2017-05-12

The past few weeks have been full ones for LD4P at Princeton:

  • April 24 - 28: The week of meetings at Stanford went well, with plenty of interesting and informative discussions happening between the scheduled events. The sheer volume of notes has inspired us to set aside structured time solely for the purpose of recapping the meetings and their implications.  
  • May 1: The core group met with Anne Jarvis to brief her on the Stanford meetings, and to discuss possible next steps.
  • May 10: Jennifer Baxmeyer gave a presentation for an event at the Library of Congress called Mapping the Wilderness of Knowledge: The Card Catalog, Past, Present and Future. Her pithy presentation was Evolving Toward a Catalog in the Semantic Web: Princeton’s Project with Jacques Derrida’s Personal Library (not yet published online). Here is a good review of the event.
  • May 11: Claude Willan, a postdoc in the Center for Digital Humanities, kindly met with us to discuss research questions that drove his ‘John Locke likes this’: An ego-network analysis of Locke’s letters. Claude's dataset and our Derrida dataset share a theme of teasing out relationsips between people over time, with academic scholars as our (anticipated) primary users.  

In other news ...

  • Our two students are finishing up the double-blind transcriptions of dedications -- a big step toward encoding it as linked data
  • We have hand-crafted a single linked data description of one of our Derrida items to provide a basis for a new cataloging editor, called Vitrolib, which is under development at Cornell. Hand crafting is currently necessary because tools to convert from MARC, and their underlying ontologies (what they convert to), are in active development.