While Photographic Collections as the Fotothek of the Bibliotheca Hertziana have many images of Inscriptions, or
-Drawings of inscriptions, Epigraphic Databases contain editions of inscriptions with images. This different perspective is a decisive one. The Photographic collection approaches the description of a photograph looking at what it represents and describes it within a description of an object. It is partial to the documentation and to the object. Epigraphic editions, even those with a more holistic approach are biased towards the text or at the best the support on which this is inscribed. There is of course richness within the encounter of the respective valid and complementary perspectives.
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While Photographic Collections as the Fotothek of the Bibliotheca Hertziana have many Photographs of inscriptions, or of
+drawings of inscriptions, Epigraphic Databases contain editions of inscriptions with images. This different perspective is a decisive one. There is of course richness within the encounter of the different perspectives.
Metrical inscriptions may be intuitively associated with a more deep connection between text and context, but as these are not my field of research I will develop my argument on an example which is not immediately relevant to the topic, and I am certain metrical inscriptions experts will not fail to draw their own parallel cases.
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The two disciplines mainly involved in this experiment are Art History and Epigraphy, but Codicology, History and probably also Archaeology and Semantics are not excluded.
- For none of these I am an expert, and for none I can claim results of any type.
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I claim only that there is no technological obstacle to a comprehensive linking across disciplines of information recorded and available online, which can be simply enriched with qualified links in the most common and widespread formats to deliver immediate important results with tools in the hands of everyone.
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I claim in this text that there is no technological obstacle to a comprehensive linking of information recorded and available online, which can be simply enriched with qualified links in the most common and widespread formats to deliver immediate important results with tools in the hands of everyone.
Getting quality content in quality formats, with relevant semantics online, is a much more urgent and challenging task than implementing large infrastructures or newer technologies.
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Searching for research
A "real" link in the Fotothek -verso
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I will try to show something which is not new, namely that different perspectives like those of a photographic collections and epigraphic databases, or the two worlds of knowledge available to researchers as "printed materials" and "online resources" building up in the web, are complementary: while both suffer the same issues (findability, accessibility, quality control, style) they both build knowledge by linking. Linkage in both ways from the web-based-and-digital world to the printed-material world are bidirectionally faulty and hard to make without specific expertise. FAIR-washing practices have made the complexity of this interrelation even more of an hindrance for researchers.
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I will try to show with a practical experiment how we can build knowledge by linking using the expressiveness of the languages of the web, which surpasses that of simple argument, if associated and accompanied by this textual argument. Linkage from the web-based-and-digital world to the printed-material world are bidirectionally faulty and hard to make without specific expertise ane FAIR-washing practices have made the complexity of this interrelation even more of an hindrance for researchers who need to navigate it.
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The researcher (scholarly or not) is in facts the underestimated missing link, not the software or the tools. Numerous collaborative tools, analogue and digital, exist and are actively used, so no such tool, and no specific digital tool can actually claim to close any part of this gap.
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We still need a lot of work to be in a position to fight the mass censorship, to use Eco's words, to which the web contributes so vastly, now at the speed of a artificial intelligence, building false and unreliable contents vertiginously while real knowledge still and always will need painstakingly long time and effort.
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My practical exercise will consist of a naïve step by step experiential path among available documents online, to show how their availability alone, without connections is activated and made valuable only by connections, which are directly embedded in the text of this presentation as RDFa.
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The researcher (scholarly or not) is, in facts, the underestimated missing link, not any software or tools. Numerous collaborative tools, analogue and digital, exist and are actively used, so, no such tool, and no specific digital tool can actually claim to close any part of this gap.
+
We still need a lot of work to be in a position to fight the mass censorship, to use Eco's words, to which the web contributes so vastly, now at the speed of a artificial intelligence, building false and unreliable contents vertiginously fast, while real knowledge still and always will need painstakingly long time and effort.
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My practical exercise will consist of a naïve step by step experiential path among available documents online, to show how their availability alone, without connections is activated and made valuable only by proper connections.
While this experience will resonate in that of any one who has done some research, I propose here a further experiment, as I encode within this same text this connectsion as RDFa, assigning where needed the necessary entities and structures to make the path followed semantically relevant and machine interpretable, thus connecting at a fine granularity the addressed resources.
