Metamodelling through : the prolegomena

So back in February I was asked to contribute a chapter to a new book being confected by some top people in the domain of the digital humanities,  an invitation which I naturally accepted with alacrity, and only a small sense of alarm. I admit: I was flattered, though naturally also felt it was about time my eminence was recognised in such a way.

Dashing off an abstract is an easy task, so I did that, and then forgot all about it. Here’s the abstract. Like other such pieces,  it promises much, and even gets mildly polemical towards the end, which seemed to do the trick, as the proposal was, in due course, accepted.

 

Where do metamodels come from and how do they survive?
Lou Burnard

There is a very old joke about standards which says "Standards are a
 good thing because there are so many to choose from". Like many old
 jokes, this plays on an internal contradiction (the structuralist
 might say "opposition") in its topic. Standards are, on the one hand,
 of most benefit to the extent that they reflect and facilitate
 diversity ; on the other, they are of necessity managed or even
 imposed by a centralising authority. This contradiction is
 particularly noticeable when the process of standardisation has been
 protracted because the technologies concerned are only gradually
 establishing themselves. We see this tension even in consumer
 electronics where there is a financial market-driven imperative to
 establish standards as rapidly as possible; but the same tension
 underlines the gradual evolution of ways of thought via communities of
 practice into de facto and (eventually) "real" standards. This article
 explores the evolution of standards for data modelling methodologies
 with regard to this tension. It considers some significant early
 experiments with the application of data modelling techniques to
 humanities research data (Manfred Thaller; J-C Gardin) and discusses
 to what extent some researchers simply adopted technical standards
 emerging in the wider data processing community (relational databases,
 information modelling), while other communities strove to define their
 own models (AI, language understanding systems). It will present in
 some detail the theoretical model (metamodel) underlying the Text
 Encoding Initiative's approach to standardisation and ask the question
 whether, over time, all such community-based efforts are forced
 further towards convergence and away from diversity. The TEI currently
 maintains a balance between "do it like this" and "describe it like
 this" schools of standardisation; in the long run, it therefore risks
 being superceded by advocates of the latter who distrust the former,
 or advocates of the former, who are impatient with the latter. 
Oxford, 1 Mar 2014

Summer came and summer is now going, and this particular bird is coming home to roost. I received last week a polite reminder that my manuscript should be delivered by the end of the current month, should conform to a defined house style, and would I please sign in blood the form I was sent back in April assigning my rights in this non-existent work to non-existent publishers Snipcock and Tweed ? Naturally I replied at once pleading for a stay of execution (but ignoring the rights assignment question) which was graciously accorded, somewhat to my surprise, even unto mid October. So now I really have little excuse not to find out what grand idea this abstract is abstracted from, really ought to get down to doing the research it grandly promises to summarise, and write the wretched piece. If only I didn’t have all those other more interesting (or less interesting but more urgent) things to do.

Well, let’s see., I plan to use this blog as a record of the painful process, just so that in years to come I can look back and see where it all went horribly wrong. At least no-one is likely to find me here.

 

 

 

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