Porphyry

Porphyry is a desktop client for qualitative analysis of images and qualitative analysis of texts.

Features

Source

Viewpoint

Portfolio

Porphyry is designed for:

Selecting fragments in document sources,
Gathering fragments (or sources) in collections,
Organizing collections into an outline,
Writing a new document from the outline,
Submitting the document to peers or superiors,
Publishing the document (making it public).

Aims

The tasks listed earlier match exactly what scholars do since the middle ages. If that means it really corresponds to what people do with a pen and paper, it means also that we could wonder whether it is necessary to go digital or not. In our opinion, this “simple” change of medium could drastically modify practices and disciplines.

First, it enhances the way scholars make explicit the links they find between documents. Secondly, it is far easier for them to share their primary sources and their interpretations (from narrow groups to world wide publishing). Thirdly, it is now possible to trace every action done on the digital media and then to follow the interpretation trail leading to a research result.

Inside look

Porphyry complies with the Hypertopic model but has a few specificities.

First, because topic networks in Porphyry are done by the users themselves rather than by computer scientists, we decided to keep the relations between topics simple and use only one kind of them: “topic-inclusion” (which forms a “directed acyclic graph”). Despite its simplicity, this relation type can be used for hyponymy (e.g. “philosopher is a kind of human”), meronymy (e.g. “head is a part of human”), instantiation (e.g. “Socrates is a philosopher”), and even for the most advanced patterns (associations, association links, association roles, etc.).

Secondly, because we are more interested in the “sense making” process than in its results, Porphyry traces every situation when a context between two information objects is tied or untied by someone.

Last but not least, because items must be shared by different author groups and even accessible to readers to follow authors’ interpretation trails, these items must be available in the system. Therefore, the entities handled by Porphyry are documentary fragments, sources (images and plain texts) and folders.

Genesis

Porphyry v0

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Porphyry would not exist without the transdisciplinary seminar of ARTCADHi . Researchers in history, historiography, archaeology, and art history came with their document corpora and their related research topics. The transdisciplinary study of corpora and research practices lead to the design of theoretical models.

First, archaeologists had been early adopters of databases and expert systems. They had experienced the limits of impersonal “data” and “facts”. The archaeologists in our team proposed instead the notion of “source”: from ancient texts, to artifacts photographs and even to researchers’ articles, all of those are sources (i.e. authored “discourses”).

Secondly, “viewpoints” was a way to bring intersubjectivity (interpretations conflicts), whose need in archaeological information systems had arisen for long without being addressed.

Thirdly, the evolving topic network built on top of document fragments was inspired by the semiotic analysis of excavations reports partially based on the “interpretative semantics”.

Lastly, the idea to consider historical knowledge as a process is the root of historiography. Indeed, through these discussions, the knowledge engineers of our team had to move from the “ontological approach” they followed before to a new one they called an “hermeneutical approach”.