On Expertise and Expert Performance

Expert (Chambers Dictionary of Etymology)

What do expertise and expert performance have to do with this digital curation of knowledge creation project?
Well, if I can understand better what expertise is, where it comes from, and how it is constituted, I will have armed myself with a very valuable tool to identify how experts in the reading of ancient documents can be digitally supported in their task.
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance [1] is a very informative and rich book, which gathers findings on and around expertise as studied from various points of view: from Psychology, from Artificial Intelligence, from the Cognitive Sciences. Here are the highlights of my readings, presented, of course, within the framework of my own interests, that is, my aim to develop a piece of software which experts working with inscribed artefacts (including papyrologists and ancient near-east scholars) will find useful to conduct their research.

How to define Expertise?
Naturally, expertise is defined with respect to a specific domain; experts are specialists, they excel in a given domain. Yet regardless of the domain, there are two stances to define expertise and thereby experts. The first one states that expertise is a talent; this is the absolute approach, where experts are identified as those who produce exceptional results. The other one states that expertise is characterized by a high level of proficiency; this is the relative approach, where experts are those whose achievements and experience are greater than that of novices [2]. In that scope, Hoffman [3] defined the following proficiency scale (analogical to the craftsmanship stages as established in medieval times): Continue reading

Posted in Readings, Theoretical framework | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Multi- and Cross-Disciplinary Research: Getting Organized

Leaving the starting blocks

This is where it all starts. Today is officially the first day of my fellowship, and I need to get myself into gear and out of those starting blocks. I’ve done cross-disciplinary work before, but here, I’m flying solo – or almost, as I thankfully have a mentor, and an advisory board of 7 to help me steer this project in the right direction.

So. I have 9 months to build a tool that will enable to curate digitally the knowledge creation process that is the act of interpretation of ancient textual artefacts such as Roman writing tablets and cuneiform tablets. I’m not starting entirely from scratch as this project is the natural continuation of the e-Science and Ancient Documents project; however, I’ll be taking a different approach, and attacking the problem by many angles at the same time. That’s where logistics and organization come into play. I have piles of literature to go through, from books on Embodied Cognition to handbooks on Expertise and Expert Performance and on Science and Technology Studies, via articles and manuals on Argumentation Theory, Logics, and Epistemology. All very exciting indeed – if a little intimidating maybe (is that possibly why I’ve just capitalized the names of all those fields)? And I’ll have to go through them one by one. I want to.

Beyond the workplan that I have established in the grant proposal, and that dictates monthly milestones (e.g.: the first month, January 2012, is mostly dedicated to bibliography), I will be using this blog to report and react on my readings. First in the pile, and the subject of my next post, will be an account of my musings through:

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance” (2006) K. Anders Ercisson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich and Robert R. Hoffman (eds). Cambridge University Press.

Posted in News, Readings | 1 Comment

Beyond Data Curation: Knowledge Curation

Exciting news came in a couple of weeks ago: the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) has awarded me a fellowship!

I mentioned this early-career fellowship application in my last post, and well, now I can present to you what I’ll be working on. It’ll be a 9 months project, starting in January and it’ll be concerned with knowledge curation in the context of the development of interpretations of ancient textual artefacts. And this blog was originally started with this very project in mind. I will remain at OeRC, and Prof. Alan Bowman will be my mentor.

Here are the official title and summary:

Digitally Curating Knowledge Creation: Understanding and Recording the Process of Interpreting Cultural and Historical Artefacts

Interpretation and re-interpretation of textual artefacts such as Roman wooden tablets (e.g. the Vindolanda tablets) and cuneiform clay tablets are a core activity for documentary scholars and historians. It is the act of interpretation of these documentary artefacts that gives them a meaning both as a text and as an object, one that can then be shared amongst academics and with the wider public, shedding light on a past history and culture. Interpretation is thus an act of knowledge creation.

Creating this knowledge is a complex and often arduous task that involves elaborate rationales that are strongly influenced by the context in which they are developed. For example, Continue reading

Posted in News | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Writing and writing…

On hold

Artwork by Marc Johns (www.marcjohns.com)

Three months I’ve kept you on hold – even if without drab music or  compliments! It’s now high time to resume activities on this blog! It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing though, on the contrary. In those three months, I’ve been mostly writing, writing papers, writing grant proposals and replies to reviews of grant proposals. And exploring new avenues for future research.

It was that time of year again, where, as a staff member of a non teaching department at the University of Oxford, I had to start thinking again of how to maintain myself in employment – and preferably in research. Being of post-doctoral standing in a non-teaching department has both advantages and drawbacks. One advantage is that my daily tasks all revolve around research without ever being overruled by teaching and admin-related responsibilities, the main drawback however is that without teaching duties, it is much much harder to get a permanent contract at the university – and, as a matter of fact, the permanent staff in the department are either of professorial standing, or are lecturers jointly employed by the department and a teaching department, or are part of the research support team. So with the end of my contract lurking in the not so far distance (December), the main focus was on creating my next job. I had some research ideas in store, all of which are connected in one way or another to the main focus of this research blog. Continue reading

Posted in News | Tagged | Leave a comment

On public vs private research

Back from Würzburg, where I attended the “Digital Palaeography” ESF exploratory workshop (talks and abstracts here) – and on which Dr. Dominique Stutzmann reports in his blog – I find myself pondering on issues of public vs private research. Youtie, times before the widespread adoption of digital tools, already commented on this issue in the context of papyrology. In his 1963 paper [1], he presents the internal workings of what papyrologists do. In doing so, he defines public papyrology, which consists in presenting the results of papyrological work by publishing editions of the studied texts. These editions usually offer a diplomatic transcript, a reconstruction of the text, a commentary on the presented interpretation, and sometimes a line drawing of the text, along with photographs of the text-bearing artefact. Once the edition published, further interpretation of the text is open to scholarly debate and to its use as evidence for further historical research. Upstream, the work of the papyrologist, however, is much more of a private activity, which aims to produce a transcription of the text, and is paved with what Youtie [1, p27] describes as:

“[...]the doubts, the hesitations, the numerous false starts and new beginnings; the guesses sometimes confirmed, sometimes rejected by the script;  the continual recourse to books for information of every sort – lexical, grammatical,  palaeographical, historical, legal; the interludes of exhaustion and depression[...]“

Unsurprisingly, I realized at the Digital Palaeography workshop that palaeographers seem to undergo the same type of process. In his keynote, Prof. Eef Overgaauw underlined the fact that uncertainty is ubiquitous: “No answer is final” he said, “No result is conclusive. They are all provisional.”

Not only does this chime with my current reflections on uncertainty, it also made me acknowledge that the notions of public and private research do likely extend beyond papyrology and palaeography, and that the shifting shape of uncertainty Continue reading

Posted in Theoretical framework, Workshop report | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Deciphering and interpreting (proto-)cuneiform

Proto-Elamite clay tablet from Susa, in the Louvre (courtesy of Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s great to be back “in the field”! Well, it’s nothing exotic, really, as I went to Wolfson College, Oxford, to attend one of Dr Jacob Dahl‘s interpretation sessions, where the subject of study for this group of three students, Jacob and myself was a set of Proto-Elamite texts (yes, this is a wikipedia link; it has been approved by Jacob, for more info on cuneiform scripts, check here). When I say it’s not exotic, in fact, to me it is – well, not Wolfson that is, but Proto-Elamite, which I have never encountered before. So far, the interpretation sessions I’ve attended had to do with Latin cursive texts such as the Vindolanda tablets, or with Greek epigraphy; two scripts that belong to the group of segmental alphabet writing systems (as does the script I’m using to write this post). Proto-Elamite, in contrast, is thought to be a derived from the proto-cuneiform script; it is classified as logophonetic and seems to be at times pictographic and at times syllabic. Additionally – and non-negligibly – Proto-Elamite is one of those few ancient languages that Continue reading

Posted in Data collection | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

‘Şalmu’ and the nature of digitized artefacts

Last term (Hilary term 2011) at the traditional Oxford Slade Lectures, I had the chance to hear Prof. Z. Bahrani speak about the nature of representations in the Ancient Middle-East. The title of her lecture series “The Infinite Image: Art and Ontology in Antiquity” (many thanks to Prof. A. K. Bowman who flagged them up!) resonated with some of the questions we were dealing with while working on the e-Science and Ancient Documents project. I was  not able to attend the very first lecture, but enjoyed tremendously the second one, as well as all the following ones. The second lecture, entitled: “What is/was an image?”, struck very close to home and got me thinking about mimesis and subsequently about the nature of digital images of artefacts, or more generally of digitized artefacts. Continue reading

Posted in Readings, Theoretical framework | Tagged , | 1 Comment

From Artefact to Meaning

In the context of papyrological, epigraphical, and cuneiform studies research, this blog aims to document:

Experts interpreting a Roman stylus tablet

Experts interpreting a Roman stylus tablet

• the study of expert practices, when setting to the task of deciphering and interpreting an artefact.

• the methods adopted to bring about, identify, support, and record key moments of discovery, creation, invention of the meaning of the studied objects and thus of the resulting historical knowledge. These methods will borrow approaches from cognitive sciences, philosophy and sociology of science.

• the development of a piece of software to support this task, based on results of various case studies.

• the assessment of the impact of digital tools on traditional practices, and their integration into the researchers’ workflow.

The ultimate goal is to show that, beyond the (meta-)data attached to an artefact, it is also essential to capture, to conserve and to curate the intermediate stages of the knowledge creation process attached to that object so that, if needed be, its re-interpretation is facilitated. Contextualization of objects is crucial to their interpretation, and therefore to their meaning, as it is presented in museums. The narrative aspects associated with the dissemination of historical and cultural knowledge will also constitute one of the objects of study of this research blog.

Posted in Implementation, Theoretical framework | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment