The scholarly field of the digital humanities has recently expanded and integrated its fundamental concepts, historical coverage, relationship to social experience, scale of projects, and range of interpretive approaches. All this brings the overall field (including the related area of new media studies) to a tipping point where it has the potential not just to facilitate the work of the humanities but to represent the state of the humanities at large in its changing relation to higher education in the postindustrial state. Are the digital humanities up to this larger task?

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The state of the digital humanities: A report and a critique

The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science

The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree. Consensus Study Report.

Wordnets have been created in many languages, revealing both their lexical commonalities and diversity. The next challenge is to make multilingual wordnets fully interoperable. The EuroWordNet experience revealed the shortcomings of an interlingua based on a natural language. Instead, we propose a model based on the division of the lexicon and a language-independent, formal ontology that serves as the hub interlinking the language-specific lexicons. The ontology avoids the idiosyncracies of the lexicon and furthermore allows formal reasoning about the concepts it contains. We address the division of labor between ontology and lexicon. Finally, we illustrate our model in the context of a domain-specific multilingual information system based on a central ontology and interconnected wordnets in seven languages.

Challenges for a Multilingual WordNet

Innovation may be triggered by crossing the lines that delineate the fields of spatial knowledge and practice. Transgressing epistemic boundaries could bring about the possibility of new approaches to researching and transforming space. This paper identifies three interrelated types of epistemic boundary, and critically explores how they may be crossed. Set by definitions of the disciplinary subject matter, concepts, and practices, these boundaries may be crossed, respectively, through relational ontology, meta-disciplinary paradigms, and dialogic practices. These crossings, however, have problems of their own. Epistemic practices are both cognitive and social, and need to be addressed through dynamic and democratic multiplicity.

Researching Space, Transgressing Epistemic Boundaries

We report on the experience of creating a socially networked system, the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE), for representing knowledge in the form of relationships between people, documents, and groups Developed as an intercampus, interdisciplinary project of the University of California, this work reflects on a collaboration between scholars in the humanities, software engineering, and information studies by providing an opportunity not only to synthesize different disciplinary perspectives, but also to interrogate and challenge the assumptions each brings to team-based design projects in the digital humanities This work examines socially networked knowledge as both content and methodology for collaboration, calling for further critique and future investigation of epistemological questions in models of social networks

Creating Socially Networked Knowledge through Interdisciplinary Collaboration

The aim of the following report is to outline the content of the lectures given during the First IAOA Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis July 16--20, 2012, Trento, Italy. The report emphasizes some of the hot topics or open questions discussed during the sessions, while reflecting a variety of perspectives on the goals of ontological analysis and the importance of interdisciplinarity in dealing with certain problems.

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Eric Chuk

Papers

Creating Socially Networked Knowledge through Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Diverse perspectives on ontology: A joint report on the First IAOA Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis