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Capacities

Now we stand in front of the shelves of our digital library and we see how ontologies can help dynamically arrange the books according to the glasses we use to perceive them. What about opening the books? What happens when we start to navigate not only in the library but in the documents contained in the library? The first of the core features listed under Capacities provides an answer to this question.

Scholarly navigation

The traditional scholarly infrastructure has been useful because with a simple bibliographical reference at the bottom of a page, an author was able to refer in a very precise manner to a specific passage contained in another article or in a book. A scholar in pre-digital times did not navigate the library by following a list of “hits” like the kind produced by Google. Scholarly knowledge is not structured like a list or a tree, but rather like a graph. In mathematics, a graph indicates a set of objects connected by links, where the links can be labelled. These links not only indicate the connection between two objects, but explain the type of—or reason for—the connection. The structure of a set of documents connected by references in footnotes, which indicate both a link and the reason for the link, can be formally described as a graph. Understanding this helps to dispel a common misunderstanding—that the difference between printed books and hypertext is that a book ensures a sequential reading whereas hypertext introduces non-sequential reading. Nothing could be more false in the realm of scholarly research, because a key characteristic of scholarly reading is precisely that it is non-sequential. A classicist at work in the library is likely to have a dozen or more books open on the table and to jump from one to the other: he verifies, he looks for connections, he follows links made explicit through the venerable tradition of scholarly citation chaining.

Now that we have a clear picture of how the scholar works, the question becomes: how can we transpose this good old system of scholarly citation into a digital infrastructure, producing a new referencing system that employs all of the powers of the Internet? I proposed a feature called dynamic contextualisation at the level of database programming and scholarly navigation at the level of user interface. Thanks to this feature, when a user selects a critical essay he will be automatically presented with a list of all the primary sources cited in the essay, a list of all the articles cited by the selected essay, and, more importantly, a list of all the essays in which other authors cite the essay currently being viewed. When a user selects a manuscript page, the system will immediately present all the transcriptions, editions and translations available for that page, as well as all critical essays commenting the selected page.

Often research infrastructures for the humanities are completely based on search engines; to the point that they are actually more search infrastructures than research infrastructures. Scholarly navigation attempts to provide a complementary model, in which you don’t need to search words to find that fundamental piece of information that allows the production of new interpretations, that is: who has previously commented on this passage and how?

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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