Digging by Debating: Linking massive datasets to specific arguments

FAIN: HJ-50092-12

Trustees of Indiana University (Bloomington, IN 47405-7000)
Colin Allen (Project Director: July 2011 to November 2014)
Katy Boerner (Co Project Director: July 2011 to November 2014)

The development of a suite of semantic analytical tools that would allow researchers to study arguments and argumentative structure in digitized textual collections. The project is led by a team of scholars from Indiana University (US) and the University of East London (UK) with additional contributors from the University of London and the University of Dundee. The UK partner, the University of East London, is requesting £150,000 from the UK funding consortium.

We will develop and implement a multi-scale workbench, called "InterDebates", with the goal of digging into data provided by hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of digitized books, bibliographic databases of journal articles, and comprehensive reference works written by experts. Our hypotheses are: that detailed and identifiable arguments drive many aspects of research in the sciences and the humanities; that argumentative structures can be extracted from large datasets using a mixture of automated and social computing techniques; and, that the availability of such analyses will enable innovative interdisciplinary research, and may also play a role in supporting better-informed critical debates among students and the general public. A key challenge tackled by this project is thus to uncover and represent the argumentative structure of digitized documents, allowing users to find and interpret detailed arguments in the broad semantic landscape of books and articles.

Associated Products

Cross-Cutting Categorization Schemes in the Digital Humanities (Article)
Title: Cross-Cutting Categorization Schemes in the Digital Humanities
Author: Allen, Colin
Author: The InPhO Group
Abstract: Digital access to large amounts of scholarly text presents both challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. Meeting these challenges depends on having high-quality representations of the contents of digital resources suitable for both machines and humans to use. Different ways of categorizing these contents are appropriate for different purposes, leading to the further problem of relating the contents of different categorization schemes to each other. This essay discusses the rationale for categorizing philosophical concepts and surveys some of the main approaches to doing so for materials that are continuously changing. It describes the goals and methods of the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project and provides an example of the kind of analysis that is made possible by powerful modeling methods.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673276
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.1086/673276
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Isis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press on behalf of the History of Science Society

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