Joris van Zundert
Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands
Age: 40
Interview: 5.2.2013
Profile
Joris van Zundert studied Dutch language and culture at Utrecht University and graduated on an animation scenario of the Middle Dutch novel ‘Van den Vos Reynaerde’. After commercial activities, he started his scientific career as a researcher and specialist of digital scientific data and information at the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services in 2000.
Since 2005 he is researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In 2007 he became Chair of Interedition, a meanwhile European/US initiative to foster interoperability and collaboration in tool development for digital textual scholarship. In 2012 he was added to the management team of the Huygens Institute and became responsible for the ‘Methodology research program’ aimed at integrating suitable digital tools and techniques into the humanities methodological approaches.
As a researcher and developer his main interest lies with the possibilities of computational algorithms for the analysis of literary and historic texts, and the nature and properties of humanities information and data modeling.
View on enhanced publications
Joris has a strong preference for digital publications, because of the ease of discovery, and making citations and references. Non-textual content such as data and multimedia can be easily included. In addition, digital publications can be directly made available and quickly distributed among colleagues.
A drawback of digital publications is the lack of durability, which implies an inherent risk of loss information over time. Moreover, existing standards are applied in a non-uniform way and new forms of publishing often use methods and techniques that are not standard at all, which causes a durability problem. In spite of that, these experiments provide new insights and perspectives leading to new knowledge, which make them interesting.
What is missing in the traditional publication system?
· First of all a peer-review process for publishing tools comparable with that of scholarly articles. Although in principle tools could be evaluated in the same way as research papers and data sets, there are not yet any journals for that purpose.
· In particular for the type of research Joris does a different form of citation would be interesting, i.e. direct citation of another digital application in one’s own article (similar to the concept of transclusion proposed by Ted Nelson). This questions the nature of digital publications and draws attention to the inherent fluidity of texts on the Internet.
· Reciprocal linking would greatly enhance our body of knowledge (although at this time it is not feasible as an open web solution for security reasons and spamming). Reciprocal linkage means that a link from A to B is automatically supplemented with a back-link from B to A. In this way publications would become much more complementary to each other, which would also facilitate annotation and more automated reasoning.
Top features
Downloading data is a top feature when enhanced publications are concerned. It is highly desirable that data underlying an article are also published, at least in some way, but preferably as a web service / API. Only then a network is formed that supports computational humanities and that allows colleagues to apply their own algorithms to material referenced in a publication.
Tools should be integrated with a publication, which makes the results of research more transparent. This does not imply that these tools are part of the publication itself; linking is also acceptable as second best. Not only data, but also queries should be archived, which documents the path of questions a researcher has followed.
A related issue is the formalization of hypotheses and claims in a scholarly discourse. In this respect the current narrative method in the humanities has considerable weaknesses. When formalization is realized, an agent could automatically search through publications to corroborate hypothesizes. We may expect that scholars at some point will communicate hypotheses in a formalized form, but more likely our hopes in this respect should be pinned on advanced language technology.
Sometimes textual expression fails and visualization is required, for example, in explaining the working of collation algorithms or for attractive representation of quantitative data. Diagrams and particularly animations are helpful to provide a deeper insight, but the technical facilities, resources, or support are often not available to make a representation of such a conceptualization.
In summary, the most the important features of enhanced publications are:
- Digital availability of the publication itself
- Data availability
- Processes and algorithms and related tools linked to the publication
- Reliable annotation, i.e. persistently anchored annotations.