e-Science developments in the UK: temporal mapping and location aware web

technologies for the humanities

Stuart Dunn

Centre for e-Research, King’s College London

Digital Humanities 2008, Oulu

e-Science methods and next steps

* Artifacts and representation: from text to beyond text

* Data: from data deluge to ‘complexity deluge’

* Collaboration: from talking about stuff to doing stuff

* Interdisciplinarity: new kinds of relationships between disciplines (e.g. dance and archaeology)

* Interpretation: employment of high-end technologies (e.g. HPC) to reach new interpretations of our data

e-Science methods and next steps

* Artifacts and representation: from text to beyond text

* Data: from data deluge to ‘complexity deluge’

* Collaboration: from talking about stuff to doing stuff

* Interdisciplinarity: new kinds of relationships between disciplines (e.g. dance and archaeology)

* Interpretation: employment of high-end technologies (e.g. HPC) to reach new interpretations of our data

• 'We will use AG in the near future wanting to recreate a situation where scholars from around the world would get together with a document and try to make a reading of it. We have not been able so far to have the same view from wherever we are'

A&H: Using the services

• 'They allow me to talk to a network of interested scholars who focus with me on digitised high resolution surrogates of manuscripts which we can all view together in real time as in remote location and which each of the partners can manipulate and zoom in and out at real time'

Arts-humanities.net: support for activities

King’s College London: Digital Laboratory

King’s College London: Digital Laboratory

King’s College London: Digital Laboratory

“The tools we have most commonly used to interact with data, such as the "desktop metaphor" employed by the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, are not really suited to this new challenge. I believe we need a "Digital Earth". A multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet, into which we can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data.”

Al Gore, speech at UC Berkeley, January 1998

http://www.isde5.org/al_gore_speech.htm

Locating ourselves within the Digital Earth

Ecotricity wind turbine, Reading

Underlying assumptions

Google Earth

[v. 4.2 (beta)]

Ecotricity

Asda, Lower Earley

Berkshire [v. 1.0]

• A tool for automated and consistent georeferencing of both digital and non-digital objects

• A consistent method of coding spatial and temporal data simultaneously (KML is good for some things, not for others)

• Articulation of the benefits of collaborative environments (beyond email and Google)

• Computational power - e.g. for processing mass (and massive) bulks of satellite imagery