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This system of dynamic contextualization can also be combined with the domain scholarship ontologies mentioned above. For example, if Nietzsche is cited in an essay published in the Wittgenstein research library, the reader could mouse click to the Nietzsche research library and go right to the original source in Nietzsche. There he will have translations of the passage in different languages and commentaries from Nietzsche experts. Scholarship, indeed, is the capacity to analyze the same object with different criteria, and different objects with the same criteria, and this is important not only from a methodological but from an epistemic and cognitive point of view. The objects of the hard and human sciences always result from a process whereby meaning is constructed within a research community. The increase in the number of contributions concerning a certain object actually represents a progressive transformation of this object, insofar as each essay discovers unknown properties. To know that an aphorism is genetically or thematically related to other texts and manuscripts can radically change our comprehension of this object of study: it is as if one had identified a gene on the basis of a certain number of characteristics and then ten scientific articles illustrated hitherto unknown properties and unsuspected relations with other genes, thus appreciably transforming its very definition. This is the epistemological value of the Scholarly Navigation, which permits one to follow very concretely and very closely the epistemological process of object construction.

Dynamic contextualisation can also be seen as a new form of scholarly citation in the digital era, morepowerful than the old citation system because it is bi-directional and dynamic. Bi-directional means that the system can not onlypoint towards a textual passage but also go backwards to the origin of all the references that quote it. Dynamic means that thelist of articles referring to a certain passage is updated automatically without the need to peruse all journals andmonographs manually, as in the case of the Science Citation Index . With this system you can develop automatic bibliometric surveys withoutusing core journals arbitrarily chosen and manually browsed, and it would be the actual give-and-take of real academic discourseregistered automatically on the network through citations that would determine the reputation of scholars—and not a tiny numberof core journals chosen by the editors of the Science Citation Index . I am against the use of impact factor for the evaluation ofscholarship, for a number of reasons I will not mention today, but if we are going to use impact factor, the dynamiccontextualisation could offer a fairer way to realize it.

Semantic knowledge management

A scholarly system of information management should be capable of managing semantically structured information. This function can either be linked to the previous one, the scholarly navigation, or can be implemented in the form of a traditional search engine, but it is important to use Semantic Web technologies, because, as we mentioned, scholarly knowledge comes naturally in the form of graphs with labelled arcs.

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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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