Dr. Ian McCrabb1, Dr. Mike Lynch1
1Systemik Solutions, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Ian McCrabb is the founder and managing director of Systemik (systemiksolutions.com), a Sydney-based IT consulting group focused on open-source digital humanities platforms and research sites. Systemik supports a portfolio of humanities research platforms, web content management solutions and associated consulting and support services. Ian’s PhD dissertation 'Buddha Bodies and the Benefits of Relic Establishment: Insights from a Digital Framework for the Analysis of Formulaic Sequences in Gāndhārī Relic Inscriptions' continued his focus on methodologies for the analysis of donative inscriptions and characterization of the ritual practices and religious significance of relic establishment in Gandhāra.
Mike Lynch Biography is accessible from his ORCID: 0000-0001-5152-5307
Abstract:
Background: A significant proportion of humanities research projects—collections, digital editions, cultural and historical—do not fit the laboratory research paradigm of repeatable experiments (data set-algorithm-result set) commonly undertaken in the social sciences and textual analysis.
These projects might be characterised as ‘relationship graphing’; incremental, cumulative, granular, and collaborative semantic annotation and linking of heterogenous content and data. The research output is a node graph and, commonly, a persistent web presence. An analysis of relevant Australian Research Council (ARC) projects indicates this characterisation applies to ‘the digital’ in significant proportion of projects over the last 10 years.
These projects might have been, and some were, executed in Heurist albeit two critical desiderata, interoperability with linked open data and contemporary immersive web publishing, proved problematic.
Program: The overarching program of activities to develop a national shared researcher workbench and content management system framework for humanities. At the 2023 conference we presented (From Heurist to the Data Commons) an RO-Crate sustainability path for these heritage data sets.
Our current project is to develop a Node Graph CMS aligned with Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) standards for linked open data. The development of the Node Graph CMS is likely based on Omeka S and will include a suite of resource templates and modules (archive, map, node graph and image). Node Graph CMS will support effective workflows for content and data annotation and linking, sustainable standards-based node graph data structures and an effective framework for generating contemporary, immersive web sites.