do we do europeans? there is wolfgang wildgen at u. of bremen (_process,
image, meaning_).
jerry
At 09:44 AM 10/18/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Business:
>
>AL: Sowa, Bringsjord and Kirschenbaum have all confirmed. Trevor Harris
>supposedly will. We can invite one more person. Who?
>
>Proposed Speakers / Topic
>
>Kathy Ball -- Georgetown, nlp <http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/cball.html>
>Niels Finnemann -- history of computer/social impacts
>Lev Manovich -- new media aesthetics, <http://www.manovich.net/index.html>
>Martha Blodgett -- information communities in library context, UVa
>Kathy Ryall -- Mitsubishi Lab, interface,
><http://www.merl.com/people/ryall/>
>Jim French -- navigation and information retrieval, UVa
><http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~french/>
>Dave Luebke -- graphics, UVa
><http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/profs/luebke.html>
>Dave Brogan -- graphics, UVa
><http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/profs/brogan.html>
>Aldona Towner -- is there an nlp person at IBM?
>Ben Schneiderman -- information visualization
><http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/>
>Bill Buxton -- interface <http://www.billbuxton.com/>
>David Noble -- electronic communities, coming here anyway in November,
>maybe just sit-in
>
>
>Topic: Data Structures
>Leader(s): John Unsworth and Daniel Pitti
>
>JU: What we're not talking about today: not talking about very basic data
>structures that computers use to manage data--lists, arrays, hash tables,
>etc.; character sets (?);
>
>DP: Usually use the term structured information rather than data
>structures.
>
>AL: To what extent to we want to step back from actual implementations--to
>talk about classification systems, ontologies, logic, etc before we talk
>about DTD's and databases.
>
>JM: Historicization is important. We need to talk about classification
>systems from Aristotle on . . . It's a misnomer to state that we're
>talking about structured information; really, we're talking about
>re-structured information.
>
>JD: How are we to understand the development of database structures in the
>history of set theory? Relational databases first appeared in the
>late-60's and early-70's. Why is this?
>
>JU: The structures we're talking about assume important things about the
>data: hierarchy, atomical units, relations.
>
>GR: Would you consider a character set a data structure?
>
>DP: Computers weren't really interesting to humanists until computers were
>able to name things--to specify their own semantics. To name things and
>to specify structures. Two technologies most frequently used--databases
>and markup languages.
>
>Not talking about visually or aurally structured information here, just
>text.
>
>Markup. The _Gentle Introduction_ seems quite ancient now. Written about
>SGML without any knowledge of XML; talks about many things which have now
>been eliminated in XML.
>
>Email between Allen Renear and Jerry McGann.
>
>Encoding is an interpretation. A DTD could not be written to capture all
>aspects of a text.
>
>Important distinction: procedural vs. declarative markup
>
>The _Gentle_ doesn't delve into the philosophical issues.
>
>Primary assumption that differentiates markup from relational databases:
>hierarchy. Markup assumes that text is inherently hierarchical.
>
>JM: Could you say something about standoff markup?
>
>JD: What kinds of information are appropriate for markup, for databases,
>and for a third category of structures?
>
>RD: Lets take a step back and talk about theories of representation. It's
>just as important to talk about what's not represented in any structure.
>Let's look at a wider range of knowledge representation, theories of this
>beyond applications in the computer.
>
>DP: The introduction of computers forces us to concentrate on sturctures
>that are processable.
>
>What types of information best fit our two tools, databases and markup?
>
>Database:
>info. w/ repeating patterns
>
>Markup Language:
>ordered information--is the order of the objects important
>
>WM: What is the "is" of text? Renear says that "text is." How well
>accepted is that?
>
>WM: Are we relativists or positivists? Are we theorists or practitioners?
>
>AL: I would like to suggest that we first attempt to be theoreticians.
>And then second, practitioners.
>
>JU: I suggest that we work first as practictioners and second as
>theoreticians. We should start with constraints.
>
>TH: Fundamental conflict: representing things for what they are vs.
>representing things for a purpose.
>
>JU: Ask students to model their families as XML, object-oriented database,
>relational database.
>
>JD: classification aspect is one thing we're talking about here, but
>aren't we also talking about metalanguages. How do we talk about the
>languages that we are using.
>
>JU: What do you mean by metalanguage? Grammars? Semantics?
>
>JD: We should be aware of what it means to talk about a system of
>representation as a system of representation. These tools assume that
>we're making a system of representations about a system of
>representations. Should we talk about meta structures and what they
>"mean"?
>
>Certain ways of assuming that you enter data into a database or a markup
>language. How do we describe the way we use this?
>
>JU: Rules of integrity. DTD--you must parse a document according to rules
>of integrity. Relational database--relational algebra enforces rules of
>integrity. Object-oriented databases don't enforce rules of integrity.
>
>What's the syntax here? And where are the semantics of the syntax
>expressed.
>
>In object-oriented systems, perhaps you hide the syntax in the methods.
>You don't declare at the beginning very many rules. There's no way to
>tell if the objects are internally consistent.
>
>GR: Process of structuring. How do you go about trying to find or force
>structure on data. There is a moment when you're trying to discover
>structure when exploratory markup is very helpful. That is when you're
>still trying to find the structure. Markup languages like CoCa. (TACT
>uses CoCa.) Developed by Susan Hockey. Used in linguistics.
>
>TH: CoCa was a late '70's markup language that was developed on a
>particular computer.
>
>JM: Has a brief description of it in her book.
>
>GR: Key philosophical thing. "1" is true of "act" until you get to "2."
>
><act 1> xxx xxx xxx xxx <act 2> xxx xxx xxx
>
>SR: Suspicious of distinction between procedural and descriptive.
>
>JU: Procedures are, in fact, descriptive. But only implicitly
>descriptive.
>
>SR: XML is a procedural language that doesn't have its procedures defined
>yet.
>
>DP: Much of what people actually markup are implicitly procedures. You
>want someting to happen to the text.
>
>TH: You do this with a purpose. You want to call a procedure at the last
>minute, maybe, but you do have an intention.
>
>DP: 125 different occasions for which italics were used in the OED.
>Should we make 125 tags?
>
>SR: Almost the same as saying that typography is not semantic. Or layout
>is not semantic. That's just wrong.
>
>DP: Maybe distinction should be noun vs. verb.
>
>GR: This method--CoCa--describes a very humanities oriented-method of
>processing the text. XML encourages another, a distanced evaluation of
>the entire structure before entering into it. CoCa describes a linear
>method of reading. It's very hard to do document analysis in a
>hierarchical manner. CoCa is serial.
>
>TDBSGML -- with a lookup table, you can take a tact database and convert
>to a TEI-lite document.
>
>JU: Two questions. milestone vs. continuation of truth until stated
>otherwise
>
>GR: Instead of "closing" tags, you change the value of the variable to
>"off" or "stop."
>
>Good exploratory markup language doesn't enforce hierarchy from the
>beginning.
>
>JU: Is this pointing to a different between a deductive and an inductive
>approach. The inductive approach would use exploratory markup.
>
>GR: How do we do document analysis as a practice?
>
>JD: Pedagogical methods. CoCa might be a very good pedagogical tool.
>Doesn't require a pre-existing DTD.
>
>JU: This points to how comfortable we are about some positivist notions of
>text. We laugh about turning metaphor "off," but yet we have a sense of
>metaphor as a bounded thing.
>
>What differnt models or tools might be more appropriate at differnt
>moments of analysis, different places in the process.
>
>Or maybe have students markup a text, feed to "Fred" or other agent that
>will return the DTD implicit, and see how you structured.
>
>RD: Look at theories of text. Then have students try to markup texts
>according to these different theories.
>
>JU: In February we'll have Paul Eggert visit and talk about
>JIT--just-in-time markup.
>
>Email URL about this.
><http://idun.itsc.adfa.edu.au/ASEC/PWB_REPORT/choice.html>
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