Analyzing and Visualizing Uncertain Knowledge: The Use of TEI Annotations in the PROVIDEDH Open Science Platform

The underlying uncertainty in digital humanities research data affects decision-making and persists during a project’s lifecycle. This uncertainty is inevitable since most empirical claims cannot be assessed against an absolute truth (Drucker 2011; Binder et al. 2014). This situation has been previously recognized together with the need to report the degrees of uncertainty that accompany such claims (Blau 2011). Although TEI makes it possible to annotate text with notions of certainty or precision, examples of actual projects taking advantage of this are scarce. There are many possible explanations for uncertainty’s lack of visibility in computationally supported humanities research; among them, the need for tools specifically designed to address the goal of defining and managing uncertainty stands out. Thus, efforts to provide technical support for humanities research should focus on managing and making uncertainty more transparent, rather than removing it. Another challenge is the fact that there is no agreement on a generic taxonomy for the different types of uncertainty that researchers may face. Various researchers across disciplines, working on varying projects and data sets, can use different categories to classify the uncertainties present in a particular case. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative platform for collective annotation of TEI data sets. We briefly present the flexible taxonomy of uncertainty used in the platform and describe two data sets used for its testing. Then we describe use cases of annotations available on the platform, and how they translate into TEI annotations. Creating and interpreting annotations with and without uncertainty should now be easier, especially for researchers who do not know TEI markup.