Research Infrastructure for the Study of Eurasia (RISE): Towards a flexible and distributed digital infrastructure for resource access via standardized APIs and metadata
數位典藏與數位人文國際研討會（第9屆）=International Conference of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities (9th)
出版日期
2018.12.18
頁次
21 - 37
出版者
臺灣數位人文學會
出版地
臺北市, 臺灣 [Taipei shih, Taiwan]
資料類型
會議論文=Proceeding Article
使用語言
英文=English
附註項
1. Hou Ieong “Brent”, Ho: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. 2. Sean Wang: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany, and Syracuse University, United States. 3. Belouin, Pascal: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. 4. Chen, Shih-Pei: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
關鍵詞
digital humanities; sinology; cyberinfrastructure
摘要
Digital humanities (DH) is a burgeoning field of research in sinology and Asian studies more broadly, and its diversity and maturity necessitate a digital research infrastructure fit for DH-focused scholars’ specific needs. In particular, the DH landscape evolved in a way that encourages fragmentation of both sources and tools, and these compartmentalized resources centered around disciplines and texts. RISE (formerly known as “Asia Network”) is our solution to address this fragmentation across disciplines. It is a pioneering approach for resource dissemination and emerging data analytics (such as text mining and other fair-use, consumptive research techniques) in the humanities. It is a language-agnostic software that facilitates the secure linkage between third-party research tools to different third-party textual collections (both licensed and open-access ones) via application programming interfaces (APIs). Put more simply, it reduces the distances among DH resources not by duplicating them in a central repository, but by linking them together via flexible APIs. It revolutionizes how scholars can work with textual sources by promoting a flexible, networked approach to digital infrastructure development. Crucially, RISE is a loosely-coupled software with flexible topologies; it can enable both federated or centralized linkages, and it can even “disappear” as long as its API and metadata standards remain in place to facilitate communications among distributed databases and tools in the back-end. Thus, unlike large- scale infrastructural projects, RISE actively lowers the profile of centralized infrastructure and instead promotes existing tools and resources by enabling their interoperability in a flexible and distributed manner. As a result, it allows scholars to fully leverage the potential of material digitization and digital research tools without re-creating silos of resources in the digital realm. We believe that RISE, coupled with developing novel licensing models suited for digital research methods (including consumptive research like text mining), would significantly improve the infrastructure behind DH scholarly research in sinology and beyond.
目次
1. Introduction 2. Landscape of DH in sinology 3. Primary issues to be addressed 3.1. Unconnected resource silos 3.2. Heterogeneous access and exchange data formats 3.3. Data import into (browser-based) digital research tools 4. “RISE”: a basic cyberinfrastructure for DH research in sinology 4.1. Main concepts 4.1.1. Users 4.1.2. Organizations 4.1.3. Domain objects 4.2. Progressive software architecture and development 4.3. Authentication and access control 4.4. Dealing with various resource formats 5. Conclusion 6. Acknowledgments
