Events and Periods As Concepts for Organizing Historical Knowledge By
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Events and Periods as Concepts for Organizing Historical Knowledge by Ryan Benjamin Shaw A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management and Systems and the Designated Emphasis in New Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Emeritus Michael Buckland, Chair Professor Ray Larson Professor Daniel Melia Fall 2010 Events and Periods as Concepts for Organizing Historical Knowledge © 2010, All Rights Reserved Ryan Benjamin Shaw Abstract Events and Periods as Concepts for Organizing Historical Knowledge by Ryan Benjamin Shaw Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management and Systems and the Designated Emphasis in New Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Emeritus Michael Buckland, Chair Events and periods are not objectively existing phenomena, but concepts we use to organize our knowledge of history. ey make historical change comprehensible and help us orient ourselves with respect to the history of the culture in which we participate. us they are indispensable for describing both the content of history scholarship and the context of documents that serve as evidence for that scholarship. As historical discourse shis its emphases and new aspects of the past come to be considered significant, periods and events are subject to constant change. Despite this change, we can model periods and events in systems of knowledge organization because it is possible to discern and formally describe relatively stable recurrent patterns in their narration. 1 大好きな有紀とあいりにこの博士論文を捧げます。 i Contents Acknowledgments ...................................... iv 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Organization of the Dissertation .......................... 2 2 History and Concepts 4 2.1 History as Conceptualization ............................ 6 2.2 Typology of Historical Concepts .......................... 8 2.2.1 Ordinary Concepts ............................. 8 2.2.2 Colligatory Concepts ............................ 10 3 History and Knowledge Organization 21 3.1 History and Collecting Institutions ......................... 22 3.2 Describing Documents ................................ 24 3.3 Describing Concepts ................................. 26 3.4 Boundary Practices: Editions and Exhibits ..................... 31 3.5 Computers, Databases, Digitization, and the Web ................. 33 3.6 Conclusions ...................................... 39 4 Temporal Concepts in History: Periods and Events 41 4.1 Periodization ..................................... 41 4.2 Periods as Norm-Defining Models ......................... 43 4.3 e Unreflective View of Historical Events ..................... 45 4.4 Historical Events as Concepts ............................ 45 4.5 Periods and Passages of Events ............................ 48 4.6 Expanding the Notion of the Historical Event ................... 52 4.7 Narrative Sentences and Temporal Structures ................... 56 4.8 Periods and Events .................................. 57 5 Requirements for Historical Event Directories 59 5.1 Individuation ..................................... 60 5.2 Selection ........................................ 66 5.2.1 Selecting Events ............................... 66 5.2.2 Selecting Documents ............................ 67 ii 5.3 Contextualization .................................. 69 5.3.1 Exploration ................................. 71 5.3.2 Orientation ................................. 73 6 Modeling Historical Events and Periods 77 6.1 Modeling Events ................................... 80 6.1.1 Events and Time .............................. 81 6.1.2 Events, Spaces and Places .......................... 83 6.1.3 Participation in Events ........................... 84 6.1.4 Types of Events ............................... 85 6.1.5 Example Event: Berkman Began Writing ................. 85 6.2 Modeling Periods ................................... 87 6.2.1 Example Period: e Civil Rights Movement .............. 89 6.2.2 Fuzzy Models ................................ 91 6.2.3 Categorizing Periods ............................ 92 7 Conclusion 94 7.1 Contributions ..................................... 96 7.2 Future Work ..................................... 97 Bibliography 98 Appendices 107 A LODE: An Ontology for Linking Open Descriptions of Events 107 A.1 Introduction ..................................... 107 A.2 Namespace ...................................... 107 A.3 Summary of Terms .................................. 108 A.4 Vocabulary Classes .................................. 108 A.4.1 Class: Event ................................. 108 A.5 Vocabulary Properties ................................ 109 A.5.1 Property: atPlace .............................. 109 A.5.2 Property: atTime .............................. 109 A.5.3 Property: circa ............................... 109 A.5.4 Property: inSpace .............................. 110 A.5.5 Property: involved ............................. 110 A.5.6 Property: involvedAgent .......................... 110 B Example Event: Berkman Began Writing 112 iii Acknowledgments ough this dissertation is credited to me alone, I was able to write it only with the help and sup- port of many others. e Institute of Museum and Library Services generously funded a National Leadership Grant for Libraries (award number LG-06-06-0037-06) and, with the National En- dowment for the Humanities, an Advancing Knowledge Digital Partnership grant (award number PK-50027-07) that supported me during my dissertation research. Joseph Hall provided me with the LATEX templates for producing a dissertation that elegantly meets the UC Berkeley format- ting guidelines. Lewis Lancaster and the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative introduced me to the world of “digital humanists” and encouraged me to think of what I was doing in more than purely instrumental terms. Lynda Hardman, Raphaël Troncy and the Centrum Wiskunde & In- formatica kindly hosted me in wonderful Amsterdam and gave me the opportunity to learn how Semantic Web technologies can be applied to cultural heritage management. I was lucky enough, in the various grant-funded projects I worked on, to meet regularly with a strong team of collaborators. Of these, special thanks go to Ray Larson and Daniel Melia for not only working with me on these projects but also agreeing to serve on my dissertation committee. I’d also like to single out Barry Pateman of the Emma Goldman Papers for working closely with me, providing unvarnished feedback and giving me a considerable amount to think about every time we met. He has been a significant influence on this dissertation. e students of the School of Information have over the years provided an incredibly stimu- lating intellectual environment, one which has changed my way of thinking about things in more ways than I can count. Paul Duguid’s doctoral colloquiums were particularly useful for learning and discussing the practical aspects of becoming a researcher. I would especially like to thank my doctoral cohort, Megan Finn and Dan Perkel, for patiently listening to my rants and giving me excellent feedback and support when I needed it. Finally, I certainly could not have done without the support of two people in particular. My advisor Michael Buckland was extremely generous with his time and wisdom. He never hesitated to help me, whether it was to untangle some intellectual confusion or route around a bureaucratic obstacle. Many if not most of the ideas in this dissertation originated in discussions with him. Finally, my wife Yuki was extraordinarily patient as two years of graduate school stretched into seven. Her love and support made this dissertation possible, and I cannot thank her enough. iv Chapter 1 Introduction As a child, I could not color within the lines. Nor interest myself in children’s books. I also had trouble with categories, and this I have never outgrown. I have trouble understanding the concept of eras, I question the line in our culture that separates organic and inorganic, I talk to trees but also speak to rocks, I distrust chunks of meaning called the Ancient World, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the American Century. Charles Bowden, “Contested Ground” During my teens, I was oen struck by the fact that I seemed to be living through an important period of history. e fall of the Berlin Wall when I was thirteen, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union over the following two years, marked (I was told) the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new, as yet unnamed, era of peace and prosperity. is was quickly followed by the invention of the World Wide Weband the dawning of a new information age. Like a tourist who, ignorant of the schedule, arrives at Buckingham Palace just before the Changing of the Guard, I considered my timing to be very lucky. Luckier certainly than my parents, who, having been born shortly aer World War II, had to wait forty years for anything important to happen! In my mid-to-late twenties my timing seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. Where in my teens bad old eras had given way to new and exciting ones, in my twenties I witnessed America’s tragic entry to the ominous post-9/11 world. e darkness of the Bush era ensued, fading into the Great Recession shortly aer I turned thirty. Perhaps my parents hadn’t been so unlucky to spend their formative years in the quiet stasis of Pax Americana. What gave me the sense of living in interesting times?