ClioWire

ClioWire is the platform developed by the EPFL Digital Humanities master students and the members of the EPFL Digital Humanities Lab (DHLAB). The platform is an hybridation between Twitter and Wikipedia. The ambition of this platform is to curate simple open bricks for historical knowledge, shaped as short texts. It is meant to be based on no prefixed ontology, but collectively negotiated conventions and reformatting by bots. This is what works well on Wikipedia and in our Digital Humanities bachelor course. It is meant to offer easy onboarding, i.e. the process in which one get accustom to a new system/platform (even for beginners and people with only very basic IT skills). This is what works well on Twitter. One goal is to offer simple and robust long-term archiving for bricks of historical knowledge.

ClioWire curates historical elementary units as basic bricks for historical knowledge. They constitute some sort of minimal information unit coding relationship between entities and sources. They typically encode what is usually referred as events. As bricks, Fictilis are artificial construction that can be continuously being remolded and combined in order to create greater pieces of knowledge. We suggest to try to model History as an immense collection of Fictilis.

Their main characteristics are the following • Fictilis are 140-character long textual sequence (like tweets) (this constraint may be dropped) • Syntax of Fictilis follows some (evolving) conventions but no strict rules (like tweets) • Fictilis can be written by humans or by machine, and read by humans are machines (like tweets). • Fictilis have a first author but can be modified by anyone. They are fundamentally considered as a common good (unlike tweets) • Fictilis are fully versioned. The history of their modification can be visualized. They are like mini-Wikipedia page (unlike tweets) • Fictilis can be attached to geographical coordinates, temporal coordinates, sources (URLs), document segments • Each Fictilis as a unique universal ID (like tweet), that can serve as reference in other Fictilis and on the web. • Fictilis can be tagged as dubious or any other classification characterizing the trust one can have. The tagging itself can be partly done by bot (like for tweets) • In sum, tweets are particular kind of Fictilis, but Fictilis are more general than tweets The managing system for Fictilis enables to do the following operations • Inserting massive numbers of Fictilis based on existing sources. If a bot imports Fictilis massively, it will be their first author. • More generally applying bot operation at a massive scale on Fictilis (like for Wikipedia) • Retrieving all the Fictilis mentioning an entity (people, place) and visualizing them as timelines or maps or both. • Retrieving all the intervention of a given user (i.e creation or editing of Fictilis) • Retrieving all the Fictilis mentioning a given source (URL) • Visualizing the editing history of a Fictilis • Mapping the worldwide activity of Fictilis • Computing the list of the most active user, the most edited Fictilis (like in Wikipedia) • More things in the same spirit …