Digital Hermeneutics: Agora And The Online Understanding Of Cultural Heritage

In SEM each event is defined by four elements, i.e. actor, location, period and type. The core of digital hermeneutics is formed by two components: object-event relationships and event-event relationships. By making explicit relationships between the objects and events, and between the events themselves we can facilitate users in their access and in- terpretation processes of objects in online cultural heritage collections

The Web has offered cultural heritage institutions and their public a medium rather than a product [8], changing their traditional task from information interpreters to that of in- formation providers [6]. As information providers, cultural heritage institutions therefore need to think about the way they provide meaningful access to and presentation of their collection. They furthermore need to think about how users may enrich their collection descriptions with their personal perspectives. The information flow from heritage institu- tions to the public thus needs to be supplemented with an information flow from the public to the heritage institution. This two-way information flow, where the producers and in- terpreters of Web applications meet, marks the Web as a place of dialogue [17].

As information about the historical context of the object is currently not present in the museum database, we automati- cally enrich the database records with historical events from the “A Child in War” book by using information extraction techniques. Details of our approach can be found in [15, 10].

The historical event information is modeled according to the Simple Event Model (SEM) [16]. To maximize interoperabil- ity, SEM is aimed at minimal modelling of events (similar to the Event Ontology [9] and Lode [12]) but it has the added benefit of being compatible with other external, and complex vocabularies and event models.

Structured event descriptions that facilitate the development of digital hermeneutics are sparse or biased to- wards a specific collection or topic. The development of dig- ital hermeneutics in the historical domain is therefore chal- lenged by the current state-of-the-art in language technology to extract the event information from texts. In this section, we identify the main challenges we face in the automatic creation of historical narratives for digital hermeneutics.[..]

The main building blocks in the interpretation process of history and collection objects are historical events and the relations between these events and the objects. A collection object on its own, has no meaning; by adding events to the object’s description we provide its historical context. This gives the object meaning and makes it possible to interpret it. A single historical event often gives only a part of the whole historical context of an object, therefore narratives are important in the interpretation process. A narrative is formed by a chain of historical events. In principle, any sequence of historical events can form a narrative, however, we define a set of event-event-relationships from which nar- ratives follow that are meaningful from a historical perspec- tive. We call these narratives proto-narratives, as they are key to the interpretation process of users.

In this paper we aim to answer two questions: (i) what object-event-relations and event-event-relations support and enhance access to and interpretation of cultural heritage col- lections? and (ii) how can we model historical event descrip- tions to facilitate this access and interpretation?

We distinguish three types of object-event-relationships defining the event dimension of objects. The first two types of object-event relationships are given by the historical context as the majority of the general public will perceive it; what historical event, such as, a war or important invention is related to this object?

i The object depicts an event (e.g., Attack on Yogyakarta) or aspect thereof (e.g., an actor, a place) ii The object is used or functions in an event (e.g., a sword is used in a war)

In addition to the object-event relations that are related to the content of the object, there is a third type of object- event relationships that tells us more about the history of the object itself, such as, the creation of the object or its inclusion in a museum collection.

..the basic event-event relations that are defined by three elements, i.e. two different events and a relationship type. We distinguish three basic relation- ship types, corresponding to three of the event properties:

A topological or location-based relationship: two events are related because they involve the same place (e.g., Yo- gyakarta) B conceptual or type-based relationship: two events are re- lated because they involve the same type (e.g., War) C biographical or actor-based relationship: two events are related because they involve the same actor (e.g., Toha).

Digital hermeneutics is the encounter of hermeneutics and Web technology [1]. Traditionally, hermeneutics has been a theory of interpretation in the humanities. With the advent of the Web, this theory needs to be amended to account for the interpretation of information in a digital environment. Digital hermeneutics forms the appropriate context to think about providing access to and interpretation of online col- lections of cultural heritage institutions. Its main aim is to investigate the relation between the human interpretation process and Web applications supporting that interpreta- tion process.