Thinking about interpretation: Pliny and scholarship in the humanities

Abstract

Pliny is a piece of software that is meant to stimulate discussion within the Digital Humanities (DH) about how tools might be built that could find greater acceptance within the wider humanities community; something that has eluded the DH to date. Unlike many other tool projects within the DH, which are meant to show new and novel ways to apply technology to transform scholarly practice, Pliny is designed to support the act of conventional scholarly interpretation. It is meant to be a tool that blends so well into the task of the development of an interpretation, as scholars actually conventionally practice it, as to be almost invisible. In this, it follows some of the H-LAM/T design principles of Douglas Englebart, some of whose principles can be seen in software such as the word processor. In this article, several of the principle elements of conventional scholarly practice are described—centred on the act of annotation, notetaking, and the using of these notes as the basis for exploring ideas that emerge from working with the objects of study. Pliny's design is then discussed in the context of how aspects of its design—its affordances—support the scholar who is working with these elements. In particular, it illustrates an approach to the modelling of notes and associated ideas at the time when they are still largely un- or only partially structured.

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