Abstract: Textual Intranets: Using Linked Data to comprehend manuscript traditions
By Timothy Belllefleur, University of British Columbia
American Oriental Society Meeting 2017
Friday March 17th afternoon - ANE II, Bunker Hill Room
Omni Hotel, California Plaza, 251 South Olive Street, Los Angeles
“Linked Data” is often described in terms of connecting various separate resources together into a network that can be traversed, queried, and interacted with by the public (see: the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data). As robust standards emerge, compelling as their potential may be, they have not yet particularly addressed how the effort involved in employing them might yield not only unique but also direct benefits to a scholar’s own work in-progress. In the field of textual scholarship, how can these ideas enhance scholars’ ability to interface with their own work? Furthermore, is it possible to employ them with minimal friction to existing formats, methods, and data already in use by scholars in their projects?
Using Linked Data and associated standards, including JSON-LD, the International Image Interoperability Framework, the Web Annotation Data Model, and a limited set of established data ontologies, I will present my answer to these questions in the form of a use-case using a portion of my work on Sathaye’s project “The Cultural and Textual History of Sanskrit Riddle-Tales.” The project, which aims to produce a digital edition of the medieval Sanskrit story collection Vetālapañcaviṃśati, consists of some 90+ significantly manuscripts of images and TEI-encoded text, as well as a variety of secondary sources and critical edition-specific data (stemmata, corrections, etc). I will demonstrate how Linked Data can be employed on top of the existing material to aggregate information about the text-collection and to connect primary and secondary materials, media, and information in such a way that they may be easily cross-referenced and retrieved. One concrete example here is the comparison and sourcing of some 675+ proverbial verses spread across 25 stories and an opening/closing frame, a process which has up to this point only been undertaken in part and manually by Ludwik Sternbach’s 1971 The Kāvya Portions in the Kathā Literature using an 1881 critical edition by Heinrich Uhle. All this is accomplished without sacrificing the desired terseness of mark-up in the existing data and remaining flexible to future change (i.e. text not yet transcribed, further manuscript discovery possible). Furthermore, this Linked Data layer provides access to the complex network of interrelated data in such as way as to permit otherwise-difficult analysis of a corpus of this size.