11:32 < edsu> @pirate [tdih]
11:32 < zoia> edsu: Claude Shannon be born in Gaylord, Michigan.  Known as th'
              inventor 'o information theory, Shannon be th' first to use th'
              word "wee bit."  Shannon, a contemporary 'o Johny-boy von
              Neumann, Howard Aiken, 'n Alan Turin', sets th' stage fer th'
              recognition 'o th' basic theory 'o information that could be
              processed by th' machines th' other pioneers developed.  He
              investigates information distortion, redundancy 'n noise, 'n (1
              more message)
11:33 < edsu> @more
11:33 < zoia> edsu: provides a means fer information measurement.  He
              identifies th' wee bit as th' fundamental unit 'o both data 'n
              computation.

Happy Birthday Cap’n Shannon.

Last week’s Washington DC Semantic Web Meetup focused on History and Genealogy Semantics. It was a pretty small, friendly crowd (about 15-20) that met for the first time at the Library of Congress. The group included folks from PBS, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Center for History and New Media–as well as some regulars from the Washington DC SGML/XML Users Group.

Brian Eubanks gave a presentation on what the Semantic Web, Linked Data and specifically RDF and Named Graphs have to offer genealogical research. He took us on a tour through a variety of websites, such as Land Records Database at the Bureau of Land Management, Ancestry.com, Footnote and Google Books and made a strong case for using RDF to link these sorts of documents with a family tree.

As more and more historic records make their way online as Web Documents with URIs, RDF becomes an increasingly useful data model for providing provenance and source information for a family tree. On sites like Ancestry.com it is important to understand the provenance of genealogical assertions, since Ancestry.com allows you to merge other people’s family trees into your own, based on likely common ancestors. In situations like this researchers need to be able to evaluate the credibility or truthfulness of other people’s trees–and being able to source the family tree links to the documents that support them is an essential part of the equation.

Along the way Brian let people know about a variety of vocabularies that are available for making assertions that are of value to genealogical research:

• rdfcal : for Events
• BIO : for biographical information
• Relationship : for describing the links between people
• FOAF : for describing people
• TriG : for identifying the assertions that a researcher makes and linking them to a given document

The beautiful thing about RDF for me, is that it’s possible to find and use these vocabularies in concert, and I’m not tempted to create the-greatest-genealogy-vocabulary that does it all. In addition, Brian pointed out that sites like dbpedia and geonames are great sources of names (URIs) for people, places and events that can be used in building descriptions. Brian has started the History and Genealogy Semantics Working Group which has an open membership, and encourages anyone with interest in this area to join. While writing this post I happened to run across a Wikipedia page about Family Tree Mapping, which indicated that some genealogical software already supports geocoding family trees. As usual it seems like the geo community is leading the way in making semantics on the web down to earth and practical.

I followed Brian by giving a brief talk about the Chronicling America, which is the web front-end for data collected by National Digital Newspaper Program, which in turn is a joint project of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. After giving a brief overview of the program, I described how we were naturally led to using Linked Data and embracing a generally RESTful approach by a few factors:

• a need to create persistent Cool URIs for newspaper titles, issues and pages so that people could reference them.
• the desire to make views available for the institutions around the United States that supply us with data
• the need to make our data available as a participant in the Digging Into Data Challenge
• a desire to kick the tires on the relatively new Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange vocabulary for describing aggregations of resources on the Web so that they can be meaningfully harvested

One thing that I learned during Brian’s presentation is that sites like Footnote are not only going around digitizing historic collections for inclusion in their service, but they also give their subscribers a rich editing environment to search and annotate document text. These annotations are exactly the sort of stuff that would be perfect to represent as and RDF graph, if you wanted to serialize the data. In fact the NSF funded Open Annotation Collaboration project is exploring patterns and emerging best practices in this area. I’ve had it in the back of my mind that allowing users to annotate page content in Chronicling America would be a really nice feature to have. If not at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov proper, then perhaps showing how it could be done by a 3rd party using the API. To some extent we’re already seeing annotation happening in Wikipedia, where people are creating links to newspaper pages and titles in their entries, which we can see in the referrer information in our web server logs. Update: and I just learned that wikipedia themselves provide a service that allows you to discover entries that have outbound links to a particular site, like chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

Speaking of the API (which really is just REST) if you are interested in learning more about it check out the API Document that Dan Chudnov prepared. I also made my slides available, hopefully the speaker notes provide a bit more context for what I talked about when showing images of various things.

Afterwards a bunch of us headed across the street to have a drink. I was really interested to hear from Sam Deng that (like the group I work in at LC) PBS are big Python and Django shop. We’re going to try to get a little brown bag lunch going on between PBS and LC to talk about their use of Django on Amazon EC2, as well as software like Celery for managing asynchronous task queues.

Also, after chatting with Glenn Clatworthy of PBS, I learned that he has been experimenting with making Linked Data views available for their programs. It was great to hear Glenn describe how assigning each program a URI, and leveraging the nature of the web would make a perfect fit for distributing data in the PBS enterprise. It makes me think that perhaps having a session on what the BBC are doing with Linked Data would be timely?

Well into the multi-month thread Tim Berners-Lee offered up a very helpful, historical recap of the “what is a resource” issue , in which he said:

I would like to see what the documents [AWWW and RFC 2616] all look like if edited to use the words Document and Thing, and eliminate Resource.

A Short History of “Resource”

Which, somewhat predictably, started a discussion of what a Document is. However this conversation seemed more tangible and earthy, and culminated in Larry Masinter recommending David M. Levy’s book Scrolling Forward:

… since much of the thought behind it informs a lot of my own thinking about the nature of “Document”, “representation”, “Resource” and the like.

www-tag email message

Now Larry is a scientist at Adobe, a company that knows a thing or two about electronic documents. He also works closely with the W3C and IETF on web architectural issues. So when he suggested reading a book to learn what he means by Document my ears perked up. The interjection of a book reference into this rapid-fire email exchange was like a magic spell, that made me pause, and consider that a working definition of Document was nuanced enough to be the subject matter of an entire book.

I’ve come to expect references to Michael Buckland’s classic What is a Document? in discussions of documents. I hadn’t run across David Levy’s name before so Larry’s recommendation was enough for me to request it from the stacks, and give it a read. I wasn’t disappointed. Scrolling Forward is an ode to documents of all shapes and sizes, from all time periods. It’s a joyful, mind expanding work, that explores the entire landscape of our documents: from cash register receipts, the multi-editioned Leaves of Grass, email messages, letters, books, photographs, papyrus scrolls, greeting cards and web pages. Since this takes place in 212 pages, it is not surprising that the analysis synthesizes rather than being exhaustive. Having received a doctorate in computer science from Stanford, obtained a diploma in calligraphy and bookbinding from the Roehampton Institute, and then worked at Xerox PARC studying the nature of documents for 15 years, Levy’s own professional career is marked by a bringing together of scientific and humanistic disciplines.

One of the key messages of the book is a working definition of the Document. Levy’s draws out his definition largely in contrast to a statement made by David Weinberger in his 1996 Wired piece What’s a Document? where he says:

The fact that we can’t even say what a document is anymore indicates the profundity of the change we are undergoing in how we interact with information and, ultimately, our world.

What is a Document?

To which Levy responds:

We can say what a document is. Doing this, however, requires a somewhat different approach from that which dictionaries take. It requires going beyond word usage. It does require looking at the relevant technologies, but in such a way that we aren’t fixated on them, that we don’t fetishize them. Most of all, it requires immersing ourselves in the social roles these technologies play.

Scrolling Forward p. 23

So Scrolling Forward is a survey of sorts; a survey of document types that are inextricably linked to the social contexts in which they were created. This approach to describing rather than positing a theory of documents dove-tailed nicely with some reading of Wittgenstein I’ve been doing recently. In Wittgenstein’s later period he eschewed positing philosophical theories, but instead attempted to resolve philosophical problems by exploring the richness of language and its use in social settings, or language games, to lay bare the problem in a therapeutic way. Levy takes a similar approach in simply laying out the complex, sometimes contradictory history of documents before us, instead of carving out a logical argument and selecting facts to support it.

Some parts of the book that were of particular interest to me (as a software developer working in the area of digital preservation) were the sections discussing document fixity:

… paper documents, and indeed all documents are static and changing, fixed and fluid. There is a reason why text and graphics editors have a Save button, after all.

Scrolling Forward p. 36

Also of interest was Levy’s analysis of why the idea of “digital libraries” is such a lightning rod of opinion (which perhaps applies to its sister concept “repositories”).

[The] ambiguity between institution and collection is carried through in the phrase “digital library”. For some groups, most notably librarians, the phase refers most directly to institutions that oversee digital collections, while for other professionals, primarily computer and information scientists, it refers to digital collections, without regard to the institutional settings (if any) in which they might be managed … Digital library, it seems to me, draws much of its power from this ambiguity: it provides a name for collections of digital materials that invokes the aura of the modern library and its social mission (library as social institution). But it does so without actually making any commitments to the public good (library as collection).

Scrolling Forward p. 135

And finally, Levy doesn’t shy away from the big questions of how our psychological and religious impulses influence our notions of what documents are.

The human search for and construction of order [...] is our response to the profound mystery, and accompanying anxiety, of existence. Emerging into an unfathomable universe and fearing we are nothing within it, we strive to create a meaningful and ultimately immortal place for ourselves [...] Culture creates the conditions for a meaningful existence, for us to play out our games of physical and symbolic survival. But it is an ongoing performance, a play we can never stop performing, lest we see the back-stage gears and levers and be reminded of the mysterious and terrifying backdrop against which we are performing it. [Documents] are death-transcending, lack-filling artifacts of major proportions. Perhaps they can’t literally prevent our physical demise or fill our deepest sense of lack. But they are the central participants in our attempts to do so. Every one of them — each cash register receipt, each greeting card, each Post-it note — makes a contribution to the collaborative edifice we call human culture. Although few carry the weight of the Bible or the Constitution, all of them inform us of “what is and what we should do”. And in concert they help us create and sustain an orderly, and meaningful human lifeworld.

Scrolling Forward pp. 187-188

Heady stuff to be sure. And now I feel like I’ve traveled far from the beginning of this blog post, and the definition of information resources and the semantic web. Scrolling Forward has given me a very personal perspective on what documents are, and have been–and as a result I’m a bit more hopeful about the future of electronic documents. Working in digital preservation, it’s sometimes pretty easy to give in to despair. I’m not sure what the the application of this perspective is towards the normalization of language in the Architecture of the World Wide Web and RFC 2616. But it seems certain that part of the answer lies in not taking our information technologies too seriously, and trying to stay focused on the roles that they play in our individual and collective lives:

We make a mistake, I believe, when we fixate on particular forms and technologies, taking them, in and of themselves, to be the carriers of what we want either to embrace or resist. Not only do we fail to see the forms and technologies in their full complexity, but we use them, in their symbolic simplicity, as blunt instruments with which to beat one another over the head.

Scrolling Forward p. 198

PS. The bibliography is a great source of new material to read too.
PSS. This blog post was also a not-so-secret experiment in using RDFa and the Bibliographic Ontology to mark up quotations. Check out the rdf assertions you can extract from it using the RDFa Distiller.

Via the discussion list I was able to learn that Shirley Liang (with the help of Nancy Eichacker) was able to locate a transcript of the hearings, which includes the details of Carl Fleischhauer’s demo of a Hypercard / Laser Video Disc based system before the House and later the Senate. Yes, HyperCard. LoC was making a pitch for American Memory before Congress just a few months after Tim Berners-Lee made his proposal to build a “web of notes with links” at CERN. Incidentally, I learned recently in Andrew Lih‘s Wikipedia Revolution, that Ward Cunningham‘s first implementation of Wiki was written using Hypercard.

I digress…and I want to digress more.

As a Library School student in the mid 90s I became a big fan of American Memory. It seemed like an audacious and exciting experiment right on the cutting edge of what the World Wide Web made (and continues to make) possible. The work that Caroline Arms and Carl Fleischhauer did to expose metadata about American Memory collections (with the technical expertise of Dave Woodward) deepened my interest in what LoC was doing. In hindsight, I think seeing this work from afar is what got me interested in trying to find a job at the Library of Congress.

Seeing that American Memory is turning 20 this year made me fess up to a crazy idea of writing a history of the project. In conversation with those much more knowledgeable than me I think I’ve convinced myself that a good place to start would be compiling a bibliography of things that have been written about the project. It seems a relatively simple and logical place to start.