www.e‑humanities.net

Abstract: This paper will argue that archaeological network researchers are not well networked themselves, resulting in a limited and sometimes uncritical adoption of formal network methods within the archaeological discipline. This seems to have followed largely from a general unawareness of the historicity of network-based approaches which span at least eight decennia of multi-disciplinary research. Many network analytical techniques that would only find a broader use in the last 15 years were in fact introduced in the archaeological discipline as early as the 1970s. The unawareness of alternative approaches is most prominent in recent archaeological applications of formal network methods, which show a tendency of adopting techniques and models that were fashionable at the time of publication rather than exploring other archaeological and non-archaeological approaches. This paper does not aim to argue that every archaeological network study should include a historiography. It merely wishes to stress the need to explore the full range of existing network techniques and models. I will illustrate that knowledge of the diversity of archaeological and non-archaeological network methods is crucial to their critical application and modification within archaeological research contexts. This paper will for the first time trace the academic traditions, network concepts, models and techniques that have been most influential to archaeologists. I will do this by combining a close reading of published archaeological network applications with citation network analysis techniques. A citation network was created consisting of almost 10,000 publications and their internal citations. This network consists of all archaeological network analysis applications, all publications cited by them and the citations between those publications. This data was extracted from Web of Knowledge (http://wok.mimas.ac.uk/) as well as manually when the publications were not included on Web of Knowledge. The paper concludes that in order to move towards richer archaeological applications of formal network methods archaeological network analysts should become better networked both within and outside their discipline. The existing archaeological applications of network analysis show clear indications of methods with great potential for our discipline and methods that will remain largely fruitless, and archaeologists should become aware of these advances within their discipline. The development of original archaeological network methods should be driven by archaeological research problems and a broad knowledge of formal network methods developed in different disciplines. Also, given the wide availability of large datasets a citation network analysis of scientific literature is considered particularly suitable to guide a close reading and explore the emergence and evolution of new ideas.

Tom Brughmans is an archaeologist specialised in digital technologies. He received his undergraduate and Masters degrees in Archaeology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) in 2007 and 2008 respectively. In 2009 he obtained a Master in Science in ‘Archaeological Computing: Spatial Technologies’ from the University of Southampton. For a year after that Tom worked as a research assistant at the Archaeological Computing Research Group of the University of Southampton. Here he was involved in several archaeological projects including the Portus project and the ‘Urban connectivity in Iron Age and Roman southern Spain’ project. In addition Tom worked for as a research assistant for the ICRATES project at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Tom is currently doing his PhD in Archaeology at the University of Southampton as a member of the Archaeological Computing Research Group. His research aims to explore the potential of a complex networks research perspective for the archaeological discipline through case-studies on amphora production in Roman southern Spain, Roman Ostia and Portus, table ware distribution in the Roman eastern Mediterranean and Roman Sagalassos.

Materials
Slides on Scribd.com

Links

• http://archaeologicalnetworks.wordpress.com/
• http://connectedpast.soton.ac.uk/

Abstract: Referring is such an essential part of scholarly activity across disciplines that it has been regarded as one of the scholarly primitives. Browsing and navigating through cited publications are also becoming ubiquitous features of electronic journals and digital tools for managing bibliographic information. There is, however, a kind of citation whose potential has not been fully exploited to date. These are called "canonical citations" and are the references used in Classics to refer to passages of ancient texts.
In my presentation I will discuss the main aspects related to making such citations – and the network they create – computable. After presenting the characteristics of canonical citations, I shall discuss in detail my approach to their automatic extraction from texts – which has been modelled as a Named Entity Recognition problem. I will then outline some possible applications based on the analysis of a citation network consisting of both modern and ancient resources and their potential impact on traditional scholarship. Such citations are of essential importance particularly to scholars working on classical primary sources, as they refer to their very research object: texts. Being able to capture and analyse them on a large scale can give us some interesting insights into the dynamics of the reception of texts from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.

Matteo Romanello is from Venice, Italy, where he received a BA in Classics and an MA in Digital Humanities from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in 2005 and 2008 respectively. Between October 2008 and May 2009 he was visiting research scholar at the Perseus Project (Tufts University, Medford, MA) where he worked under the supervision of Gregory Crane on digital editions of fragmentary texts. Since October 2009 Matteo is doing his PhD in Digital Humanities, at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. His doctoral research, supervised by Willard McCarty (KCL, DDH) and Shalom Lappin (KCL, Department of Philosophy), investigates the use of citations to ancient texts contained in journal papers as a means of enhancing information retrieval in Classics. In June 2011 Matteo joined the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) in Berlin to work on the EU-funded project "Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities" (DARIAH-DE). His main research interests include: interoperability, domain-specific information extraction and retrieval, applications of ontological modelling to the knowledge domain of Classics and citation network analysis.

Materials
Download the slides

References

• Romanello, M., Boschetti, F. & Crane, G., 2009. Citations in the Digital Library of Classics: Extracting Canonical References by Using Conditional Random Fields. In Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Text and Citation Analysis for Scholarly Digital Libraries. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 80-87. Available at: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W09/W09-3610.
• Romanello, M., 2011. New Value-Added Services for Electronic Journals in Classics. JLISit, 2(1). Available at: http://leo.cilea.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/4603.
• Romanello, M., 2011. The Digital Critical Edition of Fragments: Theoretical Problems and Technical Solution. English, (1958), p.149-158. Available at: http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15592.