Abstract
Chapter one introduces an innovative, item-based approach to modeling and managing complex research data as implemented in the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment (OCHRE). The OCHRE platform is designed to accommodate the most basic need of academic research: the ability to observe anything and everything needed to understand a given subject and to keep track of what has been said about it. This is made possible by using a framework for data that is on the one hand flexible and on the other hand comprehensive. This approach has been applied successfully by the authors over the past twenty years in a wide range of fields: archaeology, history (economic history, legal history, history of science), language studies, literary studies, paleontology, philology, and sociology. And, in principle, it is applicable to any field of research. Through examples, illustrations, and extensive case studies from active research projects, the hope is that scholars will gain a fresh computational perspective and will be inspired and motivated to explore new ways to apply database computing methodology to their research.
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Notes
- 1.
See Huggett (2015a, p. 90) who reflects on the questions, “What effect does the process of structuring data for a database have on the way that we think about that data, on the way we go about recording that data, the way in which we retrieve that data, and the way in which we subsequently analyse that data [11]?”.
- 2.
We describe the OCHRE Data Service here, but see Cox and Verbaan (2018), especially their chapters 7–10, for a broader discussion of research data services.
- 3.
https://www.crane.utoronto.ca/. Since 2012, the project, originally based at the University of Toronto, has been awarded over 4.5 million dollars from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
- 4.
A Harris matrix is a highly structured sequence diagram used by archaeologists to depict stratigraphic relationships over time. See Edward C. Harris (1979).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
From Atkinson’s project description in the OCHRE Project Gallery, https://voices.uchicago.edu/ochre/project/florentine-catasto-of-1427/.
- 8.
- 9.
From Lidgard’s personal website at https://www.fieldmuseum.org/about/staff/profile/101.
- 10.
From the abstract to Stratford’s book on the subject: “This volume focuses on a set of documents pertaining to a series of events that took place in one year. They reveal a tapestry of trade disruptions, illnesses, and commerce, as well as illuminate the relationships between texts and their material context, between narrative and time, and between economic forces and individual agency” (Stratford 2017).
- 11.
- 12.
For background on the project, see Stolper (2007).
- 13.
See the PFA project website (https://isac.uchicago.edu/research/projects/persepolis-fortification-archive) for a description of the various photographic methods employed by the project, from conventional photography to high-resolution scanning, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
INFRA was re-written first in 1995 using Borland’s Delphi, based on Turbo Pascal, then in 1996 using Delphi 2, with Object Pascal for 32-bit Windows.
- 17.
An ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) driver provided the interface between the application frontend and the database backend.
- 18.
- 19.
First on the list of greatest Java apps ever written is the software that controlled the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover as it explored the red planet in 2004.
- 20.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) first created the official XML 1.0 Specification in 1998.
- 21.
PC Magazine, May 26, 1998, p. 230.
- 22.
See also Randall (1997).
- 23.
“Tamino” is an acronym: Transactional Architecture for Managing Internet Objects.
- 24.
“Tamino’s key differentiator is native storage and retrieval of well-formed or valid XML documents, along with the integrated management of Internet objects and SQL data, transaction support, high performance, and high scalability” (Schöning and Wäsch 2000).
- 25.
In this scenario, the Java application that runs locally on a user’s personal computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) acts as the “client” which interacts over the Internet with the Tamino “server” which is running remotely in a data center.
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Schloen, S.R., Prosser, M.C. (2023). Introduction. In: Database Computing for Scholarly Research. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46696-0_1
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