Humanities ontology requirements and design discussion

Duke humanities-related ontology extensions

At the request of the Duke and Brown VIVO implementation teams we are having a work session on modeling things like acting, archives and portfolios, CD recordings and liner notes, catalogs and catalog essays, choreography collections, commissions, compositions and performances of those compositions, architectural design projects, conducting, directing, dramaturgy, exhibitions, exhibition series, festival participation, film, graphic design, group shows, guest teaching, installations, master classes, photography, prints, public lectures, radio broadcasts, radio interviews, puppetry, scene design, sculptures, solo performances, workshops. Please join in or comment if you're interested.

One approach is to first decide general categories –

  • What of the above are new kinds of outputs, similar to publications but in a different form?
    • is a set design just embodied in the performance or is it documented through drawings and photos that persist and would be citable after the performance is over?
  • What things are more like roles that contribute to events (including performances and exhibits)
    • is the realization of the role of actor, set designer or choreographer in a performance sufficient to record, without any notion of output?
  • Are there things that fall more in the category of awards or professional service?
Here's an example complaint from our Architecture Department:

Professional Practice –

The Vivo profile has been utilized for our faculty in an inaccurate manner regarding their professional practice.  Architectural practice and Art exhibitions are being categorized under “Talks and Presentations.”  This is not an accurate way to describe this very important part of our faculty’s research.  Faculty who make their research, as opposed to writing about it, need to have their work portrayed in a manner that does not imply a one-day effort such as a talk or presentation.  Can there not be a separate category for Practice?  To see a particularly poor representation of this, please see Maria Park’s profile where her exhibitions all appear as though they were a one-hour talk given at these locations, and making the “solo” specification seem particularly out of place as opposed to the distinction it is meant to portray.

This also brings up the need for distinguishing between being the creator of a work vs. being the subject of the work. 

Notes from the meeting

Duke is looking at the existing data in the current faculty reporting system (SES) and trying to represent it in VIVO

  • Art (Visual Studies and Art History)
  • Dance
  • Theater
  • Music

Brown has a lot of interaction with the Rhode Island School of Design – working on committees there, curating exhibits, serving as some sort of a judge; they are looking at a number of departments and have a database table called Artistic Works that have been pulled from the faculty CVs.  There are also broader issues with the humanities to discuss in a less immediate sense.

  • Being on a review committee
    • Related to book reviews but more of a role than an output publication
  • In looking at Music, there is the notion of going on a tour performing a particular music or theater piece authored or directed by a faculty member – and performing multiple roles on the tour. Event series doesn't seem to really capture what goes on the tour – a collection of performances, which in the database is a set of rows.
  • The notion of a citation – you are interviewed by a magazine, a play is reviewed somewhere – not really an award, but belongs in the mix
  • Artistic exhibits – there's also the notion of permanent installation, and touring exhibits, and the distinction between solo and group exhibits as a distinction of merit and significance, much like the level of contribution to authorship as is tracked in Europe
  • Translations are some people's primary work, but also related to another work
  • Contributions of a photo or illustration to a published work.
  • Consulting is another contribution that faculty members would like to have recognized – e.g., a faculty member who does a lot of curatorial work for museums
  • Commissions, as of artwork, music, or buildings

Pat has been working on an update to the spreadsheet and looking at roles

  • performer (encapsulating actor, musician)
    • may be grouped under a heading called Performances
  • designer
  • director (distinct from a director position for a research center, but is broader than conductor or theatrical director)
    • will likely have at least minimal information about the performance(s), including the play performed, the date(s), and venue
    • may also have an exterior sponsor or affiliated organization
      • Art Basel, Spoleto Festival
  • choreographer (4 people had sections called Choreography on their CVs)
    • minimal: "choreography, Duke University, April 2003"
    • Choreography for "The Miser", March-April, 2010
    • just need something for the choreography role to be realized in

New types of events

  • festival
  • guest teaching
  • master class
  • public lecture

Were able to solve some of the issues in diverse event listings when a person had written multiple screenplays.

Remaining issues:

  • CD liner notes – an essay on someone else's recording of Mozart
    • commentary or editorial
  • re-staging
    • model as a performance with the option to link to an earlier event
  • video and television
    • is the broadcast a performance, with a modeling of their role in the performance
    • if a recording, could model explicitly as a video or just add  a web page link as the fairly minimal approach
      • could decide whether to join the performances as a series, or to join the outputs as a collection
  • other objects like sculptures
    • see discussion below
  • gaming
    • software?
  • apps
    • software
  • motion graphics
    • animations – a sibling of film or video

Have we looked at other ontologies of film or art?

There is also the question of FRBR and its FABIO expression

What is the workflow? is this a service that is provided, or is the faculty member editing him or herself

  • So far at Brown the process is to model data off CVs, but moving to self-editing
  • Cornell captured data off of existing web pages, and then first presented more open-ended text blocks; less experience

How about having a Professional Practice heading (rather than Artistic Works)

  • could see exhibits or talks and presentations within that more easily than under Artistic Works
  • order by permanence as one measure of significance – permanent installation, then series or 

Do we need to use the more general Information Resource or Information Content Entity

  • a work such as a sculpture has physicality but some aspect of information and/or communication
    • William Noland's website has a title, range of dates during which it was created, materials, and dimensions – may not necessarily include whether or where it was acquired or exhibited
  • a building? has physicality plus a permanent geographical location, but also plans
    • not a temporal event
  • a building that was never built
  • a commission
  • a photographer who's work is photographs of buildings that couldn't be built
  • choreography – there is some sort of record, but the choreography is not the same thing as the performance

We could model all the detail, but our task is to capture the CV

In VIVO we have several ways to approach this:

  • differentiate by property 
  • use different role (choreographer or performer in the same kind of performance)
  • or we can use collation by subclass where no differentiation by property or role is not needed (e.g., as is done for publications)

Next steps

  • a plan for what extensions are needed
  • a time frame for when these changes will be available
  • aim for ontology work January, custom form work and list views in February

sandbox

  • we need an ontology VM to replace http://flora.mannlib.cornell.edu:8080/vivoontology
  • but we need to be able to have sample data in ways that doesn't complicate creation of the ontology release
  • some things can go right in Cornell VIVO
  • Brown may have a sandbox
  • Duke will not have Pat after next week
    • may not be able to call on the dev team for help with ontology-related work until have time to work out priorities
    • they will be supporting self-editing
    • have the possibility of editing in Elements – they have some categories like Design, performances, compositions, etc (under Others) , but prompts you for the same categories of role as articles or books – are either author, editor, or translator
      • local administrators can customize their local instances
      • but would have to get that data to VIVO – adds another layer that don't really need
      • won't find in any consistent information online

 

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