Notes

Outline

** Return to Informedia DL Colloq Site ____________ The rise of Cultural Informatics Gregory Crane Professor of Classics Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship Perseus Project Tufts University

Perseus Project DL development 1987- Ancient Greco-Roman Culture DLI-2: “A Digital Library for the Hum.” Up through early 20th century Calculatedly disparate collections Production: www.perseus.tufts.edu 9million pages/month, 85% Greco-Roman Research: what characterizes cultural DLs? Audience / Services / Content Model Triad Cross-over: e.g. NSDL work

Cultural Informatics Why not “Computational Humanities,” “Humanities Computing,” “Computing and the Humanities”? Too confining Textual and fine arts Associations with canonical culture, esp. western Cultural Informatics -- very broad Challenging but important perspective

Cultural Informatics Object of Study: Geo-spatial open: All cultures of the world Temporally open: cultures as evolving process Past, present and future Goals: Analysis of cultures Communication between cultures Fundamental to world peace and prosperity

Cultural Informatics Two domains of study Knowledge as end product Wissenschaft /Germanic model Knowledge as means to an end … But what end? British tradition: Character formation Traditional culture: cultivation of sensibilities

How important is cultural knowledge? Is this a significant “end”?

Does culture matter? Jerusalem Kosovo Baghdad Mecca Congo Rwanda

Applications Visualization: Tracking anger against the US (terrorism/national security) Identifying cultural trends (Marketing/trade) Broad educational Acquiring information, individual and comparative

Mapping Trends

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Culture Matters! F-Measures for Place Name Identification Includes semantic classification and identification (Which Springfield) Greco-Roman Sources: 95% European Sources: 90% US Sources: 80%!!!

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Applications Customized knowledge support What info do readers A vs. B need? Backgrounds, purposes etc. Documents: what am I reading? Objects: what is this thing? Spaces: where am I moving? Audiences Tourists and visitors Peace-keepers and ground forces Business

Cultural knowledge is a means for … ?

What am I looking at? Cambridge Civil War Monument (1870) Linking to other data City Directories Regimental Histories Period Maps Old Photographs

Cultural Knowledge Instantaneous responses shape experience Can you look up the point of a joke? Externalized and objectified knowledge FOUNDATION of modern society Internalized and personalized knowledge FOUNDATION of human consciousness

Cultural Knowledge Internalized, evolving, and dynamic Requires intensive knowledge acquisition Cf. Running, finger exercises, practice, practice Enhances every element of society We see more where we look We hear more when we listen We feel more when we live

Cultural Knowledge Localized and personal Universal in human experience Deeply intertwined with self and identity Perceived as devalued in the West and US especially This perception core security danger Source for much (most?) strategic anti-US feeling

Cultural Informatics Objective, scientific study of the processes whereby we promote enhanced subjective, emotional experiences in the world Information --> knowledge --> wisdom Fundamentally interdisciplinary Complements humanities computing

Library Becomes Infrastructure Moving through a neighborhood When were these houses built? What is their style? Who lived here? Moving thru an ecosystem What are the plants/animals? What systems are in play? Answers to every quantifiable question delivered in real time on the spot

Reading in a Democratic Society Continuation of reading revolution 1760-1830, before and after Now requires a cultural informatics Includes but transcends textual materials What is the point of health and prosperity? Emerson’s American Scholar in the 21st century

System Input Quantitative data -- easiest States self-organize into databases (“Seeing like a state”) Linguistic data -- hard Minimally dozens, if not hundreds Varying level of documentation Cultural data -- hardest Language/Culture clusters: thousands+

Cultural Informatics begin at the limits AND intersection of manual analytic techniques generic computational techniques Cross-trained experts Serve as connectors between specialists Have intuitive understanding of not-yet-articulated possibilities from BOTH sides

Cultural Informatics Aggregation and Visualization Extraction from many examples Quantified, targetted generalizations Focus and customization Start from a document/object/scene Customized decision support Yes/No decisions (~search) Discursive analysis (~browsing)

How do we do it now? Or do we? Players -- no real specialists Faculty in higher education Librarians Think tanks Intelligence Community Broadcast media Journalists and professional authors

How do we do it now? Or do we? Computing and the Humanities Focus on semi-passive analysis Emphasis on publication Social science & empirical data How well do we work with heterogeneous data? How well do we work with multiple languages? Computer and Information Science How far have we gone in document understanding? Do we distinguish encyclopedic/semantic data?

How do we do it now? Or do we? Cultural Grant Agencies: IMLS, NEA, NEH Governmental libraries: LOC to public libs Governmental museum/sites: SI, NPS Intelligence agencies: CIA, NSA, etc. NSF: SBE, experiments with DLI, ITR

What do we need to do? Provide new kinds of training Cultural Informatics As self-standing discipline? As new specialty in History/Anthro/classics etc. As new specialty within Computer Science As logical extension of Lib and Info Science

What do we need to do? Core cultural informatics experts 50? Able to coordinate many different efforts History/Information Science Domain Specific experts 100s/1000s of experts in Area Studies/Lang Tech etc. Build up to 100? Grad students/postdocs Research support: $50m/year?

What do we need to do? Create technological infrastructure Broaden/expand the evaluation forums More TREC/ACE/DUC/CLEF/SENSEVAL etc. Build knowledge resources Parallel corpora, lexica, portable heuristics Focus on broad semantic as well as encyclopedic analysis Homo ignavus (lat.) ~ “bad man” but …

What do we need to do? First cut: 100 languages in five years Allow $1,000,000/language $100m US Knowledge Sources --> 1922 (Pub Dom) City directories, Census, Newspapers & Periodicals Encyclopedias, school texts, manuals Maps, gazetteers Allow avg $1,000,000/year @ 300 years: $300m

What do we need to do? World peace and prosperity are the goal What US agencies do what? IMLS, NEH, NEA, LOC, SI, NPS all have roles But much work must be situated in NSF Cultural informatics includes scientific and engineering research NSF should, at the least, incubate these aspects of cultural informatics

How do we know we are there? Can dynamically plot cultural states across the globe from dozens of language/culture combinations Can support reading/spatial exploration/object analysis customized for many different categories of user