Welcome To POSTDATA
The project is conceived from an interdisciplinary point of view and it is structured in three different dimensions to reflect the need of building bridges between the disciplines, users and methodologies: academic and philological, technological, and social and user-oriented.
The project will lead to the creation of a digital platform for poetry edition targeting different kind of users: scholars with academic purposes who want to work on critical digital editions, non-experienced uses that want to read, share and learn more about poetic traditions and also companies who will use this resource for different application in fields like education, psychology, tourism or cultural purposes. Accessibility is considered one of the key considerations to ensure the success of the platform so all technologies used will be hidden to most users. In this way, the platform will offer a user-friendly environment for people who do not posses any technical computing abilities.
Project Objectives
From the philological point of view, the main objective of this proposal will be to develop a conceptual standardization to build an abstract model for poetry representation based on existing philological concepts taken from projects, manuals and corpora from the different traditions. Furtheremore this phase is divided into three secondary objectives:
• To carry out a comparative analysis of digital projects and repertoires from different poetic traditions and extract the main conceptual elements and metadata shared by most of them.
• To analize the evolution of manuals and academic studies on poetry in order to understand the evolution of theories and to choose the most adequate concepts for its digital representation.
• To create an abstract model of representation with the essential common elements extracted in the first two objectives.
From the technological point of view, the project objective is to translate the philological standardization described in the previous model into existing digital humanities standards in order to exchange information (mainly TEI-XML for tagging, SQL for structuring, and OWL for publishing datasets as Linked Open Data). The secondary objectives of this pillar will be:
• To study and revise the digital standards which have been created or applied to poetry: TEI-XML verse module, some Dublin Core and Cidoc-CRM elements, FRBRoo, and Europeana Data Model, among others.
• To design a model to analyze and represent the concepts described in the philological conceptualization.
• To build a common ontology using semantic web technologies and W3C standards (such as OWL) and publish the metadata extracted from the philological conceptualization as linked open data (LOD), ready to be shared, linked and improved by the community of users.
• To develop a framework to link data with external existing datasets, such as the data hubs of the Spanish or French National Libraries, the British Museum LOD portal, or the Getty Vocabularies.
From the social and user-oriented point of view, the main objective will be to build a user-friendly environment to manage textual editions and documentary collections using existing standards based on XML, together with other advanced programming languages, query languages and database tools, suitable for different kinds of users (academic, professional and social) without high computing abilities. The secondary objectives of this final phase will be:
• To create a resource that let user make his own choices following a “do-it-yourself”
• To design a publication environment suitable for different types of users: academic users, social users (users with not academic purposes, but literary interests), and professional users (like teachers, musicians, tourist operators, Apps developers, etc.).
• To train academic researchers and professional users in digital humanities tools and possibilities, by offering, together with the environment, webinars, tutorials and learning guides and materials on the technologies used.
• To embed all the content available in this virtual environment into a linked-data framework to let users perform faceted searches with different levels of complexity, based on SPARQL queries, with multiple visualization possibilities.