4/07/12' <title> " Practising Metadata <emph> " The Text Encoding Initiative and " the Architecture of Meaning </emph> </title> " Dr Paul Scifleet Charles Sturt University, Sydney, AU pscifleet@csu.edu.au With Professor Susan P Williams University of Koblenz, Koblenz, DE … research focuses on the organisation of knowledge in virtual spaces. He is interested in the design and management of information resources in networked environments, and in particular, the challenges individuals and organisations face in practice. He is concerned with the ways digital networks and information flows shape (and are shaped by) social and organisational communication and the changing dimensions of this for documenting society. The social organisation of knowledge: the exploration of how our documentary practices are [socially] constituted 1'
4/07/12' Background and context ! Markup Languages (ML) available for over 20 years ! Widespread and growing agreement among professional communities and standards developers about the type of information that must be supported within each domain ! However literature indicates the community vision faces challenges … and many goals may not be realised ( cf. Debreceny & Gray (2003); Wrightson (2007);Sperberg-MacQueen & Burnard (2004) ) ! Arguments for and against the role of markup languages are continuing now, in social media, as programmers argue whether inclusion of metatadata for short message communications (XMPP Vs ATOM Vs JSON .. and combinations within) is worth all the time and effort 4 2'
4/07/12' The research challenge XML transformation XML validation Shared XMLification Data store Document input The process and practices of documenting are black-boxed and/or treated as unproblematic and routine The articulation work involved in documenting and documentation is largely invisible How are the definitions of content and the design of encoded documents being determined in practice? Aim of my work has been to extend existing understandings by providing an in- depth investigation of documentary practices 5 The Study › A survey focusing on how ML’s are being used in practice - 2008, 32 respondents, 12 countries {Australia [1], Denmark [1] France [1] Japan [1] Taiwan [1] Canada [2], Italy [2], Nederland [2], Norway [2] Slovenia [2] United Kingdom [4],USA [13]} - Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): All kinds of texts: focus on literary and linguistic works, widely adopted - Chosen for its maturity. Has been very influential for the design of other semantically rich vocabularies, e.g. Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), Health Markup (HL7) and Legal Markup (LegalML) - Research design comprised 3 data collection instruments: (1) the completion of a questionnaire booklet, (2) the contribution of encoded texts to support the study’s analysis (3) interviews conducted by the researcher 6 3'
4/07/12' Openning up the black box 7 TEI fragment 8 4'
4/07/12' Criticism and concern › Paul Caton (2001) has described this type of encoding as : “ … a signifying practice strongly implicated in a politically conservative human ideology .” › … because a normative encoding practice favours a mechanistic view of content designation that tends to hide the political and performative aspects of the activity of encoding. › Geoffrey Nunberg (1996) has described digitisation as the “morselization” of text into uniform, structured, quantifiable components. › Both share a belief that there is a changing conception of information within this that requires further attention to the practices that surround the design of the material documentary form if we are to ensure that the effort of changing to digital structures and processes does not result in the loss of substantial, meaningful and material human knowledge. 9 TEI fragment 10 5'
4/07/12' Research lens: Practice Theory 1. Prioritises the array of practices that converge on the research phenomena as a field of practice 2. Explores more than routine and normative elements of the activity. 3. Presents a field of practice as a structuring space where interactions amongst the elements of the field are determined by the resources available to the field, their interactions with the habitus (background, knowledge and feel for the game) of the practitioner and the interrelationships of these things with each other. 4. Is allied with a social constructionist epistemology that emphasises the relational idiom between people and artefacts and their interaction. 5. Is an interpretive approach to research that presents practice as theory . 11 Conceptual framework for the Field of Practice 12 6'
4/07/12' Mixed method study " 3 interrelated data collection techniques (questionnaire, markup analysis, in- depth interviews) to account for both sides of the encoding relationship ( the documenter’s relationship to the document ) " Questionnaire survey of 32 TEI markup projects (quant. and qual. questions) " In-depth automated markup analysis (28 projects submitted 630 text files) " In-depth interviews with participants representing 15 projects 13 Managing findings 14 7'
4/07/12' Themes in documentary practice 15 Conceptual framework for the Field of Practice 16 8'
4/07/12' Themes in documentary practice 17 Key findings: ML as Standard 18 9'
4/07/12' Themes in documentary practice 19 Key findings: Mission " Rate the degree of autonomy your unit has in deciding which text encoding projects to proceed with. " While more than 78% of scholar-practitioners working on digital encoding projects rated their autonomy as highly autonomous or more, all library- respondents rated their autonomy from somewhat autonomous to not all Raising two issues that we explored further in the study … 20 10'
4/07/12' Questions of Professional Difference “The TEI’s adoption as a model in digital library projects raised some interesting issues about the whole philosophy of the TEI, which had been designed mostly by scholars who wanted to be as flexible as possible … A rather different philosophy prevails in library and information science where standards are defined and then followed closely – this to ensure that readers can find books easily.” (Susan Hockey, discussing the history of the TEI 2004) › Are there different encoding practices emerging within different professional areas of responsibility in the governing institutions, most particularly between academic scholarship and librarianship? › This study could find no evidence of differences between the encoded texts that could be attributed to scholar and librarian › A sense of autonomy may play out in practice and there are different encoding models in play, but they are not attributable to distinctions between scholars and librarians 21 Example of markup analysis 22 11'
4/07/12' Example of markup analysis 23 Example of markup analysis 24 12'
4/07/12' The Perception of Autonomy › The study identified significant organisational influences on the decision making of encoders that influences both what to encode and how it is encoded (depth & detail) › All participants acknowledged - The service orientation of their work (production, for a sometimes unknown user) - Conformance to collaborative projects or production for database distribution and subscription services › However, in a scholarly environment particularly, the influence of organisational arrangements on encoding choices and the institutional influence on documentary practice is often subtle and evidenced only in the general context of organisational doxa (factors like in-kind support and limitations on resources are playing a role but often not recognised for what they are): “ … under these conditions many constraints are not noticed until they are breached.” 25 Key finding 1. An emergent documentary practice - The study presents a profile of documentary practice previously unexplored 2. The document - The profiles of encoded document show no discernible differences based on pre- existing professional domains of practice (not traditional humanities scholarship or librarianship) 3. The documentary task - The categorized list of professionals involved in documentary practice presents an unexpectedly complex picture of collaborative document production - Project directors; IT specialists; content, metadata and markup specialists; digital collections and preservation specialists; editors; financial management and other specialised advisory roles including legal 4. A design process - The patterns show a consistent pattern in design: document analysis, similar procedures for encoding, end user analysis and post implementation review occurring 26 13'
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