Last Friday the DM2E Advisory Board gathered in the confines of the Humboldt Universität Berlin to give their feedback on the first demo of the tools being developed as part of the project and to determine guidelines for the future functional evolution of the DM2E scholarly toolset.
Attendees from the Board included:
* **Susan Schreibman (Trinity College Dublin)**
* **Tobias Blanke (Kings College London)**
* **Stefan Gradmann (Humboldt Universität)**
* **Steffen Hennicke (Humboldt Universität)**
* **Sally Chambers (DARIAH)**
* **Felix Sasaki (W3C)**
* **Alois Pichler (University of Bergen)**
* **Laurent Romary (INRIA)**
* **Gerhard Lauer (Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities)**
The initial focus of the meeting was the demo of two tools developed by Net7 as part of DM2E and now in prototype phase: Pundit and Korbo. Both of these tools are designed to operate on the immensely rich source of Linked Data that is being supplied to DM2E via the Consortium content providers and that will become part of the Europeana.
We will be releasing both these tools for remote user testing next week and if you’re interested in trying them please sign up to the mailing list so we can notify you once they’re ready.
[Sign up to DM2E Mailing List](http://sympa.cms.hu-berlin.de/sympa/subscribe/dm2e-news)
##Korbo
An aggregation platform for gathering Linked Data objects relevant to your area of research into single workspaces or “baskets”.
This platform will be immensely useful for Digital Humanities developers wanting to build applications on top of and explain Europeana metadata in creating virtual scholarly ‘desktop’ environments.
##Pundit
Pundit is a powerful but easy to use semantic annotation tool that enables you to link sections of text to each other or to other Linked Data resources on the net such as DBPedia, Freebase and Geonames. In case a text document comes with a microstructure including sub-entities identified by URIs such structures can be used transparently – or else a highlighting function will be available that would as well enable the highlighting of image areas.
Pundit can operate on top of the objects that you have collected in your Korbo “basket” or workspace, and as such, it is an example of the kind of tools that other developers might want to build with Korbo to enhance scholarship in the humanities.
##Screencast
To whet your appetite for the full demo of these tools we’ve composed a short screen cast:
##Ongoing work on scholarly primitives
Professor Stefan Gradmann presented his proposed model for the scholarly domain as a whole and his elaboration of the scholarly primitives concept foundational to the Digital Humanities since John Unsworth’s pioneering work on the subject [^1].
Gradmann identified a number of central ways a scholar engages with a digital corpora to be further elaborated in a forthcoming paper co-authored with the DM2E Advisory Board. Modeling and automated semantic ‘expansion’ (dynamic contextualisation to variable degrees of semantic ‘neighborhood) were considered among the most promising and challenging functional extensions moving beyond mere annotation functionality. This work will inform the future development of Korbo and Pundit.
##The Wittgenstein Case Study
At the meeting it was confirmed that at the very start of 2013 a group of about 10 Wittgenstein scholars will begin working on Wittgenstein’s Brown Book manuscripts as they are made available by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen to DM2E as well as on scholarly material related to this text.
This will enable the scholars interactions with the texts in Korbo and Pundit to be traced and fed back into the platform itself, further honing its functionality so that it respondes precisely to the needs of scholars working in a digital enviroment.
The scholarly semantic graph resulting from this incubator activity will be an object of scholarly work itself, as the modeling of this dynamic aggregation of RDF statements and of its evolution may create new insights into the way thought and discourse form and evolve in virtual research environments.
[^1]: [“Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?”, 2000](http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html)