[open-humanities] OKFest Session "Open Data and the Panton Principles for the Humanities"

Fri Jul 25 12:17:30 UTC 2014

Hi everyone,

It's taken me a little while, but I've finally had a chance to go through
the notes from the session. They make for a very interesting read. One
thing in particular caught my eye, and it was the difficulty over using the
term 'open data' to describe the objects and products of research in the
Humanities. This is something we tried to fudge with the word 'works' in
the original drafts a few years back, but clearly needs to be addressed in
detail.

Taking up the suggestion in the notes to think about this on a discipline
by discipline level, here's a little thought experiment, based on my own
work as a student of literature (with a very rough science example in the
background).

- I write an article on death in Hamlet (a scientist might write an article
on the common cold in humans)
- Data? My observations on the play, in the form of chosen quotations,
notes, and selections from criticism (the scientist's observations on
patients, supported with a reading of relevant recent research)
- Note that my data is *not* the entire play, this would be the equivalent
of the scientist's human subject
- In other words, Hamlet is *a source of data* for my work

Moving on to publication
- When submitting his article, the scientist also publishes the
(anonymised) dataset he has collected on the common cold in line with the
Panton Principles, allowing his data to be reused and verified by others
- I submit my article, and also publish openly... what? my notes and chosen
quotations will already be in my article, so there won't be much left over.
- I could publish all the material behind my article, notes and quotations:
but, in making this readable, have I not just rewritten my article in the
public domain?
- I suppose just an anthology of quotations (providing all my sources were
PD) might be a useful thing to have available, but the presence of such a
thing would not save anyone following me from having to reread the sources
in full anyway...

What can we conclude from this little experiment for literature?
- There is a distinction between the researcher's dataset and his or her
source.
- The easiest way to make the dataset open would be pushing for open access
to the researcher's article, since the dataset will be heavily embedded in
it
- An alternative option would be open publication of a collection of all
the quotations, etc. used in the article, but this would involve a change
in academic practice, the use of PD sources only, and is of limited utility
for future researchers anyway.

Comments? Questions? Perhaps someone from another discipline could try
something similar? @John - what would this look like for a historian?

J

On 22 July 2014 11:55, Peter Kraker <peter.kraker at tugraz.at> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> James Harriman-Smith asked me to post the results of the OKFest Session on
> "Open Data and the Panton Principles for the Humanities" to this list
>
> The session was well attended, and with Peter Murray-Rust we had one of
> the original authors in the audience. I first gave a short introduction to
> Open Data and the Panton Principles which you can find here:
> http://de.slideshare.net/pkraker/opendata-humanities
>
> Afterwards, we had an animated discussion on the issues of open data in
> the humanities. Then, I asked the participants to go into groups of 3 or 4
> to come up with solutions to these issues. The discussion and the solutions
> were captured by two participants in the Etherpad:
> https://pad.okfn.org/p/Panton_Principles_for_the_Humanities
>
> All in all, the session went very well. I hope that the outcomes are
> useful for your adaptation of the Panton Principles to the humanities. If
> you have any questions, please let me know!
>
> Best,
> Peter
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-- 
James Harriman-Smith
Open Literature Working Group Coordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org/members/jameshs
Skype: james.harriman.smith
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