"...if we follow the same procedures at different sites and/or at different times, the knowledge objects we produce at those different times and places has a stronger relation with one another."

The following materials have been suggested by participants in the workshop, and have been organized into rough groupings for ease of navigation. This is not intended as a comprehensive list of readings on data modeling in the humanities, but (at the moment) reflects the textual emphasis of the workshop.

Austin et al. point out that the statistical methods that are at the heart of data mining are not able to distinguish real from spurious associations. Data mining employs the automated examination of enormous bodies of data. Its usefulness is thought to be proportional to the size of the data set that it collates; however, as the data set becomes larger and as the number of attributes that serve as potential relata increases, the number of potential relationships increases exponentially. Importantly, the number of spurious associations also increases. With enough data, no significance test will be stringent enough to provide assurance against the kind of results found in Austin et al. What is needed, according to Austin et al. is a “pre-specified plausible hypothesis.” For statistical analysis to be useful, the researcher must begin with a hypothesis, preferably a plausible one, if the research is to be valuable.

What exactly is a pre-specified plausible hypothesis and how can we generate it if data mining can’t do that for us? The question was posed some sixty years ago by the philosopher Nelson Goodman using different terms: Goodman believed that a critical question for epistemology was to distinguish between “projectible and non-projectible hypotheses.” One can more or less replace “pre-specified plausible hypothesis” with Goodman’s term “projectible hypothesis.” According to Goodman, when we seek to understand what hypothesis is (or is not) projectible, we do not come to the problem “empty-headed but with some stock of knowledge” which we use to determine what is (or is not) projectible. Projectible hypotheses will be those which do not conflict with other hypotheses that have been supported in the past. They will commonly use the same terminology of previously supported hypotheses. The terminology appearing in the hypotheses will have become “entrenched” in the language. This goes a long distance toward explaining why we don’t find the link between one’s astrological sign and medical conditions plausible. Twenty-first century Western medicine is not accustomed to linking astrological signs to ailments and so must find any hypothesis that does so implausible.

If Goodman is correct, then data mining is of little use without an historical understanding of the field of science to which the data pertains.

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Here, we have another argument for allocating library resources to pay for librarians with deep subject expertise. As e-science develops, vendors will make more and more data sets available, regardless of their actual worth to researchers. To effectively choose the data sets that are of value, librarians must have a thorough understanding of the research needs of their patrons. To do this, they must have a deep understanding of the field. Unfortunately, with the excitement swirling around e-science, the mere access to large data sets threatens to become the be-all and end-all in collection management. If we aren’t careful, we may find ourselves with mountains of data from which everything and nothing can be concluded.

Have we somehow conspired to arrange matters so that knowledge is always what we say about something rather than what we show about it? If so, it would account for the difficulty of using objects as constituting or communicating knowledge. Is the problem that the whole concept of knowledge and research arises out of words rather than actions, or do we simply have too narrow a range of examples, i.e. only lexical examples? Have we defined ourselves into a corner?

Knowledge and its articulations are strongly influenced by diversity in, e.g., cultural backgrounds, schools of thought, geographical contexts. Judgements, assessments and opinions, which play a crucial role in many areas of democratic societies, including politics and economics, reflect this diversity in perspective and goals. For the information on the Web (including, e.g., news and blogs) diversity - implied by the ever increasing multitude of information providers - is the reason for diverging viewpoints and conflicts. Time and evolution add a further dimension making diversity an intrinsic and unavoidable property of knowledge.

The international conference USE-2008 aims at addressing issues related to theoretical conceptions and empirical applications of research on information use in knowledge production processes at different levels of activity in society.

Competence is our tacit, internalised knowledge of a language. Performance is external evidence of language competence, and is usage on particular occasions when factors other than our linguistic competence may affect its form.

It makes further information about a topic available at the end of a URL. It relieves people of having to create their own context and condensed background.

Textop will be a set of projects, managed by a strong collaboration among a global group of scholars, with the aim of organizing the information contained in books, dictionaries, opinionated essays, and news articles--and perhaps other sources--into a sin

Screencasting can be an excellent way to transmit tacit knowledge.

If the academic gift economy – where we offer each other intangibles and are tied to each other through vague debts of gratitude – were to be phased out entirely, the result would obviously be disastrous for the development of knowledge.

The core of our service portfolio is a technological platform that consistently makes available innovations in the areas of Social Software, Semantic Web and Information Retrieval.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia

It is an open, industrial-strength, scaleable and extensible platform for creating, integrating and deploying unstructured information management solutions from combinations of semantic analysis and search components.

Knowledge Media is about the processes of generating, understanding and sharing knowledge using several different media, as well as understanding how the use of different media shape these processes.

Gregory Bateson made substantial contributions to many fields of science...