Project
Semantics of History
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Abstract
The project Semantics of History is funded by the VUA Interfaculty research institute CAMeRA and carried out by two PhD-students from the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Exact Sciences.
Semantic modeling of information, knowledge and language mostly assumes a static definition of the world. Concepts and instances of these concepts are defined as a static model; language and expressions are related to this specification. Even dynamic systems consider the most recent version of some reality as the preferred definition and only require updating the model to the actual facts. From a historic perspective this position is not adequate. History is typically a record of different realities in time and specifically focus on the changes in reality. Even stronger, the perception of history can be different for different participants and for different cultural and linguistic groups. Finally, the reflection on the past can be different based on our different views: history has been and will be re-written many times.
Information systems of historical archives should handle the dynamicity in time and represent all realities at an equal level while at the same time they should define the relations, the invariables and changes across the realities. The units of change are events and typically in history events can be organized at different levels of change. The most constant elements are locations, people and dates but nevertheless many different structures are still possible, which need to be related relative to these more constant elements. Such a system should also allow users to classify and structure reality from any possible perspective when accessing the archives.
Vast amounts of historical data are available as free text. The text itself can be related in time just as the events. For direct reporting and communication in the same time-frame there will be little distance between the communication date and the event date. Historical documents on the other hand have a large distance between reporting and event date. We also expect that the linguistic expression for naming these events will be different; exhibiting high abstraction and others types of perspectives in historical reports as compared to actual news reports. A historical information system requires an innovative view on the semantics of events and the ways we can conceptualize these through language in different genres of documents.
Project Proposal
Project Overview
Last update: August, 2009, p.vossen(at)let.vu.nl