0.32 Scholarly information management: a proposal  (Page 9/11)

There are different kinds of links to express the range of relations between primary and secondary sources. For example, we could distinguish between positive and negative citations of an article; or between philological, rhetorical, or philosophical analyses of a text passage; or between archaeological, historical, or stylistic analyses of a painting or an artefact. We need to have software agents to exploit these relations, like a bibliometric application that takes into account not just of the number of citations of an article, but also their quality—positive/negative, agree/disagree, etc.—to calculate a weighted impact factor; or an application to manage index of concepts according to the philosophical domain ontologies. If we codify all this information using a standard language (like RDF), all the computers connected to the Internet could refer to and analyze it, and everybody could program applications to use it in ways that we can’t even imagine.

This was the original idea of Tim Berners Lee, and, as you may have noticed, the title of my text is an homage to the thirtieth anniversary of the paper in which he described the project of the World Wide Web. That paper—judged “vague, but exciting” by his boss, Mike Sendall—already contained the fundamental idea of what Berners-Lee later developed under the name of Semantic Web. Tim Berners Lee was fully aware that structuring knowledge in form of a tree would “not allow the system to model the real world.” Information Management: A Proposal, Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, March 1989, May 1990, (External Link) ; Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web , London/New York, Texere, 2000, pp. 229-251.

Interfaces

Interface is a very important element for any information system in general and particularly for a website aiming to represent the complex knowledge relationships used in science or scholarship. In this case, a single unique interface cannot fit the needs of different scholarly communities and therefore I don’t have in mind to present you the ideal interface. On the contrary, I would like only to report my experience, my own trial and error process, in designing an interface capable of representing the concept of dynamic contextualization, hoping that it could be useful for designing similar websites. Dynamic contextualization is a coherent and rigorous concept, but, as it turned out, quite difficult to transpose in an intuitive and easy navigable interface. In the HyperNietzsche website, designed in 2003, contextual information was displayed using a vertical bar on the left of the screen: while navigating the website, the contextualization sidebar presented the user with all of the contributions related to the document in the form of a list of hyperlinks. See Paolo D’Iorio, “Nietzsche on New Paths: The HyperNietzsche Project and Open Scholarship on the Web,” in Maria Cristina Fornari (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche. Edizioni e interpretazioni , Pisa, ETS, 2006, pp. 475-496, also available at the address: (External Link) . It seemed a simple, reasonable and standard solution (if standard means the fact that a lot of websites were designed using a left sidebar and users were more and more familiar with it). Nevertheless, users experienced difficulties with the navigation and they were not even able to visualise the facsimile or the transcription of a Nietzsche manuscript. Starting from the version 0.4 of HyperNietzsche, we therefore introduced a series of new Web pages, called “views,” which didn’t contain contextual information and made navigation easier and more perspicuous. Finally, at the end of 2007, we decided to radically modify the interface and the conception of the website to mark this turning point, we changed the name of the project from HyperNietzsche to Nietzsche Source. Besides, “hyper,” “hypertext” has always been rather vague and foggy concept and the attempts to make it more precise haven’t been particularly successful; and now it sounds quite retro. “Source,” on the contrary, is an old idea in the humanities but one that is just as relevant as it has always been. More vintage than retro. It also has a technological meaning (code source) and a political one (open source), but it is true that the principal meaning refers to knowledge in general and to the philological sources in particular. It suggests the concrete and documented nature of research and it also indicates that in the websites bearing this name we could find the essential primary and secondary sources for anyone who wants to study the life and work of an author.