September 4, 2008

Mitsuyuki Inaba (Day 1, Part 1)

Mitsuyuki Inaba (Professor, Graduate School of Policy Science, Ritsumeikan University; Associate Member, Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, University of California, San Diego)

The World Wide Web and Digital Humanities: A Once and Future Discipline

The World Wide Web keeps on developing as an infrastructure for sharing and exchanging knowledge among not only academe but also all kind of social activities. A new trend called Web 2.0 reduces the gap between experts and non-experts, and leads us to engage in participative and collaborative creation around the world. Semantic Web is a key concept for the next stage after Web 2.0, which interconnects various artifacts and cultural heritages to implement human/machine intelligible knowledge bases on the Web. This development of the Web that aims at the integration of human wisdom with the digital technology was already anticipated at its birth. In this presentation, the future vision of Digital Humanities will be discussed by overviewing the history of the Web evolution.