we are deeply invested.  The challenge is realizing that potential.  Sites need to be designed to address and engage multiple audiences and that is no easy feat.  It usually involves creating separate views or portals which is a costly endeavor – the cost of a good accessible interface could run between $15,000-$40,000.  Moreover, we do not yet have good usability studies for such projects or often the infrastructure or resources to conduct them.  Here perhaps we can better draw on the intellectual resources of our academic colleagues in the business schools and psychology who study and teach such things.

I owe special thanks to the organizers of this conference,  Professors Sarah Bond and Paul Dilley.  They created a conference that was of high intellectual value, paced humanely, with a collegial environment that facilitated useful interactions, all the while using remote technologies judiciously and effectively.  As one who has organized several conferences, I know that this is no mean accomplishment.

The conference tweets have been storified and can be seen here, here, and here.

 

The Big Ancient Mediterranean: A Preliminary Thought

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gephi04

I had the good fortune of participating today in a conference called The Big Ancient Mediterranean at the University of Iowa. The purpose of the conference is to discuss ways in which digital projects (including my own Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine) might better use linked open data to facilitate research.  There is a nice cross-representation of projects that primarily provide data (like my own) and frameworks or services (like Pelagios) that bring together the data from different projects.

The idea behind linked open data is that different kinds of data (e.g., texts, coins, inscriptions, papyri) can be brought together based on one or more criteria.  A simple example might be some connection to a place (as Pleiades does), but a date (or range) or person might be the criterion of selection.  For example: Give me everything related to Jerusalem from the late Second Temple period.  (This example is a little tricky because it involves defining the “late Second Temple” period.  Fortunately, there’s a site, PeriodO, that will soon be able to do this.)

There is a technical issue at the heart of this kind of data gathering on which we have spent, and will continue to spend, a significant amount of time.  For any service to gather data from another site according to a criterion it must know how to query the other site.  Ideally for these purposes, then, all participating sites need to use a common, controlled vocabulary (or other stable identifier, or URI).  Otherwise, if my “Jerusalem materials” are designated as belonging to Aelia Capitolina (the name of the city given by the Roman emperor Hadrian), a search might well overlook them.  Having all participating projects use some common linking vocabularies is not impossible, but given both the scattered and often under-funded nature of such projects as well as preferences of individual scholars (never to be underestimated) it is challenging.

The more interesting issue, though, is why bother?  Undoubtedly, the gathering of multiple kinds of materials with one search is potentially efficient, especially if I can more or less trust the results.  If I want to write about the city of Sepphoris in Late Antiquity, a single search might ultimately bring me the bulk of the materials I need.

For most of the participants (and I include myself) at the conference, though, there is a more exciting if still hard-to-articulate promise to this kind of data selection.  It is not just the collecting, but the digital assembling and visualizing of such data that will either answer research questions or pose new ones.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this issue in general terms.  How can the use of digital tools not just help scholars to do what they’ve always done as scholars quicker and better but also do something entirely new?

I do not have an answer to that question, but spending the day thinking about linked data has helped me to see better one possible direction.  Digital visualization helps to shift the vantage point.  Usually, for example, when I create my narratives I start with texts.  I branch out from the texts, using geography, archaeology, etc. to enhance or challenge my texts, but the base is usually textual.  Think of this as standing in a point (the textual point) at the lines of a web that connect to my other kinds of data.  But if I move to another point on the web – say, geographical -and look back out at my web, it will look different.  With the click of a button I can make my starting point a map, an inscription, the visual image of an archaeological site, or graph.  More or less the same material, but a different view and context.

Transformative?  I’m not sure.  But I’m intrigued by the possibility of easily changing my vantage point, having my data shuffled, and seeing what new insights or questions emerge.

More to come.  In the meantime, there has been an active twitter feed of the conference at #BAM2016.  I look forward to tomorrow’s sessions.